University of Dayton Magazine, Autumn 2011

This issue includes Faith and tenacity — Curran, campus and community, plus regeneration research and on the region\u27s rivers with the River Stewards.https://ecommons.udayton.edu/dayton_mag/1005/thumbnail.jp

An archaeological investigation of hybridization in Bantenese and Dutch colonial encounters: food and foodways in the Sultanate of Banten, Java, 17th to early 19th century

The constant mutability of cultures as they meet and mix provides an ongoing laboratory in which to explore human dynamics. In this dissertation, I analyze the process and results of one indigenous-colonial encounter in Dutch Indonesia, using archaeological evidence from Banten, Java that illuminates interactions between Bantenese elites and Dutch East India Company (VOC) soldiers in the 17th to early 19th century. Banten, a global trade center and the focal point of Dutch expansion in Asia, had a cosmopolitan and multinational society of long standing, already apparent when the Dutch arrived in 1596. My research shows that a kind of "reverse" colonialism occurred here. Bantenese cultural influences penetrated more deeply into Dutch culture than the other way around, so that colonial Dutch culture took on a new, hybridized identity. Utensils and vessels necessary for preparing and serving meals from excavations in the indigenous Sultan's Surosowan Palace, its surrounding Fort Diamond manned by VOC soldiers, and the Dutch headquarters at Fort Speelwijk provide the evidence. Petrographic and archaeological study indicate that the Dutch used locally produced Bantenese-style cooking vessels and lids, rather than import European tripod pots to accommodate their traditional open-fire cooking. Local Bantenese continued to use cooking stoves without tripod vessels, maintaining their culinary habits. VOC archives revealed a change in Dutch staple food from bread to rice. Hired male cooks and local women who prepared home meals (as wives and concubines) acted as cultural conduits, while vibrant local manufacturing and trade made local goods readily available. Thus Dutch cooking became hybridized with locally available vessels and ingredients. The Banten results differed from the Dutch Cape Colony in South Africa but were similar to the Dejima trading post in Japan where the Dutch relied on local products. I conclude that proximity and daily interactions with the host society were crucial for shaping Dutch responses to the new environments and creating hybrid culture, instead of replicating their homeland. This study places Banten on the global map of cross-cultural interactions and colonial discourse; I hope to stimulate other researchers to test my hypotheses and build on these interpretations.2016-12-31T00:00:00

Luxury, Aesthetics And Politics: The Social Lives Of Medieval Romance

This dissertation project traces a cultural reception of the romance genre in England and France in the late fourteenth century. In compiling lengthy descriptions of courtly trappings, medieval romances serve as vehicles for idealized aristocratic self-presentation and thereby become complicit in associating material luxury with aristocratic power. I argue that while the changes in material technologies of medieval textual production break down the exclusivity of romance by opening the texts to wider reading publics, the positive representations of luxury in verbal ornament and visual programs of narrative art objects continue the perpetuation of aristocratic privilege. Chapter One examines the Shield of Gawain in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Trojan image-texts in Chaucer’s House of Fame as imitatio of Virgilian ekphrases, theorizing medieval understanding of a Greek poetic device. Chapter Two analyzes the Tryst beneath the Tree episode from Tristan and Isolde as it is rendered on fourteenth-century Parisian ivory caskets, situating the composition within the larger visual program that teaches aristocratic women about heterosexual desire through a negotiation of sight and touch. Chapter Three reads Pearl as a romance-adjacent text and a material object, identifying an emotional community within which the positive vocabulary of aristocratic luxury is deployed as a vehicle for communicating intricate feelings of loss, and where salvation becomes the ultimate aesthetic experience. The dissertation culminates with Chapter Four, which examines Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and the Breton lay Emar� as texts that thematize a romance encounter and invite the associative reading of romance. By attending to the surface pleasures of romance within these seemingly disparate texts, this dissertation locates the genre’s unique aesthetic—a preoccupation with surfaces, conventions, and the boundaries of the perceptible and the experiential. As such, this project intervenes in the growing field of medieval aesthetics. As a feature of both its internal worlds and its physical media, luxury gives us a sense of how romance mediates the aesthetic encounter, while constructing aristocratic ideals and celebrating earthly pleasures

Composition portfolio

Composition is a process of applied research. In a portfolio of eight original pieces, the technical and aesthetic components of this process are investigated from the perspective of several theoretical precepts which both inform and underpin its creative strategy. Drawing on theories of intertextuality, composition is collocated within a broad current of thought in which ideas and material from pre-existing ‘texts’ across a variety of disciplines are utilised and explored to create new compositional ‘texts’. This procedure is tested from several, key perspectives, characterised variously as: (i) problem-seeking, (ii) serendipitous, (iii) transgressive, and (iv) transcriptive. The first of these draws on John Dewey’s notions of art as a form of creative problematisation. In the second, techniques are developed in which performance flexibility is balanced against structural exactitude, aided by a series of parametric tables that outline a range of variables across the different elements of musical sound. As a transgressive process, compositional procedure is informed by Viktor Shklovsky’s theory of aesthetic defamiliarisation. Finally, as a form of transcription, the research draws on Ferruccio Busoni’s observations about notation and its key transmutational role in manipulating and recasting musical ideas. By adopting an eclectic attitude towards materials and techniques, a compositional strategy is formulated which offers an alternative to the assumption that advancement in the field is inevitably shaped by an ineluctable, dialectical process. A polyvalent approach and direct interaction with materials, it is argued, are the important creative ingredients which present valuable and meaningful developments in compositional language, form and technique.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Maritime expressions:a corpus based exploration of maritime metaphors

This study uses a purpose-built corpus to explore the linguistic legacy of Britain’s maritime history found in the form of hundreds of specialised ‘Maritime Expressions’ (MEs), such as TAKEN ABACK, ANCHOR and ALOOF, that permeate modern English. Selecting just those expressions commencing with ’A’, it analyses 61 MEs in detail and describes the processes by which these technical expressions, from a highly specialised occupational discourse community, have made their way into modern English. The Maritime Text Corpus (MTC) comprises 8.8 million words, encompassing a range of text types and registers, selected to provide a cross-section of ‘maritime’ writing. It is analysed using WordSmith analytical software (Scott, 2010), with the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) as a reference corpus. Using the MTC, a list of keywords of specific salience within the maritime discourse has been compiled and, using frequency data, concordances and collocations, these MEs are described in detail and their use and form in the MTC and the BNC is compared. The study examines the transformation from ME to figurative use in the general discourse, in terms of form and metaphoricity. MEs are classified according to their metaphorical strength and their transference from maritime usage into new registers and domains such as those of business, politics, sports and reportage etc. A revised model of metaphoricity is developed and a new category of figurative expression, the ‘resonator’, is proposed. Additionally, developing the work of Lakov and Johnson, Kovesces and others on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), a number of Maritime Conceptual Metaphors are identified and their cultural significance is discussed