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Audiovisual Afterlives: The Soundtrack Of Liberal Nostalgia, Max W. Kaplan
Audiovisual Afterlives: The Soundtrack Of Liberal Nostalgia, Max W. Kaplan
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Following the 2016 American Presidential election, celebrity endorsements proved to be a more narrow gauge of public opinion than ever. The symbolic alignment with popular musicians, which had long abetted the Democratic Party’s standing with youth and particular identity groups, seemed only to reaffirm the party’s establishment status, drawing disavowal in a wave of anti-establishment sentiment on both the left and right. ‘Retromania,’ a term first coined by Simon Reynolds in 2010, can be tracked conceptually from the nostalgic inclinations of twenty-first century popular culture to the ideological sphere, where nostalgic, essentialized constructions of community, identity, and progress have coalesced …
Tracking Keywords In American Studies, Thomas Cleary
Tracking Keywords In American Studies, Thomas Cleary
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Tracking Keywords in American Studies is a computational text analysis project that provides interactive data visualizations which allow for deeper analysis of issues and discourses in the American Studies journal American Quarterly. Taking inspiration from Keywords for American Cultural Studies, which provides a list of keywords to serve as an entry point into understanding American Studies, my project takes these keywords and plots their occurrence throughout American Quarterly. Complimentary to the word counts, I chart algorithmically generated topics produced using topic modeling to look at discourses in the journal. This offers a different perspective on American Studies than …
Creating New Suns: Early Examples Of Afrofuturist Literature, Makeba Lavan
Creating New Suns: Early Examples Of Afrofuturist Literature, Makeba Lavan
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Over the last twenty years, specifically with the summer 2002 issue of Social Text edited by Dr. Alondra Nelson, Afrofuturism has become a serious focus for academic inquiry. For people familiar with the term, Afrofuturism is presented as a movement borne of our contemporary moment. However, this dissertation explores the ways in which Afrofuturism is actually a cornerstone for both African American literature and the struggle for civil/human rights. I do this by exploring the following questions: How does the enslavement of African/ African Americans and its aftermath play out in early African American literature? How do African Americans writers …
“Whispers Out Of Time”: Memorializing (Self-) Portraits In The Work Of John Berryman, John Ashbery, Anne Carson, And Nan Goldin, Andrew D. King
“Whispers Out Of Time”: Memorializing (Self-) Portraits In The Work Of John Berryman, John Ashbery, Anne Carson, And Nan Goldin, Andrew D. King
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This thesis documents four distinct post-WWII North American writers and artists—the poet John Berryman, the poet John Ashbery, the classicist and writer Anne Carson, and the photographer Nan Goldin—who expanded traditional definitions and practices of portraiture. Their works—The Dream Songs, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” Nox, and The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (and “The Cookie Portfolio”)—developed new ways of representing human subjectivity and the self that integrated the influences of Romanticism, Modernism and Postmodernism, but were not defined by these movements. In an era when notions of autonomous art and human identity became fractured, they picked up the …
The Urban Domestic: Homosocial Domesticity, Literature, And Culture In 19th And 20th Century New York City, Krystyna Michael
The Urban Domestic: Homosocial Domesticity, Literature, And Culture In 19th And 20th Century New York City, Krystyna Michael
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
My dissertation, The Urban Domestic: Homosocial Domesticity in the Literature and Culture of 19th- and 20th-Century New York City,explores the relationship between transformations in urban planning and domestic ideology through American literature. Specifically, I take up Walt Whitman and Edith Wharton as two authors with distinctly ambivalent relationships to the hetero-normative nuclear family and the ways New York’s built environment shaped and controlled the nation’s gender and sexual politics. My reading bridges a critical gap between studies of culture and its literary expressions on the one hand, and of architectural design and the urban environment …
Windows On The World: The Aesthetics Of Difference In Neoliberal New York, Nicholas Gamso
Windows On The World: The Aesthetics Of Difference In Neoliberal New York, Nicholas Gamso
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation seeks to refine critical methods for interpreting global cities and their cultures, charting an aesthetic history of neoliberal New York — from the 1929 regional plan to the present. Surveying a range of literature, art criticism, and planning discourse, I argue that the global has served as the dominant motif of spatial production and political power during this watershed era. I trace this argument through analyses of midcentury planning’s global spatial imaginings, gentrification and imperial metaphor, transnational encounter in World literature, and the city’s contemporary waste and recourse imaginaries. While I follow the Marxist account of the New …
Ana Mendieta, The Iowa Years: A Critical Study, 1969 Through 1977, Julia P. Herzberg
Ana Mendieta, The Iowa Years: A Critical Study, 1969 Through 1977, Julia P. Herzberg
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation investigates the artistic development of Ana Mendieta (born Cuba, 1948; died United States, 1985) from 1969 to 1977 when she lived in Iowa City, attended the University of Iowa, worked as an art teacher, and established herself as an artist. Mendieta is known for her early performance pieces and earth-body sculptures. From the late 1980s her work has been increasingly included in the contexts of feminist art history, performance, photography, work in nature, body art, self-representation, Cuban art, and transcultural identity. Collected by major museums throughout the United States, her work has begun to be included in surveys …