Arts and Humanities Commons^™

'Gave His Life For The Empire': Memory, Memorials, And Identity In The British Empire After The First World War, Bryan Mcclure

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines the construction of personal memorials after the First World War across the British Empire nations of the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, to understand how individuals sought to make their own memorial to remember their loved one killed in the conflict. In comparison to other studies on the construction of national or other community memorials, this dissertation explores how individuals accepted or rejected dominant discourses in creating their own memorials that spoke to how they remembered the war. It is based on a large database of more than 2,000 private memorials to individuals that …

At Dusk, Michelle Paterok

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In supplement to my Master of Fine Arts thesis exhibition, this dossier is composed of an extended artist statement, photographic documentation of artwork, a transcribed interview with artist Ben Reeves, and a curriculum vitae. These components contextualize the motivation and research that inform my studio work in painting. The extended artist statement describes the personal and theoretical foundation of my Master’s thesis project—a series of paintings collectively titled At Dusk, which documents everyday interior space in order to explore the invocations of colour, light and atmosphere. The interview with Ben Reeves provides insight into his artistic practice in painting, …

Thomas Reid On Language And Mind, Alastair L.V. Crosby

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The dissertation concerns Thomas Reid’s philosophy of language. In the first three chapters, I discuss his philosophy of language in relation to his developmental psychology. More specifically, I discuss his answers to two questions: (i) what does the ability to understand artificial linguistic signs make possible? and (ii) what makes the ability to understand artificial linguistic signs possible? The focus is on Reid’s claim that the mind’s ability to understand artificial linguistic signs makes it possible for it to acquire a number of distinct mental abilities, such as to conceive universals, to judge, and to reason. I argue this claim …

The Embroidered Tablecloth: How Locale Influences Eastern European Jewish Textile Production, Elena Solomon

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Recent scholarship frames craft as distinct from art and as an encapsulation of cultural expression at a given moment. Building on that framework, this thesis analyzes the shifting attitudes towards the production of handmade textiles among Eastern European Jews in the US in the twentieth century, as influenced by their migration. To demonstrate the textile environment at that time, this thesis examines pre- and post-migration primary sources and autobiographical writing, including Mary Antin’s The Promised Land, supplemented with interviews of first- and second-generation immigrants to Chicago. In contrast with stereotypes about craft as historically stable, defining craft as regional …

Spinoza On Language, Luis Ramos-Alarcón

Western Ontario Early Modern Philosophy (WOEMP) Online Events

Some scholars have understood that Spinoza’s extreme rationalism, nominalism, conventionalism, and rejection of a semantic theory of truth make his philosophy incapable to use language for philosophical and scientific purposes; insofar he considered language a source of inadequate knowledge, falsity, and error. Thus Spinoza finds contradiction in his inevitable use of language to express his philosophy. This paper has four aims: first, propose an explanation on why language is inadequate knowledge for Spinoza; second, present differences between inadequacy, falsity, and error in language; third, argue on the Spinozian use of the geometrical method as a solution for the adequate use …

Still, Unfolding, Ramolen Mencero Laruan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Together with my Master of Fine Art thesis exhibition, still, unfolding, at Zalucky Contemporary (Toronto, Ontario), this dossier constitutes the following accompanying components: a comprehensive artist statement, documented artwork, an interview with artist Erika DeFreitas, and a curriculum vitae. These components contextualize my subject-position, and outline theoretical research, motivations, and reflections that drive my work. I expand on the diasporic experience, politics of knowledge, and the autobiographical genre as they are linked methodologies in the retrieval of immigrant histories. The fusion of autobiography and fiction becomes a hopeful approach in challenging forgotten or omitted history and confronts the expectations …

Sanaugavut: Art From Kinngait, Nakasuk Alariaq

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

“Sanaugavut: Art from Kinngait” explores 20^th century Inuit art from an Inuk’s perspective to highlight the work Inuit participants contributed to in the development of commercialized art production in the North. The author Nakasuk Alariaq is from Kinngait (Cape Dorset) and is the first Inuk graduate student at Western University to be offered space within the university’s formal settings to curate an Inuit art exhibition. This exhibition and thesis go hand in hand and are therefore very important to advocates of Indigenous self-representation in academia and in galleries. The exhibition “Sanaugavut: Art from Kinngait” was …

Watching And Working Through: Navigating Non-Being In Television Storytelling, Tiara Lalita Sukhan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation explores various examples of the concept of symbolic non-being within television drama. It seeks to investigate the ways and degrees to which television storytelling can represent and perform the psychoanalytic process of “working through.” The medium of television provides a unique framework for investigation as television does not just illustrate (represent) working through as something a fictional character experiences, but it also performs it structurally, through the incorporation of three medium-specific features: duration, immersion and repetition. Television represents working through on a mass scale – imagining a collective audience by addressing big political, personal and/or institutional issues that …

The Tapestry Of Memory, Kathryn M. Lawson

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Rationality points to the complete annihilation and end of a life when the body perishes, and yet when a loved one dies we continue to experience that person in a myriad of ways. The focus of this thesis will be a phenomenological exploration of the earthly afterlife of those we have loved and lost. By positing the subject as always intersubjective and as temporal in nature, this thesis will investigate how we continue to create and interact with the deceased upon the earth. In the introduction, this work will be placed in the context of the phenomenological tradition. The first …

On Coming And Going, Quintin Teszeri

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dossier and the accompanying exhibition On Coming and Going (presented at the Artlab Gallery in January 2017) constitute my MFA in Visual Arts thesis. The first chapter of this dossier is a Comprehensive Artist Statement in which I reflect on how my art, thinking, and life engage different meanings of coming and going in different ways. The statement approaches a deeply subjective and aggregate philosophy, or perhaps an attitude, or perhaps most appropriately if also most cliché, a way of being, in the face of relentless transience. The second chapter is a review of Michel de Broin’s 2016 Castles …

Praesentia Sublimis: Studies In The Differend, Dylan T. Vaughan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Interrogating the notion of the differend, taken from Jean-Franҫois Lyotard’s book of the same name, in which a wrong occurs along with the impossibility of its representation as a wrong, this thesis attempts to rearticulate the relationship between the distant and heterogeneous theories dealing with a supposedly common subject matter: namely, the sublime. The sublime as it is taken up in the rhetorical pedagogy of Longinus, the transcendental aesthetic of Immanuel Kant, and the postmodern theory of Jean-Franҫois Lyotard refuses to yield a shared dimension that could bind together these major moments of thought. There are sublimes, it seems, …

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 …

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 …

Turning To See Otherwise, Jennifer L. Martin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis dossier, in combination with an exhibition at the McIntosh Gallery, considers whether an archival collection can generate an alternative narrative other than that which may already exist in the original film and photographic documents. Rather than represent a singular truth, I seek to articulate the transformative realities of collective memory by re-orienting the material for broader viewer identification. I have mined photographic and filmic materials from a personal family archive to focus fragments that specifically record the gesture of the turning face—the turning towards the observer. This “turn” then includes both the turn towards the initial film-maker embedded …

The Legacy Of Military Necessity In Italy: War And Memory In Cassino And Monte Sole, Cynthia D. Brown

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The rise of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist party and its disastrous alliance with Nazi Germany remains one of the most well-known parts of Italy’s Second World War experience, at least in English historical literature. The war did not end when the Italians surrendered to the Allies in September 1943. Military histories of what followed focus on the bitter campaign waged between the Germans and the Allies on the Italian peninsula. Much less is known about the impact of war on the Italian nation and its civilians.

From the Italian perspective, the war was a defining yet difficult period that remains controversial …

Relational Viewing: Affect, Trauma And The Viewer In Contemporary Autobiographical Art, Matthew Ryan Smith

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines the communicative relationship between contemporary autobiographical art and the viewer. By analyzing the work of six artists, Richard Billingham, Jaret Belliveau, Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, Lisa Steele and Bas Jan Ader, I maintain that lived experience and personal history condition the way viewers respond to autobiographical art. I turn to literary theory as a critical methodology to argue that autobiographical art operates as a catalyst for identification, memory and self-discovery. I use affect and trauma theory to demonstrate how artwork produces meaning and discourse through the viewer’s feelings, emotions and bodily sensations. Consequently, I survey the importance …

Broken Passages And Broken Promises: Reconstructing The Komagata Maru And Air India Cases, Alia Rehana Somani

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My dissertation examines two events in Canada’s past that have played formative roles in the debate about the place of the South Asian diaspora within the Canadian nation. The first is the 1914 Komagata Maru incident, in which 352 British subjects of South Asian origin aboard a Japanese ship – the Komagata Maru – were denied entry into Canada and forced to return to India. The second is the 1985 bombing of Air India Flight 182, an event that claimed the lives of almost 300 Canadian citizens, most of South Asian origin, who were traveling from Canada to India. My …

Managing Historical Capital In Shandong: Museum, Monument And Memory In Provincial China, James Flath

History Publications

This paper traces the development and distribution of museums and public monuments in one province of China during the twentieth century, with special emphasis on the cultural policies of the post–Mao reform era. By considering the museum and monument (i.e., artifacts, historically significant geographic features, and the physical representation of historical experience) as among the most tangible aspects of historical capital, it is demonstrated how region, province, and nation are involved with public and private interests in an ongoing dialogue over what types of history are to be represented, and in what context. This evidence suggests that while the state …

Unearthing The Past: The Archaeology Of Bog Bodies In Glob, Atwood, Hébert And Drabble, Anthony Purdy

French Studies Publications

Within the narrative poetics of the archaeological find, accounts of the discovery of beautifully preserved Iron Age bodies in the peat-bogs of Northwestern Europe constitute a particularly complex, well-defined and resonant subgenre. A reading of the genre’s founding text, P.V. Glob’s The Bog People, reveals a repertoire of tropes and topoï that will inform subsequent fictional treatments of bog body finds. Arguing that the poetic specificity of the bog body lies in its extraordinary capacity to abolish temporal distance and mediate between past and present, this essay seeks to define the figure as a special kind of chronotopic motif, or …