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Daniel Morse
Daniel is working on his PhD at Temple University in Philadelphia, where he has also taught classes on American Popular Culture. So far he has been primarily interested in the work of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce in light of both post-structuralist and psychoanalytic theory. Before he settled down to graduate study he played in the Washington, DC based DIY post-punk band A Day in Black & White with whom he performed in 13 countries and countless states. He has a review of two recent titles from Slavoj Zizek forthcoming (Fall 07) in Duke University's boundary 2, an international journal of literature and culture.
The Gramophone Effect Effect: (Mal)function in Woolf's Between the Acts
Much recent scholarship (particularly that produced by Melba Cuddy-Keane and Bonnie Kime Scott) is concerned with Miss la Trobe's use of the gramophone as a reflection of, and then challenge to, fascism. While the beginning of the Second World War certainly looms over this work, the malfunction of the gramophone suggests something beyond a simple escape from "the masterŐs voice." A Freudian reading reveals not that Woolf's project was any less subversive, but rather that the gramophone operates in a very different manner than has been suggested. The gramophone is not subversive in the hands of Miss la Trobe (she is importantly frustrated with its malfunction), but rather, by pointing on one level to the act of secondary revision as articulated in Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, and on another, going beyond secondary revision to suggest the function of trieb (variously translated as either Instinct or Drive), it emerges to demonstrate how the logic of the dream as well as drive can operate in ultimately destructive ways.
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