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Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows, 2001-2002 |
Mellon Fellows |
Project
Nina Caputo
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Nina Caputo
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Project
Rosanne Currarino Freshman Seminar Late nineteenth-century social movements to shorten the hours of labor in America were quite literally about time, specifically, about the amount of time an employer could require an industrial wage worker to work for him. But these movements, led by organized labor, economic theorists, and social reformers, also directly addressed the meaning of time for the individual male wage worker in an industrial capitalist society. Antebellum producerite ideology had held that a male citizen's social and political independence was assured through his control of his labor time. Industrial wage work, then, made "wage slaves" out of men who could not control their labor time. The push for shorter hours, however, repudiated producerite ideology's insistence that wage workers were neither men nor citizens. Instead, labor leaders, economists, and reformers all insisted that shorter hours of labor would allow men to reclaim social authority, but now as consumers rather an as producers. Freed from unnecessarily long hours of tedious work, they argued, men could establish their social position away from work through prudent consumption of goods and through leisure activities. Dr. Currarino will trace the emergence of a male subjectivity based on control of leisure time and consumption rather than on control of labor time and production in the late nineteenth-century American movement to shorten the hours of industrial labor. Economic thought, humanitarian reforms, and the labor movement all stressed workers' social roles as consumers rather than producers and effectively replaced the male producer with a consumer as the ideal citizen. In the process, they constructed new rights of citizenship, including the right to employment, to high wages, and to leisure time that complemented and bolstered workers' social roles as consumers. By the twentieth century, it became possible for Americans to think of consumers, rather than producers, as the bedrock of society. |
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Project
Daniel Foster Freshman Seminar Interpreters of Richard Wagner's Ring cycle have long debated whether this work emblazons a revolutinary path or utopia or, in the end, opts for apocalypse by nullilfying both the progress its characters have made onstage and the time its audience has spent offstage. Usually interpreted as a struggle between two competing ideological views of history--a Young Hegelian radicalism and a Schopenhauerian quietism--Wagner's Ring has often been reduced to an either/or proposition: either humanity is free to revolt or doomed to revolve. This research project, however, views the Ring through the lens of performance time in an effort to transcend such ideological debates. Because opera is an interdisciplinary staging of both music and language, it necessarily constructs time in various contradictory ways. The approximate clock time of dramatic recitatives contradicts the apparent timelessness of lyric arias, while the linear movement of harmonic development opposes the circular movement of ABA musical structures. In Wagner's Ring cycle, these contadictory uses of time are then brought to the level of an artistic technique Dr. Foster's project uses performance theory to analyze how Richard Wagner adapts time to the Ring Cycle. Through his treatment of music, libretto, and audience, he creates two major tensions in terms of performance time: a tension between the linear and the circular and between the free and the constricted. Rather than confining himself to one adaptation or another, Wagner's use of performance time places the Ring on the dividing between orthodox and avant-garde theatrical conventions. |
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Project
Ruth E. Iskin Freshman Seminar Today's museum visitors reportedly
spend an average of 20 seconds in front of works of art, and school teachers
report that the MTV generation requires changes every 10 seconds in the
classroom. Our shortened attention spans thrive on speedy communications
and rapidly changing images. Clearly, we are living in "quick-time"
-- an accelerated pace of life, and an experience of time as rushed, fleeting,
and disrupted. Dr. Iskin's project proposes that
quick-time, which describes the constant acceleration of our sense of
time, is a defining characteristic of modern times and explores how media
images contribute to this culturally constructed experience of time. It
makes a major contribution to developing an interdisciplinary approach
to the study of images and media by analyzing advertising posters from
1890 - 1914 as a case and contributes to art history, media studies, and
the emerging field of visual culture. Dr. Iskin asks two questions which
are critical to an interdisciplinary understanding of media images: 1.
How do mass-media images which use new technologies and invent new communication
modes contribute to a change in visual and temporal experience? 2. How
are instantaneous communications of media images related to the society
of mass production and consumption? Posters were developed as advertising
for mass-produced commodities and entertainments by communicating their
message in a flash and were designed to capture the gazes of modern passers-by
in a world in which multiple stimulations competed for attention. Investigating
this earlier historical moment in the evolution of modern media images
will contribute to an understanding of the acceleration of quick-time
images during the television and internet eras within a longer historical
trajectory. |
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Project
Julia Rudolph Freshman Seminar Why should legal institutions, and legal culture more generally, give weight to past legal decisions? How does a particular conception of time implicit in the construction of the past affect present legal meanings? Is the law said to be legitimate because it is part of a continuum, a part of ongoing traditional time, or because it can be linked with a precise moment in the past, a part of time as a discrete event? Attention to these questions was a central part of English common-law culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Over the course of those two centuries important changes take place in English common-law culture. This period witnesses the emergence of a new common-law mentality based on a new conception of time. There is a change from an imprecise construction of time, in the notion of the "immemoriality" of the law, to a deliberate conception of time, in the development of the notion of precedent and the specificity of precedent. Dr. Rudolph's project sets out to explore this change, to study legal concepts and forms of common-law culture in England during this period, with a particular focus upon the decade after the Revolution of 1688 in England. Dr. Rudolph argues that exploring 1690s legal culture is essential for a better understanding of the adaptability and vitality of the common law and the continuing impact of this tradition in English cultural identity. Her hypothesis is that the common law survived as an important part of legal culture because of its role in mediating key aspects of Enlightenment thought. |
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