This thesis argues for a reading of Virginia Woolf’s work based on notions of character and characterisation as a primary interpretative perspective. The bulk of Woolf scholarship, particularly in recent years, has not been directed towards the study of character, due to both general theoretical discomfort with the category of character, and a sense that Woolf’s work in particular, as that of a feminist and modernist writer, may not respond well to traditional readings of character. However, Woolf’s exploration of the human self and its relations with other people is best understood by looking at her formal experiments in characterisation. Her writing was consistently engaged with questions of character, as an examination of her early journalism makes clear. In the years before the publication of her first novel, Woolf articulated a broad theory of character in her reviews of contemporary literature and in essays on Gissing and Dostoyevsky. In The Voyage Out, Woolf began a writing career of experiment in character, examining a continuum of character ranging from complete nonidentification to a consuming over-identification. A key element here is the introduction of the notion of the Theophrastan type as an alternative form of fictional characterisation that corresponds to a way of knowing real people. In Jacob’s Room, Woolf continued to focus on the speculative nature of characterisation and its demands for imaginative identification demonstrated by her short story collection Monday & Tuesday. The importance of this issue is clear from the debates she engaged in with Arnold Bennett during the 1920s, a debate re-framed in this paper as focussing on characterisation. Jacob’s Room initiates a quest for an elusive ‘essence’ of character that may, or may not, exist outside of the structuring forms of social life, and may or may not be accessible through speculative imaginative identification. This elusive essence of character is a primary focus of Mrs. Dalloway, a novel which explores the ways the self can be shaped under social pressures into more permanent and stable structures. This is explored in the novel in a series of metaphors circling around treasure and jewels. While alert to the role of exterior factors, including time and memory, the novel maintains at least the possibility that some more internal form of the self exists and can be represented in fiction. This possibility is explored further in Woolf’s short story cycle Mrs. Dalloway’s Party, and leads into To the Lighthouse’s study of character and its ability to represent essential or internal aspects of self, the self as it exists in relation to other selves, and ultimately a projected or created version of character that reconciles this complexity. This is again carried out through the use of a extensive chain of metaphors which function symbolically in the text, and through a meditation on the nature of the relationship between real people and their fictional counterparts. While the novel offers no clear resolution, it gestures towards a type of characterisation, and hence a type of relationship, based on limited understanding and acceptance. This notion is picked up in The Waves, a novel which both explores the continuity of the self as represented by character over time - something that is also important in The Years - and explores the ways that characters can be represented and the implications this has for the types of unity that can, for good or for ill, be achieved. Again, a notion of a limited character, closer in form to caricature than to the whole and rounded characters often associated with Woolf, is proposed by the novel as a possible solution to the problem of character. In Woolf’s last two novels, The Years and Between the Acts, many of these themes reappear, and Woolf simultaneously situates her characters more firmly than ever in a comprehensible physical and social context, and uses them to explore areas where language and rationality cease to function.

In this thesis I develop an account of Nietzsche’s great man framed around the idea that he is a ‘monster of energy.’ In the first part I establish that Nietzsche developed a criterion to assess the value of values, centred on whether they express abundance or exhaustion. Cultivating an abundance of energy is the key to how we should approach the problem of suffering, how we master ressentiment, and ultimately, how we experience authentic joy. We should thus use energy expenditure as the standard to evaluate the different narratives that we use to interpret ourselves and our existence. In the second part I use this criterion to establish the types of narratives most conducive to creating oneself as the monster of energy. I argue that the great man should desire to determine his own will, should cultivate strength of character, believe in the freedom of his will, and take responsibility for the self that he has created. Finally, I examine the attitude the great man should adopt towards his past, and argue that we should reject the idea that the eternal return plays an important role in the process of becoming a great man, since this process should emphasise the necessity of self-mastery, asceticism, and the cultivation of a unified and volitional self.

This Thesis is a theoretical attempt to analyze the emergence of Autism as a discourse and, through it, the emergence of the Autistic Subjectivity. My primary aim is to create a kind of history of the different modes by which autistic persons become subjects. I am following a post-structuralist methodology, based on Michel Foucault’s work on the birth of psychiatry and institutions, his analysis of power relations, his ideas on the objectification and subjectification of the individual, and finally his notions of governmentality and bio-power. More specifically, I am making use of the Foucauldian techniques of Archaeology and Genealogy in order to investigate the birth of Autism through, the psychiatric discipline, psychoses, classificatory systems and the Asylum of the late Eighteenth and Nineteenth century. Under the same methodological strand, I am treating the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), in relation to Autism, as a disciplinary tool and as a discursive event. I present the existing knowledge on Autism and more specifically on the ‘impairment in social interaction’ and ‘in pragmatic language’. Finally, I attempt an analysis of Autism as a apparatus, through its episteme, mechanisms, and elements. I give an overview of the two main epistemologies on Autism, that of psychoanalysis and TOM (Theory of Mind) and I introduce the notions of bio-power and governmentality as drive mechanisms, which inform the elements of the apparatus and turn them into regulators of the autistic subjectivity. I am making an analysis of specific elements that I recognize as most important for the objectification and subjectification of the autistic individual; these are: autobiographies and educational institutions. Moreover, I discuss how through a continuum of truth discourses, strategies of intervention, and modes of objectification, the Autistic individual finds itself in a battle of modes of power, where it either consents to normalization or shields its ‘pathology P’ by disobedience and resistance. Finally, I argue that the deconstruction of existed discursive entities and their reconstruction upon a different epistemological basis leads to a rethink of Autism in terms of Education. What is needed is an emphasis to the notion of παιδεία (paideia), which aims to the creation of free and self-fulfilled human beings, rather than exclusively to the notion of εκπαί δευσις (ekpaideusis), that gives emphasis to the development of capabilities, and in the case of autistic children, to the creation of docile, marginalized bodies.

This thesis tracks the formal and conceptual development of my work during the two years of graduate study at the VCU Photography and Film Department. It describes the influence of photography on my evolution as an artist and contextualizes my desire to expand the practice beyond the traditional limitations of the medium. It recounts my experimentations with assemblage, video and installation and their contribution to my understanding of spatial and temporal dimensions in the formal construction of my work.In part, the thesis is also a statement of my convictions about art making. It discusses theimportance of perception and subjective experience, as well as the role of personal history in my work.

[AURA] is a collection of photographs of landscapes and objects that have been implicated in fringe beliefs, alternative narratives and the strange events that reside beyond the scope of our everyday experiences. These photographs represent the symbols used to describe phenomena and also concentrate on the areas surrounding the events. My investigation also examines how the affect of the landscape has contributed to the interpretations by those that witnessed it. As a photographic collection, [AURA] investigates issues related to truth, as well as the role of subjectivity versus objectivity in my photographic practice. By concentrating this discussion on issues of sensation and the objects used to symbolize and identify the encounters with peculiar phenomena, I have been attempting to place emphasis on the way the aesthetics of the photograph can speak to issues outside of the image.

Concurrent with a bloom of interest in the archive within academic discourse, an intense cultural fascination with museums, archives, and memorials to the past has flourished within the United States. The ascendency of digital technologies has contributed to and magnified this “turn” by popularising and habituating the archive as a personal memory tool, a key mechanism through which the self is negotiated and fashioned. This dissertation identifies a sustained exploration of the personal archive and its place in contemporary life by American novelists in the twenty-first century. Drawing on theories of the archive and the collection, this dissertation analyses the parameters of the curated self through close-readings of recent novels by five US authors. The first two chapters read Paul Auster’s Sunset Park through trauma theory and Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved through psychoanalysis, noting that in each the system of archiving generates moments of catharsis. The two chapters argue that, for the subject shattered by trauma, archiving activates and fulfils psychoanalytic processes that facilitate the self’s reintegration and prompts a discursive revelation about the painful past. The texts, thus, discover in the archive strategies for achieving, however provisionally, a kind of stability amongst unexpected change. The next two chapters reveal the complicity of archival formations with threats posed in the digital age and articulate alternative forms of self-curation that counteract these pernicious forces. To ward off information overload, E.L. Doctorow’s Homer and Langley advocates the ethical flexibility of “blind” narration that, wending through time, accommodates a broad range of perspectives by refusing to fantasise about its own ultimate and total claim to accuracy. Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, meanwhile, diagnoses the cultural anxiety over increasingly invasive surveillance measures. While the novel situates the digital archive, or database, at the heart of this new dataveillance, it recommends investing the self in material collections, where personal meaning is rendered in the inscrutable patois of objects that disintegrate over time. For Egan, the material archive thereby skirts the assumed readability and fixity of data on which this surveillance thrives. The conclusion analyses Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia, observing within it and the other novels a consistent concern with archival destruction, erosion, and stagnation. Together, the texts suggest that the personal archive is persistently stalked by disintegration and failure. Yet, within this contemporary moment in which curation has become a widespread means of self-fashioning, they also show how these hazards can be creatively circumvented or actively courted, can threaten the subject or be harnessed by it.

Situated in the changing context of Mandarin learning in the United States, Mandarin these days is changing from a less commonly taught language to a more commonly offered foreign language option in American secondary schools. However, in the applied linguistic literature, "few empirical studies have focused on pre-college CFL learning" (Ke, 2012, p.98). Moreover, the transition from high school to university often entails complex social, cultural, and emotional changes (e.g., Nathan, 2006). The goal of this dissertation project, therefore, is to investigate how students' investment in Mandarin is socially and historically constructed at these three levels: personal, familial, and institutional, as they transition from high school to university. This study draws upon the theory of identity and investment (Norton, 1995) to examine how these teenage language learners are multidimensional beings with multiple desires, and how their investment is produced or reproduced from social interactions, and is subject to change. Three high school campuses were chosen, because Mandarin classes are now offered from kindergarten through twelfth grade in these schools. Six students who expressed their intentions to continue learning Mandarin in university consented to participate in this study. Data collection for this study lasted from March to December 2015, which covered these students' last semester of high school, their first semester of college, and the period between. Data were collected from interviews and monthly informal Skype chats, and supplemented with class documents. Using qualitative analysis methods, the findings show the following factors as salient to their investment in Mandarin learning at the high school stage: 1) the students' personal interest, and 2) the influence from their families and their institutions. In the university setting, these students' investment in Mandarin was mostly mediated at the personal and the institutional levels. The results reveal the identity shift from childhood to adulthood these adolescent learners experienced during the transition. Specifically, the adolescent learners became more independent in making their own decisions, and less dependent on their families, both financially and symbolically. Second, the findings also highlight how these individuals' investment in Mandarin could be constrained at the institutional level. This points to the need for L2 educators to pay attention not only to individual students' personal interests and motivations in language learning, but also to a better understanding of how students perceive their own identities and whether foreign language learning is accessible to learners institutionally.

In this paper, I expand on poststructuralist and feminist theories of the body, gender, and subjectivity through an analysis of media discourse on childhood obesity. Through textual and narrative analyses of news segments on childhood obesity, I demonstrate that the obese child's body, as an abnormal body, is represented as a text of the 'abnormal' conditions in which that body is produced. Thus, the single-mother family structure and/or nonwhite and working class families -- families saturated with the excessive, out-of-control subjectivity of the Other-- are visible on the excessive, out-ofcontrol body of the obese child. I will argue that the discourse surrounding childhood obesity is indicative of a moral panic, where children's bodies are used to express a fear of the destabilization of the normative family structure and a fear of an irrational, excessive, over-consuming society saturated with the subjectivity of the Other.

D.Phil. / In South Africa, teachers have a particular legacy derived from the historical, social, political, cultural and economic past. Despite the power of education authorities, teachers have established strong traditions of overt and covert resistance. Education management is not entirely in control of what happens inside the classrooms and in the vanguard of policy implementation. Therefore, the study on teacher subjectivities was a crucial lever to unpack the mysteries inside the teachers‟ personal professional world. There is inadequate knowledge and understanding in the macro-education environment about teacher subjectivities in education management, policy development and implementation. In this regard, the study sought to answer questions about the role of subjectivities in policy implementation by establishing whether teachers understood the change processes at national, provincial and institutional level. It sought to trace the impact of teacher subjectivities on teaching, learning, curriculum and examinations; establish whether teachers described the new educational dispensation as neutral; whether teachers‟ perceptions of their role in policy implementation in general and curriculum and educational assessment policy in particular affected implementation; whether teachers‟ aligned themselves between educational discourses and teacher subjectivities when it came to the implementation of policy; and whether teachers were able to deal with the complexities of practice regarding the new curriculum and assessment policies. The study traced in literature the notion of subjectivity within the discourses of early thinkers and in particular through the lens of Michel Foucault‟s post-structuralism. Teacher subjectivities were tracked from whence they were moulded at home, social and cultural institutions, early and tertiary education as well as in the context of teachers‟ personal and professional life histories.

Pretendemos demonstrar como Agostinho reconduz a questão gnóstico-maniqueia das duas almas para o campo da interioridade humana, associando vida e alma como bens compreendidos pelo intelecto e, consequentemente, irredutivelmente verdadeiros. Na primeira parte da dissertação, buscamos os traços da questão no livro III das Confissões, parágrafos 1,1 à 6,12, em duplo interesse quanto a noção de pecado: primeiro, como ser ou ausência de ser, defectus da vontade individual; em seguida, como miséria - herança de uma impotência dejá lá e sintoma de uma situação de dessemelhança (regio dissimilitunis). Essa dupla visada tem o intuito de verificar possibilidades de assimilação e afastamento da gnose-maniqueia, a fim de que possamos seguir os argumentos filósofo de Hipona no enfrentamento do problema da existência da alma má em um tratado de 392, Sobre as Duas Almas (De duabus animabus) segunda parte de nosso trabalho. Nessa obra, o bispo procura derruir o dogma maniqueu a partir da alma como primeira consideração (cogito cf. tríade ser-vida-intelecto); atribui-lhe natureza intermediária entre sensíveis e inteligíveis e livre determinação de si pela atividade de valorar os bens que a cerca. Consequentemente, a alma tem a missão de julgar os valores das naturezas apreendidas e organizá-las internamente segundo a via de percepção própria: sensível ou inteligível. Ora, esse procedimento é volitivo, então Agostinho descobre a absoluta indeterminação interior da vontade como único elemento do móbile humano e convoca a teoria das partes da alma, segundo a tradição neoplatônica, para redefinir o 7 alcance da parte intelectiva da alma a partir de sua experiência de falibilidade pessoal. Ao final, o esforço de reconhecer ontologicamente a alma como incorporeamente una momento em que pecado é definido como estado negativo de ser -, deve considerar a cisão original e supra individual: um involuntário instalado no seio do voluntário. Reintroduzse a questão das duas almas no plano geral da filosofia do bispo, em registro notoriamente distinto: interioridade e confissão / The aim of this thesis is to demonstrate how Augustine reappoints the Manichaean issue of \"two souls\" to the field of human interiority, as associate life and soul as goods perceived by the intellect and therefore irreducibly real (cogito). Thus, the soul can judge the value of natures and organize them internally according to each way of perception of soul: sensible or intelligible. In the first part, we seek to understand the question through the analysis of third book of the Confessions, paragraphs 1.1 to 6.12. We proceed in double interest, interrelating two notions of sin: 1) The nature of being or not beingdefectus of individual will- and 2) as misery -heritage impotence deja lá in order to aim possibilities of assimilation and refusal of the Manichaean gnosis. In addition, we explore how Augustine faces the problem of the existence of evil soul in analysis of the treatise of 392, About the Two Souls (De duabus animabus) - second part of our work. In this work, the Hipponate seeks to demolish all gnose through doctrine of two souls. Thus, the soul is the first consideration -cogito: being, life and intellection comprenhended only by the intellect- by which intuitive definitions of will and sin are allowed. After discovering the absolute indeterminacy of the will as the only element of human mobile, Augustine proceed to adapt the theory of \"parts of the soul\", according to the Neoplatonic tradition, and sharply modify the role of intellectual part of the soul- in context of his own experience of fallibility. At the end, the effort to recognize the soul as ontologically non-corporeal and undivided moment in which sin is 10 defined as denial of being (defectus) - should also consider the original and supra-individual cleavage: \"an involuntary installed within the volunteer\". It was reintroduced the question of two souls\" in the philosophy of the bishop in distinguished register: interiority and confession