Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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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 give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item Guido's Compendio: Disegno, Colore and the Idea of Summary Forms(2021) Cui, Yanzhang; Colantuono, Anthony; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis is about Guido Reni and his "Union of Disegno and Colore." It treats the painting as a visual summary of a complicated biography and a vast artistic consciousness. As the concept of compendio elucidates the synthetic nature of Reni’s allegory and his creative identity, I contextualize the word compendio in terms of style and the Idea in early modern Italian art. Finally, this project reviews how scholars have read Guido Reni’s paintings, and in doing so it expands the ways in which the artist and his oeuvre may be analyzed in relation to his sense of self and literacy.Item The Ethics of Allegory in /Paradise Lost/(2011) Vasileiou, Margaret Rice; Grossman, Marshall; Leinwand, Theodore; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation reframes the debate about whether Paradise Lost is an allegorical poem by focusing on Milton's assertion that all language is allegorical because it reflects the difference-from-Himself that God has inscribed into language and built into human ontology. Milton emphasizes this allegorical difference in two ways in Paradise Lost. First, he points out the difference between the logic of language and the landscape by which we try to describe and apprehend it, even ascribing the fall to Eve's decision to ignore this difference and to embrace the logic of language as if it captured truth. Second, he forces the allegorical figures of Sin and Death to contend with and participate in Christian history, thereby destabilizing their figurations as representations of abstract ideas, and displaying the impossibility of fusing word and thing (i.e., of collapsing allegorical difference) in the historical context of pre-apocalyptic time. This dissertation argues that Milton uses both of these strategies to oppose the universal language ideology of the late seventeenth century, whose proponents promised to speak the world exactly as it is, to fuse word and thing. From Milton's perspective, these proponents threatened to write over God's truth with a language that reflected their desire for intellectual domination of the world more than it reflected the natural world they supposedly sought to describe. Thus, Paradise Lost reminds us that word and thing cannot be fused, that other-speaking not only reflects human ontology--that is, humankind's suspension in a state of difference from and similarity to God--but also represents the only kind of speaking that refers to God. Language that does not admit its difference from truth, in contrast, writes over the sublime truth with a verbal idol that purports to embody what it can only allegorically represent.Item Desglosar la memoria. La sensibilidad del tiempo en la obra poesía de José Antonio Ramos Sucre(2009) González, Pausides; Aguilar Mora, Jorge; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the theme of memory in the poetry of José Antonio Ramos Sucre (1890-1930), a Venezuelan poet associated with the country's first literary vanguard group known as the "Generación del 18". In order to fully understand the poetry of Ramos Sucre, it is important to begin by looking at the thematic shift that occurred in his writing when his interest in the glorious past of the nation completely gave way to a poetically recreated notion of universal memory. Such displacement can be seen as a manifestation of what Walter Benjamin called "loss of experience." Through this lens, it is possible to show that the work of Ramos Sucre is part of a collective sense of grief born mainly from the Venezuelan reality of the nineteen twenties, the years during which the country was deeply entrenched in the dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez. The sense of grief is expressed through a poetic subject, the "I" in Ramos Sucre's poems, which is tied to a continual remembrance, and specifically to the experiences that are part of its duration. Here it becomes clear that Ramos Sucre's work was greatly influenced by the philosophy of Henri Bergson. This dissertation performs an unconventional reading of the poetic work of Ramos Sucre, in which the existence of a single self is identified, a single "I" that is capable of remembering all of his own experiences. Finally, this dissertation shows how the poetic subject in Ramos Sucre's poetry expresses his memory through writing, and how the purpose of his writing is to achieve his own oblivion. We conclude our work by considering the orphic nature of that oblivion, so that the "loss of experience", expressed through an exceptional voice of the Venezuelan vanguard such as Ramos Sucre, ends up being replaced by the need for a return to the orphic country that so captivated the imagination of the Romantic poets.