Landscape art reinvents itself throughout history, along with changes in relationships between humans and nature. During unprecedented processes of urbanization, industrialization, and globalization, the past two hundred years witnessed shifts in global landscapes. The idea of using art to cope with a sense of loss becomes the departure point for my art project. To contextualize my work, I will discuss art scenes in urbanizing Europe and contemporary China and explore the powerlessness of individuals under the formidable trend of development reflected in landscape art.

When Frank Zappa died in 1993, he left Civilization Phaze III as a last testament to both his musical and thematic purpose. The work received a handful of reviews in the popular music press, and has subsequently been ignored by both the popular press and, with few exceptions, academia. Many are the composers whose careers have been thought describe a mid-period mastery, followed by later decline. This presumption seems to have fallen upon Frank Zappa, apparently due to his retirement from the concert stage, and final years writing music on the Synclavier. This thesis seeks to demonstrate that Zappa's compositional abilities were in no way diminished at the end of his life, but had instead reached a peak level of mastery in composition of his last work. This thesis shall provide an analysis and musical/extra-musical description of this piece, with the intention of situating it in relation to Zappa's compositional legacy, and to establish Civilization Phaze III as the crowning compositional achievement of his career.

This dissertation, ""'Superior to all men': Violent Masculinity, Fascism, and American Identity in Depression-era American Literature,"" examines how American authors used modernist techniques and formal experimentation to recast the violent hero during the Great Depression. Using Richard Slotkin's work, I show how this revision of the hero contributed to a critique of frontier narratives, and the traditional, nineteenth-century socio-political ideals they maintained. The hard-boiled male was both a continuation of the hero's dedication to violent action and a subversion of the frontier as a narrative model for modern life. Despite his pulp origins, American modernists used the hard-boiled male prominently in literary critiques of American life throughout the thirties. With this figure, they expanded the experimentation of the twenties to a literary analysis of the national, economic, and political crises of the Depression, and in doing so their works questioned the roles of race and gender at the heart of American life and politics. The critique of heroic narratives gained particular focus with the rise of fascist politics abroad, and these authors increasingly suggested that such narratives produced and maintained proto-fascist discourses in American life. However, I argue that as the fascist threat grew prior to World War II, authors rehabilitated the frontier hero as a counter to fascism and in concert with democratic liberalism, the New Deal, and the Popular Front. I discuss texts by Ernest Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, William Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck, and Richard Wright, as well as films directed by John Ford. / acase@tulane.edu

The Irish throughout their tumultuous history immigrated not only to North America but across Latin America, particularly to Cuba, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, and Mexico. Ireland and many of these Latin American countries share a close yet under-examined relationship, inasmuch as they are predominantly Catholic, post-colonial, hybrid populations with fraught immigrant experiences abroad and long histories of resisting Anglo-centric imperialism at home. More particularly, the peoples of these nations engage intimately with the dead (as shown, for example, by the Mexican Day of the Dead and Celtic roots of Halloween), and the dead appear frequently in literature from these countries that takes up issues of colonialism and anti-colonial struggles. The dead can function as repositories for forgotten history and allies in counter-imperial struggle; these roles become particularly important in the 20th century, wherein the forces of economic modernization have rushed to erase the memories of the dead. From the speech of the dead in the prose works of Juan Rulfo, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Samuel Beckett, and Carlos Fuentes, to the anticolonial poetics of William Butler Yeats and Julia de Burgos, this thesis examines how these two regions have, both in parallel and in concert, utilized the dead to bolster various nationalistic projects. This dissertation also explores patterns of Irish/Latin American literary citation and influence, tracing, for example, how Jorge Luis Borges’s responded to James Joyce, or how a scene from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is re-enacted in the novels of Flann O’Brien and Gabriel García Márquez. This project contributes to comparative approaches to Irish literary and modernist studies, improves our nascent understanding of how the Irish and Latin Americans have interacted throughout their overlapping histories, and expands our comprehension of how the dead have been and continue to be utilized across the developing world to resist economic neo-colonialism.

My dissertation is the first project to situate the telephone in the context of Britain’s efforts to standardize the English language. I argue for a new understanding of literary modernism as profoundly influenced by advances in telephony and their recruitment for the imperial work of linguistic purification. Using a methodology that combines media theory, sound studies, disability studies, psychoanalytic theory, and gender criticism, I locate in the works of Joseph Conrad, George Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf a preoccupation with the fantasy of perfect sound reproduction that is always tethered to the mother tongue and its protocols of enunciation. By examining a range of Victorian and modern technologies from the ear phonautograph to the sound spectrograph, I trace the development of a telephonic literature between 1899 and 1941—a literature concerned with intelligibility, with the accurate registering and reproduction of sound. I recover the phonic subtexts of these works to show how they subject their readers to the sort of “audile training” required of early telephone users, whose practiced hearing and refined speech were needed to overcome the noise of the network. My project ultimately demonstrates how advances in communication engineering, motivated by racialized, gendered, and ableist ideals of linguistic and sonic purity, shaped modernist texts that endeavored to reproduce sighted sound. In doing so, it redefines literary modernism in terms of its ties with imperial media that assisted in the linguistic colonization of British subjects, revealing how the fantasy of a “pure, originary” mother tongue and fears of the degradation of English shaped a modernist aesthetic that negotiated between wanting to eradicate linguistic difference and desiring to embrace the “noise” inherent within all communication.

This paper argues that narrative techniques in Absalom, Absalom! demonstrate Faulkners anticipation of postmodern thought and style. Similar techniques in Christopher Nolans film Memento serve to highlight how both writer and director confound the notion of master narrative by disrupting chronology and raising questions about the reliability of the narrators in each work. Nolan orders all events of the film in reverse while threading chronologically ordered events throughout to tell the story of Lennys murder investigation. Faulkner likewise uses "dischronology," such as flashbacks to tell the story of Thomas Sutpen. Both Faulkner and Nolan provide key information through questionable narrators at strategic times to manipulate reader's/viewer's thoughts and opinions about specific characters. Nolan and Faulkner use several narrators, none of whom witnessed all events, to tell the stories of each work. A close examination of these similar narrative techniques creates a parallel between two otherwise unrelated works. More importantly, such an examination shows that although Faulkner was a modernist writer, his work Absalom, Absalom! anticipated a postmodern era. To provide additional support for the argument that Absalom, Absalom! anticipates a postmodernist understanding of Narrativity, this paper will offer a perspective that incorporates ideas of postmodern thought and narratological studies from Seymour Chatman, Gerald Prince, and Julia Kristeva. It will also draw from ideas of such Faulknerian scholars as Donald Kartiganer, Michael Millgate, and David Minter. Against the backdrop such scholarship provides a comparison of the narrative techniques of Absalom, Absalom! and Memento enhances the postmodernist understanding of historical "truth" as necessarily partial, fragmented, and subjective.

acase@tulane.edu

Master of Letters (with Merit) / The objective of this paper is to examine the self-portrait paintings of Frida Kahlo and to explore the way in which they articulate a ‘self’ and ‘identity’ through creating an innovative feminine vocabulary. The aim of this creative research is to explore the way in which Frida Kahlo represented her sexual subjectivity in the body of self-portraits she produced in her short life time. The self-portraits, some of which were produced in a state of severe physical disability and chronic illness, were also created in the shadow of her famous partner- socialist Mexican muralist/ revolutionary Diego Rivera. An examination of the significant body of self-portrait paintings produced by Frida Kahlo, informed by her personal letters, poems, and photographs, broadens the conventional definitions of subjective self beyond the generic patterns of autobiographical narrative, characteristic of an inherently masculine Western ‘self’. In Kahlo’s self-portraits the representation of the urban Mexican proletarian woman-child draws stylistically from the domain of European self-portraiture, early studio photographic portraiture, and the biographical Mexican Catholic retablo art, with its indebtedness to the ancient Aztec Indian symbology of self.

I should like to have completed this process by having this project bound so that it read from right to left instead of the traditional manner in which we have learnt and been taught to read. In partaking of such an activity, it would have been my purpose and intention to share with you my sense of physical discomfort that has situated itself beside me at various stages from the on-set of my research. Because I believe in this process, I have decided to follow a traditional approach, and as you can see it reads as it should from left to right. In the introductory phase of this study, I assert quite unequivocally that this is not a thesis. Instead I promote this as a prolegomena; an interlocutory prolusion. But don't be deceived! This is very much a thesis. It has been researched according to guidelines, formatted according to specifications and ethically undertaken. I want you to believe that it is a thesis. Partially because I have pursued this research in a very serious manner and also because no matter how much we try to avoid becoming enmeshed in a system, ultimately we find that we are. Three years ago I embarked on a quest. At this time, I proposed that I would undertake a study on the Historical Understandings of passion throughout the Western World. This idea came to a sudden and dramatic halt, through the encountering of what I should like to refer to as a series of problems. In order to do justice to my subject, I decided to write about these obstacles, a decision that I hoped would lead me back to my original statement of intent, following their reconciliation. It is Michel Foucault, that I credit with the title for this thesis. After reading his book entitled "This Is Not A Pipe" (1982) I felt a certain sense of inspiration and ethical obligation that I considered worth taking the risk for. Due to no longer writing a thesis on passion, I decided that this could not be called a thesis. It could only be an introduction to my thesis that would speak about why it had become impossible for me to pursue my thesis at this stage. The other reason that this carries the title of this is not a thesis, surrounds my favouring the post-modern over any other position that I have inquired about. This prolusion involves a discussion surrounding many of the problematics associated with my research processes. These include extensively looking at existing methodologies available when undertaking research today. Adjunct to the illumination of these problems, I look at literary disruptions; my penchant for knowledge and my naive aspirations which all contributed to thwarting my journey into completing an adequate study on passion. Included in this prolegomena, are two diagrammatic representations of passion. The first seeks to re-inscribe through re-presenting passion away from its traditional juxtaposition with love or sexual gratification. It re-presents passion as a polyvalent movement that is vastly more complicated than that to which we have come to believe in through out the centuries. Accompanying this depiction, are the traditional notions of passion. This is based on the works of authors such as Aquinas, Daly, Cicero and McLellan. In the conclusion of this prolusion, I suggest that there is a need to re-write a new methodology. One that transcends our current juncture that promotes stances belonging to foundationalism, anti-foundationalism and non-foundationalism. It is my ardent belief, that this is a necessary course of action and will enable the subject of passion to be spoken to as never before.

<p>The doctoral thesis sets out to describe and analyse how the mid-twentieth century Norwegian design community domesticated ideologies partly inherited from the traditional applied art movement (brukskunstbevegelsen), partly imported from various international currents of the so-called “modern movement”, in their co-construction of industrial design culture. The empirical studies follow two paths/levels; the ideology/propaganda debated in and mediated through the design magazine Bonytt, and the strategies/materiality/products developed by the ceramics/earthenware/porcelain manufacturer Figgjo. As such, the thesis is a cultural history of industrial design, where design (as) culture is seen as a sort of dialectic or discourse between ideology and practice. This often uneasy relation between ideology and practice is the leitmotif of the study. The concept of domestication, along with other theoretical frameworks and methodological tools appropriated from STS, becomes valuable when studying this process by following the actors in their construction, negotiation and mediation of these ideologies as played out in their main debate forum, the design magazine Bonytt. However, the domestication of industrial design culture in Norway does not end with the writings of campaigning designers, enthusiastic journalists, ardent academics and organization men. The mediations between ideology and practice is also traced in a domestication perspective. As such, the manufacturing industry - here represented by the ceramic tableware manufacturer Figgjo - represents a second site of domestication, where the ideologies undergo new negotiations and transformations in meeting other users, requirements and circumstances.</p>