Issued also as inaugural dissertation, Munich. / "Quellen und literatur": p. [x]-xv.

This essay illustrates the principal technical and compositional innovations in the piano literature of the twentieth century, through an examination of the piano etudes written by the period's most accomplished pianist-composers. The etude is generally regarded as one of the most common musical forms designed to provide pianists with practice material for perfecting a particular technical skill. The most influential composer who established the norm for the composition of piano etudes and raised their suitability as concert works was Frederic Chopin. Piano etudes, however, gradually shifted as compositional vehicles in the twentieth century. Composers began to discard the harmonic language of traditional theory by employing more irregular and atonal materials, which gradually replaced the standard figurations of nineteenth-century composition. The author addresses works based on traditional technical idioms such as intervals (double thirds, fourths, fifths, and octaves), scales, arpeggios, chords, repeated notes and finger independence in Chapter Four. In Chapter Five, works containing modern types of notation and unusual technical requirements are examined. The format for these chapters is as follows: general comments on the complete work, compositional description of each individual piece and finally, performance remarks. This essay is limited to piano etudes written by composers who are also generally regarded as accomplished pianists. The composers discussed in this essay are Claude Debussy, Alexander Scriabin, Bela Bartók, Olivier Messiaen, Geörgy Ligeti, Louise Talma, and William Bolcom. In addittion, this essay collects and examines piano etudes that are considered suitable for both study and concert programming, a criterion that narrows the etude selection examined in this essay to works that have been recorded and performed in public.

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Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

This thesis examines certain narratives in Richard Burton's and T.E. Lawrence's encounters with the Arab East. By juxtaposing both Orientalists' accounts of Arab sexuality with the changes that had been taking place in Arabic literary and cultural discourse of the time, I highlight what appears to be a disparity in representation. Nonetheless, I argue that this disparity stems from a perception of ‘difference' that characterises the relationship between East and West. This perception of ‘difference' is further explored in the writings of Arab scholars on European culture since the beginning of the Euro-­‐Arab encounter in the nineteenth century. I expose the epistemological bases of this modern encounter and situate it within the political changes that had been shaping the emerging Middle East on the eve of modernity. Burton and Lawrence are also situated within this context. I show how their Orientalist discourse involved a process of conflating ‘text' and ‘experience' while interacting with the Arab East. This conflation is evident in their textual rendition of certain experiential episodes they underwent in the Orient. While both Orientalists' attraction to the Arab East may have been epistemological in origin, I argue that their narratives on Arab homoeroticism have been discursively subjective. In this, they appear to reflect the selectivity with which fin-­‐de-­‐siècle Arab scholars had been reproducing accounts of their past cultural heritage; albeit paradoxically. When Burton and Lawrence seem to have been heightening manifestations of Arab male-­to-male sexuality, their contemporary Arab intellectuals had been engaged in a process of systematic attenuation of the traces of past depictions of homoerotic desire in Arabic literature. Although I focus on analysing texts from both Orientalists, I also draw on contemporary historical events, for they form part of the contextual framework in which my analysis operates.

Comfort—with its various connotations of physical ease, wealth, independence, and service—is an important concept to Jane Austen, who uses comfort in her novels to both affirm and challenge accepted women’s roles and status in her culture. In the late eighteenth century, new ideas of physical comfort emerged out of luxury along with a growing middle class, to become something both English people and foreigners identified with English culture. The perceived ability of the English to comfort well gave them a reason for national pride during a time of great anxieties about France’s cultural and military might, and Austen participates in her culture’s struggle to define itself against France. Austen’s “comfort” is the term she frequently associates with women, home, and Englishness in her works. Austen’s depiction of female protagonists engaged in the work of comforting solaces modern readers, who often long for the comfort, good manners, and leisure presented in the novels. Surveys of two sample groups, 139 members of the Jane Austen Society of North America and 40 members of the online Republic of Pemberley, elicit data confirming how current readers of Austen turn to her works for comfort during times of stress or depression. Although some readers describe using Austen’s novels as a form of escapism, others view their reading as instructive for dealing with human failings, for gaining perspective on personal difficulties, and for stimulating their intellects. Austen’s fiction grapples with disturbing possibilities, such as the liminal position of powerless single women at the mercy of the marriage market and fickle family wishes, as much as it provides comforting answers. Comforts (decent housing, love in marriage, social interaction) are such a powerful draw in Austen’s works because women’s discomfort is so visible, and for many, so likely. Thus, Austen’s comfort challenges as much as it reassures her audience.

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The thesis is two-fold. First, that Nietzsche's early writings owe more to Schiller than he subsequently wished to admit. This is demonstrated by evidence from Die Geburt der Tragödie and the Nachlass notes of the same period. Second, that there are tangible parallels of content and intent between Schiller's Ästhetische Briefe and Nietzsche's Die Geburt der Tragödie. The thesis is not an 'influence study', although the issue is addressed. By examining his hitherto neglected attitude to Schiller, this study sheds light on Nietzsche's tactics when dealing with men and their ideas in his writings. This, however, is not the main point of the thesis, which is to analyse the connections between the two texts. The essential point of comparison is that Die Geburt der Tragödie and the Ästhetische Briefe both set out aesthetic prescriptions for a diseased culture. Certain kinds of art are deemed capable, by virtue of their timeless and incorruptible properties, of reforming the human psyche, and by extension of promoting cultural integrity and vitality. After analysing Nietzsche's attitude to Schiller, particularly in connection with the argument of Die Geburt der Tragödie, the thesis compares the strategies adopted in the two texts: both present triadic schemes of historical development, in which the Greek experience is regarded as crucial; their aesthetic 'reform programmes' are predicated on psycho-metaphysical pictures of human nature; and both texts reject attempts to cure human ills by political means. The thesis is an attempt to articulate, compare, and criticise the respective projects and to see in what sense(s) they were untimely. Both projects were untimely, in the sense that they were deliberately out of step with their times. In each case, the alleged remedial properties of art themselves are characterised as untimely. They are borrowed from another time, or are said to be out of time altogether. The thesis concludes that the two texts, although outstanding contributions to aesthetic theory, were inappropriate (untimely) attempts to tackle larger problems.

This thesis undertakes an excursion into the network of science, art, and popular culture at the end of the 19th century to examine the interrelations between these various strands in relation to the emerging cinema and its so-called spiritual dimension. Instead of an ontology of the image, or a cultural (metaphorical) analysis of spirits, phantoms or spectres as immaterial manifestations, this thesis proposes an ontology of the spectators' perception through which the spiritual dimension, frequently associated with audio-visual media, should be sought within the perceptual processes of the mind. It takes the cinema spectators' experience into the centre of this investigation and argues for their active participation in and understanding of the cinema as philosophical dispositive from the very beginnings of its inception. It looks into the interconnections between the various constituencies that shaped the projecting image technologies and their reception at the time. In particular the context of a broader intellectual framework and concerns about time, movement, memory and consciousness, reveal a thickness and complexity especially in the interrelations of the oeuvres of Jules-Etienne Marey and Aby Warburg. Henri Bergson's system of thought, germane to these concerns, will be elaborated in detail and used to build an onto logical/anthropological model of the cinema spectator in order to suggest how the contradictory forces of the rational and the 'irrational' can help us understand the spiritual dimension of the emerging cinema. The cinema dispositifm this approach appears as a paradigm to exemplify the productivity of this nexus and provides a platform for further research into issues such as consciousness, precognition, intuition and psychic phenomena. The spectator in this anthropological/ontological discussion treated in a conceptual way and grounded in a historical context appears in a fuller dimensionality that allows us to accommodate the so-called spiritual dimension beyond the dichotomy of the material and immaterial, the body and the mind. This model of the cinema spectator that this thesis proposes can be defined as an embodied, immanent and above all actively participant agent, which can be extended into a wider discussion of the perception, uses and interpretations of technology.

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