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This thesis examines certain narratives in Richard Burton's and T.E. Lawrence's encounters with the Arab East. By juxtaposing both Orientalists' accounts of Arab sexuality with the changes that had been taking place in Arabic literary and cultural discourse of the time, I highlight what appears to be a disparity in representation. Nonetheless, I argue that this disparity stems from a perception of ‘difference' that characterises the relationship between East and West. This perception of ‘difference' is further explored in the writings of Arab scholars on European culture since the beginning of the Euro-­‐Arab encounter in the nineteenth century. I expose the epistemological bases of this modern encounter and situate it within the political changes that had been shaping the emerging Middle East on the eve of modernity. Burton and Lawrence are also situated within this context. I show how their Orientalist discourse involved a process of conflating ‘text' and ‘experience' while interacting with the Arab East. This conflation is evident in their textual rendition of certain experiential episodes they underwent in the Orient. While both Orientalists' attraction to the Arab East may have been epistemological in origin, I argue that their narratives on Arab homoeroticism have been discursively subjective. In this, they appear to reflect the selectivity with which fin-­‐de-­‐siècle Arab scholars had been reproducing accounts of their past cultural heritage; albeit paradoxically. When Burton and Lawrence seem to have been heightening manifestations of Arab male-­to-male sexuality, their contemporary Arab intellectuals had been engaged in a process of systematic attenuation of the traces of past depictions of homoerotic desire in Arabic literature. Although I focus on analysing texts from both Orientalists, I also draw on contemporary historical events, for they form part of the contextual framework in which my analysis operates.

This thesis is the first book-length treatment of the poems in George Oppen's Discrete Series (1934), providing a counterbalance to critical readings of Oppen's work which have to date focused on work published after his return to poetry (i.e. from 1962 onwards). It is a philosophical presentation of the work which argues that the poems are themselves philosophical presentations of objects, and by those objects and that presentation, of the historical circumstances of those objects and the poems themselves. Its method is Adornian in three senses: first, it holds that literature is not only subject-matter for a (sub)subset of philosophy but a potential mode of participation within it; second, the philosophical writing with which the thesis puts the poems into dialogue is not a single authorship nor strictly aesthetic, but a broad range of writings by Kant, Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche (with a special emphasis on Hegel); and third, continual recourse is made to Adorno's own writings on art and objecthood. After a brief account of the pre-history of Objectivism, of Oppen's connection with Ezra Pound, and the circumstances of the work's production and appearance, the poems are analysed in depth alongside more thoroughly institutionally validated works by, among others, Pound and T.S. Eliot. The main focus of these readings is on the physical objects represented: their nature, type, consistency, and the fact and manner of their presentation. These objects are characterised by their resolute materiality – their distinctive hardness and their uniform impenetrable surfaces. These properties are analysed from literary-historical, historical and philosophical perspectives, i.e. in the contexts of modernist hardness and its precursors; industrial production and the individual; and the causes and consequences, in thought, of the experience of bare materiality that the poems present. Finally it considers how the poems, as well as registering a particular mode of object experience, themselves seek to produce it.

This examination of photography in Thatcher's Britain explores the abject photographic responses to the discursive construction of ‘sick Britain' promoted by the Conservative Party during the years of crisis from the late 1970s onwards. Through close visual analyses of photojournalist, press, and social documentary photographs, this Ph.D. examines the visual responses to the Government's advocation of a ‘healthy' society and its programme of social and economic ‘waste-saving'. Drawing Imogen Tyler's interpretation of ‘social abjection' (the discursive mediation of subjects through exclusionary modes of ‘revolting aesthetics') into the visual field, this Ph.D explores photography's implication in bolstering the abject and exclusionary discourses of the era. Exploring the contexts in which photographs were created, utilised and disseminated to visually convey ‘waste' as an expression of social abjection, this Ph.D exposes how the Right's successful establishment of a neoliberal political economy was supported by an accelerated use and deployment of revolting photographic aesthetics. My substantial contribution to knowledge is in tracking the crises of Thatcher's Britain through reference to an ‘abject structure of feeling' in British photography by highlighting a photographic counter-narrative that emerged in response to the prevailing discourse of social sickness. By analysing the development and reframing the photographic languages of British documentary photographers such as Chris Killip, Tish Murtha, Martin Parr and Nick Waplington, I demonstrate how such photography was explicitly engaged in affirmative forms of social abjection and ‘grotesque realism'. This Ph.D examines how this renewed form of documentary embodied an insurgent photographic visual language which served to undercut the encompassing discourses of exclusionary social abjection so pervasive at the time.

Thesis (M.S.V.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1979. / Videocassette is in 1/2 in. VHS format; copied from the original 3/4 in.U-Matic format. / by Ellen Kozak. / M.S.V.S.

Thesis argument: There is a Culture of Violent Reductivism in Representing Warsaw, which means that: Warsaw is reduced to a symbol of heroism in the hands of God/History or the Expert; imagining is reduced to historic imaginary and by the same token futuristic imaginary; both based on a positivist-romanticist system of thought; the reductivism deploys philosemiotic violence (acts of offering with expectations attached); the reductivism/violence is a symptom of a ‘neurosis’ of the social national/imaginary; the reductivism stops Warsaw/Poland from imagining present and future more openly. An alternative is to represent Warsaw as a series of post-historical objects that: are discrete texts, singular images, drawings, physical objects; are paradigmatic and analogical; they move from specificity to specificity; offer different forms, where ‘form’ is non-objective and means relationship; are a series of critiques, reflections, descriptions that work as architectural hypotheses; represent three exemplar imaginaries of Warsaw (the Birth, the Rebirth, the Second Rebirth); together form a ‘distracted’ architectural archive of Warsaw’s imaginaries. In this way, the thesis posits an example of a methodology of representing Warsaw that opens the possibility for Warsaw/Poland to imagine itself differently. Key themes: Culture of violent reductivism in representing Warsaw, reduction of Warsaw to a symbol of heroism, domination of the historic futuristic imaginary, philosemi(o)tic violence, neurosis of the social imaginary (guilt), positivist romanticism, post-historical object, paradigmatic knowledge, non-objective form, seriality of representation, architectural hypothesis, three imaginaries of Warsaw, ‘distracted’ archive of imaginaries.

This thesis features the work of Carolyn Jeans Mills for a Masters of Fine Arts in Sculpture.

A thesis report submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Painting.

A thesis report submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Painting.