Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 269-275).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1998. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 214-219). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

The central concern of my thesis is to bring into focus the problematic relation between Georges Rouault's (1871-1958) pictorial vocabulary and his subject matter: on the one hand, abstract mark-making and on the other, a refusal to cede to abstraction or formalism through an insistence that these marks remain yoked to representation. The result is an examination a way of painting that embraces its state of uncertainty, which interrogates its own construction, and strains against the very materiality it simultaneously celebrates. Chapter one traces the critical reaction to Rouault's painting in the early years of the twentieth century, which was at best mystification, and at worst, disgust. This chapter also analyses the thick painterly terms of these paintings and their resistance to conventional meaning, arguing that there are parallels between Rouault's project and contemporary experimental forms of art and literature within modernism. Chapter two continues this exploration, attending to the various relationships between surface and depth that are interrogated by Rouault's canvases. These relationships reveal the deep philosophical and theological questions at stake Rouault's painting. Chapter three explores a theological reading of Rouault's work beginning with the aesthetics of his associate, the French Catholic philosopher, Jacques Maritain - a reading that shows how painting can be true to its material conditions and strain towards a higher, albeit obscure, form of knowledge. Against this, the last chapter argues that the paintings also support the possibility of a bleaker world-view, aligned with Dostoyevsky's kenotic theology, in which matter potentially overwhelms the possibility of transcendental meaning. In conclusion, I argue that Rouault's painting interrogates the vocabulary of modernism and presents the 'fallen' or 'wounded' state of a painting that acknowledges its material conditions.

Siegfried Kracauer is mostly known for the work on film theory he wrote during his post-war exile to North America. This thesis proposes to examine a lesser known and far more complex portion of his oeuvre, namely the vast body of essays and monographs he produced throughout the 20s and 30s as editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung, which offer not only a cultural diary of the Weimar republic but also a critique of modernity and the many upheavals it engendered. Using both a detailed analysis of his own work as well as an examination of the various critical responses it elicited, this study aims at exposing the paradoxical complexity of Kracauer's stance towards modernity and its various mass cultural manifestations, a complexity which has unfortunately often been misjudged and reduced to a mere middling position. Indeed, because of his refusal to opt for a definite position, to either fully embrace or reject modernity, Kracauer has often been miscast as a mere seeker of compromise, a thinker who tried to make edges rounder and ease tensions. This thesis is an attempt to prove that far from trying to annihilate the tensions of the modern era, Kracauer in fact sought to cultivate them. He may have refused to opt for a definite stance---be it a "yes" or a "no"---towards modernity, yet his position is not to be reduced to a tepid "maybe", but ought to be seen, rather, as a truly Janusian simultaneous "yes" and "no" towards it. In our age of extreme relativism, where tension is to be avoided at all costs, there is some valuable insight to be gained from Kracauer's obstinate fight against comfortable compromises of any kind.

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Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 217-229).

To study architectural space in relation to other works of art, the author aims at understanding how meaning depends upon the medium within which it is formulated. More importantly, the process of re-stating a work from one medium to another requires analytically rigorous study at the level of design thinking. In this thesis, Piet Mondrian’s sixteen Diamond Compositions, George Braque’s Studio Series, and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’s Comptesse d'Haussonville will be studied as points of departure of John Hejduk¡’s two sets of architectural projects: the Diamond Series and the Wall House Series. Compositional similarities among these works will be discovered as the design means of Hejduk’s architecture. Moreover, these paintings suggest two design ends: C flatness and otherness. Hejduk’s poems about paintings and his architectural drawings will be examined as working media in which the two design ends are formulated. On this basis, the Diamond Series and the Wall House Series will be analyzed once again on the basis of how flatness and otherness are constructed in architectural space. In a way, Hejduk defines his own design means in the medium of architecture. It is noted that the re-statement of meaning in the medium of architecture involves both a retrospective understanding of the spatial structure and an embodied experience of the immediate spatial condition. Only when space makes sense independent of the references back to existing works in other media such as painting or poetry and the key design move is made will the readings of such works become architectural concepts. In the media of painting, poetry, architectural drawing, and architectural space, John Hejduk designs intention in its own right as part of the design process. Therefore, working across media entails far more than superficial references or fanciful representations. Rather, it is a serious investigation into the construction of medium-specific meaning, which the work of Hejduk clearly exemplifies. For the same reason, Hejduk’s work can be understood beyond personal or mystical expressions, becoming a tangible, logical, and thereby shared construction.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Department of Music, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2006. Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 791-825). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:NR19808

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of Art History, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references.