abstracts_119-5_P5T1.indd Abstracts 1216 Daniel Brown, Wilde and Wilder The use of Oscar Wilde’s Salome as the ground for the silent-screen star Norma Desmond’s film script and character is central to Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boule- vard but oddly neglected by the film’s critics. This essay reads the film through its engagement with Salome, discussing its adoption from the play of a self- consciousness about the conditions of its art, which extend beyond the film’s pro- duction to cultural history and film aesthetics. Norma asserts the image and ideology of the Hollywood star through her identification with the aestheticist fig- ure of Salome, while Joe Gillis not only writes film scripts but, with his peers Betty Schaefer and Artie Green, also foregrounds narrative conventions in his ef- forts to organize and control his own life and experience in the film. Through its main characters, Sunset Boulevard presents an allegory of Hollywood cinema in which the complementary filmic principles of image and narrative culminate re- spectively in madness and death. (DB) 1231 Michael Rothberg, The Work of Testimony in the Age of Decoloniza- tion: Chronicle of a Summer, Cinema Verité, and the Emergence of the Holocaust Survivor The trial of Adolf Eichmann, in 1961, is generally considered a turning point in the history of Holocaust memory because it brought the Holocaust into the public sphere for the first time as a discrete event on an international scale. In the same year, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s film Chronicle of a Summer appeared in France. While absent from scholarship on memory of the Nazi genocide for over forty years, Chronicle of a Summer contains a scene of Holocaust testimony that suggests the need to look beyond the Eichmann trial for alternative articulations of public Holocaust remembrance. This essay considers the juxtaposition in Chronicle of a Summer of Holocaust memory and the history of decolonization in order to rethink the “unique” place that the Holocaust has come to hold in dis- courses on extreme violence. The essay argues that a discourse of truth and testi- mony arose in French resistance to the Algerian war that shaped and was shaped by memory of the Nazi genocide. (MR) 1247 Elizabeth Yukins, An “Artful Juxtaposition on the Page”: Memory, Per- ception, and Cubist Technique in Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth While scholars have appreciated the influence of jazz on Ralph Ellison’s composi- tional strategies, this essay examines how Ellison’s interest in the visual idiom of modernism—namely, cubism—influenced the prose style of his posthumously published novel Juneteenth. Evidenced by his friendship with Romare Bearden and his expressed fascination with the visual arts, Ellison’s knowledge of cubist practice informed his textual experiments with time, space, and the narrative ren- dering of memory. Cubist techniques such as fragmentation and the combining of [ P M L A 1420 [ © 2004 by the modern language association of america ] multiple perspectives offered Ellison formal methods to configure the complex consciousness of his main characters and the vexed history of race relations in America. His literary and political visions meet in the mercurial relation between fragmentation and pluralism, for in his multifaceted, nonlinear prose one sees the fraught simultaneity of past and present, memory and vision, historical violence and continued democratic aspiration. (EY) 1264 Susan Cannon Harris, Clearing the Stage: Gender, Class, and the Free- dom of the Scenes in Eighteenth-Century Dublin This essay investigates the conditions and consequences of Thomas Sheridan’s at- tempt to bar spectators from behind the scenes at the Theatre-Royal in Dublin’s Smock Alley. Sheridan succeeded in revoking the “freedom of the scenes”—a privilege by which aristocratic men were allowed to roam the green room, dress- ing rooms, and stage during the performance—because Dublin was the cultural and political center of a colonial society whose members were struggling for con- trol over the spaces outside the theater. The reform provoked a conflict known as the Kelly riots, which began with a spectator’s attempted rape of an actress in Sheridan’s production of John Vanbrugh’s Aesop. Contextualizing the Kelly riots in the political and cultural situation of eighteenth-century Ireland, this article il- luminates the role that the theater plays in the construction of subjectivity and in the interrelation among gender, class, and national identities. (SCH) 1 1 9 . 5 ] Abstracts 1421