Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Addictive Potential: Regimes, Transformations, Circulations, Kayleigh E. Shield

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis employs a poststructuralist framework to consider the possibilities for agency and resistance in consumer capitalism. The argument begins with an examination of figures who emerged in nineteenth century psychiatric discourses, and the roles that those figures play in poststructural and postmodern critiques of psychoanalysis and psychiatry, specifically in the work of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I then argue that David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest presents us with a new figure—the addict. My reading of Wallace is informed by poststructuralist critiques of psychiatric power and by Wallace’s own affinity for the fiction of Franz Kafka. I …

Spaces Of Collapse: Psychological Deterioration, Subjectivity, And Spatiality In American Narratives, Andrew Papaspyrou

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis studies the relationship between spatiality and subjectivity within the context of modern and contemporary American narrative. Combining a psychoanalytic approach with phenomenological considerations, I set out to analyze the ways in which spatial structures mediate madness, paranoia, the compulsion to repeat, and uncanny anxiety. Space serves a primary focus of my analysis, and I outline the different ways that language and consciousness construct space. Considering the work of William Faulkner, Francis Ford Coppola, Paul Auster, and Mark Z. Danielewski, I argue that particular spaces, such as houses and cities, represent or contribute to particular forms of psychological psychosis …

Epic And Genre: Beyond The Boundaries Of Media, Luke Arnott

FIMS Publications

Noting the resurgence of popular and academic interest in epics across disparate media, this essay proposes a theory of the epic genre that transcends particular media and cultures. It seeks to reconcile discussions of the epic in Aristotle, G.W.F. Hegel, Georg Lukács, Mikhail Bakhtin, Erich Auerbach, and Northrop Frye, arguing that traditional definitions of epic narrative are instead subsets of a greater generic structure. The epic is, following Gregory Nagy and Franco Moretti, among others, a literary “super-genre” that encompasses as many other kinds of narrative as possible. The essay explains how epic narrative, disembedded from earlier oral poetry, is …

Narrative Epic And New Media: The Totalizing Spaces Of Postmodernity In The Wire, Batman, And The Legend Of Zelda, Luke Arnott

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Narrative Epic and New Media investigates why epic narratives have a renewed significance in contemporary culture, showing that new media epics model the postmodern world in the same way that ancient epics once modelled theirs. It demonstrates how the epic genre recurs across different cultures and subcultures, even as each instantiation of the epic remains unique to its particular society.

The dissertation draws upon genre theory from critical discourse analysis and from observations made by various critics about the epic’s status as a literary “super-genre,” which encompasses as many other kinds of narrative as it can. It extends genre theory …

A “New Harmony”: Intertextuality And Quotation In Toru Takemitsu’S Folio Iii, Rebecca Shaw

2015 Undergraduate Awards

The last in a set of three pieces, Folio III (1974) by Toru Takemitsu (1930–1996) was the composer’s first foray into solo classical guitar composition. Although Takemitsu’s guitar works are often overlooked or examined sparingly at best, Folio III is a complex composition that warrants exploration. It combines aspects of chromatic saturation and octatonicism with Baroque-era tonality via the quotation of Chorale No. 72 “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden” from the St. Matthew Passion (1727) by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750). This essay blends theoretical analysis with aspects of Takemitsu’s philosophy to clarify the significance of the chorale’s quotation to …

Toward A Postmodern Avant-Garde: Labour, Virtuosity, And Aesthetics In An American New Music Ensemble, John R. Pippen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines the aesthetic beliefs and labour practices of the American new music ensemble eighth blackbird (lower-case intentional). Drawing on ethnographic research conducted with the ensemble for the past six years, I show how the ensemble responds to specific cultural pressures endemic to the classical music scene, its new music vanguard, and to the contemporary United States. eighth blackbird, I argue, has created an ensemble identity and performance style designed to satisfy numerous audience positions, from experts well-versed in the intricacies of musical techniques to lay-persons unacquainted with the values and practices of new or classical music. This attempt …

Narrativity In Postmodern Music: A Study Of Selected Works Of Alfred Schnittke, Karen K. Ching

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The validity of music narratives has engendered much debate and research. This dissertation traces the development of narratology from its pre-structuralist phase to the post-structuralist phase where the discipline went through a narrative turn and blossomed into a broad-spectrum expansion that takes the form of interdisciplinary narratological studies such as music narratology. By adopting the viewpoints of postmodern philosophers and psychologists such as Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Ihab Hassan, Jean-François Lyotard, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Carl Jung, we develop a cognitive narratological theory for postmodern music that is veracious both epistemologically and philosophically.

We then analyze formally and contextually four concertos by …

Seeking The Self In Pigment And Pixels: Postmodernism, Art, And The Subject, Selma Purac

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this study, I examine how works of art become vehicles for the postmodern inquiry into the nature of subjectivity. My thesis narrows the focus to those characters who attempt to ground themselves in works of art, especially representational paintings. I argue that, to cope with what they see as the chaos of a decentered postmodern world, these figures try to anchor their confused identities in what they wrongfully interpret as stable and mimetic artworks. Nostalgic for an imagined past when representation was transparent and corresponded to reality, they believe that traditional figurative art offers the promise of cohesive meaning …