Browsing by Author "Plummer, Sarah E."

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    Good and Radical Bread: Bread and Puppet Theater's Sourdough Traditions
    Plummer, Sarah E. (Liminalities, 2024-12-28)
    This article examines Bread and Puppet Theater’s bread, its relationship to puppetry, its role at performances, and its place as an ideological engine for this institution's cultural work. In this essay I argue that Bread and Puppet Theater mobilizes bread in the same way they use puppets, as a narrative tool and as a symbol drawing upon personal and global cultural understandings of bread.
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    How is a Woman Like a Watermelon?: Advocating a Psychological and Comparative Examination of Brautigan's Novels
    Plummer, Sarah E. (Virginia Tech, 2010-04-28)
    "How is a Woman Like a Watermelon" examines two of Richard Brautigan's novels, In Watermelon Sugar and An Unfortunate Woman, as they relate to each other in ways that offer a better understanding of each. This paper enriches an understanding of Brautigan's work by exploring the historical context of his writings, studying his style and presenting diverse interpretations in a mutually inclusive way that complements the multifaceted qualities of his writing. By studying Brautigan's novels in a comparative manner, the essential and distinctive principles that drive Brautigan's work—his manipulation of genre, use of memory and a complex first person narrator as an author persona—are better understood. Because of Brautigan's use of the first person, this study advocates an analytical psychological analysis aimed at discerning underlying emotion within apparent personal detachment, the use of projection as a defense mechanism, and the psychological associative value of words, images and memories. An inclusive and comparative study that foregrounds these psychological elements will ultimately allow for a more complete and subtle analysis of Brautigan's work.
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    Objects in Protest: Bread and Puppet Theater's (Non)Human Solidarities
    Plummer, Sarah E. (Virginia Tech, 2023-07-17)
    Bread and Puppet Theater's use of performing objects offers an aperture to contemplate complex assemblages that blur lines between the human and the nonhuman. Drawing upon cultural studies, feminist materialism, circus studies, and puppetry studies, I consider both the bread and the puppets as they intersect with various assemblages and fields of interpretation. These configurations demonstrate how the objects embody (non)human, material, and conceptual aspects. Because of this ability to exist within the meshes of binaries, performing objects are well suited to challenge and expose other binaries and hierarchies through three categories of analysis — movement, difference, and intra-action — based on Karan Barad's work on matter. In addition to the theoretical framework, I conducted ethnographic interviews and rely on my own experience as an apprentice at Bread and Puppet in 2004, considering myself as co-constitutive actant within the scope of analysis. I examine the way the theater uses sourdough bread and puppets as performing objects to create meaning, express ideology, apply tension within constructs of power, and demonstrate a model for co-dependent living between humans and objects