The Department of Comparative Literature is delighted to announce that Anna Street has completed her PhD, entitled ‘Comedy of the Impossible’, under the joint supervision of Professor Shane Weller and Professor Elizabeth Angel Perez (University of Paris-Sorbonne, Paris IV).
Anna’s thesis gathers evidence highlighting the historical and conceptual developments in the post-Second World War period that made way for a radical shift in comedy’s inferior status, as demonstrated in the plays of Arthur Adamov, Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, and N. F. Simpson.
Charting the development of comedic theories alongside philosophy’s growing reliance on dramatic techniques, comedy has the power to transform our basic assumptions and thinking practices, and blur the line of distinction between the abstract and the concrete, the mechanical and the organic and, ultimately, between life and death.
By demonstrating how this reversal is accomplished through linguistics, metaphor, and dramatics, Anna’s study reveals how comedy subverts the idea of a socio-symbolic order that relies on the logic of possibility.
Anna’s thesis was completed as a European Jointly Supervised PhD (Cotutelle) between the University of Kent and the University of Paris-Sorbonne, allowing her to obtain a double doctorate in Comparative Literature from Kent and in English (Theatre) Studies from the Sorbonne.
Our congratulations to Dr Street.
For more details on a PhD in Comparative Literature, please see: https://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/complit/postgraduate/index.html
For more information about European Jointly Supervised PhD Scholarships, please see: www.kent.ac.uk/scholarships/search/FNADEURJOI02