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- Genre: Doctoral Dissertation
Description
"Romantic Cyber-Engagement" offers a new type of dissertation organized around three projects that combine the core values of the Digital Humanities with the hypertext tradition of scholarly pursuits in the field of Romanticism. The first of the three Digital Humanities contributions is to the profession. "A Resource for the Future: The ICR Template and Template Guide" articulates a template for the construction and operation of an advanced conference in Romantic studies. This part of the project includes the conference web site template and guide, which is publicly available to all interested organizations; the template guide includes instructions, tutorials, and advice to govern modification of the template for easier adaptation for future conferences. The second project, "Collaborative Literature Projects in the Digital Age: The Frankenstein Project" is a functional pedagogical example of one way to incorporate Digital Humanities praxis as an interactive part of a college course. This part of the dissertation explains the "Frankenstein Project," a web site that I created for an undergraduate critical theory course where the students contributed various critical approaches for sections of the novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. The final project, "'[W]hat they half-create, / And what perceive': The Creation of a Hypertext Scholarly Edition of 'Tintern Abbey;'" is a critical approaches section in which I created an interactive web site that focused on the primary work, "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey: On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798." This advanced, multimodal site allows viewers to examine various critical approaches to each section of the primary work, and the viewer/reader can interactively engage the text in dialogue by contributing their own interpretation or critical approach. In addition to the three products and analysis generated from this dissertation, the project as a whole offers an initial Digital Humanities model for future dissertations in discipline of English Literature.
ContributorsMatsunaga, Bruce (Author) / Lussier, Mark S (Thesis advisor) / Broglio, Ronald (Committee member) / Wright, Johnson K (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This project will attempt to supplement the current registry of lesbian inquiry in literature by exploring a very specific topos important to the Modern era: woman and her intellect. Under this umbrella, the project will perform two tasks: First, it will argue that the Modern turn that accentuates what I call negative valence mimesis is a moment of change that enables the general public to perceive lesbianism in representations of women that before, perhaps, remained unacknowledged. And, second, that the intersection of thought and resistance to heteronormative structures, such as heterosexual desire/sex, childbirth, marriage, religion, feminine performance, generate topoi of lesbianism that lesbian studies should continuously critique in order to index the myriad and creative ways through which fictional representations of women have evaded their proper roles in society. The two tasks above will be performed amidst the backdrop of a crucial moment in history in which lesbianism jumped from fiction to fact through the publication and obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall's novel, The Well of Loneliness. Deconstructive feminist and queer inquiry of under-researched novels by women from the UK and the US written within the decade surrounding the trial reveals the possibilities of lesbianism in novels where the protagonists' investment in heteronormativity has remained unquestioned. In those texts where the protagonists have been questioned, the analysis of lesbianism will be delved into more deeply in order to illustrate new ways of reading these texts. I will focus on women writers who, as Terry Castle suggests, "both usurped and deepened the [lesbian] genre" with the arrival of the new century (Literature 29). It is my attempt to combat heteronormativity through a more positive approach. As Michael Warner asserts, "heteronormativity can be overcome only by actively imagining a necessarily and desirably queer world" (xvi). This is not to say this study will be all roses and no thorns; a desirably queer world is not about a wish for an utopia. For this project, it is about rigorously engaging in the lesbianism of literature while acknowledging how a lesbian reading, a reading for lesbianism, can continue to both expand and enrich the critical tradition of a text and the customary interpretation of various characters.
ContributorsWagner, Johanna M. (Author) / Clarke, Deborah (Thesis advisor) / Lussier, Mark (Thesis advisor) / Mallot, Edward (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
This dissertation examines cultural representations that attend to the environmental and socio-economic dynamics of contemporary water crises. It focuses on a growing, transnational body of “hydronarratives” – work by writers, filmmakers, and artists in the United States, Canada, and the postcolonial Global South that stress the historical centrality of water to capitalism. These hydronarratives reveal the uneven impacts of droughts, floods, water contamination, and sea level rise on communities marginalized along lines of race, class, and ethnicity. In doing so, they challenge narratives of “progress” conventionally associated with colonial, imperialist, and neoliberal forms of capitalism dependent on the large-scale extraction of natural resources.
Until recently, there has been little attention paid to the ways in which literary texts and other cultural productions explore the social and ecological dimensions of water resource systems. In its examination of water, this dissertation is methodologically informed by the interdisciplinary field of the energy humanities, which explores oil and other fossil fuels as cultural objects. The hydronarratives examined in this dissertation view water as a cultural object and its extraction and manipulation, as cultural practices. In doing so, they demonstrate the ways in which power, production, and human-induced environmental change intersect to create social and environmental sacrifice zones.
This dissertation takes an interdisciplinary environmental humanities approach, drawing on fields such as indigenous studies, political ecology, energy studies, cultural geography, and economic theory. It seeks to establish a productive convergence between environmental justice studies and what might be termed “Anthropocene studies.” Dominant narratives of the Anthropocene tend to describe the human species as a universalized, undifferentiated whole broadly responsible for the global environmental crisis. However, the hydronarratives examined in this dissertation “decolonize” this narrative by accounting for the ways in which colonialism, capitalism, and other exploitative social systems render certain communities more vulnerable to environmental catastrophe than others.
By attending to these issues through problem water, this dissertation has significant implications for future research in contemporary, transnational American and postcolonial literary studies, the environmental humanities, and the energy humanities. It demonstrates the potential for a focus on representations of resources in literary texts and other cultural productions to better grasp the inequitable distribution of environmental risk, and instances of resilience on a rapidly changing planet.
Until recently, there has been little attention paid to the ways in which literary texts and other cultural productions explore the social and ecological dimensions of water resource systems. In its examination of water, this dissertation is methodologically informed by the interdisciplinary field of the energy humanities, which explores oil and other fossil fuels as cultural objects. The hydronarratives examined in this dissertation view water as a cultural object and its extraction and manipulation, as cultural practices. In doing so, they demonstrate the ways in which power, production, and human-induced environmental change intersect to create social and environmental sacrifice zones.
This dissertation takes an interdisciplinary environmental humanities approach, drawing on fields such as indigenous studies, political ecology, energy studies, cultural geography, and economic theory. It seeks to establish a productive convergence between environmental justice studies and what might be termed “Anthropocene studies.” Dominant narratives of the Anthropocene tend to describe the human species as a universalized, undifferentiated whole broadly responsible for the global environmental crisis. However, the hydronarratives examined in this dissertation “decolonize” this narrative by accounting for the ways in which colonialism, capitalism, and other exploitative social systems render certain communities more vulnerable to environmental catastrophe than others.
By attending to these issues through problem water, this dissertation has significant implications for future research in contemporary, transnational American and postcolonial literary studies, the environmental humanities, and the energy humanities. It demonstrates the potential for a focus on representations of resources in literary texts and other cultural productions to better grasp the inequitable distribution of environmental risk, and instances of resilience on a rapidly changing planet.
ContributorsHenry, Matthew S. (Author) / Adamson, Joni (Thesis advisor) / Sadowski-Smith, Claudia (Thesis advisor) / Broglio, Ronald (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was no universal term to describe a person who practiced science. In 1833, the term “scientist” was proposed to recognize these individuals, but exactly who was represented by this term was still ambiguous. Supported by Bruno Latour’s theory of networks and hybridity, The Emerging Scientist takes a historical approach to analyze the different collectives of individuals who influenced the cultural perception of science and therefore aided in defining the role of the emerging scientist during the nineteenth century.
Each chapter focuses on a collective in the science network that influenced the development of the scientist across the changing scientific landscape of the nineteenth century. Through a study of William Small and Herbert Spencer, the first chapter investigates the informal clubs that prove to be highly influential due, in part, to the freedom individuals gain by being outside of formal institutions. Through an investigation of the lives and works of professional astronomer, Caroline Herschel, and physicist and mathematician, James Clerk Maxwell, chapter two analyzes the collective of professional practitioners of science to unveil the way in which scientific advancement actually occurred. Chapter three argues for the role of women in democratizing science and expanding the pool from which future scientists would come through a close analysis of Jane Marcet and Agnes Clerke, members of the collective of female popularizers of science. The final chapter examines how the collective of fictional depictions of science and the scientist ultimately are part of the cultural perception of the scientist through a close reading of Shelley’s Alastor; or, the Spirit of Solitude and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ultimately, The Emerging Scientist aims to recreate the way science is studied in order to generate a more comprehensive understanding of the influences on developing science and the scientist during the nineteenth century.
Each chapter focuses on a collective in the science network that influenced the development of the scientist across the changing scientific landscape of the nineteenth century. Through a study of William Small and Herbert Spencer, the first chapter investigates the informal clubs that prove to be highly influential due, in part, to the freedom individuals gain by being outside of formal institutions. Through an investigation of the lives and works of professional astronomer, Caroline Herschel, and physicist and mathematician, James Clerk Maxwell, chapter two analyzes the collective of professional practitioners of science to unveil the way in which scientific advancement actually occurred. Chapter three argues for the role of women in democratizing science and expanding the pool from which future scientists would come through a close analysis of Jane Marcet and Agnes Clerke, members of the collective of female popularizers of science. The final chapter examines how the collective of fictional depictions of science and the scientist ultimately are part of the cultural perception of the scientist through a close reading of Shelley’s Alastor; or, the Spirit of Solitude and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ultimately, The Emerging Scientist aims to recreate the way science is studied in order to generate a more comprehensive understanding of the influences on developing science and the scientist during the nineteenth century.
ContributorsSoutherly, Kaitlin (Author) / Lussier, Mark (Thesis advisor) / Broglio, Ronald (Committee member) / Bivona, Daniel (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
The Desert Southwest has no shortage of representations in literature, art, and film. Its aesthetics—open horizons, strange landscapes, and vast wilderness—inform and saturate the early Western films of John Ford, the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe, Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, and continue in today’s popular imaginations. My work acknowledges such contributions and then it challenges them: why are those names more widely associated with the Southwest than Luis Alberto Urrea, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, or Pat Mora?
The project intersects the environmental humanities, critical theory, and cultural studies with the Desert Southwest. It explores the fullness of desert places with regard to cultures, borders, and languages, as well as nonhuman forces and intensities like heat, light, and distance. Dispelling the dominant notion of desert as void or wasteland, it sets a stage to suit the polyvocality of desert place. My work is interdisciplinary because the desert demands it. It begins with Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian in order to reorient readers towards the rupture of the US War With Mexico which helped set the national and cultural borders in effect today. I then explore Denis Villeneuve’s film Sicario to emphasize the correlation between political hierarchy and verticality; those who can experience the desert from above are exempt from the conditions below, where Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway and Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood take place. The novels expose the immanence and violence of being on the ground in the desert and at the lower end of said hierarchies. Analyzing Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World and Mora’s Encantado enables what I term a desert hauntology to produce a desert full of memory, myth, ancestors, and enchantment. Finally, the project puts visual artists James Turrell and Rafa Esparza in conversation to discover a desert phenomenology. The result is an instigation of how far is too far when decentering the human, and what role does place-based art play in creating and empowering community.
John Ford was from Maine. Georgia O’Keeffe, from Wisconsin. Edward Abbey, Pennsylvania. As someone born and raised in the Desert Southwest, I’ve written the project I have yet to encounter.
The project intersects the environmental humanities, critical theory, and cultural studies with the Desert Southwest. It explores the fullness of desert places with regard to cultures, borders, and languages, as well as nonhuman forces and intensities like heat, light, and distance. Dispelling the dominant notion of desert as void or wasteland, it sets a stage to suit the polyvocality of desert place. My work is interdisciplinary because the desert demands it. It begins with Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian in order to reorient readers towards the rupture of the US War With Mexico which helped set the national and cultural borders in effect today. I then explore Denis Villeneuve’s film Sicario to emphasize the correlation between political hierarchy and verticality; those who can experience the desert from above are exempt from the conditions below, where Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway and Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood take place. The novels expose the immanence and violence of being on the ground in the desert and at the lower end of said hierarchies. Analyzing Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World and Mora’s Encantado enables what I term a desert hauntology to produce a desert full of memory, myth, ancestors, and enchantment. Finally, the project puts visual artists James Turrell and Rafa Esparza in conversation to discover a desert phenomenology. The result is an instigation of how far is too far when decentering the human, and what role does place-based art play in creating and empowering community.
John Ford was from Maine. Georgia O’Keeffe, from Wisconsin. Edward Abbey, Pennsylvania. As someone born and raised in the Desert Southwest, I’ve written the project I have yet to encounter.
ContributorsOsuna, Celina (Author) / Broglio, Ronald (Thesis advisor) / McHugh, Kevin (Committee member) / Bell, Matt (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
Increased awareness and technological solutions will not solve the global ecological crises of climate change and mass extinction by themselves. A fundamental shift is needed in how we view ourselves and our relationships with all life to avoid further degradation of the biosphere and ensure a more equitable future. A crucial part of such a shift means expanding the range of species that fall under human consideration. Viewing non-human life, including plants, as intrinsically rather than instrumentally valuable can be transformative to how we, as a species, think about and enact practices that encourage sustainable development. By highlighting the intelligence and communication abilities of plant life through artistic work, a strong counter-narrative can be developed against the dominant utilitarian view of plants as merely a resource for human cultivation and consumption. This dissertation explores plant intelligence and communication as models for music composition and networked sound installations. It is comprised of two complementary components, a sound installation, Unheard Voices, and the following document that explores the relevant artistic precedents, ecological, philosophical, and practice-based research that was conducted to facilitate the creation of the installation project. Focusing this research are the questions: 1) How can plant intelligence in communication, as outlined by plant neurobiologists and ecologists, serve as a model for creating sound installations? 2) How can such art pieces help viewers reflect on humanity’s interconnection to nature and reconsider plants as sentient, communicative, and intrinsically rather than instrumentally valuable?
ContributorsArne, Devin (Author) / Paine, Garth (Thesis advisor) / Feisst, Sabine (Committee member) / Broglio, Ronald (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
This dissertation proposes the concept of “the open hand” as a philosophy of openness. The need for a philosophy of openness is derived from the contemporary turn towards things that is anchored in continental thought, but is at work in a variety of disciplines. This current interest in things has stirred the critique that the normalized human grasp on things is deficient because it cannot suitably handle the reality that intangible depth inheres in all things human and nonhuman. From the pandemic of SARS-CoV-2 and its disease COVID-19 to issues of social justice, the need to make room for the abyssal side of things is as compelling as ever. However, accommodating the deep reality of all things is complicated by the fact that it requires an orientation not guided by self-centered insularity, but by a serviceable theory of self-emptying openness. Sketching a philosophy of openness with the open hand, this dissertation reveals that while openness to things is critical for solving the complex issues of the twenty-first century, its opposition not only has existential primacy, but also can be and has been exacerbated by humanity’s contemporary technological lifestyle.
ContributorsBurgin, Gregory Ladimir (Author) / Ratcliffe, Krista (Thesis advisor) / Broglio, Ronald (Thesis advisor) / Huntington, Patricia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020