This dissertation examines Éliane Radigue’s collaborative compositional practice as an alternative model of creation. Using normative Western classical music mythologies as a backdrop, this dissertation interrogates the ways in which Radigue’s creative practice calls into question traditional understandings of creative agency, authorship, reproduction, performance, and the work concept. Based on extensive interviews with the principal performer-collaborators of Radigue’s early instrumental works, this dissertation retraces the networks and processes of creation—from the first stages of the initiation process to the transmission of the fully formed composition to other instrumentalists. In doing so, I aim to investigate the ways in which Radigue’s unique working method resists capitalist models of commodification and reconfigures the traditional hierarchical relationship between composer, score, and performer. Chapter 1 traces Radigue’s early experiences with collaboration and collective creativity in the male-dominated early electronic music studios of France in the 1950s and 60s. Chapter 2 focuses on the initiation process behind new compositions. Divided into two parts, the first part describes the normative classical music-commissioning model (NCMCM) using contemporary guides for composers and commissioners and my own experiences as an American composer of concert music. The second part examines Radigue’s performer-based commissioning model and illuminates how this initiation process resists power structures of the NCMCM. Chapter 3, which is centered on the role of the composer, score, and performer, is divided into three parts. The first details the relationship between composer, score, and performer in the mythologies of nineteenth-century Western classical music. I again draw from both primary sources and my own personal experiences as a composer to explore these normative frameworks. The second details the procedures of Éliane Radigue’s creative process in her earliest collaborative instrumental compositions (Elemental II, Naldjorlak I, and OCCAM I for solo harp) and the Occam Ocean series as a whole. Using these as a point of departure, the third part explores the role of the composer, score, and performer in Radigue’s collaborative process, examining the ways in which these roles are reconfigured to create new, more equitable relationships between creative actors.

This paper takes the position that creativity can be enhanced by multimedia. Computer software was designed and a study was conducted to measure that proposition. The author used participant self-analysis as a means to gather data on creativity enhancement holding to the presupposition that people can tell when they are creative and when their creativity is inhibited. The results of the study supported the belief that multimedia and the software designed for that purpose was able to enhance creativity.

While existing criticism of Emma Tennant's work emphasizes its feminist agenda, less attention has been paid to her rewriting of different narratives and discourses. Tennant's career has centered on challenging literary values as well as generic categories, realist conventions, and gender stereotypes. Contrary to implications that rewriting is "re-vision," an "act of survival" that corrects or subverts earlier texts, this thesis argues that Tennant's characteristic resistance to categories also extends to the work of rewriting and revision. Her texts suggest that the act of "writing back" is not as straightforward as it may seem, but deeply ambiguous and ambivalent. Developing theories of the "signature" that return the writer-as-agent to the otherwise anonymous field of intertextuality, this thesis traces Tennant's figurations of writing, metafictional devices, and intertextual allusions to show how these relate to themes in the fiction. Examining groupings of the texts from different critical perspectives, each chapter shows how Tennant's rewritings destabilize notions of originality, identity, and agency, and represent political discourses and social progress in an ambivalent way. While this thesis offers very specific insights into Tennant's work, the close readings also encompass broader themes, such as feminism and postmodernism, the gothic, myths of home and exile, and the ventriloquistic techniques of pastiche and biofiction. The arguments centered on her work contribute to the larger discourse on rewriting in two ways. First, in problematizing assumptions that rewriting inherently strives toward progress or correction, this thesis argues that rewriting can dramatize the ambiguity and ambivalence that haunt acts of resistance. Second, in advancing challenges to the idea that intertextuality functions anonymously, it argues that rewriting can return agency to the text by offering representations of authorship that engage with literary and cultural history.

Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2013. / Please refer to full text for abstract.

The problem of this study was to determine whether there was any relationship between selected personality variables and art production with structured and non-structured stimuli.

Hawthorne is one among the few American writers who have dwelt on the subject of the creative process throughout his works. Through introspection and then skillfully enumerating the necessary elements of artistry, Hawthorne educated his audience in the progression of creating a piece of work. Many changes have taken place in literature since Hawthorne's time, but the basic principles set forth in his theories still hold true. Hawthorne's theories of art and his analysis of the creative process are surely among his most important contributions to literature. In the absence of a long national literary history, he mingled the Actual with the Imaginary and adapted his work to a form of the novel called Romance. With materials he could find concerning the short history of his country, he showed how past events influence the present. He examined the creative process that took place in his own work and shared with posterity the conditions under which he created.

This study utilized a phenomenological research methodology based on Husserl's work to explore the content of subjective internal experiencing during the art process. The study was designed to examine what transpired during the art experience in therapy to provide a better understanding of the therapeutic dimensions of the subject's interaction with the art medium, in this case drawing with pastels. This phenomenological study involved four subjects who participated in eight therapy sessions each, in which art was the principal medium, for a total of 40 hours of therapy over a period of 10 weeks. On the basis of the findings and conclusions of this study, recommendations were made for a series of studies to be conducted to gain broader insight into the therapeutic modalities of the art process. Some considerations for training programs of therapists in the use of art in therapy and recommendations for therapists trained in the use of art in therapy were also included.

As an undergraduate journalism student, I was taught the “little person, big picture” reportage technique – in essence, using an individual’s story to illuminate a larger issue. In this collection, in which I aim for honesty and relatability, I position myself as the “little person” in essays meant to convey one individual’s experiences and thoughts in hopes of touching another individual who’s gone through similar experiences or had similar thoughts. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2015. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Here, the natural world is consumed - a physical reality and an internal one. It is walled, but roofless - a contained space. Elements are absorbed, same energies interacting within us that work around us - the natural forces of gravitation and electromagnetism, fire and water, growth, and time. Fundamental interactions in nature, forces that hold the universe together are treated as symbolic of the human experience. The sense of rooflessness is an essential theme to my thesis. There is a constant return to the sky. The shifting clouds, the stages of the sun and the moon mimic a traveling through time, a constant change. There is a given feeling of freedom and confinement. There is a vulnerability, a destitution, and a lack of shelter. The open sky, always out of reach, is a tease to be free. Though it also hints at a feeling of oneness, a symbolic relation between the divine and the human. The open, uninterrupted path for direct prayer. Roofless indicates a continuous linkage between the ground and the sky, between rain and dirt, between nature and humankind. . / by Sahar Rehman. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2011. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2011. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Inspired by the baroque prose of Melissa Pritchard, The Animalcules of Adam: & Other Small Tales is a genre-bending short story collection that incorporates elements of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and translation. Spanning in subject and setting, from the primitive bear rituals of Finland to the coroner’s inquests of 19th century England, the purpose of this thesis project is to develop a uniquely immersive voice, while ostensibly investigating the origins of curious inventions, including the microscope, the kaleidoscope, and the first English dictionary. This collection borrows from, and deliberately manipulates, the texts of important historical figures, such as Walt Whitman, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek and Robert Cawdrey, in an effort to make a home in the voice of another. It is a playful and linguistically sensitive study of the nature of invention; a meta-fictional commentary on the anxiety (and ecstasy) of influence; and above all else, a celebration of the written word. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2014.. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection