Theses and Dissertations from UMD
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2
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.
Browse
6 results
Search Results
Item Reading the Contemporary Body in the Works or Eduardo Lalo and Rita Indiana Hernández(2021) Lewis, Matthew C; Quintero-Herencia, Juan Carlos; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is interested in specificities of Caribbean bodies and the strategies that are used to perform, imagine, and make sensible the textual body so that it may be read through archipelagic contexts. I posit that the multi-disciplinary works of Dominican Rita Indiana Hernández (Santo Domingo 1977) and Puerto Rican Eduardo Lalo (Cuba 1960) turn a critical and creative eye to the corporealities that have been obscured and overshadowed by exotified, mainstream, and normative bodies and their representation. I argue that we tell stories with our bodies, and, likewise, the body is a text to be performed, read and made sensible. However, what we understand for the body—its capabilities and its limits—is a direct product of how these narratives have been politically and socially constructed, appropriated, and implemented in hegemonic discourses. My intervention lies questioning what narratives and images or the body are produced and privileged in these texts: how do these corporealities become sensible and make sense of the other bodies around them? What are the potential corporeal poetics and politics that may tie these texts together? By looking at the representation of anonymous bodies, the creation of Puerto Rican body-images, and the Dominican bodies situated within primal soundscapes, I suggest that these specific texts break with both preconceived and prescribed notions of a “Caribbean identity” and what it may mean to be Caribbean. This dissertation aims to interrogate the limits of hegemonic discourses of nationality and history by engaging with the ways in which the texts of Hernández and Lalo perform their own relationship to the contemporary, always crossing and challenging limits, imagining transitive bodies in constant motion, and implementing diverse strategies to produce and inhabit contemporary intervals that fiercely reject fixed and prescriptive notions of what a Caribbean body is, or of what it is capable.Item The Favor of Another: Labor and Precarity in Contemporary Fiction(2019) Macintosh, John A.; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Favor of Another: Labor and Precarity in Contemporary Fiction examines how fiction since 1980 responds to changes to the composition of labor and of work itself. In particular, it is interested in the representation of service sector work in the novels of Stephanie Danler, Don DeLillo, Helen DeWitt, Mohsin Hamid, Jamaica Kincaid, Chang-rae Lee, Imbolo Mbue, Dinaw Mengestu, Bharati Mukherjee, Stewart O’Nan, and Merritt Tierce. The dissertation argues that these novelists develop aesthetic strategies to respond to issues including globalization, immaterial labor, entrepreneurial subjectivity, and financialization. Novels about domestic work register a push-pull dynamic of labor migration from the Global South and in doing so ascribe alternately too much or too little agency to domestic worker characters. The challenge of representing restaurant work leads to a strategy of formal and affective repetition to mimic the routine of interactive service. Novels critical of entrepreneurship either expose cliché as the underlying trope of innovation or reflect the failure of entrepreneurial discourse to account for workers at the bottom of the labor market. Although literary criticism about finance tends to insist on abstraction, reading financial novels for labor reveals the contradiction between that representation and reality. While the labor novel seems to have waned, the dissertation reconceives the genre by examining a range of formal responses to work in novels not often read together. Its analysis concludes that reading for labor not only reveals how fiction registers changes in political economy, but also revises our understanding of the contemporary novel more broadly. The novels studied also provide insight into interdisciplinary debates about social and economic precarity since the mid-1970s. Often defined in terms of degraded work and the retrenchment of the welfare state, theorists emphasize a neoliberal restructuring of the economy as the cause of precarity. The dissertation argues instead that precarity is inherent in capitalist economies and its reemergence is symptomatic of prolonged economic stagnation. Taking seriously the etymological overtones of precarious—the dependence on the favor of another—it argues that the end of precarity requires not nostalgia for a previous arrangement of labor, but a challenge to the wage system itself.Item CRAFTING CONVERSATIONS: ARCHITECTURE AS A MEANS AND A VENUE FOR EXPLORING CONTEMPORARY,POSTCOLONIAL, JAMAICAN IDENTITIES(2017) McKenley, Joseph Stephen; Lamprakos, Michele; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis will explore the relationships between postcolonialism, the formulation of identities, architecture, fine art and folk art, making and craft-making. It will delve into postcolonial discourse to understand what postcolonialism is, how it is defined, and what it means in the Jamaican context. It will explore how identities are defined and what factors are considered in the creation or unearthing of identities. It will explore what role making and craft-making have in creating and/or expositing identities as well as the relation between making and craft-making with architecture. Ultimately, the research will lead to the question, in what ways can architecture manifest cultural identity and how can architecture illustrate a Jamaican, contemporary, postcolonial identity.Item Constrict-Depart, String Quartet No. 1(2017) Green, Bradley Stuart; DeLio, Thomas; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Constrict-Depart is a piece for string quartet in two movements that lasts approximately fourteen minutes. The title refers to an overarching sonic theme within and across both movements that consists of the constriction and subsequent expansion of a vacillating pitch band. In addition, the form of each movement is defined by the constriction and expansion of the string registers. The title also refers to a constant push and pull between a self-imposed binary categorization of sonic materials. The binary categories of sound being explored are defined as noise (aperiodic sounds) and pitch (periodic sounds). In this context, noise is classified best as a sound or collection of sounds that offer no perceivable pitch, or a cluster of pitches (either within the same register or multiple registers) so dense that individual pitches become imperceptible. By contrast, pitched sounds would be classified as sounds in which there is a definite and perceptible frequency, or group of frequencies. In the piece, these categories of sound are set as two extremes on a spectrum, with noise on one end and pitch on the other, and are juxtaposed as extremes, and also as collections of sounds that fall between the two extremes of the spectrum. The piece is composed with the use of time frames, and the graphic notation was created specifically to allow for a greater degree of performance freedom than is generally possible with standard notation, while still maintaining a fixed formal structure that keeps the order of sound events the same from performance to performance. Each performer is to read from the full score, and the performers are instructed to realize their parts independently of the ensemble and to not attempt to coordinate attacks based on the visual relationship between their part and another part in the score (except where indicated). This independence allows for the music to occur naturally as a result of intermingling individual realizations, as opposed to general coordination.Item TIME WARPS AND ALTER-NARRATIVES: GAY AND LESBIAN ENGAGEMENTS WITH HISTORY IN BRITISH FICTION SINCE WORLD WAR II(2013) Clark, Damion Ray; Cohen, William A; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Contemporary British gay and lesbian authors engage with history through two distinct methods I call fixed moment/cultural critique and abstract moment/fantasy space. The fixed moment/cultural critique model focuses on a fixed historical moment, usually from the recent past. By focusing on this fixed moment, authors explicitly engage in critiques of the present that question society's homophobia and gay and lesbian people's participation in their own oppression. The abstract moment/fantasy space model uses moments from the distant past, often collapsing historical and narrative time and space to create a fantasy space for lesbians and gay men to reflect on their own cultures and identities and to create links with their literary and historical ancestries. Mary Renault's The Charioteer (1953) and Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty (2004), both demonstrate the vein of historical engagement in gay and lesbian British fiction that builds a political argument challenging heterosexual cultural and political definitions of homosexuality and detailing the effects of such definitions on gay people. They do this while rooting this discussion in a specific near past iconic historical British moment: World War II for Renault, and the height of Margaret Thatcher's rule in the 1980s for Hollinghurst. The second vein of historical engagement is one that holds as its purpose gay and lesbian cultural fantasy. Neil Bartlett's Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall (1990) and Who Was That Man?: A Present for Mr Oscar Wilde (1988) and the Sarah Waters' Tipping the Velvet (1998) explore authorial engagement with the more distant past as a means of examining the present and creating possible futures. The past in these works is not one sharply defined locus; rather it is broadly defined periods that the authors seek to collapse with the present. In the Coda, I turn to the films of Derek Jarman and Isaac Julien, and the plays of Alexi Kaye Campbell and Jackie Kay to see how the fixed moment/cultural critique and abstract moment/fantasy space models apply to contemporary British art mediums outside of narrative fiction.Item Rewriting Eastern Wisdom: Buddhism and Hinduism in American Literature from Jack Kerouac to Maxine Hong Kingston(2013) Garton-Gundling, Kyle; Kauffman, Linda; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)While recent scholarship on post-1945 American writers has re-examined the role of religion, few scholars have focused on Asian religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism. My dissertation explores the varied strategies by which American writers inscribe Asian religions in their fiction. I argue that Asian religions have been crucial in post-1945 American literature's engagement with American freedom. Key writers have used Asian thought to critique American individualism, while also reshaping Eastern beliefs through Western political ideals. My study thus illuminates a two-way relationship between Asian traditions and socially engaged American writing. By examining this body of literature, I uncover new ways of thinking about religion, transnationalism, and ethics. Each chapter links a specific literary trope to a particular aspect of Eastern thought. My first chapter, "Crazy Wisdom and Beat Zen: Jack Kerouac, Tom Robbins, and Gary Snyder," explores how these influential Beat writers challenge American conformity by celebrating the Buddhist figure of the eccentric sage. My second chapter, "Secret Arts and Paranoia: Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo," shows how Pynchon's Vineland and DeLillo's Underworld demystify secret Eastern knowledge in order to challenge the assumption that secrecy warrants paranoia. My third chapter, "Asian Religion and African Dreams: Alice Walker and Charles Johnson," demonstrates that Walker and Johnson reinterpret African American identity, portraying Hindus and Buddhists as African Americans' spiritual ancestors. My fourth chapter, "Buddhist Nonself and Asian American Identity: Lan Cao and Maxine Hong Kingston," explores how Cao and Kingston use Buddhist teachings of nonself to question what it means to be Asian American.