English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item “DISCRETION IN THE INTERVAL”: EMILY DICKINSON’S MUSICAL PERFORMANCES(2020) Holmes, Gerard; Smith, Martha Nell; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Discretion in the interval”: Emily Dickinson’s Musical Performances considers Dickinson’s writing in the context of improvisational aesthetics prevalent in musical and writing cultures during her lifetime, but now largely effaced from their print reproductions. Her manuscript poems fall into two broad categories: those she preserved for herself, which I liken to musical scores, and those shared with friends, family members, and acquaintances, often by mail, which I liken to extemporaneous musical performances. These two sets of manuscripts coexist in a dynamic, cyclical, and generative process, through which Dickinson generated a growing set of performance possibilities each time she inscribed a given poem or added a variant word, phrase, or punctuation mark. Collectively, these manuscript variants comprise a set of performance instructions, akin to an improvising composer’s marked-up score or scores. This project accords with recent feminist and manuscript-based Dickinson criticism that considers the poems to be open-ended, allowing recreation by readers with each rereading. My discussion of improvisation is informed by the use of the term within ethnomusicology, which considers extemporaneous creative practice within, and constitutive of, the cultures that produce it. Dickinson's work also arose from, enabled, and constituted a community of readers and writers. Nineteenth-century musical, literary, and religious cultures prized improvisation. In the United States, distinct but interrelated strains of improvisational aesthetics existed within European-American and African-American cultures. Dickinson's engagement with these creative cultures is evident in her letters as well as poems, as a set of key terms and practices. Dickinson’s rewriting and sharing within her self-selected network refused the stabilizing, duplicative tendencies of print, allowing instead a practice of writing in multiple, audience-directed iterations. Rather than revising teleologically, Dickinson writes toward increasing multiplicity and possibility. For improvisers, no single text or performance is definitive. Each increases the set of possible performances. Dickinson's manuscripts, often written extemporaneously to accompany a letter or note, drew from preserved manuscripts, on which she recorded guiding words, phrases, and markings that signal available variations. Her engagement with improvisation has implications for representation of her work in print and online, and for nineteenth-century literary studies more generally.Item Sonic Movie Memories: Sound, Childhood, and American Cinema(2016) Cote, Paul James; Auerbach, Jonathan D.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Though the trend rarely receives attention, since the 1970s many American filmmakers have been taking sound and music tropes from children’s films, television shows, and other forms of media and incorporating those sounds into films intended for adult audiences. Initially, these references might seem like regressive attempts at targeting some nostalgic desire to relive childhood. However, this dissertation asserts that these children’s sounds are instead designed to reconnect audience members with the multi-faceted fantasies and coping mechanisms that once, through children’s media, helped these audience members manage life’s anxieties. Because sound is the sense that Western audiences most associate with emotion and memory, it offers audiences immediate connection with these barely conscious longings. The first chapter turns to children’s media itself and analyzes Disney’s 1950s forays into television. The chapter argues that by selectively repurposing the gentlest sonic devices from the studio’s films, television shows like Disneyland created the studio’s signature sentimental “Disney sound.” As a result, a generation of baby boomers like Steven Spielberg comes of age and longs to recreate that comforting sound world. The second chapter thus focuses on Spielberg, who incorporates Disney music in films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Rather than recreate Disney’s sound world, Spielberg uses this music as a springboard into a new realm I refer to as “sublime refuge” - an acoustic haven that combines overpowering sublimity and soothing comfort into one fantastical experience. The second half of the dissertation pivots into more experimental children’s cartoons like Gerald McBoing-Boing (1951) - cartoons that embrace audio-visual dissonance in ways that soothe even as they create tension through a phenomenon I call “comfortable discord.” In the final chapter, director Wes Anderson reveals that these sonic tensions have just as much appeal to adults. In films like The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), Anderson demonstrates that comfortable discord can simultaneously provide a balm for anxiety and create an open-ended space that makes empathetic connections between characters possible. The dissertation closes with a call to rethink nostalgia, not as a romanticization of the past, but rather as a reconnection with forgotten affective channels.Item TRANSNATIONAL JAZZ AND BLUES: AURAL AESTHETICS AND AFRICAN DIASPORIC FICTION(2010) Hartley, Daniel LeClair; Washington, Mary Helen; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the influence of jazz and blues on African Diasporic fiction. While the influences of jazz and blues on African American cultural production have received critical attention for many decades, I contend that literary criticism neglects to recognize that jazz and blues are more than just national forms. They are international forms that have influenced a diverse group of writers and their novels. My work fills gaps in current scholarship by examining well-known and lesser-known novels that depict jazz and blues both within and without American contexts. This international approach is crucial to any examination of jazz, blues, and fiction because it expands our understanding of how authors aim to represent the experiences of African Diasporic people throughout the world. Building on the work in African American literary criticism and jazz studies, this dissertation examines the varying elements of jazz and blues -- what I refer to as "aural aesthetics" -- that writers incorporate into fiction in order to understand the continued influence of music on African Diasporic fiction. In Chapter One, I contend that Langston Hughes uses the blues as a form of protest in his first published novel Not Without Laughter (1930) to advance critiques of racism and African American involvement in World War I. In Chapter Two, I argue that Ann Petry fills her first novel The Street (1946) with a blues aesthetic that not only undergirds her representations of protest but also responds to the call for the use of vernacular forms in literature. In Chapter Three, I argue that Jackie Kay in Trumpet (1999) and Paule Marshall in The Fisher King (2000) represent the jazz-inflected solo as a means through which their characters build individual identities that challenge notions of an undifferentiated, monolithic African Diaspora. In Chapter Four, I contend that John A. Williams in Clifford's Blues (1999) and Xam Wilson Cartiér in Muse-Echo Blues (1991) present protagonists as composers that use jazz and blues as methods to assert individual African Diasporic identities and to express communal histories that are not present elsewhere in literature. By providing a critical framework for understanding the influence of jazz and blues in African Diasporic fiction, this project responds directly to criticism that limits the study of jazz and blues to American texts and contexts, calls for a reconsideration of those nationalistic tendencies, and argues for the critical engagement of jazz and blues as forms international in scope.