Browsing by Author "Siegle, Robert B."
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- 2 Questions: what becomes architectureLambert, Joseph Edward (Virginia Tech, 1998-01-13)For several years, certain personal efforts relied heavily upon an essential belief in Lou Kahn's masterful answer to a student's question, because Architecture is. Kahn's spiritual awareness brought about a poetic significance to the studying, learning, and actualizing of our environmental efforts. Through his profoundly simple answer of architecture's essential existence, Kahn suggested that our works could never reach this state of being (even reason being unable to reach to far), leaving us only the ability to aspire towards it- with works ever to it, never with works of it. In the despair of our Modern response we set to achieve an end worth of its recognition which simply fails to acknowledge that the question was one of why, not one of what. His answer, and its suppressive conditions of existence, is no longer solely acceptable to a student's question. To my Master I say, reconception is necessary; the answer requires a more dynamic essence. As it is with the nature and dynamic flow of all 10,000 things- one can never exist, though one is always existing; one can never live , though one is always living, and in our cultural and social attempts to assimilate and accommodate our environment- our attempts will never be, only ever becoming. In other words, Mr. Kahn, I would like to supplicate and supplement, because Architecture becomes.
- Anarchy in Critical Dystopias: An Anatomy of RebellionLoy, Taylor (Virginia Tech, 2008-04-17)This paper is a cross-genre pilot study in Anarchist thought experiments. It is not an attempt to produce an encyclopedic review of the emergence or function of anarchism in critical dystopias. My objective is not so ambitious; my aim is to plot the evolution of each rebellion within its own context. In the end, I hope to broaden an understanding of Anarchy and Anarchism: not an understanding that congeals and grows more rigid, but rather an understanding that expands and flows, nearing a point of superfluidity. The primary focal points of analysis are Ursula K. Le Guin's novel The Dispossessed, the graphic novel V for Vendetta, created by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, and the film The Matrix, written and directed by the Wachowski Brothers. These texts and film have been selected for this project because they each present disparate versions of anarchistic rebellions. Drawing from Thomas Hughes' characterization of the evolution of large technological systems, I analyze the responses of the protagonist Anarchists in these works to the oppressive components of their respective technological infrastructures. The aim of this paper is not to conclude definitely what Anarchism is but what it does, how it works within the boundaries of each thought experiment. Ultimately, each of these texts is a performance, an acting out of Anarchistic ideals embodied in each character's response to the demands of their environment.
- Beating the Dead Horse: Deconstructing the Junk Genius of Naked LunchSmith, Kevin Darrell (Virginia Tech, 2013-06-11)William S. Burroughs challenges each reader of Naked Lunch to make meaning of its convoluted pages. This project explores the two crucial keys to fuller understanding of his groundbreaking literary work: Logic and Ethics. In "Beating the Dead Horse: Deconstructing the Junk Genius of Naked Lunch," I illustrate Burroughs' means of exposing the flawed binaries that undergird the Aristotelian Logic of language. In Naked Lunch, the author bares the slippery nature of any such Logical language, whereby each word comes with a range of denotations and connotations, all of which shift constantly according to a concomitantly shifting context. This project primarily explores Burroughs\' means of subverting traditional logic by exposing the flaws that riddle the foundations of language, essentially undermining the syllogistic system via the system (essentially fashioning a word virus/vaccine chain). I also analyze the Ethical grounding of Naked Lunch, which grows directly from Burroughs' logical/linguistic subversions. Namely, Burroughs sought to expose the problems with the common Utilitarian Ethic that ultimately pushes the individual to the margins while subsuming the individual within the group (a symptom of the binary logical/linguistic systems that pervade thought and encourages othering). This article provides substantial evidence that links Burroughs\' ethical equations directly from his Algebra of Need to Jeremy Bentham's Hedonistic Calculus.
- Becoming Light: Releasing Woolf from the Modernists Through the Theories of Giles Deleuze and Félix GuattariLandefeld, Ronnelle Rae (Virginia Tech, 2005-04-26)Critics of Virginia Woolf's fiction have tended to focus their arguments on one of the following five cruxes: Woolf's personal biography, the role of art, the nature of reality, the structure of her novels, or they focus their arguments on gender-based criticism. Often, when critics attempt to explain Woolf through any of these categories, they succeed in constructing borders around her writing that minimize the multiplicities outside them. Post-structuralist theory helps to open up difference in Woolf's writing, specifically, the theories of Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Their book, A Thousand Plateaus, allows readers of Woolf's novel, To the Lighthouse, outside the confines some past critics have put around it. I apply select Deleuze and Guattarian metaphors to Woolf's To the Lighthouse in order that multiplicities of the novel stand out. The Deleuze and Guattarian metaphors that are most successful in opening up difference in To the Lighthouse are strata; the Body without Organs; becoming; milieu and rhythm; and smooth and striated spaces.
- Beyond Binary Digital EmbodimentClinnin, Kaitlin Marie (Virginia Tech, 2012-04-24)The late 20th and early 21st centuries have seen the creation of new forms of subjectivities that represent the integration of digital and information technologies into construction of the self and bodies. I argue that to this point there has not been a satisfactory theoretical framework for the experience of bodies in virtual environments that does not default to problematic binaries of physical and virtual, real and unreal, and meaningful and meaningless. These dualistic constructions render experiences of bodies within virtual settings meaningless. In order to examine how this power differential between physical and virtual came to be, I engage with Katherine Hayles' evaluation of information as a disembodied entity. I argue that Hayles' humanist principles prevents her from fully understanding the experience of bodies within virtual spaces as meaningful and important. I then deconstruct the materialist basis of representation in order to demonstrate how information can be reconceived as an embodied force. I further analyze digital media art installations, specifically dance performances, to examine how digital bodies are currently experienced in relationship to corporeal forms. I finally offer two new theories of and the networked body in order to dismantle the binary between physical and virtual and to make a space for all embodied experiences to be valued.
- Boarding PassesSimpson, Elias (Virginia Tech, 2012-04-24)This book of poetry represents my best poems written in the last 14 months. The themes that arise are not project themes but personal interests. Chronologically it charts much of my life, beginning before I’m born, and ending in an uncertain future. It focuses primarily on the last five years (trip to France, graduation from college and graduate school, and starting a family). It is not about coming of age, because the speaker doesn’t. Instead it plays with the idea of growing up, the impossibility of it and the inevitability of it. I want it to be a series of paper airplanes to terminals in the airport of everyday life. They are spaces between living that represent life. It can be read chronologically. It could be read backwards. It can be read with feet up or down. The poems like coffee. During takeoff and landing please put seat in upright position, and tray tables up. In the time between beginning and ending the world should change. The book creatively and thoughtfully conveys an emotional understanding that is my own, and that deserves to be shared because it insists on being written down, over and over again.
- Bodies in Vertigo: the language of liminalitiesWard, Shelby Elise (Virginia Tech, 2014-12-19)Starting with my own travel experiences, and with the help of poets, Elizabeth Bishop, Jorie Graham, and Emily Dickinson, I create a theory of displacement, called Vertigo. Vertigo is not only a sense of falling, but a sense of detachment from reality that I felt traversing through different cultures, languages, and worlds for the first time. Vertigo is a liminal, transformative space that allows an individual to experience the created nature of their own worldview and culture. This is also a physical experience, as Bishop, Graham, and Dickinson give evidence to in their poetry, as the individual experiences a heightened sense of their physical bodies. This work acknowledges the privileged position of the traveler, and reveals that often the observations we make in this privileged position can be moves of colonization. Poetry is one way to both acknowledge these moves, and to also show what we can learn from these moments when we continue to question and explore. Additionally, poetry, as a medium of mindful reflection, allows for a language that is capable of handling the physical knowledge of the body; the mental mapping of the cultural and personal realities of the individual; and also the geographic and political landscapes that surround an individual or population, simultaneously. With this understanding, the theoretical framework for displacement, bodies, and place, which Bishop, Graham, and Dickinson give us, is the foundation for exploring how poetry can provide knowledge for more 'scientific' writing, such as, cultural geography or cognitive science.
- Controlling Bodies: Mothers, Adolescents, and Bad AdviceCanipe, Cayce Leigh (Virginia Tech, 2012-04-24)Since the 1990s, medical and media articles containing the word "obesity" inevitably included the word "epidemic" as well. These articles usually pointed to the exponential growth in overweight and obese persons in high-income and low-income countries alike. A recent field of literature called "fat studies" has sought to question this so-called epidemic, bringing to light inconsistencies or down-right falsehoods present in obesity research. While researchers in this field have importantly uncovered many myths surrounding obesity and overweight, examinations of the rhetorical strategies used to approve potentially dangerous weight loss or weight maintenance procedures remain few. This thesis project hopes to cover just a portion of that gap by examining two groups targeted most directly by obesity researchers: women and children. Particularly, this research examines potentially dangerous recommendations made by doctors and the media to pregnant obese women and obese adolescents. Ultimately, this project uncovers dualisms of wrong versus right bodies and fat stigmatization in the "objective" language of health about obesity. This polemic leaves pregnant women and adolescents little choice except either to conform or to face a world of media and medicine that blames these two groups for the "choice" to remain fat.
- Dialogical Writing in Philosophy and Literature. A Study on Plato's Crito and Gorgias and Peacock's Nightmare AbbeyGabor, Octavian (Virginia Tech, 2002-04-17)Both Thomas Love Peacock and Plato use dialogue for their works while they differ in what they envisage and what they achieve, i.e. same form, different objectives. Thus, having Peacock and Plato writing dialogues in different frames - one literary and one philosophical - raises an important question: can literary writers be more provocative of thought in the audience than writers of philosophical dialogues? If so, what then are the features of dialogical writing, whether literary or philosophical, or common features that pertain to both these fields, that cause it to be respectful or nurturing to the minds that encounter it? This question will underlie the whole paper. It actually comes from the fact that in dialogue, whether deployed in philosophical or literary texts, we do not see the author's opinion clearly expressed. In dialogue, and this is often true for Plato, the author's dogma loses itself under the various dogmas that the characters have; the author hides himself behind his personages. The readers do not encounter only one mind that has claims of revealing a truth - the philosophical approach - or that lays out a story - the literary one. In dialogue, the reader finds an ongoing discussion and becomes part of it. Through the analysis of two of Plato's dialogues, the Crito and the Gorgias, and Peacock's satirical novel, Nightmare Abbey, I intend to show that, used in philosophy or literature, dialogue seems to be the perfect tool to communicate the idea that once expressed becomes its negative: the only thing that we know is that we do not know anything.
- The erotic state of D. & V.Leung, Dallas G. (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1992)
- FrameworkSmallwood, Brian (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1994)As Bergson says, we do not perceive the thing or the image in its entirety, we always perceive less of it, we perceive only what we are interested in perceiving or rather what it is in or interest to perceive, by virtue of our economic interests, ideological beliefs, and psychological demands. We therefore normally perceive only cliches. But if our sensory-motor schemata jam or break, then a different type of image can appear, because it no longer has to be "justified." - Gilles Deleuze, "Cinema and Time," in The Deleuze Reader, ed., C. Bouncas (New York: Columbia University, 1993), p. 182.
- The franchise gas station: a study of agenda, subtext, and consequencePerkins, Audrey Rebecca Ann (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1993)The icon of the corporate gas station is a familiar site to any mobile consumer in the United States. Its familiarity is a result of the high demand for a product and repeated structures present in each community. according to the marketing material, such recognition is a desired architectural end, yet this end is not the result of architectural endeavors alone. For the advancement of the corporation, marketing is used here to promote the ease of use and the desired corporate image. There is no fault in such a procedure. It is interesting to consider the gas station as a paradox of forces and intentions. The paradox consists of the images of the literature and the reality of the structure. The literature projects an image of desired harmony, non-obtrusive and neutral participation in any environment. At the same time, the recognition of a moulded and repeatable form is used to attract and comfort the customer into a situation of “brand recognition”. Therefore, the building distinguishes itself from its background. Obviously, this is not in order to advance profits by attracting customers. Neither interest is “incorrect” yet the dually directed function of the structure is not always expected or considered. Claiming the accommodation of both the community and customers within the same structure is a desired policy of the corporation.
- A Genealogy of Frankenstein's Creation: Appropriation, Hypermediacy, and Distributed Cognition in Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl, Victor Erice's Spirit of the Beehive, and Mary Shelley's FrankensteinStafford, Richard Todd (Virginia Tech, 2011-04-29)Studies of Frankenstein-related cultural, literary, and filmic productions tend to either focus atomistically on a particular cultural artifact or construct rather strict chains of filiation between multiple artifacts. Media scholars have developed rich conceptual resources for describing cross-media appropriations in the realm of fandom (including fan fiction and slash fiction); however, many scholars of digital literary culture tend to describe the relationships between new media artifacts and their print counterparts in terms that promote what is "new" about these media forms without attending to how older media forms anticipate and enter into conversation with electronic multimedia formats. This paper suggests an alternative to this model that emphasizes the extent to which media forms remix, appropriate, and speak through other media and cultural artifacts. Studying Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, James Whale's classic Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein films, Victor Erice's Spirit of the Beehive, Bill Condon's Gods and Monsters, Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl, and some of the scholarly literature around the Frankenstein narrative, the construction of gender, and the discourse of post- humanity, this paper explores the mechanisms through which these artifacts draw attention to their participation in a greater "body" of Frankenstein culture. Additionally, this paper explores how these artifacts use what Bolter and Grusin have described as the logic of hypermediacy to emphasize the specificity of their deployment through a particular medium into a specific historical situation.
- How is a Woman Like a Watermelon?: Advocating a Psychological and Comparative Examination of Brautigan's NovelsPlummer, Sarah E. (Virginia Tech, 2010-04-28)"How is a Woman Like a Watermelon" examines two of Richard Brautigan's novels, In Watermelon Sugar and An Unfortunate Woman, as they relate to each other in ways that offer a better understanding of each. This paper enriches an understanding of Brautigan's work by exploring the historical context of his writings, studying his style and presenting diverse interpretations in a mutually inclusive way that complements the multifaceted qualities of his writing. By studying Brautigan's novels in a comparative manner, the essential and distinctive principles that drive Brautigan's work—his manipulation of genre, use of memory and a complex first person narrator as an author persona—are better understood. Because of Brautigan's use of the first person, this study advocates an analytical psychological analysis aimed at discerning underlying emotion within apparent personal detachment, the use of projection as a defense mechanism, and the psychological associative value of words, images and memories. An inclusive and comparative study that foregrounds these psychological elements will ultimately allow for a more complete and subtle analysis of Brautigan's work.
- "The Length of Our Vision": Thoreau, Berry, and SustainabilityGibbs, Jared Andrew (Virginia Tech, 2010-04-22)The past several years have seen increased awareness of environmental degradation, climate change, and energy concerns—and with good reason; addressing the problem of sustainability is vital if American culture is to both persist and thrive. Because this issue affects all aspects of our lives, it can easily seem overwhelming, encouraging the belief that solutions to these problems lie beyond the scope of individual action. This study seeks to identify legitimate personal responses one can make to issues of sustainability. I approach this subject with an eye toward answering a simple series of questions: Where are we?; How did we get here?; Where are we going?; Is that where we want to go? I briefly investigate the history of the idea of progress, focusing especially on our culture's fascination with and embrace of technological progress. Following this investigation, I examine two works that offer critiques of progress: Thoreau's classic text, Walden, and Wendell Berry's, The Unsettling of America. These texts are chosen for a few reasons. First, a clear tradition of critical inquiry can be traced from Thoreau to Berry. Second, the historical distance between these authors makes a comparison of their work particularly illuminating. Though they are citizens of the same country, speak the same language, and ask similar questions, each author writes in response to different worlds—Thoreau's just beginning to embrace industrial capitalism and technological progress, and Berry's very much the product of that embrace. Most importantly, however, both authors focus on individual action and responsibility.
- Memory Machines: Exploring Moby-Dick and Gravity's Rainbow Through the History of FilmSpencer, Benjamin Paul (Virginia Tech, 2011-03-16)For close to a decade, I have weighed comparative approaches to "the Great American Novel". Progress increased as soon as I resolved on selecting Moby-Dick as the work originally responsible for issuing that slogan. Making this particular selection required the application of a dynamic concept which, appropriately, reflects critiques of knowledge production: "the Archive". Perhaps the most direct references to a conceptual archive appear in Derrida's Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, which addresses the dual forces "preservation/destruction" that influence allegory and mythology. Other critical writers refer to a similar concept through various other terms, ultimately equipping my thesis with a method for studying the relation between myth and allegory. The method draws from each writer's focus on the form and content dynamics of artifacts, and how these dynamics reflect the historical conditions that affirm or produce them. Specifically, all the writers I have selected to study, in some way consider the play between the mechanical apparatus and the representation it produces. Thus, I concluded that my literary comparative approach could involve juxtaposing a different, historically concurrent mode of documentation: film media and photography. Gravity's Rainbow is often considered, after Moby-Dick, the most universally-recognized "Great American Novel". Pynchon spends a lot of time referring to mass-produced films, their effects on the global order emerging with WWII, and to the material occurrence of film technology as it relates to the book as a material artifact. For Pynchon, the backlots built up by such "great" as D.W. Griffith constitute the twentieth-century frontier.
- Multiple Ways of Playing Serena and Blair: How Gossip Girl Revises the Role of Nancy Drew for a New Generation of Desiring-MachinesStovall, Bonnie (Virginia Tech, 2009-04-21)Previous studies on Cecily von Ziegesar's series Gossip Girl fail to explain the functionality of the series for the actual readers. Therefore, a discussion of the relationship between reader and text is necessary. By explaining from a literary perspective how reader and text interact, we can better understand why teen girls want to read the series and the exchanges that occur between the books and the readers. An exploration of how Gossip Girl relates to its series predecessors, like Nancy Drew, demonstrates how the popularity of Gossip Girl is not unique, but rather fits in with the established series pattern while receiving the same harsh criticism. As a result of analyzing the "bad" reputation Gossip Girl has earned, we can explicate how the series is currently seen to operate for the reader, questions left open when simply looking at series books historically. This exploration of the books as carriers of ideology examines how and if readers are invited to participate in a relationship with the text. However, simple reader-response theories only replicate a static relationship between reader and text. By also using a Deleuzo-Guattarian approach to the series, an understanding of how Gossip Girl acts as an "apparatus of capture" built on social conditions while still allowing the reader minimal agency for the channeling of energy/desiring flows can be found. These approaches work in conjunction in order to address the engagement readers experience with the Gossip Girl texts, which, in turn, help elucidate the phenomenon associated with von Ziegesar's books.
- "My Music is Words" -- The Poetics of Sun RaBowles, Nathaniel Earl (Virginia Tech, 2008-04-17)This thesis argues for a critical examination of the published writings of Le Sony'r Ra, also known as Sun Ra, a groundbreaking jazz musician and philosopher of the 20th century. Recent redistribution of Sun Ra's musical output, which includes hundreds of releases on many record labels from the 1950's onward, has prompted a critical renaissance towards his influence on jazz orchestration, band management, do-it-yourself ethics, and structured improvisation In spite of this resurgence of interest in his music, his written corpus has failed to produce a comparable level of criticism or discussion. It is my firm belief that it is the body of work's relative scarcity in print, not its value as literature, that has kept the material underground for such a lengthy period of time. With the recent republication of Sun Ra's daunting body of poetry and prose, the discovery of early manuscripts, and the surfacing of relevant critical essays, the time has come to analyze his poetic position within the context of African-American philosophical thought.
- Playing the Writing Game: Gaming the Writing PlayBeale, Matthew Carson (Virginia Tech, 2006-04-26)My studies consider the application of digital game theory to the instruction of writing in the first year composition classroom. I frame my argument through dialectic of representation and simulation and the cultural shift now in progress from the latter to the former. I first address the history of multimodal composition in the writing classroom, specifically noting the movement from analysis to design. In the third chapter, I examine several primary tenants of video game theory in relation to traditional academic writing, such as the concept of authorship and the importance of a rule system. My final chapter combines the multimodal and digital game theory to create what I term "digital game composition pedagogy." The last chapter offers new ways to discuss writing and composing through the theories of video games, and shows how video games extend the theories associated with writing to discussions that coincide with an interest that many of our students have outside of the classroom.
- Reading Through Displacement: Functionality of the Underlying Theme in Tim O'Brien's FictionMcClure, Benjamin Taylor (Virginia Tech, 2011-05-02)Tim O'Brien, a contemporary author writing mostly about his combat experience in Vietnam, has written eight books to date. All involve Vietnam in some way—overtly, for the most part. He and his stories are well known stylistically for several traits including the blurred distinctions between what actually happened and "story truth," something that did not really happen, but is true nonetheless. Within the story, he also blurs the line between what actually happens and what is imagined by the narrator or one of the characters; and, although he sometimes makes the distinction, he often does not. To help shed some light on this, there are a number of published interviews and articles wherein he discusses the themes, forms, and methods of his writing as well as his experiences. Research and analysis of O'Brien and his works show that, although his stories overtly deal with a myriad of other issues and themes, the complex and specific theme of displacement caused by trauma is present in all of his work, and can even be considered the engine that drives his stories and how they work with the reader. Additionally, O'Brien's well-known method of writing is actually a subtle yet intensely effective performance and enactment of this underlying theme of displacement. When used as a reading strategy, the theme itself clarifies and unlocks several points of contention about his texts such as O'Brien's generally negative treatment of women.