Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Albert Camus's Mediterraneanism In La Peste, Jacquelyn Libby

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The following dissertation uses the speech Camus gave at the inauguration of a new community arts center in Algiers in 1937, entitled “La Culture Indigène. La Nouvelle Culture Méditerranéenne,” to show that this expression of Mediterraneanism, as well as its evolution, can be detected in his novel La Peste, which was published ten years later in 1947. The bearing of Camus’s identification with the Mediterranean world on his speech is that it generated a sense of in-betweenness. This in-betweenness, I argue, is a key feature of Camus’s Mediterranean thought that is also found in La Peste’s subject matter, …

Pirandello Proto-Modern: A New Reading Of L’Esclusa, Bradford Masoni

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Luigi Pirandello’s first novel, L’Esclusa, written in 1893, but not published in its definitive edition until 1927, straddles two literary worlds: that of the realistic style of the Italian veristi, and something new, a style and approach to narrative that anticipates the theory of writing Pirandello lays out in his long essay L’Umorismo, as well as the kinds of experimental writing that one associates with early-20^th-century modernism in general, and with Pirandello’s later work in particular. The novel’s living in both worlds, however, makes it an interesting and problematic text. First, it gives readers insight into …

Of Stars And Solitude: Two Mexican Documentaries, Paul Julian Smith

Publications and Research

By happy coincidence, Mexico in 2016 yielded two expert and moving documentaries on women, sex, and aging: María José Cuevas’s Bellas de noche (Beauties of the Night) and Maya Goded’s Plaza de la Soledad (Solitude Square). Both are first-time features by female directors. And both are attempts to reclaim previously neglected subjects: showgirls of the 1970s and sex workers in their seventies, respectively. Moreover, lengthy production processes in which the filmmakers cohabitated with their subjects have resulted in films that are clearly love letters to their protagonists.

Bodies Of Knowledge: An Anatomy And Kinesiology Of The American Prison Nation, 'Human'-Making, And Twenty-First-Century Techno-Gods, Lyndsey Karr

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The social production of hegemonic knowledge has historically been legitimized in relation to the sanctioned status of the ‘Human’.[1] Beginning with the American Prison Industrial Complex and what sociologist Beth E. Richie conceptualizes as the “prison nation,” I will show the ‘human’ as a contingent and composite status appearing along a spectrum of Flesh, Body, and ‘Human’ (Flesh-Body-‘Human’) statuses and subjectivity.

Bringing this ‘Human’ continuum into conversation with twenty-first-century media, (micro)computational technologies, and contemporary knowledge and social economies, I expand the notion, reach, and scale of the American “prison nation.” Following Mark Hansen’s treatment of twenty-first-century digital media, I …

Yellowing The Logarithm: How Money Solved The Problem Of Freedom, Neil S. Agarwal

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is on the historical development of a co-constitutive relationship between money as the form of appearance of value and race as the form of appearance of human difference. It demonstrates this relationship through a study of experiments with monetary value in eighteenth-century British America. At a time when Bank of England notes circulated primarily among merchants and within London, colonial freeholders issued paper currencies through representative assemblies and posited a link between this enterprise and the well-being of a larger provincial community within which their bills would circulate. I show how their experiments provided a means for creole …

Arte De Resistencia De Escritoras Latinas En Los Estados Unidos: Magali Alabau Y Carmen Boullosa, Agustin De Jesus

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In my dissertation, I focus on the literary production of Latina authors, who live and write in the United States. By using the notion of the art of resistance, I explore the works of Magali Alabau, Hemos llegado a Ilión, Volver and Amor faltal, and Carmen Baullosa, Texas. Both writers clash about the discourses linked to segregation. Pondering on their works, I propose to extend the current idea of the art of resistance, associated with political views, to one that opposes all kinds of segregation. In Part I, taking into consideration the debates regarding truth and fiction, …

Scholasticism And Formal Structure In Camille Saint-Saëns's Fugues For Keyboard, Pedro Segarra-Sisamone

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Drawing on the treatises of Cherubini (1835), Dubois (1901), and Gedalge (1901), this dissertation examines the relation between the fugue d’école and Saint-Saëns’s compositional practices with reference to his fugal works for piano and organ and sets out to answer the question: To what extent are the formal and tonal structures of Saint-Saëns’s fugues determined by the organizational conventions associated with the fugue d’école? While the scholastic fugue has been described as an artificial construct, this study argues that this tripartite model, with its variants and subtypes, can be considered as the parent model for most fugues composed during the …

Elogio Del Amateur: Traducción Y Resistencia En La Era Del Panamericanismo (Ee.Uu. 1889-1945), Maria Soledad Marambio Castro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation explores the notion of amateurism in the context of the translation of Latin American literature in the U.S. at the beginning of the 20^th century. I argue that all literary translators are amateurs in terms of their modes of production, and that this condition allows them to resist the hegemonic projects of their day (In this dissertation, “amateurism” does away with the pejorative connotation that the term has acquired in the common use). With this in mind, I study the work and the career path of two American translators, Alice Stone Blackwell and Isaac Goldberg, and the …

Aesthetic Geographies: Art, Crises, Urban Imaginaries, Erin Siodmak

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Performance art, with its origins in Dada, Futurism, and Surrealism, has long been a political, politicized, and transgressive form of art, posing challenges to art world institutions, political and social norms, and the nature of art itself through practitioners’ unconventional uses of the body, space, and audience/viewer participation. Much of the power of performed art comes from its performative and transitory nature: it does not simply express, represent, or communicate information. Rather, performative art forms such as installation or performance are productive of political aesthetics. Art may not necessarily intervene directly with political, legal, and legislative decisions or acts, but …

Meaning Through Things, Marilynn Johnson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Interpretation is the process by which we find meaning in the things in the world around us: clouds on the horizon, bones, street signs, hairbrushes, uniforms, paintings, letters, and utterances. But where does that meaning come from and on what basis are we justified in saying a particular meaning is the right meaning? Drawing from debates in the philosophy of language, I argue that a complete theory of meaning and interpretation must be grounded in intentions. My argument employs research in the philosophy of language, aesthetics, linguistics, and cognitive science to develop a general framework of interpretation. This framework is …

From Design To Completion: The Transformation Of U.S. War Memorials On The National Mall, Sara Jane Weintraub

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation looks at U.S. war memorials on the National Mall built between 1983 – present. Each memorial designer was selected through an open design competition process and was subject to the same government approval processes. The Commission of Fine Arts (CFA), the National Capitol Monuments Commission (NCMC), and the National Park Service (NPS) all must approve memorials built on the National Mall. In some cases, the memorials shared project architects and sponsoring agencies. The case studies show that the design competition process ultimately shapes the meaning and appearance of the built memorials.

I argue that the guidelines, winning design, …

La Symbolique Païenne Dans L'Oeuvre De René Depestre, Wilson Decembre

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My goal in this thesis is to show that the different metamorphoses of René Depestre’s works can be schematized under two determinant stages in which the author’s paganism has different functions and significations. In the first stage, his paganism gives him the tools for his revolt that is purely artistic and existential before it becomes political on account of the author’s discovery of the socialist realism. In the second stage that follows the break of Depestre with Marxism as well as his reevaluation of the Négritude ideology, his paganism becomes truly Dionysian, in the Nietzschean sense of the word, to …

Una Democracia Aterrorrizada: Justicia Y Afecto En Los Textos De La Transición Democrática Argentina, Mariana Graciano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes the links between justice and affect in some of the most emblematic texts of the democratic transition in Argentina. Films, novels and photos are incorporated here as texts or complex utterances, as they constitute a framework of signs with a communicative intention that makes sense in a given context. In order to analyze these links, I consider terms from the field of transitional justice (reconciliation, forgiveness, restoration) and specific affects (terror, empathy, guilt, resentment, tenderness, happiness and cruelty).

The key questions guiding this thesis are: what links did visual arts and literature have in relation to the …

Heavy Ink: A Documentary On The Comicbook Revolution, Renzo Adler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Heavy Ink is a documentary short focusing on the comic anthology magazine, Heavy Metal, examining its history as both a standout comic magazine, and how it fits into the larger tradition of comic books. What started off in 1977 as a sci-fi offshoot of National Lampoon ushered in a new era of comics by bridging the gap between American and European comic sensibilities with a talent pool from all over the world.

Heavy Metal would go on to have reverberations beyond comics into music, movies, and the global entertainment landscape of today. Heavy Metal introduced the world to artists such …

Assessing The Cyborg Center: Assemblage-Based, Feminist Frameworks Toward Socially Just Writing Center Assessments, Erin M. Andersen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation will broaden the purview of recent scholarship pertaining to socially just writing assessments by making connections among assemblage theory and materialism, studies of ecological and anti-racist assessments, and studies of writing center work, to ground theoretical conversations in everyday practices. Focusing on systemic oppression in the neoliberal university and consciously using assemblage theory as a mechanism for confronting multiliteracies allows writing center directors to see the constant movement and reshaping of students’ knowledges as they approach different environments, different courses, and different genres. Notions of intra-relatedness and intertwinings evident in assemblage theory are essential to this dissertation’s consideration …

Culture And Mental Health: Considering The Role Of The Complex Cultural-History In Irish-American Population, Tiffinie Patricia Sesko

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study investigates the mental health of Irish immigrants and first generation Irish Americans. As the Irish-American population makes up such a large portion of the entire population of the United States, it is important we acknowledge its origin and take that into account where mental illness and treatment are concerned as the Irish culture has a pronounced effect on mental health. The intended audience of this review are expert and non-expert members of the clinical setting and community who may gain insight on helping a client or family member find a way to understand and express repressed feelings affectively. …

The Varieties Of Tone Presence: On The Meanings Of Musical Tone In Twentieth-Century Music, Aaron Harcus

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is about tone presence, or how musical tone shows up for experience in twentieth-century music. In exploring the subject of tone presence, I rethink notions of “pitch structure” in post-tonal theory and offer an alternative that focuses on the question of what it is to be a musical interval for experience, drawing on a wide range of research from social theory, semiotics, theories of emotion, African American studies, literary theory, usage-based linguistics, post-colonial theory, and phenomenology. I begin by offering a critique of three basic assumptions that constrain understandings of what we mean by pitch structure in post-tonal …

The Politics Of Shorter Hours And Corporate-Centered Society: A History Of Work-Time Regulation In The United States And Japan, Keisuke Jinno

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Shorter working hours drew much attention as a means of fighting unemployment and crisis in capitalism during the first half of the twentieth century. Nowadays, shorter work-time is rarely considered a policy option to fix economic or social issues in the United States and Japan. This dissertation presents a history of work-time regulation in the United States and Japan to examine how and why its developments and stalemate took place.

In the big picture, developments of work-time regulation during the first half of the twentieth century were a part of concessional modifications of class relations, a common phenomenon in many …

Jazz And Recording In The Digital Age: Technology, New Media, And Performance In New York And Online, Dean S. Reynolds

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a study of the uses of recording technologies and new media by jazz musicians in New York. It privileges the perspectives of professional musicians, gleaned through interviews and observation of their discourses and practices in live and recorded performances and in online new media spaces. Contrary to scholarly and critical approaches to jazz that privilege live performance, this dissertation argues that mediatization, through use of recording technologies, digital formats and platforms, and social media, is a vital mode of jazz performance in the digital age. Chapter 1 shows how formative encounters with jazz by musicians coming of …

When Old Age Changed: Inventing The "Senior State," 1945-1975, Benjamin Hellwege

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation asks why public assistance at the federal level in the United States has become significantly oriented towards the needs of older Americans since the New Deal era. It argues that in effect the United States has developed an old age welfare state – a “senior state,” in other words, which has sought primarily to protect the economic status of older Americans, and that the creation of this “senior state” represents the end-point of a long-term project by social reformers, organized labor, and old age advocacy organizations over the course of the second half of the 20th century to …

The Conflict Of Progressive And Conservative Tendencies In The Film Work Of Steranko, James H. Romberger

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis analyzes the work of narrative artist James Steranko on three finished films: the short AFI film Shadow House, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Bram Stoker's Dracula, directed by Francis Ford Coppola. It demonstrates how Steranko's efforts on all of these projects are consistent with the overriding concerns of his art, yet it also examines his conflicting impulses, on the one hand to initiate progressive narrative structure and visualization, and on the other to support socially conservative, patriarchal values. Steranko is among the first American comic book auteurs and he …

Women In The Workplace: The Impact Of Earning Potential Empowerment And The Work-Life Balance, Alysha-Beth Rodriguez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Gender inequalities may be observed in different fields. When women choose to pursue career growth, they need to be ready to encounter significant challenges to find the balance between their professional and personal lives. This thesis discusses the hypothesis that modern US women occupying executive positions in the field of finance may achieve a work-life balance if certain internal and external factors are taken into consideration and evaluating the situation when women can or cannot achieve a work-life balance. The purpose of this thesis is to examine the role of earning potential in women’s careers as a factor in navigating …

Never Forgets: Traumatic Trace Within Public Space, Jan Descartes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper will interrogate the ways in which ephemera from events affects the human and non- human environment and how the absence, manipulation or presence of traumatic trace weaves itself into the atmosphere of the past, present and future. It will look at space and the ways that trace manifests itself in hierarchal spaces and Lebbeus Woods’ concept of heterarchial spaces, which are organic and/or horizontally organized. A thread throughout is the question that if trace from trauma can exist in the visual field, i.e. the physical or digital landscape, in a way that maintains a discourse without perpetuating oppression. …

The Queer Allure Of Digital Sociality, Benjamin Parrish Haber

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the resonance between queer sociality and emergent forms of digital communication. Drawing from queer theory and LGBTQ social histories, this dissertation charts the convergence of digital social modulation with the polyvalence, promiscuity, and mutability of queer sociality. A close analysis of the infrastructure and design of Facebook, Snapchat, Grindr, and other queered social media platforms demonstrates how digital capitalism’s desire for lifelong compulsive engagement is in part facilitated by an appropriation of the ongoingness of queer sexuality and relationality. In highlighting the key role of temporality, aesthetic, and affect in regulating the creation and circulation of digital …

Custodian Of The Specie: White Women, Capital, And Slavery In The Hemispheric South, Jenny Leroy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation argues that white women played crucial roles in the economic, political, and cultural circuits that linked the United States and Cuba, and the hemisphere broadly, during the nineteenth century. It inserts white women into a historical account of U.S. imperialism by analyzing the literary works of a number of American women who traveled to or simply fantasized about Cuba during this period of intense and widespread interest in the island. It identifies white women not just as providing the symbolic rationale for Cuban annexation or intervention – the preservation of their chastity being a common justification for the …

Constructing Music Of Rebellion In The Triumphant Empire: Punk Rock In The 1990s United States, David Pearson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the late 1980s, the punk scene in the United States was plagued by Nazi skinheads, the macho violence of “straight-edge hardcore,” and musical stagnation. Moreover, Ronald Reagan, the symbol of all that punks detested, was no longer president, the Cold War was coming to an end, and the United States was fast becoming the world’s sole superpower. These dilemmas put punk rock’s viability as a music of rebellion against the dominant order in a state of crisis.

Emerging out of this late 1980s malaise was a new wave of (leftist) political bands that took lyrical aim at the New …

Choteo Cubano: Humor As A Critical Tool In Twentieth-Century Cuban Theater, Rebecca L. Salois

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project analyzes the incorporation of choteo in specific Cuban theater texts written during three distinct periods in twentieth-century Cuban history, all of which coincide with specific moments of social, political, and/or economic unrest or transition. Choteo in the theater has served as a tool to demonstrate discontent and frustration with authority figures in various contexts. As that need has altered over time, so too has the approach that playwrights have taken to speak out about these issues. I suggest that by responding to changing circumstances with choteo, confronting a difficult situation is more palatable to audiences or readers than …

Claude Iii Audran: Ornemaniste Of The Rococo Style, Barbara Laux

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The ornemaniste Claude III Audran worked over the course of some forty years to delight elite aristocrats, including Louis XIV, by creating cutting-edge arabesque designs with motifs drawn from popular culture. He became a maître in the Académie de Saint-Luc. He chose not to become a member of the Académie royale de peinture et sculpture, but he subcontracted work to Académie artists and achieved unparalleled status as a master of his craft. Despite the longevity of his successful career, previous scholarship has only examined a handful of individual projects and the arc of his career has never been fully examined. …

Vim Parat: Patterns Of Sexualized Violence, Victim-Blaming, And Sororophobia In Ovid, Melissa Marturano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation argues for the importance of understanding the depiction of sexualized violence and rape in the Roman poet Ovid’s extensive corpus through the modern feminist concepts of victim-blaming (blaming victims of sexual abuse for their own abuse) and sororophobia (female figures participating in misogyny). It explores sexualized violence and rape in Ovid long-form, examines the discernible patterns that emerge and the deviations from them as he depicts that violence throughout his texts, and more importantly, introduces victim-blaming and sororophobia into an analysis of these patterns. Despite the fact that previous scholars have done substantial analyses of the patterns of …

Dreams And The Maternal Imaginary: From Nostalgic Intersubjectivity To Mourning, Julie Ackerman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation concerns the history of psychoanalytic thinking about dreams. It is about both the psychic function of dreams and their theoretical function, or the function that they have served within psychoanalytic discourse. It begins with a consideration of the significance of the dream in classical thinking, where it was conceptualized as a psychic emergence in the context of maternal absence. It traces the way in which the rise of object relational paradigms led to the reconceptualization of the dream in relation to the presence of the maternal mind rather than the absence of the maternal body. It describes how …