Kyle Miller

Date of Award

2023

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Myhill, Nova

Area of Concentration

Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies

Abstract

This thesis proposes the carnivalesque as potentially subversive when placed outside of the time and space of the carnival due to the unrestrained body’s status in society as perverse and potentially dangerous. The first chapter discusses Mikhail Bakhtin’s “grotesque body” in the carnival in conversation with both the Russian Carnival puppet Petrushka as it existed prior to and during the Russian revolutions in 1905 and 1917 against Tsar Nicholas II as well as Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (or King Ubu), conceptualizing similarities between the puppet and the body under the contexts of subversive entertainment. Jarry’s Ubu Roi is placed within late 19th-century drama through comparisons to both Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and its naturalistic stance on the body, and to symbolist drama’s representations of the body. The second chapter compares Petrushka’s rather 2-dimensional plot and comedic form to the puppets of the horror-comedy Youtube web series “Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared”, who seem to have a more complicated ontology and reality than that of Petrushka, which I argue places them in the realm of the uncanny, and therefore the subversive. I compare the puppets of “Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared” to Jim Henson’s “Muppets” in order to place it, at least initially, in a realm of the familiar so that the subsequent breaking of this familiarity may be explored. The way these puppets are portrayed, both as complicated and horrifying as well as familiarly comedic, proves the “uncanny” to be subversive in a way unlike Jarry’s Ubu Roi, which repelled its 19th-century French audience.

Download

Share

COinS