Felt_space infrastructure: Hyper vigilant spatiality to valence the visceral dimension

Felt_space infrastructure: Hypervigilant spatiality to valence the visceral dimension. This thesis evolves perception as a hypothesis to reframe architectural praxis negotiated through agent-situation interaction. The research questions the geometric principles of architectural ordination to originate the ‘felt_space infrastructure’, a relational system of measurement concerned with the role of perception in mediating sensory space and the cognised environment. The methodological model for this research fuses perception and environmental stimuli, into a consistent generative process that penetrates the inner essence of space, to reveal the visceral parameter. These concepts are applied to develop a ‘coefficient of affordance’ typology, ‘hypervigilant’ tool set, and ‘cognitive_tope’ design methodology. Thus, by extending the architectural platform to consider perception as a design parameter, the thesis interprets the ‘inference schema’ as an instructional model to coordinate the acquisition of spatial reality through tensional and counter-tensional feedback dynamics. Three site-responsive case studies are used to advance the thesis. The first case study is descriptive and develops a typology of situated cognition to extend the ‘granularity’ of perceptual sensitisation (i.e. a fine-grained means of perceiving space). The second project is relational and questions how mapping can coordinate perceptual, cognitive and associative attention, as a ‘multi-webbed vector field’ comprised of attractors and deformations within a viewer-centred gravitational space. The third case study is causal, and demonstrates how a transactional-biased schema can generate, amplify and attenuate perceptual misalignment, thus triggering a visceral niche. The significance of the research is that it progresses generative perception as an additional variable for spatial practice, and promotes transactional methodologies to gain enhanced modes of spatial acuity to extend the repertoire of architectural practice

Benjamin Britten: Text Setting as Cultural Custodian in Art Song

Proposing the thesis that, for Benjamin Britten, text-setting analysis is analogous to song analysis; this dissertation cautions that non-engagement in text-setting is to approach song as if it were instrumental music; likewise, to consider inadequately the wide-ranging musical implications of music-text relations is to limit the interpretive possibilities of song. This research approaches the analysis of song through an engagement with songs composed by Britten in the 1930s from texts by W. H. Auden. Blending insights from literary and linguistic studies with rhythmic analysis, this necessarily interdisciplinary research places song analysis in cultural context; text (poetic and musical) requires social context. Setting out with this rationale and these aims, this dissertation offers new perspectives for song interpretation, song classification and the social function of song. Poetic analysis is presented as central to an understanding of Britten’s song text setting. The mimetic possibility of song to present word and mood painting receives widespread support. This dissertation goes beyond this often considered diminutive fundamental capacity of song to represent text, and recognises a more complete representation of poetic form, the effect of individual words and word units and poetic meaning, in song. Musical language is repeatedly and consistently shown to highlight, to reinforce, to accentuate, to stress, to correlate and align with text; essentially song complements or contests verbal language. These musical equivalences are shown to be derivative of text but also become independent of text in song. Text setting is proposed not as one possible component of song analysis; rather text setting is the ultimate consolidating focus of song interpretation

Aesthetic Sensitivity

[eng] Aesthetic sensitivity is a central idea in the field of empirical aesthetics. The present research contributes a historical-critical review of its origin and development through the history of the discipline, a new theoretical approach aligned with current knowledge, novel methodological tools to investigate this and other relevant psychological constructs, and empirical evidence based on this conception that advances scientific understanding of sensory valuation.[spa] La sensibilidad estética es una idea central en el campo de la estética empírica. La presente investigación aporta una revisión histórico-crítica de su origen y desarrollo a través de la historia de la disciplina, un nuevo enfoque teórico de acuerdo con los conocimientos actuales, novedosas herramientas metodológicas para investigar éste y otros constructos psicológicos relevantes, y evidencia empírica basada en esta concepción que avanza la comprensión científica de la valoración sensorial.[cat] La sensibilitat estètica és una idea central en el camp de l'estètica empírica. La present investigació aporta una revisió històric-crítica del seu origen i desenvolupament a través de la història de la disciplina, un nou enfocament teòric alineat amb els coneixements actuals, noves eines metodològiques per investigar aquest i altres constructes psicològics rellevants, i evidència empírica basada en aquesta concepció que avança la comprensió científica de la valoració sensorial

Representations of screen heterosexuality in the musicals of Fred Astaire and Vincente Minnelli

This thesis examines the ways in which heterosexuality is rendered in the Hollywood genre where its existence is most privileged: musicals of the studio era (c. 1930 - c. 1960). In this popular film category, heterosexuality is expressed in a framework of "boy-meets-girl" amatory coupling that is remarkably amplified and insistent. In analysis that is at once sympathetic and critical of the subject matter, I show that heterosexuality in the Hollywood musical is constructed in a way that is far from monolithic. On the contrary, I find that there are in fact varieties of heterosexual identity that exist in the genre, and that they are most succinctly revealed through romantic engagement. Yet heterosexuality is depicted along divergent formulations owing to contrasting relational aims and assumptions. Building on Richard Dyer's 1993 essay, "'I Seem to Find the Happiness I Seek': Heterosexuality and Dance in the Musical," I will discuss how the basis of these separate models is traceable to different approaches related to power distributions between men and women. These processes, in turn, arise from different notions concerning masculinity and femininity. In this way, a mix of gender expressions inhabit the Hollywood musical leading to an assortment of heterosexual models. Textually these models become visible not only through an analysis of characterization and the position of the man and woman within the narrative, but in the camera work, all aspects of the mise-en-scene, and most cogently, in the arrangement of the central heterosexual couple in the song-and-dance sequences. For my examination of heterosexuality in the Hollywood musical, I will concentrate on the work of two of its greatest auteurs: Fred Astaire (star) and Vincente Minnelli (director). The impact each man made on this genre is hard to overestimate. In terms of methodology I divide my analysis between these two artists, and ascertain what model(s) of heterosexual identity are communicated by them. Then after establishing what design(s) of heterosexual life each one suggests (for Astaire I analyse Top Hat (1935] as well as Carefree [1938] and The Sky's the Limit [1943], while for Minnelli I look at Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) and The Pirate (1948]), I conclude this thesis by examining their most acclaimed joint effort (The Band Wagon (1953]) to discern what, if any, change one might have had on the other. A phenomenon tied to the US musical (whether stage or screen) is that although it is the most heterosexual of genres, it is also one traditionally both crafted and appreciated by gay men. Though it does not fall within the scope of this thesis, it is worth speculating for future work if Astaire's heterosexuality and Minnelli's homosexuality had any significant bearing on the way they represented the standard boy meets-girl plot device upon which the Hollywood musical relies

Republicanism, tacitism and style in English drama: 1585–1608

In the sixteenth century, both on the Continent and in England, Cicero served as a pre-eminent model for rhetorical style. Reacting against the veneration for Cicero’s rhetoric, late Elizabethan authors experimented with an ‘anti-Ciceronian’ style, imitating the writings of Seneca and Tacitus rather than those of Cicero. Whereas in the middle decades of the twentieth century the contrast between Ciceronian and anti-Ciceronian styles provided the dominant framework for studies of early modern prose, more recent commentators have offered compelling criticisms of this distinction. In response, this dissertation provides an alterative account of the anti-Ciceronian style, arguing that it can be characterized as an epigrammatic ‘sententious’ style. Adopting a historical formalist approach, this dissertation examines the political context of the sententious and Ciceronian stylistic movements. While sententious writing was associated with Tacitean political attitudes, the Ciceronian style was linked to the republicanism of its namesake. Accordingly, early modern dramatists, including Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson and Kyd, used the sententious style to convey Tacitean restraint, whereas Ciceronian rhetoric expressed republican outspokenness. In a series of recent studies on republicanism, Quentin Skinner has shown that early modern republicans were committed to a distinctly classical conception of liberty. Applying Skinner’s views on political philosophy to drama, this dissertation reconceives the role of republicanism in early modern drama, showing that the classical republican notion of liberty is explored in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Richard II, Jonson’s Sejanus and several plays by Marlowe, Daniel and Chapman. This dissertation changes our understanding of both early modern rhetorical style and also the dramatization of republicanism and Tacitism

Eating from the Tree That Causes Insight: An Investigation of the Presence of Wisdom in the Paradise and Fratricide Narratives

This work examines the presence of wisdom as a theme within the Paradise and Fratricide narratives of the Hebrew Bible (Genesis 2:4–3:24). As the nature of “wisdom” in the Paradise Narrative is not agreed upon by interpreters, one goal of this work is to offer a more precise definition of wisdom as a theme in this account. A second goal is to ascertain whether this wisdom theme in the Paradise Narrative continues into the Fratricide Narrative. The analysis begins by examining literary historical issues in the Paradise and Fratricide narratives, and the conclusions of this chapter form the starting point for the rest of the study. The symbols/motifs in the Paradise and Fratricide narratives that have a potential association with wisdom are then considered in two ways. First, the use of the symbol/motif within the narratives themselves is examined. Secondly, the use of the symbols/motifs in outside sources (especially “wisdom literature”) is reviewed, followed by consideration of whether there is a connection between these outside occurrences and the use of the symbol/motif in the Paradise and Fratricide narratives. It is concluded that the type of wisdom featured in the Paradise Narrative is not strongly related to the discussion of wisdom within the “wisdom literature” of the Hebrew Bible. Instead, the supposed “wisdom” theme in the Paradise Narrative has to do with the knowledge of good and bad, which is a characteristic associated with maturity and social influence. It is argued that this same kind of “wisdom” is also in focus within the following account, the Fratricide Narrative. These conclusions imply that it is imprecise to refer to the Paradise and Fratricide narratives as “wisdom literature” or as literature influenced by the wisdom tradition. Furthermore, the connection between the Paradise and Fratricide narratives is strengthened by defining this shared theme, suggesting that these stories should be understood as a literary unit

“The Issue of Our Common Human Life”: Poetic Self and Public World in John Berryman’s Art

This thesis challenges the critical codification of John Berryman as a “Confessional” solipsist that has to date excluded his oeuvre from efforts to contextualise historically the mid-century generation of American poets. Its exploration of both the literary and the sociopolitical concerns that have shaped his verse furthers current understanding of the work by placing a new emphasis upon the interdependence of poetic self and public world. Through a chronological survey of Berryman’s published poetry, prose and manuscripts, I demonstrate his fears of marginalisation and the loss of individual agency to represent not an inner but an outward gaze, symptomatic of a wider malaise in post-war American society. Later chapters develop this framework by establishing parallels between the poems’ permeability to the flux of contemporary experience and their ambivalent depictions of Berryman’s growing literary fame. The result, I argue, casts fresh light upon the work as a movement towards a radical metapoetics that figures the persona as the simultaneous product of society and of the text’s public reception. Berryman’s staging of the symbiotic relationship between art and life foregrounds the central function of both self- and sociopolitical critique within his poetry: it highlights the impact of the failed American Dream upon public life and literary ambition. The Introduction provides a detailed outline of the approach and contents of the thesis. Chapter 1 examines the poet’s apprentice work in The Dispossessed and Sonnets to Chris, and relates dissatisfaction with the New Critical literary school to his subsequent discovery of a “new and nervous idiom” for the post-war world. In Chapter 2, I trace the motifs of national and literary expatriation in Berryman’s first long poem Homage to Mistress Bradstreet to discuss the dispossessed poetic “I” as a vehicle for exploration of American tensions past and present. Chapters 3 and 4 present a sustained analysis of Berryman’s epic poem The Dream Songs. Whilst Chapter 3 focuses upon the work’s depiction of American dystopia, Chapter 4 addresses its performance of Berryman’s own literary success, arguing for the later Songs’ origins in an anxiety of reception that desires to cement the poet’s status in an uncertain world. My final chapter reads Berryman’s last volumes Love & Fame and Delusions, etc. of John Berryman in the light of these discussions, suggesting his conflicting perceptions of fame to function as a catalyst for renewed efforts to reconcile the poetic self with wider society