This thesis discusses art produced by holy women in New France and New Spain in addition to figural sculpture from the former and the Guaraní missions of Paraguay. The art produced in such disparate regions transcends the realities of the human body through a negation of natural physiognomies and emotive states in favour of stylized forms and serene expressions. Since no comparative studies yet exist for the arts of New France and colonial Latin America this thesis presents a crucial challenge and opportunity to explore commonalities. As the first female missionaries outside Europe nuns in New France strived to become living saints and martyrs. Some arts, particularly embroidery, operated as penance to aid women in achieving their quest for immortality. In Mexican nunneries women’s bodies became works of art through their integration in to multiple mediums, as seen in portraits of nuns in which bodies operate as canvases. Similarly, through performance the woman’s body in the Ursulines of Quebec City became a component of her embroidery which she embodied with her holy aura. The omission of suffering is a prominent feature in figures of Christ and the saints in Guaraní and French Canadian sculpture. These aspects are heightened through the carving of draperies assuming the emotion absent in the figures. With similar characteristics appearing in both locations this thesis discusses why two cultures vastly removed in distance display profound stylistic similarities. The colonizer’s art replacing that of the colonized is a myth perpetuated by the belief that indigenous cultures were eradicated through contact with Europeans. Similarly, we cannot assume a continuity of European artistic ideals among French settlers in New France. This presents another discourse on the convergence of cultures thoroughly separated from one another in the scholarly consciousness. / Thesis (Master, Art History) -- Queen's University, 2013-10-24 16:42:01.18

Inaug.-diss.--Breslau.

Texte remanié de: Thesis doctoral--University of Minnesota, 2005. / Bibliogr. p. 187-198. Index.

Thèse--Lettres--Toulouse II, 1973. / Bibliogr. Index.

My main thesis is that Baroque can be considered not only as an aesthetic or historical period in the seventeenth century; it is also a way of producing knowledge that puts into dynamic interaction diverse genres, disciplines and historical contexts. I visualize my project under the rubric of a cabinet of curiosities, and I reframe the continued juxtaposition of objects, machines, instruments and artwork that characterize the baroque cabinet to offer an explanatory construct of the early modern Hispanic world and modern Latin American literature and culture. In the first chapter of the dissertation, I contextualize the extensive theoretical discussion on Baroque and Neo-baroque within the studies of collection and curiosity. My main goal with this approach is to create a specific bibliography and understanding of Baroque as a complex process of collecting and displaying different kinds of knowledge through emotions such as wonder and marvel. In the second chapter I examine the impact of the New World on the stable "tower of knowledge" of humanists at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries. One definitive consequence of this impact was the questioning of the liabilities of ancient text and the need to arrange the new information, which was coming from different resources, into collections of distant and peculiar objects. Expanding this historical frame, I analyze how letrados in the seventeenth century, such as Favián, Sigüenza y Góngora, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Espinoza Medrano, and Arzans Orsúa, were displaying the New World as the biggest collection of curiosities as a way of constructing an emergent criollo subjectivity. After grounding the project in the theoretical and colonial Baroque, my study turns, in the third chapter, to the modern Neo-baroque. I argue that modernity in Latin America is generated by the assimilation of the Enlightenment into a Baroque system. Therefore, Baroque in Latin America represents more than a simple or "erroneous" copy; it is rather a process of "cannibalization" and counterconquest, as José Lezama Lima proclaimed in his literary essay "Baroque Curiosity" (1957). This dissertation is written in Spanish. / 2015-07-11

Gestures are common in baroque opera performances, to help communicate the content and is a way to be more expressive with the whole body while performing. I wanted to explore baroque gestures to improve and expand my capacity to communicate through expressive movement, to develop my own skills as an opera singer and to add another important layer to my baroque performance. I have analysed La Messaggiera’s aria, Un in fiorito prato, from Claudio Monteverdi’s opera L’Ofreo. This by analysing the character, the aria and the music, including a poetic and word by word translation. I chose words from the aria and combined them with gestures. Overall, three recordings were made; one baseline, to show how I usually perform and two recordings applying and developing the gestures. The second and the third recordings were evaluated by myself and three separate reviewers, by comparing the recordings and providing feedback on my baroque gesture performance development. The feedback stated that the applied gestures helped to convey the dramatic content and enhanced my sense of phrasing and helped to reinforce the soft and loud contrasts of the singing. This helped to enhance the reviewers’ perceptions of the character’s emotional expression of the aria. I will continue to develop my knowledge and use of baroque gestures when performing baroque opera repertoire.

No description available.

Empirical studies of the baroque abound. The bibliography is enormous. Yet, to this day, if one asks: "What is the baroque?" the answer that can be expected is a hesitant: "Mostly...an architectural style which became prevalent in 17th century Europe." With his much acclaimed Lo barroco, Eugenio d'Ors did succeed in extending the sphere of significance of the baroque, from the stylistic domain where it had been confined for many centuries, onto the much vaster realm of epistemology. However, despite the soundness of d'Ors's epistemological approach, the trouble with his "eons" theory is that nothing in the world, be it natural or man-made, fits neatly into such precise, universal categories. The fault, as we see it, lies in the classical dynamics underlying the dorsian opposition clasicismo/barroquismo. But today, man's newly acquired understanding of microphysical processes has led to a non-classical scientific paradigm--a breakthrough which has totally changed man's fundamental concepts about the world and himself, and has enabled the French scientist and scholar, Stephane Lupasco, to elaborate a revolutionary epistemological paradigm: la logique du contradictoire, based on the antagonistic forces inherent to Energy, and on its remarkable properties of relative potentialization and actualization. Making use of Lupasco's novel theories, we, in turn, have developed a new conception of the baroque, a phenomenom which finds its explanation solely through the application of the lupasquian logique du contradictoire, and, more specifically, through the definition of psychic matter (la conscience de la conscience et la connaissance de la connaissance) as Energy's awareness of its own tripolar, infrastructural dynamics and of its inexhaustible creative potential. It is, indeed, to this existential self-consciousness that the term baroque can most aptly be applied.

No description available.

Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.