Browsing by Subject "literature"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    The ABC of It: Why Children's Books Matter
    (University of Minnesota, 2019-02-15) Marcus, Leonard S.; Von Drasek, Lisa
    For fourteen months beginning in June 2013, the New York Public Library hosted an exhibition about the role of children’s books in world culture and in our lives. Now with this book, a collaboration between the University of Minnesota’s Kerlan Collection of Children’s Literature and children’s literature historian Leonard Marcus, the nostalgia and vision of that exhibit can be experienced anywhere.
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    The Intentional Curation of Short Verse Narratives in a Compilation Manuscript for a Medieval Audience
    (2022-07) Groepper, Emily
    This dissertation investigates a compilation manuscript of short verse texts from the fourteenth century, Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (ÖNB), Cod. 2885. It examines the organizational structures in order to demonstrate that it is a purposefully curated collection. By analyzing individual stories and clusters of texts according to their stylistic, thematic, and linguistic features, I demonstrate that the collection is carefully constructed with a specific audience in mind. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of the codex that contributes to a more detailed description of its audience. This includes an analysis of the manuscript in comparison to similar contemporary manuscripts, and it considers the inclusion of paratextual features and narrative structures. Additional focus is given to the characters within the narratives as well as the emotions expressed by those characters. This points toward how various emotions were valued or devalued and helps to build a more robust profile of the intended audience. These multiple, overlapping layers demonstrate that the manuscript’s audience consisted of both men and women with a relatively high social standing. They most likely lived in an urban environment and were familiar with biblical, Latin, and medieval German literatures. Though they may not have been part of a formal, royal court, they still aspired to hold on to the lofty ideals propagated by courtly literature. While this is a case study, it has the potential to be mapped onto other compilation manuscripts. This approach contributes to the reconstruction of the medieval reception of short verse narratives and a closer understanding of how, why, and for whom such manuscripts were produced.
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    The Revolutionary Task of Cinema: Modernism and Mass Culture in Shanghai and Buenos Aires
    (2019-05) Sedzielarz, Aleksander
    This dissertation reconstructs the interconnected cultural histories of film and literature in Shanghai and Buenos Aires in the period 1927-1937. Through readings of previously untranslated texts on film form and film technology by Alfonsina Storni (1892-1938), Roberto Arlt (1900-1942), Mao Dun (pen name of Shen Yanbing, 1896-1981), and Xia Yan (pen name of Shen Naixi, 1900-1995), I identify a movement in cinepoetics common to Latin America and East Asia that mobilized local popular culture for global working-class political goals. My research investigates into key points in the history of the encounter between cinema and literature in these two cities and links internationalist movements in revolutionary politics with the vibrant film cultures emerging in these two cities—as seen through the eyes of each writer. Through a close textual, visual, and auditory analysis of film clips, film reviews, film-poems, reportage, film-inspired fiction narrative, screenplays, and soundtracks, each case study tracks the work of these writers as they participated in a transpacific intellectual network of anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist politics during the period of rising fascism, class conflict, socialist solidarity, and political upheaval in the years prior to the Second World War. My study finds that their experiments with film pushed the boundaries of traditional writing forms. Moreover, in developing new critical practices of viewing and listening to cinema Storni, Arlt, Mao Dun, and Xia Yan each contributed to a politically engaged internationalist current of cinematic modernism. During this brief period of resistance to the globalized dominance of Hollywood entertainment commodities, each of these writers exemplified the strengthening of cultural movement based in cinema, which presented the cinematic experience as grounds for a renewed modern social experience with the potential to radically disrupt sociopolitical formations of class, nation, and state. As a collaboratively produced and collectively consumed cultural form, cinema presented each of these writers with a means for reinventing political thought in ways that embraced the intricacies of urban life in cities on the periphery of globalized circuits of capital. Linked by an attention to film as a politically volatile fusion of mass art and mass spectacle—an attention that, at key moments, gave these writers common cause in resisting cultural exports that extended the reach of European and American empire—my study discovers these radical intellectuals as leaders in a transpacific cultural front that ultimately aimed at establishing cinema as a mass art that could unify worldwide movements against the capitalist exploitation of the working classes.
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    A Student-Initiated, Integrated Pharmacotherapeutics Learner-Centered Course
    (University of Minnesota, College of Pharmacy, 2015) Hopman, Shawn; Popovich, Nicholas G.
    Objective: To evaluate a learner-centered, elective course complementing pharmacotherapeutic instruction. Design: A one credit-hour elective as developed. Enrolled students were responsible for article selection and to lead in-class discussions. A content-validated discussant rubric was use to peer review each discussant. Assessment: Enrolled students kept current on the literature and nurtured an obligation to themselves and their peers to be prepared on a weekly basis to discuss the selected article. Discussion demonstrated varied opinions and provided ample opportunity for students to use technical/clinical language. Also, the course allowed for thinking at a higher level, discussing complex ideas/issues, and developing oral communication skills. Conclusions: This learner-centered approach allowed the enrolled students to take ownership of their learning and complement their learning from the traditional mode of learning in two pharmacotherapeutic courses. It encouraged the students to investigate the clinical literature as a means to complement and enhance their knowledge.