This essay illustrates the principal technical and compositional innovations in the piano literature of the twentieth century, through an examination of the piano etudes written by the period's most accomplished pianist-composers. The etude is generally regarded as one of the most common musical forms designed to provide pianists with practice material for perfecting a particular technical skill. The most influential composer who established the norm for the composition of piano etudes and raised their suitability as concert works was Frederic Chopin. Piano etudes, however, gradually shifted as compositional vehicles in the twentieth century. Composers began to discard the harmonic language of traditional theory by employing more irregular and atonal materials, which gradually replaced the standard figurations of nineteenth-century composition. The author addresses works based on traditional technical idioms such as intervals (double thirds, fourths, fifths, and octaves), scales, arpeggios, chords, repeated notes and finger independence in Chapter Four. In Chapter Five, works containing modern types of notation and unusual technical requirements are examined. The format for these chapters is as follows: general comments on the complete work, compositional description of each individual piece and finally, performance remarks. This essay is limited to piano etudes written by composers who are also generally regarded as accomplished pianists. The composers discussed in this essay are Claude Debussy, Alexander Scriabin, Bela Bartók, Olivier Messiaen, Geörgy Ligeti, Louise Talma, and William Bolcom. In addittion, this essay collects and examines piano etudes that are considered suitable for both study and concert programming, a criterion that narrows the etude selection examined in this essay to works that have been recorded and performed in public.

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This thesis considers the hitherto unexplored question of modernism and non-fictional genres. Although modernist studies have long been attentive to the implications of modernism’s “manifestos”, and recent work on modernist magazines has shed new light on forms beyond poetry and fictional prose, little attention has been afforded to other non-fictional writing. Similarly, although a growing school of criticism has emphasised the significance of “the everyday” in modernist texts, few have examined non-fiction concerned with leisure or daily life – a particularly unusual omission given the rich possibilities such texts offer for our understanding of how everyday lives relate to wider society. This thesis examines instructional texts which make radical interventions in the social and political upheavals which follow the First World War. Contra to the well-debunked yet still pervasive narratives which typify the modernist text as a work of disinterested – even isolated – genius, these examples demonstrate a broad-ranging, complex engagement with popular venues. Surveying examples of popular genres such as cookbooks, travel guides and radio programs written by a range of canonical and lesser-known modernist writers, it demonstrates how modernist writers re-appropriated the common features of such mainstream forms in order to stage various (and varied) interventions in local and national affairs. Its reading of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Somerset (1949) and Scottish Scene: The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Albyn (1934), by Hugh MacDiarmid and Lewis Grassic Gibbon, shows how adopting the “textual codes” of travel guides provided authors with a means of writing back against the over-simplistic narratives of region and nation popular in other examples of the genre. Likewise, The Alice B Toklas Cook Book (1954) and F.T. Marinetti’s The Futurist Cookbook (1932) are read as divergent examples of texts which stage radical interventions in food practices as they relate to nationhood and conflict. Comparable interventions are also unearthed in the media. Flann O’Brien’s Cruiskeen Lawn columns (1940-66), published under the name Myles na gCopaleen, are often read in studies of Irish political and cultural consciousness. This thesis argues that they must also be read in terms of genre, demonstrating how a subversive use of headlines, bylines and other page architecture signals O’Brien’s use of the newspaper form itself to pass comment on the cultural and political life of the Republic of Ireland. Finally, this thesis turns to broadcast culture, with a chapter on radio and documentary films. Through readings of Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen's radio broadcasts, and the GPO Film Unit collaboration of Benjamin Britten and W.H. Auden, this chapter shows how irony and experiment allowed writers to turn state-sanctioned media to their own ends during the interwar years – suggesting that literary readings are crucial to understanding modernism's engagement with new media. Through these different readings, this thesis highlights the sheer diversity of modernist genres which have either received little critical attention, or whose formal specifics have been under-acknowledged. As a result, it is able to reframe modernism’s approach to several areas of twentieth-century life, approaching anew pressing areas of concern in the field – for instance, space and place, the circulation of texts, the everyday, and the commercial, lowbrow and domestic – demonstrating the critical importance of instructive genres to understanding literary modernism.

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Thesis (M.A. in National Security Affairs)--Naval Postgraduate School, December 1990. / Thesis Advisor(s): Abenheim, Donald. Second Reader: Teti, Frank M. "December 1990." Description based on title screen as viewed on March 30 2010. DTIC Descriptor(s): Foreign Policy, United States Government, Variations, Abandonment, Pressure, Fear, Dissociation, Policies, Cold War. DTIC Identifier(s): Foreign Policy, History, United States, Isolationism, World War 1, World War 2, Cold War, Post Cold War Era, Theses. Author(s) subject terms: Isolationism, U.S. Foreign Policy, U.S. History - 1914-1990. Includes bibliographical references (p. 177-185). Also available in print.

Over the past two decades, American poet Jorie Graham has composed six books of poems. Graham struggles to understand how we make sense of the world through thinking grounded in the logical operations of reason and through thinking that operates as more of a detached wandering that enables direct experiential participation in the present moment-modes of thought occasionally differentiated as "intellect" and "intuition." Throughout her work, Graham repeatedly experiments with ways to "frustrate" the intellect in order for intuition to wander over an idea while at the same time she relies on the intellect to rescue the mind from directionless wandering. In her early poetry Graham explores ways of defining and describing what it feels like to think. Later, she enacts thinking within the lines of her poems, sometimes allegorizing the operation of the intellect and intuition and sometimes provoking readers into an experience of one particular way of thinking through the act of reading. This study examines Graham's various successes and failures as she struggles to discover "blossoming" moments of balance between the controlling intellect and the wandering intuition. Beginning with the origins of this line of thinking in Graham's early work, this study traces the poet's path of development through each book of poems in order to demonstrate the back and forth momentum shifts of intellect giving way to intuition and intuition being organized by rational thought. Through her epistemological errancies, her wanderings within and without ways of knowing, Graham discovers "blossoming" moments of wholeness where both modes of thought meet "in solution, unsolved." / Master of Arts

“An Eco-Alchemical Vision: Hermetic Writing in Twentieth-Century British Literature” examines the intersection of alchemical thinking with contemporary green discourses. This project focuses on four writers from the last century: W. B. Yeats, Charles Williams, Lindsay Clarke, and Patrick Harpur. It considers a wide selection of their writing across literary genres, including the novel, the short story, the essay and poetry. While each of the texts under consideration figures the relationship between the human and the nonhuman world in different ways, reading them alongside one another reveals a shared preoccupation with the status of the material world. For these writers, the alchemical tradition offers a way of both speaking and thinking about physical phenomena that affirms our complex entanglement with materiality. Like the medieval and Renaissance alchemists, all four writers seek to disrupt the rigidity of the boundaries often erected between what dominant modes of thinking in the Western philosophic tradition have categorized as organic and inorganic. My analysis of each writer will draw out how the material is represented in their literary work, and what we might gain from reading their work ecocritically. There are thus three converging lines of inquiry that will frame this project: first, how does this minor current of what I am describing as “eco-alchemical” fiction and poetry fit within larger movements in twentieth-century British literature; second, how do these four figures recuperate alchemical thinking for twentieth-century and contemporary audiences; and third, what does this contribute to the current field of ecocriticism.

Thesis advisor: John F. Baldovin / This dissertation is about three key moments in the developing theology of the Church's holiness and sinfulness in the twentieth century: the ressourcement movement of the 1930's-50's, Vatican II, and the pontificate of John Paul II. Chapter One discusses the contributions of these six early-twentieth century theologians: (a) Emile Mersch ---Church as Mystical Body of Christ (b) Henri de Lubac ---the paradoxes in understanding the Church as in time and beyond time (c) Hans urs Von Balthasar ---the Church as covenant (d) Yves Congar ---the scandal of division in the Church and the image of the Church as the People of God (e) Karl Rahner---the Church as sacrament for the World (f) Charles Journet ---the Holy Spirit as the formal cause of the Church Chapter Two discusses the influence of the theologians examined in Chapter One on specific passages in Vatican II's document on the Church, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium (1964). Chapter Three shows how Pope John Paul II further advanced the understanding of the Church's holiness and sinfulness in his millennial program which included two documents, Tertio Millennio Adveniente (1994) and Novo Millennio Ineunte (2001) and a public apology on March 12, 2000 for the sins of the members of the Church. The Conclusion argues that John Paul II's apology was the fruit of a century of theological reflection on the nature and mission of the Church that began with ressourcement theology and was advanced by the convocation of Vatican II and its subsequent documents, particularly Lumen Gentium. Additionally, there is a discussion of the agenda for further theological investigation in the twenty-first century that these three twentieth-century moments suggest. / Thesis (STD) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. School of Theology and Ministry. / Discipline: Sacred Theology.

In this thesis I explore how music-text relations in Frank Zappa’s music work together to express a central narrative, with a particular focus on his use of musical allusion. First, I frame Zappa’s creative perspective from a Dadaist philosophy, illuminating an underlying critique of American culture through the use of musical and lyrical devices such as allusion. I explore how Zappa uses allusion as a narrative device and how these allusions affect a listener’s interpretation of a track. Finally, I provide an in-depth analysis of “Billy the Mountain” from the 1972 album Just Another Band From L.A. I first present an overview and analysis of the narrative as it is presented in the lyrics and then explore how musical parameters contribute to the narrative of the track. By understanding the interaction of music and text, I create a platform from which Zappa’s music can be better understood.