ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ...

creation on the basis of active motivation. 127 It is necessary to take a different path
through phenomenology than that taken in previous chapters. Efforts to analyze the
essences of various objects, or of copresent objects in their special categories is, for
Husserl, the business of descriptive or static phenomenology. 128 The goal of the second
branch, “explanatory phenomenology,” is to comprehend the “general structures and
modalities that encompass all categories of apperceptions.” 129 While the two categories
do not depend on mutually exclusive considerations, they are distinct in emphasis.
In the previous chapters, this investigation has focused on the artistic creation of
specific objects, and commented mainly on their influence on each other. This chapter’s
emphasis on McPharlin’s contribution finds itself mainly commenting on the impact of
the categorical apperceptions of an important author/organizer. McPharlin may have
made only one blackface puppet in his lengthy career. Yet his ideas about blackface
puppetry and puppetry in general, likely exert marked influence on the twentieth-century
eidos of the field.
What previous puppeteers had been struggling toward, however unintentionally,
were two branches of puppet theatre, conditioned by dynamic changes in the field of
representation. In large context, it was part of an ongoing branching of highbrow away
from lowbrow, in the traditions beginning in American civilization during the nineteenth
127 Edmund Husserl, “Static and Genetic Phenomenological Method,” The Essential Husserl:
Basic Writings in Transcendental Phenomenology, after Analyses Concerning Passive and Active
Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic, translated by Anthony J. Steinbock (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1999), 321.
128 Ibid., 318-19.
129 Ibid., 318.
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