Thesiss

The tragedy at Waco, Texas in 1993 underscores some of the dangers of reading the book of Revelation monologically. Assuming that the goal of the interpretive task is to discover a single, propositional meaning, monologic approaches ignore the dialogic nature of language and lit…

This dissertation explores the corpus of Spanish and Portuguese song contained in the eight principal manuscript sources of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Its purpose is to treat songs as cultural products which reflect, react to, or comment upon the culture o…

The mélodies of André Caplet (1878-1925) are permeated with an abundance of intricacies and complexities in terms of tonality and rhythm. Through exploring aspects of tonal and rhythmic structures in the sets Paroles à l'absente, Le vieux coffret, Trois fables de Jean de La Font…

This thesis explores the ways in which the aftershock of an apparent crisis in Soviet identity after the death of Stalin in 1953 can be detected in selected musical-literary works of the Stagnation era (1964-1985). Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalinism in his 'Secret Speech' of…

This research attempts to show that a total work of art, or Gesamtkunstwerk, of the magnitude of the Rahbani brothers', makes a society more literate by: (1) Appealing to the largest possible section of the population, (2) Releasing the imagination of a people, (3) Empowering th…

The formation of the Spanish nation and empire reverberates in its 16 th- and 17th-century literature, as the so-called "Reconquest" of the Iberian Peninsula by the Northern, Christian kingdoms (8th-15 th centuries) served to create both new national territory and also an identi…

This dissertation is a study of popular music and state-controlled radio broadcasting in the Arabic-speaking world, focusing on Syria and the Syrian radioscape, and a set of American stations named Radio Sawa. I examine American and Syrian politically directed broadcasts as mult…

The focus of this dissertation is on the vocal music of Young-Ja Lee, the most important Korean woman composer of our time, within the context of the history of Korean Western music with special attention given to her songs. Many Korean women composers of Western music invested …

For several hundred years, in response to Charles Finney’s innovations, American churches emphasized evangelism over worship within corporate worship services. This approach redirected the vertical focus of corporate worship from God to the horizontal focus of non-believers as t…

This thesis is an analysis of class as it is represented in select works published and released from Britain during the long ‘80s: a period ranging from the 1980s to the mid-1990s. I will be analyzing the poem v. written by the British author Tony Harrison, as well as songs on t…

This dissertation explores the roles of language and place in the formation and representation of social identity among Ishelhin (Tashelhit Berber speakers) in Southwestern Morocco. Drawing on sociological practice theory and anthropological approaches to language ideology, I ar…

In the past forty years the fluid Uyghur muqam song tradition has been transformed into a cultural canon used to represent the Uyghur ethnic group within China and on the world stage. Traditional muqam performers have provided the magma of songs that scholars and politicians hav…