Erik Beckmans roman Inlandsbanan (1967) har, tillsammans med hans hela författarskap, både kritiserats och hyllats som obegriplig, med en berättarstruktur som aktivt bryter mot ett konventionellt, episkt berättande och anammar en försvårande, gestaltande skriv- och läsakt. Derrida diskuterar i Of Grammatology (1967) funktionen hos den skrivna texten som betecknande det betecknande, det vill säga betecknande det talade språket som betecknar den refererade betydelsen, och hur relationerna dessa sinsemellan förskjutits. På ett liknande sätt har Inlandsbanans textfunktion förskjutits från en episk berättartradition till en icke-muntlig, materialistisk struktur. Med hjälp av en inomkompositionell, intermedial begreppsapparat, och en hypotes kring ett musikaliserat berättande, där gestaltande former tar sig runt den muntliga språktraditionen inom litteraturen, ses Inlandsbanan här i ett nytt ljus och en del av dess påstådda obegriplighet redes ut. Allt detta sker integrerat i en diskussion av en intermedial metod för analys, som hela tiden har sitt stöd i Erik Beckmans roman. Slutligen manifesteras en diskussion i form av en analys av romanen med uppsatsens teoretiska diskussioner som grund. Detta fungerar både som inblick i ett i mångt och mycket förbisett författarskap, och i en terminologi för att hantera skarpt avvikande texter inom litteraturvetenskapen.

The strong part of Horkheimer and Adorno&rsquo / s philosophy is their critique of the Enlightenment. They argue that the consequent of the Enlightenment has been the destruction of the Enlightenment itself. There are two main reasons in the background of this destruction. First of them is the destruction of individual because of the understanding of reason in the Enlightenment. Individuals cannot define their existence beyond the determined roles of society any more. The second reason is the certain distinction between the human beings and nature. The epistemology of the Enlightenment makes nature an object of knowledge and views the world as a summation of facts. This understanding makes subjects passive in providing the objectivity of knowledge. Accordingly, the subject is alienated from his or her knowledge. Horkheimer and Adorno&rsquo / s critical thinking provides possibility for the human autonomy. It tries to understand human beings and society in a dialectical process. It considers the relation between parts and the whole as a mutual relation. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the relation between subject and object is neither an absolute duality nor an absolute unity.

The importance of value lies in its potential influence of people¡¦s behavior and decision. It also determines how people distribute their available resources. After the World War II, in the western developed countries people¡¦s value has changed to post-materialism due to the stable growth of economy in these countries. People transferred their value priority from economy growth, stable job, authority, order, and rationality, to freedom of speech, environmental protection, multi-value, leisure time, art, and self- expression. These changes have caused governments to react these issues think about how to govern the diversity and complicity of changing value. This research focuses on value of time and space transformation by analysing data from Taiwan Social Change Survey (TSCS). Through re-construction scale and calculate score of post-material value, the paper examines trend of value changes from 1985 to 2005 by adopting one-way ANOVA, two-way ANOVA and three-way ANOVA approaches to analyse the differences of value among socio-economic variables. From the findings this research reveals that: (1) In Taiwan, value including period effect, age effect and cohort effect has significant changes along with time passing by; (2) Variables influencing value changes include age, income, education, job, marriage, and urban attributes. Income interacts with urban attribute, and moreover, income, urban attribute, and marriage interact with one another; (3) The effect of gender has not been proven for influencing value change; however, value of female gradually changes toward post-material value; (4) The influence of income value decreases when income decrease; however, this influence does not have significant change between people of age 40 to 59; (5) Job does not have significant influence on secondary industry and tertiary industry in early stages, and it also does not have significant influence on primary industry and secondary industry in lately stages; (6) People with high income, high education, or in unmarried status have high post-material value; (7) The difference of urban attribute shows that there is significant difference between urban, town, and rural, due to urban value changes toward post-material in early stage; however in lately stage there is no significant difference between urban and town. From the finding above it indicates that value changes from urban to town in space respect; (8) Between urban and income interaction of value change, people in urban area show significant difference of income value, then comes to people in town, finally people in rural area. As to the interaction among urban, income and marriage, it shows that single people with low income show significant difference in urban attribute; (9) Governments of urban area with post-material features should distribute resource in post-material governance. This research finds that there are significant post-material features in urban area, and significant material features in rural area; (10) Form indictor of macroeconomics, personal expenditure, interpellation of city council, election bulletin, final accounting of expenditure, this research shows that urban governance also shifts as researched value changes; (11) Since 2000, Taiwan has faced economic recession and raising unemployment problems which cause value changes toward material value. This change leads local governments to decrease expenditure on both environmental protection and community development during 2000 to 2007; (12) Urban government should focus on good governance, and value changing toward post-material contributes to foundation of good governance. Governments should improve the way of governance based on these value changes.

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 2008. Graduate Programme in Communication and Culture. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 88-91). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:MR38821

When a disaster the magnitude of the Deepwater Horizon blowout and oil spill takes place, is it natural for the news media stories, investigative reports, and public deliberation to focus almost exclusively on finding the person or group responsible for such a horrendous scene. Rhetorically speaking, the discourse surrounding the event can be characterized as a reductive form of praise and blame rhetoric (epideixis). However, these efforts, while well-intentioned, are troublesome because searches for the one technical cause and the sole personal culpability are thwarted by the sheer complexity of the ecological, technological, scientific, institutional, and communicative network required for such a disaster to take place. Thus, to demonstrate the insufficiency of extant models of disaster in a variety of fields, which tend to privilege human-centered approaches, Dead Man's Switch: Disaster Rhetorics in a Posthuman Age explores the ontology, technical documentation, and rhetorical theory of disasters through a posthuman lens. To find a more critical approach to understanding the nature of disasters in the twenty-first century, I ask the following questions: How do rhetoricians and technical communicators account more fully for the human and nonhuman forces at work in the precipitation of disaster? How do rhetoricians and technical communicators find an approach to ecological catastrophe that goes beyond the mere "environmentalist rhetoric" characterizing the public response? Through the application of several posthumanist theories, my project develops an approach to disaster that complicates traditional ways of approaching causality and blame. I use accident reports, news media stories, and popular literature as data for this project. By examining these texts, my project has broad implications for technical communication, rhetorical theory, and philosophy of rhetoric.

Agency is a foundational and ongoing concern for the field of Rhetoric and Composition. Long thought to be a product and possession of human action, rhetorical agency represents the most obvious connection between the educational and theoretical work of the field and the civic project of liberal arts and humanities education. Existing theories of anthropocentric rhetorical agency are insufficient, however, to account for the complex technological work of digitally enmeshed networks of humans and nonhumans. To better account for these complex networks, this project argues for the introduction of new materialist theories of distributed agency into conversations about agency within Rhetoric. Such theories eschew the distinction between rhetorical and material agency and instead offer a way of accounting for action and change that makes room for rhetorical and material interventions as well as human and nonhuman participants. I take as my site the social media aftermath of the 2013 bombing at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. The digital networks of human users and nonhuman spaces (especially Twitter and Reddit) produced specific tangible effects: #BostonHelp helped stranded runners and tourists find food, shelter, and ways of communicating with family and friends, and Reddit’s /r/findbostonbombers forum enabled and fueled hurtful speculation about an innocent missing student. The strength, impact, and endurance of these networks leads me to three important conclusions: rhetorical/material agency must be distributed across a network of human and nonhuman participants; human intention no longer functions as an appropriate measure of the success or failure of rhetorical/material agency; and responsibility – like agency – must be distributed across networks’ human and nonhuman members.

This paper seeks to forge a grounds for conversation between the affective turn in contemporary theory and a vital materialist ontology. This conversation focuses on materials and their affects through the experience of weirdness. I use weirdness to describe a register of enchantment which is disruptive and alienating, rather than enticing and delightful. The project is motivated by a desire for ways to think about our relationship to the natural world that afford for fuller experiences of perception. The paper works through four major sections; the first three form a conceptual framework while the fourth is an exercise in mobilizing the concepts through subjective readings of affect. It begins by establishing a concept of vitalism with which to think about interactions with a moving, active world and, in following vitalism across borders of embodied flora and fauna, agitates the notion of what constitutes life. To put vitalism into a dynamic of engagement between entities, I then chart processes of affect through various conditions and situations, such as haunting, hallucination, anticipation and psychotropics. I then address the concept of the event in order to trace the contours of affect as it manifests through situated, temporal passages of force. This conceptual netting culminates in episodic readings of affective experiences, taking a kaleidoscopic form oriented toward anxious fascination. / text

In this project, I am interrogating discourse surrounding the 2008 WHO/UNAIDS controversy, which both preceded and followed the publication of an article in the U.K. newspaper The Independent. The article reported that the head of the World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS initiative admitted that the threat of an AIDS pandemic among heterosexuals was “officially” over. These texts are particularly important for such an endeavor because, as I will argue below, the controversy enables both “AIDS” and “heterosexuality” to operate as floating signifiers whose meanings are contested in public discourse in ways that ultimately reinforce heterosexual privilege and under-attention to the AIDS crisis. In the end, the destabilization of the meaning of HIV/AIDS does not serve emancipatory ends. Although the destabilization of meaning is the emancipatory gesture ‘par excellence’ for the poststructuralist tradition, my investigation shows that the destabilization of meaning in the WHO controversy actually results in the reification of master narratives. / text

In this dissertation, I argue that the iconoclastic and anti-materialistic "art of living to God" is the central theoretical preoccupation of English and American Puritan intellectuals. I call attention to a wealth of previously unacknowledged writing about image, art, architecture, and form in Puritan literature, while highlighting how recent materialist analyses of Puritan culture have effectively obscured evidence of iconoclasm and anti-materialism in this milieu. In the first chapter, I explore the Puritan inheritance of John Calvin's theology of the "living image," which defines human beings as God-made pictures and greater than all images that are man-made. I explain how Puritan image theory is wedded to a theorization of the art of living to God, such that Puritan art and image theory are one and the same. The second chapter delineates various ways in which the imitation of Christ undergirds the conceptualization of "art work" in Puritanism. Here I focus on how Puritan ideas about both art and image intersect with their theorizations of happiness, shining, walking, and printing/pressing. I examine the theology of "edification" in my third chapter, probing how godly Puritans were understood to be "living architecture" and "living plants." In Chapter 4 I consider how Puritan anti-formalism contributes to and complicates Puritan art and image theory. More than anything else, a preoccupation with theorizing image, art, architecture, and form is what makes intellectual Puritanism a coherent tradition across space (England and the Netherlands to New England) and time (ca. 1560-1730). In the fifth and concluding chapter, I address an aspect of Puritan ministerial writings in which pastoral practice is defined not as art work but in terms of image curatorship and conservation. I then suggest that Puritan biographical literatures are archives or histories of artful and edificatory performativity. I argue that texts such as broadside elegies, funeral sermons, the monumental collections of lives by Samuel Clarke and Cotton Mather, and perhaps even gravestones should be understood as histories of Puritan art and architecture. / History of Art and Architecture

This dissertation makes progress on the mind-body problem by examining certain key features of epistemic defeasibility, introspection, peer disagreement, and philosophical methodology. In the standard thought experiments, dualism strikes many of us as true. And absent defeaters, we should believe what strikes us as true. In the first three chapters, I discuss a variety of proposed defeaters—undercutters, rebutters, and peer disagreement—for the seeming truth of dualism, arguing that not one is successful. In the fourth chapter, I develop and defend a novel argument from the indefeasibility of certain introspective beliefs for the conclusion that persons are not complex objects like brains or bodies. This argument reveals the non-mechanistic nature of introspection. / text