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Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-05, Section: A, page: 1577. Adviser: Jonathan Fineberg. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 287-310) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-02

abstract: My dissertation primarily investigates the vast literary corpus of “Qiantang meng” 錢塘夢 (A dream by Qiantang River, 1499, QTM hereafter), the earliest preserved specimen of the Chinese vernacular story of the “courtesan” 煙粉 category, which appears first in the mid-Hongzhi 弘治period (1488-1505). The story treats a Song scholar Sima You 司馬槱 (?) who traveled in Qiantang and dreamed of a legendary Su Xiaoxiao 蘇小小, a well-educated and talented courtesan who supposedly lived during the Southern Qi 南齊 (479-520). Fundamentally, I am concerned with how and why an early medieval five-character Chinese poem, questionably attributed to Su Xiaoxiao herself, developed across the later period of pre-modern Chinese literary history into an extensive repertoire that retold the romantic stories in a variety of distinctive literary genres: poems, lyric songs, essays, dramas, ballads, vernacular stories, miscellaneous notes, biographical sketches, etc. The thematic interest of my research is to evaluate how travel and dream experiences interactively form a mode whose characteristics could help develop a clearer understanding of biji 筆記 (miscellaneous notes) as a genre which is representational and presentational, exhibiting a metadramatic textual pastiche that collects both fact and fiction. The timeless popularity of QTM storylines reflect and express the trope of the “travel and dream” experience. This is something of a “living” complex of elements through which a textual community in later generations can reconstruct their authorial and cultural identity by encountering, remembering and reproducing those elements in the form of autobiographical and biographical expression of a desiring subject. Travel and dream experiences are cross-referenced, internally dialogical, mutually infiltrating, and even metaphorically interchangeable. They are intertwined to create a liminal realm of pastiches in which we can better examine how the literati in the Yuan (1271-1368), Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties formed their own views about a past which shapes and is shaped by both collective and individual memory. Such retellings both construct and challenge our understanding of the complex networks of lexical and thematic exchange in the colloquial literary landscape during the late imperial period. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation East Asian Languages and Civilizations 2017

The dissertation explores the centrality of the Platonic Solids, and polyhedral geometry generally, to the artistic and mixed-mathematical cultures of Renaissance Germany. Beginning with Albrecht Dürer’s groundbreaking treatise on geometry, the Underweyung der Messung (1525), the dissertation redefines sites of early modern experimentation to include the graphical spaces in which new geometrical knowledge was practiced, invented, contested, manipulated, discarded, and presented. The research describes the historical contexts and development of the practice of polyhedral geometry over the course of the 16th century, expanding from Dürer to the lesser-known textbooks for practical geometry that his work inspired in Germany, and continuing with epitomes of the polyhedral genre, namely Wenzel Jamnitzer’s Perspectiva corporum regularium (1568) and the drawings of the Augsburg artisan Lorentz Stöer. The dissertation then follows the migration of polyhedra into intarsia and turned-ivory artifacts used for teaching applied geometry to European aristocracy, and concludes by addressing the polyhedral cosmology of the astronomer Johannes Kepler. By tracing the lifespan of polyhedra from their use as perspectival tools and pedagogical devices in Renaissance workshops into courtly Kunstkammern and onto the precious surfaces of domestic objects, the dissertation uncovers the influence that the decorative arts had on the conceptualization of geometrical knowledge and its new engagement with materials and concepts of materiality. / History of Science

What is the Self-Portrait of Thomas Smith about? In this dissertation I ask that question about a key work in the American art canon. In search of an answer I look for meaning in five outstanding details of the portrait: the subject's powerful blue eyes, the skull beneath his hand, the battle scene on the wall, the poem on the table, and his elegant lace cravat. I find that the painting presents a vivid description of seventeenth-century conflict and emotional as well as spiritual malaise. The artist emerges as an individual philosophically at odds with his peers and disdainful of their of values. Smith's Self Portrait, dated circa 1680, is generally acclaimed as the first known self-portrait painted in the colony and is recognized for its stylistic innovations: Baroque modeling and composition at a time and place when an earlier, linear style prevailed. The painting is also regarded as the first signed canvas in America. These assertions tend to brush aside some troublesome problems: (1) identity of the artist cannot be confirmed; (2) it is not entirely certain the portrait is, indeed, a self -portrait; (3) the signature may not belong to the artist; (4) it may not, in fact, have been painted by a man named Smith; (5) the date assigned to the portrait is conjectural; and (6) its provenance is almost entirely anecdotal. External documentation of this work is clearly unstable, but in spite of, or perhaps because of such uncertainties, when asked to speak for itself the painting is far more remarkable than canonical convention leads us to believe. Research for this painting inspires me to reconsider the question of intention, not in terms of what may have been in the artist's mind, but rather with regard to the intention of the work itself as it interacts with the intention of its observer. The concept of intentionality in this discussion is freed from the onus of intentional fallacy and offers instead a resilient, reflective way of thinking about meaning, especially with reference to the genre of self-portraiture.

This dissertation examines the ways in which Lydgate's Troy Book, both the textual and visual narratives, functioned in fifteenth-century England. As Henry V sought to legitimate his claim to the throne usurped by his father, he capitalized on the burgeoning sense of an English national identity by patronizing literature in the English vernacular as a means to glorify both nation and language. In an age in which genealogical claims were the most important indicator of a person's right to rule, Henry exploited the Trojan origin myth, which had circulated in England and other European communities since the early Middle Ages, not only to glorify England as an inheritor of Rome's imperial mission and to solidify the Lancastrian claim, but also to help solidify and renew the English claim to the French throne. The Troy Book was immensely popular in the fifteenth-century and was reproduced in at least twenty-three manuscripts, including fragments. Eight of these manuscripts received illustrations, and a basic visual program can be detected in each of them. However, two of these manuscripts are exceptional for the inclusion of illustrations beyond this basic program - London, British Library, MS Royal 18 d. ii (c. 1455-62) and Manchester, John Rylands Library, MS English 1 (c. late 1440s). Because the manuscripts were produced at different points in the fifteenth century, a careful examination of the images in light of contemporary historical events helps establish the patron's views and ambitions that may have helped shape the pictorial narrative. I will argue that the anomalous images in the Royal manuscript must be read in light of both the recently failed war with France and the current civil war between the houses of York and Lancaster and that these images represent aristocratic anxieties and desires for peace. This argument will culminate in an examination of the images in the Rylands manuscript, the most sumptuous of the Troy Book manuscripts, which includes sixty-nine miniatures. It was commissioned slightly earlier than the Royal manuscript during the waning fortunes of the Hundred Years War and conforms most closely to the purposes of the original text: to glorify Trojan origins and England by identifying Henry V with Hector, to act as a manual for chivalry and proper war practices, to emphasize the role of fortune in worldly events, and to provide moral instruction to both the aristocracy and the nobility. / A Dissertation submitted to the Program of Interdisciplinary Humanities in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2015. / April 16, 2015. / England, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Henry V, Lydgate, Troy / Includes bibliographical references. / David F. Johnson, Professor Directing Dissertation; Jack Freiberg, University Representative; David Gants, Committee Member; Svetla Slaveva-Griffin, Committee Member.

acase@tulane.edu / 1 / Emily C Floyd

archives@tulane.edu / This thesis analyzes submission-oriented Latina/o zines based in South Texas. Each publication circulates nationally and internationally, featuring artistic submissions from this network. Through three case studies, this thesis investigates zines’ roles in forming spaces, both discursive and physical, for feminist, queer, Latina/o identity-making. The three case studies of South Texas-based zines are: St. Sucia, founded by Isabel Ann Castro and Natasha I. Hernandez in San Antonio, Texas (2014), Muchacha Fanzine, founded by Daisy Salinas in San Antonio, Texas (2012), and ChingoZine, in Austin, Texas (2012). These collaborative zines challenge the celebrated individualism of the modern artist by privileging a collective platform over the individual voice. The editors of these zines weave together submitted multimedia works—written, photographed, painted, drawn—into a curated selection that exhibits an alternative artistic network. These zines exemplify key aspects of contemporary artistic production: they are collectively authored, privilege lived experience over artistic training, and foreground alternate personal narratives. These works thus reshape the art historical narrative of U.S. contemporary art away from largely white, largely male, New York-based artists working in a succession of trends (Minimalism, Conceptual Art, Neo Geo, Appropriation, etc.). Instead, these zines foreground queer, female, artists of color whose work brings historical Latina artistic and punk subcultures in dialogue with contemporary political commitments to revising art history. As objects of study, a zine-focused approach for an art historical analysis calls attention to the alternative approaches to artmaking and understanding of art. The creators, contributors, and readers of these works hold many roles, thus the zines themselves become avenues through which to understand the social role of artmaking. These zines disorder archival divisions to reinterpret contemporary art of the U.S. as already transnational, as already inflected by feminist thinking, and as overtly queer. / 1 / Mia Isabella Uribe Kozlovsky

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