The YAWP: Villanova's Graduate English Program Blog

  Villanova, PA –  In How to Do Things with Dead People: History, Technology, and Temporality from Shakespeare to Warhol (Cornell University Press, 2022), Villanova English Professor Alice Dailey, PhD, offers a study of Shakespeare’s English history plays that initiates a radical break from the interpretive practices that have dominated literary criticism for the past several decades. While those practices have traditionally prioritized the historical context from which a literary artifact emerges, Dr. Dailey’s book expands the plays’ context beyond the conditions of Shakespeare’s England, allowing readers to consider them among human contrivances for representing and relating to the dead. How to Do Things with Dead People describes Shakespeare’s historical drama as—fundamentally—a reproductive technology by which living replicas of dead historical figures are animated and re-killed on stage. Considering the plays in such terms exposes their affinity with ...

Check out the front-page story in today's  Philadelphia Inquirer   to see Villanova English's own Dr. Alice Dailey discussing the amazing discovery of a Shakespeare First Folio annotated by John Milton, which had been hiding in plain sight in the Free Library of Philadelphia since 1944.

Congratulations to Dr. Alice Dailey, whose article, " Little, Little Graves: Shakespeare's Photographs of Richard II ," was just published in the prestigious journal Shakespeare Quarterly . Dr. Dailey's essay argues that the play's many static, inset images of a dead King Richard function through a "temporal aesthetics" that cannot be summarized by the concept of the king’s two bodies, as Ernst Kantorowicz influentially argued. In place of this paradigm, Dr. Dailey invokes "the photographic phenomenology of Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag to describe how Richard generates images of his grave to proliferate himself across multiple temporal dimensions." Richard objectifies himself as a corpse while by imagining himself in the position of someone contemplating his grave after his death. By capturing himself in images of morbid stillness, Richard deploys a "photographic technology of aesthetic objectification and scopic anticipation....