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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Subject: search.filters.subject.Gertrude Stein

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    The Makings of Digital Modernism: Rereading Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans and Poetry by Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven
    (2009) Clement, Tanya E.; Kirschenbaum, Matthew G.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In this dissertation, I argue that digital methodologies offer new kinds of evidence and uncover new opportunities for changing how we do research and what we value as objects for literary study. In particular, I show how text mining, visualizations, digital editing, and social networks can be applied to make new readings of texts that have historically been undervalued within academic research. For example, I read Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans at a distance by analyzing large sets of data mined from the text and visualized within various applications. I also perform close readings of the poetry of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven differently by engaging online social networks in which textual performance, an ever-changing interpretive presentation of text, is enacted. By facilitating readings that allow submerged textual and social patterns to emerge, this research resituates digital methodologies and these modernist works within literary studies.
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    Play I[-III]
    (2004-11-24) Twombly, Kristian Mark; DeLio, Thomas J; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Play I[-III] is a quadraphonic electroacoustic composition based upon a play of the same name by Gertrude Stein. In the original play, lines of spoken text are freely mixed with stage directions and character assignments. In typical Steinian fashion, the text most often consists of word play based on alliteration and repetition, though it occasionally veers toward intelligibility. The occasional suggestion of intelligibility encountered throughout the text reminded me strongly of the behavior of chaotic strange attractors in mathematics, such as the Lorenz and Hénon attractors. These formulae seek to describe, mathematically, the behavior of weather in the atmosphere and the orbit of celestial bodies. Like Stein's use of language, these systems never quite reach a completely ordered "steady-state." Calculations derived from both the Lorenz and Hénon attractors were used to determine many aspects of my composition, from the smallest detail to the larger form. For example, each recorded line of text was broken into collections of sentences, groups of words, individual words and phonemes. The Lorenz attractor was then utilized to choose what type of sound was heard, in what order, at what time, in which channel, by which speaker and, even, what nature of transformation was to be applied to each sound. Every sound and section in Play I[-III] was subjected to such treatment. Stein's play features four characters: two male, two female. Additionally, there are nine lines of text that I chose to have read by a narrator. All of the source sounds in Play I[-III] were generated from recordings of the parts for each of these characters. The narrator is utilized to define formal boundaries. There are nine basic sections, the order of which was determined by calculations derived from the Lorenz attractor. While the narrator occupies a narrowly defined sonic space in the right rear channel, the other characters open a much larger area, both sonically and spatially. Play I[-III] was composed utilizing the CSound sound synthesis software, as well as Sonic Foundry's ACID Pro and Sound Forge, Sound Hack, Wavewarp and the CDP software suite.