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 FOLKLIFE, TRADITIONS, AND NATIONALISM: INFLUENCES ON WESTERN CLASSICAL MUSIC(2021) Hunter, Thomas; Sloan, Rita; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation performance project seeks to feature music written for the classical concert setting that is inspired by, directly references, or highlights specific and unique aspects of a particular country, culture, tradition, or heritage, that fall outside of typical western classical music. This may present as an arrangement of a folk song, the use or quotation of a distinct folksong melody or popular dance rhythm, an allusion to a piece of folk lore, the inclusion of nationalistic idioms, or mimicked instrumentation.I wish to demonstrate the impact and fascination many composers had with their own roots or those of another country, and the effect that it had on their music. I suggest that classical music conceived with this perspective has the potential to be particularly gripping. It has a wonderful ability to feel ancient, familiar, and new all at the same time, and can create a meaningful connection to the past while remaining deeply satisfying, intensely modern, and culturally relevant. In an effort to explore the legacy of this sort of music and the work of composers who found it arresting, I developed three concert programs during which I played music composed with some form of distinct folk, cultural, or nationalist influence. I primarily focused on music of the 20th century with a particular emphasis on American and English music, but by the end of the project, I visited America, England, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Hungary, Romania, France, Greece, Argentina, Slovakia, and Israel and commissioned a local composer to write a piece that was featured at the last concert.Item “SO HARD A STEPMOTHER” TO POESY: LEVERAGING THE TRADITIONAL BALLAD AS EPIDEICTIC RHETORIC AND SOCIAL ACTION(2020) Danielson, Kathy Anne; Valiavitcharska, Vessela; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Poetics are foundational to both social ideology and rational forms of argumentation. Highlighting a foundational role for rhetorical poetics, I suggest the traditional, third-person narrative ballad idiom as epideictic rhetoric and look at the agential intent of the ballad form from within the foundational elements of its construction/re-construction: its story selection, protagonist selection, narrative sequencing, authorial gaze, and narrative outcomes. The traditional ballad is most widely viewed as a folklore representative of cultural values and beliefs, yet the traditional ballad is also a site of social contest, a challenge to normative cultural ideology and harmful social structures. Despite its distanced wrappings, often we find the “traditional” ballad is a rhetoric narratively structured to apportion blame, an epideictic seeding conviction for the necessity of social change.Item Revisiting the Reservation: The Lumbee Community of East Baltimore(2020) Minner, Ashley Colleen; Williams Forson, Psyche; Pearson, Barry L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Revisiting the Reservation” is an analysis of the relationship between Baltimore’s Lumbee Indian community and the neighborhood where the community settled following the second World War. It is an inquiry into the roles of memory and place in the formation of identity. Vestiges of the Lumbee tribal homeland in North Carolina have become part of the built environment in East Baltimore as a result of the presence of Lumbee people. Tangible aspects of East Baltimore now also exist in the Lumbee tribal homeland. Lumbee people of East Baltimore are the living embodiment of both places. Over time, the community’s connection to the neighborhood has changed due to a complex set of factors ranging from Urban Renewal to upward mobility. This dissertation asks how the community’s identity has been affected. American Indian identity, constructed through a colonial lens, necessarily diminishes over time due to changing connections. The Baltimore Lumbee community illustrates that identity is actually an additive, adaptive process; heritage is living and culture continually evolves. This dissertation utilizes an interdisciplinary framework synthesized from the fields of American Indian Studies and Public Folklore to consider questions of heritage using a decolonial lens. The Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina is introduced via the tribal homeland and the social and economic conditions that prompted a mass migration to East Baltimore. East Baltimore is introduced via an abbreviated chronicle of the presence of American Indian people and other racial and ethnic groups leading up to the presence of Lumbee. Drawing primarily on oral history interviews and archival research, experiences of Lumbee arriving to Baltimore in the postwar years are highlighted, as are the safe havens they adopted, established and stewarded to exist freely and in community with one another away from “home.” The research process to map Baltimore’s former “reservation” and develop a walking tour to commemorate its sites is detailed as a project of reclamation of history, space, and belonging. An analysis of the expressive culture of subsequent generations of Baltimore Lumbee, including fashion, material possessions, food, and speech, reveals that memory and place play significant roles in the formation of identity. As connection to place changes over time, memory of place within identity prevails. Communities must share memory to understand how to engage in a future.Item BY THE AUTHORITY OF DREAMS: TRUTH AND KNOWLEDGE IN KICHWA MUSKUY NARRATIVES(2020) Carney, Lisa Warren; Harrison, Regina L.; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)For Kichwa-speaking Runa of Ecuador’s tropical forest region, narratives about muskuy experiences—dreams and visions—are revered sources of knowledge. Muskuy is a real (non-fantasy) experience in which humans communicate with each other and non-human persons that inhabit their environment, acquiring information and powers in the process. Through analysis of video recordings of muskuy narratives told by Kichwa speakers (2014-2016), this dissertation explores how verbal artistry, performance technique, and emotional resonance are central to knowledge acquisition and transmission. Specifically, narratives are deemed truthful and authoritative when they evoke empathy and memory through imagery, gesture, and vocal dynamics. Whereas ethnography and psychoanalysis have been the prevalent models for scholarship of indigenous dream practices, this is among the first scholarly work to use diverse methods of ethnopoetic analysis such as close reading, performance studies (Bauman, Hymes), linguistic analysis (Mannheim, Nuckolls), and ethnographic contextualization (Galli, Uzendoski) to elucidate the aesthetics of Kichwa muskuy narratives. Chapter 1 examines muskuy as a source of gender-specific knowledge and authority conveyed in the narrative of a master ceramicist woman’s dream interaction with a Clay Master Spirit. Narrative skill is one manifestation of mature womanhood or manhood that is developed partially through muskuy. Through artful storytelling, a narrator demonstrates her feminine strength. Chapter 2 elucidates the central role of dialogue in articulating authority and credibility. In a narrative of a boy’s transformation into an anaconda, implication and allusion induce dialogic resonances (Bakhtin), while quotation and perspective-marking with “evidential” enclitics animate authoritative voices within the narrative. Additionally, interlocutors substantiate narrative information through commentary and story contributions. Chapter 3 compares a traditional muskuy narrative from the community of Sarayaku, Ecuador, to the same story transformed for digital media platforms that in turn give it the force of prophecy in activist contexts. Thus, strategic and creative modifications allow muskuy narratives to remain an authoritative source of knowledge for Runa as they are recontextualized for non-indigenous audiences. The truth and authority of muskuy narratives emerge from artistry that engages listeners’ imagination, memory and emotion. Affecting and aesthetically complex, these stories are an ancestral form that remains salient for Runa today.Item HASIDIC HAGIOGRAPHY IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION – A HISTORICAL AND LITERARY PERSPECTIVE.(2020) Mandel-Edrei, Chen; Zakim, Eric; Jelen, Sheila E; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Hasidic Hagiography in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” sheds light on a neglected genre in the scholarship of modern Hebrew literature – Hasidic hagiography. Nineteenth-century Jewish Enlightenment activists, influenced by Romanticism with its perspective on “primitive,” “national” literatures, read Hasidic hagiographies as folklore; until today this genre is excluded from the canon of Modern Hebrew literature and from critical literary discourse. My work challenges this myopia and offers a critical perspective on the complex relationships among religion, mysticism, and modernity within the Hasidic stories; it shows how Hasidic hagiography represented an alternative path for Jewish modernization that rejected the binary lens of the Enlightenment’s secular rationalism. The dissertation’s title references Walter Benjamin, who revolutionized an understanding of literature as a reaction to changes in society wrought by industrialization and market capitalization. My dissertation applies a similar perspicacity to the study of Hasidic hagiography. The 1848 revolutions, the growing political and cultural awareness, and the influences of print-capitalism in Galicia, prompted two Hasidim–Menachem Mendel Bodek (1825-1874) and Michael Levi Rodkinson (1845-1904) to print oral Hasidic hagiographical stories in the popular format of folktale collections, thereby constituting Hasidic hagiography as a new genre in Hebrew literature. These projects marked a sharp transition from oral and intimate gatherings with the tsadik to popular printed experience of the masses. The process through which mechanical reproduction replicates the first-hand meeting with the tsadik for the masses, reflects the Hasidic engagement with the project of Jewish modernity. Distributed through networks of popular media, Hasidic hagiography became the device through which Hasidism integrated into contemporary Jewish and secular discourses, responding to ideas such as nationalism and individualism. The goal of this project is twofold: first, to offer a new critical methodology for reading those texts and establish a framework for discussing similar cases of marginalized texts in world literature; and secondly, to offer a new understanding of the political role of Hasidic hagiography and its promise for modern Jewish experience and literature. Finally, my dissertation contributes to our understanding of the political and cultural functions of popular literature, and illuminates alternatives to historiographies of national literatures.Item The Family Sadness(2019) Fruchter, Temima Sarah; Fuentes, Gabrielle L; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Family Sadness is a novel-in-progress that spans four generations of women in one Eastern European Jewish family and engages the idea of a speculative queer lineage. The story zigzags geographically and temporally, moving from Poland in the 1920’s to Brooklyn in the 1950’s, to Maryland in the 1980’s, and finally to contemporary Warsaw. The characters communicate across space and time, and their stories are woven through a body of invented Jewish folklore that collages age-old Jewish folk tropes with a contemporary queer sensibility. The narration of this book is polyphonic – humans and other creatures, animate and inanimate, contemporaries and time-travelers all participate in building this universe. Shiva, the youngest in this lineage, travels to Warsaw amidst ancestral refractions. This is, in part, a story about how stories are made. About how what feels impossible is sometimes truest, and about what is visible when we start to pay attention.Item Furrow(2017) Neal, Laura; Collier, Michael; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Furrow is a testimony of leaving and returning, challenging the quotidian perception of country life primarily rooted in rural South Carolina. The speaker is a silent observer, a witness, and at times an unwilling participant who interrogates the connections and disconnections between family and the natural world.Item Soundings(2013) Knowlton, Daniel Aaron; Casey, Maud; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This collection of stories features characters who "sound" their pasts, their childhoods, their families, and their obsessions, sometimes surfacing with gained clarity, and sometimes losing themselves to the depths. The collection takes its title from the opening story where the narrator becomes increasingly obsessed with tracking a group of whales by sound. The title holds the literal meaning of whales sounding (diving), and the metaphorical idea of delving into some unknown or revisited place or memory, sending out a voice or a thought, and listening to the echoes. The ensuing stories further explore this theme in a mix of realistic and fantastical settings, from a cub scout pack and a small town church, to communities inhabited by a Father Time character and miniature doppelgangers. The collection also holds a particularly strong attachment to the forests, coastline, and small towns of New England.Item Alegria: The Rise of Brazil's "Carnival of Popular Participation," Salvador da Bahia, 1950-2000s(2012) Metz, Jerry Dennis; Williams, Daryle; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the second half of the twentieth century, the annual carnival in the economically depressed northeastern city of Salvador da Bahia underwent a series of transformations that brought it from relative anonymity in Brazil--where festivities in the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Recife had long been given pride of place--to the status of (inter)national showpiece in terms of cultural and entrepreneurial innovation and touristic appeal. It became a dominant factor in year-round local music production. In an era of political constraint, it appeared to embody the collective performance of multiple democracies including race and free-market consumerism. New forms of popular participation were linked to innovations in carnival that, in other national carnival sites, would have been precluded by regulation and tradition. This dissertation draws from debates and analysis in Brazil's intellectual, policy, and media spheres regarding carnival, folklore, tourism, Bahian culture, mass culture, and national identity to argue that 1) the traits of creative spontaneity and popular participation in Salvador's carnival gained prominence as both national ambivalence over "folklore" increased, and dictatorial regimes constrained political democracy; 2) the state, rather than discursively and economically controlling Salvador's carnival, has more often reacted to artistic production and market forces, its hegemony configured through strategies of support and appropriation linked to tourism and an internally amplified social ethic of alegria; and 3) media and cultural commentators have made Salvador's modern carnival a new locus for longstanding national conversations over Brazilian identity, regionalism, race, and cultural imperialism, casting its innovation as simultaneously a promising engine of renovation and a threat to both local and national traditions. Salvador carnival's progressive implications of participation and inclusion have been blunted by a process of political redemocratization that was associated with neoliberal policies at the national and local levels; its internal contradictions and commercialism have challenged both its national and local symbolic power.Item CHASING THE SINGERS: THE TRANSITION OF LONG-SONG (URTYN DUU) IN POST-SOCIALIST MONGOLIA(2011) Yoon, Sunmin; Provine, Robert C.; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Long-song (Urtyn duu) is a prominent Mongolian traditional folk song genre that survived throughout the socialist period (1921-1990) and throughout the political transformation of Mongolia from socialism to democratic capitalism after the Soviet Union was dismantled and terminated its aid to Mongolia in 1990. This dissertation, based on research conducted from 2006 to 2010, presents and investigates the traces of singers' stories and memories of their lives, songs, and singing, through the lens of the discourse on change and continuity in, and as, folk tradition. During the socialist period, this genre was first considered backward, and was then subtly transformed into an urban national style, with the formation of a boundary between professionalism and amateurism among long-song singers and with selective performance of certain songs and styles. This boundary was associated with politics and ideology and might be thought to have ended when the society entered its post-socialist period. However, the long-song genre continued to play a political role, with different kinds of political meaning one the one hand and only slight musical modification on the other. It was now used to present a more nostalgic and authentic new Mongolian identity in the post-socialist free market. Through my investigation, I argue that the historical transition of Mongolia encompassed not merely political or economic shifts, but also a deeper transformation that resulted in new cultural forms. Long-song provides a good case study of the complicated process of this cultural change.