English Theses and Dissertations

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https://hdl.handle.net/1794/2042

This collection contains some of the theses and dissertations produced by students in the University of Oregon English Graduate Program. Paper copies of these and other dissertations and theses are available through the UO Libraries.

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Browsing English Theses and Dissertations by Subject "Aesthetics"

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    Stylish Politics: Long Takes in Post-1945 Cinema
    (University of Oregon, 2017-09-06) Cheney, Zachary; Aronson, Michael
    This dissertation is a politically conscious, comparative-historical formal analysis of long takes at the intersection of art and mass-market cinemas in the post-WWII era. Given the contemporary fascination with long takes in the critical discourse of film along with its fairly rampant employment in contemporary mainstream cinema, the discipline has lacked scholarship carefully examining formal techniques as such while remaining alert to the non-reductive possibilities for their political significance. Enlisting and building on the analytical approach of a cinematic poetics, the project outlines numerous contingencies in the practice of very long takes and their function in producing meaning before attending to the technique at the levels of cinematography, editing, and mise-en-scène in separate chapters. Objects of analysis are roughly divided in each chapter between progenitors of contemporary long-take practice—Italian neorealist films, Rope (1948), the 1960s and 1980s films of Jean-Luc Godard, and Jeanne Dielman (1975)—and more recent examples—Timecode (2000), Children of Men (2006), Birdman (2014), A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014), and Too Late (2015). The dissertation invests in the inseparability of form and content, as well as the political stakes of long take practice at both levels by parsing out the historical, technological, cultural, and diegetic contexts of long takes. In so doing, the approach exemplifies previously unrecognized possibilities for employing a historical poetics in a manner acknowledging a formal technique’s commitments to and participation in social power dynamics. These dynamics are legible within a film, in its production, and in its participation in the historical tradition of authorship as constructed in European art cinema.
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    Troubling Ideals: Rebecca Harding Davis and the Consequences of Industrialization in Life in the Iron Mills
    (University of Oregon, 2020-09-24) Vernon, Adam; Rossi, William
    When Rebecca Harding Davis’s novella, Life in the Iron Mills first appeared in Atlantic Monthly in 1861, manufacturing cities had already cultivated an industrial appearance through smoky skies, soot-covered landscapes, and waste from over population. This appearance was common across the eastern United States, including Wheeling, West Virginia, the town in which Davis grew up in and on which she based her story. As concepts of pollution and environmental hazard were just emerging, “citizens, business owners, legislators, courts, physicians, and sanitarians debated the consequences of coal smoke and other forms of waste for municipal economies, urban aesthetics, human health, and morality” (Gatlin 202). Anxiety from the debate was heightened by the fact that many viewed soot and smoke as a sign of industrial and national progress. In blanketing her landscape and characters with soot and smoke, Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills stands as an obvious critique of the national ideology of progress, exposing the moral and environmental pollution it furthers and the idealist aesthetics that sustain it. At the same time, she is reluctant to throw Howells’ “ideal grasshopper” out with the bath water. While engaging in a recognizably realist exposé, targeting the despoiled industrial landscape, labor and class exploitation, and elitist spectatorship, she also employs a more symbolic aesthetic, one that furthers her critique while also pointing to the possibility of transcendence or redemption. Whether Davis intentionally innovated this hybrid aesthetic or not, it reflects a close observation of industrial reality and a strong desire to reveal to her reader the corrosive moral consequences concealed by the popular national ideology of progress.
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    Wasteful Words: Visions and Failures of Literary Efficiency in American Fiction, 1885-1910
    (University of Oregon, 2016-10-27) Gazaille, Brian; Wonham, Henry
    This dissertation examines how writers helped scientists and engineers transform “efficiency” from a mathematical tool for assessing machine performance to an organizing principle for society. Historians and literary critics have helpfully sketched this transformation. They have paid particular attention to manifestations of Taylorism and Fordism in modernism, especially in the “kinetic” poetics of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and John Dos Passos. But while scholars have illustrated how modernism pushed efficiency into contexts like labor and politics, they have only begun to consider efficiency’s role in Gilded Age fiction, particularly in the works of utopian thinkers—such as Edward Bellamy and Charlotte Perkins Gilman—and technological cynics—including Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Frank Norris, and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton. I argue that efficiency was a decidedly aesthetic concern in the novels of the Gilded Age, an idea so exciting and anxiety producing that writers felt compelled to scrutinize it in terms of literary form. Indeed, the writers examined in this dissertation developed nuanced rhetorical and narratological programs to explore efficiency’s conceptual possibilities outside the factory, specifically in the domestic sphere, the pastoral places of California, and the writer’s study. Moreover, these writers struggled to make sense of efficiency’s conceptual expansion. Thus, their novels reflect the difficulties of realizing different kinds of social efficiency. The texts I analyze either try but fail to represent the promises of a machine-made society, or they use self-destructive literary forms that call attention to the wastes of industrial capitalism. By attending to the poetics and competing definitions of efficiency advanced by these writers, my dissertation explores how Americans adapted traditional literary structures to promote or challenge the idea of technological progress. This dissertation includes previously published material.