Professor%20Sue%20Jones: List of publications

By focusing on three short versions of Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth, this chapter shows the intersection between Shakespearean tragedy and modernist dance aesthetics at a fundamental stage of modern dance's development and, as is...

This chapter explores the aesthetics of the experimental modernist fiction of Joseph Conrad and Samuel Beckett to open up debates about reenactment of dance in the twentieth century. Using the theories of Gabriele Brandstetter and Paul Ricoeur to explore correspondences in dance and literary skepticism about narrative, the discussion shows how both writers interpolate their stories with fleeting passages of gesture or movement phrases that syncopate and undermine the teleological flow of narrative. This discussion suggests a choreographic re-embodiment between dance and text that focuses on communication beyond words. The similarity of Conrad and Beckett lies in their uses of gesture, but while Conrad’s movement phrases re-embody early twentieth-century expressivism, Beckett’s look back to early twentieth-century innovations in abstraction which examine the mechanical function of the body, rhythm in time and space. Beckett does not reference a mental (or emotional) state, whereas Conrad’s gestures are affective, identifying an emotional interiority.

Building on the newly published editions of Eliot's prose and poetry, this contemporary research collection opens avenues for understanding Eliot both in his own right as a poet and critic and as a foremost exemplar of interarts modernism.

Joseph Conrad's reputation predominantly rests on his proto-modernist exploration of the individual male consciousness. Throughout his fiction, protagonists such as Charlie Marlow, Lord Jim, Razumov and Axel Heyst are preoccupied with (frequently failed) quests for identity, isolated figures grappling with a troubled psychology, trying to make sense of their situation in a hostile or unwelcoming community. In this context, parties (other than political ones) do not immediately spring to mind as familiar locations or sources for Conrad's narratives, and when they do occur they are not always markers of social harmony in his work. His emphasis on the relationship between individual and society in his narratives often means that parties subvert rather than confirm their conventional generic function as closure of comedy. Instead, Conrad is highly sceptical of the social gathering. Rather than presenting the party as a convenient setting for communal engagement, he uses the occasion of social interaction to comment on a number of moral anxieties, the concealment of hidden agendas, frequently showing the ways in which individuals are persuaded, incited or bullied into following interests not quite their own. Through the setting of the party he examines: the individual's dominance over the group (Peter Ivanovitch's revolutionary gatherings at the Château Borel in Under Western Eyes (1911)); political machinations (the pub gatherings of anarchists in The Secret Agent (1907)); or issues of female identity.