Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Sound Minds: Women’S Novels, Vibrational Experience, And The Listening Imagination In Nineteenth-Century Britain, Elizabeth Weybright

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Sound Minds: Women’s Novels, Vibrational Experience, and the Listening Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Britain traces nineteenth-century evolutions of the concept of auditory subjecthood and brings narrative representations of audition and utterance in novels written by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot to bear on sound studies, acoustic research, and adjacent philosophies of musical aesthetics. Between Ernst Chladni’s groundbreaking publications on acoustic science in 1787 and 1802 and Hermann von Helmholtz’s enormously influential study of sound waves and musical theory, On the Sensations of Tone: As a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music (1862), continental Europe and Britain saw proliferating …

Towards A Decolonial Feminist Aesthetics: Gender, Race, And Empire In Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’S Dictee, Juwon Jun

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Defining revolutionary struggle as a struggle between fictions, Trinh T. Minh-ha asserts that art in revolution is a spiritual presence which widens the conception of freedom. Political struggle is constituted by clashes in differently written and conceived realities—hinged on the creation and realization of multiple liberatory fictions. Liberation then requires us to attend to creating new myths and conceptions of freedom which can free us from the current structures of domination that produce current subjects and realities. If culture is indeed an “essential element in the history of a people,” mapping decoloniality in cultural and aesthetic fields may be essential …

Topics Of The Sky: Ashbery's Involving Search For The Poem, Tom M. Carlson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

An essay lived by John Ashbery's Three Poems with special attention to the possibility of cosmic relevance. This paper attempts to imagine priorities and needs proper to celestial bodies. Three Poems is the consciousness that gives possibility to the text, while Blanchot, Nietzsche, and other thinkers ground its exploration in philosophical analysis.

The Picturesque And Its Decay: The Travel Writing And Journals Of Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Wollstonecraft, And Mary Shelley, Gabrielle Kappes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project puts forth the argument that when the late eighteenth century’s taste for nature and picturesque tourism had peaked, writers following in the picturesque tradition grappled with the limitations and confines of these aesthetic categories. In the chapters that follow, I present three authors, Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Shelley, who are all dissatisfied with the conventions of the picturesque. Dorothy Wordsworth’s Alfoxden Journal (1798) demonstrates the nuances of the picturesque instability where distinctions between nature and the cultural production of nature have become muddied. I then examine three tour narratives in order to draw attention to how …

To See Again: Vision And Revelation In American Poetics, Emily C. Raabe

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With this project, I am arguing for a particularly American visual poetics that dwells in the state of suspension implied by attention, quivering between wonder and contemplation, immobility and unfixity as it seeks to reveal, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes in his 1945 The Phenomenology of Perception, the world which is “always ‘already there’ before reflection begins — as an inalienable presence.”^[1] Grounded in visual theory, the project pairs poets and artists, searching not for similitude, but rather examining resemblance, difference, and most important, relation. Susan Howe, one of my guides for this project, writes that, “immense perspectives …

The Ethics Of Perception In Transatlantic Romantic Poetry, Charles W. Rowe

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Ethics of Perception in Transatlantic Romantic Poetry is a report on the ethical significance of British and American Romantic poetry composed between 1785 and 1865. This study focuses on the poems of William Cowper, William Wordsworth, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman. Its central claim is that these poets composed a body of work that sought to show readers how their sustained attention to everyday perceptual experience could lead them towards a more empathic way of being.

The first chapter argues that the late-eighteenth century poet William Cowper is the initiator of the ethically-oriented poetry of perception that Wordsworth, …

Queerness, Witchcraft, And Embodied Presence: Aesthetic Knowings Of What A Body Can Do, Megan Bigelow

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Taking as a point of entry the critique of representation and affirming the limitations of the cuts that language makes, this capstone project explores the imbrications and assemblages between Foucault’s concept of subjugated knowledges, witchcraft and other body-based ways of knowing and being, and the consciousness of non-human forms such as plants and through the framework of non-representational theory, process philosophies, aesthetics, queerness, and the concept of difference itself.

Since such theories themselves are living, breathing entities, this capstone project explores the ideological split that has occurred between sacred and secular beliefs, moving through different figures such as nuns and …

Toward A Posthuman Ecology: Evolutionary Aesthetics In Transatlantic Romanticism, Kaitlin Mondello

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation traces the vibrant interchange between Romantic literature and science in the nineteenth century that necessitated new forms of aesthetics. I argue that Romantic writers and scientists co-created a new way of understanding nature that moved away from hierarchical anthropocentrism toward what I call “posthuman ecology.” This work explores shared scientific, literary, and philosophical sources for Erasmus and Charles Darwin, Mary and Percy Shelley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Emily Dickinson. I connect aesthetic innovation to ethics to ask more broadly how literature can provide an affective and effective space to represent and engage scientific discourse. I conclude that understanding …

Insurgent Knowledge: The Poetics And Pedagogy Of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, And Adrienne Rich In The Era Of Open Admissions, Danica B. Savonick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Insurgent Knowledge analyzes the reciprocal relations between teaching and literature in the work of Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara, and Adrienne Rich, all of whom taught in the Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge (SEEK) educational opportunity program at the City University of New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Drawing on archival research and analysis of their published work, I show how feminist aesthetics have shaped U.S. education (especially student-centered pedagogical practices) and how classroom encounters with students had a lasting impact on our postwar literary landscape and theories of difference. My project demonstrates how, …

Bloomsbury's Byzantium And The Writing Of Modern Art, Elizabeth Sarah Berkowitz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Bloomsbury’s Byzantium and the Writing of Modern Art” examines the role of Byzantine art in Bloomsbury art critics Roger Fry’s and Clive Bell’s narratives of aesthetic Modernism. Fry, in his pre-World War I and interwar writings and teachings on art, and Bell, in seminal texts such as Art (1914), have been branded by art historiography as the prime movers in a Formalist, teleological narrative of Modern art still prevalent in textbooks today. Fry’s and Bell’s ideas were later adopted by important Modernist authors and cultural figures, such as Alfred H. Barr, Jr., first director of New York’s Museum of Modern …

Black Models Matter: Challenging The Racism Of Aesthetics And The Facade Of Inclusion In The Fashion Industry, Scarlett L. Newman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The global fashion market is expanding every day, but often, the global fashion runways do not reflect that reality. On average, black models make up for six percent of models used on the runway during the fashion month calendar. This small percentage is also mirrored in advertisements and editorials featured in popular fashion magazines. In the 1970s, black models were met with great opportunities, and that success trickled down into the 1980s and the 1990s. As the 90s came to a close, top designers opted for an aesthetic that ultimately excluded models of color, but black models beared the brunt …

Joseph Beuys And Social Sculpture In The United States, Cara M. Jordan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Alongside the rise of the activist movements in the late 1960s, the German artist Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) proposed his concept of “social sculpture” — a method of fostering creativity, aimed at transforming society through interdisciplinary dialogue — as an alternative to the chaotic political, economic, and social life of postwar West Germany. He sought to heal society through a work of art with holistic and spiritual intentions, centered on the belief that art can include the entire process of living and therefore can be created by a wide range of people beyond artists. Although his ideas are understood and even …

Radical Interiorities, Aesthetic Selves: Charlotte Brontë, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Miciah Hussey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In her essay “On Being Ill” (1926), Virginia Woolf writes “We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others…There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds' feet is unknown.” My dissertation explores how the novel’s attempts to represent this inherently intimate and estranging “virgin forest” also test its formal limitations. From free indirect discourse to stream of consciousness, the development of the novel is marked by different modes of reproducing inner life that push beyond the boundaries of historical, social, and physiognomic indices. I argue that these narrative and …

"Follow The Bodies": (Re)Materializing Difference In The Era Of Neoliberal Multiculturalism, Briana Grace Brickley

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines a transnational literary archive in addition to analyzing shifting U.S. American cultural and political landscapes, and shows how critically attending to the various terms, figures, and valences of corporeality opens generative avenues for addressing the contemporary historical conjuncture, often referred to as the neoliberal capitalist era. Neoliberal capitalism, understood here to be a complex, diffuse ideology that manifests in part as a number of broadsweeping economic changes—including widespread deregulation and privatization, the increasing influence of international financial organizations, governmental cuts in social spending, and structural adjustment programs for the formerly colonized nations of the global south—operates in …

Art As Display, Frank M. Boardman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Art is essentially a type of display. As an activity, art is what we do when we display objects with certain intentions. As a set of objects, art is all of those things that are displayed for those purposes. The artworld is the social atmosphere that surrounds this particular activity of display. And a history of art is an evolving narrative of change in the practice of this sort of display.

Specifically, to focus for convenience on art as a set of objects, this is what we can call the “displayed-object thesis”:

x is a work of art iff: (a) …

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 …

Le Pianiste: Parisian Music Journalism And The Politics Of The Piano, 1833–35, Shaena B. Weitz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the French music journal entitled Le Pianiste, published in Paris from 1833 to 1835. Through an analysis of the journal’s contents, it reconsiders the nature of music journalism and musical life in Paris at the time it was in print, focusing in particular on canon formation and the power of the press. Le Pianiste’s remarkably detailed descriptions and analysis of the French music world challenge long-held perceptions of the era about taste and reception history, yet it remains an unstudied document. While past work on the music press has focused on criticism and reception, this …

The Philosophical Side Of Contemporary Art Forms, Kristina Bodetti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this project is to show that contemporary art forms, specifically popular music, film and comics/graphic novels, are capable of, and do in many cases work as philosophical pieces. I believe that an analysis of these mediums will reveal instances in which the works of art explicate established philosophical theories, expand upon them, and in some cases invent new theories.

Each new medium of art gets examined by philosophy in its turn and its merits as a unique art form are debated. From these arguments it is possible to extrapolate the ways in which these works can become …

Paris And Havana: A Century Of Mutual Influence, Laila Pedro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation employs an interdisciplinary approach to trace the history of exchange and influence between Cuban, French, and Francophone Caribbean artists in the twentieth century. I argue, first, that there is a unique and largely unexplored tradition of dialogue, collaboration, and mutual admiration between Cuban, French and Francophone artists; second, that a recurring and essential theme in these artworks is the representation of the human body; and third, that this relationship ought not to be understood within the confines of a single genre, but must be read as a series of dialogues that are both ekphrastic (that is, they rely …