Type
Text
Type
Thesis
Advisor
Advisor: Robinson, Benedict | Committee members: Dunn, Patricia
Date
2018
Keywords
John Milton, Samson Agonistes, Disabiity, instability
Department
Department of English
Language
en
Source
This work is sponsored by the Stony Brook University Graduate School in compliance with the requirements for completion of degree.
Identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/11401/78895
Publisher
The Graduate School, Stony Brook University: Stony Brook, NY.
Format
application/pdf
Abstract
There is a significant absence of critical work examining the portrayal of disability in the English Renaissance unless it relates to examining disability as a metaphor. In this paper, I seek to evaluate the portrayal of blindness, and, more broadly, the impaired body in John Milton’s dramatic poem Samson Agonistes. What I wish to evaluate is that impairment in the drama is a natural condition which occurs to an unstable, fragile human body which equally fragile social norms are built upon; the grey-area which Samson’s impaired body occupies makes these social norms clear, as well as their exclusion of disabled subjects. Using Lennard Davis’s social model of disability, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s ideas of staring, and Mitchell and Snyder’s narrative prosthesis, I wish to show that in a drama concerned with the relationship of spectator and spectacle, reaffirming normalcy occurs through reinforcing familiar tropes which ascribe meanings onto the defamiliarized body. Ultimately, Milton’s drama suggests that imposing meaning onto impairments can itself be disabling. | 47 pages
Recommended Citation
Johnson, Ashley Lynn, "“To Such a Tender Ball as th’Eye Confin’d”: Disability and the Instability of Authority in Milton’s Samson Agonistes" (2018). Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions). 3967.
https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/stony-brook-theses-and-dissertations-collection/3967