Digital Commons Network^™

The Monumental Province: Asia And The Temples Of The Roman Empire, Andrew Findley

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This dissertation presents a study of monumental temples built or appropriated by the Romans in the province of Asia from the late 1st to the middle 2nd century AD. The practice of constructing extraordinarily large temples in Asia originated during the Hellenistic period but ceased for several centuries until the Roman Empire took control of the region and began to build monumental temples in the province. This study focuses on five temples that best represent the Roman relationship with monumental temple building in the province of Asia: the Wadi B Temple at Sardis, the Vetters Temple at Ephesus, the Red …

“I’Ll Be Your Mirror” : The Appropriation Of Ovid’S Metamorphoses And The Philosophy Of Self-Construction In Seneca’S Oedipus, Theodore Macdonald

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No abstract provided.

Pastiche And Appropriation In "Philip The Philosopher's" Hermeneuma, Alexander Leedom

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No abstract provided.

Between The Map And The Territory: Taking The World Apart In The Age Of Un-Discovery, Carla Lacey Fisher Schwartz

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The map is demonstrative of a basic human impulse, the desire to understand our surroundings and our position within the world. Through the activity of mapmaking, we aspire to comprehend comprehensively, but the very nature of the map allows for only partial understanding. Despite this objective for total knowledge, the blank space of a map is a necessity; in order for a map to be useful it must leave some aspects out. This blank space, along with other blanks in visual representation, is an active silence, and holds meaning in its absence.

While the map attempts to represent a territory, …

Envisioning The Unseen: Sisyphos In Chthonic Landscapes, Elizabeth Graff Wolfson

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No abstract provided.

Moral Disagreement And Moral Realism, Martin Turner

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This dissertation provides a novel argument from disagreement against moral realism. Moral anti-realists have long suspected that something about the scope and/or nature of moral disagreement threatens moral realism, but existing arguments are either unsound, or rely upon premises which are too question-begging to anyone who does not already share anti-realist metaethical sympathies. This dissertation contends that moral anti-realism provides the best explanation of our view that we ought to hold onto our moral judgments in the face of disagreement about them. It contends that the most plausible view in the epistemology of disagreement tells us that, were our moral …

Spaces Of Japonisme And The Art Of Whistler, Van Gogh, And Monet: Collecting, Decoration, And The Japanese Other, Diane Marie Towle

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The belongings a person surrounds himself with can be physical representations of his interior life and social aspirations. Many avant-garde artists in late nineteenth-century Europe collected Japanese art, particularly woodblock prints, and used this art to decorate their living spaces. In this dissertation, I studied the collections and decorations of Whistler, Van Gogh, and Monet, and analyzed their art to discover how they used ideas from Japanese art and their understanding of Japanese culture to define their artistic identities and to develop a decorative vision, moving away from spaces defined by linear perspective and tonal indications of volume, and toward …

The Craft Of Fiction: Teaching Technique, 1850-1930, Mary Stewart Atwell

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The Craft of Fiction, 1850-1930

This dissertation considers two models of authorship active in the British nineteenth century: one that viewed the writing of fiction as the province of genius unconnected with the world of work, and another that saw it as a practice requiring a set of learned skills. This distinction carried implications of class, since writing that was understood to be work could be a product subject to marketplace exchange, and also gender, since the "hack-writing" so despised by mid-century periodical writers was often discursively feminized. Though the model that privileged genius and disregarded the labor involved in …

Collaboration, Presence, And Community: The Philip Glass Ensemble In Downtown New York, 1966-1976, David Allen Chapman

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This dissertation examines the Philip Glass Ensemble as it took shape within New York's emerging loft-and-gallery scene. This group of musicians participated in the migration of artists and performers into downtown Manhattan in the late sixties and in the subsequent formation of the "alternative spaces" of SoHo and its neighboring districts. These spaces fostered fruitful contact between the ensemble and the area's burgeoning community. This dissertation employs the group as a frame for several richly detailed and interrelated stories about minimalism and "new music" during this crucial period of late twentieth-century American musical history.

Relying on new archival and oral …

Through The Body: Corporeality, Subjectivity, And Empathy In Contemporary American Art, Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt

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This dissertation considers the relationship between embodied experience, subjectivity, and empathy expressed in artworks created and exhibited in New York in the early 1990s and linked with identity politics. I focus on works that represented or evoked bodies and elicited viscerally somatic responses from viewers. As I demonstrate, the multicultural and post-structuralist interpretive frameworks applied to these artworks hinged on implicitly antagonistic notions of subjectivity which undercut the works' affective potential. In particular, such models disregarded the powerful epistemological import of corporeality in favor of discursive constructions. Through three paired case studies, I investigate how these artists engaged with emerging …

Reading, Travel, And The Pedagogy Of Growing Up In Late Nineteenth-Century Germany, M. Stanley Majors

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This project brings together the domestic world of young adult reading with the foreign world of international travel that informed German experience at the end of the nineteenth century. By uniting these two ostensibly disparate realms under one interpretive frame, I offer a new perspective on the theory and practice of young-adult reading at the turn of the last century and the role this reading about travel played in the development of sense of self and sense of place within a national body.

My analysis reads specific youth literature about travel: Brigitte Augusti, Friedrich Pajeken) against depictions of youth reading …

The Evolution Of Broadway Musical Entertainment, 1850-2009: Interlingual And Intermedial Interference, Dj Kaiser

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Itamar Even-Zohar's polysystem theory: 1978, revised 1990) postulates that translated literature occupies a central location in a young literature and serves an "innovative" function until the literature matures, at which time translated literature is pushed to the periphery and is "conservative": approximating the native repertoire). Using a "distant reading" approach: Moretti 2005), this project explores the position of both translated and adapted literature in the evolution of Broadway musical entertainment. Using an original database of more than four thousand productions of musical entertainment from professional New York playhouses associated with the history of Broadway from 1850 through 2009, various waves …

The Performance Of Art: Picasso, Léger, And Modern Dance, 1917-1925, Amanda Holly Beresford

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This thesis examines the phenomenon of easel painters designing for ballet companies in Paris in the 1910s and 1920s. It focuses on the work of Picasso for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and Léger for De Maré's Ballets Suédois between 1917 and 1925, and considers the consequences for these artists' studio practice of their involvement in dance theatre. Their work is situated in the historical context of Wagner’s influential notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk—total theatre synthesizing all the arts, including painting—and its reinterpretation by avant-garde theatre practitioners from the mid-nineteenth into the early twentieth century. Picasso’s and Léger’s stage designs reveal the dynamic …

The Spiritual Reformist Thought Of The Amīr ʿAbd Al-Qādir Al-JazāʾIrī In The Eyes Of His Western Interpreters: A Critical Historiographical Review, Daanish Faruqi

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No abstract provided.

Vilém Flusser's Media Philosophy: Tracing The Digital In Nature Through Art, Anne Popiel

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Philosopher Vilém Flusser's theories and metaphorical writing style are considered together in order to explain the connection between digital technology, nature and artistic creativity in his work.

La Littérature Des Enfants De Harkis : Mémoire Et Réconciliation, Vincent Jouane

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This dissertation focuses on a corpus of autobiographies and novels produced since 2002 by children, mainly daughters, of harkis: Algerian civilians who fought on the French side during the war of independence of Algeria between 1954 and 1962), including Dalila Kerchouche, Fatima Besnaci-Lancou and Zahia Rahmani. In this study, I have argued that this emerging literature differs from other "minor literatures," as defined by theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, by the fact that these young authors withold the traditional discourse of victimization to emphasize dialogue and reconciliation. In the first chapter, I examine how the notion of historicity can …

Hans Castorp Und 'Der Große Krieg'. Männlichkeitsbilder In Thomas Manns Roman 'Der Zauberberg', Simon Wester

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No abstract provided.

Sentimental Ideology, Women's Pedagogy, And American Indian Women's Writing: 1815-1921, Christine Cavalier

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ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Sentimental Ideology, Women's Pedagogy, and American Indian Women's Writing: 1815-1921 by Christine Renée Cavalier Washington University in St. Louis, 2011 Professor Vivian Pollak, Chairperson This dissertation examines how sentimental notions of respectable womanhood and refined education shaped the polished poetry and prose of four seminal female figures in the history of American Indian literature: Jane Johnston Schoolcraft: 1800-1842), the earliest American Indian female author recovered thus far; E. Pauline Johnson: 1861-1913), the most successful nineteenth-century Native writer who became Canada's iconic poetess and Native national symbol; S. Alice Callahan: 1868-1894), the first American Indian female novelist; …

The Model Prodigal: Jesuit School Plays And The Production Of Devotion In The Spanish Empire, 1565-1611, Brandan Grayson

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In this dissertation I examine the relationship between early modern Jesuit theater and the construction of religious practice in the Spanish Empire. I focus upon plays that reinterpret the Biblical Parable of the Prodigal Son to argue that the Society of Jesus utilized the stage to acquire religious authority over the domestic sphere and to promote paradigms of masculinity that would halt imperial decline. Chapter One sets forth a theoretical framework for this discussion by employing performance theory to establish that theatrical productions often dialogue with the social issues of their day. It reviews the historical context of Jesuit theater …

Culture And Exchange: The Jews Of Königsberg, 1700-1820, Jill Storm

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This dissertation traces the history of the Jewish community in Königsberg, East Prussia, from its founding in 1700 to the aftermath of the Prussian Emancipation Edict of 1812, as well as the early stages of Jewish embourgeoisement and political integration. My project combines aspects of a traditional communal history with newer trends in Jewish history, including an integrated discussion of economic and cultural life. I argue that the commercial successes of the Jewish mercantile elite in Königsberg, in particular of the Friedländer family, set the stage for the publication of ha-Measef and the local flowering of the haskalah. Moreover, I …

Representaciones E Imaginarios Sobre La Pobreza: Villa Miseria Y Subjetividad En La Literatura Argentina Del Siglo Xx Y Xxi, Maria Forcadell

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This dissertation studies the representation of shantytowns in Argentine narrative of the 20th and 21st century. The intellectual assumes the role of mediator and strengthens and or defies the social imagery about the poor and the space s/he inhabits. I argue that the socio-economic crisis of December 2001 affects the way in which writers imagine the subaltern and his/her urban spaces. As the narratives of progress and modernity enter in crisis, the villa miseria and poverty are reconfigured in new tales. This project is concentrated mainly in the post crisis fiction and on the emergency of social actors such piqueteros, …

Origin And Early History Of The United Hebrew Congregation Of St. Louis, 1841-1859, The First Jewish Congregation In St. Louis, Donald Irving Makovsky

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No abstract provided.