Thesis advisor: Dennis Shirley / In 1814, a group of wealthy Boston merchants led by Francis Cabot Lowell established the Boston Manufacturing Company in Waltham, Massachusetts. In the decades before the Civil War, Lowell and his partners constructed public schools for Waltham children living in the vicinity of the mills and paid many of the schools' educational expenses, including teachers' salaries. The company also promoted adult education through its establishment of the Manufacturers' Library and its support of the Rumford Institute for Mutual Instruction, one of the first lyceums in the United States. Previous research on the Boston Manufacturing Company has primarily focused on its unique labor force ("mill girls") and its role as America's first modern industrial corporation, while the story of the company's involvement in education has been neglected. Based on company records, school committee reports, newspaper accounts, Francis Lowell's personal correspondence, and other archival sources, this study highlights the forgotten history of corporate support for education in antebellum Waltham. The findings indicate that the support given to Waltham educational institutions by Francis Lowell and his business partners can be attributed to their patriotism, generosity, and belief in civic virtue. Implications for the history of American education, the Industrial Revolution, and twenty-first century public/private sector educational partnerships are addressed. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

This dissertation explores the important but long forgotten career of the American artist Francis Davis Millet (1848-1912) and in the process calls into question several common understandings of turn-of-the-century American civic art. Through an examination of Millet’s civic art, including mural painting, illustration, and parades, I argue that Millet attempted to use the works he created for large audiences to help viewers navigate a common modern experience: the cultural diversity they encountered all around them. While many American artists making civic art during this period focused on allegorical scenes and emphasized whiteness, Millet’s images taught audiences about cultural diversity and even reflected a certain cultural sensitivity in their careful rendering of nonwhite subjects. In doing so, Millet employed the rhetoric of empiricism and engaged with his subject matter in a manner understood by his audience to be under the purview of science. This, I argue, aligned his project to the hierarchical understanding of “culture” and “evolution” presented by the anthropological community at the time, which argued for the superiority of white over nonwhite groups. In this way, though Millet attempted to move away from all-white subject matter and used global themes relevant to a modern moment, the underlying message he promoted served to reinforce notions of Anglo American hegemony.

The frontier has long been an important part of mythic American ideology as a space with untapped resources offering the potential for social mobility. This thesis looks at writing representing the three types of frontiers identified by Lucy Lockwood Hazard to demonstrate how this boundary between the “civilized” and “savage” actually reveals the instability and inaccessibility of the American Dream. Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail is one of the quintessential narratives about the geographical frontier; while deeply racist and sexist, it manifests doubts about the rhetoric of inhumanity attributed to indigenous populations. The industrial frontier’s creation of exploitative factory structures that were then translated into domestic spaces is illustrated by William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. The canonical novel speaks to the inability of the poor to achieve social mobility and the reemergence of social hubs as the space of opportunity. Finally, Jade Chang’s 2016 debut novel, The Wangs vs. the World, works to completely reframe the frontier genre by positing characters of color as protagonists, resisting their typical location on the “savage” side of the frontier binary. Chang uses the concept of the spiritual frontier to foreground the difficulties minorities face in order to be accepted into white society. The instabilities manifested by each of these frontiers ultimately point to the ways in which the American Dream has historically been an escapist impossibility and inflicted violence on women, lower classes, and people of color.

Natalie Schmidt Ferreira

Cette recherche a pour but l'étude de situations traumatiques caractérisées par l'absence de langage. Il se penche plus précisément sur une évaluation du lien paradoxal entre l'expérience de mort psychique où le langage fait défaut et entre différentes expressions créatrices dans les arts (au théâtre chez Samuel Beckett, dans la poésie dans l'œuvre de Paul Celan et dans l'œuvre artistique de Francis Bacon), telles des trouvailles spécifiques au renouvellement du langage et de la vie. Cette démarche est soumise à la capacité de l'artiste de supporter la "mort psychique" et l'absence de représentation et de langage, ce que je nomme dans ce travail "le langage négatif", et d'en faire ressortir, par son art, des piliers qui formeraient un nouveau piédestal à la vie, à l'existence, à la créativité et à la découverte. Ce sujet a préoccupé le célèbre psychanalyste britannique Wilfred Bion et l'a amené à développer un ensemble de concepts théoriques et cliniques. Le modèle conçu dans cette recherche utilise les concepts théoriques et cliniques de Bion concernant les psychothérapeutes et psychanalystes et donne la possibilité de définir les différentes voies par lesquelles un artiste réussit à se servir de la créativité ou du processus de création comme étant un contenant (concept fondamental chez Bion) lui permettant d'accéder à des territoires et des domaines psychiques situés au-delà du langage. Dans une certaine mesure, différemment de Bion focalisé sur la thérapie, le modèle préconisé par cette présente recherche, fait essentiellement appel à la création artistique et à l'artiste au sein du processus créatif, comme étant le témoignage de son expérience dans "l'espace de mort". Il permet ainsi, non seulement de découvrir un "langage" propre à l'artiste mais aussi d'enrichir la théorisation thérapeutique psychanalytique de Bion, qui lui-même, tout comme Freud, admet que l'artiste devance le psychanalyste et parfois même lui trace la voie. / The purpose of this research was to study traumatic situations characterized by the absence of language. More specifically, the focus is on the paradoxical relation between the experience of "psychic death" in which language fails and on the other hand, different creative expressions in the arts (in the theatre of Samuel Beckett, in the poetic writings of Paul Celan, and the paintings of Francis Bacon), as well as specific discoveries recreating the possibility of language and even life. This act is made possible by the capability of the artist to support "psychic death" and absence of representation - named in this work "negative language", and to go through it by his art which recreates an access to life, creativity and new discoveries. This subject preoccupied the eminent British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion and led him suggest an abundance of new theoretical and clinical concepts. The model developed in the present research uses these conceptualizations of Bion concerning the psychotherapist and the psychoanalyst and applies it to the different ways that serve the artist to successfully use creative processes to form a container (a fundamental concept in Bion’s theories), and thus get access to territories and zones which are beyond common language. Bion focuses on therapy while the present model and research focuses on the artistic creation as a testimony coming back from the "region of death". It enables not only to find a "language" for the artist but also to enrich the psychoanalytic psychotherapeutic theorization of Bion, who admitted as Freud did that the artist precedes the psychoanalyst and even paves a new way.

No description available.

In this thesis I investigate the nature of noir subjectivity, and the degree to which it can be described as heroic. To investigate these issues, I have chosen to illustrate my argument by analysing my novel, Viper, and two films that renew the noir cycle at different socio-political crossroads in America: in 1958, Alfred Hitchcock???s late noir, Vertigo, and in 1974, Frances Ford Coppola???s neo-noir, The Conversation. Because these texts present an extreme theorisation of deception in terms of the assembling and erasure of subjective identity, they will serve as a basis to explore the question of noir subjectivity. In proceeding thus, I argue in the dissertation that film noir???s most innovative borrowing can be described as a monstrous stitching together of incompatible parts???the real and the imaginary, the past and the present, the living and the dead???which accounts for a cut both between, and within, the image. It is this prosthetic approach to representation that takes the noir mode beyond its existential, individualist limits, and accounts for the subjective wound in noir: the heroic conflict between the singular and the multiple. In my analytic procedure then, I extend the idea of monstrosity beyond its current boundaries in contemporary theory. I do this by fusing Marie H??l??ne Huet???s conception of the monstrous imagination, which is a theory of art, with Gilles Deleuze???s powers of the false, which belongs to a philosophy of time. I posit a dialogic exchange across these analyses and my novel to suggest that the cinematic cut not only accounts for what Deleuze has termed the time-image but also is symptomatic of the chronic wounding of the riven noir hero. These analyses suggest that, while sustaining the aura of authorship through technical innovation and stylistic mastery, film noir serves paradoxically to challenge the mastery of the model designated as masculine. In my novel I continue to deal with the issues raised in the dissertation, through a rearticulation of a subjectivity that irrevocably alters its relation to representation in its affinity with the image, its serial movement through interstitial space, and its novel powers of falsification.

Despite the authoritative and very explicit directions from the Vatican in 1903, the Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne successfully resisted the demands for a major reform of liturgical Church music for 35 years. This thesis will examine the reasons for this strong and effective resistance to the demands of the Holy See and show that despite being complex and interrelated these reasons can be summarised under two fundamental headings. The thesis will examine the broad spectrum of music performed in the Melbourne Archdiocese, but because of the limited availability of information and the prime importance of the two principal churches of the Archdiocese, it shall concentrate on St. Patrick’s Cathedral and on St. Francis Church. The thesis shall also examine in detail the documents of the Holy See concerning liturgical music which were relevant to musical practice in Melbourne. Special attention is drawn to the influential Motu proprio Tra le sollecitudini (1903) issued by Pope Pius X. The time span of this thesis covers the 95 years from March 1843 when the first music was sung in Melbourne’s only Catholic church to 1938 when Archbishop Daniel Mannix ordered the reforms to liturgical music as demanded by the Vatican. The thesis shall demonstrate that the resistance to the reform of liturgical music in the Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne was due to the two following influences: the fact that the new freedom and wealth that the immigrant Irish community of the Archdiocese of Melbourne experienced enabled them to establish churches and liturgies whose grandeur and artistic excellence symbolized their success in establishing a major new social and cultural status in their new home. Church music was one of the great manifestations of this and as an integral part of their new significance and sense of achievement, it was to be jealously guarded. the second was the matter of authority and the independence of the Catholic bishops from the dictates and interference of the Vatican authorities. These Irish-born bishops were trained in an historical milieu in Ireland and Europe which fostered a fierce pride in the value of autonomy from external and alien authority. In this they were given a great degree of protection by the isolation of Australia and its distance from outside authority. In this Archbishops Carr and Mannix both proved to be strongly independent leaders who proved to be most reluctant to automatically implement reforms imposed by the Vatican. It will be shown that only in the fourth decade of the twentieth century was Episcopal authority finally brought to bear to make reforms to liturgical music a reality in the Catholic Church in Melbourne.