This report examines maximalist voice in the nonfiction work of James Agee, Lester Bangs, and David Foster Wallace. The term maximalist voice is meant to capture a set of authorial strategies for depicting a vast, complex American reality with an equally complex literary style, one that is simultaneously didactic, chaotic, and intimate. In particular, this report examines Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Bangs’s Psychotic Reactions and Carburator Dung, and Wallace’s Consider the Lobster. In using “voice” as an analytic lens, this report highlight those qualities of the three author’s nonfiction writing that draw upon the particular conventions of oral communication. It concludes by arguing for increased use of voice as a way to analyze literary writing. / text

Not available / text

This thesis examines and contextualises historically significant aspects of the ways in which David Roberts’ lucrative lithographic publication Egypt and Nubia (1846-49) represented the “Orient”. The analysis demonstrates that Roberts used tropes, particularly ruins and dispossessed figures, largely derived from a revised version of British picturesque landscape art, in order to depict Egypt as a developmentally poor state. By establishing how this imagery was interpreted in the context of the early Victorian British Empire, the thesis offers an elucidation of the connection between British imperial attitudes and the picturesque in Roberts’ work. The contemporary perception of Egypt and Nubia as a definitive representation of the state is argued to relate, not only to the utility of the picturesque as an “accurate” descriptive mode, despite its highly mediated nature, but also to the ways in which Britain responded to shifting political relationships with Egypt and the Ottoman Empire between 1830 and 1869. This political element of the research also suggests a more problematised reading of Robert’s work in relation to constructs of British imperialism and Edward Said’s theory of ‘Orientalism’, than has been provided by previous art historical accounts. A significant and innovative feature of the research is its focus on extensive analysis of textual descriptions of Egypt in early Victorian Britain and contemporary imperial historiography in relation to characteristics displayed in Roberts’ art. This offers a basis for a more specific, contextual understanding of Roberts’ work, as well as historically repositioning nineteenth-century British picturesque art practice and the visual culture of the early Victorian British Empire.

No description available.

Just lucky is a chamber work for three singers, three percussionists and saxophone quartet. It is a setting of a poem of the same name by David Bush. / text

No description available.

Compared to the solo percussion works, little academic work has been done in the research and analysis of percussion ensemble compositions. David Lang, a Pulitzer Prize winning composer, has written many prominent works for percussion in both the solo and chamber setting. His work, The So-Called Laws of Nature for percussion quartet, written in 2001, has quickly become standard repertoire. Lang composed the piece with many overlapping processes, patterns that are affected in a pre-defined manner, in line with his totalist style. Using traditional analytical methods would not accurately represent the complexity the work has to offer to the performer. This paper will attempt to find musical significance by breaking down the individual processes.The conclusions from this research are mostly open-ended and, to some extent, subjective. The most effective performers will take the objective analytical information and use it to create an informed, well-intentioned, subjective experience. In this study of The So-Called Laws of Nature the analysis attempts to connect the objective--the data--and the subjective--the analysis of that data--to work together to aid the performer to create the best possible musical and ultimately artistic interpretation.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.