Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item EN BUSCA DE UN PAÍS INTERIOR: LA NOVELA LÍRICA VANGUARDISTA EN GILBERTO OWEN, ROSAMEL DEL VALLE Y HUMBERTO SALVADOR(2015) Gonzalez, Norman Alberto; Aguilar Mora, Jorge; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Scholars have shown a tendency to analyze the so-called “historical avant-garde” from a perspective of "shock". This vanguardist gesture seeks to destabilize a mode of thinking and doing art in the early part of the twentieth century. If there is indeed an inevitable initial historical moment when the avant-garde becomes iconoclastic and distinguishes themselves in a patricidal gesture, there must exist another moment when the contributions of the avant-garde can be seen to challenge not only the formal aspects of the cultural tradition, but also its contents. Few authors have considered the avant-garde writings in dialogue with a tradition that began in the nineteenth century or with other contemporary aesthetics —often opposed in style and approach. One purpose of this work is to locate other aesthetic affinities with the avant-garde movement to better define how they differ and create their own genealogies as well as enter into dialogue with each other. In order to achieve this I propose a reading of the context in which one can see the necessity to seek a new expression for the spiritual demands of the time. One of these new spiritual demands is addressed by the so-called lyrical novel, which can be considered as a subgenre of the literary vanguards. Thus, by analyzing three Latin American writers: Gilberto Owen (Mexico, 1904-1952), Rosamel del Valle (Chile, 1901-1965) and Humberto Salvador (Ecuador, 1909-1982) and their avant-garde lyrical novels written between 1928 and 1931, I will identify what can be considered new, which elements characterize these novels, and how their content challenges the traditional narrative genre and creates new sensibilities. The avant-garde fundamentally breaks with the aesthetics of representation, leading to broader ontological, epistemological, and political ruptures. The aim of avant-garde literature is to regain the dynamic aspect of reality that was lost through the domination of rationalism. We are able to explore this re-appropriation through unique approaches to the elements of imagination, the occurrence (or not) of events, and experience and see how the authors were able to contribute to the radical critique of aesthetic beliefs and notions of reality at the beginning of the twentieth century.Item Vienna's Transnational Fringe: Arts Funding, Aesthetic Agitation, and Europeanization(2011) Poole, Justin Aaron; Hildy, Franklin J; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation deals with a subculture of transnational fringe artists, which is emerging in Europe in the early part of the twenty first century. It examines this subculture within the confines of Vienna, Austria, which was once the capital of a grand supra-national empire that spanned much of Central and Eastern Europe. Vienna is the site of this case study because in recent years the city has been instituting a self-conscious internationalization of its fringe scene, which resulted from local politicians' desires to help the city regain some of its long lost symbolic capital and become a legitimate competitor in an expanding and converging European field of cultural and economic production. In Vienna's struggle for symbolic capital, the city's subculture of fringe artists is defined by their need to collaborate with the socio-political demands of the local government. They are also impacted by the requirement that they adhere to the economic, ideological, and aesthetic demands of transnational social spaces, i.e. co-production venues and fringe festivals, throughout Europe. The artists are enmeshed in external pressures as they forge paths for themselves within an increasingly uniform European fringe scene. The artists' complicity in the processes of globalization and Europeanization, which enable their subculture as they threaten to divest them of their "avant-garde impulse," causes the artists to adopt a highly ironic posture in their work. This posture, which is evident in their performances, may be partially to blame for a widespread claim that European fringe artists are suffering from an aesthetic crisis. An examination of two fringe groups, i.e. Toxic Dreams and Superamas, which are thriving within Vienna's current system, reveals how any analysis of the aesthetics and ideologies of the performances being generated in the context of Europe's fringe scene must take into account the material realities that the artists are facing. In this dissertation the term conglomerate performance is used a as a descriptor for the emergent genre that is adapted from a media-induced and "McDonalidized" system of cultural production within a specific, yet vital niche of European culture.Item PANG XUNQIN (1906-1985) - A CHINESE AVANT-GARDE'S METAMORPHOSIS, 1925-1946, AND QUESTIONS OF "AUTHENTICITY"(2009) Zhu, Xiaoqing; Kuo, Jason; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation has three goals. The first is to chart the artistic life of Pang Xunqin (1906-1985) and his art works from 1929 to 1946. Pang's metamorphosis from an aspiring young artist in Paris and Shanghai in the 1920s and 30s, into an artist in his own right, a graphic designer, an educator, and a scholar of the history of Chinese art and craft, while ceaselessly trying to renew himself - all this is a record that deserves an art historical recognition. The second goal is to locate Pang Xunqin in the historiography of Chinese modern art in an attempt to problematize issues of inclusion and exclusion in the historiography of the field. The third goal, which is closely tied to the second, is to utilize post-colonial inquiries to explore myriad issues of non-Western modernism embodied in Pang Xunqin's case. Such issues include the divisions among the "traditionalists," the "academic realists," and the "modernists," colonial cosmopolitanism in the Shanghai of the 30s, and the appropriation of "primitivism" in the 40s. Attention also focuses on the issues of authenticity and "hybridity," Western orientalization of the East and self-orientalization by the East in cross-cultural encounters, and identity politics and nationalistic agendas in the construct of the guohua (national painting) and xihua (Western painting) divide. The post-colonial methodology employed here helps raise questions regarding the binary construct of tradition vs. modernity, the East vs. the West, the center vs. the periphery, and the global vs. the local. By placing Pang Xunqin's case in its semi-colonial historical and transnational context and by engaging in dialogue with the recent rich scholarship on cultural and post-colonial critiques, in conjunction with a formal analysis of his paintings and designs, this dissertation offers not only a monographic study of Pang's artistic life but also a critical examination and reassessment of the established art historical narratives of Western-trained artists in the historiography of Chinese modern art.