PhD, English Literature; University of California, Santa Cruz & University of California, Los Angeles, 1992.
Dissertation: Dark Imagination: Poetic Painting in Romantic Drama. Director: Frederick Burwick, University of California, Los Angeles. This study investigates the paradigm shift that occurred in the aesthetics of the stage, of painting and poetry and in some representative works of Joanna Baillie, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and George Gordon, Lord Byron. These poets dramatize interiority; specifically they envision Romantic drama as a series of ekphrastic moments, skiagraphically portrayed, always enhanced by the passions. Essentially a redefinition of Romantic drama, the dissertation also argues that the poet/dramatists conceived their work for the stage and the page, emphasizing aesthetic complementation in audience response, and thematizing the fundamental duality of perception and the inherent dramatic illusion of the genre.
I have no doubt the author is a sensible and charming person. She herself produces paintings of the sea. But this language is a long way from charming. It is the professional jargon of a guild, a clique, a small group of trained functionaries who toil away in a corner of the academy producing such truck.