Browsing by Subject "Nostalgia"
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Item Capturing the social memory of librarianship(2013-05) Smith, Alan Arro; Roy, LorieneThis research has identified elements of the social memory of librarianship from the last half of the twentieth century by collecting and examining thirty-four oral history interviews of librarians at the end of their careers. These professional life stories trace an important arc through the history of library and information science. Many of these librarians began their careers prior to the use of any form of computer technology in libraries. This cohort ushered in a wave of technological innovations that has revolutionized the access to information. These oral history interviews are part of the Capturing Our Stories Oral History Program of Retiring/Retired Librarians sponsored by the American Library Association and the School of Information at the University of Texas. The social memory includes regret and nostalgia for the librarianship practiced at the beginning of their careers, excitement and wonder about how technology has fundamentally changed the profession, and perspectives on the popular stereotype associated with their careers.Item Feeling forgotten : the survival of Romantic memory in Charlotte Smith, William Godwin, and Walter Scott, 1784-1815(2009-05) Russell, Matthew Robert, 1969 Aug. 18-; Wettlaufer, Alexandra; Moore, Lisa L. (Lisa Lynne)Feeling forgotten charts a shift in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English literature that is structured on a crisis of memory. This shift consists in a movement towards a literary construction of aesthetic and moral self-forgetfulness that draws its intense power from an anxiety about human mortality and historical forgetting. Through analyses of texts that depict the need to overcome individual and cultural loss through a desire for oblivion, Feeling forgotten contends that the Romantic period gave birth to anti-mnemonic aesthetic in which the displacement of a perceived loss of the feeling of lived memories into various literary fictions preserves the past in such a way as to answer an unavoidable loss of feeling by asserting that the past, one's own and others, can be felt (again) in the complex affective experience found in reading about the past. In a more ambitious sense, Feeling forgotten attempts to point the way towards an understanding of Romantic and post-Romantic nostalgia as a strong rejection of its melancholic forbearers and as a response to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century self-forgetting. Indeed, the rejection of this more complex Romantic form of nostalgia, one in which the always frustrated attempt to inscribe forgetfulness itself into the text of memory is productive of the ongoing act of writing, would become the founding principle for later forms of nostalgia that seek to render forgetting as an act that resides outside the written text. Based on a reorientation of Charlotte Smith's poetic archive of feelings, which defines feeling as the failure of poetry to contain and defuse feelings themselves, and the passionate rationalism of William Godwin's early nineteenth century texts, in which self-analysis serves as both the generator and corruptor of the sympathetic feelings found in sentimental literature, Walter Scott's passive, amnesiac romances stage the fantasy of an evasion from the political and material significance of history.Item I don’t want to set the world on fire…or do I? : playing (with) history in Fallout 3(2010-12) Gonzales, Racquel Maria; Kackman, Michael; Kumar, ShantiWhile considering the role of media in shaping and examining histories, we must also grapple with formal limitations in approaching and understanding the past. The thesis aims to bring video games into critical conversations regarding history, memory, and nostalgia by considering the similar and unique perspectives the medium can bring alongside film, television, radio, and literature. Player positionality and interactivity within the unconventional, non-linear game storytelling form allows for different engagements with history. Focusing on the futuristic, post-apocalyptic role-playing game Fallout 3 (2008), this study interrogates the game’s nuanced presentation of genre as a cultural mediation of the past, the negotiation of memory with history, and our problematic assumptions about technology and narratives of progress. While the study finds games may provide rewarding and potentially critical explorations of history, the self-reflexive nature of video gaming emphasizes the medium’s possibilities, limitations, and implications as a cultural product shaped by the very forces constructing history.Item Ibn Ḥamdīs and the poetry of nostalgia : a rhetoric of collective memory(2012-08) Keener, Kaley Tamara; Ali, Samer M.; El-Ariss, TarekNostalgia is a term that is often used in literature and popular culture to connote an individual’s relation to a specific place, time or object, however, despite its use in literary analysis, it is often overlooked as a rhetorical devise employed to connect to, persuade, and influence an audience. This paper analyzes the poetry of Arabo-Siculo poet Ibn Ḥamdīs and his use of nostalgia in his poetry to influence and persuade his audiences abroad. I look to the sociologists Fred Davis and Svetlana Boym and their descriptions of nostalgia as being either public or private, restorative or reflective. Drawing on these terms, I propose that Ibn Ḥamdīs writes a relational nostalgia, that is, a nostalgia that he writes into his poetry not just for cathartic, personal benefit, but as a persuasive, rhetorical measure for his audience, and in this way he builds a collective, shared memory between himself and his audience. In addition to nostalgia, I will also be looking to Suzanne Stetkevych and Samer Ali and their work on the socio-political nature of Arabo-Islamic poetry to see how Ibn Ḥamdīs creates and employs this relational nostalgia for his audience and the effect it has on them.Item No bad memories : a feminist, critical design approach to video game histories(2014-05) Weil, Rachel Simone; Lee, GloriaCertain unique sights and sounds of video games from the 1980s and 1990s have been codified as a retro game style, celebrated by collectors, historians, and game developers alike. In this report, I argue that this nostalgic celebration has escaped critical scrutiny and in particular omits the diverse experiences of girls and women who may have been alienated by the tough, intimidating nature of a twentieth-century video-game culture that was primarily created by and for boys. Indeed, attempts to attract girls to gaming, such as the 1990s girls' game movement, are usually criticized in or absent from mainstream video-game histories, and girly video games are rarely viewed with the same nostalgic fondness as games like Super Mario Bros. This condition points to a larger cultural practice of trivializing media for girls and, by extension, girlhood and girls themselves. My critical design response to this condition has been twofold. First, I have recuperated and resituated twentieth-century girly games as collectible, valuable, and nostalgic, thereby subverting conventional historical narratives and suggesting that these games have inherent cultural value. Second, I have created new works that reimagine 8-bit style as an expression of nostalgia for twentieth-century girlhood rather than for twentieth-century boyhood. This report contains documentation of some relevant projects I have undertaken, such as the creation of a video-game museum and an 8-bit video game called Electronic Sweet-N Fun Fortune Teller. In these projects and in future works, I hope to disrupt dominant narratives about video game history and nostalgia that continue to marginalize and trivialize girls' and women's experiences and participation in contemporary game cultures.Item Once you go you know : tourism, colonial nostalgia and national lies in Jamaica(2012-05) Wint, Traci-Ann Simone Patrice; Gordon, Edmund Tayloe; Franklin, MariaJamaica is rich in contradictions. Life, like the landscape, is made up of great highs and lows, a wealth of beauty paralleled by intense desperation. This report explores these contradictions through an examination of the image of Jamaica packaged and presented to the world as a consumable tourism product. In 2012 as Jamaica prepares to celebrate 50 years of (in)dependence, the small nation finds itself battling (neo)colonialism, dependence, dispossession. Tourism is Jamaica’s main source of revenue and the industry is a major employer. The island’s role as a premier tourist destination is thus inseparable from Jamaicans’ daily lives. The current marketing slogan says to tourists ‘Once you go, you know”, I argue that this assertion is representative of the form tourism takes in Jamaica. By literally and figuratively granting understanding and ownership of the island and its resources to foreigners, the construction of Jamaica’s tourism product systematically commodifies Jamaica, its people, and culture. I seek to interrogate the role of tourism in Jamaica’s continued exploitation and to question the presence of secrecy, colonial nostalgia and national lies in how Jamaicans self identify and in how we are portrayed.Item Psychobilly : imagining and realizing a "culture of survival" through mutant rockabilly(2011-05) Kattari, Kimberly Adele; Moore, Robin D.; Erlmann, Veit; Menchaca, Martha; Miller, Karl; Seeman, SoniaIdentifying simultaneously with the cool 1950s greaser, the punk rebel, and the zombies, murderers, and monsters of horror lore, psychobillies (“psychos”) cobble together an identity that expresses their subcultural subjectivity. They construct and cultivate an alternative present, a participatory culture that offers multiple strategies for relieving the pressures of working-class life, for experiencing pleasure despite hardship. As one research participant put it, “psychobilly is a culture of survival.” This dissertation explores the interwoven, multiple reasons why musicians and fans identify with this alternative, underground culture, tracing the integral role it plays in their lives and the ways in which psychobillies creatively reconstitute aspects of the cultural past in the present. I focus on the advantages that a tight-knit social community confers and on the ways in which various fantasies and lived practices provide transcendental escape as well as feelings of control and power. My research draws both from a long line of cultural studies and from more recent trends in popular music scholarship that focus on musical meaning in everyday life. Accordingly, I employ an ethnographic writing style that privileges the multiple voices and identities of my research associates.Item Remembering and performing the ideal campus : the sound cultures of interwar American universities(2010-08) Schafer, Kimberly Ann; Ford, Phil, 1969-; Buhler, James, 1964-; Cleary, Richard; Davis, Janet; Dell'Antonio, Andrew; Erlmann, VeitIn this dissertation, I examine extracurricular music of American universities between the two World Wars and consider it as an indicator of the idealization of collegiate life. Interwar discourse at American universities demonstrated the two contrasting ideals of the older collegiate model and the more recent university model. The collegiate model was associated with ideals related to character building, a sense of community, and a common curriculum, whereas the university model was associated with social utility, research, and liberal culture. Proponents of the collegiate model idealized an older collegiate life in America. One version of this idealized collegiate life captured the popular imagination of Americans in the late nineteenth century – the vision of students developing their social skills in the extracurriculum at the expense of their intellect in the official curriculum. Various members of the university community at Stanford University, The University of Texas, and Yale University promoted this idyllic view of collegiate life in the extracurriculum. Marching bands, glee clubs, and bell instruments were thought to transmit collegiate values of community and character building. The music’s adaptation to modern trends and values, however, reveal that it did not fully adhere to an idealized image of pre-modern college life. The university communities believed that music (and sound in general) with its ability to reach listeners’ memories and emotions, was unique in its access to interior subjectivity. This belief guided university administrators to use campus sounds to instill school spirit and nostalgia. Yet the failure of certain audio memorabilia, namely the Talking Page of the Onondagan yearbook of Syracuse University and The Cactus in Sound of The University of Texas, leads us to question this assumption of special interior access. Administrators, students, and alumni all had a hand in using sounds to elicit these strong sentiments toward their university, which administrators hoped would foster increased financial supportItem Somewhere between here and there : Sharon Hayes and Catherine Opie, picturing protest(2013-05) Rubin, Caitlin Julia; Smith, Cherise, 1969-Both Sharon Hayes’s "In the Near Future" (2005-2009) and Catherine Opie’s photographs of assemblies and rallies (2007—) take protest as a topic of investigation. Hayes enacts solo protests in urban centers and documents her project’s iterations; Opie attends organized marches and demonstrations and photographs the gathered crowds. Yet while both projects perform or picture protest in the present-day, neither is wholly of this moment. In her staged actions, Hayes holds the signs and slogans of earlier social movements, and both she and Opie create and consider the images they capture in relation to experiences and visual records which predate them. This thesis considers the ways in which expectations and desires for present and future moments are rooted in understandings of social or political pasts, investigating the work of Hayes and Opie alongside the events of Occupy Wall Street and the histories of the movements these artists reference: ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), Queer Nation, and the Memphis Sanitation Strike of 1968. Focusing on the role of the documentary image in the creation and remembrance of historical events, the paper looks at how the longing to reinhabit a pictured past becomes incorporated within a desire to feel historical, and how fantasies of the past and future are absorbed into the charged space of present. Concentrating first on this temporal rearrangement (referred to by Hayes as an “unspooling of history”) and turning next to the reengagement and embodiment of symbolic imagery, this thesis explores how works by Hayes and Opie emphasize disappointment in the present scene while simultaneously endeavoring to establish alternative spaces of social and political possibility—both new sites and reimagined worlds of belonging.Item Working through a monumental break up : ideological transitions, ironic monumental disruptions, and public deliberation(2012-12) Vartabedian, Sarah Ellen; Cloud, Dana L.; Blair, Carole; Bolin, Paul; Jarvis, Sharon; Brummett, BarryAt present the literature of counter-monument studies does not account for the complex interactions of irony and nostalgia in memorial spaces. The three case studies examined in this project show that nostalgia can produce critically engaging spaces of deliberation depending on how ironic commemoration intervenes in comic or tragic frames. In order to show that more rhetorical focus is possible, I have challenged the conceptualization of counter-monument studies through what I have termed the “ironic monumental disruption.” Monument studies must address how the idea of the counter-monument, in which the "counter" supposedly resides in the artifact itself, valorizes monolithic critiques and fails to recognize that contexts, interactions, and artifacts all shape the symbolism of the commemorative site. Alternatively, ironic monumental disruptions offer critical and deliberative opportunities in their interactions with visitors and provide more conceptual insight into transitional commemorative practices. The monuments reviewed in this project initially appeared to provide additional reinforcement for escapist, capitalist narratives, but my examination of them has revealed that allowing for (ironic) commemorative contradictions provides discursive openings for publics unknowingly silenced by a lack of public deliberation. Commemorative irony produces valuable insights into the current historical moment and the representational issues created by ideological transitions. The citizens of Bosnia, Bulgaria, and Hungary express varying levels of nostalgia about their communist past, which is why the commemorative sites within these countries create a valuable spectrum of ironic and nostalgic entanglements. Commemorative irony produces valuable insights into the current historical moment and the representational issues created by ideological transitions.