UMD Theses and Dissertations
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Item “CHARACTERS” IN DIVERSE WORKS FOR PIANO, 1720-1944(2024) Chan, Ham; Dedova, Larissa; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The main aim of this research project is to gain a thorough comprehension of piano music classified as “Character Pieces,” as well as music that exhibits similar musical traits but is not officially categorized as such. In a narrative context, a character is typically defined as a person depicted within a story, either through description or direct speech. In the realm of music, characters are often linked to the mood or atmosphere. Expanding on this, characters in music should assist performers and listeners in creating a musical scene through their individual imaginations. The fundamental essence of “Character Pieces” can be distilled to compositions imbued with distinctive musical qualities. While there exists no unanimous consensus regarding the precise criteria for characterizing a piece as such, there is a general consensus that compositions bearing evocative titles such as Ballade, Fantasy, Nocturne, and Mazurka are commonly regarded as character pieces. In a more scholarly context, the Harvard Dictionary of Music aptly defines the term “Character Piece” as a convenient designation encompassing a substantial body of short compositions from the 19th century, designed to express a definite mood or programmatic idea. Most of these compositions are written in ternary form, a structure that proves especially suitable for depicting two contrasting moods, such as the dramatic section A and the lyrical section B.A notable feature of the genre is its freedom from a fixed naming convention, enabling compositions to encompass a wide array of titles. This stands in stark contrast to other genres such as Sonatas and Variations, which are inherently defined by predetermined names and structural elements. However, influences on “Character Pieces” in terms of structure and musicality can be found in some of these genres. Several of these works will also be highlighted in the program. “Character pieces” can be viewed as a genre conceptualized by scholars to encompass the majority of piano music from the 19th century that may not adhere to conventional notions of “serious” music. Given the flexibility of this classification, the three planned recitals have been carefully curated to showcase music relate to this genre, spanning from works of Bach to Prokofiev composed between 1720 and 1944. Each recital will revolve around a central theme, with the initial installment titled “Fantasies and Ballades,” followed by “Humanity” in the second recital, and concluding with “Literary Inspirations” in the final recital.Item EEG EFFECTS OF EVENT MODELS IN STORY COMPREHENSION(2023) Rickles, Ben Bogart; Bolger, Donald J; Neuroscience and Cognitive Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Cognitive models can offer deep insights into how stories are comprehended. Models which follow event segmentation theory (EST) focus on the processing of brief episodes or events within a narrative and the boundaries between events. To test the brain mechanisms proposed by EST to occur at the event boundaries we looked at electroencephalographs (EEG) recorded from 49 participants as they were tasked with both listening to and recalling 9 blocks of ~ 6 minute-long audio clips in one of three conditions: single ordered stories, unrelated events from unrelated stories, or single stories in scrambled order. All stimuli were designed to contain event boundaries spaced at semi-regular intervals. Accuracy during an inference recognition task administered after each block was highest in the single ordered stories condition. Analysis 1 examined the effects of event boundary vs. local semantic context on evoked negativities (N400) related to lexical processing of each word. Effects of condition suggest that narrative structure affected lexical processing, more so than event-level structure and sentence-level semantic context. Analysis 2 Examined changes in alpha (8.5-12.5 Hz) and theta (4-8 Hz) band power of the EEG induced by the onset of the event boundary. Boundary-induced changes in both frequencies were recorded, in all conditions. The largest increases were recorded during the ordered stories over large portions of the scalp. How these findings relate to cognitive mechanisms suggested by event segmentation theory is discussed.Item Inhabiting the Memoir: Architecture through Narrative Structure(2015) Aronson, Erica Rachel; Rockcastle, Garth; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Narrative structures have the ability to elevate architecture to more meaningful, poetic places. Memoirs in particular enable the reader to dissociate from his or her self to experience multiple ways of seeing and thinking about the world. The act of reading a memoir is a participatory and vicarious one in which the reader actively engages with and “experiences” the events of the story, told by another. My thesis will explore how architecture can serve as a related medium in which to imbue narrative content and structures. This thesis seeks to translate and explore narrative structures into form/space implications as a means of re-presenting and enhancing processes of self-discovery, meaning, and architectural experience.Item Pirates, Anarchists, and Terrorists: Violence and the Boundaries of Sovereign Authority(2014) Shirk, Mark Alexander; Haufler, Virginia; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines how states combat episodes of violence that pose an ontological threat to the state. Sovereignty is a bundle of practices that draw, maintain, and redraw boundaries around political authority, the state is the polity constructed by these boundaries. The boundaries can be physical such as a border between state or conceptual such as that between public and private. These boundaries create the `conceptual maps that state leaders use to make sense of the world. The threat posed by violent action is constructed by narratives. Revisionist narratives of violence, the focus of this study, are illegible to states using current conceptual maps and therefore cannot be defeated while they remain. States are forced to redraw the boundaries of sovereign authority in the course of combating these threats, resulting in a transformed state. In my three cases - golden age piracy in the 18th century, anarchist `propagandists of the deed' at the turn of the 20th, and al Qaeda - I demonstrate that the state develops creative solutions to concrete crises. For instance, golden age pirates exploited a surfeit of ungoverned land and open markets in the early 18th century Atlantic to attack trade forcing colonial states to bring their Atlantic colonies into the domestic sphere and shift the sea into an open space. Similarly, the rise of the labor movement and the development fingerprint databases and the universal passport system were, in part, responses to the threat of anarchists propounding "propaganda of the deed" at the turn of the 20th century. Finally, counterterror innovations devised to combat al Qaeda, such as targeted killing and bulk data collection, have transformed borders from sites of exclusion designed to keep out undesirables to sites of collection where they are tracked and controlled. Each case demonstrates how states re-inscribe themselves by redrawing conceptual boundaries, such as between in order to make sense of an episode of revisionist and respond effectively.Item Les Représentations littéraires de la guerre civile libanaise: pour une poétique du lien(2014) Matar, Marilyn; Brami, Joseph; Modern French Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation I analyze representations of the Lebanese civil war in literature, and focus mainly on the works of the Francophone writers, Wajdi Mouawad, Elie-Pierre Sabbag and Ramy Zein. I trace in these works recurring themes and motifs that allow me to bring out the singularity of the aesthetics of war writings from the Lebanese civil war context. My thesis also reflects on the ethical questions raised by these works, which undertake a basic and universal examination of evil, meditate on the horrors of war, revenge and reconciliation, and grapple with the limits of human dignity. In the introduction, I present the authors and their works in the socio-historical context of the Mashrek and, more specifically, of Lebanon and the wars it has experienced since 1975. My dissertation is comprised of five chapters: In the first chapter, I examine the literary representation of the human cost of war: the aftermath of trauma, exile, and death. I also show how war and identity become inextricable in this literature. In the second chapter, I focus on the rewriting of myths and Greek tragedies such as Oedipus and Antigone as a way to gesture towards the unspeakable tragedy of war. In the third and fourth chapter, I demonstrate the importance of narrative by analyzing the links between intimate storytelling and the public space of theater, and by reexamining the notion of catharsis. The final chapter is a detailed study of the metaphors of reconstruction and reconciliation in Lebanese Francophone literature. In this section, I show how these works are characterized by a will to transcend conflicts; they thus constitute a powerful call for a society based on humanist ethical values.Item J. EDGAR HOOVER AND THE RHETORICAL RISE OF THE FBI: THE PUBLIC CAMPAIGNS AGAINST VERMIN, THE FIFTH COLUMN, AND RED FASCISM.(2012) Underhill, Stephen Michael; Parry-Giles, Shawn J; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project examines J. Edgar Hoover's rhetorical leadership of the Federal Bureau of Investigation during the Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S Truman administrations (1933-1953). Hoover launched and sustained a concerted domestic propaganda program that helped enhance his own political power and invented the FBI as a central force in domestic and international matters. In the process, he re-envisioned conceptions of U.S. citizenship by promoting notions of idealized citizenship. Hoover entered law enforcement and U.S. politics during the early decades of the twentieth century--a time of increased use of public campaigns sponsored by the U.S. government and presidential administrations to alter public opinion on important policy matters. This period witnessed, for example, the country's experimentation with domestic propaganda during World War I. While the Soviet Union and Germany used disease, vermin, parasite, and body metaphors to organize their own domestic propaganda campaigns in the following decades, Hoover used these same metaphors to advance the need to purify America and exterminate its social pariah. Through his public campaigns against vermin (1933-1939), the Fifth Column (1939-1945), and Red Fascism (1945-1953), Hoover constructed a reality in which corruption and subversion were immutable elements of democratic life. Increasingly, Hoover's tactics of threat and intimidation began to mimic the tactics of threat practiced by America's enemies, moving the country closer to what many at the time called a police state. Hoover's coupling of propaganda and coercive tactics ultimately helped him to rapidly expand the FBI and undermine his superiors and counterparts in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. Whereas Roosevelt benefited politically from building up a secret police force, Truman inherited a cunning FBI director eager to use his power to expand and exploit the rhetorical presidency during the Red Scare.Item Un lugar en el mundo: literatura, conocimiento y autonomía en tres novelas colombianas de finales del siglo XX(2009) Romero, Diana Patricia; Sosnowski, Saúl; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation I analyze three end-of-20th-century Colombian novels: La muerte de Alec (1983) by Darío Jaramillo Agudelo (1947), Sin remedio (1984) by Antonio Caballero (1945) and Basura (2000) by Héctor Abad Faciolince (1958). This analysis revisits the problematic relationship between literature and knowledge stemming from the loss of grounding of human action arising from modernity and exacerbated by end of 20th Century posmodernism and constructivist currents. Revisiting the Kantian concept of aesthetic autonomy, in which knowledge and art were closely linked, I propose that taking up again this relationship constitutes a search for a space in which literature can be conceived as an autonomous space as long as it is not separate from knowledge. This search makes sense in a context in which literature has lost its privileged aesthetic status faced with the attacks of the militant commitment of the 60&rsquos and 70&rsquos and with the fact that other cultural manifestations have become more popular with the advent of cultural studies and other postmodernist and poststructuralist trends. Each of these three novels emphasizes different social and aesthetic imaginaries such as the romantic aesthetic tradition, existentialist philosophy and cognitive science. These social and aesthetic imaginaries are activated by a credulity/incredulity (skepticism) mechanism that either makes possible the search for a space of autonomy in which knowledge and literature reconcile or that evinces a longing for their reconciliation. The question of the grounding of knowledge and values remains unsolved while heuristic and pragmatic solutions are offered.Item Visiones y Re-visiones: el Espacio de la Nación en la Narrativa Uruguaya del Retorno a la Democracia(2005-12-06) Rivero, Elizabeth Gladys; Sosnowski, Saúl; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation, I analyze the textual strategies that enable literature to explore a multiplicity of "other nations" emerged after the fragmentation of Anderson's "imagined community". My analysis is focused on spatial images in some novels published in Uruguay in the post-dictatorship period (1985 to the present). These post-dictatorial re-visions are based on the demolition of the old homogenous and essentialist conceptions of the nation, and their aim is to foster a permanent dialogue of complementary/opposite community models, rather than establish themselves as the official one. I study the novels La casa de enfrente (1988) by Alicia Migdal, Perfumes de Cartago (1994) by Teresa Porzecanski and Cañas de la India (1995) by Hugo Achugar to show how the traditional ideas about the nation, identity, memory, and history are re-written from a feminist/feminine point of view. These texts emphasize the political significance of the space of the house, and the deletion of borders between the private and public spheres, as well as between the local and the global. In the novels Trampa para ángeles de barro (1992) by Renzo Rosselló, Estokolmo (1998) by Gustavo Escanlar and Caras extrañas (2002) by Rafael Courtoisie, I argue that the choice of narrative genre implies a sordid image of the community. Moreover, the geographical trajectories of the characters convey a rhetoric that fragments the urban map, and develops ghettos. Finally, in El camino a Ítaca (1994) by Carlos Liscano (1949), Un amor en Bangkok (1994) by Napoleón Baccino Ponce de León (1947) and Cielo de Bagdad (2001) by Tomás de Mattos (1947) I explore how a new national imaginary is restructured in the light of transnational migrations and the internationalization of symbolic markets. To that end, the novels resort to the literary tradition through inter-textuality, re-signifying the power of literature to interpret the new identity realities and "dream" of alternative world models, thus creating a post-modern "utopia".Item BODY/IMAGE/NARRATIVE: CONTEMPORARY RHETORIC OF BODY SHAPE AND SIZE(2005-05-03) Brown, Sonya Christine; Fahnestock, Jeanne; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The dissertation examines body shape and size from a rhetorical perspective as ethos, or character, in contemporary American culture. The analysis is primarily of narrative and visual texts that proliferated in the debate over ideal body size and shape that has emerged in the last fifteen years. By demonizing fatness and glamorizing slenderness for women and muscularity for men, our culture has rendered all bodies' shapes and sizes rhetorical. The body as material and visual rhetoric is interpretable as representative of character, with the fat body representing a lack of the virtues that seem inherent in the lean body: health, fitness, discipline, beauty. Narratives written about individual's bodies, including weight loss success stories, eating disorder memoirs, size acceptance narratives, and films that feature actors in fat suits, have the possibility to maintain or challenge prevailing views about body shape and size and the relationship between body shape and size and character/ethos. The four narrative genres studied have emerged in mainstream cultural productions rather than what might be considered alternative media, and come from a wide variety of popular sources. These narrative genres, and also the visuals that accompany or transmit the narratives, are important pieces of the debate over acceptable body shape and size for men and women. The last fifteen years of the debate have brought with them changes to mainstream media through challenges to the ideal body image for women, though men, particularly heterosexual men, have limited venues through which to challenge media representations of ideal male physiques.