Matching Items (30)
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 This thesis builds upon unpublished correspondence and documents available only in special collections at the University of Southern California (USC), as well as film scores in archives at USC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
This dissertation analyzes contemporary American literature, which includes novels, graphic novels, film, and television of the last forty years, to deconstruct the critical relationship between lived space, institutional power, and trauma. It examines literary representations of traumatic moments in recent American history--the attacks on the World Trade Center, Hurricane Katrina, the emergence of the Homeland Security state, and the introduction of the "new metropolis"--to demonstrate that collective trauma at the turn of the century is very much a product of the individual's complex relationship to the state and its institutional auxiliaries. As many philosophers and social critics have argued, institutional forces in contemporary America often deprive individuals of active political engagement through processes of narrative production, and this study discusses how literature both represents and simulates the traumatic consequences of this encounter. Looking to theories on urban, domestic, and textual space, this dissertation explores and problematizes the political and psychological dimensions of space, demonstrating how trauma is enacted through space and how individuals may utilize space and exploit narrative to achieve critical distance from institutional power. Literature as a narrative medium presents vital opportunities both for exposing the machinery of institutional power and for generating positions against the narratives produced by the state.
ContributorsPattison, Dale (Author) / Gilfillan, Daniel (Thesis advisor) / Clarke, Deborah (Thesis advisor) / Thompson, Ayanna (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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
This dissertation illuminates overlaps in Mormonism and the New Spirituality in North America, showing their shared history and epistemologies. As example of these connections, it introduces ethnographic data from women who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in order to show (a) how living LDS women adapt and integrate elements from the New Spirituality with Mormon ideas about the nature of reality into hybrid spiritualities; and (b) how they negotiate their blended religious identities both in relation to the current American New Spirituality milieu and the highly centralized, hierarchical, and patriarchal Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The study focuses on religious hybridity with an emphasis on gender and the negotiation of power deriving from patriarchal religious authority, highlighting the dance between institutional power structures and individual authority. It illuminates processes and discourses of religious adaptation and synthesis through which these LDS women creatively and provocatively challenge LDS Church formal power structures.
ContributorsDaughtrey, Doe (Author) / Cady, Linell (Thesis advisor) / McDannell, Colleen (Committee member) / Wenger, Tisa (Committee member) / Fessenden, Tracy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
My dissertation project, Mormons at the World's Fair: A Study of Religious and Cultural Agency and Transformation looks at a pivotal period of transition within the American religious and political national culture (1880-1907). Using Mormonism as an important focal point of national controversy and cultural change, this dissertation looks at the interconnections between Mormon transitions and the larger national transformations then under way in what historians call the "progressive" era. Prominent scholars have recognized the 1893 World's Fair as an important moment that helped initiate the "dawning" of religious pluralism in America. This national response to American religious diversity, however, is limited to a nineteenth-century historiographical framework, which made real religious pluralism in the next century more difficult. Bringing together into one narrative the story of the anti-polygamy crusades of the 1880s, the ambivalent presence (and non presence) of Mormonism at the World's Fair of 1893, and the drawn-out US Senate Hearings and ultimate victory of Mormon apostle and Senator Reed Smoot in 1907, this dissertation offers new insights into the meaning and limitations of American religious liberty, the dynamics of minority agency, as well as a deeper understanding of America's developing national identity.
ContributorsSmith, Konden Rich (Author) / Moore, Moses N (Thesis advisor) / Cady, Linell (Committee member) / Fessenden, Tracy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Homemade overpressure chemical devices, commonly known as bottle bombs, are a current topic in the news media. These homemade overpressure chemical devices are a variety of homemade chemical bombs which are constructed by youth for amusement, mischief, or misbehaviors. These bombs are made from common household chemicals. The media is frequently presenting stories about the dangers of these homemade overpressure chemical devices. The media reports that this trend is spurred by the use of YouTube and other social media. As a result of the amount of information about homemade overpressure chemical devices on YouTube and other social media, youths can quickly learn how to fabricate and use these devices. However, these youths, like many in the community, are unaware of the hazards or legal consequences associated with this activity. At this time, reliable information about this form of homemade chemical bombs is limited. Therefore, this research project will explore the culture, fabrication, legality, and risks associated with these homemade chemical bombs. Then, the research will determine if the construction of these devices is a national problem as suggested by the news media and first responder organizations with an annually increasing number incidents, property damage, and injuries. The Center for Disease Control's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report for the week of July 18, 2003 presented the last and only known scientific attempt to determine the impact of homemade overpressure chemical devices on society. However, the Center for Disease Control was not able to get an accurate determination of the trends associated with homemade overpressure chemical devices due to the limitations of the data it reviewed. This research project looks at the data available from national databases, municipal databases, and the first responders of nine cities to determine the impact that Homemade Overpressure Chemical Devices are having on these communities within the United States. The research concluded that the number of Homemade Overpressure Chemical Devices cannot be gathered from either a national database or municipal databases. Interviews with first responders indicate that all areas of the United States are experiencing some Homemade Overpressure Chemical Device activity. However, this activity usually remains low until spurred on in a fad-like pattern.
ContributorsBuccola, Karen (Author) / Olson, Larry (Thesis advisor) / Peterson, Danny (Committee member) / Brown, Albert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
In the United States, responsibility for public safety falls under the purview of federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies. These agencies use a range of strategies to ensure public safety, relying primarily on surveillance, the police, the jail and prison system, and the courts to adjudicate wrongdoing. The United States’ over-reliance on incarceration as an all-encompassing solution to social problems, paired with persistent police violence that disproportionately results in the death of Indigenous, African American, and Latino/a people, has placed these public safety practices under intense scrutiny. There has been a plethora of research examining the crisis of mass incarceration in particular, and the racial, class, and gendered inequities plaguing the criminal justice system more broadly.
Through the (Re)imagining Public Safety Project, I make two primary interventions in this larger body of work. First, this is an abolitionist project. In other words, I ask how people generate safety in their daily lives without relying on the police, or prisons, or criminalization. Second, in developing these alternatives, I center the perspective of people of color who have been directly impacted by racially discriminatory public safety practices. To do so, I designed a collaborative, mixed-method qualitative research project that uses participant-generated photo elicitation interviews, alongside participant observation to (re)imagine public safety. Participants in this project theorized what I am calling “insurgent safety” to describe an alternative practice of safety that is underwritten by what I term “a public ethic of care,” “counter-carceral communication,” and play. Insurgent safety is the presence of self-determination, interdependence, mutual aid, shared vulnerability, joy, and communion rather than walls, cages, and banishment.
Through the (Re)imagining Public Safety Project, I make two primary interventions in this larger body of work. First, this is an abolitionist project. In other words, I ask how people generate safety in their daily lives without relying on the police, or prisons, or criminalization. Second, in developing these alternatives, I center the perspective of people of color who have been directly impacted by racially discriminatory public safety practices. To do so, I designed a collaborative, mixed-method qualitative research project that uses participant-generated photo elicitation interviews, alongside participant observation to (re)imagine public safety. Participants in this project theorized what I am calling “insurgent safety” to describe an alternative practice of safety that is underwritten by what I term “a public ethic of care,” “counter-carceral communication,” and play. Insurgent safety is the presence of self-determination, interdependence, mutual aid, shared vulnerability, joy, and communion rather than walls, cages, and banishment.
ContributorsMcDowell, Meghan (Author) / Lim, Merlyna (Thesis advisor) / Cheng, Wendy (Thesis advisor) / Fernández, Luis (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Guantánamo: The Amen Temple of Empire connects the fetishization of the trauma of nine/eleven with the co-constitution of subjects at Guantánamo—that of the contained Muslim terrorist prisoner silhouetted against the ideal nationalistic military body—circulated as ‘afterimages’ that carry ideological narratives about U.S. Empire. These narratives in turn religiously and racially charge the new normative practices of the security state and its historically haunted symbolic order. As individuals with complex subjectivities, the prisoners and guards are, of course, not reducible to the standardizing imprimatur of the state or its narratives. Despite the circulation of these ‘afterimages’ as fixed currency, the prisoners and guards produce their own metanarratives, through their para-ethnographic accounts of containment and of self. From within the panopticon of the prison, they seek sight lines, and gaze back at the state. This dissertation is thus a meditation on US militarism, violence, torture, race, and carceral practices, revealed thematically through metaphors of hungry ghosts, nature, journey and death, liminality, time, space, community, and salvage. Based on a multi-sited, empirical and imaginary ethnography, as well as textual and discourse analysis, I draw on the writing and testimony of prisoners, and military and intelligence personnel, whom I consider insightful para-ethnographers of the haunting valence of this fetishized historical event.
ContributorsColeman, Diana (Diana Murtaugh) (Author) / Talebi, Shahla (Thesis advisor) / Matustik, Martin (Committee member) / Fessenden, Tracy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
This study analyzes competing forms of Protestant Christianity within the Bible Belt of the Upper South (Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina). On one hand, a conservative “culture war” version of Christianity has dominated the South, and deeply influenced national politics, for almost fifty years. This form of Christianity is predicated on white supremacy and heteropatriarchy and regulates religious, as well as sexual, gender, and racial norms. On the other hand, an emerging movement of those once socialized in the culture war version of Protestantism is now reconfiguring the regional traditions. Through ethnographic fieldwork, qualitative interviews, and historical analysis, this study explores the ways these post-culture war Christians are navigating and negotiating relations with family, church, and politics and society more broadly. This work argues that Protestantism in the Upper South is being re-landscaped from the inside by individuals staying within the tradition who seek to reorient regional, national and religious identities. This study goes beyond generalizations about changes in American religion to shed light on the specific motivations, conflicts and dynamics inherent in shifts in lived religion in this particular region. In so doing it also contributes to deeper understanding of processes of religious change more generally.
ContributorsShoemaker, Terry (Author) / Cady, Linell (Thesis advisor) / Gereboff, Joel (Committee member) / Bennett, Gaymon (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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