College of Arts & Humanities
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item GABRIEL FAURE (1845-1924): INNOVATOR OF THE FRENCH MODERN STYLE AS SEEN IN HIS WORKS FOR CELLO AND PIANO(2003) Oh, Jooeun; Elsing, Evelyn; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, MD)Gabriel Faure was a deeply influential leader in establishing modem trends in early twentieth-century French music. His individualistic compositions include both traditional and modern aspects incorporated into his own distinctive style. This doctoral project is a study of Faure's contributions to French chamber-music and explores especially his works for cello. In the first chapter of this dissertation, a brief biography of Faure is presented, and Faure's personal relationships with several influential contemporaries, including Camille Saint-Saens, are discussed. The second chapter describes Faure's highly effective career as Professor and then Director and reformer at the Paris Conservatoire. In the third chapter, Faure's chamber music is discussed, with emphasis on his works for cello. His works can be divided into three time periods, each representative of the composer's unique musical style and illustrative of Faure's stylistic development throughout his career. The fourth and final chapter examines the evolution of Faure's musical approach, while his complete works for the cello are analyzed and compared. Diverse reactions of his contemporary critics to Faure's late-period chamber works are also presented. As part of this doctoral project two recitals of works by Faure and his contemporaries were performed at the University of Maryland School of Music. The works performed in the first recital include Camille Saint-Saens' Romance for Violoncello and Piano, Opus 36 ( 1877); Maurice Ravel's Sonata for Violoncello and Violin ( 1920-22); Claude Debussy's Sonata for Violoncello and Piano ( 1915); and Faure's Violoncello Sonata No. I in d minor, Opus I 09 ( 1917). The second recital incorporated selections from all three of Faure's compositional periods: Elegie for Violoncello and Piano, Opus 2-1 ( 1880); Papillion for Violoncello and Piano, Opus 77 ( 1885), Romance for Violoncello and Piano, Opus 69 ( 1894 ), Sicilienne for Violoncello and Piano, Opus 78 ( 1898, originally 1893 ); Violoncello Sonata No. 2 in g minor, Opus I I 7 ( 1921 ); and Piano Trio in d minor, Opus I 20 ( 1922-1923 ).Item Haarlem Tabletop Still-Life Painting, 1610-1660: A Study of Relationships Between Form and Meaning(2003) Gregory, Henry Duval V; Wheelock, Arthur K. Jr.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, MD)Scholars have considered Dutch still life and its meaning from a variety of methodological perspectives and have often reached different opinions on the prevalence of intentional moralizing meaning in these pictures. This study approaches meaning - that is, messages specifically religious or moralizing in nature - in still-life painting by focusing on paintings produced in Haarlem between 1610 and 1660 and assessing their capacity for meaning in terms of their visual structure and the objects featured in them. Drawing on a database of 630 paintings created for this study, I analyzed the patterns that developed in Haarlem tabletop still-life painting; from the objects and foods used in these paintings to their thematic types and compositional characteristics. The results of these analyses foster an understanding of the most typical forms of the Haarlem tabletop still life. However, these analyses also pennit one to identify works exceptional in visual structure and/or use of objects that convey unmistakable messages focused on christological and vanitas themes. A prime example of a painting with these qualities is a large canvas by the artist Willem Claesz. Heda (1635 - National Gallery of Art, Washington). The compositional structure in this picture focuses one's attention on a roll along the front edge of the table. A contrast between the roll and the rest of the table is evident: the latter has been consumed while the former is untouched. The presence of elements connoting transience - an extinguished candle and a broken berckemeier - underscores the allegorical nature of this painted table and sharpens the contrast between the roll as symbol of Christ and the rest of the table as a worldly, ephemeral indulgence. While most tabletop still Iifes painted in Haarlem between 1610 and 1660 were not overtly allegorical, a significant number were. The methodology in this study allows one to identify these paintings and assess the nature of their meaning.Item "Many Hands Hands": Early Modern Englishwomen's Recipe Books and the Writing of Food, Politics, and the Self(2006) Field, Catherine; Donawerth, Jane; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)"Many Hands Hands" is a study of early modern Englishwomen's recipe (or "receipt") books. It traces how women explored and expressed matters of food, politics, and self in culinary, medicinal, and cosmetic recipes. The receipt book genre was closely associated with the work of the early modern house, where women were accepted as authorities in matters of household management; thus, the receipt book was particularly accessible to women as they searched for modes of self-expression. Through recipe practice, the housewife managed her own body, as well as the bodies of those under her care (such as her husband, children, servants, and neighbors); at the same time, she occasionally exerted pressure on the body politic of the state. In this period, domestic activities within the home were often politicized, and I argue that the housewife's role and recipe practice were considered central to definitions of English nationhood. In addition to surveying women's manuscript recipe collections, I also analyze printed representations of their recipe practice from the beginning and middle of the seventeenth century. In Shakespeare's All's Well that Ends Well (c.1604), the female practitioner is represented as powerful and capable, yet Helen's specialized knowledge about the (royal) male body makes her a troubling and disturbing figure to the other characters in the play, including Bertram of Rossillion, the man she hopes to marry. The play ultimately valorizes Helen's practice, however, and it reinforces an empirical world view, where with the proper "how to" (or recipe), bodies are knowable and healable, in spite of their transgressive (if predictable) desires. By the middle of the seventeenth century, "how to" books of recipes (in print and in manuscript) come to be increasingly influenced by utopian writings. Printed cookbooks attributed to women reveal utopian longings in the form of royalist nostalgia, a desire to reclaim the past as a place of good household management and national economy. Recipes became a mode through much women and men could reflect on the "how to" workings of the body in order to improve the health of the individual and, ultimately, the body politic of the state.Item WORD SENSE DISAMBIGUATION WITHIN A MULTILINGUAL FRAMEWORK(2003) Diab, Mona Talat; Resnik, Philip; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is the process of resolving the meaning of a word unambiguously in a given natural language context. Within the scope of this thesis, it is the process of marking text with explicit sense labels. What constitutes a sense is a subject of great debate. An appealing perspective, aims to define senses in terms of their multilingual correspondences, an idea explored by several researchers, Dyvik (1998), Ide (1999), Resnik & Yarowsky (1999), and Chugur, Gonzalo & Verdejo (2002) but to date it has not been given any practical demonstration. This thesis is an empirical validation of these ideas of characterizing word meaning using cross-linguistic correspondences. The idea is that word meaning or word sense is quantifiable as much as it is uniquely translated in some language or set of languages. Consequently, we address the problem of WSD from a multilingual perspective; we expand the notion of context to encompass multilingual evidence. We devise a new approach to resolve word sense ambiguity in natural language, using a source of information that was never exploited on a large scale for WSD before. The core of the work presented builds on exploiting word correspondences across languages for sense distinction. In essence, it is a practical and functional implementation of a basic idea common to research interest in defining word meanings in cross-linguistic terms. We devise an algorithm, SALAAM for Sense Assignment Leveraging Alignment And Multilinguality, that empirically investigates the feasibility and the validity of utilizing translations for WSD. SALAAM is an unsupervised approach for word sense tagging of large amounts of text given a parallel corpus — texts in translation — and a sense inventory for one of the languages in the corpus. Using SALAAM, we obtain large amounts of sense annotated data in both languages of the parallel corpus, simultaneously. The quality of the tagging is rigorously evaluated for both languages of the corpora. The automatic unsupervised tagged data produced by SALAAM is further utilized to bootstrap a supervised learning WSD system, in essence, combining supervised and unsupervised approaches in an intelligent way to alleviate the resources acquisition bottleneck for supervised methods. Essentially, SALAAM is extended as an unsupervised approach for WSD within a learning framework; in many of the cases of the words disambiguated, SALAAM coupled with the machine learning system rivals the performance of a canonical supervised WSD system that relies on human tagged data for training. Realizing the fundamental role of similarity for SALAAM, we investigate different dimensions of semantic similarity as it applies to verbs since they are relatively more complex than nouns, which are the focus of the previous evaluations. We design a human judgment experiment to obtain human ratings on verbs’ semantic similarity. The obtained human ratings are cast as a reference point for comparing different automated similarity measures that crucially rely on various sources of information. Finally, a cognitively salient model integrating human judgments in SALAAM is proposed as a means of improving its performance on sense disambiguation for verbs in particular and other word types in general.Item FROM TRAVELING EXPEDITIONS, TO MUSEUMS AND TO FILM: NATIVE AMERICANS AND THE IMPACT OF MISREPRESENTATION(2003) Henry, Melissa Ann; Fuegi, John; Harrison, Regina; Robinson, Eugene; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)Item "THIS ROT SPREADS LIKE AN EPIDEMIC" POLICING ADOLESCENT FEMALE SEXUALITY IN ICELAND DURING WORLD WAR II(2000) Baldursdottir, Bara; Gullickson, Gay L.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)The thesis examines events, perspectives and prevailing discourses that led to the criminalization of adolescent female sexuality in Iceland during World War II. Provisionary law was passed that became the foundation to submit young women to the mercy of special Juvenile Court, which tried girls for real or suspected sexual relationships with British and American servicemen, and sentenced them to rural homes or to a reformatory. Through the critical theory of Nira Juval-Davis, I have demonstrated that in the national discourse, Icelandic women who dated the foreign troops, stepped over the line that signified the nation 's boundaries and failed to become the bearers of the collectivity's identity. Their lack of Icelandicness turned them into the threatening "other". They were placed on the margin of society, as legal actions were taken to protect and police their sexuality.Item Mary Shelley and Utopian Domesticity(2002) Sites, Melissa Jo; Fraistat, Neil R.; English; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)In her seven novels and other writings, Mary Shelley critiques traditional restrictive domestic ideology while developing a feminist utopian vision of domesticity. She begins with Wollstonecraft's prescription for women's education and adds Godwin's ideas of simplicity, frankness, and forgiveness. Domesticity fosters these very conditions. Ernst Bloch's theory of the utopian function within ideology shows how the false consciousness of domestic and Romantic ideology can bear a utopian impulse. To provide a historical context of domesticity in feminist and reform thought, I discuss the emphasis on education, the importance of community, and the life of the mind in companionate marriage in Mary Astell, Sarah Scott and Margaret Cavendish; I then show how Adeline Mowbray by Amelia Opie and The Empire of the Nairs by James Lawrence illustrate the effects of putting Godwin's and Wollstonecraft's theories into practice. I look at Shelley's exploration of Romantic ideology in Frankenstein while countering prevalent critical misreadings of its nascent ideal of utopian domesticity. I then explore how Mathilda, Midas, Proserpine, and Maurice, or the Fisher's Cot develop contrasting ideas of utopia and dystopia around isolation and community. In her political novels, Valperga, The Last Man, and Perkin Warbeck Shelley developed Wollstonecraft's feminist theories and focused on women's relation to political power. Valperga's Euthanasia exemplifies the powerful Wollstonecraftian citoyenne and Shelleyan Romantic hero. The Last Man illustrates the priority of personal over public concerns, while Perkin Warbeck questions the legitimacy of political ambition. In her domestic novels, Lodore and Falkner, Shelley creates utopian domesticity by modifying Godwin's political system and by revising the Byronic Romantic hero; in Falkner, she rewrites Godwin's Caleb Williams according to a feminist idea of social justice. I conclude by looking at Persuasion by Jane Austen, Records of Woman by Felicia Hemans, and Helen by Maria Edgeworth, which demonstrate awareness of the potential benefits and drawbacks of domesticity, but were less concerned than Shelley with feminist critique.Item Washington's Main Street: Consensus and Conflict on the Capital Beltway, 1952-2001(2002) Korr, Jeremy Louis; Caughey, John L.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)This dissertation combines approaches from cultural landscape analysis, ethnography, and planning history to study the Capital Beltway in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. as both a physical artifact and a social institution. Drawing on interviews, survey data, fieldwork, and documentary research, I explore the ways in which the Beltway, its creators and users, and its surrounding natural landscape have affected each other over fifty years. Three research methods underlie this study. First, I introduce an analytical framework for odology, geographer J.B. Jackson’s term for the study of roads, focusing on the beliefs and values roads reveal and create, dynamics of power and access, contributions to normativity, issues of conflict and consensus, and effects on individuals’ lives and identities. Second, I develop and apply a detailed framework model for cultural landscape analysis, building on previous efforts in cultural geography and material culture studies. Third, I draw on and analyze the dynamics and results of a Web survey. The dissertation provides the first detailed discussion of the Capital Beltway's development and construction in Maryland and Virginia, drawing in part on interviews with ten of its original engineers and beginning with an overview of the origins of beltway planning in the United States. It examines the Beltway's effects on individual lives, communities, and the broader metropolitan Washington region, concentrating on conflicts and perceived inequities created by the Beltway's construction, and on both states' efforts to pursue their own agendas and also to redress residents' concerns over the fifty years covered. The study addresses both physical and cognitive manifestations of the Beltway, exploring how the road exists in the minds of the people who use it and how its material and conceptual iterations combine to play an integral role in their lives. It also analyzes how the Beltway serves concurrently as a template through which individuals and groups promote their values and beliefs, as a venue of conflict and community, as a vehicle for the creation of a distinct regional identity, as a site of negotiation between public and private space, and as a site for mediation and compromise in interjurisdictional cooperation.Item Karl Briullov's Portrait of Countess Samoilova(2002) Regina, Kristen; Hargrove, June; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)The stunning Portrait of Countess Samoilova (1832- 1834), painted by the Russian artist Karl Briullov (1799-1852), has been traditionally considered as only a decorative high society parade portrait. However, this thesis argues that the portrait is more than this: through encoded signifiers it ref1ects Briullov's love for and possession of Julia Samoilova, and a possible love affair between artist and sitter. Artistically these symbols developed out of the conventions of the eighteenth-century phenomenon turquerie, which continued into the nineteenth century as Orientalism. Employing such artistic conventions as turquerie in a highly personal manner, Briullov navigated across social boundaries (he was not of Samoilova's noble class) to transform this portrait into a covert profession of his love for the sitter and simultaneously possess her as his own. Popular in Europe, especially France, turquerie was at first a fashion for Turkish styles and motifs in interior design, masquerade balls, clothing and furniture. But European fantasies about the East intensified through colonial expansion at the end of the eighteenth century. Turquerie came to represent a European superiority over an exotic "other,' often manifested in the image of the black servant, which is also prevalent in Orientalist paintings. But the discourse of Orientalism extends over broader visual arenas such as the bath, harem-life, landscapes of exotic foreign lands and their inhabitants. Orientalism is a discourse which is based on continued colonial conquest and primarily considered a European, namely French and English, “othering" of the Near East and North Africa. Within the Orientalist revisionist discourse, other imperializing countries such as Russia are reconsidered. However, Oriental ism presents a dilemma when applied to Russia, as its identity is simultaneously European and Eastern "other," with western European perceptions tending to view Russia as singularly Eastern. To complicate the issue further, Russia itself was an imperialist nation. Samoilova is conceptually developed within this Russian discourse or Orientalism. As both artist and sitter were living in Italy when the portrait was painted, it was the duality and perception of Russian cultural identity that Briullov manipulated when creating Samoilova. The painting is a manifestation of both traditions of turquerie and Orientalism.Item The Public Sphere and the Political Sphere: Rhetorical Interconnections(2002) Klumpp, James F.Exploration of the relationship between the public sphere and the political sphere. Key rhetorical concepts that mediate the relationship between them are explored.