Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Searching For New Landscapes, Halim Lee

Masters Theses

“Searching for New Landscapes” ventures beyond familiar environments to explore new territories in graphic design.

By changing our environment and patterns, looking at things anew with a fresh perspective, and transforming the tools we use, we can spark new insights and catalyze evolution for growth.

This study proposes getting away from known environments and breaking existing habits by responding instinctively and rapidly to unexpected prompts.

The collected works and writing underpin the importance of thinking flexibly with a lighthearted “why not?” attitude and looking at things beyond existing definitions.

These methodologies are further applied to the action of teaching, to …

Defamiliarizied Gender In The Works Of Hayao Miyazaki, Jolie Finley

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Defamiliarized Gender in the Works of Miyazaki Hayao argues that the films of Hayao Miyazaki portray unconventionally strong female protagonists through a process called defamiliarization. Defamiliarization is a literary technique that transforms familiar qualities to ones that seem strange and new to the audience. Miyazaki borrows from and rejects elements of Japanese culture to create characters and settings that evoke the defamiliarization of gender in the films Spirited Away and Kiki’s Delivery Service. Examples of this in Miyazaki’s works include allusions to historical figures of the opposite gender in his own characters and presenting fantastical creatures of Japanese folklore …

Yes, Baby: Essays, Amy Gault

MSU Graduate Theses

This creative thesis includes thirteen flash nonfiction pieces and one fiction short story exploring emotions and experiences that have changed who I am today. These writings are personal experiences or are inspired by personal experience. These creative works interrogate deeply transformative events and situations, such as familial relationships, trauma, poverty, living in the Midwest, patriarchy, and the beauty in existing. In the thesis’s critical introduction, I examine how my flash nonfiction pieces employ Milan Kundera’s theory of the appeal of play and Charles Baxter’s concept defamiliarization. I analyze how the succinct form of the flash essay allows my nonfiction writing …

Other Realms, Louis Rakovich

Masters Theses

Can a system existing in rigid order be taken back to a state of malleability, a space of potential not yet actualized?

If creation reduces the infinite to produce the finite, then in the simplest sense, creation is the process of bringing something tangible, real, out of the ether—out of the primordial chaos of possibility. The technique of defamiliarization can be viewed as an agent of de-creation, the active reversal of creation, in order to make creation possible once again. As such it holds spiritual power in its own right.

In pursuit of this state of renewed potentiality, I use …

Life, Love, And Loss: Redefining The Trauma, Samantha Crystal Rae Barnette

MSU Graduate Theses

This thesis begins with a critical introduction analyzing the use of defamiliarization and the Dostoevskian hero in literature as a catalyst for a change in perception for victims of trauma. I create a relationship between the theories of Viktor Shklovsky and Mikhail Bakhtin as applied to both my own and published works. Short stories from Carmen Maria Machado and Marly Swick and Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale help to situate my own writing within this theoretical approach. The basis of my hypothesis lies in the blurred effect that trauma can have on the individual, causing an automatic response to …

Skew-Morphic Dream, Yoonsu Kim

Masters Theses

Skew-morphic Dream explores design approaches that shift one’s viewpoint, that agitate the familiar with a daydream. The doubling disjunctions presented here frame an ‘unreal real’, a skewed perspective on the function-driven interface design represented in skeuomorphism. To achieve this effect, a kind of perceptual halt, I implement defamiliarization. Within these spaces, there emerges an opportunity to think differently about perception, tools, and interfaces.

This thesis catalogs three methods used to create ‘skew-morphic dreams’: utilizing familiar tools with inverted functions, opening portals to defamiliarized landscapes, and developing platforms that require the audience to behave in unfamiliar ways.

Brilliant Women: Prose And Poetry, Amelia Fisher

MSU Graduate Theses

This collection of creative writing explores themes and subjects relating to feminism, sexuality, performativity, societal woes, popular culture, and the different ways we communicate. The individual pieces often examine women’s empowerment and lack thereof. These stories, essays, and poems are introduced by a critical work situating the contents of the thesis within greater literary traditions, such as Viktor Shklovsky’s defamiliarization, which I claim can function on the structural level as well as the story level, and his theory of the Chronotope; time and place are significant threads I follow from one genre to the next to create a cohesive collection …

Gustav Mahler The Protomodernist, Austin M. Doub

Musical Offerings

Steeped in a cultivated European tradition and burdened by several personal tragedies, Gustav Mahler undeniably shaped the course of classical music leading into the twentieth century. Holding fast to late Romantic stylistic conventions including complex rhythmic concepts, emotional and expansive melodies, and a strict adherence to form allowed the forward-thinking composer to seamlessly introduce modern elements into his symphonies. Through Mahler’s commanding symphonic output, the composer successfully maintained strong Austro-German stylistic principles while propelling the genre forward. In these symphonic writings, modern techniques of tonal decentralization, chromaticism, quotation, and paraphrasing are met with cohesive and compelling narratives to create balanced …

Holy Estrangement: The Poetics Of Estrangement In John Donne's Divine Poems And Sermons, Anton Bergstrom

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This dissertation examines literary estrangement, that is the act and effect of making the familiar strange in a literary work, in the religious poems and sermons of the poet-preacher John Donne (1572–1631). My study uncovers and explores what Donne "estranges," how he achieves this, and for what purpose, as well as the practices and modes of thinking that shaped his poetics. In Donne's religious verse and prose, making the familiar and traditional tropes, images, doctrines, and events of Christianity strange forms active readers and revitalizes those elements, imbuing them with newfound interest, significance, and affective power.

My study offers a …

Horror Fiction, Aljoša Mršović

Student Publications

Horror is a relatively new emotion. It is based on the subversion of a scientific account of the world. Therefore, it could not have existed prior to the establishment of such an account. Furthermore, it is unique because it can only be experienced through a fictional medium, as only a fictional medium allows the violation of the scientific, or natural, account of the world. There are several schools of thought that attempt to explain the phenomenon of fictional emotions, but 'irrationality' appears to be the most in touch with the scientific understanding of how the brain processes fictional emotions. Ultimately, …

See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil: The Poetics Of Violence In Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry, Benjamin Julius Dranoff

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College

Heaven's Disco Dances, Savannah Leigh Osbourn

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Heaven’s Disco Dances is a collection of poetry about finding identity through defamiliarization and displacing oneself from reality to better understand it. Within the literary community, there is a great deal of derision toward writing that fails to be “real” or “serious” enough, and poetry is an excellent example of how sometimes the extraordinary speaks to us in ways that realistic fiction cannot. The marvelous and fantastic might serve as an escape from the world, but not necessarily from reality. Rather, they give readers a different lens on life, and sometimes that makes it a more powerful one, because people …

La Poética Del Enrarecimiento En La Mujer Sin Cabeza (2008), De Lucrecia Martel, Karina Elizabeth Vázquez

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

El cine de Lucrecia Martel frecuentemente ha sido abordado desde perspectivas que privilegian las problemáticas de género, así como la memoria y el trauma en relación con la última dictadura militar argentina. Si bien estas miradas sobre la producción de Martel son apropiadas, especialmente aquellas que se enfocan en las relaciones familiares disfuncionales y las dinámicas de poder en los feudos provinciales, se ha dejado de lado el contenido crítico que presentan sobre el tema del empleo doméstico y la relación entre formas de precariedad laboral e impunidad social. Este ensayo propone una lectura de La mujer sin cabeza (2008), …

Tracing Motion, Stephanie M. Clark

Theses and Dissertations

This document explores the use of motion within design to defamiliarize a message. The objective is to expand a viewer’s level of understanding through prolonged perception. I experiment with this idea using present-day tools which afford my own movement during the capturing process to create various visual interpretations of motion. I look to László Moholy-Nagy, Aleksandr Rodchenko and Eadweard Muybridge who explored the use of the camera, the new technology of their day, to understand its potential to create a new visual language. They believed the lens of the camera was the eye of the future—and the public’s exposure to …

Seven Strangers, Rhetorical Devices For Hospitality, Epiphany, And Repentance In The Media Flood, Jimmy Butts

All Dissertations

Beginning with the foundation that rhetorical devices are often inherently defamiliarizing, often to productive ends, this study explores the theories, ethics, and praxis behind defamiliarizing rhetorical tactics. Because of the cultural shift toward increasing novelty within 21st century media production, it is progressively difficult for the contemporary writer to speak into the boisterous public sphere, which in turn creates a growing need for uniquely unfamiliar modes of rhetorical intervention. Strangeness offers a lens for seeing deliberate stylistic choices within the information flood; additionally, it asks us to consider how we can compose for potentially disinterested audiences. The examination also suggests …

Interpreting With "All Possible Caution, On Mental Tiptoe": Nabakov's Post-Romantic Renewal Of Perception In Lolita, Curtis Donald Le Van

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Although presenting the concept of love in a form not accepted by societal conventions does indeed estrange the conception of love in Nabakov's Lolita, it does nothing to explain how readers accept Humbert's passion, without immediately and consistently disregarding it as lewd and inappropriate. I will argue that Nabakov estranges the romantic conceptions not by defamiliarizing the occasion of love (i.e. by making the romance a manifestation of pedophilia), but rather by defamiliarizing and complicating the acts of both reading and interpreting. First, I will make associations between the Romantics and Nabokov, regarding their shared desire to renew the habitual …

An Inquiry Concerning The Teaching Of Critical Thinking In An Advanced Placement Literature And Composition Class, Minnette Northcutt

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project is intended to serve as an exploratory investigation of inquiry-based teaching in an Advanced Placement (AP) literature and composition course. The rigid curricular constraints of AP courses and the assessment-based guidelines for teaching such courses can challenge the value placed in teaching students to think critically. This project seeks to draw attention to the difficult terrain that teachers navigate when trying to foster environments that facilitate inquiry-based learning while at the same time holding students to the standards set by the curriculum. As an exploratory study, the project aims to identify important issues and questions concerning inquiry-based learning …