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Western University

2011

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Articles 1 - 30 of 90

Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Touching Bodies/Bodies Touching: The Ethics Of Touch In Victorian Literature (1860-1900), Ann M.C. Gagne Dec 2011

Touching Bodies/Bodies Touching: The Ethics Of Touch In Victorian Literature (1860-1900), Ann M.C. Gagne

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Tactility becomes a marked preoccupation in mid-Victorian literature. The description of how characters touch one another and negotiate their surroundings through tactility reinforces the ethics of intersubjectivity in Victorian England. I argue that touch becomes representative of embodied experience in Victorian literature. As well, touch goes beyond the explicit moral taxonomies found in etiquette books to provide implicit guiding principles for the negotiation of both the public and the private. The Contagious Diseases Acts (CDAs) serve as a point of departure for an analysis of tactility in Victorian literature for the CDAs emphasized and reinforced the importance of legislating touch. …


The Vatican, American Catholics And The Struggle For Palestine, 1917-1958: A Study Of Cold War Roman Catholic Transnationalism, Adriano E. Ciani Dec 2011

The Vatican, American Catholics And The Struggle For Palestine, 1917-1958: A Study Of Cold War Roman Catholic Transnationalism, Adriano E. Ciani

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The modern relationship between the Vatican and the state of Israel is rooted in a much deeper history of relations between Judaism and Christianity. In the main, this relationship was fraught with tensions and animosity, as early Christian writers chastised and demonized Judaism, ensconcing a hostility that endured for centuries. The advent of political Zionism in the nineteenth century renewed Roman Catholic fears of a Jewish-dominated Palestine, where religious sites sacred to Catholics would fall under the political jurisdiction of a Zionist state. In 1904, Pope Pius X granted an audience to the prominent Zionist Theodor Herzl, in which he …


Emergence And Reduction In Science. A Case Study, Alexandru Manafu Dec 2011

Emergence And Reduction In Science. A Case Study, Alexandru Manafu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The past decade or so has witnessed an increase in the number of philosophical discussions about emergence and reduction in science. However, many of these discussions (though not all) remain too abstract and theoretical, and are wanting with respect to concrete examples taken from the sciences. This dissertation studies the topics of reduction and emergence in the context of a case study. I focus on the case of chemistry and investigate how emergentism can help us secure the autonomy of this discipline in relation to the underlying microphysics. I develop an account of emergence (called functional emergence) that is, …


Biological Inheritance And The Social Order In Late-Victorian Fiction And Science, Sherrin Berezowsky Dec 2011

Biological Inheritance And The Social Order In Late-Victorian Fiction And Science, Sherrin Berezowsky

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation investigates the heightened interest in heredity as a biological inheritance that arises after the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and how this interest intersects with concerns about class mobility and the shifting social order. Within this framework, this project considers how heredity became a means of organizing and regulating bodies in keeping with what Michel Foucault terms bio-power. It unearths the cultural work within literary and scientific writings as they respond to narratives of self-help and self-improvement by imagining heredity as a means of stabilizing the social order, and by extension the nation, at …


Total Men!: Literature, Nationalism, And Mascuilinity In Early Canada, Aaron J. Schneider Dec 2011

Total Men!: Literature, Nationalism, And Mascuilinity In Early Canada, Aaron J. Schneider

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis identifies the figure of the totally competent man (a model of early Canadian masculinity distinguished by an unprecedented breadth of competence) as a recurrent feature of early Canadian literary texts, and examines the development and representation of this figure with particular attention to its deployment as a model of national manhood by early Canadian literary nationalists. It argues that the production of a broadly competent model of manhood as an ideal model of national manhood by early Canadian literary nationalists was an anxious work carried out in the face of real and sensible threats to the new nation …


A Rawlsian Idea Of Deliberative Democracy, Angela D. White Nov 2011

A Rawlsian Idea Of Deliberative Democracy, Angela D. White

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In my thesis, I develop a framework based on John Rawls's Political Liberalism that addresses the question: how is it possible for democratic institutions and their decisions to be legitimate, given that (i) they are supposed to be governed by the "will of the people", but (ii) the people will disagree with each other about what political institutions ought to do about any given issue? Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson advance a deliberative democratic response to this question, which has served as the basis of governments' attempts to "strengthen democracy". They argue that political decisions are justified insofar as they …


Social Money: Literary Engagements With Economics In Early Modern English Drama, Myungjin Choi Nov 2011

Social Money: Literary Engagements With Economics In Early Modern English Drama, Myungjin Choi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis investigates the impact of economic philosophy and history on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English drama. It focuses primarily on the ways in which emergent mercantilist theories, new labour models, and changing class structures informed literary production. The significant influence exerted on the English public by financial developments during the early modern period suggests that economic concerns were of preeminent relevance to public discourse. As a result, playwrights cognizant of these worries produced plays that incorporated the distinctive language and character of economic thought and engaged their audiences through tableaus representative of select aspects of London’s financial landscape. In my …


Aristotle's Concept Of Nature: Three Tensions, W.W. Nicholas Fawcett Nov 2011

Aristotle's Concept Of Nature: Three Tensions, W.W. Nicholas Fawcett

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The concept of nature (phusis) is ubiquitous in Aristotleʼs work, informing his thinking in physics, metaphysics, biology, ethics, politics, and rhetoric. Much of scholarly attention has focussed on his philosophical analysis of the concept wherein he defines phusis as “a principle or cause of being changed and of remaining the same in that to which it belongs primarily, in virtue of itself and not accidentally” (Phys. 192b21-23) and the implications this has in various parts of his philosophy. It has largely gone unnoticed, or unremarked, that this is not the only understanding of phusis present in his thinking. This thesis …


Meta-Heuristic Strategies In Scientific Judgment, Spencer P. Hey Oct 2011

Meta-Heuristic Strategies In Scientific Judgment, Spencer P. Hey

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In the first half of this dissertation, I develop a heuristic methodology for analyzing scientific solutions to the problem of underdetermination. Heuristics are rough-and-ready procedures used by scientists to construct models, design experiments, interpret evidence, etc. But as powerful as they are, heuristics are also error-prone. Therefore, I argue that they key to prudently using a heuristic is the articulation of meta-heuristics---guidelines to the kinds of problems for which a heuristic is well- or ill-suited.

Given that heuristics will introduce certain errors into our scientific investigations, I emphasize the importance of a particular category of meta-heuristics involving the search for …


Digital Scholarship @ Western: A Linguistic Perspective, Ileana Paul Oct 2011

Digital Scholarship @ Western: A Linguistic Perspective, Ileana Paul

French Studies Presentations

No abstract provided.


The Other Sides Of Billy Joel: Six Case Studies Revealing The Sociologist, The Balladeer, And The Historian, A. Morgan Jones Oct 2011

The Other Sides Of Billy Joel: Six Case Studies Revealing The Sociologist, The Balladeer, And The Historian, A. Morgan Jones

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The failure of music critics to recognize Billy Joel’s tendency towards writing songs about issues greater than himself, issues such as the Vietnam War, the Cold War, struggling American industries and the effect of mass media on popular culture, particularly on two albums, The Nylon Curtain and Storm Front, has led to a pronounced lacuna in serious scholarship on Joel and his music. Relegated to adult contemporary radio stations due to the success of romantic pop ballads such as “Just the Way You Are,” “She’s Always a Woman” and “Uptown Girl,” and derided as a drunken egomaniac by many …


Noms Composés En Turc Et Morphème -(S)I, Volha Kharytonava Oct 2011

Noms Composés En Turc Et Morphème -(S)I, Volha Kharytonava

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Cette thèse est une étude des noms composés. Plus spécifiquement, cette étude se concentre sur la question des noms composés en turc et du morphème –(s)I dans l’approche de la Morphologie distribuée. Dans le Chapitre 3 je suggère que le morphème –(s)I est généré dans la position du n – noeud qui nominalise et catégorise la √racine. J’étudie la question de l’ordre du morphème –(s)I avec d’autres morphèmes : morphèmes dérivationnels et le morphème du pluriel. Je propose que les morphèmes dérivationnels nominalisants sont des √racines liées qui fusionnent avec des √racines libres au-dessous du niveau du n (morphème …


El Gracioso En El Teatro De Calderón: Un Análisis Desde Las Humanidades Digitales, Miriam A. Peña-Pimentel Oct 2011

El Gracioso En El Teatro De Calderón: Un Análisis Desde Las Humanidades Digitales, Miriam A. Peña-Pimentel

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study has two equally important objectives: firstly, the design of a new methodology for analyzing literary texts that make use of new technologies to facilitate the task of the researcher. Secondly, the application of the methodology to a selection of Calderón de la Barca´s comedies to analyze the central role that the character of the gracioso plays in defining the essential characteristics of such plays.

The methodology presented here helps to manage large amounts of information while maintaining the semantic structure inherent in the dramatic text. It is divided into five distinct phases: manual annotation of the works following …


Corporeal Returns: Theatrical Embodiment And Spectator Response In Early Modern Drama, Caroline R. Lamb Sep 2011

Corporeal Returns: Theatrical Embodiment And Spectator Response In Early Modern Drama, Caroline R. Lamb

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Taking its cue from the many Renaissance playwrights who emphasized their spectators’ participation, this dissertation develops a model of audience response based on what texts from the period reveal about early modern spectators’ active engagements with staged bodies and stage space. Discussing plays by Shakespeare, Peele, Beaumont, Marston, Ford, Middleton, and Tourneur, I establish an analytical arc that travels gradually deeper into the body, moving from performances that depict the superficial violation of the body to those that represent its violent penetration onstage, thereby encouraging spectators to contemplate the body’s physiological recesses. Early modern anatomical science and its exploration of …


Feeling Better: The Therapeutic Drug In Modernism, Philip Glennie Sep 2011

Feeling Better: The Therapeutic Drug In Modernism, Philip Glennie

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This project argues that by reading first-person accounts of drug intoxication in European modernism, one can uncover qualitative structures that broadly inform the modernist experience of space, time, language, desire, and embodiment. Evidence for this systematization of subjective experience appears in the early twentieth-century movements of phenomenology, existentialism, psychoanalysis, and even structural linguistics. In addition to their systemic approach to subjective experience, however, these movements also insist that some form of psychic or existential discomfort is inherent to modern experience, and all of them engage in a marked attempt to address this pain therapeutically. Thus while modernist thought conceives of …


Immediacy And Aesthetic Remediation In Television And Digital Media: Mass Media’S Challenge To The Democratization Of Media Production, Michael S. Daubs Sep 2011

Immediacy And Aesthetic Remediation In Television And Digital Media: Mass Media’S Challenge To The Democratization Of Media Production, Michael S. Daubs

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation, Immediacy and Aesthetic Remediation in Television and Digital Media: Mass Media’s Challenge to the Democratization of Media Production, analyzes North American television’s aesthetic remediation of user-produced media forms. I argue that the use of the aesthetics of user-produced media in television production is more indicative of the television industry’s hegemonic influence over cultural creation and discourse than of the democratization of media production. It includes a semiotic analysis of television and user-produced reality-based media such as television news, citizen journalism, video blogs, and reality programming. This is followed by another case study on animation centering on television’s …


Mexican Temporary Agricultural Workers In Canada: A Language And Migration Approach, Maria Eugenia De Luna Villalón Aug 2011

Mexican Temporary Agricultural Workers In Canada: A Language And Migration Approach, Maria Eugenia De Luna Villalón

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The purpose of this study is to fill a gap in the sociolinguistic research on language issues faced by temporary migrants. My research involves a compilation and analysis of the sociolinguistic facts relating to the situation of Mexican Temporary Agricultural Workers (MTAW) who come to Ontario and Quebec through the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP). Following an ethnographic approach and methodology, I investigated the following research questions: 1). How do the biographic backgrounds –human capital- of MTAW restrict or allow them to renegotiate their identity and to be able to deal with their new social and linguistic environment? 2). What …


Red De Comunicación Jesuita Desde La Misión De Moxos, Carlos-Urani Montiel Aug 2011

Red De Comunicación Jesuita Desde La Misión De Moxos, Carlos-Urani Montiel

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The Society of Jesus shared information and generated knowledge through a communication network that made it possible to trace connection patterns. Jesuits used reiterative forms to share messages and to distribute knowledge between their European and American provinces. The aim of my thesis is to account for the scope, impact, and advantages of such communication strategies, which applied in a context where the environment was a decisive factor for the missional ministry. The Moxos Mission on the upper Amazon in what is now modern Bolivia consisted of an array of small urban settlements with strong influence in the Hispanic Kingdom …


"Ça Devient Une Question D’Être Maîtres Chez Nous”: The Canadiens, Nordiques, And The Politics Of Québécois Nationalism, 1979-1984, Terry Gitersos Aug 2011

"Ça Devient Une Question D’Être Maîtres Chez Nous”: The Canadiens, Nordiques, And The Politics Of Québécois Nationalism, 1979-1984, Terry Gitersos

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation analyzes the discourses produced by the selected newspaper coverage of the Montréal Canadiens and Québec Nordiques, two professional hockey clubs based in the province of Québec, from 1979 to 1984. Sport has long provided a medium for national identification, and constitutes one the most effective institutions through which the nation is imagined. This is especially true of Canada, where ice hockey has been celebrated as the country’s national game and a window into the Canadian soul. However, sport is a malleable institution; in Québec, hockey has long served as a symbol, speaking to French Canadian national identity, imbued …


From Marriage Revolution To Revolutionary Marriage: Marriage Practice Of The Chinese Communist Party In Modern Era, 1910s-1950s, Wei Xu Aug 2011

From Marriage Revolution To Revolutionary Marriage: Marriage Practice Of The Chinese Communist Party In Modern Era, 1910s-1950s, Wei Xu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation focuses on exploring the myth of ―revolutionary marriage‖, a popular and lasting marriage tradition of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The concept of ―revolutionary marriage‖ came out of a marriage revolution initiated by the May Fourth radicals in order to challenge the traditional marriage system. This term was then borrowed by the early Chinese Communists who used it to describe their socialist marriage ideal. However, regarding the CCP‘s marriage policy, there was always a gap between the progressive ideals and the conservative realities. In every piece of propaganda the CCP swore to completely overthrow the feudal arranged marriage …


A Season In Town: Plantation Women And The Urban South, 1790-1877, Marise Bachand Aug 2011

A Season In Town: Plantation Women And The Urban South, 1790-1877, Marise Bachand

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

What did the city mean for plantation women in the slaveholding South? This dissertation documents how a privileged group of women experienced and represented urban space in a society primarily defined by its rurality. From the very beginning of colonization and until the end of slavery, cities like Charleston and New Orleans occupied a key place in the lives of these women. Bridging the artificial gap between country and city present in the historiography, this study revises the plantation mythology, which contends that plantation mistresses rarely went to town, and when there, they seldom ventured beyond the domestic space. After …


The Powered Generation: Canadians, Electricity, And Everyday Life, Dorotea Gucciardo Aug 2011

The Powered Generation: Canadians, Electricity, And Everyday Life, Dorotea Gucciardo

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Most studies of electricity in Canada have examined the process of electrification from a business or political perspective, emphasizing the role of private and public institutions in electrifying the country. Such approaches neglect the primary targets of the electrification process: Canadians as consumers of electricity. This dissertation analyzes electrification as a social phenomenon. Drawing from archival sources in Canada and the United States, as well as newspapers, magazines, and government documents, the author addresses technological debates in Canadian history and investigates the relationship between technology and society. The broader themes in this dissertation include: urban electrification, rural electrification, domestic electrification …


The Olympic Games And The Secret Cold War: The U.S. Government And The Propaganda Campaign Against Communist Sport, 1950-1960, Toby C. Rider Aug 2011

The Olympic Games And The Secret Cold War: The U.S. Government And The Propaganda Campaign Against Communist Sport, 1950-1960, Toby C. Rider

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the Soviet Union and its East European satellites used international sport as a diplomatic tool to convince the world that communism was a vibrant and superior political ideology. This study explores the U.S. government’s effort to counter the communist “sports offensive.” In particular, it is demonstrated that the U.S. government harnessed the Olympic Games as a platform to wage a propaganda campaign against communist sport during the early years of the Cold War. Based on declassified documents and a range of previously unexamined archival material, this dissertation argues that the United States …


Theory As A Second Story: Extending A Tale, Cathy Benedict Aug 2011

Theory As A Second Story: Extending A Tale, Cathy Benedict

Music Education Publications

No abstract provided.


Critique Of The Discourse Of Authentic Leadership, Rita A. Gardiner Ms Aug 2011

Critique Of The Discourse Of Authentic Leadership, Rita A. Gardiner Ms

Women's Studies and Feminist Research Publications

This article considers the new management discourse of authentic leadership is deeply problematic because it fails to take into account how social and historical circumstances affect a person’s ability to be a leader. It examines some of the arguments made by proponents of authentic leadership theory, and contrasts these claims about authenticity with Hannah Arendt’s concept of uniqueness, as well as considering Heidegger’s notion of authenticity as resoluteness. It also looks at the ways in which authentic leadership fails to address issues related to power and privilege by looking specifically at how silence operates. The author argues that it is …


Temporalidades Múltiples En La Encrucijada: Representaciones Artísticas De Lo Afro En Latinoamérica Y El Mundo Hispánico Durante La Actual Etapa De Globalización, Eduard Arriaga Jul 2011

Temporalidades Múltiples En La Encrucijada: Representaciones Artísticas De Lo Afro En Latinoamérica Y El Mundo Hispánico Durante La Actual Etapa De Globalización, Eduard Arriaga

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Nowadays talking about national, racial or gender identities and its representations is quite difficult due to current global-local dynamics of cultural formation. In that sense, approaching to these issues requires the use of comprehensive theories and complex tools in order to forge a better understanding. My dissertation explores the artistic representation of ‘afro’ in the Hispanic world (or the culture built upon the legacies of Africans and African-descendants in the New World and especially in the Caribbean) during the current stage of globalization. In my dissertation, I argue that afro-artistic contemporary representations are overcoming traditional ones -bound to race as …


Cell Phones From Hell, Steven Bruhm Jul 2011

Cell Phones From Hell, Steven Bruhm

Department of English Publications

Recently Hollywood has remade a number of movies from the 1970s, movies in which young women are terrorized by a murderer calling from a telephone located elsewhere in the house. In the remakes, the murderer uses a cell phone, which effectively destroys the sense of space and distance on which earlier horror films were predicated. In one way, these films gesture to Jean Baudrillard's idea of “the transparency of evil,” in that they depict the collapse between the speaking self and the technologies of monstrosity against which the self might be defined. In another way, though, the films proliferate sites …


Romantic Anarche: The Philosophical And Literary Anarchism Of William Godwin, Jared M. Mcgeough Jun 2011

Romantic Anarche: The Philosophical And Literary Anarchism Of William Godwin, Jared M. Mcgeough

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study examines the philosophical and literary anarchism of William Godwin. Through an analysis of several of Godwin’s major texts, including Political Justice (1793, 1796, 1798), “Of History and Romance” (1798), and his novels Caleb Williams (1794), St. Leon (1799) and Mandeville (1817), I argue that Godwin’s relationship both to the intellectual history of anarchism and its literary expression in the form of the historical romance is more complex than has been recognized. In order to tease out this complexity, I approach Godwin from the perspective of recent critics who reread the ideals of classical anarchism through post-structuralist theory. Rather …


States Of Insurgency: Dismemberment And Citizenship In The American 1848, David J. Drysdale Jun 2011

States Of Insurgency: Dismemberment And Citizenship In The American 1848, David J. Drysdale

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

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In this dissertation, I examine how the antipodal forces of insurgency and counterinsurgency are crucial to the articulation of citizenship and identity in antebellum American literature. I suggest that a coherent, self-contained American identity was maintained through acts of physical and discursive dismemberment that disciplined insurgent expressions of democracy and idealized in their stead an enervated, acquiescent body politic. My dissertation traces how a series of American writers confront the dynamic of insurgency and counterinsurgency in an effort to reconcile the nation’s revolutionary origin with its colonialist practices. I …


Music In The Belly: Music And Mother-Child Interaction, Kaarina Marjanen Jun 2011

Music In The Belly: Music And Mother-Child Interaction, Kaarina Marjanen

Leading Music Education International Conference

This study explores the possibilities of and reasons for using music education as a support in very early mother-child interaction, throughout musically supporting the attachment.

Dr. Marjanen's PhD dissertation (The Belly-button Chord: Connections of Pre- and Postnatal Music Education with Early Mother-child Interaction) is available online at: http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-951-39-3769-0