Intro & Extract
Book Overview
Urban 17th Century Jacobean dramaturgy is renowned
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for its matafictional play with artifice and the fragmented points-of-view of its desperate self-fashioning dramatis personae;
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for the mixed tones and self-reflexive ironies that tempt and tease them towards religious, political, and sexual corruption;
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and the macabre, tortured effects of simultaneity that blur the Realist aesthetic and destabilises the safe moral bearings of its often confused audiences.
This interdisciplinary study builds on recent postmodern advances in theatre, film, and media studies – in areas of identity, gender, and narrative – to argue for a realignment of cinema’s own dissembling urban ironist, Alfred Hitchcock, within this subversive dramaturgical lineage.
In defence, the study juxtaposes revitalized texts, such as Webster’s The White Devil (1612) and Hitchcock’s newly restored films, notably Rear Window (1954) and primarily Vertigo (1958) that, since the 1980s, have powerfully resonated as totemic ‘limit’ texts with contemporary critics, academics, film directors, and audiences alike.
Comparative analysis of such titles builds in closing chapters to a relevant contextual consideration of the interpellative trends in new media technologies that have also, since the 1980s, beguiled users to vertiginously fashion themselves as cyber observers, rhetors, and performers within, what is now, the 21st Century’s own fragmented Jacobean panspectron environment.
An extract from Chapter One is here that includes a sequence analysis of Notorious (1946):- jv-extract-ch-1.pdf
Alan Taylor, Berlin, December 2006
…and Cut
