In their debuts, Anne F. Garréta, Marjane Satrapi, and Shirin Neshat, envision the experiences of female and non-binary protagonists as foreigners caught in-between the constraints of societal norms. Juxtaposing the works of these contemporary women writers and visual artists, this dissertation explores the themes of cultural hybridity, exile, migration, and multiculturalism by foregrounding these authors’ framing of liminality which defines the lives of ethnic, gender, and religious minorities in France and the United States. The existing scholarly discourse on these artworks often emphasizes their individual qualities and contextual backgrounds, inadvertently neglecting the possibilities for dialogue between them. Furthermore, there is a lack of investigation into the intricate interplay between the narrative content and the formal choices of storytelling in these artworks. By drawing on feminist psychoanalysis and feminist phenomenology, I argue that these cross-cultural and émigré artworks defy fixed categorizations of genre, form, and medium of expression to abate (orientalist and heteronormative) linear storytelling which once marginalized ethnicities, religions, and genders. Particularly, this dissertation examines this adverbial-infinite mode of becoming a foreigner, as an artistic construal of a threshold that connects the body of artwork to an embodied interpretation. The three chapters in this dissertation discuss experimental strategies used by these artists to situate their protagonists at a threshold between a fictionalized or real past and the present moment of reading, viewing, and interpreting. By focusing on the traveling faces of protagonists in a threshold, the result shows how artistic formal strategies give the audience affective immediacy to the liminal state of minority experiences.

Since the mid-1970s, punk has operated to fulfill the postmodern objective to destabilize and disrupt metanarratives. In the early days of punk, US and UK punks used their Do It Yourself (DIY) aesthetic and ethos to counter the aggressive capitalist takeover of music and media. With its roots in anarchism, egalitarianism, and individuality, punk’s philosophical and ideological base, methods for pushing boundaries, and monstrous aesthetics have made a lasting impression that can be clearly identified in many of the social justice movements of the past 40 years. This project examines punk publics and publishing praxes and argues that marginalized groups utilize punk’s disruptive strategies to disseminate culture beyond the boundaries of hegemonic systems of knowledge production. This dissertation focuses on punk not as a counterpublic but as what I call a parapublic due to its position alongside the dominant culture. As punk’s recognizable signifiers continue to be absorbed into and consumed by capitalism, these signifiers become part of the mainstream, leading to a reconfiguration of punk. The reconfigurations signal a shift in the dominant culture because punk seeks to make itself abject to appear monstrous. We can look at the abject as occupying a position between the subject and the object, and then we can see that punk allows us to examine culture’s fears and desires through the embodiment of its monsters. This project centralizes the figure and the function of the monster within the works and publishing practices of zines and the punk authors Dennis Cooper and Kathy Acker.

This study explores the eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century German dramatic genre Sklavenstücke (slave plays). These plays, which until recently have not received any significant attention in scholarship, articulate a nuanced critique of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade and thus bear witness to an early German-language discourse indicative of abolitionist currents.Tracing individual acts of German-language abolitionism, I investigate the correlation between abolitionist movements in the Euro-American space and German involvements in these very efforts. In this sense, I contest the notion of an absence of German abolitionist awareness in Europe during the Age of Enlightenment. My reading of these slave plays contributes to discussions about the transcultural nature of abolitionist discourse and defies the notion that abolitionist activism only emerged within the specific nation-states that have previously been the subject of scholarship. Challenging this layering both theoretically and analytically, then, requires an innovative shift that centers approaches rooted in Black thought and theories, which are the foundation of this study. These concepts are necessary for engaging with issues of slavery and abolition while at the same time exposing white paternalist perspectives and gazes. Plays of this genre often foreground the horrors of slavery at the hands of cruel white slaveholders, and characterize enslaved Black Africans as unblemished, obedient, submissive, hard-working, and grateful “beings” deserving of humanitarian benevolence. Based on these sentiments, an overarching discourse opposing slavery and the transatlantic slave trade emerged by way of German-language theatrical plays, theoretical treatises, newspaper articles, academic writings, travelogues, diary entries, and journal articles that negotiated the nature, origin, and legitimacy of Black African humanity around debates on slavery. Thus, my study demonstrates that these German-language literary contributions indicate inscribed socio-critical commentary and take up transatlantic abolitionist discourses, a dialogue that surfaced under the auspices of the Enlightenment.

When the Warsaw Ghetto was demolished by German forces towards the end of World War II, there were few physical traces of the Ghetto left standing. As such, both historians and the public must look to other types of sources to understand what life and death were like for the inhabitants of the Ghetto, and how they have remembered their experiences within the Ghetto. These memories and representations of the Warsaw Ghetto can be found in memoir-style written works, and later, in films based on these works. This thesis will examine the ways in which the Warsaw Ghetto was represented by two authors who survived it, Władisław Szpilman and Marcel Reich-Ranicki, and how their memory of the Warsaw Ghetto is represented in the films based on their lives and survival, The Pianist, and Mein Leben: Marcel Reich-Ranicki.

History and art have always had an intersecting relationship, and each helps us to acquire a better understanding of the other, since artistic works help us to visualize the zeitgeist of a particular point in history. The connection between art and history is most apparent when the radical changes that befall society through historically important events, especially conflict, are followed by sweeping changes in society, which trickle their way down into the minds of artists and creators, whose works subsequently reflect these changes. We cannot understand these works and their relationship to their respective period of time simply by isolating them into individual components like art style, artist, and location. They are socially and historically charged, part of a larger network of intersecting relationships that factor in concepts like ideology, material, and culture. We can examine the analytical power of this framework, better known as actor network theory, in a post-WWII European landscape, a period heightened by rapid social changes as the citizens of the formerly war-torn continent worked to rebuild and recover. When examining the artistic output of vanquished nations, mainly Italian neorealist films and German Trümmerfilmen, in a framework built around the principles established in actor network theory, we can see how the historical, political, social, and cultural developments established in the wake of European fascism’s unceremonious collapse is reflected on film when compared to the victorious United States, whose infrastructure and film industry remained mostly unscathed.

As a result of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs, works can be distributed and viewed at a global scale with the simple click of the mouse. One can even visit entire museums and virtually walk through their collections without having to leave one’s own seat. Furthermore, new software, programs, and digital tools facilitate and make possible the ability to experiment and create one’s art in ways that were previously unimaginable or even unheard of. This is also true with the dissemination of one’s art and the visibility of contemporary artists who create works pertaining to the digital realm. However, the availability, usage, and training associated with such technologies do not come without its own implications and drawbacks. Unfortunately, there exists a great disparity not only with access and availability of the Internet at a global level, but also a digital divide, which indicates that the technologies and sciences are “gendered”—for instance, the male majority in STEM professions and fields of study. When considering the Humanities, specifically the genre of contemporary art and literature, women’s marginalization is witnessed there too, as distinguished canonical works belong to predominantly Caucasian, Anglo-Saxon men. In the digital age then, Iberian and Latin American women writers and artists face the challenge of visibility and recognition in two territories—technology and contemporary artistic creation—dominated by men. This study gathers contemporary female artists of digital works originating from North America, the Caribbean, South America, and Spain who utilize a wide variety of tools to conduct and create their artwork. The artists and authors analyzed in this project include: Teresa Serrano (México, D.F. 1936-), Adriana Calatayud (México, D.F. 1967-), Ana Mendieta (Havana, 1948-1985), Maritza Molina (Havana), Yasmín S. Portales Machado (Havana, 1980-), María María Acha-Kutscher (Lima, 1968-), Praba Pilar (Colombia), María Cañas (Seville, 1972-), and Pilar Albarracín (Arcena, Huelva 1968-), with the objective of investigating the manner in which digital tools are being used by these women artists and writers for the purpose visibility, identity (de)construction, as spaces of resistance, and to explore how those messages are transmitted and transformed through digital mediums.

Conceptual poetry begins with the spark of the writing process, the moment when a poet finds inspiration and begins to write a poem. It is in that moment when the poem begins to be conceptualized, evolving throughout every part of the writing process. Conceptual poetry is the evolving idea of what the poem is working toward becoming, the concept of the end performance, and how the poem will be received. This conceptualization changes drastically with the revisions made throughout the process, the idea of the poem is revised as the author interacts with the work and audience. The revisions to the conceptualization may be minute or drastic. Small changes can be changing the feeling you want to elicit from the reader from slight anxiety to tones of fear. Larger changes can be changing the entire message you want to portray to your audience. Poems go through critical revisions that can leave a poem, and its conceptualized performed product, completely transformed and sometimes unrecognizable from the beginning product. The conceptual poetry and performance ends at the point where it leaves the author and becomes perceived and digested by the audience. The performance itself will always be conceptual and will never truly fulfill the concept the way that the poet has envisioned it.

With this thesis, I have set out to answer two fundamental questions within music: does music mean anything, and should music mean anything? In answering those questions, I also set out to create a creative project that would implement these ideas: an original concept album of music that is programmatic in nature and incorporates motivic composition, jazz improvisation, lyrics, extra-musical audio and more all in the service of telling a narrative, a story, through music. I have done research into understanding music as a language, finding that this language is primarily communicative and recreational, rather than representational, of meaning. As well, I discuss the various different ways that music composers from Wagner to Williams have created narrative meaning in their works, using examples of leitmotif and other devices, as well as tracing the contextual associations of meaning that occurs when music is perceived in certain contexts. Furthermore, I discuss the dialogue between absolute and programmatic music, and also talk about the role of jazz improvisation in adding meaning to works.
For the second part of my thesis I talk about how I came to create the creative project aspect. I discuss how and why I designed the narrative that I did, and also analyzed the music I have created to illustrate how I implemented the various methods of musical storytelling that I detail in the first part of the paper. Lastly, I discuss my plans for publication and release of the creative project.
The third part of this thesis is a sample of the creative project. There is a version of the narrative that goes along with the creative project, as well as one of the eight pieces of original music on the creative project, entitled Journey.
Overall, I found that music does have meaning, it is just meaning that society ascribes to it based off of artistic intent and context, and as to whether music should mean anything, I believe that this is a question best left to be answered on an individual basis. Music can be whatever it wants to be.

Dale and Edna is a hybrid animated film and videogame experienced in virtual reality with dual storylines that increases in potential meanings through player interaction. Developed and played within Unreal Engine 4 using the HTC Vive, Oculus, or PlayStation VR, Dale and Edna allows for players to passively enjoy the film element of the project or partake in the active videogame portion. Exploration of the virtual story world yields more information about that world, which may or may not alter the audience’s perception of the world. The film portion of the project is a static narrative with a plot that cannot be altered by players within the virtual world. In the static plot, the characters Dale and Edna discover and subsequently combat an alien invasion that appears to have the objective of demolishing Dale’s prize pumpkin. However, the aliens in the film plot are merely projections created by AR headsets that are reflecting Jimmy’s gameplay on his tablet. The audience is thus invited to question their perception of reality through combined use of VR and AR. The game element is a dynamic narrative scaffold that does not unfold as a traditional narrative might. Instead, what a player observes and interacts with within the sandbox level will determine the meaning those players come away from this project with. Both elements of the project feature modular code construction so developers can return to both the film and game portions of the project and make additions. This paper will analyze the chronological development of the project along with the guiding philosophy that was revealed in the result.
Keywords: virtual reality, film, videogame, sandbox