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[pt] A presente tese propõe como chave de leitura de Origens do totalitarismo, de Hannah Arendt, a análise de seus personagens, que não poderiam ser mais variados: judeus, antissemitas, artistas, intelectuais, comerciantes, políticos, aventureiros, charlatões, pais de família, assassinos e líderes populares como Hitler e Stálin. Numa obra de tamanho fôlego e que trata de assuntos tão complexos como antissemitismo, imperialismo e o próprio totalitarismo, parece improvável que tantos tipos humanos envolvidos possam ser tratados sob termos comuns. O argumento da tese mostra que para Arendt as diferenças são menos determinantes do que um traço comum a todos aqueles homens: a incapacidade cada vez maior de discernir realidade de ficção. Assim, a tese procura tratar do que parece ser um poderoso argumento antropológico com óbvias implicações para a teoria da história. / [en] The current thesis works on Hannah Arendt s The Origins of totalitarianism by analyzing its characters, who could not be more varied: Jews, anti-Semites, artists, intellectuals, businessmen, politicians, adventurers, charlatans, heads of families, assassins and leaders like Hitler and Stalin. In work of such weight where complex issues like anti-Semitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism take place, it seems unlikely that the many human types involved could be considered under common terms. The thesis arguments that Arendt manages to do so by considering such differences less determinant than a common trace shared by all those men: the ever-growing incapacity to discern fiction from reality. Thus, the thesis works on what seems to be a powerful anthropological argument with inevitable implications to theory of history.

This dissertation examines how the chaotic social space of post-civil war England inspired new ideas of the ideal social structure and its ability to create social and political stability. Focusing on three non-fiction prose tracts, Margaret Cavendish’s Worlds Olio (1655), Thomas Traherne’s Christian Ethicks (1675), and Gerrard Winstanley’s Law of Freedom (1652), I use the concept of “space-making,” or “how texts aided readers in producing the space in which they understood humanity to be living” (Sauter 47), to engage three distinct perspectives on social cohesion. I situate my study within the larger context of the scientific revolution, and what Michael Sauter calls the “spatial reformation,” whereby humanist thinkers embraced Euclidean geometry to “make” space in a manner akin to God. I argue that, through their writing, Cavendish, Traherne, and Winstanley structure theoretical space to control, guide, or influence how social beings relate to one another and to the state. In doing so they make social space heterogeneous. The authors create theoretical spaces in which alternatives to England’s social structure are outlined. These alternatives reflect the subjectivity and interests of the space-maker, and while each author wishes to establish social cohesion in post-civil war England, the spaces they create reveal unique perspectives on social responsibility, free will, and self-preservation, leading readers to question the benefits and drawbacks of social cohesion. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This dissertation examines three works of non-fiction prose by Margaret Cavendish, Thomas Traherne, and Gerrard Winstanley, all of whom were seventeenth-century writers. I examine the ways that social structure in post-civil war England in fact rejects the geometric premise popular among canonical natural philosophers that all space (including the spaces we inhabit as human beings) was homogeneous. Instead, I argue that homogeneous space is oppressive in a social context, while also acknowledging that heterogeneous social spaces (spaces that are divided and have distinct "parts") also tended to limit the free will of social actors, particularly those in the lower classes. I examine themes related to free will, self-interest, and subjectivity, specifically with respect to how these themes can both create or detract from social cohesion.

[pt] Este trabalho apresenta e analisa a estreita proximidade entre Poesia e História que se torna a base e o método de escrita dos ensaios poéticos de Octavio Paz. O poeta trata a história como um lugar da poesia. Isso mobiliza a categoria metódica que é comum ao fazer historiográfico, para dentro do terreno da ficcionalidade. Qual será o impacto na mobilização da poesia e de seu terreno como método para a escrita da história? Uma vez que a história está sempre tensionada entre ficção e verdade, a narrativa crítica sobre o passado é submetida à verdade? Se a poesia é sempre insurgente à verdade, a força resultante é destrutiva e favorável em relação à História. Se por um lado a concatenação de forças que as múltiplas imagens do passado evocadas por Paz permitem uma proximidade com o passado, por outro, um breve momento de lucidez destitui a verdade da centralidade do discurso historiográfico e a atuação do ensaio permite um procedimento historiográfico que represe essas imagens em torno de um sentido, não mais factual e teleológico, mas voltado para o acontecimento e os múltiplos sentidos que a realidade pode ter. / [en] This work presents and analyzes the close proximity between Poetry and History that becomes the basis and method of writing Octavio Paz s poetic essays. The poet treats history as a place of poetry. This mobilizes the methodical category that is common in historiographical work, into the realm of fiction. What will be the impact on the mobilization of poetry and its terrain as a method for writing history? Since history is always tensioned between fiction and truth, is the critical narrative about the past subjected to truth? If poetry is always insurgent to the truth, the resulting force is destructive and favorable in relation to History. If, on the one hand, the concatenation of forces that the multiple images of the past evoked by Paz allow a proximity to the past, on the other hand, a brief moment of lucidity deprives the truth of the centrality of the historiographical discourse and the performance of the essay allows a historiographical procedure that represent these images around a sense, no longer factual and teleological, but turned to the event and the multiple meanings that reality can have.

[pt] Esta pesquisa se propõe a analisar as formas através das quais a franquia de videogames Sid Meier s Civilization (1991-) lida com a História. Trabalhando com referenciais do campo dos game studies em perspectiva interdisciplinar, tentei construir uma compreensão da História encontrada nos jogos, concentrada, principalmente, em permanências identificáveis ao longo de seus 30 anos de existência. Meus três principais objetivos foram: propor a compreensão dos jogos da franquia como histórias – isto é, como obras que apresentam teses acerca da experiência humana em perspectiva diacrônica; questionar abordagens que limitam a interpretação desses jogos à sua natureza enquanto obras especificamente estadunidenses; e posicioná-los como herdeiros de uma tradição de pensamento histórico que remonta pelo menos ao Iluminismo. / [en] This research aims to analyze the ways through which the Sid Meier s Civilization videogame franchise deals with History. Drawing from the field of game studies in an interdisciplinary manner, I have tried to build an understanding of the History found in the games, focusing mainly in constants found throughout it s 30 years of existence. My three main objectives were: to propose the understanding of the franchise s titles as histories – that is, as works that present theses about the human experience in diachronic perspective; to question approaches that limit the interpretation of these games to their nature as specifically U.S. American works; and to position them as heirs to a tradition of historical thinking that goes back at least to the Enlightenment.

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary study of scientific change. The undulatory theory of light replaces the emission theory of light in the early nineteenth century, triggering an "optical revolution" and vigorous debates among physicists in British from the 1830s to the 1850s. In this study I give the first full account of this extended episode of scientific change, drawing on methods and concepts from history, sociology and philosophy of science. The interdisciplinary account of the episode provides a basis for criticizing the existing models of scientific change in the philosophy of science. Previous historical studies of the “optical revolution" pay little attention to the period after the 1830s. Because the cognitive superiority of the undulatory theory had become obvious in the early 1830s, some historians have implicitly assumed that any controversy would soon come to a natural end. I, however, document that intensive debates continued from the 1830s until the end of the 1850s, and that emissionists even enjoyed temporary victories in their fights with undulationists. The narrative reveals the historical complexities of this episode: the debates extended long after the cognitive superiority of the undulatory theory should have become apparent by modern standard, the results of the debates did not necessarily coincide with modern cognitive judgements, and individual agents played decisive roles in determining how long a debate lasted and how it would end. On the basis of the historical narrative, I provide a philosophical analysis of the practices of theory appraisal and experiment appraisal that constituted the main theme of the controversy. Instead of merely identifying the criteria of evaluation employed in this episode, I pay special attention to how individual agents actually applied these criteria in concrete situations, what kinds of strategies or tactics they employed for the applications of these criteria, and how they created favorable conditions, both cognitive and social, for successfully applying these criteria. Individual agents’ efforts in selecting application strategies and in creating favorable conditions made the practices of appraisal complicated, exhibiting various features that are incomprehensible if we limit ourselves merely to studying the criteria of evaluation. I finally discuss a different approach to scientific change. The existing philosophical models of scientific change merely analyze the final product of science -- scientific theories, and ignore the impact of social factors and the role of individual agents. I suggest we concentrate on the process of knowledge production, and pay attention to individual agents’s practices in this process, as well as to the relevant cognitive and social factors that influence individual agents. Following this new approach, scientific change is understood as an evolution that involves interactions among three elements: theory, experiment, and human agent. / Ph. D.

Despite their continuing importance to the UK economy and their employment of significant numbers of workers from a range of professions, the utilities have received scant attention from critical scholars of work. This neglect represents a missed opportunity to examine the impact of nearly twenty years of privatisation and marketisation on workers, their jobs and their unions. This thesis aims to make a contribution to knowledge here by investigating, contextualising and explaining changes in the labour processes of a privatised utility in the United Kingdom. The research is informed by oral history methods and techniques, rarely adopted in industrial sociology, and here used alongside labour process theory to reconstruct past experiences of work. Drawing on qualitative data sets, from in-depth interviews with a cohort of employees who worked continuously over three decades at the research site, British Gas’s Granton House, and on extensive company and trade union documentary evidence the research demonstrates how British Gas responded to restrictive regulation and the need to deliver shareholder value by transforming pre-existing forms of work organisation through introducing call centres. The call centre provided the opportunity for management to regain control over the labour process, intensify work and reduce costs. In doing so, the study identifies the principal drivers of organisational change, documents the process of change evaluates the impact on workers’ experience. Thus, as a corrective to much recent labour process theory the research offers both an ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ account of change over an extended time. The contrast between workers’ experience of working in the clerical departments and in the call centre could not be starker. Almost every element of work from which workers derived satisfaction and purpose was abruptly dismantled. In their place workers had to endure the restrictive and controlling nature of call centre work. The relative absence of resistance to such a transformation is shown to be a consequence of failures in collective organisation, rather than the totalisation of managerial control, as the postmodernists and Foucauldians would have it.

La thèse se propose d’étudier différentes formes de la représentation du passé dans le roman contemporain français. Si la recherche a pu constater, depuis un certain temps déjà, un véritable « retour de l’Histoire » sur la scène littéraire actuelle, force est de constater que chez certains auteurs, ce « retour » s’accompagne d’une méfiance profonde à l’égard de la connaissance de l’Histoire et des formes (culturelles, littéraires) de sa mise en récit. Ainsi Philippe Forest, dans Le Siècle des nuages (2010), raconte-t-il l’histoire de son père tout en se posant la question de savoir comment on peut écrire cette histoire qui constamment se dérobe. Il en sort un roman historique paradoxal et foncièrement autoréférentiel qui se construit et se déconstruit sous les yeux du lecteur. De façon comparable, Jean Rouaud, dans L’Imitation du bonheur (2006), invite son lecteur dans « l’atelier » de l’écrivain afin d’exhiber les sources et les ressources de son travail. Il ne se sert ainsi des techniques de l’illusion réaliste que pour mieux les parodier par la suite. Dans Waltenberg (2005) d’Hédi Kaddour, en revanche, la critique du récit historique se fait à travers la fragmentation de l’intrigue, la multiplication des temps et des lieux ainsi que par l’abandon de la linéarité. Aussi l’auteur nous présente-t-il une histoire éclatée qui se soustrait aux catégories d’unité et de cohérence. Bien que les stratégies de représentation dans ces trois romans soient diverses, elles renvoient pourtant à un concept commun que je propose ici d’appeler le récit historique critique.Dans la partie principale de mon travail, il s’agit d’analyser les trois romans mentionnés ci-dessus en tenant compte, notamment, des outils méthodologiques élaborés par la narratologie (D. Cohn, A. Nünning, W. Wolf) et par la théorie de l’histoire (H. White, P. Ricœur, R. Kosel-leck). Cette partie principale est précédée d’une partie plus « théorique » subdivisée en trois axes de recherche : L’approche systématisante essaie de condenser certaines des caractéristiques les plus importantes du récit historique critique dans une vue d’ensemble, élargissant par ailleurs le propos sur d’autres textes littéraires (contemporains). L’approche historicisante se propose de tisser un lien entre les romans analysés dans la partie principale de la thèse et l’œuvre de Claude Simon, considérée ici comme une sorte de paradigme esthétique pour une nouvelle écriture de l’histoire. L’approche comparative, enfin, tourne le regard vers les historiens professionnels (Ginzburg, Jablonka, Boucheron) qui, à l’instar des romanciers, ont exploré, ces derniers temps, de nouvelles formes de mise en récit du passé. Si ces nouvelles formes se rapprochent du récit littéraire par l’usage qu’elles font de la fiction, elles restent néanmoins sceptiques sur la possibilité même de représenter le passé, devenant de la sorte comme un équivalent en histoire du récit historique critique littéraire. / This PhD thesis offers a study of different forms of representations of the past in the French contemporary novel. Since several years, literary critics agree that there has been something like a “return to history” on the actual literary scene. But we also have to state that some con-temporary authors combine this “return” with a profound suspicion against the knowing of history and the (cultural or literary) forms of telling it. In his Le Siècle des nuages (2010), Philippe Forest tells the story of his father while at the same time questioning himself about how to represent a story which seems to withdraw itself constantly. The result is somewhat paradoxical and may be described as a self-referential historical novel that constructs and deconstructs itself in front of the reader’s eyes. In a similar way, Jean Rouaud’s L’Imitation du bonheur (2006) invites its reader in the artist’s workshop in order to reveal the sources and the resources of the story. Exploiting the techniques of realistic illusion, Rouaud is in fact parodying them. Waltenberg (2005) by Hédi Kaddour acts differently: in this novel, historical narration is undermined by a broken storyline, by a pluralization of times and spaces and by the abandoning of the chronological order. Thus the author confronts us with a history “in pieces” that doesn’t obey the principles of unity and coherence anymore. Even if the strategies of historical representation are quite different in these three novels, they are all based on a common concept which I suggest to call “critical historical narration”.The main part of my work consists of the analysis of the three novels mentioned above, an analysis which is mostly based on methods provided by narratology (D. Cohn, A. Nünning, W. Wolf) or theory of history (H. White, P. Ricœur, R. Koselleck). This main part is preceded by a more general part that is subdivided into three theoretical approaches: the systematizing approach tries to reunite some of the most important features of critical historical narration in a synopsis and thereby takes also account of other (contemporary) literary texts. The historical approach connects the novels analysed in the main part of this thesis to the work of Claude Simon, which will be considered here as an esthetical paradigm for a new kind of historical narration. Finally, the comparative approach focuses on professional historians (Ginzburg, Ja-blonka, Boucheron) who have been exploring new strategies of historical writing in the same way that novelists have done. Indeed, if these new strategies converge with those in literary writing because of the use they make of fiction, they are nevertheless included in a more general reflection on the possibilities of representing the past. Historiography thus may provide something like an equivalent to critical historical narration in literature.

The diploma thesis The Role of Travesty Show in Media Culture is concerned with a question if we can find some similarities between the way how media presents travesty show and the way how people think and talk about this kind of entertainment. As a research method I chose qualitative content analysis and questionnaire. Theoretical part focuses on explanation of technical terms, history of homosexuality, queer culture, queer theory, travesty show and history. In practical part I will create concrete codes from qualitative content analysis and from these codes I will make categories. Part of practical part is also a questionnaire. In the end of this thesis I will compare the codes from qualitative content analysis with the answers from the questionnaire. And based on this comparison I will find out if there exist any similarities between the way how media presents travesty show and the way how people think and talk about this kind of entertainment.

Visual records of place remain to a large degree inadequate when attempting to make visible the ephemeral states of consciousness that underlie the damage wrought by brutal regimes, let alone make visible the extraordinary histories and power structures encoded in images and views. This practice-led dissertation examines an emerging critical landscape genre in post-apartheid South Africa and Namibia, and its relationship to specific themes such as identity, belonging, trauma and memory. The landscape genre was traditionally considered inadequate to use in expressions of resistance under apartheid, particularly in the socially conscious and reformist discourse of South African documentary photography. I argue that, as a result of historical and cultural shifts after the demise of apartheid in 1994, a shift in aesthetic and subject matter has occurred, one that has led to a more rigorous and interventionist engagement with the landscape genre. I demonstrate how, after 1994, photographers of the long-established documentary tradition, which was meant to record 'what is there' in a sharp, clear, legible and impartial manner, would continue to draw on devices of the documentary aesthetic, but in a more idiosyncratic way. I show how these post-apartheid, documentary landscapes both disrupt and complicate the conventional expectations involved in converting visual fields into knowledge. I further investigate, through my own experimental documentary work, the ideologically fraught aspects of landscape representation with their links to Calvinist and German Romantic aesthetics. I appropriate and disrupt certain tropes still prevalent in popular landscape depictions. I do this in an effort to reveal the complex and troubled relationship that these traditions share with issues of willed historical amnesia and recognition in contemporary Namibia. Through my practice and the examination of other photographers' and artists' work, this project aims to further a self-reflective and critical approach to the genre of landscape and issues of identity in post-apartheid South Africa and Namibia.