Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Germanic Studies, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 7, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-10, Section: A, page: 3870. Adviser: William Rasch.

M.A.

This dissertation analyzes the extent to which the pictorial cycle and poetic text in the Códice Rico manuscript of the Cantigas de Santa María of Alfonso X el Sabio convey the same religious and ideological messages. The Códice Rico portrays an ordered, laboring Christian society with some presence of Jews and Muslims, at the mercy of nature and human nature and saved only by the grace and intercession of Holy Mary. In this iconographic society, King Alfonso appears both as the exemplary Christian ruler and the devotee of Mary, singing her praises and exhorting others to do the same. This dual representation suggests that the pictorial cycle of his Marian project is not merely pious, but also politically motivated and forming part of Alfonso X's greater ambition, the crown of Holy Roman Emperor.

This dissertation articulates the ways in which black (e)migration to the territorial frontier challenges the master frontier narratives as well as African American migration narratives, and to capture how black frontier settlers and settlements are represented in three contemporary novels. I explore through the lens of cultural geography the racialized landscapes of the real and symbolic American South and the real, symbolic and imaginary black territorial frontier. Borrowing perspectives from cultural and critical race studies, I aim to show the theoretical and practical significance of contemporary literary representations of an almost forgotten historical past. Chapter I traces the sites of history, memory and imagination in migration and frontier narratives of enslaved and newly freed black people in the Oklahoma Territory. Chapter II addresses an oppositional narrative of masculinity in frontier narratives depicted in Standing at the Scratch Line by Guy Johnson. Chapter III examines how the black frontier landscape can be created and recreated across three generations who endure racial threats, violence and the razing of Greenwood during the Tulsa Riot of 1921 in Magic City by Jewell Parker Rhodes. Chapter IV scrutinizes the construction of black frontier subjects and exclusive black communities in Paradise by Toni Morrison. My dissertation seeks to add to and expand the literary studies of migration and frontier narratives, taking into account two popular novels alongside a more academically recognized novel. The selected novels mobilize very different resources, but collectively offer insights into black frontier identities and settlements as sites of a past, present and future African American collective consciousness.

This dissertation looks at the spatial strategies which people enact in their daily lives and which, in turn, become part of the sociocultural and historical context of their existence. It examines this nexus, which conjoins human behavior with the physical world, in the context of an urban built environment located in Europe during a period of intense social and political change early in the twentieth century. Specifically, the dissertation focuses on life in one part of Berlin—Moabit—during the Weimar Republic (1918–1933), drawing on historical data and life histories I gathered from people who lived there during that period. The chapters which make up the first part of this study explore historical documents and studies to establish that Moabit was home to a heterogenous urban population and to sketch out the social profile of this population. The assertion that Moabit was socially heterogeneous is in direct opposition to popular and scholarly stereotypes of the area as a working-class district. The contradiction between this stereotype and how people talk about Moabit in their life stories gives rise to questions about how places gain reputations and how we think and talk about places. The second part of the dissertation is ethnographic and plumbs personal narratives to show how different place-related practices contributed to an urban heterogeneity that was sociohistorically specific to the Weimar period. It opens with a look at what we can learn from the different ways in which people talk about the place named Moabit in their life histories. Ensuing chapters reveal that people's construction and practice of place were intimately involved with their sense of social identity, both integral components of and contributors to a system of social relations which set the working and middle classes in opposition. Further, spatial strategies varied within both these groups as well, most clearly along gender and political fines and in ways indicative of attitudes towards social change and modernity. Finally, the life histories allow us to trace how such practices of differentiating urban place developed through the socialization of children and youth. In conclusion, this work returns to an examination of the importance of place as a cultural construct in Weimar Berlin, by looking at the value placed on being sedentary. I argue that the ideal of sedentarism was a cultural response to the contemporary economic and social stresses experienced by Berliners, but was rooted in politically-loaded practices of the modern era in Europe as well. During the Weimar Republic this cultural construct provided a vehicle for place-making practices which concurrently addressed people's material and social needs.

‘Just Like Hitler’ explores the manner in which Nazism is used within mass American culture to create ethical arguments. Specifically, it provides a history of Nazism’s usage as a metaphor for evil. The work follows that metaphor’s usage from its origin with dissemination of camp liberation imagery through its political usage as a way of describing the communist enemy in the Cold War, through its employment as a vehicle for criticism against America’s domestic and foreign policies, through to its usage as a personal metaphor for evil. Ultimately, the goal of the dissertation is to describe the ways in which the metaphor of Nazism has become ubiquitous in discussion of ethics within American culture at large and how that ubiquity has undermined definitions of evil and made them unavailable. Through overuse, Nazism has become a term to vague to describe anything, but necessary because all other definitions of evil are subject to contextualization and become diminished through explanation. The work analyzes works of postwar literature but also draws in state sponsored propaganda as well as works of popular culture. Because of its concentration on Nazism as a ubiquitous definition of evil, it describes American culture through a survey of its more prominent, popular, and lauded works.

This study describes a moment when tourism was created in America, and how, in the decades after, it was discovered by a broad swath of American society. Beginning as an infrastructure created for the recreation of wealthy, the tourist world created in the Hudson Valley became increasingly more accessible and visible in the years after 1790, most particularly after 1817. This new visibility heavily influenced artists such as Thomas Cole and writers like James Fenimore Cooper, who created for the tourist market. By the late 1820s, these images combined with the rising prosperity of the period and the falling cost of travel spurred thousands of Americans to travel to these storied sites. By 1830, all classes of Americans had became exposed to tourists and tourism. All this happened in the context of the changing society of American cities, especially New York. There, rapid growth led to increasing social disorder. A search by the gentry for safe enclaves resulted in the tourist sites, but the very infrastructure they created to facilitate their travels was later used by the very classes they had wanted to avoid. The large numbers new tourists from non-wealthy classes began to overload the traditional tourist sites, causing increasingly visible cultural tensions. By eighteen-thirty the Hudson Valley was being written of by the cultural avant-garde as being overexposed. A search for other tourist sites ensued. Exclusivity would be briefly found in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, but others in the gentry sought longer-term solutions including private clubs, summer homes, and semi-private resorts such as Newport. Places such as Saratoga, too, would find ways to reinvent themselves, especially in the light of the decline of other formerly exclusive sites like the nearby Ballston Spa. This study uses a large body of cultural evidence supported by dozens of diaries and letters to demonstrate that by eighteen-thirty the idea of tourism had penetrated deep into American culture, affecting art, literature and commerce. Although it would take another generation before tourism became a truly mass activity, by 1830 the basis of American tourism had been set.

In the preface to this collection, "Poetry and History: Finding 'What Will Suffice,'" I show how Czeslaw Milosz's "Dedication" and Jorie Graham's "Guantánamo" embody the virtues of philosophical meditation and the moral imagination to create a unique poetry of witness. These poems also provide American poets with an example of how they can regain the trust of an apathetic general reading audience. Tinder for the Bathhouses is a collection of poems in which I use the moral imagination to indirectly bear witness to events as far ranging as the Holocaust and the Iraq War. Using the family as a foundation, I show how historical narratives can provide a poet with the tools to think about larger metaphysical questions that poetry can raise, such as the nature of beauty and the purpose of art.

This dissertation explores execution literature, a genre of literature popular in the Northeastern American colonies and successor states. The texts I explore are written between 1693 and 1817 and feature people of African descent. There are three types of texts that make up execution literature; execution sermons, written and delivered by pastors written especially for the condemned immediately before his or her execution, last words, autobiographical texts taken from the prisoner's own mouth immediately before death, and dying verse, rhyming poetry written on occasion of the execution of the criminal. Although execution literature can provide a wealth of information, it has tended to be excluded from consideration as a means of discovering more about the experiences of people of African descent by the popularity of Slave Narratives. Whereas enslaved men and women including Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Mary Prince and William and Ellen Craft are well known and their lives well represented in secondary literature, Joseph Hanno, Mark, Phillis, John Joyce and Peter Matthias among others are noticeably absent from the scholarship. Additionally, I argue that Puritans and their descendants were, as Robin Blackburn puts it, “ethno-religious exclusivists.” To refer to Puritans as racists is historically inaccurate. Biological racism as an ideology was invented later, with the advent of the institution of chattel slavery. Puritans and their descendants held a different worldview, reflected in execution literature. They believed themselves to be the direct descendants of the ancient Hebrews of the Bible. The Massachusetts Bay Colony was New Israel, and here they attempted to align their lives as closely with Biblical precedent as possible. The Bible, especially the New Testament, emphasized that people ought to be less concerned with their earthly condition than with their eternal destination. One never knew when he or she would die; therefore it was of the utmost importance to spend one's life preparing for judgment. The significance of execution literature is not in its relationship to other genres of literature written by and about people of African descent. Instead, the literature itself provides a wealth of information that has not been explored to the full.

This dissertation is concerned with the depiction of the historic events of July 20, 1944, their representation and reception in West German Theater, and analyzes the plays of Karl Michel's Stauffenberg (1947), Walter Erich Schäfer's Die Verschwörung (1949), Walter Löwen's Stauffenberg. Tragödie (1949-1952), Peter Lotar's Das Bild des Menschen. Eine Geschichte unserer Zeit (1952), Wolfgang Graetz' Die Verschwörer (1965), Hans Hellmut Kirst's Aufstand der Offiziere (1966), and Günther Weisenborn's Walküre -44 (1966). The consolidation of the Third Reich and the progressive seduction of millions consequently led to the resistance of a few. The more totalitarian a state is, the larger the differences between the government and opposition, and the more determined the resistance against it. The resisters turned their value systems inside out. They deviated from everything they had previously stood for as members of the Officers' Corps and the national-conservative elite. This is unparalleled, not only in Germany, but in military history as well, and therefore deserves reverence. A few Germans took on personal responsibility for events of the time; they accepted their fate as leaders knowing that they might forsake their own lives, and those of their families. In that respect, the unsuccessful assassination attempt and the failed coup are secondary to the catalytic effect that these events had on eventual post-war German Society: the democratic state can therefore not reflect enough upon these men and women, their motivation, and contribution to the andere Deutschland. The failed coup of July 20, 1944 is the most prominent example of German resistance against the NS-Regime and at the same time a symbol for the failure of the entire German resistance. The failure however may be seen as positive, since it avoided a revival of the devastating stab-in-the-back myth, and prevented Hitler from becoming a martyr. This dissertation confronts different levels of history and methods of dealing, arranging, and manipulating a historic event in literary representations, and situates the plays in the context of the popular historic drama. The connecting factor between the classic historical drama and the documentary July-drama is the historic topic. In both, the author plays with some aspect of world history. The seven plays, whose reception indicate societal developments in early post war Germany, are discussed in a predominately socio-political and historical context as a contribution to the cultural memory of the German resistance to Hitler. The complex moral responsibility, the theological question of legalizing the murder of a tyrant, the uneasy juxtaposition of unconditional obedience and critical thinking that lead some to disobedience, others to collaboration, are topics in world history that are of interest to any generation and culture. The answers to these problems and the background of the particular playwright, affect the depiction of the conspirators, who in extremes may be seen as heroes or traitors.