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
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Item SPIRITUALIST RITUAL AND THE PERFORMANCE OF BELIEF: SPIRIT COMMUNICATION IN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY AMERICA(2013) Thompson, Robert Charles; Frederik Meer, Laurie; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Spiritualism is an alternative religion focused on establishing contact between living participants and the spirits of the dead, dating to the mid nineteenth century. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic research at the Center for Spiritual Enlightenment in Falls Church, Virginia, I analyze the three primary rituals of Spiritualist practice--spirit messages, spirit healing, and unfoldment--and argue that performance is central to Spiritualists' ability to connect with the spirit world in a way that can be intersubjectively confirmed by more than one participant. Spirit messages are performed by mediums to a congregation or audience in order to prove to individual spectators that their deceased loved ones have continued to exist as disembodied spirits after their deaths. Spirit healing is performed by healers who channel the energy of the spirits into participants in order to improve the participant's mental, physical, and spiritual condition. And unfoldment is the process whereby Spiritualists study and practice to be able to make their own direct personal contact with the spirit world. Spiritualism purports to be a science, religion, and philosophy. I consider the intersection between criticism of empirical evidence and entertainment in order to establish how Spiritualists attract newcomers and the intersection between religious belief and ritual participation in order to establish why newcomers choose to become converts. I consider Spiritualism's early history in order to discover the nature of the delicate balance that criticism and belief have established in Spiritualist practice. And, in my analysis of contemporary Spiritualist ritual, I trace the path of the convert from a newcomer with a primarily critical attitude toward Spiritualism to a believer pursuing an increasingly direct connection with the spirit world. I conclude that the live, personal interaction of Spiritualist performance is central to Spiritualists' ability to negotiate a cooperative integration of scientific criticism and religious belief.Item Illusion and Disillusionment in the Works of Jeff Wall and Gerhard Richter: Picturing (Post)Modern Life(2007-11-19) Adams, Virginia; Mansbach, Steven A.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study is a meta-critique of the discourse surrounding the emergence of large-scale, color photography around 1980 and the concurrent "return to painting" through an examination of the art praxes of Jeff Wall and Gerhard Richter. As Western avant-garde art shifted from conceptual practices toward large-scale, figurative painting and photography during the late 1970s and early 1980s there developed a vociferous discourse that, to a large degree, was highly critical of the changes that were taking place. The most strident aspect of the discourse emanated from fundamentally Marxist critics and academicians who viewed the turn to more aesthetically-based art forms as an undesirable capitulation to the political hegemony of the conservative administration in the United States, and to a burgeoning and increasingly international art market fueled by improving economic conditions. This criticism looked less than carefully at the art and the stated positions of the artists. This study mines the critical writings about both Wall and Richter in order to illuminate the discourse and elucidate the limits of art-historical writing that arises from rigid theoretical positions. It focuses particularly on the writings of Benjamin Buchloh, Douglas Crimp, Rosalind Krauss and Jean-Francois Chevrier. The writings of Wall and Richter are also given considerable weight and their voices are invoked as full participants. The works of Wall and Richter involve inextricable combinations of photography and painting in very different ways, and the role of medium within the discourse is examined. In addition, the artists' references in their works to art forms of earlier periods in the history of Modernism are also considered. Although this study focuses on the period 1976 to 1990, it pays considerable attention to connections between early twentieth century German and Russian theories of montage and the art of Jeff Wall, and Wall's illuminated transparencies are emphasized. The geographic scope of the study includes North America and West Germany, where much of the controversy about the "return to painting" was generated, and where exhibitions of the work of both Wall and Richter occurred frequently during the study period.