ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ...

minstrelsy-derived Topsy, as genuine black characters. Thus, his “Sambo” is markedly
more clownish than the less exaggerated design of Nounou, for his Witch Moon. Chesse’
soundly rejected the minstrel clowns, though he perhaps did so more for aesthetic than
cultural reasons. He mandated the imagined authenticity of “black dialect” in O’Neill’s
play, but simplified in his imagining the more nuanced representation of “black speech”
in the original play. Using the phenomenological method to place brackets around the
puppeteer’s notion of authentic black culture provides a more refined bracket on the
essence of that puppeteer’s creation, even if it does not provide a bracket for the essence
of authenticity itself, if such a thing can be said to exist in physical or even theoretical
reality.
The most considerable advantage of phenomenology as a method is that it gives
the scholar the privilege of placing brackets around specific materials. In cases where
time has left the puppeteer’s own writings, copies of her/his plays, photographs of her/his
productions, and extant puppets, the phenomenological method allows the scholar to
work with each individual item in turn, and then to examine the overall essence of
puppetry that manifests from the whole. In cases where most of these materials have
been lost to history, such as the Stellar Marionettes’ Minstrel Show: Epaminondas, the
scholar can instead define the essence of what is available, in this case the text of
Bryant’s story, and limit conclusions to that essence.
For puppetry especially, phenomenology helps articulate the complete essence of
the form, as few other theoretical models do successfully. Puppetry’s atomized nature
creates the potential for curious disfunctions within the elements. Since the constructed
form of the puppet, its performance manipulation, and its voice are often produced by
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