Matching Items (25)
Description
This study explores the eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century German dramatic genre Sklavenstücke (slave plays). These plays, which until recently have not received any significant attention in scholarship, articulate a nuanced critique of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade and thus bear witness to an early German-language discourse indicative of abolitionist currents.Tracing individual acts of German-language abolitionism, I investigate the correlation between abolitionist movements in the Euro-American space and German involvements in these very efforts. In this sense, I contest the notion of an absence of German abolitionist awareness in Europe during the Age of Enlightenment. My reading of these slave plays contributes to discussions about the transcultural nature of abolitionist discourse and defies the notion that abolitionist activism only emerged within the specific nation-states that have previously been the subject of scholarship. Challenging this layering both theoretically and analytically, then, requires an innovative shift that centers approaches rooted in Black thought and theories, which are the foundation of this study. These concepts are necessary for engaging with issues of slavery and abolition while at the same time exposing white paternalist perspectives and gazes. Plays of this genre often foreground the horrors of slavery at the hands of cruel white slaveholders, and characterize enslaved Black Africans as unblemished, obedient, submissive, hard-working, and grateful “beings” deserving of humanitarian benevolence. Based on these sentiments, an overarching discourse opposing slavery and the transatlantic slave trade emerged by way of German-language theatrical plays, theoretical treatises, newspaper articles, academic writings, travelogues, diary entries, and journal articles that negotiated the nature, origin, and legitimacy of Black African humanity around debates on slavery. Thus, my study demonstrates that these German-language literary contributions indicate inscribed socio-critical commentary and take up transatlantic abolitionist discourses, a dialogue that surfaced under the auspices of the Enlightenment.
ContributorsOduro-Opuni, Obenewaa (Author) / Berman, Nina (Thesis advisor) / Holub, Robert C. (Committee member) / Gilfillan, Daniel (Committee member) / Usman, Aribidesi (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
Conceptual poetry begins with the spark of the writing process, the moment when a poet finds inspiration and begins to write a poem. It is in that moment when the poem begins to be conceptualized, evolving throughout every part of the writing process. Conceptual poetry is the evolving idea of what the poem is working toward becoming, the concept of the end performance, and how the poem will be received. This conceptualization changes drastically with the revisions made throughout the process, the idea of the poem is revised as the author interacts with the work and audience. The revisions to the conceptualization may be minute or drastic. Small changes can be changing the feeling you want to elicit from the reader from slight anxiety to tones of fear. Larger changes can be changing the entire message you want to portray to your audience. Poems go through critical revisions that can leave a poem, and its conceptualized performed product, completely transformed and sometimes unrecognizable from the beginning product. The conceptual poetry and performance ends at the point where it leaves the author and becomes perceived and digested by the audience. The performance itself will always be conceptual and will never truly fulfill the concept the way that the poet has envisioned it.
ContributorsPolmanteer, Katherine (Author) / Gilfillan, Daniel (Thesis director) / Murphy, Patricia Colleen (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor, Contributor) / College of Integrative Sciences and Arts (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
History and art have always had an intersecting relationship, and each helps us to acquire a better understanding of the other, since artistic works help us to visualize the zeitgeist of a particular point in history. The connection between art and history is most apparent when the radical changes that befall society through historically important events, especially conflict, are followed by sweeping changes in society, which trickle their way down into the minds of artists and creators, whose works subsequently reflect these changes. We cannot understand these works and their relationship to their respective period of time simply by isolating them into individual components like art style, artist, and location. They are socially and historically charged, part of a larger network of intersecting relationships that factor in concepts like ideology, material, and culture. We can examine the analytical power of this framework, better known as actor network theory, in a post-WWII European landscape, a period heightened by rapid social changes as the citizens of the formerly war-torn continent worked to rebuild and recover. When examining the artistic output of vanquished nations, mainly Italian neorealist films and German Trümmerfilmen, in a framework built around the principles established in actor network theory, we can see how the historical, political, social, and cultural developments established in the wake of European fascism’s unceremonious collapse is reflected on film when compared to the victorious United States, whose infrastructure and film industry remained mostly unscathed.
ContributorsBrown, Tristan Michael (Author) / Gilfillan, Daniel (Thesis director) / Vitullo, Juliann (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05
Description
With this thesis, I have set out to answer two fundamental questions within music: does music mean anything, and should music mean anything? In answering those questions, I also set out to create a creative project that would implement these ideas: an original concept album of music that is programmatic in nature and incorporates motivic composition, jazz improvisation, lyrics, extra-musical audio and more all in the service of telling a narrative, a story, through music. I have done research into understanding music as a language, finding that this language is primarily communicative and recreational, rather than representational, of meaning. As well, I discuss the various different ways that music composers from Wagner to Williams have created narrative meaning in their works, using examples of leitmotif and other devices, as well as tracing the contextual associations of meaning that occurs when music is perceived in certain contexts. Furthermore, I discuss the dialogue between absolute and programmatic music, and also talk about the role of jazz improvisation in adding meaning to works.
For the second part of my thesis I talk about how I came to create the creative project aspect. I discuss how and why I designed the narrative that I did, and also analyzed the music I have created to illustrate how I implemented the various methods of musical storytelling that I detail in the first part of the paper. Lastly, I discuss my plans for publication and release of the creative project.
The third part of this thesis is a sample of the creative project. There is a version of the narrative that goes along with the creative project, as well as one of the eight pieces of original music on the creative project, entitled Journey.
Overall, I found that music does have meaning, it is just meaning that society ascribes to it based off of artistic intent and context, and as to whether music should mean anything, I believe that this is a question best left to be answered on an individual basis. Music can be whatever it wants to be.
For the second part of my thesis I talk about how I came to create the creative project aspect. I discuss how and why I designed the narrative that I did, and also analyzed the music I have created to illustrate how I implemented the various methods of musical storytelling that I detail in the first part of the paper. Lastly, I discuss my plans for publication and release of the creative project.
The third part of this thesis is a sample of the creative project. There is a version of the narrative that goes along with the creative project, as well as one of the eight pieces of original music on the creative project, entitled Journey.
Overall, I found that music does have meaning, it is just meaning that society ascribes to it based off of artistic intent and context, and as to whether music should mean anything, I believe that this is a question best left to be answered on an individual basis. Music can be whatever it wants to be.
ContributorsPrice, Alexander (Author) / Gilfillan, Daniel (Thesis director) / Kocour, Michael (Committee member) / Libman, Jeffrey (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor) / School of Music (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
This thesis evaluates how films from Western Europe portray the social, political and economic degradation that allows the American influence to rise leading up to the Cold War. Specifically, this thesis evaluates classic films from Weimar Germany, the Soviet Union, post-fascist Italy and post-Vichy France as historical and cultural artifacts that depict the harsh conditions of postwar life and how American influence revitalized daily European life. While the American influence (defined as the support of democracy, technological modernization and a capitalist economy) was supported by many struggling Europeans who looked to the United States as a standard to rebuild, critics from each country viewed American influence as a threat to the stability of national independence which they sought to maintain as recovery balanced postwar society.
ContributorsBarney, Clinton (Author) / Gilfillan, Daniel (Thesis director) / Hedberg Olenina, Ana (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor) / Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies, Sch (Contributor)
Created2022-05