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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Item Writing Oceanic Bodies: Corporeal Representations in the Works of Déwé Gorodé, Claudine Jacques, and Chantal T. Spitz(2013) Frengs, Julia Lynne; Orlando, Valerie K; Modern French Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Oceanic women's bodies have been objects of fascination throughout centuries of Western literature. European voyagers of the eighteenth century lauded the exotic Tahitian female body, while in the nineteenth century, the Kanak (indigenous New Caledonian) body was frequently dehumanized and regarded as uncivilized. Indeed, much Western literature prior to the second half of the twentieth century has portrayed an imagined, culturally produced Oceanic body that became a stereotype in what Edward Said would call an Orientalist discourse. This dominant Orientalist discourse has, until recently, overshadowed the voices of Oceanic peoples. This project examines the representation of the body in the texts of three contemporary Francophone Oceanic women writers who successfully communicate their individual perceptions on Oceanic identity. Since the 1980s, Kanak writer Déwé Gorodé (1949), Caledonian writer Claudine Jacques (1953), and Tahitian writer Chantal T. Spitz (1954) have produced an explicitly Oceanic perspective and style in a writing that is distinct from other French and Francophone literatures. This project examines violence, specifically sexual violence, and treatments of the damaged body in the literature of Gorodé, Jacques, and Spitz, who turn the body into a political instrument. The display of sexual violence in these works forces the body into a public position, fostering a discussion and critique of the politics of Oceanic communities. Additionally, this dissertation discusses the political body, which is often either represented as in isomorphism with the land, or as rupturing the confinement endured in colonial-imposed institutions. Also addressed are the fragile silence and enunciations of identity in the texts of Jacques, Gorodé, and Spitz. Because both the Kanak and Tahitian cultures have a strong oral tradition, the question of silence imposed by the Western privileging of the written word features heavily in Oceanic writing, but as this project will reveal, the silence that has permeated the communities of French-speaking Oceania is a complicated and delicate silence. The aim of this work is to examine the contemporary configurations of an Oceanic body in the works of Déwé Gorodé, Claudine Jacques, and Chantal T. Spitz: a body that transgresses boundaries, destabilizes myths, and refuses objectification.Item Spatial Perceptual Transformation: a thesis in body_scale_form_movement(2010) Faulkner, Shawn; Eisenbach, Ronit; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis is based on three stems of interest. First, the love and respect of making and the knowledge that comes through the process of making. Second, the interest in the thesis as a proposition and the process in which a thesis is developed, similar to that of a scientific experiment. The third interest is the profound intersection between the human body and space. Building at full-scale allows one to ask questions important to the field of architecture that are not possible to explore through the conventional means of scale models, drawings and writing. The tangible qualities of a full-scale structure allow for inhabitation and direct modulation of space. This strategy enables an inquiry into the relationships between the body, embodied movement, perception, and space. The thesis will address the effects of transformational space upon the individual psyche, while exploring ways to record and measure bodily movement and perception in a changing space. This is accomplished by testing whether the introduction of change at the boundaries of an enclosure might affect human experience. The following questions are raised by the work: Is it possible to create an environment whose form alters human perception? How can we record this transformation and successfully analyze, and interpret the results? Can a dynamic, ever-changing space participate in relation between body, mind, and form? The first step of this thesis is the production and fabrication of a device in which the spatial configurations can be modulated and the reactions and movement of people can be recorded. Captured data will be analyzed to gain understanding into the relation of environment and the psychology and motion choices of the inhabitants. Knowledge gained from this experiment will be applied to design choices in which an existing movement-oriented site will be transformed. This second phase of the thesis will further speculate and reflect on the relationship between a designer's choice and the effects that choice has upon the inhabitant's movement.Item Global Capitalism Meets Local Postcommunism: Tensions in Transition as Manifested through Physical Culture and the Female Body in Romania(2008-11-21) Chin, Jessica; Andrews, David L.; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Nearly two decades after communism officially ended in Romania, the nation continues to struggle in its transition from state socialism to liberal democracy. The increased presence and influence of Western images, democratic ideals, and social ideologies produces a complex and unstable tension with persisting legacies of communism and socialist ideologies. This dissertation is a critical analysis of the ways in which various tensions are manifested within the changing physical culture in Romania, particularly through performative bodies and constructed spaces of leisure and physical activity. In addition, participation in sports and other physical activities related to fitness and health are examined to reveal disciplinary techniques that reinforce normalized constructions of gendered and classed bodies. Using a qualitative, multi-method approach, empirical data was primarily collected in gyms and fitness clubs of three major cities in Romania. Through a contextual, interpretive, and theoretically-informed analysis of the empirical findings, this project intends to expand upon and articulate theories of postcommunist transition, gender, and physical culture in the Eastern European context--opening new lines of inquiry that consider both the empowering and problematic implications of creating and negotiating new subject positions within postcommunist environments.Item The Antitheatrical Body: Puritans and Performance in Early Modern England, 1577-1620(2008-04-22) du Toit, Simon William; Hildy, Franklin J.; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The antitheatrical pamphlets published in Shakespeare's England provide an excellent view of the early modern religious engagement with the stage. However, critics have discussed the antitheatrical pamphlets most often by examining the theology or psychology they seem to represent. This study offers an interdisciplinary approach, as it stands at the shifting boundaries between performance studies, religious studies, and theatre historiography. It offers a close reading of puritan religious experience in the ethnographic grain, reading the struggle between the puritan and the stage through the lens of a contemporary discourse of embodiment: early modern humoral theory. Puritan practitioners of "spiritual physick" appropriated humoral physiology and integrated it with Calvinist theology to produce the embodied authority of prophetic performative speech. This study's central claim is that the struggle between the antitheatrical writers and the stage was a social drama, in which each side fought for social control of the authority of performative speech. I suggest that performance of prophetic speech is the primary signifier of puritan identity in English puritan culture. What distinctively identifies the puritan body is not physiological difference, but cultural practice, visible in the bodily dispositions constructed in puritan culture. The puritan body performs a paradox: it is closed, bridled, contained, and ordered; and it is open, permeable, passionately disclosing, and subject to dangerous motions and disorder. The puritan body knows itself as double. It is alienated from the flesh, and therefore constructs itself in a liminal process of becoming. I document evidence of a humorally grounded logic of practice within puritan culture; trace the outlines of the puritan body through the antitheatrical literature; and finally observe the social role of the antitheatrical pamphlets in the market for argument. The antitheatrical pamphlets order the worldly environment, shaping time and place to privilege the redemptive hegemony they construct. However, the pamphlets' engagement with the market for cheap godly print gradually served to etiolate their ritual authority. While the antitheatrical pamphlets served as "argument" that performed social distinctions, they also mark a transition in the public representation of puritanism, beginning the shift towards the carnivalesque body of the Stage Puritan.Item Digital Theatre: A "Live" and Mediated Art Form Expanding Perceptions of Body, Place, and Community(2007-05-22) Masura, Nadja; Hildy, Franklin J; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This work discusses Digital Theatre, a type of performance which utilizes both "live" actors and co-present audiences along with digital media to create a hybrid art form revitalizing theatre for contemporary audiences. This work surveys a wide range of digital performances (with "live" and digital elements, limited interactivity/participation and spoken words) and identifies the group collectively as Digital Theatre, an art form with the flexibility and reach of digital data and the sense of community found in "live" theatre. I offer performance examples from Mark Reaney, David Saltz, Troika Ranch, Gertrude Stein Repertory Theatre, Flying Karamazov Brothers, Talking Birds, Yacov Sharir, Studio Z, George Coates Performance Group, and ArtGrid. (The technologies utilized in performances include: video-conferencing, media projection, MIDI control, motion capture, VR animation, and AI). Rather than looking at these productions as isolated events, I identify them as a movement and link the use of digital techniques to continuing theatrical tradition of utilizing new technologies on the stage. The work ties many of the aesthetic choices explored in theatrical past by the likes of Piscator, Svoboda, Craig, and in Bauhaus and Futurist movements. While it retains the essential qualities of public human connection and imaginative thought central to theatre, Digital Theatre can cause theatrical roles to merge as it extends the performer's body, expands our concept of place, and creates new models of global community.Item The Body Made Visible: Scientific Practices of Seeing and Literary Naturalism(2004-11-29) Solomon, Jennifer Welch; Auerbach, Jonathan; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines how ideas about the body in the late 19th century--how to see them better and how best to represent them--are circulating in discussions among physiologists and sociologists, and how naturalist writers engage these discussions with their own representational strategies. Often, what their works create is a strong tension between methods of corporeal control--immobilizing bodies, abstracting bodies, establishing distance from bodies--and the fact that many bodies refuse to submit to any normative power. I argue that scientists develop visual strategies as a way of learning more about bodies, and ultimately this knowledge can be used for purposes of social reform and regulation. Likewise, naturalist writers focus their narrative upon the body as a way of demonstrating lack of agency and problems with developing identity. In using some of the strategies for bodily representation that physiologists and sociologists do, naturalist writers also point to social problems that warrant change. In Chapter One, I trace the desire for bodily penetration on the part of physiologists and naturalist writers such as Émile Zola and Frank Norris. I argue that the bodily interior is conceived of as mechanistic and that naturalist writers use visual methods of magnification and immobilizationsuccessful in the physiological fieldto elicit a sense of the interior. In Chapter Two, I discuss how physiologists and sociologists use abstraction to reduce bodies to an essence as a way of ordering excessive detail for measuring purposes. I argue that naturalist writers like Norris and Stephen Crane also engage in abstraction, producing familiar types on the one hand and surreal figures on the other. Finally, in Chapter Three, I examine the multitude of bodiesthe crowds. Again, I examine the relationship between social science and visual strategies of order. I juxtapose the early actualities of Edison and the Lumière Brothers with naturalist texts by Edith Wharton, Norris, and Crane, examining ways that visual strategies of ordering crowdschiefly by establishing distance and perspectiveare used and subverted in literary texts so as to highlight the disruptive power of the crowd.