Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Muslim fiction'
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Durdana, Benazir. "Muslim India in Anglo-Indian fiction /." The Ohio State University, 1997. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1487944660930967.
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Ameri, Firouzeh. "Veiled experiences: Rewriting women's identities and experiences in contemporary Muslim fiction in English." Thesis, Ameri, Firouzeh (2012) Veiled experiences: Rewriting women's identities and experiences in contemporary Muslim fiction in English. PhD thesis, Murdoch University, 2012. https://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/id/eprint/10197/.
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In dominant contemporary Western representations, including various media texts, popular fiction and life-narratives, both the Islamic faith in general and Muslim women in particular are often vilified and stereotyped. In many such representations Islam is introduced as a backward and violent religion, and Muslim women are represented as either its victims or its fortunate survivors. This trend in the representations of Islam and Muslim women has been markedly intensified following the terrorist attacks of 9/11 2001.
This thesis takes a postpositivist realist approach to reading selected contemporary women’s fiction, written in English, and foregrounding the lives and religious identities of Muslim women who are neither victims nor escapees of Islam but willingly committed to their faith. Texts include The Translator (1999) and Minaret (2005) by Leila Aboulela, Does my head look big in this? (2005) by Randa Abdel-Fattah, Sweetness in the belly (2005) by Camilla Gibb and The girl in the tangerine scarf (2006) by Mohja Kahf. Attempting to explain how these fictional texts can be read as variously writing back to the often monolithic representations of Islam and Muslim women characteristic of mainstream Western texts (such as those depicted in popular life narratives), the thesis draws attention to the ways in which particular narrative techniques highlight the complexities of Muslim women’s religious identities and experiences. Since the novels depict the lives of Muslim female characters in the West, this study is especially concerned with the exploration of the tensions and contradictions of women’s Muslim identities in Western countries, and addresses Western people’s interests and prejudices in their encounter with Muslim women. Finally, given that various aspects to Muslim women's identities and experiences are typically elided in dominant representations, it is argued that a disruption of the stereotypes of Muslim women signals the potential for the compatibility of Muslim women's distinct identities with Western values.
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Mallick, Suman. "Apples and Knives (A Novel)." PDXScholar, 2016. http://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/3023.
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ZULEIKHA, who was trained as a pianist in her hometown of Lahore, Pakistan, arrives in Irving, Texas after her arranged marriage to ISKANDER, but finds it difficult to get accustomed to the appurtenances, encumbrances, and perquisites of the middle-class housewife lifestyle. Despite giving birth to a son, WASIM, she quickly falls out of love with her dutiful but straight-laced husband. She begins giving private lessons, and commences an affair with PATRICK, a transplanted Canadian who is trapped in his own loveless marriage. When she gets pregnant, Zuleikha is convinced the child belongs to her husband. She ends her affair with Patrick, but Iskander finds out about it anyway. The ensuing confrontation between Zuleikha and Iskander turns into a physical altercation, during which Zuleikha, having fallen to the floor, is unable to see if Iskander stomps on her belly, or falls on her by accident as he will later claim. The trauma results in a miscarriage.
The unusual set of circumstances surrounding this violent episode serves as the backdrop for the rest of the story, by catapulting this otherwise nondescript couple into the glare of the public eye. Iskander is arrested and charged with feticide, and he faces a long prison sentence under Texas law. A court order prohibits him from contacting Zuleikha and Wasim, who are taken to a shelter for Muslim women and children. There, the other domestic abuse victims view Zuleikha as someone who "had it coming" because of her infidelity, and are therefore openly hostile to her. The shelter's director, a woman named REZA, is beholden to wealthy Muslim donors, and therefore arranges for Zuleikha to meet with members of a highly controversial Islamic tribunal. Zuleikha is pressured to forgive her husband and testify in his favor, so as not draw further negative attention to the Muslim community. JANE, the District Attorney, on the other hand, initially plays nice with Zuleikha and informs her that she will devote any and all available resources in the prosecution of Iskander. When Zuleikha can't get her story straight and hesitates about testifying against her husband, however, Jane, too, turns against her. Zuleikha discovers that the DA has been caught hiding her own secrets and now faces a public confidence crisis of her own. Zuleikha comes to realize that Jane's reasons for being so gung-ho about winning Iskander's conviction have as much to do with re-endearing herself to her electorate as with justice.
Zuleikha thus finds herself at the epicenter of a political firestorm fueled by winds of anti-Muslim hysteria, with different people trying to use her situation to their own advantage. When Wasim gets in a scuffle at the shelter and has to be taken to a clinic, she panics and contacts Iskander against her better judgment. Husband and wife finally confront each other while Wasim is being treated. Iskander claims to still love Zuleikha and begs her to take him back so that they and their son can resume their prior family life. But Zuleikha realizes that even if Iskander is sincere and not merely seeking reconciliation in order to avoid a harsh prison sentence, she will never be able to forgive him, let alone love him and live with him again. She comes to accept the fact that she has no control over Iskander's fate in court, and can only move forward by testifying truthfully and trying to do what is best for her and her son. While waiting for the trial to begin, she gains admission in a summer training program for piano instructors and begins the next phase of her life.
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Aydogdu, Zeynep. "Modernity, Multiculturalism, and Racialization in Transnational America: Autobiography and Fiction by Immigrant Muslim Women Before and After 9/11." The Ohio State University, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1557191593344128.
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Hayhurst, Lauren Amy. "Fictive responsibility : why all novelists are political writers (whether they like it or not)." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10871/33196.
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This PhD is part novel and part thesis. The novel, The Girl Upstairs (TGU), is in three parts. Parts one and two are included here in full. A synopsis of part three is included in the appendices. The thesis presents an original “action model” for Creative Writing (CW) called “fictive responsibility”. TGU can be treated as a case study, demonstrating the practical application of this new model. TGU follows a Bengali-Muslim family as they confront the wayward behaviour of Kifah Rahman, a feisty sixteen-year-old. Set somewhere in south-west England, Kifah’s misadventures start when she discovers an envelope discarded in a drawer. The address is her mother’s childhood home across the city, but she’s never heard of the addressee, Zubi Rahman. Kifah sneaks off school to investigate. Kifah’s clandestine visits incite rumours and soon Kifah is accused of tarnishing the family’s reputation. TGU confronts the difficult subjects of “honour”-based-violence (HBV), domestic violence and “crimes-of-passion”. By exploring different types of violence-against-women (VAW), TGU shows how perceived differences in, for example, “culture”, religion, or heritage, rather than dividing us, can present new ways to connect across moral values or lifestyles, ultimately promoting togetherness and empathy between different cultures. The thesis explores how the “political” relates to “literature” through the writer’s creative process, suggesting that all novelists are inherently politicised individuals and fictions are produced through an inherently politicised process. The significance of this is undermined by those who claim fiction writers just “make it up”. Failing to recognise the “politics of representation” that operates alongside invention in CW has contributed to the recent exacerbation around “cultural appropriation”. For some writers this presents a threat to “free” expression. For others, “free” expression must be treated with respect, especially when fictionalising characters that appear external to the writer’s own experience. Theoretical and conceptual analysis is drawn from cultural studies, ethnography, literary criticism and philosophy. Case studies include fictions with Muslim female characters in a post-9/11 setting. In addition to literary analysis, the thesis explores how “authenticity” interacts with an author’s perceived affiliation with characters or themes within the fiction.
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Leafgren, Luke Anthony. "Novelizing the Muslim Wars of Conquests: The Christian Pioneers of the Arabic Historical Novel." Thesis, Harvard University, 2012. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:10362.
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During the Arabic cultural renaissance of the nineteenth century known as the nahda, Christian Arabs made a substantial contribution to the development of fiction and journalism. Among these pioneers, Salim al-Bustani, Jurji Zaydan, and Farah Antun were inspired by translations of European fiction to write the first historical novels in Arabic. Their narrations of the Muslim wars of conquest are carefully constructed blends of history and fiction that emphasize the cultural and religious values that Christian and Muslim Arabs hold in common. In their novels, these authors celebrate the historical achievements of the Arabs and seek to inspire a new sense of Arab cultural identity, open to Christians and Muslims alike and based on shared language, history, territory, values, and aspirations for reform. In this way, these authors respond to the sectarian tensions of their time, European imperialism, and the challenges of modernism with ideas that would become central to Arab nationalist discourse in the twentieth century.
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Boone, F. Khalilah. "Really Daddy: A Collection of Stories." Thesis, Virginia Tech, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/77482.
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Really, Daddy is a collection of twelve stories that explore the dynamics of racial, intra-racial, gender, and religious power clashes. In narratives that range from realistic to postmodern, characters move through conflicts on a path to self-realization. Ostensibly the responsible ones, the protagonists’ identities are elucidated in the context of the burdens that they carry.
At the center of this collection are women and fathers in crisis, as they attempt to save their families or to nourish their own spirits. Whether the character is an African-American Muslim mother shocked into indecision when the Qur’an doesn’t lead her family in its crisis, or an enslaved woman torturing other slaves out of anger over losing her female love, fabulist techniques are combined with realism to unfold the haunting and humorous tales of the imposition of family responsibilities on the lives of the most vulnerable. Here, the reader will find the lapsed Catholic and her wife seeking help from African religion devotees who don’t approve of lesbian relationships, the maid who sacrifices her daughter to a lecherous boss so the rest of her family can eat, and the gay Muslim brother and his lesbian sister in conflict over what to do with his baby. Reflecting the contemporary world in which people live in overlapping marginal spaces of society, these are the stories of America’s forgotten subcultures.Master of Fine Arts
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Banting, Adrian. "Muslims and the politics of love in contemporary British fiction." Thesis, University of East London, 2017. http://roar.uel.ac.uk/6721/.
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This thesis explores the connections between love, multiculturalism and the novel through a study of the figure of the Muslim as understood within secular Britain. I examine representations of love in British fiction published since the Rushdie affair, arguing that love is a crucial means by which novels reproduce, subvert and challenge dominant cultural and political discourses around Muslims and Islam. Selected literary texts include a wide range of subject matter, spanning varied authors and genres, but all are united by their inclusion of Muslim subjectivities and romantic relationships in Britain. In addition to studying literary texts, I also consider the critical reception of texts, exploring critics’ negotiations of the discourses around Muslims and Islam pervasive in British media and politics after the Rushdie affair. Drawing upon Talal Asad’s notion of an ‘anthropology of secularism’, I explore love in the novel as a site of secular knowledge (Asad 2003: 1). I argue that contemporary novels which depict Muslims and Islam frequently use love as the basis for their inclusion within or exclusion from the nation. Love operates alongside and within formal literary strategies as well as concepts of gender, race, culture and class, to respond to popular debates which contest the presence of Muslims and Islam within Britain. Despite its ubiquity within popular culture, love is an under researched area which can shed light on the complex dynamics which construct and situate individuals and communities in relation to the British nation and the West more widely. Through a study of representation, this study originally contributes to an understanding of love’s invisible power in political discourse.
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Godsall, Jonathan. "Pre-existing music in fiction sound film." Thesis, University of Bristol, 2013. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.633201.
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A study of the use of pre-existing music in fiction sound film, this thesis fills a gap in the literature by studying pre-existing music as a category of music in film in itself, the premise being that there are conclusions to be drawn about the use of such music that relate to its pre-existing status, regardless of style, genre, and so on. The main questions are as follows: How and why is pre-existing music used in films? What effects can its use have for and on films and their audiences? And what lasting effects does appropriation have on the music? The exploration of these issues draws on concepts and frameworks from fields beyond that of the study of music in film, including literary theory and scholarship on musical borrowing defined more generally, and incorporates discussion of factors such as those of copyright and commerce alongside examination of texts and their effects. The thesis establishes a framework from which future work in the area can more efficiently proceed, and in relation to which previous work can be contextualised. Broadly, pre-existing music is shown to have unique attributes that can affect both how filmmakers construct their works (practically as well as artistically), and how audiences receive them, while film is argued to be a powerful influence in and on processes of musical reception. The thesis is a significant contribution to scholarship on music on film, but can also be seen as a study of the reception of music (both by and through film), and as situated within the fields of scholarship on musical borrowing and musical intertextuality.
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Borrebach, Peter Andew. "Gravel music." FIU Digital Commons, 2010. http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/1736.
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Gravel Music is a collection of poems, encompassing a wide range of styles from free verse to sonnets, including several unique forms, using rhyme where it was deemed pertinent, but also operating in a deconstructive mode where prosody is concerned. The book is divided into three sections. Poems in the first section strive toward political and critical utterance, addressing Marxism, Darwinism, neo-pragmatism, and humanism in a sequence of interrogations of the barriers between aesthetics, politics, critical theory, and philosophy, hoping to find traces of truth, fact, and authenticity that transcend category. The second section is comprised of a single lyrical narrative which follows a married couple as they interact on their small farm in late Autumn, addressing themes of literacy, love, and domesticity. The third section continues the focus on domestic life, but also addresses themes of nostalgia for childhood and lost love. The poems of this section move away from the formal, socio-political outbursts of the first section, instead operating primarily through persona and voice, bringing the book to a quiet, personal close.
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Kershaw, Hannah Charlotte. "History, memory, and multiculturalism : representations of Muslims in contemporary British fiction." Thesis, University of York, 2017. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/18198/.
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In a world that is both globalised and yet deeply divided, Muslim literary studies is crucial to understanding the complex relationship between Islam and the West. It is emerging as an inevitable and insightful field of enquiry that offers analyses of the growing body of fiction that explores the Muslim experience of Britain and the US. Contemporary fiction about Muslims is receiving substantial critical attention, and through this interdisciplinary thesis I show that it can also be a useful source in political theory. I make a contribution to this field by approaching contemporary fiction about Muslims through the lens of history and memory. I do this by examining a number of novels published from 1988 to 2015 that are either written by British Muslims or offer an insightful portrayal into the lives of Muslims in Britain. In the introduction to this thesis, I outline my theoretical framework, specifically how I apply the concepts of history and cultural memory. I also discuss the interdisciplinary nature of the work, drawing connections between political research and literary analysis. In Chapter One, I explore Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Robin Yassin-Kassab’s The Road From Damascus, showing how close encounters in multicultural spaces do not necessarily suggest successful multiculturalism due to the ongoing evocation of colonial attitudes. In Chapter Two, I discuss Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane. I suggest that both novels consider the importance of cultural memory in how Muslim migrants understand their British identities. Chapter Three examines Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, moving away from debates regarding Islamic history and instead making connections between British colonialism and race relations in the 1980s. My final chapter discusses Leila Aboulela’s The Kindness of Enemies and Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love. I argue that both novels use the concept of genealogy, or tracing ancestors, to interrogate cross-cultural relations in a time of imperialism and state violence. Ultimately, I submit that by approaching these texts through the theoretical lens of history and memory, we can gain a greater understanding of the Muslim experience of multiculturalism.
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Macauslan, John. "Schumann's music and Hoffmann's fictions." Thesis, University of Manchester, 2014. https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/schumanns-music-and-hoffmanns-fictions(6204c093-4ed6-44c9-b992-08c19f3060e9).html.
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This thesis interprets four of Schumann’s works in the light of the Hoffmann fictions with which they seem to be associated. Unlike previous studies, it deals with each of the four works, treating them as aesthetic entities enhanced by literary relationships that are not primarily programmatic, nor primarily a matter of formal parallels. Each work emerges both in a new light and as it always was. Carnaval (1834-37) appears as a dizzying comedy of theatrical vignettes and character, in the spirit of the German literary understanding of Italian carnival (including in Hoffmann), and Fantasiestücke (1837-38) as a humorous sequence of dream images, resonating with literary tales of the artist’s development, not least those in Hoffmann’s Fantasiestücke. Kreisleriana (1838), a finished masterpiece, suggests improvisations on melodic fragments appearing also in popular tunes used both in trivial variation sets and in Bach’s Goldberg Variations – which figure in Hoffmann’s Kreisleriana as opposed emblems of the philistine and the profound. Nachtstücke (1839-40) creates from plain rondos a paradoxically unsettled set, expressive of profound mental disturbances explored by Hoffmann’s book of that name. I bring out in each work previously unexamined patterns of melody, tonality, metre, sonority and form, showing how these become threads expressive of drama, emotion or symbolism. Unusually, I do not take Schumann’s approach over the 1830s as static: increasingly powerful musical means gave the music greater independence from supporting words, and what Schumann called ‘poetic’ threads increasingly coincide with core musical processes. Equally unusually, I describe those processes as resonating simultaneously with Schumann’s titles, with his culture including Hoffmann, and with his concerns around the time of composition as documented in his letters, criticism, diaries and Mottosammlung. Unlike previous work the thesis treats its subject consistently at three levels. My approach to the interpretation of the individual works at the first level is consonant with Schumann’s aesthetics as described at the second: there I focus more sharply than previous treatments on his stated view that musical works can ‘express’ ‘remote interests’ including literature, and on how he thought that possible – points that, given sensitivity to contemporary connotations and to context, emerge from his writings. Finally, at a third level, I reflect on the approach in the light of strands of musicological and intellectual thought in Schumann’s day and since.
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Grover, Danielle. "Representations of music in late eighteenth-century fiction." Thesis, University of Southampton, 2012. https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/374756/.
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The first part of this thesis will consider how a range of eighteenth-century novels represented the relationship between non-professional musical performance and femininity. Chapter one will consider music‟s status as a female accomplishment, focussing on the debate about the value of musical accomplishment as it appeared in polemical writing and novels by Jane Austen, Frances Burney, Elizabeth Hervey and anonymous writers. It will examine how far these novelists presented music as a leisure activity that benefitted women in their daily lives and how they responded to a prevalent dichotomy of intellectual endeavour and musical accomplishment. It will trace the changing function of music throughout Jane Austen‟s fiction, placing it in the context of other novels of the time, while arguing that these women writers managed to criticise certain attitudes that motivated the pursuit of musical accomplishment without rejecting music as a creative skill. Broadly, the first chapter will investigate eighteenth-century polemical writing and novels with an eye to examining how musical accomplishment became a marker of femininity in novels. Chapter two will scrutinise the role of concerts in four eighteenth-century novels in order to consider the currency of a binary opposition between non-professional and professional spaces. It will also examine how novelists evaluated such spaces through their representations of musical performance. The second section of chapter two will explore the social and political associations given to musical instruments, examining how far the representation of musical instruments, in Frances Burney‟s Camilla and Sarah Harriet Burney‟s Geraldine Fauconberg led to a criticism of disability and foreignness. Both sections will consider how music has contributed to a debate about the rise of consumerism, the organisation of spaces, the tenuous female move into professionalism and the meaning of the term luxury. I will show that Jane Austen, Frances Burney and Ann Thicknesse responded to the premise that the professional space was an unsafe place for women by including concerts that involve both performing and non-performing heroines in various ways. Thus, they were unafraid to implicitly comment on the divides between the private and public spheres. The second half of the thesis examines responses to music in the eighteenth century by analysing the relationship between music-making, sensibility and the responsive body. The third chapter will assess how male observers and suitors responded to female musicmaking, questioning both how far this altered the way in which sensibility has been understood and the central role of the body in scenes of music making. It will traverse a wider segment of literary genres and include analysis of French and Irish, as well as English, novels to assess how far nationality affected the relationship between gender, sensibility and music. Chapter four will examine musical courtship scenes, considering how far music was used as a tool in courtship and identify it as a language specifically suited to the rules of marriage-making. It will also explore the relationship between music, femininity and courtship in novels published between 1750 and 1814.
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Cox, Geraldine. "Music matters in fiction: Creative and critical reflections." Thesis, Cox, Geraldine (2015) Music matters in fiction: Creative and critical reflections. PhD thesis, Murdoch University, 2015. https://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/id/eprint/28762/.
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This thesis comprises two components: a creative piece, titled Impromptu I—X and a critical dissertation. Both pieces endeavour to investigate the use of music in fiction, and attempt to answer the following questions: What is the relationship between music and literature? What is the role of music in narrative fiction? How can reading a work from the perspective of music enhance our understanding and interpretation of a text? Within a musico-literary framework these questions seek to highlight key aspects of human experience, relationships and stories and thus enrich the interpretative potential of the verbal narrative.
Impromptu I—X, from which sections I-V are included in this thesis, is a creative piece that harmonises on two story lines. One line unfolds in contemporary Park, a fictitious inner city suburb of Perth, and the other unravels the past of Mena, an industrial town of Western Australia, purpose-built in the early 1950s to house European migrant workers and their families. Impromptu I—X encompasses a variety of moods, manipulates patterns of time and rhythm, and evokes a narrative of familial and social relationships built from distinct voices and unique characters. The musical form, impromptu, is the organising principle of Impromptu I—X, while at the narrative level, music is represented as integral to the characters’ lives through dance, song, music works and their cultural histories.
The dissertation draws on the work of cultural musicologists Lawrence Kramer and Susan McClary, literary theorists Stephen Benson and Eric Prieto, and cultural historian Gerry Smyth, to explore new ways of reading and interpreting the relationship between music and literature in three contemporary texts: Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), the first novella of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing”, and Tim Winton’s Dirt Music (2001). The musico-literary analysis opens these texts to larger socio-political, historical and cultural contexts and questions, and in doing so enhances the power and significance of human expression and experience represented in fiction.
This thesis thus demonstrates how fiction can be transformed by the interplay between music and literature, and it encourages readers to listen and respond imaginatively to the music in fiction.
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Arimbi, Diah Ariani Women's & Gender Studies UNSW. "Reading the writings of contemporary Indonesian Muslim women writers: representation, identity and religion of Muslim women in Indonesian fictions." Awarded by:University of New South Wales. Women's and Gender Studies, 2006. http://handle.unsw.edu.au/1959.4/25498.
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Indonesian Muslim women???s identity and subjectivity are not created simply from a single variable rather they are shaped by various discourses that are often competing and paralleling each other. Discourses such as patriarchal discourses circumscribing the social engagement and public life of Muslim women portray them in narrow gendered parameters in which women occupy rather limited public roles. Western colonial discourse often constructed Muslim women as oppressed and backward. Each such discourse indeed denies women???s agency and maturity to form their own definition of identity within the broad Islamic parameters. Rewriting women???s own identities are articulated in various forms from writing to visualisation, from fiction to non fiction. All expressions signify women???s ways to react against the silencing and muteness that have long imposed upon women???s agency. In Indonesian literary culture today, numerous women writers have represented in their writings women???s own ways to look at their own selves. Literary representations become one group among others trying to portray women???s strategies that will give them maximum control over their lives and bodies. Muslim women writers in Indonesia have shown through their representations of Muslim women in their writings that Muslim women in Indonesian settings are capable of undergoing a self-definition process. However, from their writings too, readers are reminded that although most women portrayed are strong and assertive it does not necessarily mean that they are free of oppression. The thesis is about Muslim women and gender-related issues in Indonesia. It focuses on the writings of four contemporary Indonesian Muslim women writers: Titis Basino P I, Ratna Indraswari Ibrahim, Abidah El Kalieqy and Helvy Tiana Rosa, primarily looking at how gender is constructed and in turn constructs the identity, roles and status of Musim women in Indonesia and how such relations are portrayed, covering issues of authenticity, representation and power inextricably intertwined in a variety of aesthetic forms and narrative structures.
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Viol, Claus-Ulrich. "Jukebooks: contemporary British fiction, popular music, and cultural value." Heidelberg Winter, 2004. http://deposit.ddb.de/cgi-bin/dokserv?id=2772862&prov=M&dok_var=1&dok_ext=htm.
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Dunst, Maura. ""Such genius as hers" : music in New Woman fiction." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2013. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/46493/.
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This thesis examines music and its relationship to gender and the related social commentary woven throughout New Woman writing, putting forth the New Woman musician figure for consideration. In contrast to the male-dominated world of Victorian music, New Woman fiction is rife with women who not only wish to pursue music, but are brilliantly talented musicians and composers themselves. These women are the focal point of this thesis. The primary texts used are Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899); Sarah Grand’s Ideala (1888), The Heavenly Twins (1893), and The Beth Book (1897); George Egerton’s Keynotes (1893), Discords (1894), Symphonies (1897), and Fantasias (1898); George Moore’s Evelyn Innes (1898) and Sister Teresa (1901); and Mona Caird’s The Daughters of Danaus (1894); with George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894) (and, to a lesser extent, the Moore texts) offered in contrast to the foregoing. This thesis seeks to answer the following question: what is music’s function in New Woman fiction, and to what end? Each chapter offers an answer to this question using different areas of women’s musicianship: stifled musicians, performers, composers, and auditors. In addition, the penultimate chapter works toward a theory of “melopoetic composition,” or the blending of literary and musical composition, and discusses the role of mirror neurons in creating a unique reading experience which is visual, aural, and neural. Ultimately, this thesis illustrates that the sister arts of music and literature were woven together by the sisterhood of the New Woman writers, who used fiction as a medium through which to assert their multi-layered creative capabilities.
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Dyehouse, Jeremiah. "Science Fiction : Rhetoric, Authenticity, Textuality and the Museum of Jurassic Technology." Oberlin College Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 1997. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin1509374752516486.
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Clements, Madeline. "Orienting Muslims : mapping global spheres of affiliation and affinity in contemporary South Asian fiction." Thesis, University of East London, 2013. http://roar.uel.ac.uk/3896/.
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This thesis asks how four South Asian Muslim novelists have responded to the challenge of writing about Islamic faith ties in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York’s World Trade Centre and the ensuing “war on terror”. This is a period when Muslim writers and commentators have come under increasing pressure to “explain” Islamic affiliations and affinities, and – as Pnina Werbner (2002: 1) has put it – to ‘disclose where ... the centres of their subjective universe lie’. Focussing on the international novels of Nadeem Aslam, Mohsin Hamid, Salman Rushdie, and Kamila Shamsie, this thesis explores the hypothesis that they can be read as part of a post-9/11 attempt to revise modern “knowledge” of the Islamic world, using globally-disseminated literature to reframe Muslims’ potential to connect with others, whether Muslims who subscribe to other versions of Islam, or non-Muslims. It considers how the “world literature” these authors create and shape maps spheres of Islamic affiliation and affinity, questioning where their subjects turn in seeking a sense of connection or identification, and why. It provides a detailed examination of the inter-cultural and intra-cultural affiliations and affinities the characters pursue in these texts, asking what aesthetic, historical, political and spiritual identifications or commitments could influence such connective attempts. It also analyses popular discourses and critical discussions surrounding the novels, offering a critical examination of the explanations offered by their authors in their non-fiction writing and commentary for privileging, problematising or prohibiting one (Islamic) affiliation or affinity instead of another, and scrutinising how the writers are appropriated as authentic and hence authoritative spokespeople by dominant political and cultural forces. Finally, it explores how, as authors of Indian and Pakistani origin, Aslam, Hamid, Rushdie and Shamsie negotiate their identities and the tensions of being seen to act as Muslim spokespeople in (conscious) relation to the complex international and geopolitical context in which they write.
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Potoczny, Marie. "From the Museum of Lost Smells." VCU Scholars Compass, 2010. http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/45.
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Two teenage girls get summer jobs as tour guides at a Christian corporation's Poverty-Around-the-World display. A man seduces women with the nostalgia of smell. A young couple finds passion while waiting at a traffic light. These and other stories in the collection explore themes of loneliness, isolation, and coming-of-age in the contemporary American landscape.
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Mudge, Ethne. "Molla's music." Thesis, University of the Western Cape, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/11394/5542.
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Magister Artium - MAMolla's Music is a novella about Maureen (Molla), a white Afrikaans woman born in 1935 in Cape Town, who faced poverty and abandonment before apartheid and who, during apartheid, faced the choice between an unwanted pregnancy with a married man, and a carreer in music funded by the father who had betrayed her. Maureen is introduced in three sections with very different voices in each. In the first section she is depicted in the context of being cared for by a single mother with severe post natal depression. The short chapters and long sentences reflect the naïvity of the subject, whose unfiltered observations allow the reader to bear witness to the traumas that dictate her character later in life. She was so ashamed of her poverty, her father's abandonment, and her pregnancy, that she hid all memories of her past from her children and grandchildren and almost managed to die with all her secrets in tact. The second section becomes more sophisticated with longer chapters. The reader is guided through the fifties by a young adult whose adolescent memories inform the events that unfold over a mere two days. Finally, the last section consists of only one chapter, but it reviews an entire life. It is written in the first person, revealing the identity of the narrator. Maureen taught herself piano before school. Her father played the violin and her dedication to music seems to be a mechanism for connecting to him and what his absence from her life represents. It is an absense that eludes consolidation until her death. Molla proved to be such a gifted child that she skipped two years of school and took on music as an extra subject until matric, but financial strain and the shackles of patriarchy limited her options and only after years of working, does she apply to the UCT college of music. She inherits a piano from her landlords, who are evicted during the implementation of the Group Areas Act of 1957. In the years after that, playing piano becomes her private liberation practised in plain sight, on the only heirloom that persists from her past. When she dies, her granddaughter has a heritage that beckons to be resolved and remembered. She does not play the piano she inherited from her grandmother, but starts to investigate its past. In the course of Molla's Music, I explore themes of Afrikaner identity, and question modes of being for white Afrikaans women in South Africa today. By offering an intimate depiction of an individual's search for meaning, while negotiating the forces of Apartheid and patriarchy, especially as a confluence of forces, I hope to gain clarity with regard to my own questions about identity.
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Watson, Anna Elizabeth. "Music lessons and the construction of womanhood in English fiction, 1870-1914." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/5479.
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This thesis explores the gendered symbolism of women's music lessons in English fiction, 1870-1914. I consider canonical and non-canonical fiction in the context of a wider discourse about music, gender and society. Traditionally, women's music lessons were a marker of upper- and middle-class respectability. Musical ‘accomplishment' was a means to differentiate women in the ‘marriage market', and the music lesson itself was seen to encode a dynamic of obedient submission to male authority as a ‘rehearsal' for married life. However, as the market for musical goods and services burgeoned, musical training also offered women the potential of an independent career. Close reading George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876) and Jessie Fothergill's The First Violin (1877), I discuss four young women who negotiate their marital and vocational choices through their interactions with powerful music teachers. Through the lens of the music lessons in Emma Marshall's Alma (1888) and Israel Zangwill's Merely Mary Ann (1893), I consider the issues of class, respectability and social emulation, paying particular attention to the relationship between aesthetic taste and moral values. I continue by considering George Du Maurier's Trilby (1894) alongside Elizabeth Godfrey's Cornish Diamonds (1895), texts in which female pupils exhibit genuine power, eventually eclipsing both their music teachers and the artist-suitors for whom they once modelled. My final chapter discusses three texts which problematize the power of women's musical performance through depicting female music pupils as ‘New Women' in conflict with the people around them: Sarah Grand's The Beth Book (1895), D. H. Lawrence's The Trespasser (1912) and Compton Mackenzie's Sinister Street (1913). I conclude by looking forward to representations of women's music lessons in the modernist period and beyond, with a reading of Katherine Mansfield's ‘The Wind Blows' (1920) as well as Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows (1956).
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Alqahtani, Norah Hassan. "Muslim feminisms and fictions in a postcolonial frame : case studies of Nawal El Saadawi and Leila Aboulela." Thesis, University of Kent, 2017. https://kar.kent.ac.uk/67676/.
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The postcolonial condition has had life-shaping effects on millions of individuals, in the Third World in particular. This study focuses on the different positions embraced by two authors recognized as 'Muslim feminists.' I explore how they engage with postcolonial subjects and particularly address women's questions in their contemporary societies, through analyses of such 'Muslim fictions' as Woman at Point Zero, The Fall of the Imam, and Zeina by Nawal El Saadawi and The Translator, Minaret, and Lyrics Alley by Leila Aboulela. Because a feminist movement is not autonomous, but bound to its sociopolitical context, the rise as well as the failure of secular political and social movements in Egypt have had an impact on feminist struggles. El Saadawi starts her independent secular feminism and inscribes her female characters as revolutionary subjects who rebel against Islamic patriarchal law. Using Caroline Rooney's concept of 'revolutionary spirit' and Linda Alcoff's positionality, this study demonstrates how El Saadawi enables her female characters to counter the brutality of Arab women's lives through different strategies, even hostile ones. Moreover, El Saadawi is as much a nationalist writer as she is a feminist one, so this study illustrates how the tale of the country has been interwoven with the private lives of women, in alignment with Fredric Jameson's paradigm. Whatever the limitations of El Saadawi's secular feminism have been, however, it is undeniable that her version of secular feminism prepared the ground for the new emergent movement that is Islamic feminism. This study examines Aboulela's novels as a comparative paradigm with El Saadawi's. From a committed Muslim point of view, Aboulela inscribes Islamic faith extensively in her writings. Her work offers a potentially universalizing, although not universal, rallying point; it offers a chance for women to create an Islamic spiritual site of belonging and possible solidarity that transcends social classes, ethnic differences and geographical boundaries. However, Aboulela`s work for emancipation is confined to a spiritual level and seems to be less radical in the feminist focus regarding women's rights.
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McGinney, William Lawrence. "The Sounds of the Dystopian Future: Music for Science Fiction Films of the New Hollywood Era, 1966-1976." Thesis, connect to online resource, 2009. http://digital.library.unt.edu/permalink/meta-dc-9839.
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Adams, Jade Broughton. "'The melody lingers on' : dance, music, and film in F. Scott Fitzgerald's short fiction." Thesis, University of Leicester, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/2381/36270.
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This thesis explores the role of 1920s and 1930s popular culture in the short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. My original contribution to knowledge is to show how Fitzgerald’s use of dance, music, and film - at the level of both form and content - impact upon his literary aesthetics. By situating Fitzgerald’s work in the context of the short story as a genre, I consider the modernist features of his short fiction in relation to short-story cycles by James Joyce, Sherwood Anderson, and Ernest Hemingway. I argue that Fitzgerald’s lyrical style can be deceptive, and his stories are often more experimental, even subversive, than often recognised. This thesis argues that it is in Fitzgerald’s subtle use of ambiguity and parody that these experimental aspects of his fiction often manifest themselves. Reading the short fiction with a view to elucidating this parodic mode, and thus exploring Fitzgerald’s social and cultural critique, we encounter Fitzgerald parodying both his own fictive traits and his earlier stories, which sheds new light on his frequently disdainful remarks about the value of his magazine fiction. As ambiguity and parody are key features of African American cultural practices of the period, the thesis also re-examines Fitzgerald’s engagement with primitivist modernism, offering a broader perspective on how he navigated between his roles as literary novelist and popular short-storyist. Popular cultural references in Fitzgerald’s short fiction do not simply serve as temporal markers or to provide scenic tone, but often function subversively, to destabilise our expectations of a commercial Fitzgerald story whilst sitting in tension with Fitzgerald’s lyrical prose style. Themes of disguise and identity are of paramount importance to Fitzgerald’s literary modernism, and his use of these cultural media, centred around the concept of performance and leisure, show Fitzgerald subtly subverting our expectations of his short fiction.
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Bates, Jessica Rachel. "Walking the Tightrope: Selfhood and Speculative Fiction in Janelle Monáe’s The ArchAndroid." Thesis, Virginia Tech, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/42520.
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Janelle Monáe’s multi-part, multi-media work Metropolis can be read as a speculative fiction text. In my work, I examine the ways in which Monáe uses the structure of her second album The ArchAndroid and the music, lyrics, and dance of her video "Tightrope" to contribute to her underlying narrative. The ArchAndroid creates an auditory experience of time travel by varying the beat and musical style and through the use of specific production techniques. The accompanying video "Tightrope" delineates its titular metaphor through its music, dance, and visuals. These elements, as part of the central narrative of Cindi and Janelle, demonstrate the ways in which Monáe plays with the concept of selfhood by continually recontextualizing identity in time and space.Master of Arts
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Whittle, David. "Bruce Montgomery (1921-1978) : a biography with a catalogue of the musical works." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.285461.
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Strong, Alissa Eugenia. "An Empirical Study on the Effects of Music and Sound Effects in Fiction E-Books." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2013. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/3912.
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Research indicates that music has a unique and powerful ability to affect how listeners react to a story (Schaefer, 1998). Publishing houses are increasingly incorporating music and other multimedia effects into their products, with companies such as Booktrack now including novel-length soundtracks with e-books. The present study aimed to empirically investigate the relationship between music and text by examining whether readers' enjoyment of and distraction from a fiction e-book is affected by the inclusion of music or sound effects. One hundred and twenty undergraduate students at Brigham Young University completed an e-book reading task (either accompanied by sound effects, music, or nothing at all) and completed a post-task survey that measured their enjoyment of and distraction from the task. It was found that multimedia-enhanced e-books were significantly more enjoyable (M = 4.555) than e-books alone (M = 4.035). Both sound effects and music (Ms = 4.512 and 4.594, respectively) led to higher levels of enjoyment than the control condition (M = 4.035), although later analyses indicated this effect was primarily found in females. Only the multimedia e-books incorporating sound effects significantly lowered distraction levels compared with the control (Ms = 1.698 and 3.621, respectively). The amount of time a participant spent engaged in multimedia behaviors (e.g., watching television, playing video games) did not consistently affect the relationships investigated. It was concluded that music and sound effects may be an enjoyable and interesting feature of e-books without detracting from the story. In some cases, the addition of multimedia made e-books as enjoyable for those who typically did not enjoy fiction as it was for those who enjoy fiction. It is recommended that publishers continue investigating this relationship, as multimedia e-books may open access to a new marketable audience for publishers.
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Mumme, Lisa Pollock Mumme. "Not things: gender and music in the Mad Max franchise." Thesis, University of Iowa, 2019. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/7056.
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This thesis is a study of the gender politics through musical discourse in the Mad Max series. Dystopian narratives are particularly interesting texts for study of gender because they allow for extreme hypothetical situations in worlds that are at once familiar and unfamiliar. Musical discourse in the Mad Max films both supports and complicates dominant readings of gender constructions. I consider the gender politics of the franchise, using Mad Max (1979) and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) as case studies, and drawing on scholarship on gender in film music, feminist film theory, and Australian car culture. In analyzing this music, I consider its broader cultural connotations, including film music tropes and operatic character types. After considering these genre associations, I analyze the musical gestures for narrative content and consider how the placement of themes with images and dialogue influences that content, with attention to how these factors contribute to a gendered understanding of the character. As the first deep thematic analysis of music in the Mad Max films, my project extends existing scholarship on both onscreen performance and gender categorizations that include musical forces resistant to strict binary categorization. My analysis of gendered musical discourse emphasizes the power of inquiry about gender in film music to clarify, enrich, and complicate texts.
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Modeste, Jacquelynne Jones. "The blues and jazz in Albert Murray's fiction: A study in the tradition of stylization." W&M ScholarWorks, 2004. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539623458.
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The use of the blues as a critical theory and as a literary model for the crafting of fiction opens new possibilities for both intellectual and artistic exploration. Reflecting the power of human agency amidst antagonism, the blues is the music of personal triumph over the brutality of circumstances despite any change in condition. The music's emphasis on improvisation reveals human agency because through instrumentation, singing, stylistic nuances, audience participation and/or venue individuals transform perceived or imagined woefulness into hopefulness. Studying the blues and its cultural legacy is significant in identifying the mechanisms by which individuals and ultimately entire communities sustain themselves. The literature that uses the blues as an aesthetic guide demonstrates variety of experience, human agency, and an individual crafting of identity in relation to group identity.;Albert Murray's Scooter series, Train Whistle Guitar (1974), The Spyglass Tree (1991) and The Seven League Boots (1995), lends insight into the ways in which the blues contributes to the writing of fiction. Initially set in the 1920s and 30s Jim Crow U.S. South, the series follows Scooter through maturity into the 1960s. Scooter is reared in the blues tradition; its history is his life. Music abounds, living conditions are harsh but his community exudes vitality that parallels the music. The blues is intrinsically linked with heroic activity because it demonstrates the ways in which personal agency transforms actual or perceived limitations.;In Murray's blues-based series, a modeling of jazz is the logical outcome of Scooter's characterization because jazz resonates with ingenuity and variety while being rooted in African American culture. This study analyzes Scooter's maturity as it parallels the development of the blues through the country blues (Train Whistle Guitar), classic blues to jazz during Scooter's college years (The Spyglass Tree), and the smoothness of style consistent with swing-style jazz during Scooter's mature adulthood (The Seven League Boots). Scooter's characterization will be considered in conjunction with Thomas Malory's, Arthur in Le Morte D'Arthur (1485); Ralph Ellison's protagonist in Invisible Man (1952); and Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas in Native Son (1940).
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Young, Sade Marie. "SOUTHERN-PLAYALISTIC-HIPHOP-SPACESHIP-MUSIC." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1305583004.
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Pasquet, Olivier. "Automatic versus automatic, materialized fiction as a confrontational compositional process : a resolved complexity : simplicity." Thesis, University of Huddersfield, 2018. http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/34734/.
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The current submitted work consists of a portfolio of musical works, visual pieces and thoughts that preoccupied me over a period of research and creation from late 2014 to 2017. Pieces described in this thesis developed into an overall artistic research and craft which led to a specific workflow serving a new personal aesthetic. Two parts describe two seemingly antonymous automatic creation processes: automatic versus automatic. The first part describes my inspirations together with a consequent formal-ization of my composition techniques. I render generative automatic music both emerging from finite state computation and infinitesimal interference. The second part shows that I often perform my music in specific sites with challenging conditions. I consider them as constraints that eventually also be-come part of the composition system. The materialization of a piece involves aback-and-forth process, between concepts and realities, that I finally transcend in the sense of surrealist automatism. This mechanical and human process is a necessity for the authenticity to my pieces.
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Boyd-Buggs, Debra. "Baraka : maraboutism and maraboutage in the francophone Senegalese novel /." The Ohio State University, 1986. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1392894752.
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Caporaletti, Daniel. "If There's Anything I Can Do." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2016. http://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/2135.
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If There’s Anything I Can Do is a collection of nine connected short stories. Each story takes place in the fictional River City, and explores the lives of characters that frequent Cellar Door, a divey, basement bar in the heart of downtown. Bartenders, musicians, regulars, neighbors, fathers, brothers, and lovers make up the crowd at Cellar Door, and each story shows the importance of place within a community.
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Crump, Simon Richard. "'My Elvis Blackout' and 'Neverland' : truth, fiction and celebrity in the postmodernist heterobiographical composite novel." Thesis, University of Huddersfield, 2014. http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/24692/.
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A PhD by publication comprising two of my books, My Elvis Blackout and Neverland, accompanied by a reflective and critical exegesis, which examines notions of truth, fiction and celebrity in the composite novel through a broadly analytical and practice-based methodology. The exegesis begins by exploring the links between the methodology of the fine artist and the new creative writer. It then demonstrates that My Elvis Blackout and Neverland represent an original contribution to knowledge in the way that they explore and develop literary form (the ‘composite’ novel), and, in their exploration of celebrity, myth-making and fictional hagiography, and that the two books function as performative critiques which probe the boundaries between fiction and the fabricated reality of celebrity culture. My exegesis analyses Linda Boldrini’s term ‘heterobiography’ (2012) with particular reference to Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy The Kid (1981), which as a bricolage relies upon the reader’s pre-conceived recognition of the historicity of its protagonist and continually tests the boundaries between fact and fiction. In this section of the exegesis, I propose that what sets My Elvis Blackout and Neverland apart from Billy The Kid is that whilst Ondaatje’s book certainly does exploit the confusions between fact, fiction, autobiography and history, it remains firmly set within the timeframe that its historical protagonist inhabits. My Elvis Blackout and Neverland remain grounded within their readers’ expectations of American settings contemporary to their nominative protagonists, but both books also feature dilations in both historical and geographical setting. Through analysis I have come to perceive ‘the celebrity persona’ as an identikit image assembled by thousands of witnesses. A photo fit photomontage tiered with impressions of subjective provenance, each layered transparency filtered through the fears and desires of fans and critics. Whereas other historiographic metafictions use historical figures as singular characters, My Elvis Blackout and Neverland can be seen to be utilising an ‘identikit’ concept to present their respective protagonists as manyheaded Hydras, or multiple probability ‘versions’ from parallel universes. By a conflation of terms, Hutcheon’s ‘historiographic metafiction’ (1988) and Boldrini’s ‘heterobiography’ (2012), My Elvis Blackout and Neverland are in fact historiobiographic metafictions. The exegesis concludes by establishing my own works’ live impact on the overarching celebrity metanarratives, and their inevitable organic status.
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Bigna, Daniel Humanities & Social Sciences Australian Defence Force Academy UNSW. "Life on the margins : the autobiographical fiction of Charles Bukowski." Awarded by:University of New South Wales - Australian Defence Force Academy. School of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2005. http://handle.unsw.edu.au/1959.4/38717.
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Charles Bukowski devoted his writing career to turning his own life into poetry and prose. In poems and stories about his experiences as one of the working poor in post war America, and in those depicting his experiences as a writer of the American underground, Bukowski represents himself as both a literary and social outsider. Bukowski expresses an alternative literary aesthetic through his fictional persona, Henry Chinaski, who struggles to overcome his suffering in a world he finds absurd, and who embarks on a quest for freedom in his youth to which he remains committed all his life. This thesis examines Charles Bukowski's autobiographical fiction with a specific emphasis on five novels and one collection of short stories. In the novels, Post Office (1970), Factotum (1975), Women (1978), Ham on Rye (1982) and Hollywood (1989), and in a number of short stories in the collection Hot Water Music (1983), Bukowski explores different periods of Chinaski???s life with a dark humour, revealing links between Chinaski???s struggle with the absurd and those aspects comprising Bukowski???s alternative aesthetic. The thesis focuses on such aspects of Bukowski???s art as the uncommercial nature of his publishing history, his strong emphasis on literary simplicity, the appearance of the grotesque and Bukowski???s obsession with nonconformity, drinking and sex. These aspects illuminate the distinctive nature of Bukowski???s art and its purpose, which is the transformation of an ordinary life into literature. This thesis argues that Bukowski illuminates possibilities that exist for individuals to create an identity for themselves through aesthetic self-expression. The thesis traces the development of Chinaski's non-conformist personality from Ham on Rye, based on Bukowski's youth in Los Angeles during the Depression, to Hollywood, Bukowski's ironic portrayal of Chinaski's brush with the commercial film industry. Through meeting the many challenges he faced throughout his life with defiance, honesty and an irreverent sense of humour, Bukowski invites readers to identify with his alternative world view. The thesis argues this particular aspect of his writing constitutes his most valuable contribution to twentieth century American fiction.
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Schereka, Wilton. "Sonic Afrofuturism: Blackness, electronic music production and visions of the future." University of the Western Cape, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/11394/6548.
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Magister Artium - MAThis thesis is an exploration and analysis of the ways in which we might use varying forms of Black thought, theory, and art to think Blackness anew. For this purpose I work with electronic music from Nigeria and Detroit between 1976 and 1993, as well as with works of science fiction by W.E.B. Du Bois, Samuel Delany, Ralph Ellison, and Octavia Butler. Through a conceptual framework provided by theorists such as Fred Moten and Kodwo Eshun and the philosophical work of Afrofuturists like Delany, Ellison, Butler, and Du Bois, I explore the outer limits of what is possible when doing away with a canon of philosophy that predetermines our thinking of Blackness. This exploration also takes me to the possible depths of what this disavowal of a canon might mean and how we work with sound, the aural, and the sonic in rethinking the figuring of Blackness. This thesis is also be woven together by the theory of the Black Radical Tradition – following Cedric Robinson and Fred Moten specifically. At the centre of this thesis, and radiating outwards, is the assertion that a set of texts developed for a University of the West – Occidental philosophy as I refer to it in the thesis – is wholly insufficient in attempting to become attuned to the possibilities of Blackness. The thesis, finally, is a critique of ethnomusicology and its necessity for a native object, as well as sound studies, which fails to conceptualise any semblance of Black noise.
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Demmler, Monika [Verfasser], and Hubert [Akademischer Betreuer] Zapf. "Biophilia and the Aesthetics of Blues, Jazz, and Hip-Hop Music in African-American Prose Fiction / Monika Demmler. Betreuer: Hubert Zapf." Augsburg : Universität Augsburg, 2015. http://d-nb.info/108077291X/34.
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Treby, Marion Elizabeth. "The signifyin(g) impulse and the music of Toni Morrison : an examination of how Morrison's fiction signifies on music, Black culture and the oral tradition." Thesis, Anglia Ruskin University, 2004. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.413621.
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Chao, Noelle. "Musical letters eighteenth-century writings of music and the fictions of Burney, Radcliffe, and Scott /." Diss., Restricted to subscribing institutions, 2007. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1467893641&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=1564&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Goad, John C. "Tracing Appalachian Musical History through Fiction: Representations of Appalachian Music in Selected Works by Mildred Haun and Lee Smith." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2015. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/2536.
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This research seeks to compare and contrast fictional Appalachian writings by Lee Smith and Mildred Haun to contemporary historical sources in an attempt to trace the development of Appalachian music between the mid-nineteenth century and the late twentieth century. The thesis examines two novels by Lee Smith (The Devil’s Dream and Oral History) and the collection The Hawk’s Done Gone by Mildred Haun, which includes a short novel and several short stories. Contemporary primary sources and scholarly secondary sources were used to compare the fictional works’ depictions of Appalachian music to their historical counterparts. Also included within the thesis is a discussion of Smith and Haun’s personal and research backgrounds and their connections to Appalachian music. Overall, the study found Smith and Haun’s works accurate and based in historical fact, in part due to both writers’ use of historical research and interviews to inform their fiction.
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Hum, Peter. "Lift the bandstand." Thesis, McGill University, 1989. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=61832.
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Miesak, Edward. "Heroes Are Born Then Made." Thesis, North Texas State University, 1987. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc504458/.
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Heroes Are Born Then Made is a theatre piece involving live actors on stage, and live music originating from an orchestra pit. The script and music is original. The music is meant to literally depict actions and emotions on stage whether the actors are present or not. The duration of the entire production is about two and one-half hours long. Six main actors are used with additional walk-ons. Sixteen musicians are required to make up the orchestra which is organized into a woodwind quartet, a brass trio, a string quartet, a piano, and a percussion quartet. The play is based on the author's conception of how people tend to treat each other when someone is caught at a disadvantage. Specifically it is a depiction of the conflict involved when the minor characters discover that the main character is trying to do something quite different from their definition of "normal."
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Zhao, Ye. "Chamber Opera 'With Her Eyes'." University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2021. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1623251121828837.
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O'Brien, Rebecca Ann. "WHEN THE INHUMAN BECOMES HUMAN: AN EXAMINATION OF THE MUSICAL PORTRAYAL OF THE ROBOT IN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY SCIENCE-FICTION CINEMA THROUGH AN ANALYSIS OF THE FILM SCORES OF AUTOMATA, EX MACHINA, AND THE MACHINE." UKnowledge, 2019. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/music_etds/142.
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Science fiction film has been telling stories about artificial anthropomorphic robots and androids for almost a hundred years, spawning films, such as Metropolis (1927), Ghost in the Shell (1951), and Blade Runner (1982). Each of these science-fiction films was complemented by a musical score that helped to create an onscreen world dominated by a dystopian view of the future. Influenced by the generations of prior science-fiction films, Automata (2014), The Machine (2013), and Ex Machina (2015) are all concerned with the same narrative in which humanity is in decline while artificial robots are rising up and experiencing life in a way that humans are no longer capable of doing. These three films were all chosen as exemplars of recent science- fiction films with stories about robots versus humans. Further, this difference between robots and humans is paralleled in the film's musical scores. Humans are represented by depressive musical themes with dull and cold timbres that symbolize how empty they have become. Robots, on the other hand, are represented by bright and lively timbres that symbolize how the robots are living more vibrant lives than humans.
This thesis traces themes for humans and robots through several important moments and tropes in each film: the state of humanity, the first encounter with the robot, the quality of life for robots and humans, and the eventual conflict that erupts between artificial and organic life. This conflict ends with the arrival of a robotic Eve figure, a sole female robot that is set apart by the film score as a special being, the start of a new age that is dominated by robotic life. These films choose to portray female robots and promote the idea of Eve because the female is seen as a mysterious Other to be feared; in the same way, humans fear these female robots because of their Otherness. Analysis and conclusions were achieved through transcription of the film scores, interviews with the film composers, analysis connecting the score to the visual scene, and constructing a historical context that connects the three films to their predecessors.
Future research can expand on these findings by adding more science fiction films to the film pool, examining just how far the musical difference between humans and robots can be traced in film. Unlocking the musical themes assigned to humans and examining how they change over time can reveal how humans perceive themselves, for better or worse. This study is also meant to serve as a gateway for more science fiction films to be studied through their music, as some film's have hidden meanings that can only be understood by examining the music and how it interacts with the visual scene. A study of Automata, The Machine, and Ex Machina manifests how humanity is making way for the robotic Eve and the next stage of evolution for the world.
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Tan, Ngiap Leng. "The uses of art in the fiction of Anthony Powell with special reference to 'A dance to the music of time'." Thesis, Birkbeck (University of London), 1990. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.401754.
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This thesis examines Anthony Powell's technique and style in A Dance to the Music of Time. These can only be fully appreciated through an understanding of the wealth of allusion, metaphor and quotation in the text. Drawn from a wide variety of sources, these are the filters through which the narrator Nicholas Jenkins both perceives and presents his view of life, and extends the possibilities of the first person narrative. The forms of art which for Nicholas constitute a parallel world to that of actual existence, and also the metaphorical means of apprehending while portraying everyday reality, are shown to be the analytical tools with which "the eternal question of what constitutes experience" may be pondered. , r Powell's narrative is one that openly exhibits and plays upon its fictional nature, absorbing and parodying the plastic, visual and dramatic arts as well as the work of other authors. It is this chameleon quality of the text that allows theme, character and situation to be illuminated in a wholly original way, varied yet precise, and which forms the focus of this study. I . ../ The thesis begins by analyzing Powell's five early novels i,n orde,r to demonstrate t~e genesis of his methods. Then the structure of A Dance to the Music of Time is examined showing how the organization of the work q~mtributes towards the meanings. . The full effect of Powell's work is gained by the rich intermingling of art 2 forms, the necessary division into separate components for study detracting from its true flavour. The next section of the thesis therefore takes a' look at the venetian sequences of Temporary Kings, a fine example of the arts working in cumulative combination. This is followed by chapters on the arts as used by Powell considered individually. Key examples, the "presiding ikons" of the text, are closely examined with the aim of demonstrating the function of the arts in the narrative. Though numerous minor allusions are also considered, the thesis seeks to be exemplary rather than exhaustive. A thread that runs through the whole thesis is the aim of deciphering the reticent and elusive character of the narrator. Revealing little in action Nicholas is indicated everywhere in a self-reflexive text that is a c' portrait of an artist at work.
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Olson, Neleigh. "AMERICAN IDYLL: STORIES." UKnowledge, 2018. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/74.
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The short stories in American Idyll: Stories experiment with the boundaries of traditional fiction by often drawing on nonfiction forms and styles to explore the roles that pop culture, locality, and cultural narratives play not only in individual lives, but also in broader terms by questioning how these elements contribute to American culture as a living, organic entity.
Often playful in tone and execution, the stories in this collection aim to inhabit a spectrum: from voice-led narratives to historical fiction to textured ethereal interactions with established cultural events and persons and wholly fictional accounts of American pop culture.
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Farouk, May. "Les Tribulations de la fiction chez Jean Echenoz : le retour du roman d'aventures : formes et enjeux contemporains." Thesis, Paris 3, 2013. http://www.theses.fr/2013PA030128.
Full textAbstract:
Vers le début des années 80, on assiste, sur la scène littéraire française, à un renouveau romanesque que le Nouveau Roman, trop centré sur les jeux de langage, semblait avoir démodé. On assiste également à une résurgence du roman réaliste, social, musical, policier et d’aventures. C’est précisément cette problématique du retour, notamment celui du roman d’aventures, que cette thèse tente d’exposer et surtout d’interroger à travers l’étude de l'oeuvre très représentative d’Echenoz. En renouant avec le genre classique, notre auteur n’hésite pas à en modifier la configuration et les enjeux. La mise au jour de ceux-ci nous permet d’élaborer une poétique du récit d’aventures postmoderne. Telle est la finalité de cette étude : revisiter les lieux d’un genre traditionnel ressuscité pour en dégager les formes et les enjeux contemporains. Mais à cet objectif, s’en ajoute un autre de plus large envergure : parcourir via l’étude du genre, les tribulations de la fiction échenozienne qui n’hésite pas à bifurquer d’un genre à l’autre, à chavirer entre deux espace-temps et à se thématiser dans une écriture elle-même périlleuse, toujours prête à malmener son lecteur totalement démuni face à l’audace débridée de son auteur et aux déroutantes perturbations de la narration et de l’œuvreSince 1980, the literary scene in France has witnessed a revival of romance once made obsolete by the New Novel (Nouveau Roman). Realistic, social, musical, crime, spy and adventure fiction has thus sprung up again. The current study examines and questions the problematic of “return” especially the return of adventure fiction in the very representative work of Jean Echenoz. Thought reviving a classical genre, the author does not shy away from modifying and remodeling that genre’s configurations and issues. Thus, this survey elaborates a poetic of the postmodern fiction of adventures, revisiting a traditional genre to extract contemporary forms and issues, so to speak. But from a broader perspective, the study underscores the tribulations of Echenoz’s fiction, work which does not mind to collapse plots, oscillate from one genre to another or sway between two space-times, at the risk of presenting itself in a turbulent mode of writing confounding the reader - who fells helpless in the face of the unbridled audacity of the author and his narrative perturbations
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Bao, Cheng. "La Musique dans l'œuvre de Boris Vian." Thesis, Sorbonne Paris Cité, 2019. http://www.theses.fr/2019USPCA034/document.
Full textAbstract:
À la fois romancier, critique de jazz, trompettiste, chanteur et directeur artistique, Boris Vian est un homme polyvalent dont la réception est diverse. Omniprésente dans sa vie, la musique lui a conféré une sensibilité qui est certainement pour une part à la source de son originalité en tant qu'écrivain. Cette recherche vise à interroger l'importance de la musique dans son univers littéraire, ainsi que les efforts qu'il a consacrés au rapprochement des deux arts. Utilisant son acception ouverte des formes de la musique, nous avons découvert un monde où l'écrivain inscrit l'art d'Euterpe de maintes manières : par les espaces, les instruments, les musiciens et les morceaux interprétés ou cités. Les éléments empruntés au jazz ont, sur l'écriture romanesque de Vian, une emprise décisive. Boris Vian reconnaît lui-même l'importance de la musique dans son « écriture-jazz », toujours rythmée et improvisatrice, libre et inventive. Dans l'œuvre de fiction, la musique exerce ainsi son influence depuis le détail stylistique jusqu'à la structure macroscopique. Le premier volet de notre étude concerne les présentations explicites de la musique dans ses fictions tandis que la partie suivante poursuit l'exploration vers une dimension plus impliciteAs a novelist, jazz critic, trumpet player, singer and artistic director, Boris Vian is a versatile man recognized diversely. Omnipresent in his life, the music has given him a keen sense that is certainly part of his originality as a writer. This research aims to investigate the importance of music in his literary universe, as well as the efforts he has devoted to bringing the two arts closer together. By taking a broad view of music as Vian, we have discovered a world where the writer inscribes the art of Euterpe in many ways : by the spaces, the instruments, the musicians and the pieces interpreted or quoted. The elements borrowed from jazz have a decisive influence on Vian's novel writing. Boris Vian himself recognizes the importance of music in his "jazz-writing", which is always rhythmic and improvisatory, free and inventive. In the work of fiction, music exerts its influence from the stylistic detail to the macroscopic structure. The first part of our study concerns the explicit presentations of music in his fiction while the following part continues the exploration in a more implicit dimension
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Erlandsson, Patrik. "Gäst i Katas hus : En undersökning av fiktionens roll i museet." Thesis, Högskolan i Skövde, Institutionen för informationsteknologi, 2018. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:his:diva-15080.
Full textAbstract:
This work is about fiction in the museum, and an approach towards transmedia storytelling with two different methods of mediation. With background in literature on cultural heritage, mediation in museums, mediation of history, fiction, transmedia storytelling and adaptation, visitors’ discussions about an exhibition and a fictional text was examined. In order to make the two methods of mediation converge, a number of themes from the existing exhibition were adapted and encapsulated in a fictional story.The visitors were primarily interested in a historical discussion in regards to the two methods of mediation. The message in both methods was considered to be historical, although different reasons as to why were expressed. The discussion about the fictional text emanated from a traditional view of historical fiction, i.e. was considered by the visitors to be provocative or compelling fictional prose that may guide a visitor to the exhibit. Somewhat contradictory to this expressed meaning, the visitors’ discussion about the fiction revealed a more suggestive and imaginative relationship with the subject matter, suggesting that fiction in the museum is a means to problematize meaning making in the museum, if they should promote experiences or build frameworks for learning in an authoritative method of mediation.