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 Performing the New Face of Modernism: Anti-Mimetic Portraiture and the American Avant-Garde, 1912-1927(2010) Walz, Jonathan Frederick; Promey, Sally M.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)At the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession in 1912, Alfred Stieglitz received the final proofs for Gertrude Stein's experimental text portraits "Henri Matisse" and "Pablo Picasso" and subsequently published these poems in the journal Camera Work. Soon afterward a number of visual artists working in the United States began grappling with the implications of such hermetic depictions. Entering into a trans-Atlantic conversation, this fledgling modernist community created radical images that bear witness to the evolving nature of subjectivity and to an extensive culture of experimentation in portraying the individual in the first quarter of the twentieth century. One of the most salient aspects of the modernist worldview was the desire to break with the past. Earlier styles, exhibition standards, subject matter, and teaching methods all came under attack, but none more basic - and symbolic - than the ancient Greek (via the Renaissance) idea of mimesis. Freed from the expectation to replicate reality "impartially," painters and sculptors began instead to emphasize more and more their own subjective experiences through expressive color choices or formal exaggerations. Portraiture, previously so closely linked to flattering transcription and bourgeois values, became the genre par excellence for testing modernist ideals and practices. This doctoral thesis examines the small group of artists working in the United States who advanced an extreme, anti-mimetic approach to portraiture through the dissociation of the sitter from his or her likeness. Drawing on performance theory, this dissertation re-imagines the portrait as a series of events within a social nexus. It also aims to reaffirm the agency of the United States avant-garde in the 1910s and 1920s as its members sought to establish, and then maintain, their status on the American cultural scene specifically through the employment of unconventional portraiture. Through the contextualization of particular objects, the consideration of period poetry, and the incorporation of newly available archival sources, the research presented here illuminates the complex intersections of modernity, representation, and subjectivity, and charts the changes in a specific mode of visual production during the fifteen-year span of 1912 - 1927, thereby demonstrating Charles Demuth's dictum that "In portraiture...likeness is a means not an end."Item Rineke Dijkstra and Contemporary Subjectivity(2008) Quick, Jennifer Eileen; Shannon, Joshua A; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this thesis, I argue that the work of contemporary Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra (b. 1959) complicates how we understand subjectivity, or the way that humans come into being and exist in the world, by both reinforcing and countering the idea that the subject is a product of social relations. Dijkstra's large-scale photographs of individuals propose a dialectical subject who is constituted both by his or her own agency as well as within exterior social circumstances. This is especially significant in light of the fact that influential scholarship on contemporary art has largely been dominated by the construct of the subject as socially determined. The theory of subjectivity represented in Dijkstra's photographs therefore demonstrates a certain ambivalence that is descriptive of contemporary subjectivity. As such, Dijkstra's photographs offer a fresh take on how we conceive of subjectivity today.Item Essentially Powerful: Political Motherhood in the United States and Argentina(2007-04-29) Gibbons, Meghan Keary; Peres, Phyllis A.; Rosenfelt, Deborah; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"Essentially Powerful" explores the roles of essentialism around motherhood in the political protests of two groups in the United States and Argentina. Another Mother for Peace in the U.S. and the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Argentina based their protests on their identities as mothers, authorizing themselves to challenge their states' actions around their children. The states themselves also used the figure of the mother to promote specific behaviors that limited political opposition. The contrast between these two approaches problematizes the figure of the subject within poststructuralist and feminist debates about resistance. The subject is seen alternately as an active agent who can use essentialism strategically and a discursive construction that can be easily manipulated by ideology. This study explores the ground between these two poles, mapping the ways in which essentialisms around motherhood can be proscriptive in the hands of hegemons, but empowering when used by subjects themselves, who blend experience with essence. Interviews with participants in both groups as well as testimonial accounts, films and media coverage of the groups combine to allow a rich exploration of essentialisms by the mothers and their states. My first chapter explores how the Madres and the dictatorship used essentialism to struggle for discursive control over Argentine motherhood. The Madres' authorization of themselves as public, political subjects -in interviews, testimonies and letters-- challenged the dictatorship's formation of motherhood as a private, domestic identity. Chapter two examines the representation of the Madres' protests in film, exploring the ambivalence that Argentine audiences experienced in the women's blurring of several traditional binaries: emotion and reason, family and state, private and public. My third and fourth chapters analyze the narrative strategies of Another Mother for Peace. These North American mothers used essentialism to justify their movement into the public, political sphere, while still performing traditional, domestic motherhood in strategic ways. My final section explores how distinct cultural, religious and historical paradigms inflected the experiences of these two mothers' groups differently, facilitating and/or problematizing their uses of essentialist identities. This analysis critiques the limitations of both proscriptive and biological essentialisms, and allows us to see how the mothers' own experiences of motherhood pushed them beyond the boundaries of traditional essentialism and into new subjectivities.Item Suffering without Subjectivity(Springer Netherlands, 2004-11) Carruthers, PeterThis paper argues that it is possible for suffering to occur in the absence of phenomenal consciousness − in the absence of a certain sort of experiential subjectivity, that is. (‘Phenomenal’ consciousness is the property that some mental states possess, when it is like something to undergo them, or when they have subjective feels, or possess qualia.) So even if theories of phenomenal consciousness that would withhold such consciousness from most species of non-human animal are correct, this needn’t mean that those animals don’t suffer, and aren’t appropriate objects of sympathy and concern.Item Consciousness: Explaining the Phenomena(Cambridge University Press, 2001) Carruthers, PeterCan phenomenal consciousness be given a reductive natural explanation? Many people argue not. They claim that there is an ‘explanatory gap’ between physical and/or intentional states and processes, on the one hand, and phenomenal consciousness, on the other. I reply that, since we have purely recognitional concepts of experience, there is indeed a sort of gap at the level of concepts; but this need not mean that the properties picked out by those concepts are inexplicable. I show how dispositionalist higher-order thought (HOT) theory can reductively explain the subjective feel of experience by deploying a form of ‘consumer semantics’. First-order perceptual contents become transformed, acquiring a dimension of subjectivity, by virtue to their availability to a mind-reading (HOT generating) consumer system.Item Sympathy and Subjectivity(Taylor and Francis Group, 1999-12) Carruthers, PeterThis paper shows that even if the mental states of non-human animals lack phenomenological properties, as some accounts of mental-state consciousness imply, this need not prevent those states from being appropriate objects of sympathy and moral concern. The paper argues that the most basic form of mental (as opposed to biological) harm lies in the existence of thwarted agency, or thwarted desire, rather than in anything phenomenological.