Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2011, English

This dissertation explores the concept of submerged experimentation in middlebrow fiction of the modernist period. Disputing criticism that posits a “great divide” between highbrow modernism and middlebrow culture of the modernist period, I argue that middlebrow modernist authors were aware of and informed about highbrow modernist writers, adapting their innovative techniques to middlebrow publishing venues and readerships. From this process of adaptation emerged covertly experimental narrative techniques that my dissertation works to recover, document, and situate within the broader context of modernist studies. The dissertation reexamines middlebrow texts from the modernist period through the critical lenses of postclassical narratology, feminist theory, and material-historical approaches to literature. The result of this integrative approach is a project which describes and classifies the formal and thematic concerns of middlebrow modernists while also engaging in the rhetorical study of specific texts. Even as I use a rhetorical approach, I also complement that approach with archival research aimed at reconstructing the original conditions of the texts' production and reception – in order to identify how and why middlebrow modernist works had the effects they did. Each chapter brings a canonical highbrow modernist work into dialogue with a middlebrow modernist work to illustrate the similarities in their experimental impulses, as well as the strategic differences influenced by audience, market, and gender: Virginia Woolf's and Margaret Ayer Barnes's uses of the domestic in Mrs. Dalloway and Edna His Wife, H.D.'s and Zelda Fitzgerald's intertextual constructions of character in Asphodel and “Miss Ella,” and Edith Wharton's and Winifred Holtby's experimentations with the tested woman plot in The Age of Innocence and South Riding. The dissertation concludes that middlebrow women writers were in fact using – but also repurposing – highbrow experimental techniques i (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, Germanic Languages and Literatures

While the “space” of modernism is traditionally associated with the metropolis, this approach leaves unaddressed a significant body of work that stresses non-urban settings. Rather than simply assuming these spaces to be the opposite of the modern city, my project rejects the empty term space and instead examines topographies, literally meaning the writing of place. Less an examination of passive settings, the study of topography in modernism explores the action of creating spaces—either real or fictional which intersect with a variety of cultural, social, historical, and often political reverberations. The combination of charged elements coalesce and form a strong visual, corporeal, and sensory-filled topography that becomes integral to understanding not only the text and its importance beyond literary studies. My study pairs four modernists—two writing in German and two in English: Joseph Conrad and Anna Seghers and James Joyce and Uwe Johnson. All writers, having experienced displacement through exile, used topographies in their narratives to illustrate not only their understanding of history and humanity, but they also wrote narratives which concerned a larger global culture. Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1900) and his Lord Jim (1904) compare to Seghers' Transit (1944) and Revolt of the Fisherman from St. Barbara (1928) in that each explores crises of modernity. Instead of using the city, Conrad and Seghers utilize the sea, the harbor, and marginalized communities to illustrate thresholds of historical crises. The topographies echo a world affected by imperialism and particularly for Seghers, fascism. In my analysis of Joyce's Ulysses (1921) and Johnson's Anniversaries (1970-83), I steer away from a traditional examination of the classic modernist city narrative. I show how the texts provide a broader and more encompassing look of the modern world through the memory of imperialism and fascism as it is reflected from outside the city limits, most notably on the coa (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2022, Art History (Fine Arts)

The Sea Ranch is an architecturally significant resort community on the north coast in California's Bay Area, with a master plan and aesthetic that is renowned for its treatment of the local site conditions and rural built environment. This study seeks to demonstrate that the Sea Ranch can be understood through the lens of settler colonialism in the United States not in spite of its ecological and site-specific credo, but indeed precisely because of it. In untangling the relationship between architecture, landscape, and vernacularity at the Sea Ranch, so too does the relationship between its visual and cultural antecedents begin to unravel the myth of the place. In reading the Sea Ranch's environmental and aesthetic citations through the experiences, histories, and means of survival of the land's original stewards, the Kashaya Pomo, the settler colonial framework undergirding the project complicates the ways in which the Sea Ranch's utopian beginnings were conceived of and are recounted in architectural history.

Master of Arts in English, Cleveland State University, 2020, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

This Side of Paradise, the semiautobiographical first novel of F. Scott Fitzgerald, provides insight into the developmental life stage of post-adolescence as it depicts protagonist Amory Blaine's journey into adulthood. Early critical conversation regarding the novel focused largely on the inconsistencies in editing and form, and while such inconsistencies cannot be overlooked, the dismissive attitude of early critics curtailed any further structural approaches to the novel. To address this problem, I use an authorial critical scope to analyze the experimental, often improvisational, structure of the novel, which has typically been viewed by these critics as the work of a “clumsy” young writer. We then add the layer of Fitzgerald's experience writing and publishing the novel to the structural and developmental approaches in order to enrich our understanding of post-adolescence in the framework of This Side of Paradise. This layered conceptual approach often illuminates the inconsistencies in comparing previous scholarship against the yet-unclear post-adolescent period. One of these inconsistencies, the issue of gender in the novel, continually presents itself in existing scholarship, even without the addition of post-adolescence. In Amory Blaine, Fitzgerald has created a new sort of male character, one which is influenced by and the mirror to the female characters of the novel. Fitzgerald, though unaware of it at the time, portrays the then-emerging American identity of the post-adolescent, doing this primarily through the use of paratextual elements and mixed literary genres, as well as an emphasis through the novel on developmental and generational identity.

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2020, English

This dissertation explores the political possibilities of being unruly. Following Sara Ahmed's definition of willfulness, this project traces the figure of the "willful woman'" through modernist narratives of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning with Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879) and ending with Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts (1941), the project uncovers the political possibilities of representing willful women with three aims in mind: to articulate the representations of women in these modernist texts as being willful; to explore how these representations of willfulness are working on and against the dominant discourses of subjecthood and intelligibility in the modernist period; and to demonstrate, by reading these texts together, the ways in which modernist authors created new realities, thereby exposing how cultural paradigms are constructed and malleable. In putting these texts in conversation with one another, I create a willfulness archive of unruly subjects who collectively offer alternatives to narratives that render certain types of subjects unintelligible. This archive, I argue, articulates how the modernist aesthetic used willfulness as a trope to create and hold open space for new and different stories and realities to be made intelligible.

MARCH, University of Cincinnati, 2008, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning : Architecture (Master of)

Post-war socioeconomic shifts have reconfigured the built environment to complex networks of private, commodified zones masquerading as public space. These spaces are inextricably linked to marketing strategies, financial gains, sustained economic growth. Here, actual uses and potential new uses of space are forcefully suppressed. This is evidenced by the War on Graffiti.Graffiti causes no structural damage; because it disrupts the image of space it is fought and suppressed. An investigation into its constructs might unveil a complex political infrastructure which implicates society, consumerism, and architecture. Thus, the goal of this thesis is to investigate the disconnect between mediated use of space built from image and the actual use of space built from need, to establish a methodology that translates the politics of graffiti from visual/graphic to spatial/occupiable. The found paradigms will be applied to three designs: a rural cycling lane, privacy shells in suburbia, and an urban workplace.

MARCH, University of Cincinnati, 2004, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning : Architecture (Master of)

An investigation of Pop Culture might reveal a set of parameters to which architecture can respond as an expression of contemporary American culture. Therefore, the goal of this thesis is to understand the plural realities of American culture—as reflected in the sometimes-controversial products of Pop Culture—and to ultimately relate these paradigms to the design of a drive-thru BOTOX Clinic in West Hollywood. Furthermore, if American culture is permeable to Pop influence, and the culture of the United States is inescapably and increasingly both multi-cultural and commodified, how does architecture readily respond to this culture? These investigations might ultimately deduce that if Pop Culture has propagated image consciousness through the Media, thereby encouraging the means of physical malleability such as BOTOX, then perhaps Pop Culture can influence the architectural design of a cosmetic procedure center. Likewise, if Pop Culture has also propagated the use of the automobile, thereby encouraging the automobile-oriented building type, then perhaps this design could also reflect Pop Culture's increasing dependence on the automobile as a mainstay of American living. These investigations will most likely produce an understanding of the extent to which Pop Culture has permeated and influenced building design in contemporary America.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2000, Theatre

In the first decades of the twentieth century, critics like H.L. Mencken and Van Wyck Brooks vociferously expounded a profound disenchantment with American art and culture. At a time when American popular entertainments were expanding exponentially, and at a time when European high modernism was in full flower, American culture appeared to these critics to be at best a quagmire of philistinism and at worst an oxymoron. Today there is still general agreement that American arts “came of age” or “arrived” in the 1920s, thanks in part to this flogging criticism, but also because of the powerful influence of European modernism.Yet, this assessment was not unanimous, and its conclusions should not be taken as foregone. In this dissertation, I present crucial case studies of Constance Rourke (1885-1941) and Gilbert Seldes (1893-1970), two astute but understudied cultural critics who saw the same popular culture denigrated by Brooks or Mencken as vibrant evidence of exactly the modern American culture they were seeking. In their writings of the 1920s and 1930s, Rourke and Seldes argued that our “lively arts” (Seldes' formulation) of performance – vaudeville, minstrelsy, burlesque, jazz, radio, and film – contained both the roots of our own unique culture as well as the seeds of a burgeoning modernism. In their analysis, Rourke and Seldes stood against easy conceptual categories (especially “highbrow vs. lowbrow”) that did not account for the richness of American culture. Both resisted the tendency to evaluate American art by the standards of European modernism. And by foregrounding matters of race and ethnic identity (even when they dealt imperfectly with them), they showed popular entertainment to be a matter of national significance. Indeed, against the received wisdom that modern American culture depended upon the pervasive spread of European modernism, they argued that American popular performance itself was the necessary foundation for our modern culture. Most importan (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, English

This dissertation redefines lyric narrative—forms of narration that fuse the associative resonance of lyric with the linear progression of narrative—as both an aesthetic mode and a strategy for responding ethically to the political challenges of the period of late modernism. Underscoring the vital role of lyric narrative as a late-modernist technique, I focus on its use during the period 1925-1945 by British writer Virginia Woolf, American expatriate poet H.D., French filmmaker Germaine Dulac, and German critic Walter Benjamin. Locating themselves as outsiders free to move across generic and national boundaries, each insisted on the importance of a dialectical vision: that is, holding in a productive tension the timeless vision of the lyric mode and the dynamic energy of narrative progression. Further, I argue that a transdisciplinary, feminist impulse informed this experimentation, leading these authors to incorporate innovations in fiction, music, cinema, and psychoanalysis. Consequently, I combine a narratological and historicist approach to reveal parallel evolutions of lyric narrative across disciplines—fiction, criticism, and film. Through an interpretive lens that uses rhetorical theory to attend to the ethical dimensions of their aesthetics, I show how Woolf's, H.D.'s, Dulac's, and Benjamin's lyric narratives create unique relationships with their audiences. Unlike previous lyric narratives, these works invite audiences to inhabit multiple standpoints, critically examine their world, and collaborate in producing the work of art. Hence, contrary to readings of high modernist experimentation as disengaged l'art pour l'art, I show that avant-garde lyric narrative in the late 1920s—particularly the technique of fugue writing—served these authors as a means of disrupting conventional, heterosexual, patriarchal, and militarist social and political narratives. During the crises of the 1930s and the Second World War, Woolf, H.D., Dulac, and Benjamin turn to the lyr (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Arts in History, Youngstown State University, 2024, Department of Humanities

The object of this text is to discuss aspects of the intellectual history of the Western civilization that reflects the doctrine of nihilism and how the precept is manifest in the culture of postmodern twenty-first century society. The pith of the essay is to conclude that, nihilism, as an intellectual supposition, hinges on the philosophies of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. Nihilism is a worthy discussion because the concept has permeated Western thought at least since the time of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and has become essential to Western culture in the twenty-first century. Nietzsche's pronouncement that “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him…” in tandem with Dostoevsky's rejoinder “But what will become of men then? ... without God… All things are permitted then, they can do what they like” is a notable definition for nihilism. Nihilism is a philosophical position that reflects a belief in nothingness and/or everything. Nihilism is “the belief that life is meaningless.” “Nietzsche defines nihilism as the situation which obtains when ‘everything is permitted' or when nothing is permitted.” Nihilism occurs as a result of the distrust of the highest value (killing God, which results in a belief in nothing) hence the reception to all eventuality (everything is permissible). In short, nihilism is a collection of ideas that denies generally believed interpretations of the human existence like morality, knowledge and meaning. This text is a discussion of the concept of nihilism and its repercussions on society.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Dance Studies

This dissertation examines the dance studio and its built environment, exploring the dynamic relationship between dance and space. The focal point is the concept of the dance studio, analyzed through the urban landscapes and the experimental art practices in the city of Zagreb from the 1950s to the 2010s. The study investigates the dance studio through the histories of spatial structures, dance history, and the history of cinema. Shaped by these processes, dance is specifically entangled with spatial structures and is expanded by their horizons, outcomes, and histories. The dance studio here is a hypothesis built in the process—a space that exists at the intersection of context and time, with dance emerging as an archival record embedded in spatial and societal change. The dissertation argues that this very process constitutes the dance studio's structure: a space, practice, and environment made possible—reimagined, shaped, and hypothesized through the lens of dance and its experimental inquiry. The study approaches the dance studio from the vantage point of the long contemporaneity, extending across both modernism and postmodernism while facilitating the juxtaposition and productive friction of these terms. The city of Zagreb is approached as a dynamic multitude, encompassing a range of developments in the socialist and post-socialist periods that influenced, challenged, and shaped art, dance artists, and their spaces between 1949 and 2010.

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2024, English

Modernist artist novels by and about women complicate traditional understandings of the kunstlerroman genre by challenging the definition and status of the “artist” and presenting a broader range of options for women interested in the arts. Beginning with Wyndham Lewis's Tarr and with specific attention to the character of Bertha Lunken, an art student, and continuing with readings of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Mina Loy's Insel, and Jessie Fauset's Plum Bun, the dissertation analyzes representations of the female artist. Through their artist protagonists, these authors explore their ambivalence regarding the importance of talent, vision, and marketability. Their portrayals of amateur artists, students, and models focus on the social and material conditions that women in the period had to navigate in order to come to their own understanding of artistic success. Such portrayals also speak to the ways women participated in various modernist movements, both as visual artists and as writers. Ultimately, a reexamination of the female artist figure in these novels allows for an expanded definition of modernism by finding continuities between the Modernist period and the late Victorian period, interrogating regionalist specificity and transatlantic communication, and considering ways that high modernist experimental fiction relates to a commonly feminized and dismissed mass-market literature.

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2024, English

This thesis aims to reexamine the works of Virginia Woolf and other Stephen family members through the lens of the supercrip concept first coined by crip theorists such as Alison Kafer and Eli Clare. Woolf has often been framed as a resourceful writer who converted the symptoms of her mental illness into sources of creative inspiration for her work. However, her life was also plagued by self-imposed, constant pressures to read and write in the face of the difficulties brought on by her symptoms. Letters between her father Leslie Stephen and Charles Darwin suggest that Leslie may have seen his literary talent as a way to justify his own disabled existence as a cyclothymic. This thesis traces how Leslie's supercrip-infused, evolutionary ideology was transmitted into three of his disabled descendants: his first daughter Laura, his nephew Jem, and his third daughter Virginia. All three of these Stephen family members were subjected to lofty expectations for their reading and writing ability. By exploring the lives of Leslie, Jem, Laura, and Virginia, it is possible to observe the damaging effects of Darwinian theories on Victorian people with disabilities and see how the supercrip stereotype informs Woolf's contributions to literary modernism.

Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2024, Music

Tracking the development of experimental music from 1920 to 1970, this paper seeks to explore how Artists have dealt with and worked within the Absurdity of Life. From Arnold Schoenberg, to John Cage, to Fluxus, the artistic shifts brought by these artists move toward a gradual acceptance of the Absurd and the break down of the Art/Life divide. Accompanying the research is a portion of an opera I wrote that simultaneously analyzes, comments on, and participates in the conflict between the Absurd and the Ideal in Art. The opera follows the poet Stephane Mallarme on his journey to create perfect expression through language despite several Absurd scenarios ranging from the fantastic to the deeply human.

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2024, History of Art

James Clifford's Art-Culture System, first published in 1988, establishes a clear differentiation between “tourist art,” and artworks worthy of the museum through a semiotic square of authenticity and multiplicity. Through this system, Clifford delineates the criteria by which Western art historians, critics, and curators ascribe value to different kinds of objects. This thesis deploys Clifford's Art-Culture System as a framework for examining the work of Ainu artists trained in tourist villages whose oeuvres oscillate between the categories of “tourist art” and “fine art” in a way that problematizes clear distinctions between the two. Of particular interest are Bikky Sunazawa (1931-1989) and Fujito Takeki (1934-2018), both woodcarvers raised in Asahikawa who began working in the tourist industry to support their families at young ages. However, while both artists challenge the categories of Clifford's system, they do so in markedly different ways: Bikky produced modernist sculptures for museum exhibition that were devoid of overtly Ainu symbology alongside smaller carvings for the tourist industry, while Fujito remained devoted to the basic practices of Ainu tourist woodcarving throughout his life but has risen to prominence in the broader Japanese art world because of the unique ways in which he has elevated particular motifs, most notably that of the bear. By using these two artists to problematize reflexive categorization of artworks along a hierarchal scale—with “tourist art” at the bottom and “fine art” at the top—this thesis will advocate for new ways of thinking about the Ainu tourist village as a place of legitimate, culturally-specific education for Ainu themselves rather than as a mere ludic space for the enjoyment of outsiders.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2023, English (Arts and Sciences)

This project aims to interrogate modernist symbolism of the dog as representations of human alterity by focusing on the importance of the dog as a robust modernist trope used to articulate the problems of being human in an increasingly industrialized, modernized society. This dissertation explores how the dog functions as a symbol with attention to class, hierarchies, kinship arrangements, sex and sexuality, but also considers the dog as a literal dog, outside of human constructs. While Darwinian theory undermines the supremacy of the human by showing how species interrelate, the dog is of particular importance because of its coevolutionary partnership with humans, having the capacity to expose the precarity of human ascendency and dissolve the human/animal boundary. The dog's capacity for destabilizing the category of human can convey humanity's degradation, but the dog is also an analogue for human constructions, articulating questions of class, gender, and sexuality. Intimacy between humans and dogs also issues new ways of thinking of kinship. Lastly, this dissertation examines modernist texts for their subtle advocacy for the better treatment of animals by imagining animal subjectivity, by humanizing the animal, or by carefully studying animal behavior.

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)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, Spanish and Portuguese

A constructed practice of homage has historically omitted women's legacies and granted nearly exclusive support for the ten male poets considered the originators of the avant-garde artistic group known as the Generation of 1927. Only recently have the modern women writers known as “las Sinsombrero” been incorporated into the homage traditions of the Generation of 1927, though an existing corpus of written, performed, and recorded homages has long been available in Spanish archives and libraries. However, the materials of homages have not yet been critically analyzed for how they reveal the gendered, classed, and sexualized ways that the literary history of the generation has been constructed. This project interrogates literary canon formation through the study of homage to make women visible within the formative spaces of early twentieth-century artistic production in Spain. The Generation of 1927 offers a special case study in the ways homages serve as mythmaking projects that center androcentric prestige formations such as anthologies. However, as a reconceptualized concept, homage can also provide lifemaking opportunities for scholars and writers of all genders and genres, as will be demonstrated in Chapter 3 in my analysis of the “Academy of Witches” gatherings of en dehors garde women. This project examines how writers like Vicente Aleixandre, Carmen Conde, and Amanda Junquera moved between their public-facing literary careers and the lifemaking impulses of cohabitation and queer futures in their shared home, Velintonia. I provide textual and cultural analyses of poetic tributes, newspaper clippings, gatherings at Velintonia, Elena Fortun's "Oculto sendero", and Amanda Junquera's "Un hueco en la luz" to interrogate the gendered dynamics of literary canon formation in homages to the Generation of 1927. Drawing on feminist critiques of the literary canon, queer theory, archival studies, memory studies, and cultural heritage studies, the present work proposes alte (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 0, English (Arts and Sciences)

In this lyrical childhood memoir, I reconstruct my experience of my parent's explosive divorce. The manuscript begins and ends in court, where at 12 I testified I no longer wanted to continue my relationship with my father. It is a moment that exists outside of linear time for me. To mimic the experience of trauma, I loop back to this scene throughout the book, each time getting closer to the moment I speak my truth. Between these courtroom sections, I flash back (and forward) to examine the relationship I had with both my parents and the relationship they had with each other, trying to make what sense I can of the way things fell apart. Written from the perspective of my younger self, I elevate the child's voice because, during all this, that voice was often not counted. As subtly as possible to avoid disrupting the reader's occupation of the child's point of view, I invite my adult perspective when necessary to provide context or future insight. At its heart, this book seeks to show that, while lacking language or the ability to articulate an experience, a child is a full person whose experience of situations is no less complex or human than that of the adults around her.

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2023, History of Art

In a 1960 article entitled “Younger American Painters,” William Rubin accused Rauschenberg's Combines of rendering the “inherently biographical style of Abstract Expressionism… even more personal, more particular, and sometimes almost embarrassingly private.” Rubin's choice of the word “embarrassingly” is telling; the Combines are not just private, but embarrassingly so; that is, the problem the Combines present is that they are not private when good sense/taste tells us they should be. This spilling over of the supposed-to-be-private into the embarrassingly deviant public has been read as an insistence on the work of art as both in its environment and in communication with it, as a valorization of the femininity associated with the interior/personal and relatedly, as a refusal of heteronormative subjectivity as dictated in the Cold War era. This paper suggests another reading—not as an alternative, but as a supplement to these: a reading of Rauschenberg's Combines through the lens of disability theory. If Rauschenberg's Combines are debased (and there seems to be some agreement that they are), and if one's experience of them is bodily (and this experience seems if not universal, then nearly so), then their association with the debased/abject body demands inquiry. Made up of disparate parts that insist upon their discrete, adjunctive identities and former lives, the Combines might be best understood as Frankensteins—disabled bodies that refuse to comply and in so doing inscribe new ways of being (corporeally) in the world.