The Christian As Witness In View Of The True Witness, Emily Patricia Wilton

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines Karl Barth’s understanding of what it means for Christian individuals to be witnesses of Jesus Christ. By analyzing the structure of Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation, with attention to his view of Jesus Christ as mediator, the thesis establishes the christological context of Barth’s concept of witness. The thesis demonstrates how Barth arrives at the conclusion that witness is central to the definition of Christian existence and identifies key features of Barth’s view of witness, namely, its theocentrism, its basis in ontology, and its enactment in human history. The thesis engages secondary scholarship in a critical appraisal of …

Thématiques Dans Les Récits Des Enfants Cachés Dans L'Univers Catholique En France, Carmen P. Mccarron

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Cette thèse examine des thématiques communes à une vingtaine de récits publiés en français par des enfants de la Shoah qui ont été cachés dans des familles et des institutions catholiques, surtout en France. La bibliographie étendue de l’Institut de recherche sur la littérature de l’Holocauste nous a donné la possibilité de rassembler et d’étudier ces textes en un corpus cohérent, pour la première fois. Nous lisons les récits dans une perspective pluridisciplinaire, tout en les situant selon l'histoire sociale, afin de relever les préoccupations centrales des enfants juifs lorsqu’ils prennent la décision délicate de partager leur histoire avec le …

"Rank Corpuscles": Soil And Identity In Eighteenth-Century Representations, Nina Patricia Budabin Mcquown

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this dissertation, I analyze scenes of encounter between human beings and human dust in eighteenth-century texts. Ploughmen exhume bones and armor in the arable, consumers taste other people’s excrement in their vegetables, and improvers lime the earth to break down ancient corpses. In process, I find that eighteenth-century British authors recognized the soil as an agent of continuity, with the capacity to preserve, mobilize, and disseminate the material constituents of identity from one body into another. At times, the soil’s powerful co-operative agency is threatening to the integrity of the human self, but I argue that authors negotiate between …

Clyfford Still In The 1930s: The Formative Years Of A Leading Abstract Expressionist, Emma Richan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In 2011, Clyfford Still’s painting 1949-A-No.1 sold for $61.7 million at Sotheby’s auction house. This painting was one of four up for auction by the artist that night, fetching a total of $114 million to build the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver to house his entire estate. Still was among the most celebrated and notorious of the Abstract Expressionists, receiving the highest praise from Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Clement Greenberg during his lifetime. Still’s legacy has faltered since his death in 1980. Until 2011, 95% of his life’s work was stored in a barn in Maryland, hidden from view. …

'What's In A List?' Cultural Techniques, Logistics, Poeisis, Liam Cole Young

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This research explores the list as a cultural and communicative form. Inspired by the ubiquity of rankings, bullet points and registries in contemporary ‘list culture,’ and by Jack Goody’s famous question ‘What’s in a list?’ (1977), I ask: how can this seemingly innocuous form be studied? What does its analysis tell us about historical and contemporary media environments and logistical networks? What can studying this unconventional object bring to media studies?

I offer four intersecting arguments. The first proposes that media studies benefits from the incorporation of approaches and concepts that I group together as ‘media materialism.’ Approaches such as …

Yaari With Angrez: Whiteness For A New Bollywood Hero, Teresa Hubel

Department of English Publications

This chapter comments on the relative insignificance of whiteness to Hindi film narratives, with white characters turning up, when they do, often as peripheral figures to create the effect of historical accuracy. It argues that in Hindi cinema, whiteness cannot function as it does in the West, where the legacy of imperialism has made it an unmarked category, whose invisibility allows it to function as a norm against which the aberration of racial others may be measured. In Indian films, whiteness is marked; and it is, increasingly, markedly white—to be resisted, or desired, or dismissed.

Fatal Attraction: The Fetishized Image Of The Fatal Woman As Gothic Double, Margaret Anne Young

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The Gothic heroine is often doubled by an image – a painting, statue, costume, drawing, projection, or mental image – that is preternaturally powerful and endowed with an antagonistic sexual presence. This image of the fatal woman, unlike portraits of the heroine, is a representation without a referent: a fetish object, both for fictional characters and critics.

I argue that the simulacrum of dangerous femininity is a shifting signifier rather than a one-dimensional representation of – as previous critics have argued – ‘male fears and desires’ or female empowerment. Following the work of sociologist Bruno Latour and narratologist Mieke Bal, …

Dirty Modernism: Ecological Objects In American Poetry, Michael D. Sloane

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines how early-to-mid twentieth century American poetry is preoccupied with objects that unsettle the divide between nature and culture. Given the entanglement of these two domains, I argue that American modernism is “dirty.” This designation leads me to sketch what I call “dirty modernism,” which includes the registers of waste, energy, animality, raciality, and the sensual. Reading these registers, I turn to what I call “ecological objects,” or representations of how nature and culture come together, which includes trash, natural resources, inanimals, and tools. Through an ecocritical mode of analysis, I introduce dirty modernism with the Baroness Elsa …

Sade Au Bûcher. Lire, Dire Et Penser La Transgression À La Lumière Des Supplices, Dominic Marion

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

La problématique de cette thèse s’ancre dans un constat : après avoir scandalisé le public pendant deux siècles, la figure de Sade paraît aujourd'hui bien intégrée à la circulation des marchandises. Notre premier chapitre cherche à aborder ce renversement en fonction du contraste qui sépare la réception initiale de Sade à la fin du XVIII^e siècle de sa canonisation dans la prestigieuse collection « Bibliothèque de la Pléiade » à la fin du XX^e siècle. Cette thèse se structure selon deux parcours diachroniques présentés l’un à la suite de l’autre. S’échelonnant sur les chapitres deux à cinq, le …

Love And Ethics In The Works Of J. M. E. Mctaggart, Trevor J. Bieber

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation attempts to make contributions to normative ethics and to the history of philosophy. First, it contributes to the defense of consequentialist ethics against objections grounded upon the value of loving relationships. Secondly, it provides the first systematic account of John M. E. McTaggart’s (1866-1925) ethical theory and its relation to his philosophy of love.

According to (maximizing) consequentialist ethics, it is always morally wrong to knowingly do what will make the world worse-off than it could have been (i.e., had one chosen one of the other courses of action available to one at the time). Many consequentialists also …

Media Literacy And The English As A Second Language Curriculum: A Curricular Critique And Dreams For The Future, Clara R. Madrenas

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis investigates whether or not the Ontario English as a Second Language/English Literacy Development (ESL/ELD) curriculum imparts the critical literacy skills necessary for students to deconstruct the multimedia messages with which the contemporary world is saturated, in order to function as informed, agentic citizens of Ontario society. Using foundations of cultural theory, radical critical pedagogy, and critical race theory, particularly the work of James Paul Gee, Henry A. Giroux, Paulo Freire and Michael Apple, this thesis explores the ways in which the current ESL/ELD curriculum can be found lacking due to its enforcement of the banking model of education, …

Aspects Of Newtonianism In Rameau’S Génération Harmonique, Abigail Shupe

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation studies the influence of Newtonianism as a cultural phenomenon on the theoretical writings of Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764). Rameau’s Génération harmonique (1737) shows a change in his thinking from his earlier work that bears witness to the debates around Newtonian science in the scientific community. Scholars have discussed possible connections between Génération harmonique and Newton’s Opticks (1704) but none has studied this issue in detail. I argue that Rameau was influenced by Newtonianism rather than by Newton’s works, and that Rameau was not always aware of this influence. In order to situate Rameau’s work within the larger body of …

Space, Territory, Occupy: Towards A Non-Phenomenological Dwelling, Brett Mommersteeg

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis analyzes the relationship between the body and space through the works of Henri Lefebvre, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The aim of the project is to move beyond Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space, which relies on a phenomenological understanding of the body and space. In order to do so, it will find in Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘territory’ a non-phenomenological and constructivist concept of space that does not posit the ‘lived body’ as a transcendent ground. As a result, it will also attempt to trace out a non-phenomenological concept of ‘dwelling’ that is not …

Preservationist Aesthetics: Memory, Trauma And The New Global Enclosures, Kate Lawless

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My dissertation is a comparative study of the role of memory in four intersecting spheres of contemporary cultural production: (memory) art, (war) photography, (trauma) literature and the (memory) museum. It argues that the sites of memory in this study—including museums of memory and human rights, the famous Sonderkommando photographs and experimental works in conceptual art and literature—are characterized by a preservationist aesthetic, which names the principle of preservation at the heart of new practices of cultural resistance and new forms of enclosure through which social, political and economic exploitation are reframed, as aesthetic problems, in terms of loss and erasure. …

Escribir La Propia Vida: Memoria, Confesión Y Autobiografía En Dos Textos Medievales, Maria Carmen Vera Lopez

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis is a critical study based on a theoretical framework of autobiography based on the deconstruction of the idea that it existed, as a literary genre,in the Middle Ages. This work takes certain characteristics of the term “Self Writing” suggested by Foucault: the first person writing and fragmentary. This model of writing, is seen in two different perspectives in two medieval texts: Memorias by Leonor López de Córdoba and Libro rimado de palacio by Pero López de Ayala, both written in the same historical context.

Epistemology Of The Cartesian Image, Mikhail Pozdniakov

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study is an examination of the epistemological history of the image. Its first strands are to be found in the Christian concept of profanity, in the difference of the world to the divine. The highest form of intelligibility profanity could have, second only to theology, was mathematics. Derived from the problems surrounding this concept are the techniques of inquiry that eventually resulted in the development of analytic geometry by Descartes. The latter marked a new sensibility regarding the physical universe and its constitution, one that is coterminous with the development of exact procedures in science. Being that exactitude regards …

Experiencing Nothing: Anxiety And The Philosophy Of Alain Badiou, William E. Rankin Iv

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis proposes to supplement the philosophy of Alain Badiou with an existentialist account of anxiety. After identifying a “phenomenological deficit” in Badiou’s thought, I argue that Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre provide the conceptual resources for theorizing the affective emergence of subjectivity from within the confines of a determinant situation. My contention, simply, is that anxiety is a rare and unsettling experience of nothing that makes apparent the underlying contingency of all situations, thereby prompting new modes of subjective behavior. In this sense, I treat anxiety as the in-situation experience of an event that may occasion the transition from a …

Literature In The Archive Of Terror: Badiou, Blanchot, Beckett, Christopher Langlois

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation conjoins the two most dominant trends in the secondary criticism of Samuel Beckett today: the philosophical and historicist approaches to his work. It explores how the Reign of Terror that erupted during the French Revolution acts as a traumatic catalyst for key developments in modernist literature and continental philosophy of which the philosophical writing of Alain Badiou, the literary-critical writing of Maurice Blanchot, and the literary-narrative writing of Beckett are perhaps the most exemplary expressions. The overarching thesis that this dissertation defends is that Beckett’s post-war prose work in The Unnamable and Texts for Nothing is overshadowed by …

The Ha-Ha Holocaust: Exploring Levity Amidst The Ruins And Beyond In Testimony, Literature And Film, Aviva Atlani

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

ABSTRACT

Jewish humour sheds a crude light on the social, political, and historical realities of the Holocaust. Paradoxically, contentiously, doses of levity during this period were very much a reality, and even a psychological necessity. The purpose of my thesis is to explore the historical, social, and political ramifications of such laughter provoking manifestations. In doing so, the nuances are highlighted which are found within the laughter of the ghettos, the transit camps, and the concentration camps. Furthermore, some of these jokes, and their subsequent variations, reappear within the discourse of children of survivors. The dissertation explores how some of …

Casta Painting And The Characterization Of Colonial Mexican Identities, Natalia Caldas

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis will examine the emergence of the casta painting genre in eighteenth century New Spain and elements of identity formation in the characterization of colonial subjects. Through the use of a database and close reading of paintings, a corpus of 370 paintings were studied and analyzed. A total of 1471 casta characters were extracted from said paintings and the relationship between actions performed, objects, and to each other was analyzed. In using this methodology results point to the significant historical division between the social communities and colonial society. By focusing on the study of particular characters fractures in imposed …

Deleuze's Apocalypse, Grant Dempsey

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Deleuze refers to the apocalyptic both positively, declaring retrospectively that Difference and Repetition was apocalyptic in its purpose, and negatively, sharing the horror expressed in D. H. Lawrence’s Apocalypse. Deleuze scholars, for their part, tend either to find in Deleuze a manner of living resistance that compels a certain apocalyptic appreciation, or to fear in Deleuze the very same and wonder how a philosophy that seems largely purposed for the promotion of disruption could be anything but escapist at best and socially-politically counterproductive at worst. This thesis is a Deleuzian investigation into the concept of apocalypse: how apocalypse can …

Crossing The Law: Trans Activism, Aleatory Materialism, And The Analyst's Discourse, Christopher M. Bomba

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines contingency to elucidate transgender activism’s leadership in radical politics. I take up Louis Althusser’s theory of aleatory materialism to politicize everyday encounters. Trans activists gain a parallax view through gendered (mis)recognition that reveals the structure of ideology’s vanishing points. By contrast, I criticize a cisgendered viewpoint and demonstrate the logical errors that result in transphobic behavior through Jacques Lacan’s version of the prisoner’s dilemma. I conclude to theorize trans activism’s engagement with the state through Lacanian analytic technique. This technique does not result in traditional “treatment,” but instead fuels activism with knowledge of the structures that must …

Political Theology Versus Public Theology: Reclaiming The Heart Of Christian Mission, Martin R. Levesque

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Christian theology has always viewed itself in relation to two communities: the church and the wider public. Political theology attempts to expose incoherencies by highlighting theological themes in “secular” society. Public theology, meanwhile, accepts that wider political communities have their own autonomy. The work of Public Theology is to bring together insights from the gospel with initiatives from wider political movements in Government, Economic Structures and Civil Society for the benefit of all citizens.

In this thesis, I explore the historical development of Political Theology with the aid of Kirwan and Phillips. I examine the evolution of Public Theology from …

A Space Without Memory: Time And The Sublime In The Work Of Janet Cardiff And George Bures Miller, Margherita N. Papadatos

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The central question of my investigation is: how do artists present the unpresentable when presentation itself is impossible? Concentrating solely on Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s artworks Opera For a Small Room (2005) and The Killing Machine (2007), I redevelop Jean François Lyotard’s concept of the sublime as put forth in his The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, in order to ask how Cardiff and Miller give shape to the unpresentable in their work. Opera and Killing are works that dynamically problematize and play with ideas of presentation, subjectivity, memory, and time. Thus, I explore my central question of …

Toward A Postmodern Avant-Garde: Labour, Virtuosity, And Aesthetics In An American New Music Ensemble, John R. Pippen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines the aesthetic beliefs and labour practices of the American new music ensemble eighth blackbird (lower-case intentional). Drawing on ethnographic research conducted with the ensemble for the past six years, I show how the ensemble responds to specific cultural pressures endemic to the classical music scene, its new music vanguard, and to the contemporary United States. eighth blackbird, I argue, has created an ensemble identity and performance style designed to satisfy numerous audience positions, from experts well-versed in the intricacies of musical techniques to lay-persons unacquainted with the values and practices of new or classical music. This attempt …

A Photographer Develops: Reading Robinson, Rejlander, And Cameron, Jonathan R. Fardy

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study examines the historical emergence of the photographer by turning to the writings of three important photographers of the nineteenth century: Henry Peach Robinson (1830-1901), Oscar Gustave Rejlander (1813-1875), and Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879). The photographic works of each of these photographers has been the subject of much historical and interpretive analysis, but their writings have yet to receive significant scholarly attention. It is the claim of this study that this archive opens a new set of questions: What did it mean to claim: “I am a photographer” at photography’s advent? How did these individuals come to identify themselves …

Deleuze Through Wittgenstein: Essays In Transcendental Empiricism, M. Curtis Allen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis undertakes a comparative study of the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Ludwig Wittgenstein to elaborate three related problems in what in Deleuze calls ‘transcendental empiricism’. The first chapter deals with the problematic of the dimension of sense in language, and culminates in a concept of the event. The second details the immanence of stupidity within thought and culminates in a practice of showing through silence. The third investigates the consequences of aesthetics for the theory of Ideas, and culminates in the concepts of ‘late intuition’ and of a form of life. Each argues for a new way of broaching …

"The Almost Nothing Of The Unpresentable": The Experience Of "My Death" In The Thought Of Jacques Derrida, Derek Liu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis argues that the understanding of Derrida’s major concepts of différance, trace, and writing requires the reference to the impossible experience of my death as having always already occurred. The thesis tries to make this experience explicit with reference to the work of Blanchot and Heidegger. Having argued that an experience of “I am dead” is the bedrock of Derrida’s early concepts and the deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence, the last chapter shows the centrality of this experience to the undoing of the animal/human binary. Coterminous with an experience of a disjointed temporality, the radical evil and expropriation …

What Are You Reading?, Kim Solga

Department of English Publications

In May 2010, a general election in the United Kingdom produced a coalition government headed by David Cameron's Conservatives and (nominally) the Liberal Democrats under deputy PM Nick Clegg. The coalition (still in power in 2014) quickly plunged the nation into a period of postcrash austerity the likes of which had not been seen for generations. When I landed at Heathrow in June 2012 to start a new job at Queen Mary University of London, the ground was thick with casualties—and getting thicker. Significant challenges to the U.K. welfare state have been launched before, of course: most visibly and famously …

Face Value: Beyond The Surface Of Brand Philanthropy And The Cultural Production Of The M.A.C Aids Fund, Andrea Benoit

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation provides a cultural and business history of M.A.C Cosmetics and its philanthropic arm, the M.A.C AIDS Fund. M.A.C Cosmetics originated in Toronto, Canada in 1981 and its growth coincided with the AIDS epidemic. Since 1994, the M.A.C AIDS Fund has raised more than $315 million for organizations that assist people affected by HIV/AIDS, through the sale of M.A.C’s VIVA GLAM lipstick. While some business scholars have discussed M.A.C’s distinctive use of cause marketing, very few works on the cosmetics industry, as well as cultural and media studies works on cause marketing, have dealt at length with M.A.C. Tracing …