Browsing by Subject "Folklore"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Gerhard Munthe's Folktale Tapestries: Designing a Norwegian National Narrative in the Nineteenth Century
    (2014-12) Warren, Erica
    This dissertation contemplates the role of the Norwegian landscape painter and designer Gerhard Munthe (1849-1929) in constructing the Norwegian nation. During the nineteenth century, the production of narratives that trace a progressive trajectory for Norway's history, within historical and decorative arts museums, along with art objects and visual culture, played a major role in constructing, defining, and promoting Norway as an independent, European nation. The Norwegian artist Gerhard Munthe, as a participant in the Paris 1900 World's Fair and through his role as a board member of the Norsk Folkemuseum (Norwegian Folk Museum) and the Kunstindustrimuseet (Museum of Decorative Arts and Design) in Oslo, participated in the nation-building process which effectively manipulated Norway's past as well as criticisms of Norway to construct and promote a modern Norwegian national identity. In their assessments of Munthe's tapestries, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century critics and scholars have noted the national aspects of his designs and some have struggled to note the tapestries place as expressive of national identity, while also noting how they might signal ambivalence towards that identity. The folktales depicted in the tapestries have the potential to negotiate that ambivalence, while also engaging with the larger project to imagine "the people." This larger project includes the efforts of the folklorists Peter Asbjørsen and Jørgen Moe, and philologist Ivar Aasen, who sought to recuperate and document folklore and language. Despite the failings of these projects, they, along with Munthe's tapestries, remain central to the story of Norwegian nationalism. Some contemporary critics seeks to demonstrate Munthe's significance in an art historical context beyond Norway through an investigation of Munthe's work and its engagement with the theories and motifs of the Aesthetic movement, the Arts and Crafts movement, art nouveau, japonisme, and Symbolism. In examining these modern movements and positioning Munthe as engaged with their ideas, it becomes clear that these movements or trends are tied together by certain repetitive narrative threads, including an insistent borrowing and imagining, a focus on craftsmanship, and a repurposing of the historical.
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    Review of Skin Folk by Nalo Hopkinson
    (Voices from the Gaps, 2005) Simonovich, Olga
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    Spectral materialisms: colonial complexes and the insurgent acts of Chicana/o cultural production.
    (2011-07) Watson, Cathryn Merla
    This dissertation uses an interdisciplinary lens to theorize the multiple ways in which contemporary forms of Chicana/o cultural production disturb and extend beyond specific "colonial complexes" or seemingly ossified compounds of time and space. Specifically, I examine how Chicana feminist theory in conjunction with Marxian and poststructuralist theory; the literary work of Bárbara Renaud González and Sandra Cisneros; the folklore of La Llorona; the urban legend and social performance of San Antonio's Ghost Tracks; and the visual art of the collaborative Project MASA (MeChicana/o Alliance of Space Artists) disrupt, redistribute, and surge beyond colonial cartographies, re-imagining and enacting alternative horizons of possibility or decolonial imaginaries. I ground my study in San Antonio, Texas, whose Chicana/o cultural production and neo-colonial geography has received scant scholarly attention, to bring to the fore both the specificity of colonial legacies and to connect these legacies to larger neo-colonial (trans)national geographies. I engage and extend diverse theorizations of the ghostly--or, that is, the contingent and ephemeral structures of desire, difference, history, lived experience, and memory--to bring into purview how colonial legacies inhere in the present and collectively enunciate what I term a "spectral materialism": that which is profoundly felt and experienced, but not necessarily visible or intelligible through language. I further argue that although this spectral materialism is animated by particular cultural and socio-spatial logics, it also gestures toward a more general embodied form of knowledge production that acknowledges the ways in which the ostensibly immaterial always already imbues the material world. This dissertation, finally, intervenes in Chicana/o, Latina/o, and American Studies through critiquing the dialectic (a dominant analytic for ascertaining meaning from cultural production) as a binary colonialist ontology that severs the material from the immaterial, as well as articulates a more supple, complex, and inductive analytic for understanding how Chicana/o cultural production generates meaning through lived experience and indexes the potential for other postcolonial futures.
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    Why the earth shakes: pre-modern understandings and modern earthquake science.
    (2010-12) Bluestone, Jamie Rae
    Using historical sources comprised of earthquake stories of multiple genres - personal anecdotes, prayers, sermons, natural histories, philosophical treatises, poems - as well as texts about modern scientific theories, this project demonstrates how unpredictable and incompletely understood phenomena like earthquakes both expose and challenge the boundaries of knowledge. The process of European expansion to the Americas in the early modern period provides some geographical and temporal structure to the broad scope of this project, which discusses stories that come from across the globe and cover the period from roughly the eighth century BCE to the present. Special attention is paid to scientific or natural philosophical views of earthquakes, and to religious and mythological stories about the phenomenon, in order to show how a fuller understanding of earthquakes requires expanding beyond traditional limits of knowledge. So far, no individual explanation for why the earth shakes - whether ancient or modern, religious or scientific - has proven to be complete. Until such time as we have complete knowledge--if that time ever comes--a diversity of perspectives can help us to frame our understanding of earthquakes and their impact on human history.