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After Collective Memory: Postnational Europe and Socially Engaged Art
(2015-12-16) Synenko, Joshua Francis; Reisenleitner, Markus
This thesis focuses on works of public art that enjoy proven success in challenging the national bias of European heritage practice. By developing methods at the intersection between collective memory, critical historiography, and theory, I situate heritage debates in relation to forms of discrimination that emerged as symptoms of the financial crisis (2008-present). I then describe how public art interventions help to unsettle the grand narratives of cosmopolitan idealism that work to neutralize anti-racist strategies in the public sphere. The progression of my thesis eventually poses a challenge to the cosmopolitan reach of the Jewish diasporic tradition in particular. To that end, I explore the archival strategies of Holocaust memory practitioners, including their express aim of including diverse (i.e. non-Jewish) histories of violent exclusion into the historical record; the social and political conditions for the emergence of counter-monuments in West Germany during the 1970s, and the subsequent efforts that were made to turn this memorial aesthetic into a global standard for the memory culture industry; the haunting resurgence of cosmopolitan aspirations in Yael Bartana’s video installation, And Europe Will Be Stunned (2011); and a meditation on Bartana’s attempt at revisiting the racial dynamics of intergenerational violence in the aftermath of genocide.
Open Access
Art and Otherness: Tragic Visions in Modern Literature
(2018-11-21) Karamally, Hamza Ali; Shea, Victor
My dissertation is entitled Art and Otherness: Tragic Visions in Modern Literature. The two main subjects of inquiry I take up are the figure of the otherboth as an expression of phenomenological alterity and as a postcolonial subjectand the representation of this figure in modern literature. I investigate the intersections between these two subjects, i.e. whether art is an especially insightful medium or discourse to discuss the subject of otherness in the sense that it represents a disruption within the nature of experience that resembles the encounter with the other. As a basic rationale, my dissertation also accordingly attempts a self-reflexivity grounded in problematizing both the formulation of and interaction between competing conventions of otherness. More succinctly, I attempt herein a methodology that reads across discourses whilst remaining on their margins, with the dual purpose of avoiding the self-confirmation of each ratiocination and finding, specifically in art (and in particular literature), a discursive practice that seeks to avoid, or perhaps transcend, a stable definition of otherness. To effectively probe the various political, psychological, existential and phenomenal aspects of otherness, my project and chapters are organized around these separate but overlapping dimensions. My selected texts are predominantly from the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a particular focus on Modernist literature, as the latters anxieties about the nature of art and of the other are particularly useful to probe these and other relevant questions. I focus primarily on fiction by Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf, Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Albert Camus, Kamel Daoud, Don DeLillo, Saadat Hasan Manto, Yann Martel and Herman Melville, to which I apply a variety of theoretical lenses. I juxtapose these texts from different literary canons and maintain a correspondingly interdisciplinary critical approach in order to disentangle the figure of the other from various competing ontological and theoretical systems. My premise for this methodology is that pairing and reading these texts in unusual contexts allows for a drawing out of shared symbology, themes and metaphors and opens up a space for a more robust conversation about the relationship between art and otherness.
Open Access
Essay in Judgment: Reading for Aesthetics in Mansfield Park
(2018-11-21) Goldberg, Bessie Rovainen; Clark, Matthew C.
My dissertation demonstrates how Mansfield Park, which contains philosophically compelling claims about judgment generally and aesthetic judgment specifically, makes these claims through a reading experience that is itself an exercise in aesthetic judgment. Although this experience could be had by any actual reader of the novel, the experience of every actual reader depends upon her willingness to measure the exercise of her own faculty of judgment against that of the self-reflective, aesthetically disinterested, yet emotionally engaged reader whom the novel itself hypothesizes. With this hypothesized reader, I argue, the novel encourages readers to realize this ideal of aesthetic judgment while also explaining the various ways they might fall short. This hypothesized reader, I argue further, strives to follow a demand similar to Mikhail Bakhtins demand in Art and Answerability for each individual to make art and life answerable to one another. Mansfield Park challenges readers to make art and life answerable primarily through a double plot structure; narrative techniques that complicate the distance between characters and readers; and the portrayal of the characters various failures of judgment. I employ methods of rhetorical narratology in my analysis of the novel to highlight the specifically literary ways it contributes to questions of philosophical aesthetics. This approach also accounts for the extent and types of disagreements about the novel in the critical literature about it. Within the general structure of a marriage comedy, Mansfield Park tells another story that challenges the expectations raised by that structure: the story of Fannys complicated perspective on Mansfield Park as both she and it change. I call this story the novels position plot. By complicating readers expectations for and judgments of the characters, the novel challenges readers to consider the extent to which their judgments of the characters and of the novel should be grounded in their expectations for a marriage comedy and the extent to which they should be informed by the novels portrayal of how ones position affects ones judgment. The novel manipulates readers expectations as well as their distance from the characters in clarifying the limits and possibilities of both disinterested and aesthetic judgment.
Open Access
Fugitive Phrases: Arcade Fire, Music, and the Amorous Subject
(2021-03-08) Allison, Stacy Michelle; Bailey, Steven C.
This dissertation asserts that passionate love is not a feeling, but a process of acculturation to a complete system of information. Niklas Luhmanns work on love as a system of communication is put in dialogue with the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj iek to demonstrate that music plays a vital role in the construction of amorous subjectivity in Western culture. The music of Canadian rock band Arcade Fire, with its concern with ideas of emotion and authenticity, provides a vehicle for revealing the process of becoming an amorous subject, such as the courtly lover; the relationship between music, love and memory, forgetting and time; the uncanny musical revenant, and the complications of sexuality. Luhmanns theory of passionate love as a system of communication and psychoanalytic analysis as developed by Lacan and iek are used to demonstrate the ways popular music forms an amorous semantic communication network. This system of communication works to resolve and enable the paradox that is passionate love. In this dissertation I develop Luhmanns theory of passionate love as a communication system alongside the theories of Lacan and iek to develop a form a theory of affective mapping, which is used in an analysis of several Arcade Fire songs. The first section of the dissertation sets out the area of study, defining and discussing ideas of love, indie rock music, and the overall methodological approach. Chapter two takes up the areas of psychoanalysis, and systems theory, leading the development of a theoretical framework that is deployed later the study. Chapters three and four focus on indie rock music, music scenes and Montreal, and Arcade Fire. Chapters five, six, and seven are comprised of case studies, each focusing on a different song and theoretical concern.
Open Access
Glamour in the Good: Exhibiting Glamour's Expression in Toronto's Urban Imaginary
(2021-03-08) Franklin, Kathryn Ashley; Ingram, Susan
This dissertation examines the beguiling but illusory concept of glamour as a historical and aesthetic component of Torontos urban imaginary. In the years since William Howland, Torontos 25th mayor from 1886-87, coined the phrase Toronto the Good, Toronto has undeniably shed its good moniker and steadily positioned itself as a glamorous world-class city. This dissertation uses glamour as a prism to illustrate how the citys literature, art, fashion, music and film have contributed to Torontos emergence as a cosmopolitan global city. Alongside these art forms, this study uses a comparative analysis to examine how historical and cultural developments such as the construction of Casa Loma, the popularity of the 1926 Miss Toronto pageant, the 1960s counterculture of Yorkville, the celebrity of the Toronto International Film Festival, the aftermath of the 1990s recession and the rise in gentrification have helped to shape a unique expression of glamour for the city. Drawing upon archival materials, primary and secondary sources, and close readings, this dissertation charts a history of glamour in Toronto and demonstrates how Torontonians have continuously negotiated, courted, and challenged the expression of glamour in the city. This history reveals the role gender and sexual orientation have played in the rise of glamour in Toronto and the conditions that shape the way women, in particular, have accessed and experienced glamour in the city. Ultimately, these contexts shed light on the ways in which Torontonians have historically navigated the tensions between glamour and the good.
Open Access
Of Field and Forest: Aesthetics and the Nonhuman on Hampstead Heath
(2016-11-25) Lee, Jessica Jasmine; Steigerwald, Joan
Hampstead Heaths eight-hundred acres of field and forest were acquired for the public in 1871. It was the first metropolitan open space in London to be acquired as a result of decades of campaigning, and is therefore central to discussions of public spaces, landscapes, and urban open spaces in Britain. This dissertation takes the Heath as its subject, arguing that its history is palimpsestic, offering a many-layered, multitudinous array of narratives that have not yet been adequately reflected in historical studies of the site. As Britain faces a new wave of privatization and threats to public spacea situation likened by some to the rampant enclosures of the nineteenth centuryI argue that the Heath and its history remain central to conflicts over access to public spaces. Through the lenses of environmental history, environmental aesthetics, and multispecies ethnography, I consider the ways in which human and nonhuman agencies have shaped the landscape and its management from the eighteenth century to the present. I consider cases as diverse as how water flow has shaped the Heath, as debates rage over dam construction work taking place on the site, to the ways in which sheep, corpses, and bramble scrub have contributed to the development of a management plan for the site. Specifically, this dissertation brings environmental history, environmental aesthetics, and multispecies ethnography into conversation, underscoring the ways in which the tools of each can contribute to a richer retelling of a landscapes many historical narratives. I draw on the work of aesthetician Arnold Berleant and ethnographer Anna Tsing to tell a fuller story of the Heaths complex history. I explore the Heath through a variety of methods: archival research; analysis of landscape aesthetics; descriptive accounts of my own aesthetic experience; participant ethnography in the form of interviews and first-hand accounts; and on-the-ground study of the Heaths landscape and natural history. In doing so, I call attention to the ways in which the many histories of Hampstead Heath are bound up with social, political, aesthetic, and nonhuman worlds, arguing that attending to their entanglement allows for a more nuanced understanding of the complex forces that shape access to public open spaces in Britain today.

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