Thesis (Ph. D.)--Flinders University of South Australia, 2000. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on July 9, 2005). Includes bibliographical references (p. 307-379).

Terror in the African Anglophone novels of Chinua Achebe, Doris Lessing, J.M. Coetzee and Laila Lalami originated as a consequence of a breakdown in the family structure. Traditionally, conventional patriarchy, in addition to securing the psychological and material needs of the family, has served as one of the building blocks of tribes and nations. Since the father figure within narrative is allegorized as a metonym of the state, the absence of patriarchal authority represents the disintegration of the link between individuals and national institutions. Consequently, characters may also turn to committing acts of terror as a rejection of the dominant national ideology. This dissertation aims to demonstrate how the breakdown of the family and the conventional gendering of roles may give rise to terrorist violence in the African setting. To recontextualize the persistence of the Conradian definition of terror as an Anglo-European phenomenon brought to Africa, I contrast the ways in which the breakdown of the family affects both indigenous and Anglo-European households in Africa across generations. I suggest that, under the reinvention of older gender norms, the unfulfilling Anglo-European patriarchy exposes Anglo-European women to indigenous violence. Moreover, I theorize that the absence of patriarchal authority leads indigenous families to seek substitutions in the form of alternative family institutions, such as religious and political organizations, that conflict with the national ideology. Furthermore, against the backdrop of globalized capitalism, commodity fetishism emerges as a substitute to compensate for the absent father figure. Therefore, this project demonstrates the indisputable relationship between the breakdown of the family structure and individual acts of terror that aim at the fulfillment of capitalist fetish or individual desire, and at the expense of national security. Finally, the rhetorical dimension of terror against family and women in Africa will be proven to be the allegorized norm of globalized terror in the twenty-first century.

The dissertation undertakes an extensive investigation of the role of the gesture – from Lessing to emoji. Through close readings of bodily gestures as inscribed in text, documented on film, employed in performance, and shared throughout the cyberspace, the dissertation demonstrates how the human body has been imagined, conceptualized, and disciplined at various points since the second half of the 18th century. Presenting a reading of the body through the lens of different media, the analyses bring forth moments of disidentification and friction between medium and body: be that in gestural disobedience to ordered stage instructions, in resistance to the demands of the filmic apparatus, or in the form of a non-white emoji. To extrapolate historical developments and also processes of quotation and transference across media, material from different periods and disciplines is assembled: from unpublished manuscripts of the early Enlightenment (G. E. Lessing) via filmic footage from the late Weimar period (G. W. Pabst), to post-dramatic theatre performances around 2000 (Chr. Schlingensief), all the way up to present-day exchanges on social media platforms.

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In diesem Beitrag wird über die Ergebnisse eines laufenden Digital Humanities-Projekt zur Sentiment Analysis in literarischen Texten berichtet und die Implikation von diesem diskutiert. In dem Projekt werden verschiedene Methoden der Sentiment Analysis auf Texte historischer Dramen des 18. Jahrhunderts von G. E. Lessing implementiert und gegeneinander evaluiert. Zur Evaluation wurde ein von Menschen bezüglich des Sentiments annotiertes Testkorpus erstellt. Basierend auf den ersten Erfahrungen des Projekts diskutieren wir über Probleme und Herausforderungen, die sich aus der Perspektive der Informatik zur Sentiment Analysis historischer Dramen ergaben. Es wird deutlich, dass bestehende Standardlösungen der Sentiment Analysis für dieses spezifische Szenario nicht ohne Weiteres anwendbar sind. Vielmehr ist die Informatik gefordert, die bestehenden Methoden anzupassen, weiterzuentwickeln und sich mit besonderen Eigenheiten der Textform historischer literarischer Texte auseinanderzusetzen.

We present results from a project on sentiment analysis of drama texts, more concretely the plays of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. We conducted an annotation study to create a gold standard for a systematic evaluation. The gold standard consists of 200 speeches of Lessing’s plays and was manually annotated with sentiment information by five annotators. We use the gold stand-ard data to evaluate the performance of different German sentiment lexicons and processing configurations like lemmatization, the extension of lexicons with historical linguistic variants, and stop words elimination, to explore the influence of these parameters and to find best prac-tices for our domain of application. The best performing configuration accomplishes an accu-racy of 70%. We discuss the problems and challenges for sentiment analysis in this area and describe our next steps toward further research

<p>The predominant focus on the male protagonist in the <em>Bildungsroman</em> genre has provoked feminist critics to offer a re-definition of the genre, claiming that the female protagonist's development differs in significant ways from the traditionally expected course of development (i.e. male). A feminist comparison between <em>A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man</em> and <em>Martha Quest</em> found, unexpectedly, that the female protagonist follows the traditional <em>Bildungsroman</em> trajectory in several respects, whereas the male protagonist deviates from it. <em>A Portrait</em> emphasizes the themes of childhood, formal education and religion, while in <em>Martha Quest</em> the themes of family relations, informal education, sexuality and marriage are treated at length. <em>Martha Quest </em>as an example of a female <em>Bildungsroman</em> deals specifically with the issues of role models, gender roles and gender inequality, which neither the traditional <em>Bildungsroman</em> nor <em>A Portrait </em>does.</p><p> </p>

The body of critical literature on Kant's philosophy of history and religion is examined and criticized for its failure to recognize the consistency of Kant's thought. In opposition to it, a new interpretation based on the critical ideas of freedom, morality and teleology is proposed. The transition from the Critiques to history and religion is justified in terms of the notion of "a priori end" and through the recognition of evil. Kant's ideas are viewed in the historical context of Leibniz, Lessing and Herder. / Kant conceives history as the process of self-creation whereby man overcomes the split within his being between the rational and sensible. Providence and freedom are complementary grounds of this process. Kant's views on biology and history rely on a revolutionary conception of time as a principle of internal development in life. The development of political wisdom and religious symbols add to rational thought an essentially historical dimension.

Zugl.: Göttingen, Univ., Habil.-Schr., 2006