Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item “CHARACTERS” IN DIVERSE WORKS FOR PIANO, 1720-1944(2024) Chan, Ham; Dedova, Larissa; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The main aim of this research project is to gain a thorough comprehension of piano music classified as “Character Pieces,” as well as music that exhibits similar musical traits but is not officially categorized as such. In a narrative context, a character is typically defined as a person depicted within a story, either through description or direct speech. In the realm of music, characters are often linked to the mood or atmosphere. Expanding on this, characters in music should assist performers and listeners in creating a musical scene through their individual imaginations. The fundamental essence of “Character Pieces” can be distilled to compositions imbued with distinctive musical qualities. While there exists no unanimous consensus regarding the precise criteria for characterizing a piece as such, there is a general consensus that compositions bearing evocative titles such as Ballade, Fantasy, Nocturne, and Mazurka are commonly regarded as character pieces. In a more scholarly context, the Harvard Dictionary of Music aptly defines the term “Character Piece” as a convenient designation encompassing a substantial body of short compositions from the 19th century, designed to express a definite mood or programmatic idea. Most of these compositions are written in ternary form, a structure that proves especially suitable for depicting two contrasting moods, such as the dramatic section A and the lyrical section B.A notable feature of the genre is its freedom from a fixed naming convention, enabling compositions to encompass a wide array of titles. This stands in stark contrast to other genres such as Sonatas and Variations, which are inherently defined by predetermined names and structural elements. However, influences on “Character Pieces” in terms of structure and musicality can be found in some of these genres. Several of these works will also be highlighted in the program. “Character pieces” can be viewed as a genre conceptualized by scholars to encompass the majority of piano music from the 19th century that may not adhere to conventional notions of “serious” music. Given the flexibility of this classification, the three planned recitals have been carefully curated to showcase music relate to this genre, spanning from works of Bach to Prokofiev composed between 1720 and 1944. Each recital will revolve around a central theme, with the initial installment titled “Fantasies and Ballades,” followed by “Humanity” in the second recital, and concluding with “Literary Inspirations” in the final recital.Item IMÁGENES DE/DESDE LAS VILLAS: LA CONSTRUCCIÓN LITERARIA DE ESPACIOS EN LA CIUDAD INFORMAL(2022) Bulansky, Daniela; Sosnowski, Saúl; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The villas (commonly viewed as “shanty towns”) in Argentina, have been addressed in literary texts since they began to form as part of the “informal city.” This dissertation interrogates the literary images of these spaces in the city of Buenos Aires, with a particular focus on works that emerge from the villas themselves. Accordingly, they do not appear as marginal, but are situated as the narrative center from which it becomes possible to question the image of a modern, compact and definitive view of the city. This dissertation has grouped texts as they relate to their sociopolitical contexts. The first group includes the short story “$1 en Villa Desocupación” (1933) by Enrique Amorim, the dramatical work La marcha del hambre (1934) by Elías Castelnuovo, and Las colinas del hambre (1943) by Rosa Wernicke (the only novel that takes place in another region); all three set in the 1930’s. The second provides an analysis of the novel Villa Miseria también es América (1957) by Bernardo Verbitsky, in order to follow the trail of the first appearances in newspapers of the term “villa miseria,” which paralleled the ways these phenomena were made visible in the second half of the 1950’s. The third group consists of four novels that followed the 2001 socio-economic crisis: Santería (2008) and Sacrificio (2010) by Leonardo Oyola, La Virgen Cabeza (2009) by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, and Con V de villera by Lula Comeron. By then, the villas were a well-recognized fact; therefore, these novels do not necessarily center on revealing their existence. The spaces that comprise the villas that these works produce are boundless, diverse, and fluid; moreover, they move away from privileging visual images, prominent in the works of the two previous groups. All of the works insert the villa within a literary tradition as spaces, equal to any other, where literature is possible. It is not a question of ignoring the power dynamics that mark the villas as a phenomenon, but to consider the movements that these works represent as they relocate the center by focusing on the interior of the villas and thus, literarily, constructing narratives from within.Item "I Shall Tell A Double Tale": Empedoclean Materialism and Idealism in the English Renaissance(2022) Libhart, Garth; Passannante, Gerard; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles (ca. 484–ca. 424 BCE) is remembered both as an enraged fool who leapt into a volcano to prove he was a god, and as a philosopher who radically suggested everything is made of matter (DK107). In the fragments of his poetry, he admits to telling a “double tale,” potentially nodding to the indistinct ontological vision embedded in his work and underscoring the way his poetry shifts between materialist and idealist frames of reference (DK17.1). I argue that Empedocles’ perspectival relativism is an alternative entry point into the problem of materialism for early modern thinkers, freeing them from the burden of strict philosophical commitment and enabling them to think in materialist terms with less anxiety about succumbing to physical determinism. For scholars of early modern literature, the Empedoclean double tale helps root the period’s tendency for perspectival indeterminacy within a specific humanistic tradition. This dissertation is organized as three long chapters, each offering a unique moment in the reception of Empedocles’ blurry ontology. In Chapter One, I argue that Philemon Holland’s 1603 translation of Plutarch’s Moralia represents a watershed moment for Empedoclean influence in English literary history. My analysis demonstrates that, while the discredited story of Empedocles jumping into a volcano to prove he was a god continues to be an attention-grabbing part of the philosopher’s legacy in the Renaissance, the seventeenth century witnesses an increasing interest in his actual philosophy. Specifically, early modern writers draw inspiration from Empedocles’ theory of effluence—the idea that the four elements emanate tiny particles of a similar composition—as they contemplate monist possibility (DK89). Illustrating this, in Chapter Two, I read Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (1607) as an exploration of the world in flux, showing how one of Shakespeare’s likely sources for the play, Plutarch’s treatise on Isis and Osiris in the Moralia, uses the idea of effluence to negotiate between the myth’s dualistic and monistic aspects. This enables me to propose that, in Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare undergirds moments like Cleopatra’s elementally framed suicide with the dynamic “double tale” of Empedoclean ontology, portraying her immortal aspiration in simultaneously materialist and transcendent terms. Finally, in Chapter Three, I turn to John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), which directly alludes to Empedocles’ volcanic suicide when Satan encounters the ghost of Empedocles, floating in Limbo, during his journey from hell to earth. Showing how Milton draws on key ideas from Empedocles’ philosophy in the process of critiquing his immortal longing, I argue that the episode is underwritten by the philosopher’s perspectival relativism. The chapter then reconsiders the monist materialism of Paradise Lost through an Empedoclean lens, suggesting that the Pre-Socratic philosopher’s unusual blend of dualistic and monistic ideation can help negotiate between divergent critical responses to Milton’s idiosyncratic materialism. Ultimately, the dissertation reveals how early modern writers take inspiration from Empedocles’ fluid movement between materialism and idealism, freed from the limitations of rigid philosophical commitment and binary choice.Item The Development of Theater in Post-Revolutionary Iran from 1979 to 1997(2022) Ahmadian , Nahid; Keshavarz-Karamustafa, Fatemeh; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This research studies the development of Iranian dramatic literature and theater in post-revolutionary Iran. In a historical survey from the 1979 revolution to the beginning of the Reform Era, it explores the connection of the dramatic literature and their productions to their cultural contexts and studies the ways these contexts impact the function and formation of Iranian theater. In a chronological survey, this research examines the ways Iranian theater developed new theatrical forms to meet and reflect on the political, social, and cultural demands of an important phase in Iranian history. This research benefits from the methods of postpositivist theater historiography to advance a revisionist historical narrative based on the dynamic dialectics between Iranian theater and its cultural setting. This is summative, analytical, and archival research. Based on archival research grounded in nearly 2000 documents, and 200 plays it also provides resources on Iranian theater history and historiography. By bringing together the list of scholarship, theatrical productions, and historical documents of the 1980s and 1990s, it provides a resource on Iranian post-revolutionary history in one of the most transformative periods in Iranian contemporary history.Item SURVIVING ROMANTICISM: DISASTER AND SURVIVAL IN LATE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY AND EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY TRANSATLANTIC LITERATURE(2022) Pozoukidis, Konstantinos; Wang, Orrin N. C. O.C.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Surviving Romanticism” argues that fictional and historical representations of disaster and survival in the Romantic period bear the potential to establish radically new ways of social and political organization that do not reproduce or replicate the pre-catastrophic world. I locate my project at the intersection of studies on disaster in Romanticism, on the one hand, and queer theories of non-reproductivity, on the other. Extending but also complicating recent Romanticist scholarship by Jacques Khalip, Anahid Nerssessian, Sara Guyer and others, “Surviving Romanticism” asserts that queer survival, a form of surviving based on an existential discontinuity that does not reproduce materially or ideologically the pre-catastrophic world, constitutes the only possibility for radical worldmaking. “Surviving Romanticism” asserts that disaster is omnipresent in the writings of the Romantic period affecting both the content of these texts as well as their structure, with disaster materializing formally as fragmentation, repetition and the lack of narrative climax and conclusion. “Surviving Romanticism” points out that in the texts this project studies survival fiercely opposes recuperation. This opposition forces us to think that for fundamental change to happen we need to move away from repairing the damaged world of the past and envision instead new ideologies and social relations that do not focus on usefulness, exchangeability and marketability. The four main chapters of “Surviving Romanticism” bring together a variety of prose, poetry and non-fiction where both real and fictional disaster takes place: Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” and William Wordsworth’s “Simon Lee” and “The Last of the Flock,” all three poems from the Lyrical Ballads of 1798, Jane Austen’s Emma and the freedom narrative of Mary Prince. Even though most of these texts have been discussed in the critical tradition, “Surviving Romanticism” interrogates the ideology of previous critical approaches that have read texts like The Last Man as cautionary tales that force us to improve our present. Instead, in “Surviving Romanticism” I suggest that survival and worldmaking take place when fictional characters, such as Lionel Verney, and historical actors, such as Mary Prince, decide to stop reproducing the world around them one that has forced them to dwell in disaster. Instead, they start to behave as if they are inhabiting a world beyond productivity, usefulness, marketability, exchangeability, racial subjection and racial capitalism that our current world practices, with these concepts constituting some of the key ideas this project discussesItem Atmospheric Media: Computation and the Environmental Imagination(2022) Moro, Jeffrey; Kirschenbaum, Matthew G; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Atmospheric media are techniques and technologies for the rationalization of air. They take many forms, from the meteorological media of weather maps and satellites, to the infrastructural media of ventilation and climate control, to the embodied media of the breath. This dissertation explores these atmospheric media as fundamental conduits for the cultural work of managing the air, and in turn, for managing climatological catastrophe. Through readings of diverse media objects, from electronic literature and science fiction to 3D printers to air conditioning in data centers, “Atmospheric Media: Computation and the Environmental Imagination” argues that scientists, artists, and laypeople alike have come to imagine the air as a computer, one that they might program as a way out of environmental crisis. Braiding interdisciplinary insights from environmental media studies, literary studies, and the digital humanities, this dissertation explores how computation smooths over atmospheric difference with the standardization of data, and in doing so, further imperils our shared skies.Item Attend Me: Attention and Animation in Early Modern Drama(2021) DeCamillis, Justine Marie; Bailey, Amanda; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)What does it mean to pay attention and what is the cost? This dissertation explores these questions in the context of a historical shift in the value and purpose of the act of attending. In the late sixteenth century attention which was understood as the foundation of devotional practice, was widely recognized as the most important currency of the commercial and court theaters. Playwrights throughout the beginning of the seventeenth century began to experiment with attention as a form of creative labor and means of animating, transforming, or subjugating bodies in performance. I trace these moments of transformative attention in the works of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Fletcher, Richard Brome and others to examine how a new form attention in performance redrew the boundaries of an increasingly secularized and commodified self. I engage a wide array of primary sources including popular news pamphlets, recipe books, political treatises, and travel narratives that theorize and debate the biopolitics of attention. In our own moment, attention is critical to the latest stage of surveillance capitalism. Corporations monetize and governmental entities monitor what we attend to as they pay close attention to us. Rather than a recent development, I assert that the stakes of and competition for attention, and concomitantly the price of distraction, gained traction on the early modern stage.Item La nature et l'Autre dans Chocolat, Tintin au Congo et Vendredi ou la vie sauvage; une lecture écocritique et post-coloniale(2021) Le Saux, Guilhem Mael; Eades, Caroline; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Tintin in Congo (1931) by Hergé, is an example of the colonial discourse colonial empires propagated to reduce both nature and the Other to inferior beings. Chocolat (1988) by Claire Denis, and Vendredi ou la Vie Sauvage (1971) by Michel Tournier, offer a critical perspective on said colonial discourse. With those three texts, among others, I offer an analysis of how the colonial and neocolonial discourses destroy, exploit and reorganize colonized spaces, nature and peoples. In the first chapter, I develop the destruction of both local cultures and natures in order to make way for colonial empires’ exploitation. In a second chapter, I go over the practices of how colonial empires exploit both natural resources and peoples in colonized spaces. Finally, in a third chapter, I explain how colonial empires intend to reconfigure colonized spaces under a European model; be it language, religion or the use of nature.Item Irrational Women: Healing Cultural Trauma Through Decolonial Consciousness and Hybrid Spirituality in Chicana and Pinay Narrative Fiction(2021) Quijano, Laura Michelle; Rodríguez, Ana Patricia; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)What discursive strategies do women of color have at their disposal to confront and dismantle white supremacist patriarchy? Pinay (Filipina) and Chicana authors engaging with this question, like Ana Castillo, Evelina M. Galang, Jessica Hagedorn, Cecilia Manguerra Brainard, Emma Pérez, and Carmen Tafolla, seem to conclude that the hybrid and decolonial consciousness emanating from cultural traumas reimagines more just and healing relationships with the self, partners, and communities. These decolonial reimaginings deprivilege and decenter rational thought as the most productive path to understanding, healing, and transformation. The mythic, creative, somatic, and spiritual are at the center of Chicana and Pinay authors’ decolonial, healing processes. In conversation with the relational work of women of color feminists, such as Gloria Anzaldúa, bell hooks, and Leny Mendoza Strobel, this dissertation reads Pinay and Chicana narrative fiction of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries side by side to demonstrate how the historical impact of Spanish colonialism and U.S. imperialism, and their resulting cultural traumas, have similarly shaped the decolonial discursive strategies that these authors use to dismantle the binaries of race, gender, and sexuality, among others. Chicana and Pinay authors create female protagonists whose irrational experiences provide them with new insights into personal and collective healing, while simultaneously redefining the boundaries of everyday reality.Item AT HOME IN THE WORLD: TRANSNATIONALISM IN THE WORKS OF EUROPEAN WOMEN WRITERS IN THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY(2021) Ehrlich, Manon; Eades, Caroline; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In Europe during the long nineteenth century, despite being relegated to the private sphere and excluded from the realms of national and international politics, women were increasingly exposed to the effects of global movements. Novels written by women, while generally dismissed because of their narrative emphasis on domestic matters, constitute important literary tools to reevaluate the historical processes of globalization through a female lens. In connecting the texts of English novelist Jane Austen, French author George Sand, and French-speaking writer Isabelle Eberhardt to contemporary global dynamics, this dissertation registers expressions of transnational mobility in their writings and argues for the formation of a cosmopolitan consciousness in nineteenth-century women’s literature. By adopting a transnational and comparatist approach that fosters interdisciplinarity and multiculturalism, this project proposes an out-scaled reading strategy to understand past female experiences in a new light. In thus challenging the boundaries of knowledge for works produced during the long nineteenth-century that have been previously read mostly as national products, this study charts the gradual re-orientation of these novels’ focus from the home to the world. Given the (geo)political and archival value of those texts as relates to the development of a global culture in the nineteenth century, this dissertation proposes a method of interpreting that helps to recover international history in the context of women’s writing. In order to capture the shifting relationship between the authors’ viewing of the world, but also their being-in-the-world, this study is divided along two sections: the formation of a transnational textual space (1) and the authors’ engagement with political matters and their subversive contribution to international history-making (2). In learning to feel at home in the world, but also to navigate the tension between the social pull of the domestic sphere and the centrifugal desire to transcend the limits to their gendered experience, these writers show us that nineteenth-century literature is more relevant than ever. Indeed, in offering us keys to negotiate in-between spaces and conflicting orientations, women writers in the long nineteenth century can help us cope with the complexities and challenges of living between the national and the global in the twenty-first century.