Matching Items (321)
Description
In the 1930s, with the rise of Nazism, many artists in Europe had to flee their homelands and sought refuge in the United States. Austrian composer Hanns Eisler who had risen to prominence as a significant composer during the Weimar era was among them. A Jew, an ardent Marxist and composer devoted to musical modernism, he had established himself as a writer of film music and Kampflieder, fighting songs, for the European workers' movement. After two visits of the United States in the mid-1930s, Eisler settled in America where he spent a decade (1938-1948), composed a considerable number of musical works, including important film scores, instrumental music and songs, and, in collaboration with Theodor W. Adorno, penned the influential treatise Composing for the Films. Yet despite his substantial contributions to American culture American scholarship on Eisler has remained sparse, perhaps due to his reputation as the "Karl Marx in Music." In this study I examine Eisler's American exile and argue that Eisler, through his roles as a musician and a teacher, actively sought to enrich American culture. I will present background for his exile years, a detailed overview of his American career as well as analyses and close readings of several of his American works, including three of his American film scores, Pete Roleum and His Cousins (1939), Hangmen Also Die (1943), and None But the Lonely Heart (1944), and the String Quartet (1940), Third Piano Sonata (1943), Woodbury Liederbüchlein (1941), and Hollywood Songbook (1942-7). This thesis builds upon unpublished correspondence and documents available only in special collections at the University of Southern California (USC), as well as film scores in archives at USC and the University of California, Los Angeles. It also draws on Eisler studies by such European scholars as Albrecht Betz, Jürgen Schebera, and Horst Weber, as well as on research of film music scholars Sally Bick and Claudia Gorbman. As there is little written on the particulars of Eisler's American years, this thesis presents new facts and new perspectives and aims at a better understanding of the artistic achievements of this composer.
ContributorsBoyd, Caleb (Author) / Feisst, Sabine (Thesis advisor) / Levy, Benjamin (Committee member) / Oldani, Robert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Simultaneously culture heroes and stumbling buffoons, Tricksters bring cultural tools to the people and make the world more habitable. There are common themes in these figures that remain fruitful for the advancement of culture, theory, and critical praxis. This dissertation develops a method for opening a dialogue with Trickster figures. It draws from established literature to present a newly conceived and more flexible Trickster archetype. This archetype is more than a collection of traits; it builds on itself processually to form a method for analysis. The critical Trickster archetype includes the fundamental act of crossing borders; the twin ontologies of ambiguity and liminality; the particular tactics of humor, duplicity, and shape shifting; and the overarching cultural roles of culture hero and stumbling buffoon. Running parallel to each archetypal element, though, are Trickster's overarching critical spirit of Quixotic utopianism and underlying telos of manipulating human relationships. The character 'Q' from Star Trek: The Next Generation is used to demonstrate the critical Trickster archetype. To be more useful for critical cultural studies, Trickster figures must also be connected to their socio-cultural and historical contexts. Thus, this dissertation offers a second set of analytics, a dialogical method that connects Tricksters to the worlds they make more habitable. This dialogical method, developed from the work of M. M. Bakhtin and others, consists of three analytical tools: utterance, intertextuality, and chronotope. Utterance bounds the text for analysis. Intertextuality connects the utterance, the text, to its context. Chronotope suggests particular spatio-temporal relationships that help reveal the cultural significance of a dialogical performance. Performance artists Andre Stitt, Ann Liv Young, and Steven Leyba are used to demonstrate the method of Trickster dialogics. A concluding discussion of Trickster's unique chronotope reveals its contributions to conceptions of utopia and futurity. This dissertation offers theoretical advancements about the significance and tactics of subversive communication practices. It offers a new and unique method for cultural and performative analyses that can be expanded into different kinds of dialogics. Trickster dialogics can also be used generatively to direct and guide the further development of performative praxis.
ContributorsSalinas, Chema (Author) / de la Garza, Amira (Thesis advisor) / Carlson, Cheree (Committee member) / Olson, Clark (Committee member) / Ellsworth, Angela (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Chris Miller's Souvenirs of Sleep is as serious as it is whimsical, if this is a possibility. The "Museum of the Zoo-real" may be an equally appropriate title as animals are often in performance. In this visual and spiritual investigation, childhood, dream, and the loss of a mother to suicide are the currents. Miller's work is informed by the cinema of Werner Herzog, Andrei Tarkovsky, Robert Bresson and beyond. Miller believes in the power of implication. The poems begin with intense focus, but are often in the business of expansion. Souvenirs of Sleep is a journey toward sense-making, a search for language that might allow it.
ContributorsMiller, Christopher (Author) / Dubie, Norman (Thesis advisor) / Hogue, Cynthia (Committee member) / Ball, Sally (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This study is intended as a catalyst to inspire new ways of thinking by educators, school administrators, and museum educators. It is a study of six K-12 art teachers who have both the technology and the opportunity at their school campuses to use collaborative videoconferencing as part of their instruction in multicultural art, linking their students to the resources of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. The art unit used for the purpose of this study was Latina/o art. Findings show the Smithsonian American Art Museum program to be of high quality and useful i students see the connection between identity of self and multicultural art.
ContributorsFosnight, Estelle (Author) / Erickson, Mary (Thesis advisor) / Stokrocki, Mary (Committee member) / Young, Bernard (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
The author explores the influences on the interiors of Hollywood films of the late 1920s and 30s. The Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, Paris 1925 is examined in historical context and its influence on design trends internationally.
The Hollywood film industry is examined, in general, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and its longtime art director, Cedric Gibbons, in particular. Eight MGM films are discussed and their interiors analyzed for related influence from the 1925 Paris Exposition.
The thesis makes a case for the influence of the 1925 Paris Exposition on Cedric Gibbons and the interiors of the MGM films of the late 1920s and 30s.
The Hollywood film industry is examined, in general, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and its longtime art director, Cedric Gibbons, in particular. Eight MGM films are discussed and their interiors analyzed for related influence from the 1925 Paris Exposition.
The thesis makes a case for the influence of the 1925 Paris Exposition on Cedric Gibbons and the interiors of the MGM films of the late 1920s and 30s.
ContributorsRishell, Ann (Author) / Brandt, Beverly (Thesis advisor) / Bender, Diane (Committee member) / Sweeney, Gray (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
This thesis explores the role of film industry boosterism in Arizona from 1911 to 2014; it argues that boosters consistently employed film as a promotional tool toward building state identity for Arizona. These boosters harnessed a variety of strategies catered specifically to a combination of personal interests and historical circumstances. Consequently, their efforts produced a variety of identities for Arizona that changed over time as new generations of boosters addressed different concerns. These state identities that boosters wanted to build relied heavily on the power of perception, often attempting to overcome or reinforce stereotypical imagery and iconography associated with Arizona. Over time, boosters used the film industry to project Arizona as: a modern and progressive state that had outgrown its frontier past; an ideal setting to make films that relived the mythical Wild West; a film-friendly place of business ideally suited for Hollywood production; and a cultural haven for filmic sophistication. Textual analysis of primary sources comprises the methodology of this thesis. Primary sources include historical newspapers, such as the Arizona Republican, and archival records of Arizona's past governors, including Governors Jack R. Williams and Raul H. Castro. These sources constitute valuable documentation created by boosters in the course of their day-to-day activities promoting Arizona, providing a window into their aspirations, worldviews and strategies. Personal interviews with active and retired members of Arizona's film boosting community are also included as primary source material, intended to capture firsthand accounts of filmic activity in the state. Using these sources as its foundation, this thesis fills a gap in the historiography by analyzing the relationship between the film industry and Arizona's state identity. While a handful of scholarly works have discussed Arizona's film history to a minor extent, they tend to take a pure narrative approach, or offer a "behind-the-scenes" look that focuses on the production aspects of films shot in Arizona. No other work focuses explicitly on boosterism or explores the statewide meaning of Arizona's film history over such a comprehensive period of time. Thus, this thesis offers a previously neglected history of both film and Arizona.
ContributorsEhrfurth, Ryan (Author) / Thompson, Victoria (Thesis advisor) / Vandermeer, Philip (Committee member) / Smith, Karen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
From Frankenstein to District 9: Ecocritical Readings of Classic and Contemporary Fiction and Film demonstrates how American studies methodologies, ecological literary criticism, and environmental justice theory provide both time-tested and new analytical tools for reading texts from transnational perspectives. Recently, American literary scholars have been responding to calls for collective interdisciplinary response to widening social disparities and species collapses caused by climate change in the new epoch recently being termed "the anthropocene." In response, I analyze canonical texts, such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World in juxtaposition with Neill Blomkamp's South African science fiction thriller District 9 and contemporary US American novels such as Toni Morrison's Sula, William Faulkner's "The Bear" in Go Down, Moses and Richard Power's Generosity and The Echo Maker, to show how writers, filmmakers, and academics have been calling attention to dramatic climate events that consequently challenge the public to rethink the relationships among human beings to other species, and to ecological systems of low predictability, high variability, and frequent extremes. Rather than focusing solely on the "human," I examine how the relationships and livelihoods of multi-species communities shape and are shaped by political, economic, and cultural forces. As a whole, this dissertation seeks to make abstract, often intangible global patterns and concepts accessible by providing models for what I call "readings in the anthropocene" or re-readings of classic and contemporary texts and film that offer insights into changing human behavior and suggesting alternative management practices of local and global commons as well as opportunities to imagine how to live in and beyond the anthropocene.
ContributorsTurner, Kyndra (Author) / Adamson, Joni (Thesis advisor) / Lussier, Mark (Committee member) / Sadowski-Smith, Claudia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
By studying of a piece of music paired with specific artwork from the time and place of its composition, one can learn more about the character and artistic merits of both the art and music, as well as their relationship to the culture in which they were created. It is the purpose of this paper to examine one specific idea within this vein of interdisciplinary study. This study explores the presentation of American visual art from the 1920s alongside Dupré's Variations sur un Noël, Op. 20. This correlation provides a platform for deeper insight into the composition. The sights and sounds of America that Dupré observed while composing his variation set, captured in artwork from that period, illustrate some of the unique and distinguishing features of the musical work. This study also explores the history and culture around music and art in the 1920's, as well as some of the existing research on the relationship between music and visual art.
ContributorsSnavley, Ashley Nicole (Author) / Marshall, Kimberlt (Thesis advisor) / Rogers, Rodney (Committee member) / Ryan, Russell (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
This study gathers the expertise of three reputable art teachers, through analysis of qualitative data collected during in-person interviews and classroom observations, as they share their experiences and insights regarding successful methods of motivating and engaging students in their beginning-level art classes. Various works of literature regarding educational motivation are reviewed, and this study begins to address the need for additional research involving this issue, as it applies to teachers of art. Commonalities between the motivational tactics of the participating teachers are discussed, as well as comparison of findings to existing literature. This may be useful to art teachers who are new to the field or who are seeking information regarding successful methods of encouraging motivation and engagement in their beginning -level art classes.
ContributorsClark, Erica (Author) / Young, Bernard (Thesis advisor) / Erickson, Mary (Committee member) / Stokrocki, Mary (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Art museums are institutions with a mission to not only preserve art and culture for the public, but to provide visitors with an educational experience. This qualitative case study includes three art museums in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area: a university art museum, a large public museum in Downtown Phoenix, and a contemporary art museum in the city of Scottsdale. This research study sought to identify the ways in which eight art museum employees from the education and administration departments identify their institutions as educational. Data was collected and analyzed through the methods of direct observations and field notes, one-on-one interviews, and photographs of educational programming.
After examining these art museums and conducting eight interviews, a description of each observation is displayed using examples of photographs and field notes. Although findings suggest a variety of educational programs for a range of visitors in each institution, all three museums offered comparable programs, activities, and events. This research study revealed similar ideas, themes, and perspectives between art museum educators and administrators. Findings indicate the importance of collaboration between both museum departments in order to ensure the success of their museums. All eight participants in the study had a passion for art and art museums as well as visitor education. Additionally, participants had concurrent thoughts in their interviews regarding concepts of educational programming, cultural diversity approaches, art museum fundamental roles, and overall educational goals.
After examining these art museums and conducting eight interviews, a description of each observation is displayed using examples of photographs and field notes. Although findings suggest a variety of educational programs for a range of visitors in each institution, all three museums offered comparable programs, activities, and events. This research study revealed similar ideas, themes, and perspectives between art museum educators and administrators. Findings indicate the importance of collaboration between both museum departments in order to ensure the success of their museums. All eight participants in the study had a passion for art and art museums as well as visitor education. Additionally, participants had concurrent thoughts in their interviews regarding concepts of educational programming, cultural diversity approaches, art museum fundamental roles, and overall educational goals.
ContributorsLechner, Nicole (Author) / Young, Bernard (Thesis advisor) / Stokrocki, Mary (Committee member) / Watts, Jamie (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018