The dissertation involves a threefold investigation of sculpture. Firstly, the interpretations are focused on particular artworks by three British sculptors: Antony Gormley (b. 1950), Anish Kapoor (b. 1954), and Rachel Whiteread (b. 1963), respectively. The notion of applied minimalism is tentatively applied to their sculptures. A primary argument is that these works are idiomatically, thematically, and theoretically founded on the heritage of American Minimalism from the 1960s. The sculptures by these three artists are seen as readings and transformations in themselves of the Minimalist sculptural idiom. Secondly, the dissertation aims at an investigation of the notion of sculpture, which is explored as a discursive term, i.e. as a working notion. Therefore, each specific sculpture in the study is analysed in terms of the means it is manifested as such. Thirdly, interpretation per se is recognised as a performative act inscribed and restricted by specific contextual features. The constituent aspects are acknowledged and employed in terms of the white cube gallery locality, minimalist theory, sign theory, sculpture as staged, and the crucial recognition of a/the corporeal viewer's own presence and movements within the gallery space. Especially pertinent to the interpretations are Michael Fried's notion of theatricality, notions of performativity, and meaning as site-specific, respectively. The dissertation argues that the notion of sculpture, specifically in the wake of Minimal sculpture and the artworks inscribed by that category in art critical discourse, relies on the imperative of a corporeal acknowledged viewer/interpreter and that significant relations as regards the notion of sculpture are therefore external to a high degree.

Composer Isang Yun developed an idiosyncratic musical language that blends Eastern-Asian and Western-European art traditions. Exiled from Korea due to political conflict, he continued his compositional career in Germany, where his music is renowned for its use of the Hauptton (“main-tone”) technique. Yun was the first to discuss this technique, which he interprets as a process rooted in East-Asian musical traditions, including Taoism philosophy. His music is remarkable in that it fuses this process within the context of Western formal structures. I combine Straus’s associational model with Yun’s Hauptton theory to analyse the second movement of Duo für Violoncello und Harfe (1984) in order to show the inclusion of Eastern-Asian and Western-European musical elements in Yun’s music. I begin by analysing several Haupttöne at the surface level through associational relationships, followed by a large-scale analysis of the entire movement with one fundamental Hauptton.

This dissertation engages a number of currents of environmental criticism and rhetoric in an analysis of the poetry, fiction, and non-fiction of the southeastern United States. I examine conceptions of genitive relationships with the environment as portrayed in the work of diverse writers, primarily William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neal Hurston, and Elizabeth Madox Roberts. Southern literature is rarely addressed in ecocritical studies, and to date no work offers an intensive and focused examination of the rhetoric employed in conceptions of environmental ownership. However, southern literature and culture provides fertile ground to trace the creation, development, and communication of environmental values because of its history of agrarianism, slavery, and a literary tradition committed to a sense of place. I argue that the concerns of the two main distinctive threads of environmental literary scholarship - ecopoetics and environmentalism of the poor - neatly overlap in the literature of the South. I employ rhetorical theory and phenomenology to argue that southern authors call into question traditional forms of writing about nature - such as pastoral, the sublime, and wilderness narratives - to reinvent and revitalize those forms in order to develop and communicate modes of reciprocal ownership of natural and cultural environments. These writers not only imagine models of personal and communal coexistence with the environment, but also provide new ways of thinking about environmental justice. The intersection of individual and social relationships with history and nature in Southern literature provides new models for thinking about environmental relationships and how they are communicated. I argue that expressions of environmental ownership and belonging suggest how individuals and groups can better understand their distance and proximity to their environments, which may result in new valuations of personal and social environmental relationships.

En esta tesis se estudian los aspectos de la poesía de Juan Larrea (1895-1980) relacionados con la traducción. Se presenta un corpus exhaustivo de las traducciones de Gerardo Diego (1896-1987) de poemas de Juan Larrea constituido a partir de textos publicados y textos conservados en el archivo personal de Diego. Se analizan los mecanismos de la escritura francesa de Larrea intervenidos por la doble presencia del francés y el español y los aspectos de la misma que representan una especial dificultad en traducción, y se ofrece asimismo un análisis de las traducciones de Gerardo Diego y una aproximación a los presupuestos de la teoría creacionista vinculados con la traducción poética. Se dedica un estudio al ultraísmo con el objetivo de contextualizar los comienzos poéticos de Juan Larrea y Gerardo Diego en la poesía de vanguardia y reconocer la naturaleza renovadora de esta en el panorama poético español de los años veinte. Igualmente, se ofrece un estudio sobre la experiencia universitaria de Juan Larrea en Córdoba (Argentina) como parte del análisis de su poesía.

Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of History, 2009. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 49-52).

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Orientador: Arnaldo Franco Junior / Banca: Ana Cecilia Arias Olmos / Banca: Orlando Nunes de Amorim / Resumo: Esta dissertação analisa o trabalho de experimentação formal com a linguagem dos mass media operada nos romances Boquitas pintadas (1969), do escritor argentino Manuel Puig, e Onde andará Dulce Veiga? (1990), do escritor brasileiro Caio Fernando Abreu. Tais romances se vinculam à trajetória de autoquestionamento da própria linguagem narrativa que, de certo modo, a literatura latinoamericana desenvolve desde os movimentos vanguardistas, nas primeiras décadas do século XX, e intensifica ao longo das fases de criação literária do boom de produção e de comercialização da narrativa latinoamericana, a partir dos anos 50-60 do século XX, aproximadamente (MONEGAL, 1968; RAMA, 2005). Pela mobilização consciente que ambos os romances fazem de procedimentos escriturais, textos, gêneros textuais e gêneros literários vinculados tanto à própria literatura quanto à linguagem dos mass media, que os agenciam com fins mercadológicos, suas narrativas se tornam representativas de dois momentos distintos da última fase de desenvolvimento do boom da literatura latinoamericana - o chamado pós-boom. Por meio de procedimentos escriturais que transpõem outras linguagens para o campo da escrita literária, as narrativas expressam uma concepção ampla do fazer literário, das contribuições formais que os mass media e sua linguagem podem oferecer à narrativa contemporânea e da função social que podem exercer na literatura latinoamericana: possibilidade de avaliação e questionamento dos códigos, símbolos e valores que constituem os mitos da sociedade de consumo, na América Latina. Boquitas pintadas e Onde andará Dulce Veiga? potencializam, então, no corpo de sua linguagem, uma leitura crítico-paródica (HUTCHEON, 1985; 1991) da história social a que sua produção literária se vincula, ao mesmo tempo em que recuperam linguagens (como a linguagem cinematográfica... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: This dissertation examines the work of formal experimentation with the language of the mass media developed in the novels Boquitas pintadas (1969), by the Argentinian writer Manuel Puig and, Onde andará Dulce Veiga? (1990), by the Brazilian writer Caio Fernando Abreu. These novels are linked to the path of self-questioning in the narrative language itself, which somehow is carried out by Latin-American literature since the avant-garde movements in the early decades of the twentieth century, and it is intensified during the process of creative writing of the ―Boom‖ in Latin American narrative production and commercialization during the 1950s and 1960s, approximately (MONEGAL, 1968; RAMA, 2005). Considering, in both novels, the conscious mobilization of writing procedures, texts, text genres and literary genres, related to literature itself and to mass media language, which manage them with market purposes, their narratives become representatives of two distinct moments in the last phase of the development of the ―Boom‖ in Latin American literature - the so-called ―post- Boom‖. By means of writing procedures, which transpose other languages into the field of literary writing, the narratives express a broad conception of literature, formal contributions of the mass media and its language can offer to contemporary narrative and, the social function that they can represent for Latin American literature: the possibility of questioning and evaluation of codes, symbols and values which form the myths of consumer society in Latin America. Therefore, Boquitas pintadas and Onde andará Dulce Veiga? enhance a critical and parodic reading (HUTCHEON, 1985, 1991) of social history to which the literary production is attached to and, at the same time, they recover languages (as film language) and narrative genres (as feuilleton or serial novels) which are significant... (Complete abstract click electronic access below) / Mestre

“O weary Champion of the Cross, lie still”: così Christina Rossetti apre un sonetto del 1890 intitolato Cardinal Newman, composto in occasione della dipartita del cardinale e dedicato alla memoria di uno dei più influenti pensatori, teologi e uomini di lettere dell’epoca. L’accorato canto di Rossetti sottolinea la potenza del pensiero newmaniano assimilando le azioni e gli scritti del cardinale all’impeto delle acque di marea, metaforizzandoli poi in un’alluvione che va a sconvolgere il tranquillo corso di un ruscelletto: “Thy tides were springtides, set against the neap/ Of calmer souls: thy flood rebuked their rill (7-8). La metafora acquatica impiegata da Rossetti sintetizza in modo efficace le qualità trasformatrici proprie della lunga parabola esistenziale di John Henry Newman (1801-1890), la quale lascia profondi solchi nel tessuto ideologico e storico di quello che gli studiosi hanno identificato come “very long nineteenth-century”. Gran parte di questi solchi sono stati tracciati da Newman percorrendo una strada faticosa e mai lineare, che lo studioso oggi può seguire attingendo al voluminoso corpus delle opere e all’altrettanto ricco apparato critico e biografico andato formandosi negli anni a commento dei suoi scritti. Assieme a John Keble e Hurrel Froude, Newman fondò le basi di quello che passa alla storia come Oxford Movement, un’esperienza intellettuale nata fra i Colleges dell’Università di Oxford che mirava a ricostruire le basi cattoliche della Chiesa Anglicana, in un contesto di generale inquietudine nei confronti dell’istituzione ecclesiastica e dei modi da questa adottati per declinare la professione di fede all’interno del tessuto sociale dell’epoca. Gli uomini del Movement concentrarono i propri sforzi teorici nella stesura e pubblicazione di numerosi Tracts for the Times, nei quali si affrontavano i temi ecclesiologici più disparati, col fine di attivare un dialogo riformatore in seno alla Chiesa d’Inghilterra. La pubblicazione dei Tracts fu di breve durata (1833-1845) ma foriera di importanti conseguenze per la società inglese e per l’esistenza di Newman, coincidendo la sua conversione al cattolicesimo con la cessazione delle pubblicazioni (1845). La conversione di Newman fece enorme impressione sull’opinione pubblica, specie per il forte sentimento antiromano che circolava nelle fila dell’establishment inglese. Il motto “No Popery” costituiva un refrain udibile in molte delle produzioni culturali dell’epoca e in special modo nei romanzi a tema religioso, fra le cui pagine il cattolico si muove come personaggio intriso di caratteristiche negative proprie del villain: “a spy, a secret agent, suave, supercilious and satanically unscrupulous, laying his cunning plots for the submission of England to ‘Jesuitocracy’”. Falsità, propensione all’inganno, sete di potere, assenza di scrupoli erano tutti connotati che l’immaginazione protestante associava alla Chiesa di Roma: la conversione procurò a Newman accuse dello stesso segno che il futuro cardinale cercò di dissipare nei suoi scritti, impegnandosi ad arrivare a una fetta di pubblico il più vasta possibile mediante due romanzi e la celebre autobiografia spirituale Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864). Le opere letterarie di Newman conobbero un dilagante successo, intrise com’erano di istanze culturali associate alla vita religiosa e di elementi autobiografici che andavano a soddisfare la curiosità del pubblico per la vicenda personale di uno degli uomini più in vista del regno di Vittoria. La peculiare intersecazione fra la determinante storico-culturale e quella autobiografica nella testualizzazione letteraria newmaniana è l’oggetto di studio qui proposto. La ricerca prende il via da un iniziale progetto su biografia e romanzo in relazione alla cosiddetta “crisi religiosa” che caratterizza gli anni vittoriani. Nel considerare i vari aspetti della questione assieme al mio tutor Prof. Enrico Reggiani, si è constatato come non fosse opportuno inscrivere la figura di Newman in uno studio tematico e pluritestuale, metodologicamente orientato a una prospettiva storico-culturale: l’influenza del cardinale sulle lettere di derivazione anglofona appare caratterizzata da un’imponente, multilivellare pervasività che echeggia sia nelle pratiche artistiche dell’epoca, ossia nell’opera della già citata Rossetti, nell’estetica della Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, nella poesia di Gerald Manley Hopkins, che in quelle novecentesche, come il sistema testuale joyciano. Se il ruolo determinante del pensiero newmaniano è riconosciuto e analizzato dalla critica nel dettaglio dei suoi aspetti teologico-religiosi, altrettanto non può dirsi dei suoi scritti più specificamente letterari: il lavoro qui presentato sarà da intendersi pertanto come un dispositivo di avvicinamento a questi aspetti dell’opera di Newman. A tal fine si è deciso di concentrare lo studio sulla close-reading di uno dei due romanzi newmaniani, Loss and Gain (1848), la cui testualità sarà investigata mediante un selezionato apparato metodologico afferente in primis al macrotesto dell’autore e in secundis a più recenti formulazioni teoriche di taglio narratologico. / In an 1890 composition dedicated to the memory of John Henry Newman, Christina Rossetti metaphorized his legacy into “springtides, set against the neap/ Of calmer souls: thy flood rebuked their rill”. She so sought to synthesize the transformative qualities of Newman’s existence (1801-1890) in the context of the “very long nineteenth century”, as defined by Margot Finn. Along with John Keble and Hurrell Froude, Newman founded the Tractarian Movement, an Oxford-based intellectual movement intending to rebuild the Catholic foundation of the Anglican Church, which at the time was facing an ever growing disquiet on behalf of its affiliates, for both ecclesiological and political reasons. In order to ignite a reformative dialogue within the Church of England, the Tractarians published a relevant number of Tracts from 1833 to 1845, when Newman converted to Catholicism. Newman’s conversion sparked a huge controversy within the public opinion, catholics at the time being subjected to a heavy cultural stigma within the establishment. Falsity, a propension to deceit and thirst for power connoted the catholic character in numerous religious novels in the Victorian period, thus prompting Newman to defend himself from similar allegations in various writings such as the Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864). Newman’s literary writings were extremely successful, since they put on display a peculiar intersection between religious cultural issues and his own autobiography. Such intersection is the object of my thesis, which will articulate around a close-reading of Newman’s novel Loss and Gain (1848) in order to highlight the main features of the Cardinal’s literary theory and practice in relation to his overall theological views, and to project them on a synchronic and diacronic perspective to attest Newman’s legacy on Eighteenth and Nineteenth century literature.

The research project, conceptualized through a comparative historical framework, focuses on an analysis of American and English education policy from 1964 to 2000 with particular emphasis on the inter-relationships between education policy and socio-economic disadvantage. Although the focus of the project is primarily the last four decades of the twentieth century, there is an initial consideration of immediate post-war discourses on poverty and education focusing on the impact that these had upon educational structures and curricula. Critical theory, particularly as conceptualized by Jürgen Habermas, and the Culture of Poverty thesis advanced by Oscar Lewis, form the methodological frameworks that underpin the research project. The research, which was conducted in two post-industrial communities with significant rates of socio-economic deprivation and records of poor educational attainment within secondary education, considers the impact of national policy upon the communities, particularly in relationship to socio-economic deprivation, access to education, equality of opportunity and equality of outcomes. The research design utilises the case study method to scrutinise two secondary schools within these communities as a means of analysing how teachers negotiated the implementation of education policies for their respective student populations. Documentary evidence and oral histories provide the methods to delve into this interconnection between education and socio-economic deprivation while modified Skinnerian and Eastonian frameworks provide the foundations upon which to analyse the data. The dissertation is not meant to trace the history of two schools and two communities but to see the schools and communities as a microcosm of American and English secondary education. The intention, therefore, is to employ the research findings to prescribe potential and future policy directions. Essentially, tracing educational history to understand it while utilising educational history as a tool to inform new and innovative policy where education can ameliorate socio-economic deprivation in each nation.