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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    Sonic Movie Memories: Sound, Childhood, and American Cinema
    (2016) Cote, Paul James; Auerbach, Jonathan D.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Though the trend rarely receives attention, since the 1970s many American filmmakers have been taking sound and music tropes from children’s films, television shows, and other forms of media and incorporating those sounds into films intended for adult audiences. Initially, these references might seem like regressive attempts at targeting some nostalgic desire to relive childhood. However, this dissertation asserts that these children’s sounds are instead designed to reconnect audience members with the multi-faceted fantasies and coping mechanisms that once, through children’s media, helped these audience members manage life’s anxieties. Because sound is the sense that Western audiences most associate with emotion and memory, it offers audiences immediate connection with these barely conscious longings. The first chapter turns to children’s media itself and analyzes Disney’s 1950s forays into television. The chapter argues that by selectively repurposing the gentlest sonic devices from the studio’s films, television shows like Disneyland created the studio’s signature sentimental “Disney sound.” As a result, a generation of baby boomers like Steven Spielberg comes of age and longs to recreate that comforting sound world. The second chapter thus focuses on Spielberg, who incorporates Disney music in films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Rather than recreate Disney’s sound world, Spielberg uses this music as a springboard into a new realm I refer to as “sublime refuge” - an acoustic haven that combines overpowering sublimity and soothing comfort into one fantastical experience. The second half of the dissertation pivots into more experimental children’s cartoons like Gerald McBoing-Boing (1951) - cartoons that embrace audio-visual dissonance in ways that soothe even as they create tension through a phenomenon I call “comfortable discord.” In the final chapter, director Wes Anderson reveals that these sonic tensions have just as much appeal to adults. In films like The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), Anderson demonstrates that comfortable discord can simultaneously provide a balm for anxiety and create an open-ended space that makes empathetic connections between characters possible. The dissertation closes with a call to rethink nostalgia, not as a romanticization of the past, but rather as a reconnection with forgotten affective channels.
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    Pleated
    (2014) Miracle, Stephanie Danielle; Pearson, Sara; Dance; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Pleated, rich in technicolor, full of imagination and wistfulness woven together with sincere characters, raw relationships, and a rock-n-roll soundtrack, is a piece about family, memory, and place. Pleated reverses the Dance Theatre of the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center and inhabits this odd space by dancing in front, inside, and on top of this tall vertical wall of folded red, purple, and gray theatre seats. Costumes in crayon box colors react sharply against the strange backdrop. The clashing gives off a vibrant burst of energy, reminiscent of a messy, adolescent bedroom. A non-linear narrative unfolds slowly, following three sisters as they revisit moments of their past together. The dance shifts seamlessly through a series of vignettes, which culminate in an emotionally volatile scene of accusation and forgiveness.
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    Infant Nation: Childhood Innocence and the Politics of Race in Contemporary American Fiction
    (2004-04-27) Werrlein, Debra Tonkin; Kauffman, Linda; Chuh, Kandice; English Language and Literature
    Infant Nation considers literary representations of childhood as sites where anxieties about race, class and gender inequalities converge. Popular and canonical representations of American childhood often revere it as a condition that precedes history, lacks knowledge, and thus, avoids accountability. I argue that invocations of this depoliticized ideal mask systems of privilege, particularly relating to white middle-class masculinity. My study highlights literature published between 1970 and 1999, a period marked by growing concern regarding boundaries of race and nation. With special attention to postcolonial and critical race theories, I argue that the authors here portray the United States as a nation infantilized by its desire to reclaim a mythically innocent past. In untidy formulations of nation that mirror their disjointed narrative styles, the novels interfere with the operation of nostalgia in American memory. They revise the ideal of innocent childhood to model a form of citizenship deeply engaged in acts of historical recuperation. I respond to theories of postmodern literature and cultural studies that emphasize the central role memory plays in shaping our future, presenting an analysis I feel is especially urgent at a time when neo-conservative policy-makers subscribe to a Trent Lott-style nostalgia for a mythically innocent pre-Civil Rights era. Chapter One examines Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters (1990). I argue that Hagedorn cedes authentic history to the corrosive powers of assimilationism and consumerism, invoking multiple stories of history’s loss instead. In Chapter Two, I shift focus to the white middle class of Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1984). I argue that DeLillo implicates patriarchal families and profiteering universities in the cultivation of “innocent” consumer identities that ultimately turn violent. In Chapter Three I discuss Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970). Morrison challenges the myth of American meritocracy, I contend, suggesting that race, class and gender oppressions exist not only in American culture, but in American childhoods. Finally, I examine Lois Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging (1997). I argue that by representing children as historically savvy social critics and not as innocents, Yamanaka models a new adult citizenry. With the other novelists here, she warns a forgetful nation against embracing the infantilized present.