English Theses and Dissertations
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Item VOICE SYNTHESIS, SIMULATION, AND MEDIATION IN VICTORIAN POETRY(2024) Bartlett, Aaron; Rudy, Jason; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation considers poetry as a print medium for the voice, one participating in the complex media environment ushered in by the nineteenth-century development of communications technology like the telegraph, phonograph, and telephone, and paralleled by the development of voice synthesis technology today. Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence have enabled machines to synthesize and simulate voices—both acoustically and in print—with startling fidelity. I situate voice synthesis as a media practice with origins in the nineteenth century and read Victorian poetry into this media history. Generative AI raises questions about subjectivity, materiality, fidelity, and truth in relation to the voice, and I bring these questions to bear on Victorian poetry. My work examines Robert Browning, William Morris, Amy Levy, and Toru Dutt. These authors demonstrate the way a mediated voice can interrogate, embrace, or problematize the materiality or textuality of their chosen medium: print. The sound of Browning’s poetry, described since the nineteenth century as stuttering or unpronounceable, foregrounds the way hissignature genre—the dramatic monologue—synthesizes voice as a formal effect. William Morris embraced a thoroughgoingly simulative aesthetics, down to the level of the page, creating art out of the mediated condition of history. The work and reception of both Amy Levy and Toru Dutt, demonstrate the way the imagination of an author’s body can impact how readers hear their voice in print, mediated by the material text. I contextualize the work of these writers within a long history of voice synthesis, which I trace from the speaking automata of the late eighteenth-century, through Herrman von Helmholtz’s nineteenth-century synthesizer, Bell Lab’s “Voder” in the twentieth century, and contemporary technology like Neural Text-to-Speech, AI chatbots, and the Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection. The development of voice synthesis technology traces changing conceptions of voice and mediation, as scientific interest moved from producing the voice by simulating its source in the vocal organs to simulating its effects on the ear. Likewise, voice synthesis technologies have long looked to achieve a kind of machinic immediacy by abstracting the voice away from the body in order to conceal the involvement of humans in the production of the machine voice. Examining Victorian poetry in this light helps to situate the challenges we confront today, within a longer legacy of media that transformed how we understand and value history, fidelity, authenticity, and truth.Item Daggers of the Mind: Performing Madness and Mental Disorder on the Early English Stage(2023) Rio, Melanie; Passannante, Gerard; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Madness is such a popular device in early modern English drama that extant playscripts are littered with stage directions indicating that a character should enter “like a madman” or simply, “mad.” Because the public playhouse required the psychosomatic participation of actors and observers from every social class and category, it served as a unique cultural laboratory in which to explore questions of cognition, embodiment, identity, and interiority. Madness as a theatrical device also offers unique insight into the challenge of “performing” an invisible disability. This dissertation examines representations of madness in the early English playhouse—primarily in the works of works Shakespeare, but also considering works by Fletcher, Webster, Middleton, Armin, and others—as well as extradramatic primary sources such as court cases and physicians’ notebooks in order to demonstrate how intersecting indices of identity influence the construction and interpretation of early modern cognitive disorder.Item "I Shall Tell A Double Tale": Empedoclean Materialism and Idealism in the English Renaissance(2022) Libhart, Garth; Passannante, Gerard; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles (ca. 484–ca. 424 BCE) is remembered both as an enraged fool who leapt into a volcano to prove he was a god, and as a philosopher who radically suggested everything is made of matter (DK107). In the fragments of his poetry, he admits to telling a “double tale,” potentially nodding to the indistinct ontological vision embedded in his work and underscoring the way his poetry shifts between materialist and idealist frames of reference (DK17.1). I argue that Empedocles’ perspectival relativism is an alternative entry point into the problem of materialism for early modern thinkers, freeing them from the burden of strict philosophical commitment and enabling them to think in materialist terms with less anxiety about succumbing to physical determinism. For scholars of early modern literature, the Empedoclean double tale helps root the period’s tendency for perspectival indeterminacy within a specific humanistic tradition. This dissertation is organized as three long chapters, each offering a unique moment in the reception of Empedocles’ blurry ontology. In Chapter One, I argue that Philemon Holland’s 1603 translation of Plutarch’s Moralia represents a watershed moment for Empedoclean influence in English literary history. My analysis demonstrates that, while the discredited story of Empedocles jumping into a volcano to prove he was a god continues to be an attention-grabbing part of the philosopher’s legacy in the Renaissance, the seventeenth century witnesses an increasing interest in his actual philosophy. Specifically, early modern writers draw inspiration from Empedocles’ theory of effluence—the idea that the four elements emanate tiny particles of a similar composition—as they contemplate monist possibility (DK89). Illustrating this, in Chapter Two, I read Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (1607) as an exploration of the world in flux, showing how one of Shakespeare’s likely sources for the play, Plutarch’s treatise on Isis and Osiris in the Moralia, uses the idea of effluence to negotiate between the myth’s dualistic and monistic aspects. This enables me to propose that, in Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare undergirds moments like Cleopatra’s elementally framed suicide with the dynamic “double tale” of Empedoclean ontology, portraying her immortal aspiration in simultaneously materialist and transcendent terms. Finally, in Chapter Three, I turn to John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), which directly alludes to Empedocles’ volcanic suicide when Satan encounters the ghost of Empedocles, floating in Limbo, during his journey from hell to earth. Showing how Milton draws on key ideas from Empedocles’ philosophy in the process of critiquing his immortal longing, I argue that the episode is underwritten by the philosopher’s perspectival relativism. The chapter then reconsiders the monist materialism of Paradise Lost through an Empedoclean lens, suggesting that the Pre-Socratic philosopher’s unusual blend of dualistic and monistic ideation can help negotiate between divergent critical responses to Milton’s idiosyncratic materialism. Ultimately, the dissertation reveals how early modern writers take inspiration from Empedocles’ fluid movement between materialism and idealism, freed from the limitations of rigid philosophical commitment and binary choice.Item Afropolitan Hackers: Redefining Anglophone African Literature(2022) Faradji, Sara; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the twenty-first century, we are witnessing a resounding boom in the production and reception of Anglophone African literature. Novelists like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Teju Cole, Lauren Beukes, and Dinaw Mengestu have achieved critical acclaim in Africa, the U.S., Europe, and beyond. My dissertation examines how these writers are reshaping our understandings of African literature and criticism. I explore how “African Boom” writers resemble computer hackers that break existing conventions and actively rebuild those systems for the better. They adeptly learn the “code” of Anglophone literature, but then they “break into” the literary canon, steal the master’s tropes, and modify the literature to be even more effective and resonant among academic and popular audiences. My dissertation specifically engages with the writing of authors who I call Afropolitan hackers. These writers distinctively reflect Afro-cosmopolitan sensibilities in both their fictional and critical works. As they receive high praise from reputable academic and popular literary critics, Afropolitan hackers make bold, dynamic changes to the very literary canon they studied and disrupted. In order to demonstrate how African Boom writers are Afropolitan hackers, I consider how they challenge past and present concerns in postcolonial literature. Specifically, I examine how some of them are “hacking” three classic literary tropes: the flâneur, the griot, and the scammer. By simultaneously debunking and extending traditional theoretical expectations of the African narrative, select Africa-based and migrant Afropolitan authors challenge the notion that their writing must epitomize a single story if they seek to appeal to a global audience.Item Staging the Middle Ages: History and Form in Early Modern English Drama(2022) Daley, Liam Thomas; Robertson, Kellie; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Early modern conceptions of what it meant to be “medieval” continue to shape our own conception of what it means to be “modern.” Writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries claimed to separate historical fact from literary fiction more effectively than their medieval forebears. And yet, many widespread ideas about the Middle Ages that persist to this day—including the idea of a “Middle Ages” at all—are the fictional inventions of early modern writers, from chroniclers and antiquarians, to poets and playwrights. Focusing on the affordances and limitations of dramatic form, this dissertation examines how enduringly popular visions of the Middle Ages crafted by Shakespeare and other early modern playwrights (including John Bale, Thomas Hughes, and Elizabeth Cary) still inform our historical understanding. These writers shaped their revisionist historiographical narratives for the Renaissance stage in a host of generic guises, not only in Elizabethan chronicle history plays, but also in secularized morality plays, Senecan tragedies, and closet drama. These early modern depictions of the medieval past gave new life to older dramatic forms characteristic of both classical and medieval theatre, such as the chorus and various forms of theatrical spectacle, while also employing new formal strategies such as the soliloquy, the dumbshow, and the play-within-a-play. All the plays examined here—including John Bale’s Kynge Johan, Shakespeare’s King John and Richard II, Thomas Hughes’s The Misfortunes of Arthur, and Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam—engage in self-conscious medievalism. Remediating earlier chronicle accounts as well as contemporary historiographical controversies (or “battles-of-the-books”), these plays fashion new fictions of when the Middle Ages ended and when modernity began. The dissertation concludes with an analysis of modern dramatic medievalism in Tony Kushner’s twentieth-century stage epic, Angels in America, a play that witnesses the continuing power of premodern dramatic and historical models as tools for re imagining ideas of national and cultural identity. Examining the formal strategies employed by all these playwrights provides insight into the ways that readers and writers have understood the medieval past, the modern present, and the shape of history itself.Item Guardrail(2022) Galvez, Madeline Yahaira; Arnold, Elizabeth; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Guardrail is a collection of poems that aim to explore the mental landscape of a person who has lost their God and yearns for the divine amidst their gradual development of a mental disorder. Told in a single section, we journey through the speaker’s tenderness, obsessions, and small sorrows both present and past. The collection takes love, intergenerational trauma, and loss as its central themes, and though we are introduced to various relationships throughout, return continuously to the central bond between that of mother and daughter. These poems hope to capture moments, both fleeting and monumental, on the journey back to self, back to God, back to love.Item 'The Native Question': Genre, Gender, and Governance in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing(2022) Thompson, Justin; Rudy, Jason; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As one of the writers in my project, Olive Schreiner, stated so plainly, “the native question is the real question.” What she meant — and what I examine in my dissertation — is that the pressing question for nineteenth-century writers was both the past treatment of Indigenous peoples and the future of settler and imperial states, from Canada to India to Australia and New Zealand. Drawing from insights in post-colonial theory and feminist literary criticism, I argue for reading nineteenth-century Anglophone women’s genre writing as inherently political. Though these women were often barred from political debates, I examine the genres in which women cloaked their political philosophy: romance novels, frontier memoirs, travel narratives, and Christian conversion stories. Simultaneously, I consider Indigenous writers to dislocate white writers as the sole narrators of colonialism in the nineteenth century. For example, in one chapter, I consider the Bengali writer and activist Swarnakumari Devi, who is now considered one of the leading women intellectuals of nineteenth-century British India. Her writing, however, was not then and is not now seen as intervening in broader political debates about the future of the Indian subcontinent. I argue, however, that her novel The Fatal Garland advocates a pan-ethnic Indian solidarity as the only political counterweight to British governance. Even contemporary critics often value her more for what she represents than what she actually said. One of my goals in this project is not only to recuperate women writers from historical footnotes into serious subjects of sustained, literary critical study but also to emphasize new modes of understanding history that come into view only by taking into account these little-known and often disregarded works.Item Working Literacies: Gender, Labor, and Literacy in Early Modern England(2022) Griffin, Danielle; Enoch, Jessica; Donawerth, Jane; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Working Literacies” explores the literacy abilities and practices of early modern working women, paying attention to the ways that ideologies of patriarchy and labor as well as the institutionalization of poor relief mediated their engagements with literacy. By examining little-studied archival material such as administrative records, literary ephemera, and petitions, “Working Literacies” nuances assumptions about working women's (il)literacy in the period, showcasing the multiple layers of literate ability that women leveraged as available means in making arguments about their lives as economically precarious workers in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. In centering the reading and composing habits of pre-modern working women, this dissertation provides historical depth to intricate relationships of gender and class in histories of rhetorical education, economic systems, and labor activism.In my three major chapters, I analyze little-studied literacy artifacts of three sites: 1) curricular and administrative materials from charity schools and orphanages; 2) ephemeral reading materials such as popular chapbooks and ballads; and 3) petitions that address working conditions for women. Although these sites may seem disparate, they present compelling evidence about the literacy of working women at different points in their lives: learning literacy skills, reading as evidence of literacy, and the use of those literacies in the act of petitioning. Furthermore, “Working Literacies” illuminates that ideologies of gender, labor, and literacy were complexly interconnected: lower-class children learned literacy skills in ways that sought to make obedient and industrious workers and wives, yet working women made inventive use of those literacy skills to engage representations of and forward arguments about their lives as workers and their gendered workplaces. In demonstrating the intricate interrelationship between class and gender in theories and practices of literacy, “Working Literacies” enters into and energizes conversations about women and labor as well as histories of literacy and rhetorical education.Item Mudlarking(2022) Rothrock, Caroline Haley; Mitchell, Emily; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Mudlarking is a novel-in-progress about realities and fantasies of queerness in the 1960s. Its two young protagonists, who have immigrated to London from unstable homes in Ireland and Virginia, seek to craft a new home for themselves out of things discarded by larger society, in a place at the fringe of reality and myth. They are “mudlarks” in both a literal and metaphorical sense, picking through refuse along the River Thames for long-lost things that can be made to glitter. Danger comes in the form of the insistent press of respectable conformity, and comfort in fluid transformation, remaking, and crafting a sanctuary out of a once-haunted space. The novel draws from conventions of Irish and Welsh folklore, as well as invented mythology, to emphasize the possibility of impossible transformations.Mudlarking is accompanied by three earlier stories that have informed its construction and themes in various ways. In A Lonely Death, the narrator has a conversation with the long-dead corpse of a stranger, while The Cunning Doll situates a familiar fairy tale in the swamps of Louisiana, and posits that the heroine and the witch are more similar than either would like to believe. Pink Moment is an ode to the color pink in all its forms, but also to the ways that we use color and place to tell fantasies of our own lives. All of these narratives are concerned with the intersection between historical and fantastical landscapes, as well as the unlikely connections that inform our concept of belonging.Item Embodied Performance: War, Trauma, and Disability on the Eighteenth-Century Stage(2021) LeRoy, Tamar Dora; Rosenthal, Laura; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project brings attention to the emotional work performed by plays about war from the Restoration and eighteenth century—how these plays position soldiers and communities in relation to one another and the state and in what ways they contribute to the work of negotiating trauma. War-themed plays of the period obsessively reenact tropes and devices that communicate particular affective scenarios or experiences of wartime. These affective scenarios include the temporality of soldiering and enlistment that locks the recruit in a state of inevitable injury and injuring; the longings for return of someone seemingly lost or displaced and the simultaneous fear of the outcome of this return (or no return); and a sense of rootlessness or displacement that unsettles surety in homeland, homecoming, or nation. The tropes and devices that convey these affective scenarios include devices involving the literal substitution bodies, such as bed tricks and dead tricks; an obsessive repetition of scenarios of recognition of identity, reunion, and the many complications of mistaken identity; and humor, joking, and comic tropes (like the soldier breeches role) that communicate a sense of the corporeal/temporal experience of war through the body. From these devices an experiential bridge is created in the playhouse between home front and warfront that positions the soldier as well as the grieving individual as part of a larger affective community. These figures are not isolated by their potentially extreme experiences of the battlefield, enlistment, waiting, or mourning: through the collective space of the stage, their extreme experiences are shown to be acknowledged by the larger group. From these plays, we see the affective experience of war at home from the community networks touched by military conflict.