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Sunday, January 13, 2019

Dr. Alice Dailey Publishes Article in Shakespeare Quarterly

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."