Thesis (M.A.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of English, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 131-142).

Specimen litterarium inaugurale--Utrecht. / Also available in print.

No description available.

Can the subaltern really speak? Invoking Gayatri Spivak's post-colonial theory on the subaltern, this study aims to highlight the necessary, yet problematic relationship between intellectuals and the marginalized groups they seek to represent. This study argues that in the last chapter of Julia Alvarez's How the Garcâia Girls Lost Their Accents, the image of the wailing cat becomes a haunting image regarding Alvarez's own subject-position as a writer, a role that often places her in the center of harsh criticism. Consequently, this project traces the subaltern figures through three of Alvarez's texts -¡YO!, In the Time of the Butterflies, and Saving the World - in order to reveal the paradox that defines their relationship with the privileged body that seeks to be their representative. The subaltern cannot speak beyond the margins without the help of the elite; however, the same position of privilege and power that enables the intellectual to write can quickly become the factor that discredits their right to speak. Consequently, this study also attempts to reclaim the voice of Julia Alvarez, who is herself silenced and thus, rendered subaltern in the literary market by critics who feel that her privileged position complicates her ability to represent the collective. / by Raquel Alonso. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2010. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2010. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

"Books recording the mores and folkways of small segments of our society are often of great sociological value. Such records may be scientific reports or interesting fiction. In the latter group are Julia Mood Peterkin's books, which attempt to record the lives of the South Carolina coastal Negroes known as Gullahs. Mrs. Peterkin's description of the lives of these exotic and unusual people has brought her literary recognition. For two of her short stories, she received the O'Henry Memorial Prize Award, and for her novel, Scarlet Sister Mary, a Pulitzer Prize. Despite her literary fame, factual knowledge about Mrs. Peterkin's life is sparse and fragmentary. To compile information not hitherto available in one source, along with bibliographical data relative to Julia Peterkin and her works, is the purpose of this study"--Introduction. / "June, 1959." / At head of title: Florida State University. / Typescript. / "Submitted to the Graduate Council of Florida State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts." / Advisor: Robert Clapp, Professor Directing Paper. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 38-43).

Thesis (M.A.)--Brigham Young University. Dept of English, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 85-87).

This thesis examines, in the light of Julia Kristeva's and Michel Foucault's recent theorisations of the productions of meaning, the work of two authors, Djuna Barnes and Audre Lorde, whose writing, it argues, sets up virtual spaces which can become places of resistance to the normative functioning of a given culture. Having sketched a philosophical background to notions of extra-linguistic space through reference to Plato, Kant, Hegel and Lacan, the first chapter considers what is distinctive in the theories of space provided by Kristeva, who (in Revolution in Poetic Language) develops Plato's notion of the chora functioning at times as a synonym for "semiotic articulation". The semiotic (le semiotique) is employed by Kristeva in a very precise way. It represents a convolution of expressions: operating as a drive system within the body that affects the structure of language (understood by her as the symbolic), as a "network of marks" that breaches the established sign systems, and as a revolutionary process that is responsible for the transgression and articulation of new meanings. Because both the semiotic and the symbolic are an inseparable part of the signifying processes of language, they together act as pathways of production. Of all these various processes and relations, the most remarkable one is that these two modalities are genderised: the semiotic chora is "enigmatic and feminine, th[e] space underlying the written"; while the symbolic is a "phallic function". That being so, one of the main features of this thesis is to articulate a feminist argument in relation to Kristeva, expounding on the notion of the spatial concept of the semiotic chora as a "resistance" to phallocentrism. The second chapter sets out to explore Foucault's spatial reasoning. My argument is that space is central to Foucault's concerns. This is demonstrated in several ways. First I suggest that Foucault's interpretation of a social construction of space is such that the subject is connected to its own fashioning processes. Second, by introducing space into his documentation of history, Foucault sets in motion a dispersion of society's master narratives. In respect of this, I argue that a methodology can be formed from Foucault's spatial term "heterotopia", where contingent sites, rather than causes, shape new discourses and open up possibilities of resistance against the techniques and tactics of domination. Because (as Foucault writes in The Order of Things) the heterotopia serves to "desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source", it not only produces discourse, it challenges all boundaries and remains essentially fluid, escaping the matrix of historical category. The next three chapters consider the implications of Kristeva's definition of the semiotic chora which, as briefly mentioned above, is constituted by psychosomatic drives. Hence, mood plays a central role in the semiotic chora. I construct a reading of Nightwood the main tenet of which is to examine the textual variations of Kristeva's resistant and abject `language'. Located in melancholy, incest, and discontentednesse ach trope forms individual chapterse xploring ways in which the limits of language are transgressed. Taken as a whole, the theme running through the three chapters on Nightwood is that new literary formations arise when the abject as mood becomes structured and made meaningful by the symbolic. The last two chapters examine Foucault's position in relation to Kristeva's, and argue that Kristeva's and Foucault's spatial thinking questions the appearance of finality and completeness in language. These chapters also provide a practical application of Foucault's heterotopia, in which spaces between contingent sites are shaped by Lorde. It is argued that opportunities of resistance are provided by Lorde who, naming her disparate position against the master narratives that fail to recognise her, locates her difference from them. In conclusion, a feminist reading of Kristeva's chora and Foucault's heterotopia reveals an opening to resistant spaces and new paths of production of meaning. Chora and heterotopia, then, are not merely abstract philosophical concepts, but powerful tools of reading, as is shown by their application in the interpretation of the works of Barnes and Lorde.

Complex dynamics is the study of iteration of functions which map the complex plane onto itself. In general, their dynamics are quite complicated and hard to explain but for some simple classes of functions many interesting results can be proved. For example, one often studies the class of rational functions (i.e. quotients of polynomials) or, even more specifically, polynomials. Each such function f partitions the extended complex plane C into two regions, one where iteration of the function is chaotic and one where it is not. The nonchaotic region, called the Fatou Set, is the set of all points z such that, under iteration by f, the point z and all its neighbors do approximately the same thing. The remainder of the complex plane is called the Julia set and consists of those points which do not behave like all closely neighboring points. The Julia set of a polynomial typically has a complicated, self similar structure. Many questions can be asked about this structure. The one that we seek to investigate is the notion of the dimension of the Julia set. While the dimension of a line segment, disc, or cube is familiar, there are sets for which no integer dimension seems reasonable. The notion of Hausdorff dimension gives a reasonable way of assigning appropriate non-integer dimensions to such sets. Our goal is to investigate the behavior of the Hausdorff dimension of the Julia sets of a certain simple class of polynomials, namely fd,c(z) = zd + c. In particular, we seek to determine for what values of c and d the Hausdorff dimension of the Julia set varies continuously with c. Roughly speaking, given a fixed integer d > 1 and some complex c, do nearby values of c have Julia sets with Hausdorff dimension relatively close to each other? We find that for most values of c, the Hausdorff dimension of the Julia set does indeed vary continuously with c. However, we shall also construct an infinite set of discontinuities for each d. Our results are summarized in Theorem 10, Chapter 2. In Chapter 1 we state and briefly explain the terminology and definitions we use for the remainder of the paper. In Chapter 2 we will state the main theorems we prove later and deduce from them the desired continuity properties. In Chapters 3 we prove the major results of this paper.

Thesis (M.A.)--Stony Brook University, 2008. / This official electronic copy is part of the DSpace Stony Brook theses & dissertations collection maintained by the University Libraries, Special Collections & University Archives on behalf of the Stony Brook Graduate School. It is stored in the SUNY Digital Institutional Repository and can be accessed through the website. Presented to the Stony Brook University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Hispanic Languages and Literature; as recommended and accepted by the candidate's degree sponsor, the Dept. of Hispanic Languages and Literature. Includes bibliographical references (p. 92-94).

In the face of an explosion of feminist discourse and an increasingly global, deeply troubled socio-religious climate, the following study explores the role of religion qua Christianity in researching female subjectivity, according to Julia Kristeva. Kristeva's pervasive influence and controversial reception in academic circles grants her the focus of this investigation. / This project familiarizes the reader with Kristeva's theory of subjectivity as a process and situates her among the plethora of feminist theorists. It also examines her view that religion is an illusory therapy for the modern subject in crisis. Finally, these two themes are brought together in a discussion on her theory of a culture of revolt, derived from the psychoanalytic process. Kristeva's vision for the future of feminism is shown to be deeply philosophical, while also socially and politically important. Furthermore, in revolt culture, religion might well leave open the possibility of researching female subjectivity.