UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
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Item FROM YOU I GET THE STORY: Tracking spirituality through the three iterations of The Who’s Tommy(2020) Marsten, Medha; Harding, James M; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the late 1960s, Pete Townshend, lead guitarist and composer for British rock band The Who, discovered the teachings of Indian spiritual leader Meher Baba. Inspired by these teachings he wrote the concept album for the first successful rock opera: Tommy. The smashing success of this album led to its adaptation into a major Hollywood film directed by Ken Russell in 1975 and its adaptation into a Broadway musical directed by Des McAnuff in 1992. This thesis examines how each adaptation contributes to the Westernization, generalization, and sanitization of the spirituality inherent to the original concept album as well as how these adaptations reflect the conflicting objectives of their lead artists.Item The Surface of Things: Reading a Cinema of Decline(2018) Leininger, Derek Michael; Giovacchini, Saverio; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A declensionist imagination dominated intellectual and cultural discourse in American society through the late twentieth century. The 1970s and 1980s were punctuated by real declines of multiple sorts, but the alarmed debates about juvenile delinquency, rural blight, urban decay, and violent crime often obscured coterminous trends and the more meaningful critiques of the historical forces prompting the changes felt as decline. By looking at American films from the 1970s and 1980s focused on thematic decline of varied sorts, this project explores the postmodern social experience of the late-twentieth century and the cultural roots of overcriminalization in the United States. Reading between the filmic lines (or what film theorist Siegfried Kracauer called the surface expressions of cinema) provides clues into unpacking the often contradictory political, social, and cultural configurations taking shape at the end of the twentieth century.Item American Blackness and Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Twenty-First Century German Literature and Film(2014) Wall, Christina Noelle; Frederiksen, Elke P; Germanic Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study represents a unique examination of the convergence of constructs of Blackness and racism in twenty-first century novels and films by white Germans and Austrians in order to demonstrate how these texts broaden discourses of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. The increased prominence of minority voices demanding recognition of their national identity within Nazi successor states has transformed white German perceptions of "Germanness" and of these nations' relationships to their turbulent pasts. I analyze how authors and directors employ constructs of Blackness within fictional texts to interrogate the dynamics of historical and contemporary racisms. Acknowledging that discourses of `race' are taboo, I analyze how authors and directors avoid this forbidden discourse by drawing comparisons between constructs of American Blackness and German and Austrian historical encounters with `race'. This study employs cultural studies' understanding of `race' and Blackness as constructs created across discourses. Following the example of Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark (1992), my textual analyses show how these constructs create a "playground for the imagination" in which authors confront modern German racism. My study begins with a brief history of German-African American encounters, emphasizing the role American Blackness played during pivotal moments of German national identity formation. The subsequent chapters are divided thematically, each one comprised of textual analyses that explore discourses integral to Vergangenheitsbewältigung. The third chapter examines articulations of violence and racism in two films, Oskar Roehler's Lulu & Jimi (2008) and Michael Schorr's Schultze gets the blues (2008), to explore possibilities of familial reconciliation despite historical guilt. The fourth chapter compares the Besatzungskinder protagonists of two novels, Peter Henisch's Schwarzer Peter (2000) and Larissa Boehning's Lichte Stoffe (2007), with the (auto)biographies of actual Besatzungskinder Ika Hügel-Marshall and Bärbel Kampmann, exposing the modern discursive taboo of `race' as a silence stemming from historical guilt. The final chapter demonstrates the evolution of German conceptualizations of historical guilt through the analyses of Christa Wolf's novel Stadt der Engel (2010) and Armin Völckers's film Leroy (2007).Item WORLD WAR II AND U.S. CINEMA: RACE, NATION, AND REMEMBRANCE IN POSTWAR FILM, 1945-1978(2011) Chester, Robert Keith; Gerstle, Gary; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation interrogates the meanings retrospectively imposed upon World War II in U.S. motion pictures released between 1945 and the mid-1970s. Focusing on combat films and images of veterans in postwar settings, I trace representations of World War II between war's end and the War in Vietnam, charting two distinct yet overlapping trajectories pivotal to the construction of U.S. identity in postwar cinema. The first is the connotations attached to U.S. ethnoracial relations - the presence and absence of a multiethnic, sometimes multiracial soldiery set against the hegemony of U.S. whiteness - in depictions of the war and its aftermath. The second is Hollywood's representation (and erasure) of the contributions of the wartime Allies and the ways in which such images engaged with and negotiated postwar international relations. Contrary to notions of a "good war" untainted by ambiguity or dissent, I argue that World War II gave rise to a conflicted cluster of postwar meanings. At times, notably in the early postwar period, the war served as a progressive summons to racial reform. At other times, the war was inscribed as a historical moment in which U.S. racism was either nonexistent or was laid permanently to rest. In regard to the Allies, I locate a Hollywood dialectic between internationalist and unilateralist remembrances. On one hand, narratives of the U.S. as the dominant wartime power affirmed the nation's benevolence and might, attesting to the United States' right to dictate the terms of postwar international politics. On the other, progressive filmmakers used images of the Allies to challenge postwar U.S.-centrism and bemoan the Cold War nation's military and economic mismanagement of international relations. Emphasizing the contested character of the war's cinematic image, the dissertation recuperates a tradition of dissent, complicating our understanding of World War II remembrance and postwar Hollywood history. The project also considers the relationship between the Department of Defense (DoD) Pictorial Division - the military's liaison with Hollywood - and the film industry. Drawing on DoD records, I show how the postwar state influenced representations of racial diversity, and how the military shaped images of the U.S. in interaction with its wartime Allies.Item Threshold: Baltimore's Post-Industrial Edge(2011) Shockley, Allison Lea; Ambrose, Michael A; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Working simultaneously at multiple scales, this thesis focuses on the process of making, a process of iterative spatial studies and the making of integrated scales of threshold between city and water. At the urban scale, a rich and layered threshold condition between city and water, public and private, and integral movement systems reconnects the city of Baltimore, Maryland with its post-industrial edge along South Clinton Street. At the community, campus, and building scales, an integration of film making, viewing and education creates a threshold between residential and industrial functions of the site. At the detail scale, material and specific connections enhance the concept and experience of threshold. Technology advancements during the twentieth century expanded industrial ports and the city of Baltimore, though subsequently caused a physical disconnection between city and water. As industry moves away, the opportunity to reconnect post-industrial cities to the water's edge is ineluctable.Item STAYING POWER: THE MAINSTREAMING OF THE HARD-CORE PORNOGRAPHIC FILM INDUSTRY, 1969-1990(2009) Johnson, Stephen Patrick; Gilbert, James B; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)When publicly screened hard-core pornographic films first appeared in theatres, in 1969, they generated less than $1 million in annual revenue. By 1990, revenue approached $600 million. By 2000, estimates placed U.S. revenue between $5 and $15 billion. This dissertation examines the hard-core industry's growth by concentrating on changes in the mode of consumption as well as noting changes in the films themselves. And it ties the story of the industry and its customers to the intersecting narratives of the Supreme Court, anti-pornography activism, and the Federal government. The industry provided a product desired by a large and growing number of Americans. Videotape technology moved hard-core film from the highly contested public space of the motion picture theatre to the more easily defended private space of the home. The more effective the films were in arousing viewers and the more secret their consumption, the more the industry grew. The nature of the debate over hard-core pornography favored those defending consumption. While opponents of hard-core emphasized pornography's putative harm, evidence for these claims never rose above the anecdotal level. Finally, successful prosecution of hard-core films became increasingly untenable. Even when Federal and state prosecutions increased during the 1980s, a grudging cultural toleration of hard-core films meant prosecutors could no longer rely upon juries to return guilty verdicts. The hard-core industry, buoyed by success and confident that it understood their consumers, employed various publications to create a sense of community, assure customers that the best films were the most sexually arousing, and that arousal was both right and proper. Masturbation is crucial to understanding the industry's growth. Because of an 18th-century medical masturbation panic that reached its peak in the United States in the late 19th-century and endured, 20th-century American courts grappled with an obscenity doctrine predicated upon a barely acknowledged, enduring belief in the dangers posed by masturbation. Ironically, hard-core film became, after the shift to videotape, an astonishingly convenient and effective fantasy tool. The hard-core pornographic film industry grew in direct relation to its ability to supply a product that facilitated private desire and masturbation.