Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item Perpetuating Conflict: Postcolonial Intervention in Afghanistan During the Cold War(2023) Dauphin, Edward George; Chung, Patrick; Woods, Colleen; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ArgumentThis thesis argues that during the postcolonial era, Cold War hegemons – The United States of America and the Soviet Union intervened in Afghanistan’s modernization to ensure their methods of modernization – capitalism and communism – remained the only options for developing nations to modernize. While most believe that American and Soviet intervention into Afghanistan was the result of Cold War geopolitics, I argue that questions of statehood and nation-making were the central factors in superpower involvement in the country. Amid a resurgence of traditional Islamic values, Afghanistan sought to modernize outside of the realm of bi-polar developmental paths imposed by American nation-state capitalism and Soviet communism. Largely founded on Orientalist beliefs, the hegemons refused to recognize the legitimacy of a modern Afghan nation built on Islamism. The hegemons believed that without First World influence, Afghan “tribalism” and “Islamism” were too primitive to possess the capability of progressing towards a modern state, one which they defined using western-orthodox models. Statehood, according to American and Soviet concepts of high modernism posited that a developing nations’ path to modernity adhered to a linear model centered on a market-based economy. According to the hegemons, once the developing nation established a market-based economy, the developing nation would adapt to either a communist or capitalist modes. Method This research for this thesis was conducted using recently declassified primary source material from the CIA’s CREST database, the Wilson Center Online for recently declassified KGB documents, and select memoirs from key individuals. Secondary source material was used to frame the historiographical context of my argument – focusing on how many historians degrade the Afghan peoples’ own agency in their modernization. When necessary, secondary source material was also used in order to fill the gaps left by redacted primary source material. Key concepts used for framing both the USG and KGB’s reasons for intervention included postcolonial modernization, High Modernism and Orientalism, and Traditional Islam. Major FindingsMajor Findings included: 1) Though they “officially” supported self-determination, the Soviet Politburo and USG found new methods to control developing nations; 2) Despite their Orientalist beliefs and hesitancy to support the PDPA, the Soviet Politburo seized the initiative in Afghanistan by planting KGB agents in PDPA; 3) The Soviet Politburo legitimized the PDPA’s modernization as high modernism by claiming that Afghanistan's tribalism created a market system, and the civil war was merely the next step in revolution towards socialism. 4) Realizing they could no longer control the PDPA, the Politburo was compelled to commit military forces to support the PDPA and maintain their influence; 5) The USG refused to recognized Afghanistan's modernization according to their own concepts of high modernism; 6) The USG sought to undermine the PDPA, the Soviet Politburo’s support of the PDPA, and Islamism as a means to modernization. De-legitimizing all three would prove American capitalism as the only viable means to modernization; 7) With no intention of establishing a long-term solution, and with no desire to threaten détente, the USG relied on the CIA and clandestine operations to perpetuate the Afghan Civil War; and 8) By perpetuating the Civil War to drive Afghanistan to become a failed state, the USG gained credibility over the Soviet Politburo. ConclusionWestern definitions of statehood and nationmaking were the driving factors behind USG and KGB intervention in Afghanistan. Afghanistan did not merely serve as the next battleground for hegemonic proxy war, instead the Afghan people sought to pursue a third method of modernization, one which conflicted with western views of high modernism. Due to preconceived notions of Orientalism, the USG and Soviet Politburo were compelled to prevent an alternative method of nationmaking to maintain their bipolar control of the world.Item The Multistable Material of Modernism: Perception, Objects, and Identity(2021) Harr, Kayla; Walter, Christina; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation argues that modernist writers channeled the transformative potential of multistability, a popular concept among twentieth-century theorists of perception, into politically charged literary practices whose goals continue to reverberate in recent antiracist and decolonial theory. In the first half of the twentieth century, psychologists used the concept of multistability to explain human perception and captured this concept in paradoxical images that appear first as one thing and then another, through a shift in what the viewer perceives as figure and ground. Writers as different as H.D., Virginia Woolf, Amos Tutuola, and Wilson Harris adapted multistability into literary practices that sought to dismantle the bounds of patriarchal, imperialist, and anthropocentric hierarchies. These writers infused their representations of perception, objects, and power dynamics with a multistability that ceaselessly troubles the divide between subject and object and its related structures of social exploitation. Moreover, placing these writers’ efforts to expand what counts as a subject or agent alongside recent theories of extrahuman ontologies that seek empowering alternatives to the exclusions of Western subjectivity offers a compelling link between modernist literary experiment and contemporary antiracist and decolonial theory concerning objects, identity, and ecology.Item Resisting the Reader: Textual Recalcitrance in British Novels, 1917-2011(2021) Wei, Tung-An; Richardson, Brian; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In “Resisting the Reader: Textual Recalcitrance in British Novels, 1917-2011,” I focus on a radical, underexamined type of difficulty which presents irreducible interpretive dilemmas at fundamental narrative levels—for example, a reader may be required to fill in gaps to complete the narrative but is unable to. Unlike what James Phelan calls “the difficult,” recalcitrance does not yield to our interpretation. Existing scholarship has mostly focused on the canonical works of “the difficult” in modernist and postmodern literature. I intervene in the scholarship by investigating the wide appeal to recalcitrance across the century, including previously overlooked late modernist and contemporary literature. Moreover, I analyze various forms of recalcitrance in different types of fiction, not just canonical or highbrow. This large scope allows me to trace how later authors repurpose modernist techniques, including recalcitrance, for new ends. I argue that recalcitrance is an effective strategy to lay bare the workings of a text. For example, in Molloy, Samuel Beckett taps into the recalcitrant lists and catechism in James Joyce’s Ulysses to fashion his lists and in turn critique traditional emplotment. Moreover, in The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes uses unreliable narration to keep readers interested in tracing the narrator’s reevaluation of his past. Recalcitrance is equally powerful in foregrounding social issues that are so complex that they can never be fully solved. For instance, Joseph Conrad’s underappreciated wartime story “The Tale” uses recalcitrance to register the public’s antithetical attitudes toward wartime rumors of submarine attacks. In the afterword, I analyze how Malaysian-Taiwanese novelist Yong-Ping Li’s The End of the River critiques colonial exploitation of Indigenous women by reworking Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. Through my afterword, I gesture toward future work on 1) additional sites of recalcitrance beyond British or Anglophone literature and 2) the transformations of modernist narrative techniques, including those bearing on recalcitrance, in global novels. My dissertation contributes to the New Modernist Studies by accounting for transnational exchange (such as Li’s rewriting of Conrad) and drawing attention to authors who are largely unfamiliar to American academia, namely Anna Kavan, Ann Quin, and Li.Item A World for All and None: De Stijl, Modernism, and the Decorative Arts(2020) Zimmerman, Devon; Mansbach, Steven; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In October 1917, the first issue of the journal De Stijl was printed in the Netherlands under the editorial leadership of Theo van Doesburg. The publication became a nexus around which a core group of progressive artists, architects, and designers were brought together. They all shared a similar goal: to be a platform through which a new aesthetic would be declared, one that would diagnose and resolve the social, cultural, and metaphysical conditions that had led to the First World War. The group’s vision was totalizing, meant to encompass all forms of art, from armchairs to architecture. This dissertation explores the position of the decorative arts within De Stijl’s utopian project. The decorative arts were the bellwether of many of the principal social, cultural, and political problems that modernity brought to the fore. As a result, the polemics that emerged from the decorative arts profoundly informed the development of De Stijl’s artistic praxis and theoretical framework during the formative years of the group. By acknowledging the origins of many of De Stijl’s intellectual and aesthetic positions within the decorative arts, this dissertation aims to present a renewed perspective on the group’s formal projects in interior design, stained glass, and furniture. By rooting the work of these artists within the instrumental role of the decorative arts, this dissertation gives needed attention to these essential, yet undertheorized aspects of De Stijl’s utopian project to provide new insights into one of the most prominent artistic movements of the interwar period. In doing so, it endeavors to call for a broader reassessment of the intrinsic role the decorative arts played in the emergence of modernism broadly, and the practice of the European avant-garde specifically, in the years following World War I.Item THE ROLE OF NEOCLASSICISM IN GENERALIZING TRADITION: INTEGRATING TEXTURAL, TONAL AND TOPICAL ELEMENTS AT THE KEYBOARD(2019) Chow, Ryan; Gowen, Bradford; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)While neoclassicism is viewed as a reaction against tonal saturation of late Romanticism, this dissertation discusses an array of works (both within and outside the scope of interwar neoclassicism) that absorbed elements of the aesthetic. Beyond Martha Hyde’s description of the neoclassical impulse as a “metamorphic anachronism,” I propose that it can extend to the following: (1) an opposition (or apposition, as proposed by Marianne Kielian-Gilbert) between specific musical elements, (2) a capitalization on ahistorical aspects of tradition, and (3) a generalization of tradition by placing the predecessor as a special case of a larger phenomenon. The first category is exemplified through chromatic displacement technique in Francis Poulenc and modified dominants in John Ireland, illustrating the coexistence of conventional periodicity with disruptive tonal practices. The second category manifests through non-contemporaneous musical codes, such as the use of musical topics (originally put forth by Leonard Ratner) within a neoclassical framework as points of departure from tradition, or the hypermeasure (proposed by Edward Cone) that capitalizes on Baroque and Romantic-era sequencing. The third category relates to Harold Bloom’s fourth revisionary ratio of a successor de-individuating the predecessor. For example, the generalization of thematic transformation while disregarding thematic character, and the generalization of the asymmetrical Fortspinnung while disregarding metric regularity, are exhibited in the works of Ernst Krenek and Peter Mennin respectively. In summary, this dissertation identifies how neoclassical-leaning composers confront tradition without placing themselves subordinate to their predecessors, forcing the listener to engage at a more fundamental level of musical syntax. The repertoire presented in this dissertation were premiered between 2018 and 2019 in the Joseph & Alma Gildenhorn Recital Hall at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, University of Maryland, College Park. Recital recordings are accessible through the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library at the University.Item Monumental Endeavors: Sculpting History in Southeastern Europe, 1960–2016(2018) Isto, Raino Eetu; Mansbach, Steven A; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation focuses on monumentality and the ways it has developed in the sociopolitical conditions of late socialist and postsocialist Southeastern Europe. It examines monumental production in this region between the 1960s and 80s, and the artistic practices that constitute responses to socialist monumentality undertaken in the postsocialist period in the republics of the former Yugoslavia and in Albania. It considers the relationship between ways of remembering the Second World War and the monumentalization of what is often referred to as ‘actually existing socialism.’ Additionally, it explores how legacies of socialist monumentality have affected contemporary artists working in relation to socialist heritage and to more recent traumatic experiences, such as the wars coincident with and following Yugoslavia’s dissolution. Southeastern Europe’s modernity has been a particularly conflicted one, both geopolitically and culturally. Home to an overwhelming number of (frequently overlapping and amorphous) ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups, the region is notable for the hybrid and disparate ways political and cultural actors—from dictators to democratically elected officials—have attempted to cultivate a collective historical consciousness. Monuments serve as particularly rich examples of the ways politicians, artists, and publics navigate collective values and contest both projected pasts and futures. The transition from late socialism to postsocialism provides diverse examples of how public monuments in countries such as Macedonia, Croatia, and Albania relate to debates on ethnicity, gender, political economy, and class-consciousness in the context of continued redefinitions of Europe’s borders and culture as a whole. Furthermore, ongoing attempts to preserve, restore, relocate, or destroy socialist-era monuments offer a rich and complicated body of evidence for the ways that histories are repurposed, especially the histories of the Partisans’ transnational antifascist struggle during the Second World War. This dissertation argues that many contemporary artists from Southeastern Europe have focused precisely on the ambiguous and conflicted meanings of socialist monuments, and have avoided treating monuments as monolithic forms associated with official ideological forces, in need of demythologization. Instead, these artists have turned to monuments in order to address the disparate histories of struggle that have given rise to Europe’s current sociopolitical situation.Item Translating the "Other": A History of Modernist Literature in the American Southwest, 1903-1945(2016) Horton, David Seth; Wyatt, David; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)William Carlos Williams wrote, “The classic is the local fully realized, words marked by a place.” There are now significant studies celebrating the “classic” regional literatures of Ireland, New England, and the American South. But what if the place is out-of-the way, and what if the words that mark it are difficult if not impossible to translate? The American Southwest is one such place, a literary region only recently coming into view. My dissertation forwards this project by focusing on how cultural work produced in the Southwest might represent the region despite the many difficulties of translation involved. Biographical, literary, historical, and archival materials allow for an interdisciplinary approach positioning Southwestern texts within the broader traditions of European and American modernism. My chapters explore the limits of cross-linguistic and cross-cultural understanding. As with Pound’s approach to translating Chinese poetry, which did not entail learning Chinese, Mary Austin argues that she need not master an indigenous language in order to translate Native American texts. Instead, she claims to mystically comprehend their essential meaning, thereby enabling and limiting her insights into the region. While Espinoza’s El sol de Texas emphasizes the challenges faced by immigrants fleeing the Mexican revolution, Venegas’s Las aventuras de don Chipote offers a model for how to cope with such challenges by a process I term “transnational mimicry.” The lexical switching between English and Spanish provides numerous opportunities to mimic and mock southwestern cultural traditions, a strategy linking the region to other colonized spaces throughout the world. The texts of Luhan and Lawrence constitute spectacularly failed attempts at translating otherness. Luhan romanticized the local cultural geography, whereas Lawrence interpreted it through a Eurocentric point-of-view. Together, their work represents the epistemological limits of a vision dominated by Anglo power structures. I conclude with Cather’s southwestern novels and suggest that while Death Comes for the Archbishop is a novelistic illustration of Benjamin’s argument that all translations are marked by at least some degree of incommunicability, it also illustrates Ricoeur’s contention that a belief in translatability is foundational to any act of interpreting a text produced by an “other” human being.Item Oral Storytelling in Modernism: Narration, Ideology, and Identity(2012) Wellman, Jennifer Jean; Richardson, Brian; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Oral storytellers abound in modernist texts - from T. S. Eliot's inarticulate J. Alfred Prufrock to Djuna Barnes' desultory Dr. Matthew O'Connor, from Joseph Conrad's loquacious Charlie Marlow and other men of the sea to Rebecca West's dainty Harriet Hume. This project theorizes the construction of orality and the figure of the oral storyteller in early to mid-twentieth-century literature, with a focus primarily - but not exclusively - on the British Isles. While the prevalence of such constructions has been surprisingly under-examined by modern literary critics, early to mid-twentieth-century writers were fascinated with oral storytelling, and this fascination provides vital insight into literary modernism's all-important efforts to redefine self and community through art and artistic innovation. Modernist authors employ written representations of oral storytelling to explore and attempt to negotiate the relationship between cultural authority and the formation of modern subjectivities. I examine modernist representations of oral storytelling in works such as Walter Benjamin's essay "The Storyteller" (1936), Joseph Conrad's An Outcast of the Islands (1896), Rebecca West's Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy (1929), Virginia Woolf's The Waves (1931), and Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape (1958). By exploring how authors contextualize ideas of orality and the oral storyteller within discourses of nationalism, literary tradition, and technology, I show that the figure of the oral storyteller presents a contact site for the contesting forces that inflect the formulation of self in the early to mid-twentieth-century. These forces include: ideologies of gender and empire; narrative itself as a culturally-inflected schema for understanding experience; and new and recently emergent communication technologies, like the gramophone and radio, which shift early twentieth-century understandings of language, presence, and the limits of the body. Moreover, as inherently self-reflexive moments within texts, scenes of oral storytelling implicitly engage with the defining modernist struggle to both undermine and appropriate the authority of earlier writers and contemporary literary and social traditions. The writers examined in this study use oral storytelling scenes to explore and delineate the relationship between dominant cultural narratives, the material world, and embodied identity.Item Writing with Image: Verbal-Visual Collaboration in 20th-Century Poetry(2010) Helwig, Magdelyn Hammond; Loizeaux, Elizabeth B; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines verbal-visual collaboration in which a poet and a visual artist work cooperatively to produce a single book. Verbal-visual collaboration is a fertile genre that refigures the historically oppositional relationship between the sister arts and that anticipates today's hypertext experiments in interart forms. I confront the problem of reading a multi-media text and posit “integrated reading” as a constructive critical approach that privileges neither word nor image. Integrated reading stresses relationships and asks questions about how the verbal and visual elements interact, what they say to and about each other, and how they work together to interrogate issues of representation. Examining the nature of poetry from the stance of images, and vice versa, means questioning the nature of representation itself. A central concern of verbal-visual collaborations, and modern poetry, is representation. My integrated readings consider issues of representation demonstrated in the process, presentation, and meaning-making of verbal-visual collaborations. My dissertation has two other goals: to begin to write the history of modern verbal-visual collaboration and to develop a taxonomy of such projects. I focus on three texts: Ted Hughes and Leonard Baskin's Capriccio (1990), Frank O'Hara and Larry Rivers' Stones (1957-1960), and C.D. Wright and Deborah Luster's One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana (2004). I trace the specific histories of these works to position each within the history of verbal-visual collaboration and to show how the creative process bears on reading a collaborative text. I describe categories of collaboration based on the working proximity of artist and poet and their relationship to material production, and my taxonomy provides a beginning for classifying the various ways in which poets interact with visual images.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.