PhD Oral Exam - Matthew Nye, Humanities - Fine Arts

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

Goodnight Moon: Master-piece, Identity, and the Shimmer analyses a suite of philosophical concepts, artworks, and events from 1900-2026, central to which is the children’s book Goodnight Moon (1947), written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd. I begin with the claim that Goodnight Moon is one of the great master-pieces of the 20th century, as a work of art, example of radical early childhood pedagogy, participatory score, and example par excellence of process philosophy of William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Susanne Langer, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Erin Manning, and Brian Massumi.

A key argument that this document makes is that Goodnight Moon produces subjectivity when it is activated in the milieu of the bedtime story. The concern with the ‘production of subjectivity’ emerges from the process-philosophical stakes that insist that the human is not at the centre of an event, nor do they produce the eventfulness of the present moment. One of the political questions that this understanding poses is, what moments of artfulness exist in germ, before the calcification of form?

Goodnight Moon: Master-piece, Identity, and the Shimmer is both a historically reparative and contemporary theoretical project: it traces Wise Brown’s use of the pedagogical technique of “seen-and-heard” storytelling developed at the Bank Street School in New York under Lucy Sprague Mitchell, which is still in use today. Through a close engagement with Gertrude Stein’s essays and lectures on the subjects of art, process, and identity during her famed ‘Lectures in America’ tour (1934-35), I demonstrate that Wise Brown was influenced by Stein’s theories of the singularity of the art object and of the “rhythm of anybody’s personality” — repetition and insistence.

After a careful study of the storybook form of Goodnight Moon, followed by studies of the book’s text and images, the thesis closes with a spiraling opening to its outside, in the form of a description of the solo research-creation exhibition Goodnight Moon: a Rhythm a Tempo, which has toured Eastern Canada from 2022-2026.