Despite being ubiquitous within the Classical style, pedals have received little attention in the scholarly literature. This dissertation adopts a form-functional approach to understanding them with an eye toward distinguishing their normative and non-normative functions. A form-functional approach begins by parsing the musical surface into formal and temporal functions. William Caplin has identified five distinct temporal functions: 1) "before-the-beginning"; 2) "the beginning"; 3) "the middle"; 4) "the end"; and 5) "after-the-end." Appearing mostly in locations 2) and 5), tonic pedals express two primary functions, formal initiation and postcadential closing for a theme. Dominant pedals also express postcadential function, but close less stable areas like transitions. They also appear in location 3), most notably in contrasting middles, where they bring harmonic contrast or uncertainty and anticipate a recapitulation. Because they frequently mediate between the home and subordinate key, I have devised four categories of dominant pedal that bring a sense of clarity to the range of functions dominant pedals can serve. V[supercript d] => V[supercript d] pedals normally express a postcadential standing-on-the-dominant or a contrasting-middle function. V[supercript t] => V[supercript t] pedals express the same functions, but in a more stable way. V[supercript t] => V[supercript d] pedals express a retransition function or a contrasting-middle function that enacts a harmonic transformation. The V[supercript d] => V[supercript t] pedal also expresses a contrasting-middle function, but reverses the direction of the harmonic transformation. Finally, with regard to their non-normative functions, pedals can loosen their formal contexts by generating form-functional overlap and expansion. / text

While scholars have carefully and rightly noted the profound influence that More’s abolitionist writings had on both the abolition movement and the developing women’s rights movement, they omit what is an essential examination of her poetics, particularly the self-conscious poetic form that she develops in her poem, “Slavery, A Poem” (1788). In conjunction with noting the rhetorical and textual devices that More implements in “Slavery” to illustrate the art of self-conscious poetics, this paper explores these same devices in a later satirical essay of More’s entitled Hints towards forming a Bill for the Abolition of the White Female Slave Trade, in the Cities of London and Westminster (1804), arguing that, by comparing the rhetorical points of overlap in these two pieces, we can identify that More’s contribution to her contemporary literary culture transcended mere female participation and publication. More importantly, through “Slavery” and Hints, More develops a unique rhetoric – a poetics of control – with which to discuss the physical constraints of slavery, the trope of the individual versus the collective, and the essential poetic and rhetorical practice of blending authorial creativity with conventional constraint. / text

Samuel Beckett’s skepticism regarding language’s ability to communicate effectively drives his dramas’ use of formal and stylistic gestures that emphasize the musical potential of words. In this report, I analyze Beckett’s play Endgame (1958) in light of its musical elements and their implications for performance. Critics have debated the putative presence of sonata form, a type of musical structure prevalent among classical pieces from the eighteenth century, in Endgame. Emmanuel Jacquart proposes that the play follows such a form, while Thomas Mansell and Catherine Laws doubt the possibility of such interdisciplinarity. Mansell wonders whether the ascription of sonata form to Endgame’s structure merely couches dramatic fundamentals in musical terms, while Laws argues that the lack of harmonic structure in human speech prevents a spoken medium like drama from fully absorbing the formal conventions of classical music. I explore the uncharted territory between these two critical camps, linking the implications of Jacquart’s position for the performance of Endgame, as well as Mansell’s and Laws’s reiterations of the fundamental separation of language and music, to Beckett’s own preoccupation with the inability of language to express thought and emotion adequately. Ultimately, I contend that Endgame functions not simply as a sonata, but as a frustrated sonata; that is, it approximates sonata form but can never fully replicate it. As such, Endgame becomes a point of origin for Beckett’s more experimental later plays, a concept I illustrate by demonstrating how Play (1963), the work commonly regarded as the turning point between Beckett’s early and late dramatic styles, essentially revisits and refines the frustrated sonata. / text

This research will strive to establish a design methodology to achieve an ideal balance or ratio between solar energy available at a given site and the electrical energy requirement of a residence in a humid subtropical climate. Solar technology should be considered as an important element of the design and not a mere energy source added after the design has been completed. The introduction of this technology should be established at the conceptual stage and evolve through the whole design process of the project. Solar energy is without doubt the best choice as an alternate to fossil fuels in Florida's humid subtropical climate, however harnessing this readily available energy source requires careful planning. Adding solar energy components during the final design stage will impact negatively on the aesthetics of the design and most likely will not provide the energy necessary to achieve sustainability. Each climate and latitude requires different strategies to maximize available solar energy, thus the design has to adapt to the energy source of the given site. Florida's original vernacular design concepts dealt with solar energy issues in a passive way, by providing shelter from the sun and creating air circulation for evaporative cooling. Today's photovoltaic technology can activate vernacular principles and create new sustainable typologies. Unlike tropical climates, the humid subtropical deals with high relative humidity in the summer months, thus demanding the use of mechanical cooling in order to reach the required comfort zone within the building's envelope. Fortunately solar energy is readily available in Florida during the critical summer season when the largest electrical loads are required by mechanical cooling. An "off the grid" sustainable design could be achieved if electrical energy use is minimized to the essentials, wind technology is used to complement the photovoltaic system and alternate energy sources as gas, alcohol and alike are used for other household energy demands that do not need to be of electrical type. This design criteria will allow Florida residents to experience a more fulfilling existence by interacting with nature in a more dynamic, efficient and intimate way.

We depend on our collective senses in order to rationalize and negotiate space. Unfortunately, sound and acoustics has become a secondary concern to that of the visual perception in architecture. The initial design intent for many modern performance spaces and music education space, for about the past one-hundred years, has not been driven by sound or acoustics, as a consequence the visual perception has become the major infl uence. Prior to modern acoustical applications, performance spaces have been designed for the essence of sound and the form and function had no divisible lines, but with amplifi cation of sound and the technology to reproduce and manipulate sound, form over took acoustics as a design based idea. This thesis is a direct reaction to the way acoustics and sound, in performance spaces, has evolved over the past hundred years with the advent of modern acoustical technology. This thesis will ask the question of how can sound and acoustics be the main inspiration for the design intent and a formal determinate of space. By using sound and acoustics as a design based method of space making, architecture can achieve a visualization of space through the aural perception of sound. Reexamining how sound reacts to the geometric shapes and forms in architecture can unveil a solution to poor acoustics in many performance spaces, and result in a method of visualizing sound and acoustics in space and not merely a visual experience of the built form. This document will analyze the principals and the application of acoustical design in performance and musical education spaces and reestablish the connection of music, acoustics and architecture. The outcome for this thesis will result in the holistic approach to an acoustically designed performance center inter-connected with scholastic spaces for musical education.

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We read a novel one sentence at a time. The first scale of attention for even the longest novel is the play of forces within the thousands of individual sentences. This project aims to rescale the analysis of novelistic form, elucidating this play of forces: how do they shape attention, and how do structures of attention give rise to aesthetic experience? We recognize the importance of form in music and architecture in part because there is no referential content to distract us. When it comes to the realist novel, however, its rich referential field easily obscures the dynamics of experience created by form. This study seeks to elucidate those dynamics. Chapter One analyzes Austen’s long interval of tension. Austen’s capacious sentence stretches attention over an entire descriptive event, producing drama and crises even when events in the fictional world are characterized by equilibrium and serenity. With the syntax of the sentence unresolved, attention cannot rest. An achieved description thus has perceptual corollaries in temporal commitment, and in attention that is divided between the immediate claims of elaboration and the prospect of closure. In Dickens, microstructures of just one to three sentences elicit the sudden apercu. Like metaphor, the apercu emerges through our recognition of a meaningful relationship between actions, facts, and utterances. Dickens presents only the raw materials of discovery (say, by juxtaposing a character’s mutually contradictory statements), leaving to us the second-order activity of recognition (her disingenuousness). Chapter Three examines how Hardy employs linguistic analogues to represent the essential structure of perceptual experience. Chapter Four, on late James, shows how shifts in attention on two scales produce two distinct experiences. Shifts to the periphery of a scene act as a temporal ballast, adding weight to the perceived dimensions of the passage. Shifts within the sentence elicit intense perceptual involvement, even when that absorption exceeds what is warranted by the semantic plane. The essence of the novel’s referenced world can be preserved in memory, but linguistic form resists memory; it is immediate and ephemeral. During the act of reading, it is one of the novel’s greatest pleasures.

Hu Shi began the modern Chinese New Poetry movement by calling for the liberation of poetic forms, but what constitutes "form" and how best to approach its liberation have remained difficult issues, as the apparent material, objective reality of literary form is shown to be deeply embedded both culturally and historically. This dissertation presents five movements of the dialectic between form and history, each illustrated by case studies drawn from the theory and practice of modern Chinese poetry: first, the highly political and self-contradictory demand for linguistic transparency; second, the discourse surrounding poetic obscurity and alternative approaches to the question of "meaning"; third, a theory of poetry based on its musicality and a reading practice that emphasizes sameness over difference; four, poetry's status as "untranslatable" as against Chinese poetry's reputation as "already translated"; and fifth, the implications of an "iconic" view of poetic language. By reading a selection of poets and schools through the lens of their approaches to form, I allow the radical difference within the tradition to eclipse the more familiar contrast of modern Chinese poetry with its foreign and pre-modern others. My dissertation represents a preliminary step towards a historically-informed formalism in the study of modern Chinese literature. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

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Until recently, Schubert's sonata forms have been treated as the partially successful products of a classicist who often misunderstood his models. The development of sonata form in his early string quartets, though, raises serious questions about such a view. The quartets (ca. 1810 to 1816), constitute the composer's first concentrated work in large-scale instrumental music and include some of his earliest compositions in any genre. The first sonata-form movements all lack the most basic features of the structure, specifically a clearly delineated subordinate theme and subordinate key in the exposition. The evolution of Schubert's sonata form from 1810 to 1816 consists of an expansion to encompass such necessary tonal and thematic contrast. This process, however, does not lead to a close imitation of the Classical prototype but rather to a highly original reinterpretation of the form. By the end of 1814, many of the distinctive tendencies in his writing are already evident. These include (1) unusual modulatory strategies dependant upon tonal ambiguity and surprise, (2) the first signs of an intensely lyrical quality in the thematic material, (3) complementary, as opposed to derivative, thematic relationships, in which the musical discourse is divided between two contrasting motivic regions connected by underlying harmonic links and (4) a widespread allusiveness in his handling of harmony, which allows an initial harmonic event or "sensitive sonority" to become increasingly significant as the music proceeds. Ultimately Schubert's innovative approach to sonata form, while weakening the Classical attributes of clarity and conciseness, infuses a new atmosphere into the structure, making it the perfect vehicle for the expression of Romantic sentiment.