dc.description.abstract | This thesis analyses stunts in the public life of late nineteenth-century New York,
where ‘stunt’ developed as a slang term. Addressing stunts as a performative and
discursive practice, I investigate stunts in popular newspapers, sports, politics and
protest and, to a lesser extent, theatre and film. Each chapter focuses on one form
of stunt: bridge jumping, extreme walking contests, a new genre of reporting called
‘stunt journalism’, and cycling feats. Joseph Pulitzer’s popular newspaper, the
World, is the primary research archive, supported by analysis of other newspapers
and periodicals, vaudeville scripts, films, manuals and works of fiction.
The driving question is: how did stunts in public life enact conceptions of
value? I contextualise stunts in a ‘crisis of value’ concerning industrialisation,
secularisation, recessions, the currency crisis, increased entry of women into
remunerative work, immigration, and racialised anxieties about consumption and
degeneration. I examine the ways in which ‘stunt’ connotes devaluation, suggesting
a degraded form of politics, art or sport, and examine how such cultural
hierarchies intersect with gender, race and class.
The critical framework draws on Theatre and Performance Studies
theorisations of precarity and liveness. I argue that stunts aestheticised everyday
precarity and made it visible, raising ethical questions about the value of human
life and death, and the increasingly interdependent nature of urban society. Stunts
took entrepreneurial idealisations of risk and autoproduction to extreme,
constructing identity as commodity. By aestheticising precarity and endangering
lives, stunts explored a symbolic and material connection between liveness and
aliveness, which provokes questions about current conceptualisations of liveness
and mediatisation.
I argue that while stunts were framed as exceptional, frivolous acts, they
adopted the logic of increasingly major industries, such as the popular press,
advertising and financial markets. Stunts became a focal point for anxiety
regarding the abstract and unstable nature of value itself. | en_US |