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371	HINGED, BOUND, COVERED: THE SIGNIFYING POTENTIAL OF THE MATERIAL CODEX Christina M McCarter (11186181) 29 July 2021 (has links) <div> <p>The idea of “the book” overflows with extraneous significance: books are presented as windows, gateways, vessels, lighthouses, and gardens. Books speak to us and feed us, and they are a method of escape. The book has long represented much more than a static, hinged, bound, covered object inscribed with words. Even when a book is not performing an elaborate, imaginative function, the word “book” very often signifies the text it holds or even the text’s author: You can open <i>The Bluest Eye</i> or carry Toni Morrison in your bag. Fourteenth-century author Geoffrey Chaucer invokes a “book” by “Lollius” as authoritative source of his<i> Troilus and Criseyde</i>, though no person exists; likewise, to conclude the same text, Chaucer asks directs his project to “go, litel bok, go.” When a book makes an appearance in narrative, it is rarely j<i>ust a book</i>—without legs, the book moves, and without breath, it lives. This dissertation asks what about the shape of the codex has helped the book become such a metaphorically rich signifier.<br></p> <p>This dissertation attempts to unravel the various threads of meaning that make up the complex “idea of the book.” I focus on one of these threads: the book as a material object. By focusing on how the book as object—not the book as idea—functions within narrative, I argue that we can identify what about the book object enables its metaphorical range. I analyze moments in literature, television, and film when metaphorical functions are assigned, not to an ephemeral, complex idea of the book, but rather to the material realities of the book as an object. In these moments, the codex’s essential, material shape (what I am calling its bookishness) enables metaphorical functioning; I show that, by examining when mundanely physical bindings, pages, covers, and spines initiate metaphorical action, we can identify how the material book has come to mean so much more than itself.</p> <p><a></a>Indeed, despite a renewed appreciation for the book as both material and cultural object, books have become so significantly meaningful that attempts to define “the book” evade simplicity, rendering books as everything and nothing at the same time. My inquire explores this complexity by starting with a simple premise: Metaphors are based on some element of physical truth. Though the book has sprouted in a variety of metaphorical directions, many of those metaphors are grounded in the book’s material realities. Acknowledging this, especially in an age of fast-evolving media and bookish fetishism, offers a valuable and novel perspective on how and why books are both semantically rich and culturally valued objects.</p> </div> <br> Literature Media Studies Early English Languages English Language North American Literature Other Literatures in English History and Philosophy of the Humanities History of Ideas literary studies english literature history of the book history of the codex codex material culture studies film and television studies dystopian literature children's literature medieval literature cross-periodization cognitive semiotics narratology narrative theory Chaucer thomas malory
372	True Irishmen and Loyal Americans: Irish American Political Culture, 1829-1911 Erin C Barr (17349592) 09 November 2023 (has links) <p dir="ltr">This is a nineteenth and early twentieth century history of Irish politics in the United States. This study focuses on political identity, culture, gender, and the use of political violence. It is also a transnational history which blends the history of the United States with the history of Ireland. This study particularly examines the roles of ordinary men and women of the Irish American community throughout the United States in global efforts to bring about Irish independence. </p> Gender history Global and world history International history Migration history North American history Transnational history American history Ireland Irish Irish American women and gender Irish immigrant women United States History transnational history migration immigration United States
373	RUSTIC ROOTS AND RHINESTONE COWBOYS: AUTHENTICITY, SOUTHERN IDENTITY, AND THE GENDERED CONSTRUCTION OF PERSONA WITHIN THE LONG 1970s COUNTRY MUSIC INDUSTRY McKenzie L Isom (11023398) 02 December 2022 (has links) <p> </p> <p>Throughout the long 1970s, country music actively sought to cultivate a more traditional, “authentic,” and conservative image and sound. By examining the country music industry, during the long 1970s, this dissertation highlights how authenticity, Southern heritage, and traditionalism within country music overlapped with the South’s broader resistance to social change. Past studies of country music have primarily been concerned with how the music and its traditional format represent the working-class culture of its audience. However, very little attention has been paid to how this adherence to authenticity and traditionalism impacted its artists, particularly the female ones. In turn, the scholarship that does pertain solely to female artists is often dismissive of the impact that the country music industry and its restrictive culture had on female artists and instead opts to foster a retroactively feminist portrayal of the them and their music.</p> <p>In examining the careers of Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Tanya Tucker, and Tammy Wynette, this dissertation argues that country music held its female artists to a far stricter standard than its male artists throughout the long 1970s and actively encouraged them to foster lyrics and personas that were in line with the genre’s conception of traditional femininity. Over time, artists like Lynn and Wynette became so intrinsically connected to these traditional personas that they could not escape it, which negatively impacted not only their careers but personal lives as well. Likewise, when Parton and Tucker attempted to challenge the gendered restriction that they encountered within country music, they were punished and shunned by the broader country music community to the point that they left it altogether. </p> <p>By exploring these highly calculated measures that the industry used to maintain each of these elements and its broader effects on the genre, its artists, and audience base, this dissertation also highlights how the authenticity label evolved into a gatekeeping term, employed at various times throughout the industry’s history to prevent unsatisfactory or controversial ideologies, images, people, and musical elements from gaining access to or the ability to change and diversify the genre. </p> Musicology and ethnomusicology Music not elsewhere classified Gender history North American history Culture, representation and identity Country Music Music History Southern Culture 20th Century United States History Contemporary US History Women's and Gender Studies Performance Studies Popular Culture
374	Ethical Wondering in Contemporary African American and Asian American Women's Magical Realism Na Rim Kim (16501845) 07 July 2023 (has links) <p>The term magical realism traces back to the German art critic Franz Roh, who in the early twentieth century applied it to (visual) art expressing the wondrousness of life. However, this definition has been eclipsed over time. Reorienting critical attention back to magical realism as the art of portraying wonder and wondering, I explore the magical realist novels of contemporary African American and Asian American women writers. Specifically, I examine Toni Morrison’s <em>Paradise</em> (1997), Jesmyn Ward’s <em>Sing, Unburied, Sing</em> (2017), Karen Tei Yamashita’s <em>Through the Arc of the Rain Forest</em> (1990), and Ruth Ozeki’s <em>A Tale for the Time Being</em> (2013). In wonder, all frames of reference at hand suddenly become inadequate. Simultaneously, the subject’s interest is heightened. As such, the act/experience of wondering may lead to humility and respect, the two attitudes at the base of any ethically flourishing life—a life that flourishes <em>with</em> others. For this reason, the Asian American woman writer and peace activist Maxine Hong Kingston espoused wondering. Affiliated with groups marginalized within the US, like Kingston my writers also promote wonder. I examine how these writers, through compelling use of both content and form, guide their readers toward a particular kind of wondering: wondering with an awareness of how the act/experience might lead to ethical flourishing.</p> Cultural theory Comparative and transnational literature Ecocriticism Literary theory North American literature Stylistics and textual analysis Epistemology Ethical theory Phenomenology Magical Realism Wonder Ethics African American Women's Literature Asian American Women's Literature Contemporary Literature Maxine Hong Kingston Toni Morrison Jesmyn Ward Karen Tei Yamashita Ruth Ozeki Paradise Sing, Unburied, Sing Through the Arc of the Rain Forest A Tale for the Time Being
375	Analyses of Common Elements and Oxides in the Paleosols of the Bahamas and of the Northern Mariana Islands Ersek, Vasile 07 August 2004 (has links) Paleosols from the Bahamas and the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) are closely related to past atmospheric circulation and dust load. In the Bahamas the sources of insoluble residue (IR) must be allogenic because the islands consist of almost pure carbonates. The Al2O3:TiO2 ratio was used to establish the provenance of the IR of the paleosols. Comparisons of this ratio from Bahamian paleosols, North African dust, Lesser Antilles ash and North American loess reveal that the African dust is the major contributor to the IR, with a potential minor volcanic input from the Lesser Antilles. The contribution of the North American loess to the IR was not determined because of geochemical similarities with the North African dust. The study of two outcrops in Eleuthera indicate that paleosols can act as aquicludes. The Bahamian samples were collected on a roughly north-south transect in order to establish the climatic influence on paleosol properties. Even though there is a marked climatic gradient in the Bahamas, the paleosol geochemistry shows no trend that could be related to paleoclimate. While previous studies indicated that the source of insoluble residues in the soils of CNMI is carbonate dissolution, the present study shows that atmospheric deposition of ash from the Mariana arc and dust from the Asian continent may play a significant role in paleosol formation. Asian dust Lesser Antilles volcanic ash North African dust atmospheric dust North American loess CNMI paleoclimate Quaternary geology X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) thin sections Al2O3:TiO2 ratio insoluble residue in paleosols carbonate paleosols carbonate islands atmospheric dust western North Atlantic Ocean western North Pacific Ocean
376	<b>Education, Race, and Language Development in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Deaf Subcultures</b> Secret Marina Permenter (19193527) 22 July 2024 (has links) <p dir="ltr">Disability and Deaf Studies scholars have documented how United States Deaf culture developed in the nineteenth century partially through Deaf schools teaching a common sign language, American Sign Language (ASL). These scholars focus on the development of a broader United States Deaf culture and its long-term struggle against teaching oralism (lip reading), without much discussion about the variability of cultural identities within the Deaf community. This paper fills that gap by examining two historical Deaf subcultures, the Deaf community founded around hereditary Deafness and isolated on Martha’s Vineyard, and Black Deaf communities formed in racially segregated Deaf schools in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It shows how each case differed from the broader Deaf experience, resulting in diverse experiences from which Deaf subcultures with distinct ASL dialects emerged. Through comparative analysis, this paper argues that separation from the broader Deaf community resulted in the development of each community as unique Deaf subcultures that resisted oppression through cultural, community, and language development. By understanding how these groups lived, this paper further shows that there is diversity within Deaf experiences rather than one shared experience.</p> Histories of race North American history Deafness Deaf Education Sign Language Deaf Culture Martha's Vineyard African American Deafness Martha's Vineyard Deafness American Sign Language Martha's Vineyard Sign Language Black American Sign Language (Black ASL) Race and Deafness Segregation by Race
377	Mouths on fire with songs: negotiating multi-ethnic identities on the contemporary North american stage De Wagter, Caroline 25 November 2009 (has links) A travers une étude interculturelle détaillée et comparée de la production théâtrale minoritaire canadienne et américaine, ma thèse cherche à mettre en lumière les les apports thématiques et esthétiques du théâtre multi-ethnicque nord-américain contemporain à la tradition anglo-américaine du 20ème siècle. Les communautés asiatiques, africaines et aborigènes sont retenues comme poste d'observation privilégié de l'expression esthétique de la condition multiculturelle postcoloniale dans le théâtre nord-américain de la période allant de 1972 à nos jours. Sur base d'un corpus de pièces de théâtre, ma recherche m'a permis de redéfinir les grandes articulations des notions d'hybridité, d'identité et de communauté/nation postcoloniale.<p><p>Through a detailed cross-cultural approach of the English Canadian and American minority theatrical production, my thesis aims to identify the thematic and aesthetic contributions of multi-ethnic North American drama to the Anglo-American tradition of the 20th century. My study examines North American drama from the vantage points of African, Asian, and Native communities from 1972 until today. Relying on a number of case studies, my research opened up new avenues for rethinking the notions of hybridity and identity in relation to the postcolonial community/nation. <p> / Doctorat en Langues et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished Sciences humaines Langues et littératures Multiculturalism Multiculturalisme African comparative approach multi-ethnic theatre and drama Indigenous Canadian and American drama Postcolonial literature
378	“DOUBLE REFRACTION”: IMAGE PROJECTION AND PERCEPTION IN SAUDI-AMERICAN CONTEXTS: A COMPARATIVE STUDY Ghaleb Alomaish (8850251) 18 May 2020 (has links) <p>This dissertation aims to create a scholarly space where a seventy-five-year-old “special relationship” (1945-2020) between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United States is examined from an interdisciplinary comparativist perspective. I posit that a comparative study of Saudi and American fiction goes beyond the limitedness of global geopolitics and proves to uncover some new literary, sociocultural, and historical dimensions of this long history, while shedding some light on others. Saudi writers creatively challenge the inherently static and monolithic image of Saudi Arabia, its culture and people in the West. They also simultaneously unsettle the notion of homogeneity and enable us to gain new insight into self-perception within the local Saudi context by offering a wide scope of genuine engagements with distinctive themes ranging from spatiality, identity, ethnicity, and gender to slavery, religiosity and (post)modernity. On the other side, American authors still show some signs of ambivalence towards the depiction of the Saudi (Muslim/Arab) Other, but they nonetheless also demonstrate serious effort to emancipate their representations from the confining legacy of (neo)Orientalist discourse and oil politics by tackling the concepts of race, alterity, hegemony, radicalism, nomadism and (un)belonging.</p> Art Literature History Disability Studies Gender studies Language North American Literature Other Literatures in English Middle Eastern Literature Comparative Literature Studies Literary Theory Aesthetics Epistemology Feminist Theory Hermeneutic and Critical Theory Comparative Religious Studies Islamic Studies Gender, Sexuality and Education British History Saudi culture American Saudi-American Orientalism Orientalism in art neo-Orientalsim Desert oil Cultural studies Arabian Gulf migration Diaspora Studies blackness slavery literature Mormonism Mormon biblical studies disability studies geopolitics 9/11 post-9/11 post-9/11 America Post-9/11, fiction terrorism extremism radicalism visual studies orientalist painting postcolonial Postcolonial Discourse Otherness Alterity munif cities of salt urbanism Modernity tradition Islamic feminism Islam whiteness studies

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