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The thesis begins with an introductory chapter that explains the creative process, providing quotes from well-known poets and examples from my own personal history and ideas. Some of the creative concepts discussed are different manifestations of inspiration, such as the duende and the Muses. However, the act of creating a work of art--what actually occurs when an artist works--remains undiscovered. Every poet is part of the poetic tradition, yet she also strives to supersede that very tradition. In my poetry, I try to build on and deviate from the poetic tradition, while simultaneously representing events from my cultural and personal history. Twenty-nine poems follow the introduction. The poems included in this volume represent a contemporary writing style influenced by Romanticism and Modernism, apparent in nature imagery and ambiguity.

The thesis that follows is interdisciplinary in nature, bringing together the fields of contemporary archaeology, cultural and historical Geography to explore the changing landscape of the Dean Forest and Wye Valley National Forest Park. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Forest of Dean was a significant industrial region, a landscape dominated by pitheads, tramroads and railways, coal mines, ironworks, and quarries. However, the twentieth century saw the radical transformation of this landscape, from industry to leisure. In the chapters that follow, it is aspects of this landscape transformation that are examined through the lens of non-representational theory, as each chapter explores the questions: what might a ‘more-than-representational’ approach to contemporary archaeology look like? And, what can archaeological perspectives offer in terms of the development of non-representational theory? Starting from the premise that contemporary archaeology is not just about the recent past, but about how we engage with the past from the perspective of the present, this thesis focuses upon those barely perceptible echoes from the past that have the power to move us in unexpected ways. As such, it examines not just the legacy of the past in the landscape, but its capacity to generate affective registers, to evoke and to unsettle. It develops a distinctly archaeological approach to considerations of materiality and time within non-representational theories, placing an emphasis on matter, memory and haunting, absence and presence. It focuses on new temporalities arising from the time of the ‘event’, new materialisms that are ‘more-than-representational’, and new ways of performing and practicing the archaeological.

Thesis based on the submission of orchestral compositions relating the music pieces to visual works. The compositions are also discussed in terms of where they fit within a contemporary, orchestral context.

The movement of people and the fluxes of the world create complex topographies and destabilise the location of our homes. In this practice-based PhD, I explore the shifting sense of home that this manifests. The dramatic transformation of the boundaries of home that demarcates the borders between ‘here’ and ‘there’, “us” and ‘them’ is examined through an autoethnographically informed approach, which takes the researcher’s self as a medium as well as a source of research. Based on personal experience, the changing nature of ‘home’ is studied as it is anchored into the self, adopting an approach that studies the cultural through the personal. In this research, the methods of research are: strategies of observing, attending to the unsettling forces of the unfamiliar, documenting my personal responses on a daily basis, and unpacking some of the existing forms and practices that sustain ideas of belonging and proposing new forms of expression to this unhomely feeling. In this study, the objective is the study of the field (including the dissolving of the ground one is standing on) and the proposing new forms, new visions. This being the case, my methods come from the disciplines of autoethnography and art practice. Throughout my PhD, I aimed to negotiate the different means these two approaches work through their field that challenges the issues of representation, documentation and presentation in cultural inquiry. This thesis explores the transformation of the sense of home and my own sense of belonging based on personal experience. It is also a contribution to the discourse that has flourished between ethnography and contemporary art over the last two decades. The project is situated at the transdisciplinary site between artistic and ethnographic disciplines and reconsiders their mutual interest in the work of cultural inquiry. With a particular focus on the moment that inquiry meets its public, I explored other possibilities of “graphy” (writing) that conventionally translates as a descriptive, textual representation in ethnography. I strived to suggest alternative forms through the ways artistic inquiry work on its field that takes this moment of encounter as a crucial part of its process. Thus, the thesis is an account of these negotiations that complements the experiments in my art practice, through which I have explored the dialogue between the two distinctive approaches to inquiry.

I explore nature in order to understand something that is becoming increasingly unfamiliar. I wonder about accelerated human transactions with nature: the control of animals, land, and resources for pleasure, consumption or survival; and how these actions manifest themselves visually in the modern world. Through images, I create new ideas about my surroundings. My questions about nature are documented through my work employing subtlety to narrate stories of contemporary environments.

The contemporary experience is profoundly rooted in the processes of remembering and recalling, recording and playing back. My work employs image and installation to speak of memory, nostalgia, and the integration of media and representation into experience. The rapid advancement of media technologies provides new immersive opportunities for the armchair traveler. Viewers may now be effortlessly transported across distances of time and space.

Arthur C. Danto introduced the term “disturbation” in 1985 to denote artworks that confront audiences with the materials of reality in order to produce reactions that are continuous with those of real life. Danto argued that disturbational art dissolve the distance between representation and reality opened up by Platonic metaphysics and by the insertion of theatrical distance, returning art to its mimetic and magical phase. The thesis uses Danto’s conceptual framework to develop a critical account of artworks that use politics as the medium for their disturbational content by creating relationships with audiences that provoke the re-realization of attitudes, experiences and identities that have been suppressed. In Shibboleth (2007) by Doris Salcedo, disturbation takes the form of the ‘political uncanny’ and in the case of Domestic Tension (2007) by Wafaa Bilal, it takes the form of the ‘political abject’. The thesis argues that Shibboleth confronted audiences with “the return of the repressed” through a disturbational process of interaction with the space of the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. Departing from existing readings of Salcedo’s work, the thesis proposes that the installation provoked the experience of the political uncanny by physically enacting suppressed historical, economic and political divisions constructed upon a friend/enemy form of relationship. Likewise, the thesis argues that the use of virtual electronic media in the process of participation in Domestic Tension radically altered the structure of collaborative activities by its production of the abject through the detachment conferred by distance and anonymity. The degree of self-censorship and accountability that exists in face to face interactions was nullified by the process of remote participation which encouraged deindividuation and anti-social or dehumanizing behavior. The tendency towards dehumanization becomes intensified when the artwork’s content is political, thereby provoking hostile and distancing effects refracted by contemporary geopolitics.

Thesis advisor: Irene Mizrahi / This study is an analysis of the theatre of the Spanish contemporary playwright Raúl Hernández Garrido. It explores in depth his tragedy Los engranajes and it applies (in a more referential manner) the results of this investigation to the rest of his plays: Los malditos, Los restos: Agamenón vuelve a casa and Los restos Fedra, included in the cycle Los esclavos. The author utilizes myth and greek tragedy intentionally in order to make readers reflect upon the concepts of destiny and the fragility of human action as well as the fragmentation, hopelessness and dissatisfaction of contemporary societies. My study demonstrates that the formal innovation of these plays and the use of tragedy as their argumental framework present not only a criticism about these concepts but also an approach towards change and a social ethic of hope founded in creative freedom and the cooperation between the text and all people involved in the creative process. As a theoretical frame of reference for my study I use texts from Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Friedrich Nietzsche, René Girard and Emmanuel Levinas. Their reflections about the genre of tragedy and/or the concept of the tragic shed light upon my analysis of themes such as human suffering, trauma, the abuse of power, violence and the ethics of responsibility in the works of our author. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Romance Languages and Literatures.

This dissertation tells a new story about the way poets responded to the clichés of public speech in the four decades following the start of World War II. During the period, many public intellectuals lamented that political discourse had become saturated with abstract stock phrases like “the fight for freedom,” “revenue enhancement,” or “service the target” that are bureaucratic in origin, designed for the mass media, and used to euphemize, obfuscate, and evade. This diagnosis, which was shared by such prominent critics as George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Lionel Trilling, and Herbert Marcuse, led to a unique response in the field of poetry. Instead of ridding their verse of such language, poets developed a distinctive approach I call “echo and critique,” whereby they would echo the clichés of political discourse and then examine their implications and study their effects. Poetry, with its attentiveness to linguistic particulars, was especially suited to this mode of close listening. At the same time, postwar poets were deeply conscious of their susceptibility to doublespeak, so that taking on political clichés obliged them to subject their own writing to scrutiny and admit to the inevitability of cant while pushing against it. Each chapter in the dissertation pairs a poet with a different form of public discourse he or she was especially drawn to: Robert Lowell and political speeches, Randall Jarrell and military propaganda, Elizabeth Bishop and news reports, and Seamus Heaney and everyday talk on political events. Crucially, these four writers were interested in specific genres for the traits they recognized in their own work. By taking apart various types of cant, therefore, they were also trying to understand where their language stood in relation to that of the politician, the propagandist, the reporter, or the ordinary citizen, and to push back against their own rhetorical tendencies. / 2020-12-11T00:00:00Z