Thesis (M.A.)--Carleton University, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 138-145). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (doctoral) - University, Cambridge (England), 2000. / Includes bibliographical references and index.

Wong Kar-wai is a premier avant-garde auteur of Hong Kong cinema. In the existing research, postmodernism is considered as a predominant approach to shed light on Wong’s aesthetics, poetics and politics. Being the iconoclastic ‘poet of time,’ Wong Kar-wai is extolled as a leading figure for his postmodernist style of visually unique and emotional resonant film works. Recurring motifs, such as alienation and rejection, time and memory, pursuit and loss, are regarded as representations of cultural and political anxieties of Hong Kong people in the context of 1980s and 1990s. Wong’s characteristic exoticism and cosmopolitism in his films also distinguishes him from other Chinese-language directors. However, when we expand the scope of the postmodern terrain, we find modernism and its attendant aesthetics are just as relevant and important as postmodernism to the understanding of Wong’s oeuvre. This thesis evokes a comparative perspective of modernism proposed by Eugene Lunn as an aesthetic approach, with an illustrative analysis by using David Bordwell’s and Kristin Thompson’s work on non-Hollywood cinema. This approach emphasizes four major directions of the social and cultural aspects influenced by modernism in art. Using this approach requires researchers to find cinematic representations of modernism in terms of aesthetic self-consciousness, juxtaposition of time, ambiguity and dehumanization within the film. This research takes Wong Kar-wai’sAshes of Time Redux (2008) as a case study to explore the alternative interpretations beyond postmodernism. The investigation of Wong’s uses of modernist approach involves the analysis of his experiments of conventional film techniques and strategic employment of the mise-en-scene, camera angles, lenses, lighting, and music, which constitute his pictorial world. My assertion is that Wong’s juxtaposition of time and space createsan elusive and ambiguous fictional world in response to his reflection on the dehumanization of an integral individual subject in the modernized world.

My dissertation, titled Hanging-Together: Kant, Goethe, and the Theory of Aesthetic Modernism, observes that many of the composers, artists, and writers working in the early twentieth century developed theories of aesthetic coherence (Zusammenhang) that contradict the canonical interpretation of the period in terms of discontinuity and fragmentation. I show that the modernists drew on Goethe’s morphology in order to conceive of the inner coherence of the work of art as neither an aggregate (in which the parts precede the whole), nor as a system (in which an idea of the whole precedes its parts), but as a morphological nexus of formal variations. My thesis is that aesthetic modernism negates the ‘outer coherence’ of the work of art in order to reveal its ‘inner coherence,’ and that this morphological concept of inner coherence does not entail the totalizing ideal maintained by the poetic and aesthetic tradition from Aristotle to Kant. I develop this argument over the course of five chapters: the first examines Kant’s concept of systematic unity; the second focuses on Goethe’s critical response to Kant’s philosophy of nature; while the last three trace Goethe’s morphology through the theoretical reflections of a modernist composer, painter, and writer—Arnold Schönberg, Wassily Kandinsky, and Alfred Döblin. What emerges is a theory of aesthetic modernism that takes into account the historical specificity of the period without reducing its significance to the ‘break’ it supposedly effects with tradition.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 254-263). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (M.A.)--Marshall University, 2003. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains iv, 80 p. including illustrations. Bibliography: p. 73-78. "Works cited": p. 67-72.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 1997. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 267-278).

Thesis (Ph. D. in English)--Vanderbilt University, Dec. 2008. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 254-263).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 1994. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 276-284).