Thesis (Ph.D.)--McMaster University, 2006. / Supervisor: Peter Kingston. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 251-257).

In my dissertation I examine how adaptations of Greek tragedy in South Africa after the fall of apartheid (1994) address the transitional stage of the country and mediate in the formation and apprehension of post-apartheid national identities and the formation of a new communitas. Drawing particularly from Raymond Williams and Jean-Pierre Vernant, I approach tragedy as a paradigmatic model for analyzing the dialectical relationship between cultural text and social context. The examination of this paradigm in the context of post-apartheid South Africa is grounded in postcolonial theory defined as an ongoing project of addressing the politics of identity representation in conjunction with the underlying conditions of cultural and material inequalities in a neo-colonial context. I am focusing on three plays that provide distinct perspectives on the problem of national identity in the post-apartheid era and distinct artistic approaches to the process of adaptation. My examination of each play consists of two, interrelated parts: in the first part, I conduct a structural analysis of the text and an examination of the ways it relates to and reworks the major themes and concepts of the Greek tragedy it adapts. In the second part, I examine the connections between the country’s dominant discourses on national identities and the plays’ representations of these.

Canada has a long history of investing in agricultural research, with public funds playing a dominant role for most crops up until recently. With the advent of biotechnology in the 1980s, the research industry underwent significant transformations. Crops more amenable to the application of DNA modification techniques (e.g., canola) gained considerable attention by the private sector and experienced an influx of private R&D investment and proliferation of intellectual property rights (IPRs). IPRs have changed the nature of knowledge from being non-excludable to being excludable, thus affecting the nature of research benefits and research incentives. The advantages and disadvantages of a stronger IPR system in Canadian agriculture are currently hotly debated in policy circles. <p> This thesis develops a theoretical model that describes the incentives for innovation and the distribution of benefits from research when such innovations are protected by Plant Breeders' Rights (PBRs) versus patents. Specifically, the research industry is modeled as a monopolistic seed company undertaking research, developing a new variety and selling it to heterogeneous farmers. The difference between PBRs and patents is embodied in the farmers' decision that incorporates the possibility of seed saving envisioned by PBRs, but not by patents. The simulation results show that under certain conditions PBRs can be as effective as patents in encouraging R&D activity, and that the share of farmers in total benefits is generally smaller under patents than under PBRs. The benefits under patenting regime, however, are not necessarily smaller in absolute terms. <P>This dissertation also develops a game theoretic model to study the impact of IPRs on the sharing of research inputs. The results reveal that when two private firms compete in a differentiated product market, they will have an incentive to protect their technologies and maintain exclusive rights. Therefore, sharing within private industry may be a challenge. As IPRs proliferate, however, a lack of incentive to share/cross-license may not be confined to private industry. IPRs may also impact the propensity of public researchers to protect or share their technologies. <P>To address the issue of sharing and assess the efficiency of the current IP protection system in the Canadian plant breeding industry, interviews with wheat and canola breeders were conducted. The responses suggest that, in general, patents have become more prevalent in both industries over the last decade, which has, in turn, reduced germplasm and information flows and increased secrecy. There is also evidence that patents undermine R&D efforts in some potentially promising areas of research and make freedom to operate in the breeding industry a concern.

In my dissertation I examine how adaptations of Greek tragedy in South Africa after the fall of apartheid (1994) address the transitional stage of the country and mediate in the formation and apprehension of post-apartheid national identities and the formation of a new communitas. Drawing particularly from Raymond Williams and Jean-Pierre Vernant, I approach tragedy as a paradigmatic model for analyzing the dialectical relationship between cultural text and social context. The examination of this paradigm in the context of post-apartheid South Africa is grounded in postcolonial theory defined as an ongoing project of addressing the politics of identity representation in conjunction with the underlying conditions of cultural and material inequalities in a neo-colonial context. I am focusing on three plays that provide distinct perspectives on the problem of national identity in the post-apartheid era and distinct artistic approaches to the process of adaptation. My examination of each play consists of two, interrelated parts: in the first part, I conduct a structural analysis of the text and an examination of the ways it relates to and reworks the major themes and concepts of the Greek tragedy it adapts. In the second part, I examine the connections between the country’s dominant discourses on national identities and the plays’ representations of these.

Through four hundred years of accumulated disparaging comments from critics, revenge plays have lost much of the original luster they possessed in early modern England. Surprisingly, scholarship on revenge tragedy has invented an unfavorable lens for understanding this genre, and this lens has been relentlessly parroted for decades. The conventional generic approach that calls for revenge plays to exhibit a recurring set of concerns, including a revenge motive, a hesitation for the protagonist, and the revenger’s feigned or actual madness, imply that these plays lack philosophical depth, as the appellation of revenge tends to evoke the trite commonalities which we have created for the genre. This dissertation aims to rectify the provincial views concerning revenge tragedies by providing a more complex, multivalent critical model that makes contemporary the outmoded approaches to this genre. I argue that Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of carnival, and the ways in which it engages with new historical interpretations of early modern drama, functions as a discursive methodology to open up more creative interpretative possibilities for revenge tragedy. Carnival readings expose gaps in new historicism’s proposed systems of omnipresent power, which deny at every turn the chance for rebellion and individuality. Rather than relegating carnival to an occasional joke, quick aside, or subplot, revenge plays explore carnivalesque concerns, and revengers plot their vengeance with all the aspects of a carnival. In these plays, revengers define subjectivity in terms of the pleasure-seeking, self-serving urges of unofficial culture; negotiations for social change occur in which folk culture avoids a repressive, hierarchal order; and carnival play destabilizes courtly systems that track, classify, pigeonhole, and immobilize individuals.

Canada has a long history of investing in agricultural research, with public funds playing a dominant role for most crops up until recently. With the advent of biotechnology in the 1980s, the research industry underwent significant transformations. Crops more amenable to the application of DNA modification techniques (e.g., canola) gained considerable attention by the private sector and experienced an influx of private R&D investment and proliferation of intellectual property rights (IPRs). IPRs have changed the nature of knowledge from being non-excludable to being excludable, thus affecting the nature of research benefits and research incentives. The advantages and disadvantages of a stronger IPR system in Canadian agriculture are currently hotly debated in policy circles. <p> This thesis develops a theoretical model that describes the incentives for innovation and the distribution of benefits from research when such innovations are protected by Plant Breeders' Rights (PBRs) versus patents. Specifically, the research industry is modeled as a monopolistic seed company undertaking research, developing a new variety and selling it to heterogeneous farmers. The difference between PBRs and patents is embodied in the farmers' decision that incorporates the possibility of seed saving envisioned by PBRs, but not by patents. The simulation results show that under certain conditions PBRs can be as effective as patents in encouraging R&D activity, and that the share of farmers in total benefits is generally smaller under patents than under PBRs. The benefits under patenting regime, however, are not necessarily smaller in absolute terms. <P>This dissertation also develops a game theoretic model to study the impact of IPRs on the sharing of research inputs. The results reveal that when two private firms compete in a differentiated product market, they will have an incentive to protect their technologies and maintain exclusive rights. Therefore, sharing within private industry may be a challenge. As IPRs proliferate, however, a lack of incentive to share/cross-license may not be confined to private industry. IPRs may also impact the propensity of public researchers to protect or share their technologies. <P>To address the issue of sharing and assess the efficiency of the current IP protection system in the Canadian plant breeding industry, interviews with wheat and canola breeders were conducted. The responses suggest that, in general, patents have become more prevalent in both industries over the last decade, which has, in turn, reduced germplasm and information flows and increased secrecy. There is also evidence that patents undermine R&D efforts in some potentially promising areas of research and make freedom to operate in the breeding industry a concern.

Project (M.A.) - Simon Fraser University, 2006. / Theses (Liberal Studies Program) / Simon Fraser University. Also issued in digital format and available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 279-292).

Thesis (M. A.)--University of Canterbury, 2009. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 120-129). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität zu Münich, 1929. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 88-89) and index.