Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2009. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 308-324).

Thesis (M.A.)--Montana State University--Bozeman, 2007. / Typescript. Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Susan Kollin. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 74-77).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2006. / Title from title screen (site viewed May 23, 2007). PDF text: 70 p. UMI publication number: AAT 3250371. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in paper, microfilm and microfiche formats.

This thesis aims to present the various aspects of Georg Kaiser's view of art and to examine its dependence on certain philosophical concepts. The first chapter attempts to show that Kaiser's vision of the regeneration of man was subject to different influences, and that it varied depending on which of the three concepts of "totality," "energy" and "spirit" (Geist) was predominant. He saw man's regeneration either as a return to his original wholeness, or as the intensification of his life-force, or as his spiritualization. The second chapter tries to show that these three concepts determine both Kaiser's views on the psychology of artistic creation, on the purpose, content, form and effect of the drama and his image of the artist. Whereas in some of his writings artistic creation is seen as a self-centered activity which provides the artist either with insight or with compensation for what he is missing in life, in most of them art is considered beneficial to mankind in that it stimulates man's regeneration. It is myth, according to Kaiser, that assures man of his ability to gain perfection. This is why "both the symbolism and the structure of so many of his plays are derived from myth. Art is understood as an attempt to free man from his historical bonds and curtailments, and to place him in a mythical context that links him with his primordial state of perfection. Art thus becomes a redeeming force, the artist a redeemer. The third chapter attempts to demonstrate that Kaiser's self-image in his theoretical writings corresponds with his conception of the artist in general. He wavered between an ideal and a sensuous determination of his existence as an artist. There were times when he would not allow anything or anybody to distract him from writing, and others when he lamented the one-sidedness of this occupation. On various occasions he delcared that he was writing exclusively for himself, and on others he saw himself as a benefactor of mankind. When, after 1933, his work was banned and he himself persecuted, he compared himself with Jesus who had come to rescue mankind and in return was crucified. The fourth chapter seeks to relate the theoretical writings to those of Kaiser's plays which have art and the artist as their theme. It is only in these that a development of Kaiser's conception of the artist becomes apparent. In Kaiser's early work between 1897 and 1911, the genuine artist is described as a somewhat superior being. But although he is critical of society, he is still part of it. In the Expressionist plays from 1912 to 1922, the artist initially is seen in an extreme abstract position from which he propagates to man the vision of regeneration. Towards the end of this period, however, this idealism is rejected as unrealistic and unattainable. The artist becomes a person who tries to achieve perfection within himself and his work. For the following twelve years, the artist virtually disappears from Kaiser's works, and it is only after 1933 that his problems and his role in society are again discussed in Kaiser's plays. For the next five years, Kaiser tried to reconcile the ideal with reality, but after his flight to Switzerland in 1938, art and reality appear to be incompatible. The artist passes his judgement on a mankind which has missed its chance of redemption. He flees from the masses which not only misunderstand but reject his admonitions, and he withdraws into the sabred realm of art in which alone the ideal of perfection can be achieved. / Arts, Faculty of / Central Eastern Northern European Studies, Department of / Graduate

This dissertation addresses the problem of raising consciousness in Walter Benjamin's writings, which focuses on the problem in his major early works, and in his later writings on photography, film, and mimesis generally. It is a closely-read interpretation, following Benjamin in his attempt to present a historical-philosophical treatment of the literature he was examining. However, it moves away from Benjamin's methodology at critical moments, presenting its own reading of the raising of consciousness as a problem not only for political theorists, but for those interested in the philosophy of history as well. The chapters focus on Benjamin's key major early works, the untranslated "Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism," his dissertation, and the essay on Goethe's Elective Affinities. It contains a lengthy chapter on Benjamin's famous Trauerspiel book, and two on mimesis and the essay on the work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility. The dissertation casts these works in a different light, one under which they have not been examined previously: this light bears the shadow of Kant. Although this is not a dissertation on Benjamin and Kant, the place of the subject and its historicity is considered when contemplating the raising of consciousness at stake in each individual chapter. The question of temporality is present in each case, and marks the presence of Kant as the figure who attempted so articulately to bridge reason and history. Benjamin realized this, and so his attention to consciousness and its temporality is so keen in all of his writings. Conclusions are always difficult to enumerate, especially when a work sees itself as necessarily unfinished. It is the opinion of this author that it is evident, in each chapter, both how Benjamin wrote about raising consciousness, what that meant in each case examined, and how this author interjected to highlight, stress, and invent new ways to read what is often so terribly obscure.

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Thesis (M.A.)--Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, 1998. / Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-06, page: 2840. Typescript. Abstract precedes thesis as preliminary leaves [1]-2. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 104-106).

This dissertation explores how in the mid-nineteenth-century, the outline, an element in art, became a symbolic form for the relationship between the individual and society. Artists like J.M.W. Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites either blurred or overstressed their outlines to highlight tensions in the ideal of the liberal individual. Writers like Alfred Tennyson, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot responded with their own experiments in characterization and plot. In attending to the conceptual analogies between the outline of figures in art, the outline of literary character, and the outline of the individual in society, I explore the gradual decline of the cultural narrative of personal development and the waning of the belief in the ability to individuate in an ever-burgeoning society. Because of the ease with which the outline’s symbolic meaning traverses the boundaries of painting, literature, and lived experience, it fosters a verbal-visual vocabulary for experiencing sociality to which the visually literate Victorians were intuitively attuned. Chapter one surveys the debate about outline, tracing a line from Blake to Ruskin. Focusing on outlines in Turner’s Snow-Storm and Millais’s Isabella, I demonstrate painting’s ability to formally articulate social critique. The following chapters explore some ways in which texts experiment with outline: diffusion, evasion, and superimposition. For instance, in In Memoriam A.H.H., rather than regain a distinguishable selfhood after loss, Tennyson gradually blends his own self with the selves that surround him, in line with Turner’s aerial perspective. In Villette, Brontë draws on her experience as a failed artist and her reading of Ruskin’s Modern Painters to fashion a uniquely feminine method of characterization, which I call negative space. She defines Lucy Snowe by filling in the space around her, leaving her to come out in relief. Finally, inspired by the photographic technique of double-exposure, Middlemarch develops characters by superimposing their identities upon one another, so that their outlines can no longer protect their illusion of singularity. Middlemarch shows how the most superficial social impulse of projecting our own preconceived notions onto our neighbors, can actually enrich rather than diminish their identities, and thus help to develop society as a whole. / 2027-03-31T00:00:00Z

Picturing Reality proposes new literary historical and art historical contexts for the development of American literary realism in the late nineteenth century. While studies of American literary realism have tended to emphasize the importance of social, political, and cultural contexts in determining the forms and aims of realist representation, Picturing Reality demonstrates the importance of aesthetic contexts for a realist art of fiction. In particular, this project proposes that painting served as a model for the development of American realist fiction of the late nineteenth century that aspired to achieve the status of art because it offered a compelling model for reconciling the aspirations of prose writing to be artistic with the requirements that it be realistic. Painting served as a creative inspiration, a conceptual template, and a practical example for the development of an art of literary realism at a time when realist writing was more often seen to be anything but a fine art. The development of an art of realist fiction was to a large extent predicated on the degree to which extended narratives in prose could “picture” in order to represent dimensions of reality that had been resistant to representation by traditional narrative forms. Picturing Reality demonstrates this influence through the writings of four American writers – William Dean Howells, Henry James, Hamlin Garland, and Sarah Orne Jewett – all of whom used painting as a model for understanding themselves as realist artists. The model of painting served each of these writers in unique and idiosyncratic ways, but in all cases the sense that it was the task of the novelist or writer of prose to “picture reality” had a pervasive influence on the form, style, and content of their works. By reading broadly and deeply in their critical and fictional body of work, and by reading reviews and critiques of contemporary critics, as well as the work of other writers and artists who served as both models or obstacles for the development of an art of realism, this project seeks to situate these four writers in their literary historical and art historical contexts. In the first chapter, I show the difficulties William Dean Howells faced as he sought to make an art of realism, and suggest that American Pre-Raphaelitism furnished a model by which realistic representation could satisfy the eye of both the scientist and the artist – a model that could be adapted to the form of the realist novel. In the second chapter, I examine Henry James’s early aesthetic education among writers associated with the art journal The Crayon, as well as among painters such as William Morris Hunt and John La Farge, and look at his early career as an art reviewer in order to demonstrate the depth and breadth of painting’s influence on James’s subsequent art of fiction. In the third chapter I demonstrate the ways in which Impressionist painting informed Hamlin Garland’s theory of local color fiction and served as a model for his sketches and stories. And in the fourth chapter I demonstrate the ways in which Sarah Orne Jewett sought to create a form of local color writing in which vivid description and word-painting would take precedence over plot-driven narrative by showing Jewett’s own complex relationship to painting – particularly watercolors. For all these writers, painting served as a complex – and ultimately ambivalent – model for the development of an art of realist fiction.