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I Couldn't Kill It Any Other Way: Infanticide In Nineteenth-Century Literature, Deirdre Mary Day-Macleod

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation looks at maternal infanticide in texts by William Wordsworth, Walter Scott, George Eliot, and Harriet Beecher Stowe in order to trace a relation between the rise of a discourse of the moral mother in the Eighteenth century and literary depictions of infanticide in the Nineteenth century. In Wordsworth's "The Thorn" (1798) infanticide provides a means to express anxiety over modernization, industrialization and authorship in a revision of the traditionally oral and rural ballad. The Heart of Midlothian (1818) by Sir Walter Scott tells the story of the effects of an infanticide that has never occurred suggesting maternal infanticide …

Mary Mccarthy, Mary Gordon, And The Irish-American Literary Tradition, Stacey Lee Donohue

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There is a distinct literary canon in the United States, composed of Irish-Catholic-American writers, which requires different modes of criticism or evaluation than other U.S. literatures, particularly the dominant, largely Protestant or Protestant-influenced, American literary canon. In addition, as a recently recognized literary tradition, many women writers have either been ignored or unnoticed because their works do not immediately fit into the evolving criteria of evaluation for the Irish-American literary tradition. My purpose in this study is not to survey the Irish-American literary canon, but to examine two women writers who have not always been admitted to an innately misogynistic …

From Idyll To Exile: The Transformed Self In The Early Works Of Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Elizabeth Powers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines works of Goethe's pre-Weimar period and his autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit, which reconstructs that early period as the emergence of poet and oeuvre in terms of the abandonment of the idyll. It disputes the traditional view of Goethe as the poet of experience ("Erlebnis"). It seeks instead to demonstrate that Goethe wrote in the manner of his poetic forebears–by the imitation of literary models–and that "experience" was created in his work by emptying these models of their communal content. Once liberated from traditional literary forms, the new subjective lyric voice was literally homeless and its encounters with …

Some Consequences Of Semantic Externalism, Consuelo Preti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Semantic externalism is the view that meaning and mental content are determined by relations to the world of objects and properties outside the physical boundaries of the subject of mental states. What you mean by your words–what you're thinking when you're thinking about something–is essentially constituted by the world at large. It has become customary to formulate externalism in terms of so-called twin earth cases–cases where (some kinds of) content do not supervene on inner states, but this formulation can be shown to be too limited to be of any great use in characterizing a theory of mind. A more …

The Spectacle Of Suffering: Repetition And Closure In The Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel, Rebecca E. Martin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since the publication of The Castle of Otranto in 1764 initiated the genre of the gothic novel, critics have claimed that gothic endings are bland, inadequate, or otherwise unsatisfying. Analyzing works written in the period 1764 to 1820 by Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Dacre, Mary-Anne Radcliffe, Mary and Percy Shelley and Charles Robert Maturin, this dissertation demonstrates that the focus on endings has blinded critics to the reader's source of pleasure in the gothic. I have drawn upon a representative sampling of novels to present a model of the interaction of reader and gothic text focused on …

The Romance Of Narrative: Design And Desire In The Odyssey, The Aithiopika, And Don Quixote, Susan Brockman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Odyssey, Aithiopika, and Quixote have a surprising set of narrative structures in common: each work falls into two distinct "halves," and each includes a large number of interpolated narratives which appear largely, though not exclusively, in the first half of the text. Both of these features–the bi-partite frames and the large number of interpolated tales–have important implications, both for the narratives as a whole, and for their relationship to the literary mode of romance. This structure imbues each text with a quality of extreme narrative self-consciousness in which part of the subject of the work becomes the …

Acting Hysteria: An Analysis Of The Actress And Her Part, Lydia Stryk

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the woman's part in dramatic representation as a hysterical construct and explores the hystericizing effect that the playing of this construct has on the actress. Drawing on feminist psychoanalytic analyses of male psychology and on the historical origins of male-invented female hysteria, this study uses dramatic representation as a model and metaphor for woman's hystericization in Western culture.

Charcot's theatricalization of female hysteria through public performances of hysterical acts and the Ophelia as psychological/aesthetic model in British mental asylums are investigated as metaphorical sources for a new definition of female hysteria as a disease of performance, of …

Richard Nixon's Position On Communist China, 1949-1960: The Evolution Of A Pacific Strategy, Glenn Michael Speer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation focuses on Richard Nixon's view of Communist China from the 1949 Revolution through the 1960 presidential election. There is also an extended epilogue examining his position on the issue in the 1960s prior to his election as president, and a discussion of the opening to China in 1972.

It is, in essence, an attempt to trace Nixon's "education," so to speak, in the foreign policy arena during his early career–a "gestation" period, if you will, for his presidential China policy. This is discussed within the context of the Cold War and the never ending melodrama of domestic politics, …

The Poetics Of Authorship In The Later Middle Ages: The Emergence Of The Modern Literary Persona, Burt Joseph Kimmelman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Literary individualism manifested itself in the twelfth century both trivially and profoundly. Word puzzles and overt self-naming within a literary work, and discussions of the nature of poetry and the role of the poet in the world, increasingly considered the purpose and efficacy of writing and ultimately of language per se. Poets asserted themselves in their works not so much for the sake of self-promotion, in a modern sense, but to address and modulate contemporary intellectual and spiritual issues. Speculative grammar, nominalism and realism, often provided the material for poets such as Guillem IX, Marcabru, Dante, Chaucer and Langland. As …

Claes Oldenburg: Sculpture, 1960-1968. A Catalogue Raisonne. (Volumes I And Ii), Susan Ginsburg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A catalogue raisonne presents the complete work of an artist so that we can better understand that artist and the period in which he or she worked. This dissertation presents all the sculptural works made by Claes Oldenburg between 1960 and 1968. I begin with the works of 1960 and continue through 1968. Although no chronological time period can be demonstrated as absolute, this one begins with an exhibition in which Oldenburg became noticed to a wide audience and ends when Oldenburg's ideas about sculpture became involved with public statements made through public sculpture rather than the studio/home/gallery themes that …

The American Academy Of The Fine Arts, New York, 1802-1842. (Volumes I And Ii), Carrie J. Rebora

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 1802, Robert R. Livingston, the United States Minister to France, conceived of the American Academy as a salon that would inspire American artists and uplift the minds of others. His brother Edward, Mayor of New York who also believed that the city's leaders were responsible for the cultural enlightenment of artists and the general public, generated financial support from the city's ruling elite. Neither the Livingstons nor the members, however, planned for the Academy's operation. The institution languished until Mayor De Witt Clinton assumed the Academy presidency in 1813. With the help of his friend John Pintard, Clinton placed …

Improvisation For Actor Training And Performance In 20th Century America (With Special Emphasis On The Spolin And Sills Tradition), Jeff David Brone

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the methods and value of using improvisation to train actors in their craft and to help them perform scripted material more effectively. The period and place covered is primarily America in the 20th century. The dissertation also analyzes the use of improvisation from a theoretical, historical and practical perspective and discusses the work of various acting teachers and companies who use (or used) improv to create theatre and who have been influenced by the basic teachings of Spolin, Sills or, in some significant instances, Stanislavski.

After a brief introductory chapter on the use of improv in the …

Class Culture And Generational Change: Immigrant Families In Two Connecticut Industrial Cities During The 1930s, Ivan Greenberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Recent social history stresses the autonomy of workers, especially the ways that immigrant families made "lives of their own." However, little attention is focused on the particular experiences of the second generation and the ways they forged their own group identity. This study, by locating the emergence of this generation, highlights an important demographic change within the working class.

Familiar developments of the 1930s take on new meaning. For example, the pivotal role of the second generation in the rise of the CIO helps to recast the early history of industrial unionism. The resurgence of the labor movement parallels the …

The Changing Face Of Fortune In Six English Versions Of The Tragedy Of Antony And Cleopatra, Mary Aileen Mallery

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study traces the development and changes in the depiction of the goddess Fortune in a selected group of dramas written between 1592 and 1678: the six English versions of the tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra. The concepts surrounding the goddess Fortune and her place in any culture change with the idea of the individual's ability to shape his own destiny. In the seventeenth century in particular Fortune becomes increasingly connected to questions of personal identity and what Stephen Greenblatt has called "self-fashioning," so that by 1678 the subject of John Dryden's All for Love is not the quest for …

Conflicting Attributions In The Continental Motet Repertory From Ca. 1500 To Ca. 1550, Young-Han Hur

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study attempts to bring together all the conflicting attributions in the motets attributed to composers who worked on the Continent during the first half of the sixteenth century. In all, it accounts for a total of 266 motets (listed in the Inventory, Appendix A) that involve conflicting attributions among 122 composers. Rather than placing the emphasis on the problem of determining the correct authorship, however, I have used the conflicting attributions as a springboard in order to shed light on a number of different aspects of sixteenth-century music.

Chapter I briefly surveys conflicting attributions in various genres from ca. …

Influences Of The Post-World War Ii Era On The American Political Theater, 1968–1972, Lydia Alix Gerson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

From 1968 to 1972, years which many historians have determined as encompassing the most focussed characteristics of the Sixties as a whole, the United States underwent enormous political upheaval which affected every one of its major institutions, including the theater. The political turmoil of the period was reflected in the theater, both mainstream and alternative. Literally hundreds of political theater pieces were produced and acted in the streets, shopping malls, church basements and stages of the United States. Yet little scholarly attention has been paid to the phenomenon. What little work is available concentrates on aesthetics; content is largely ignored. …

Escaping The Alphabet: The Reading Of Silence In The Novels Of Virginia Woolf, Patricia Laurence

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The exploration of the theme and narration of silence in Virginia Woolf's novels in this dissertation brings under scrutiny nothing less than her perceptions of the nature of gender, being, mind, knowledge and language. Woolf, searching for a language of mind amid changing concepts of mind in the twentieth century, creates a new rhetoric of silence. In defining silence as a "presence" and not just an "absence" in life and narration, Woolf displaces the privileged place of the "speaking subject" and speech or dialogue in the novel. In Chapter 1, there is an attempt to define what "silence" is in …

Mrs. Trollope's American Novels, Linda Abess Ellis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Frances Milton Trollope (1779-1863) was one of the most popular novelists and travel writers of her generation. Her visit to the United States (1827-32) provided her with material for her first and most famous book, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), and for four novels set in America (The Refugee in America, 1832; Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw, 1836; The Barnabys in America, 1842; and The Old World and the New, 1849).

This study treats all four American novels, examining them against a background of other travellers' accounts and against other fiction of the early nineteenth century in order to show how …

Talent And Technique: George Gershwin's "Rhapsody In Blue" And John Paul Ii's Mayday 1984 Address To New York Gay And Lesbian Socialists' League At Cooper Union's Great Hall (Transcribed Into Verse From Unauthorized French And Italian Versions Of The Official Soviet Translation Of The Polish Original By Norman Macafee) For Tenor Solo, Chorus (Satb), And Eight Players, Arthur Maisel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The dissertation consists of two parts, an analytical essay and a composition.

The essay starts from the fact that the musical worth of the Rhapsody in Blue has often been questioned, despite its having been a fixture of the repertoire since its premiere. A close (Schenkerian) analysis shows the flaws of the piece in detail. It also reveals considerable structural coherence, however, comprising very sophisticated treatment of motives in the foreground and middleground, and, in the background, the unfolding of a tritone as the boundary of a tonic that is both B-flat major-minor and a whole-tone collection. Since Gershwin was …

The Theatre Of Adrian Hall, Jeannie Marlin Woods

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The topic of this study is the American stage director, Adrian Hall, who has been the artistic director of the Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island, since 1964 and who has held the same position concurrently at the Dallas Theater Center in Texas since 1983.

Part 1 presents an historical overview of Hall's career, beginning with his first professional productions in Texas, continuing through his work Off-Broadway in New York in the 1950s, and covering his quarter-century at Trinity Rep and six seasons at Dallas. This segment of the study traces how Hall developed the principles that inform his …

Feminist Theory And Postwar American Drama, Gayle Austin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is concerned with developing feminism as a critical tool, to be applied to drama. Feminist theory from anthropology, psychology, literary criticism, and film theory is summarized and one theorist from each field is selected to serve as an example of how feminism in that field can illuminate drama written by both women and men.

I begin by outlining the three chronological stages of feminist criticism: (1) Images of women; (2) Women writers; and (3) The questioning of an entire field. The various political divisions of feminism (liberal, radical, and socialist) also need to be kept in mind, and …

The Politics Of Experience: Robert Morris, Minimalism, And The 1960s, Maurice Berger

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Robert Morris's oeuvre, unlike the work of most other so-called minimalist artists, is both stylistically and intellectually diverse. His range was broad: expressionist paintings, Duchamp-inspired objects, dances and performances, minimalist sculptures, large scale installations and sound environments, earth and land reclamation works, films and videos, and political acts against the museum, the labor economy, and the Vietnam war. The philosophical sources for Morris's art (he was a philosophy major at Reed College in the late-1950s) are equally rich: Herbert Marcuse, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jean Piaget, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Charles Sanders Peirce. As choreographer, writer of influential theoretical texts, and …

Eustache Deschamps' "L'Art De Dictier", Deborah M. Sinnreich

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

L'Art de dictier, written in 1392 by the prolific courtier-poet Eustache Deschamps, is the first ars poetica ever written in French. It provides invaluable insights into medieval poetics as perceived by a respected medieval poet.

L'Art de dictier is composed of two sections: a brief introductory liberal arts treatise and a prescriptive poetics devoted to the lyric. In the introduction, music is divided into two sub-categories. Deschamps calls instrumental music "artificial music" because he feels it can be taught to anyone. "Natural music," in contrast, is poetry, for only those who are inspired to compose it can do so. …

A Muted Cry: White Opposition To The Japanese Exclusion Movement, 1911–1924, Bruce A. Abrams

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study identifies the missionary-related leadership of the Federal Council of Churches, and its lay pacifist and internationalist supporters, as the most significant opposition to the anti-Japanese immigration movement in the period from the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907 to the exclusion legislation of 1924. Sidney L. Gulick (1860-1945), as a missionary on furlough and executive secretary of the F.C.C.'s Commission on International Justice and Goodwill, provided cohesion to this effort through his proposal for comprehensive immigration and naturalization reform. His program of reform centered on removal of racial barriers to naturalization and the universal application of immigration restrictions based on …

The Experience Of Public Art In Urban Settings, Roberta Degnore

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The sine qua non for an artwork in the urban realm is neither its judged "goodness" nor the ability of audiences to perceive it "correctly," but is the total experience the work contributes to as part of the fabric of interlocking meanings that places have in people's lives.

In urban settings, the physical attributes and private intentionality of a work do not stand alone. As carefully as an artist installs his/her pieces in a gallery, the same concern for their working together and with their total environment must be applied to artworks in complex public settings, where choice to be …

Revolutions Off Off Broadway, 1959-1969: A Critical Study Of Changes In Structure, Character, Language, And Theme In Experimental Drama In New York City, Alexis Greene

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze and categorize the approaches to structure, character, language, and theme that make the dramaturgy of certain playwrights writing for the Off Broadway theatre during the 1960s revolutionary in contrast to the dramaturgy of the majority of American playwrights of the 1950s. The playwrights under discussion include George Birimisa, Kenneth Bernard, Kenneth Brown, Rosalyn Drexler, Grant Duay, Tom Eyen, Maria Irene Fornes, Paul Foster, John Guare, A. R. Gurney, Jr., William M. Hoffman, Kenneth Koch, Charles Ludlam, Murray Mednick, Joel Oppenheimer, Rochelle Owens, Tom Sankey, Sam Shepard, David Starkweather, Ronald Tavel, Megan Terry, …

Ives On His Own Terms: An Explication, A Theory Of Pitch Organization, And A New Critical Edition For The "3-Page Sonata", Carol Kitzes Baron

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Ives's musical vision is tied to the expression of programmatic content. He believed that all music is program music. The first part of this study, "An Explication," shows how the extramusical dimensions are articulated in the formal design of the music. The formal, motivic, textural, and tonal techniques relate to the program. The program for the 3-Page Sonata is found in three literary sources: a note Ives pinned to his copy of the first edition, the marginal notes on the composing score, and "Memo 5" from Ives's Memos, which contains a parody of the writing of the critic W. J. …

Voice-Leading Patterns In The Fugal Expositions Of J. S. Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier", William Jonathan Michael Renwick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Although Heinrich Schenker's theory of tonal music goes very far towards uniting the traditionally independent domains of counterpoint and harmony, it does not deal directly or deeply with the connective role which imitative texture often plays in this synthesis. The obligations inherent in a canonic or fugal texture may limit compositional choices, but they also provide an underpinning of control and direction to voice leading. This dissertation demonstrates the structural role of imitation in tonal music by comparative analysis of a selected body of imitative music: the fugues of J. S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier.

A consistent and close interrelationship exists …

Sinfonia Brevis (Original Composition), Jeffrey Lynn Miller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Sinfonia Brevis. A work for orchestra (2d1 2 2 2 - 4 2 2 0, timpani, 2 percussionists, strings) in one movement divided into four sections (Andante Moderato, Allegro, Adagio, Allegro), with a duration of approximately 17 minutes.

An Analysis Of Roberto Gerhard's "Libra", Jeffrey Lynn Miller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Libra (1968), for mixed chamber ensemble, is one of the last works by the Anglo-Spanish composer Roberto Gerhard (1896-1970). Analysis of this work reveals that it employs a variety of compositional techniques, including pitch cells, serialism, folk elements, and structures based primarily on texture and timbre. This multiplicity of means reflects Gerhard's background, which included beginnings in Spanish nationalism and later work as a pupil of Arnold Schoenberg. Libra is unified through the dramatic combination of the various elements, the use of a limited number of motives, and the possible influence of a secret autobiographical program.

Sinfonia Brevis. A work …