• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.4
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• pp.567-596
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• 2009

A staple of feminist literary anthologies which was instrumental in reevaluating the writer Susan Glaspell, Trifles(1916) has received numerous comments from feminist scholars so far. Most of them tend to concentrate on the themes of female solidarity and justice challenging the androcentric system of law and order. Lacking in the plethora of thematic approaches to the play's feminist subject, however, are formal analyses considering the way in which the play's generic form assists in communicating such thematic concerns of feminism. An alternative to the typical scenario at the courtroom whose mistreatment of women must have loomed large to the young Glaspell as she revisited the old trial of a midwestern murderess which she had covered as a journalist for a local newspaper in Iowa, Trifles serves as a corrective to the courtroom dynamics offering a 'dramatic justice' as opposed to a strictly legal procedure. What this article discovers at the heart of this dramatic justice is the celebration of the unsayable, or what Wolfgang Iser termed negativity, of women's experience which has no room for reflection in the legal discourse at the courtroom tyrannized by the sayable and the evident. Examining how the dramatic form of Trifles gives a voice to the unsayable of woman's experience, which can not be properly represented at the courtroom governed by the straightforward and definitive male rhetoric, the article argues that the play is a better form than its fictional adaptation "A Jury of Her Peers"(1917) in that it syntactically suppresses the monopolizing operation of the verbal by giving precedence to the scenic and non-verbal which is constituted of setting, props, gesture and eye contacts. As a theoretical frame of reference with which to examine the modes of the unsayable in the play the article brings the concept of 'negativity,' defined by Iser as textual effects or modes of the unspeakable and unsaid, into the discussion of the taciturnity of the absent heroine and the non-verbal representation of drama.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.21 no.9
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• pp.88-104
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• 2021

The visual expression of deconstructive graphic design influenced by postmodernism differs from the traditional ways of graphic expression that consist of precise images and text and is challenging and highly experimental. The characteristics of the formative nature of such deconstructive graphic design emphasized the importance of the reader as the principal agent of aesthetic experience in the appreciation of works. For this study, a new ideological framework was developed regarding the ambiguity arising due to visual experimentation in deconstructive graphic design, assuming the central theory to be the Reception Theory (Aesthetics of Reception) centering around the recipient who is the reader. The characteristics of Iser's Reception Theory are substituted as a theoretical category and an interpretation of the works of ambiguity in deconstructive graphic design is carried out. Although Aesthetics of Reception is a literary theory about the interaction between the artist and the reader, as a method for interpreting deconstructive graphic design influenced by postmodernism, it laid a theoretical foundation and enriched the interpretation of works. Moreover, the four characteristics of Iser's Reception Theory were used to create a framework that suggested a new direction for the approach based on the reader's interaction in the process of interpreting works of modern graphic design.