Browsing by Subject "Cultural history"
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Item Based on a true story : "The Gezi Film Poster Series" and the role of narrative in cultural history(2015-05) Aksu, Leyla Aylin; Straubhaar, Joseph D.; Fuller, KathrynFocusing on a series of hypothetical film posters titled the "Gezi Movie Theatre Poster Series," commissioned by Istanbul's independent magazine Bant Mag, this thesis is a multi-methodological, exploratory case study utilizing ethnographic methods, as well as visual, textual, and document analysis. The posters within this series narrativize and encapsulate instances that took shape on the ground during the Gezi protests in Turkey in the Summer of 2013. Embodying the confluence of larger contextual events through the micro-lens of a singular organization and cultural product, the series provides an instance in which key and complex factors regarding social structure, political activism, and cultural production come together in the form of visual narrative. This undertaken analysis seeks to bring together theoretical constructs of social structure, historicization, alternative media and cultural resistance, material culture, artistic creation, and the imaginary, and apply them, in order, to Turkey, Gezi, Bant Mag, and the posters themselves, in order to create an understanding of how they each play a role within the series and its archival formation. Utilizing a critical analytical framework by focusing on the series as art, artifact, and action, after firmly contextually situating the film poster series within Bant Mag's own organizational framework, internal discourse, and history as a magazine, zine, and online resource, this study hopes to demonstrate the affordances of art, imagination, and subjectivity in the creation, documentation, and conservation of historical micro-narratives.Item The British experience with American independent photography, 1944-1980(2014-05) Jones, Andrew Wyn; Hoelscher, Steven D.; Abzug, Robert H; Lewis, Randolph; Hake, Sabine; Meikle, Jeffrey LThis dissertation explores the ways in which US-based photographic practices shaped British independent photography from the late stages of the Second World War to the beginning of the 1980s. America had become the center of the Western artistic and literary universes by the late 1940s, and the US had led the way in photography from at least the 1930s and arguably from the 1910s. American photographic technology, education, and aesthetics looked enviously advanced to Britons for most of the twentieth century, and those on the photographic vanguard in Britain cultivated relationships with their transatlantic counterparts in the hope of effecting change in British institutions. During the period studied, photographic traffic mostly emanated from the US, accompanying a broader stream of ideas, capital and cultural products that were eagerly consumed by many and resisted in other quarters as the pernicious products of American cultural imperialism. As ideas, images, and technology flowed into Britain from the US, photographic collections and personnel from Britain flowed out. American photographic practice in Britain was promulgated as much by its British recipients as their US counterparts. Influential professionals like magazine editor Bill Jay, Arts Council officer Barry Lane and freelance photographer Tony Ray-Jones sought to stimulate British independent photography by importing American institutional and aesthetic models. This catalytic process had the effect of invigorating photography in Britain which both developed along and ultimately diverged from American models. This work contributes to a larger body of scholarship examining the transnational lineages of artistic and cultural production through analyzing how actors in this flow of information sought to rework and domesticate artistic forms and ideas to suit their own purposes.Item The multi-sensory object : jazz, the modern media, and the history of the senses in Germany(2014-08) Schmidt, Michael James; Crew, David F., 1946-; Coffin, Judith G.; Miller, Karl H.; Hake, Sabine; Matysik, TracieThis dissertation traces the perceptual history of jazz in Germany between 1918 and 1960. It argues that jazz was a multi-sensory cultural object: jazz was never just sound but was fundamentally composed of many different media and their respective combinations of sensory address. This work follows the major transformations of the perception of jazz. During the 1920s, it argues, jazz was primarily a visual and textual phenomenon; by 1960, its audience considered sound to be its most important attribute and its consumption involved a well-developed hermeneutics of listening. As an intersection point for multiple media—it was a subject in newspaper articles, books, street advertisements, film, radio, and sound recordings—jazz opens a window onto the larger history of media and perception in Germany. During the twentieth century, Germany witnessed a shift in its dominant media regime. Before the rise of sound film, Germans public communication was dominated by images and text; between 1929 and 1940, German society became inundated with sound. These media regimes shaped both the contours of perception and the form and presence of cultural objects.Item The re-presentation of Arabic optics in seventeenth-century Commonwealth England(2015-05) Elghonimi, Reem; Spellberg, Denise A.; Levack, BrianArabic Studies experienced a resurgence in seventeenth-century English institutions. While an awareness of the efflorescence has helped recover a fuller picture of the historical landscape, the enterprise did not foment an appreciable change in Arabic grammatical or linguistic expertise for the majority of seventeenth-century university students learning the language. As a result, the desuetude of Arabic Studies by the 1660s has been regarded as further evidence for the conclusion that the project reaped insubstantial benefits for the history of science and for the Scientific Revolution. Rather, this inquiry contends that the influence of the Arabic transmission of Greek philosophical works extended beyond Renaissance Italy to Stuart England, which not only shared a continuity with the continental reception of Latinized Arabic texts but selectively investigated some sources of original Arabic scientific ideas and methods with new rigor. The case study at hand demonstrates how one English physician in the Commonwealth period turned to a medieval Muslim author of optics to dispel reliance on either mechanical, deterministic or occult explanation of natural phenomena.