Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Art and literature – history'

“The Art of Information Management” explores the ways that information technologies influence thought and take shape in imaginative works of literature at the turn of the seventeenth century in early modern England, from 1580 to 1605. Imaginative literature becomes a space for articulating the challenges presented by discourses perceived to have been unalterably expanded and amplified through technology, as well for experimenting with strategies to respond to those challenges.

Drawing on studies of early modern Materialism, New Historicism, Literary History, Digital Humanities, and Media Archeology, this project seeks to move the understanding of the role information technologies as agents of change forward by relocating debates concerning technology to the spaces imagined in early modern English literature of the fantastic: Thomas Nashe’s multi-modal London and ocean-sanctuary Yarmouth, Edmund Spenser’s Faery Land, William Shakespeare and Robert Armin’s holiday Kingdom of Illyria, and Samuel Daniel’s pastoral Arcadia. In each imagined space, this project looks at the printing press and beyond to attendant technologies in order to develop a better understand of the period’s relationship to our own.

The works considered here expose a moment of feverish innovation with regard to the rhetorical construction of authenticity, political expression, and right behavior. The first two chapters argue that the writings of Thomas Nashe and Edmund Spenser reflect a heightened sensitivity to the speed and timings associated with technologically-mediated discourse. The final two chapters examine the efforts of William Shakespeare, Robert Armin, and Samuel Daniel, as they sort through the solidifying perception of discourse structures outpacing traditional modes of thought and learning.

This dissertation examines representations of the family in art and literature of the Spanish court during Philip IV's reign. I contend that depictions of royal and noble families in court settings—and by artists who resided at court—spoke to the monarchy's social and political concerns at a time of imperial crisis. Family is understood here not as a fixed entity, but as a mobile cultural construct that bent, in Golden Age Spain, to address a variety of needs. The emotional and theological intricacies of a prince's marriage indicated the preparedness or ineptitude of a king to be; a noblewoman's marriage abroad to a foreign prince embodied Spain's struggles to contain the Thirty Years' War; the depiction of an artist's family in a royal palace demonstrated the ambitions of the courtier-artist.

Chapter 1 examines Vélez de Guevara's play Reinar después de morir (1635). I propose that the play's thematic interest lies in an attempt to reconcile the strictures of dynastic marriage—marriage for reasons of state—with the necessities of emotional fulfilment and mutual trust of marriage partners suggested in contemporary conduct manuals. Chapter 2 reads two short stories from María de Zayas's Desengaños amorosos (1648), "Mal presagio casar de lejos," and "Estragos que causa el vicio," as nationalist allegories. I suggest that the families Zayas depicts are metaphors for a Spanish national family, belagured in European theaters of war and beset by domestic conflicts such as the Portuguese and Catalonian uprisings of the 1640s. In Chapter 3 I explore a painting, La familia del pintor (1665), by Juan Bautista del Mazo, son-in-law of Diego Velázquez and heir to his post as painter of the king. I compare Mazo's La familia del pintor to Velázquez Las meninas. Mazo's proud portrayal of his own biological family and of a dyanasty of court artists indicates that the painting is not merely dervivative of his father-in-law's masterpiece, Las meninas; rather, Mazo has a pictorial agenda all his own, one that includes the social advancement of the court artist and of a multitude of heirs seeking the king's patronage in other careers.

In December 1911, the public exhibition of Kandinsky's Komposition V shattered the world of Western illusionism as audiences knew and understood it - or so the traditional tale goes. Yet the relative abruptness with which abstraction supposedly shocks the art world not only presents a misleading impression; it in effect creates a great riddle. If the Western art world spent centuries organized under a unifying goal of perfecting imitation, why would it now so suddenly turn its back on its institutional underpinnings by challenging, negating, or exploding the principles it had worked so hard to develop? This project responds by rejecting the presuppositions of the riddle and arguing against the traditional narrative, claiming instead that the invention of abstract art in the 1910s was neither abrupt nor unprecedented, but was already being described, theorized, or created in the 19^th century, only in literature rather than painting. Through close reading and literary analysis, I present three moments in the German literary canon in which abstract art is imagined or becomes theoretically possible: Heinrich von Kleist's Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft (1810), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's poem "Howards Ehrengedächtnis" (1821), and Gottfried Keller's Der grüne Heinrich (1855, 1879). Composing these moments are three different authors who write at three different decades, speak through three different genres, and conceive three different modes of abstraction, none of which contemporaneously achieved painted form. Connecting these moments is the following argument: each constitutes an example of the invention of abstract art in a 19^th-century literary text prior to the visual actualization of abstract art in the early 20^th century. With such images in circulation well before 1911, this study features the crucial role of literature in foregrounding the cultural developments essential for abstract artworks to "speak for themselves" in the medium of painting by establishing certain preconditions involving need, spectatorship, and the self-awareness of the artist. Thus by conceptualizing abstract images in their writing, these three 19^th-century German authors also produce necessary components of the theoretical grounding required for the 20^th-century birth of abstract art.

This dissertation contends that the kinds of consistency composition both affords and demands in order to hold together as a composition have a special location within European and American late modernism. In the decades surrounding the Second World War, artists acknowledged that art needed to let in disorder to reflect lived experience; yet, it still had to cohere in order to be recognizable as art, or a form of presentation. Paying attention to how diverse late modernist artists were thus creatively challenged, I argue that their works of art demonstrate historically located and informed compositional conservatism, or formal rigidity. Making the case for the breadth of composition's organizing force during the period, I focus on a different artist and disciplinary area in each of three chapters: Francis Bacon's oil paintings, Samuel Beckett's dramatic and theatrical work in Endgame, and Ralph Ellison's novelistic efforts in Invisible Man and his unfinished second manuscript.

Late modernist artwork exercises formal control in ways extreme enough to be called violent. But if "violence" signifies here how formal control stringently orders components (and excludes others) to bring them into line with composition's demands, this formal signification hardly removes such violence from having lived consequences. More, such components' failure to fall into line, or the artist's failure to accomplish such organization, can itself have unfortunate repercussions. Building on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's art theory, which lays the groundwork for aligning apparently dissimilar compositions, I argue that in Bacon, Beckett, and Ellison, compositional force operates in ways shared by larger physical and psychological arrangements. I show how not just home or domestic spaces, but also national and political structures, including, e.g., those defining German fascism, partake in composition's formational activities. Making use of conceptual apparatuses that extend beyond Deleuzoguattarian theory to include psychoanalysis and Frankfurt School theorists, this dissertation examines how the violence (and pleasure) of form variously subtends the period's configurations.

For more than fifty years, the Meditationes Vitae Christi (MVC) and the most famous of its illustrated manuscripts (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, Ms. ital. 115) have been employed by scholars to exemplify late medieval female spirituality. The mid-fourteenth century ilhuminated manuscript of the Meditationes in the Snite Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame that is the subject of this dissertation provides valuable evidence of the popularity of the famous text originally written for a woman religious and its appropriation by urban laity. As an example of the shorter text, in Italian, with 43 chapters plus prologue, its 48 large colored miniatures and the decorated initials that begin each chapter, point to a wealthy patron quite unlike the Poor Clare to whom the MVC text was initially directed. The style of the miniatures indicates that the manuscript was illuminated ca. 1350 in Bologna, site of the pre-eminent European university for the study of law.

The dissertation explores how the Meditationes Vitae Christi was adapted for an educated and prosperous husband and wife. While written in the vernacular, the Snite MVC illuminations bear a strong resemblance to the illustrations in fourteenth-century Bolognese legal manuscripts. Despite the vivid and often unconventional imagery of the text that is designed to stimulate the reader's affective response to its re-telling of the story of the life of Christ, the miniatures tend to preserve traditional iconographies. The superficially conventional Snite miniatures, which often seem indifferent to the visual specifics of the text, serve to align it with orthodox doctrine and underscore the veracity of its contents.

An analysis of the illuminations of the Snite MVC reveals a particular attentiveness by the illuminator to the representation of male exemplars that would appeal to an elite educated patron, who might have been a judge or lawyer, or law professor. The Infancy miniatures in particular depict St. Joseph in a prominent role and dressed as a late medieval professional man The dignified representation of St. Joseph is consistent with his scriptural appellation as a "just man " By attending to the themes of justice and wisdom in both the MVC text and in its scriptural sources, the Snite miniatures prove to be much richer in meaning than first glance would suggest, and their affinity with legal manuscript illumination hardly accidental.

The iconographic analysis of the Snite miniatures is complemented by the study of the social and intellectual context in which the manuscript was produced. Despite the seeming simplicity of the miniatures, the illuminator and his advisor prove to be theologically sophisticated and scripturally literate. By means of the illuminations, the MVC is made compatible with the religious and professional concerns of the elite laity, providing access for men wielding worldly authority into the life of Christ in which powerful and learned men play largely negative roles. The Snite manuscript responds to the lay patron's desire to see in the example of Christ and the events of his life confirmation of late medieval social, juridical, and political structures. In its miniatures, it provides saintly models for the educated laity desirous of reconciling their Christian commitments with the demands of an active, urban, professional life.

During the 18th century, the novel was criticized for a lack of representation of reality and in turn a public distrust of fiction was established. The epistolary form addressed these issues by presenting a narrative that was bound by a real-life structure that allowed for the illusion of reality and authenticity. Today, this distrust of fiction is nonexistent but the epistolary form is still present and a frequently used literary device, providing the real-life structure for an escape from reality. However, while commercial fiction has embraced the form and moved past the historical justification of the epistolary novel, most artists’ books have not. This paper will prove how the artist book has struggled to move past the historical epistolary form and what lessons it can take from the world of contemporary commercial fiction.

Play is a manifestation of overflowing excess. When applied to the study of discourse, this bounty can be understood in terms of figurativeness and depth. If “degree-zero” discourse is the almost entirely unfigured language of an instruction manual, then verse lies near the other extreme: highly figured and elaborate language open to rich interpretive possibilities. I posit a further pole yet on this continuum: the hyperabundant texts of the Renaissance, when ludics were at a height partially quashed by the Enlightenment preference for the plain style. These ludic texts are not merely decorative but rather reflect the incarnational impulse of Renaissance Christian thought; they attempt to praise and to imitate the power of Divine language, in which Word is made Flesh in the West’s master model of superabundance, grace through Christ’s Incarnation and Sacrifice.

This project conducts three case studies of playfully incarnational discourses during the Renaissance: in speech, in imagery, and in verse. First, it analyzes sermons by John Donne that reflect candidly on the power of Donne’s own ludic speech, concluding that his transgressive, gamelike rhetoric was oriented toward stimulating responsive action. Next, it examines period images through the lens of contemporary popular works that conceive of images as puzzles to be decoded, solved, and read, concluding that period anamorphoses and similar works were efforts to infuse images with lively presence in a way that helps to account for iconophobic and iconophilic strains in English Reformation thought. Finally, it reads George Herbert’s deceptively simple poem, “The Altar,” examining how the piece may be understood as an intervention into the shaped-verse tradition and how it reflects on period debates about Church fabric, concluding that the toylike or tricklike construction evokes the Eucharistic presence of the Divine in Herbert’s worshipful meditation.

At stake are a greater appreciation for Renaissance artistry, a fuller understanding of the complexityof the English Reformation, and a richer vocabularyfor play theorists working with ludic discourses. A conclusion considers these implications and explains whyRenaissance thinkers might have chosen a ludic mode of imitative worship—God’s grace and creation are themselves forms of play.