Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2024, Germanic Languages and Literatures

This paper examines the theoretical difficulties related to the study of Gretel Karplus Adorno, wife of Theodor Adorno. In 1937, Karplus turned away from a successful career as an independent businesswoman to become Adorno's wife, unofficial secretary, and life-long promoter. This decision challenges contemporary assumptions that women in Karplus' situation were either stifled during their lives or intentionally overlooked posthumously. In contrast, this paper analyzes Karplus's 1930-40 correspondence with Walter Benjamin to suggest that she saw her marriage and submission to her husband's ambition as an opportunity to achieve her own life goals, not an obstacle to those goals. Karplus found financial success and social disappointment in her Berlin career. She developed close relationships with Adorno and Benjamin out of a desire for their intellectual companionship. For this reason, she was eager to support their work, even at the cost of her manufacturing career. This paper concludes that a biography of Karplus must not only accept her decision to leave her career, despite its apparent complicity with a patriarchal bias towards men and husbands. Such a biography must also challenge ideas of success defined by the bourgeois notion of an individual genius who produces products (e.g. books) in isolation.

Committee: John Davidson (Committee Member); Paul Reitter (Advisor) Subjects: Comparative Literature; Germanic Literature; History

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, English

This project examines the relationship between music and literary modernism, arguing that modernist authors invoke music in their novels to critique and to imagine more equitable social structures. Using Theodor Adorno's theories on music's ability to model inclusive social structures through balanced part/whole, or detail/totality, relationships, I consider both formal and thematic musical connections in modernist novels. If, as Adorno argues, musical form can reflect current social structures and offer models for more equitable ones, then the modernist use of music can be understood as an attempt to critique social hierarchies and to imagine a more equitable future. My first chapter examines the works of E.M. Forster and his use of music in Howards End and A Passage to India. An extended engagement with Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and a brief reference to Indian raga allow Forster to consider issues of race, gender, and class through a musical lens. Through these musical references, Forster opens up possibilities for legibility of the individual within the whole. Ultimately, however, the individual is negated by the patriarchal and imperial whole. The second chapter turns to Virginia Woolf's late novels, The Years and Between the Acts, to argue that Woolf explores an expansive and democratic view of what constitutes music in an effort to undermine fascist communication. In my third chapter, I consider Trinidadian literature and its connection to calypso form. Using Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners and V.S. Naipaul's Miguel Street, I argue that the interactive and political aspects of calypso form, employed by Selvon and Naipaul in the ballad construction of their novels, allows for critique of the imperial power while offering alternatives to imperial narratives. Considering these author's engagements with music alongside Adorno's theories on equitable part/whole relationships in music, this project offers a new way to understand how music functions in modernist (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jesse Schotter (Advisor); Arved Ashby (Committee Member); Thomas Davis (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

BA, Oberlin College, 2019, History

This thesis is an intellectual history of dialecticism and its use in the works of the Frankfurt School members, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. Famously, these two men had a ferocious and polemical debate in the pages of Dissent Magazine in 1955-56. The Fromm-Marcuse Debate has since become almost the sole lens in which the intellectual differences and similarities between these men are analyzed. Through a comparative and historical analysis of their individual work, largely removed from the Dissent Debate, I offer a new interpretation of their conflict, their personal relationship, and a new perspective on critical theory and its relationship to political action. I argue that Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse's intellectual ideas are better juxtaposed through their interpretation of dialectics, rather than psychoanalysis, and that through this, they present us with starkly different prescriptions for individual and collective political engagement. Thus, both Fromm and Marcuse are outliers within the field of critical theory, and certainly within the Frankfurt School, even as their ideas remain in firm conflict with one another.

Committee: Annemarie Sammartino (Advisor) Subjects: American History; American Studies; European History; History; Modern History; Philosophy; Political Science

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), University of Dayton, 2017, Theology

Hans Urs von Balthasar and Theodor Adorno are not often mentioned in the same company. While undoubtedly different, I argue that their overarching diagnoses of present phenomenological conditions are strongly corroborative. Both see present experience as damaged and that this damage is manifest in the loss of our recognition of veiled presence, or semblance. This has been made possible by a kind of `forgetting' not understood in predominantly psychological terms, but historically, witnessed through the emergence of distinctly modern notions of art and aesthetics. Through exploring these connections in relation to their notions of `aura' and `glory' I suggest that not only can theology and critical theory be mutually supportive, but that a Christologically-centered theological aesthetics presents possibilities for a critical recovery of genuine experience.

Committee: John Inglis (Committee Chair); Anthony Godzieba (Committee Member); William Portier (Committee Member); Kelly Johnson (Committee Member); Brad Kallenberg (Committee Member) Subjects: Philosophy; Theology

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2015, American Culture Studies

This project looks at how the LGBTQ community uses the internet, both in positive and negative ways in terms of media production and community. I briefly give some background using the Frankfurt School scholars on media production and the disconnect it causes between culture and audience when art is produced for mass consumption and then resituate those arguments and put them in conversation with modern technology and theorists to show how imagined communities, specifically the LGBT community, can use the mass consumption of media to their advantage when they are the producers of said media. I analyze three different types of media, Grindr related pictures, Instagram, and YouTube for both positives and negatives and look at not only what the media does, but the context in which it was produced, what it was meant to do, and possible readings of the media. By allowing voices and points of view that would be marginalized through traditional means of media production to have their own space with a global audience these technologies serve as a delimiting, though sometimes dangerous space, for the LGBTQ community to gather, curry social capital, and connect with others who validate them.

Committee: Radhika Gajjala PhD (Advisor); Becca Cragin PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Gender; Gender Studies; Mass Media

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2015, Interdisciplinary Arts (Fine Arts)

This dissertation engages the state of rock music in Western popular culture over the past twenty years. Taking inspiration from the philosophy of Theodor W. Adorno, the project utilizes the concepts of progress and restoration to describe how musicians, scholars, and journalists have confronted challenges facing the continued practice of rock music into the twenty-first century. I argue that the tension between this progressive impulse in rock and a restorative response provides an explanation for aspects of rock's recent history and its creative challenges. Via interpretations of musical texts, references to artistic statements, and engagement with aesthetic theory, the chapters reveal how these concepts have been navigated in the evolving state of rock, including responding to anxieties such as the “death of rock.” Emphasis includes advocacy for a renewed focus in academic scholarship on rock as a musical phenomenon. This approach asserts that stylistic and formal development are integral to thinking about the music's social history and cultural impact. As a critical study of the recent history of aesthetic ideas, I argue that progress and restoration influence rock culture, and that diagnosing their function within the genre is vital for understanding rock's history and trajectory.

Committee: Vladimir Marchenkov (Committee Chair); William Condee (Committee Member); Judith Grant (Committee Member); Garrett Field (Committee Member) Subjects: Aesthetics; Music; Philosophy

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2014, Philosophy, Applied

This dissertation addresses how commodification as a seductive practice differs from commodification as a coercive practice, and why the distinction is ethically significant. Although commodification is often linked with technological progress, it has nonetheless been the focus of critiques which assert that many commodification practices can be considered coercive and, as such, are ethically suspect. Markedly less philosophical attention has been devoted to seductive practices which, despite their frequency of occurrence, are often overlooked or considered to be of little ethical concern. The thesis of this essay is that, in regard to commodification, the structural discrepancies between seduction and coercion are such that in widespread practice they yield different degrees of ethical ambiguity and without proper consideration this significant difference can remain undetected or ignored, thus establishing or perpetuating systems of unjust domination and oppression. I argue that a paradigm shift from coercion to seduction has occurred in widespread commodification practices, that seduction is just as worthy of serious ethical consideration as coercion, and that any ethical theory that fails to take seduction into account is lacking a critical element. Drawing on Theodor Adorno's aesthetic methodology as an approach to working with coercion and seduction within the framework of commodification, I begin by clarifying the main concepts of the argument and what is meant by the use of the term "critical" in this context. Next I present evidence for a paradigm shift in the systemic structure of commodification and argue for the need to recognize the ethical significance of seductive practices. I then apply the main argument to issues of freedom in contemporary bioethics by examining narratives pertaining to pharmaceutical development and sales. The aim of this dissertation is to show that by distinguishing between seduction and coercion as distinct modes (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Donald Callen PhD (Advisor); Michael Bradie PhD (Committee Member); Marvin Belzer PhD (Committee Member); Scott Martin PhD (Other) Subjects: Aesthetics; Ethics; Gender; Medical Ethics; Philosophy

DMA, University of Cincinnati, 2010, College-Conservatory of Music: Piano

This study comprises a three-tiered interpretation of John Corigliano's Etude Fantasy. First, the formal properties of the work are analyzed using set theory. Second, the work is analyzed using Byron Almen's recent semiotic theory of musical narrative. Lastly, in a mode of critical reflection, the study critiques the narrative suggested by Almen's theory and offers a revision employing the aesthetic theories of Theodor Adorno. Adorno's aesthetics and philosophy of negative dialectics is based upon the notion of non-identity. For Adorno, both thought and music are fundamentally a movement (“Bewegung”) without coming to a false absolute. This movement precludes any achievement of static arrival or conclusion into a single, unified, positive conclusion. This study uses this notion of non-identity to critique and modify Almen's theory of musical narrative and forms a musical narrative particular to the Etude Fantasy.

Committee: Steven Cahn PhD (Committee Chair); David Berry PhD (Committee Member); Jeongwon Joe PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Music

BA, Oberlin College, 2010, Politics

This thesis conducts a close reading of G.W.F. Hegel's theory of mutual recognition and Charles Taylor's contemporary reworking of the theory. It is argued that theories of mutual recognition contain a problematic bias toward unity and harmony that obscures the ways in which struggles for recognition are often incomplete and open to contestation. More specifically, what is subject to critique in this thesis is what I term a “genus-species” model of difference, which treats particular differences—-of individuals or of specific cultures—-as stable subsets of a broader genus. I contend that this model of difference, when applied to theories of recognition, risks two major problems: 1) it tends to overemphasize the importance of shared cultural frameworks to human agency, and thus potentially misrecognizes particular differences within these frameworks; 2) it fails to capture an important aspect of human freedom, which involves moving beyond established horizons of recognition to create new values. A different picture of recognition is suggested via the work of Theodor Adorno. The concept of mimesis, understood as the subject's ability to assimilate him or herself to a specific Other and grapple with his or her particularity, is advanced as an alternative to the totalizing horizons of recognition described by Hegel and Taylor, and thus as an alternative model of human freedom.

Committee: Sonia Kruks PhD (Advisor); Harlan Wilson PhD (Other) Subjects: Philosophy; Political Science