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This thesis is comprised of a critical component and a creative component. The creative component consists of a portfolio of creative writing drawn from a fictionalized memoir, and the critical component consists of three interconnected chapters analyzing the creative component. The creative component, titled The Accidental Peacemaker, has been written alongside my recently published (and related) book, How to Make Peace in the Middle East in Six Months or Less Without Leaving Your Apartment. It is a satirical, first-person fictionalized memoir about how the Middle East conflict manifests in North America, told from the point of view of a North American Jewish narrator. The critical component contextualizes the creative component by situating it within the disparate genres of creative writing that inform it, and by exploring its descent from them. Together, the three critical chapters argue that the creative component stands at the intersection of life writing, North American Jewish Writing, and humourous political writing. The first critical chapter, on life writing, examines the overlaps between fiction and memoir, and argues, in part, that from a creative writer's point of view, a sharp distinction is challenging to pinpoint. The second critical chapter, on North American Jewish writing, explores some efforts that have been made to determine what characteristics identify “Jewish writing,” and which identifying marks are germane to this particular piece of creative work. The third critical chapter, on humourous political writing, argues that humour and politics are particularly intertwined in North American writing and media today, and that by using humour and first-person life writing, an author can probe into sensitive political terrain without as much risk of needlessly offending as they might have if they used other approaches.

Die vorliegende Studie untersucht mittels eines Diodenlaser (808 nm) zur axillären Epilation, inwieweit eine Reduktion der applizierten Einzelenergie mit angepasster Pulsdauer und repetitiver Pulszahl (Low-Fluence) eine Verträglichkeitssteigerung, bei gleichzeitigem Erhalt der Epilationseffektivität, wie er von traditionelle High-Fluence Applikationen bekannt ist, bewirken kann. Es wurden die Axillae von 21 Patienten des Hauttyps eins bis drei nach zwei unterschiedlichen Protokollen im vierwöchigen Intervall behandelt. Auf der linken Seite erfolgte die Therapie sechsmalig mittels Low-Fluence, wohingegen auf der rechten Seite eine Kombination von dreimalig Low-Fluence- und dreimalig High-Fluence-Modus appliziert wurde. Es konnte hinsichtlich der Effektivität kein statistisch signifikanter Unterschied zwischen beiden Behandlungsmethoden nachgewiesen werden. Die Reduktion zeigte sich konstant und lag am Ende der 24-monatigen Gesamtstudiendauer im Mittel bei 45%. Die Ergebnisse stellen sich damit schlechter dar, als bei konventionellen Studien im High-Fluence-Bereich oder anderen Low-Fluence-Konzepten. Als Ursache ist am ehesten eine unzureichende Einzelimpulsdauer und eine zu gering gewählte Pulswiederholungsanzahl zu sehen. Andererseits ergab sich eine deutliche Verträglichkeitssteigerung, vor allem hinsichtlich des Schmerzempfindens und im Auftreten von Pigmentierungsstörungen zu Gunsten der Low-Fluence-Therapie.

German academic writing most commonly ignores not only the reader but also the author, which leads to a rather extravagant stylistic tone. The personal essay, as Lopate describes it and as it has been practiced from Montaigne on, still doesn’t enjoy the status it deserves in German academic writing. It shows a way of dealing with one’s authorship that opens up numerous subject-related values of (not only) literary writing.

Editorial

Schwerpunk: Schreiben in den Geisteswissenschaften (I)

Editorial

This thesis examines the crucial diagnostic and productive roles that the concepts of minor and major practice, two interrelated modes of cultural production set out by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Kafka: toward a Minor Literature (1975), have to play in the present era of ubiquitous digital technology and informatics that Deleuze himself has influentially described as the control society. In first establishing the conditions of majority and majority, Deleuze and Guattari's historical focus in Kafka is the early twentieth century period of Franz Kafka's writing, a period which, for Deleuze, marks the start of a transition between two types of society – the disciplinary society described by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish and the control society that is set apart by its distribution, indifferent technical processes and the replacement of the individual with the dividual in social and political thought. Because of their unique conceptual location, at the transition between societies, the concepts of majority and minority present an essential framework for understanding the impact of ubiquitous digital technology and informatics on cultural production in the twentieth century and beyond. In order to determine the conditions of contemporary major and minor practice across the transition from disciplinary to control societies, the thesis is comprised of two interconnecting threads corresponding to majority and minority respectively. Drawing on the theoretical work of Deleuze and Guattari, Friedrich Kittler and Fredric Jameson alongside pioneering figures in the historical development of computation and informatics (Alan Turing, Claude Shannon and others), material observation on the technical function of digital machines, and the close examination of emblematic cultural forms, I determine the specific conditions of majority that emerge through the development of the contemporary control era. Alongside this delineation of the conditions of majority I examine the prospective tactics, corresponding to the characteristics of minority set out by Deleuze and Guattari in Kafka, which emerge as a contemporary counter-practice within the control-era. This is carried out through the close observation of key examples of cultural production in the fields of literature, film, video, television and the videogame that manifest prospective tactics for a control-era minor practice within the overarching technical characteristics of the control-era major. Through an examination of these interrelated threads the thesis presents a framework for both addressing the significant political and cultural changes that ubiquitous computation effects in constituting the contemporary control society and determining the ways in which these changes can be addressed and countered through cultural production.

This thesis argues that Cassius Dio used his speeches of his Late Republican and Augustan narratives as a means of historical explanation. I suggest that the interpretative framework which the historian applied to the causes and success of constitutional change can be most clearly identified in the speeches. The discussion is divided into eight chapters over two sections. Chapter 1 (Introduction) sets out the historical, paideutic, and compositional issues which have traditionally served as a basis for rejecting the explanatory and interpretative value of the speeches in Dio’s work and for criticising his Roman History more generally. Section 1 consists of three methodological chapters which respond to these issues. In Chapter 2 (Speeches and Sources) I argue that Dio’s prosopopoeiai approximate more closely with the political oratory of that period than has traditionally been recognised. Chapter 3 (Dio and the Sophistic) argues that Cassius Dio viewed the artifice of rhetoric as a particular danger in his own time. I demonstrate that this preoccupation informed, credibly, his presentation of political oratory in the Late Republic and of its destructive consequences. Chapter 4 (Dio and the Progymnasmata) argues that although the texts of the progymnasmata in which Dio will have been educated clearly encouraged invention with a strongly moralising focus, it is precisely his reliance on these aspects of rhetorical education which would have rendered his interpretations persuasive to a contemporary audience. Section 2 is formed of three case-studies. In Chapter 5 (The Defence of the Republic) I explore how Dio placed speeches-in-character at three Republican constitutional crises to set out an imagined case for the preservation of that system. This case, I argue, is deliberately unconvincing: the historian uses these to elaborate the problems of the distribution of power and the noxious influence of φθόνος and φιλοτιμία. Chapter 6 (The Enemies of the Republic) examines the explanatory role of Dio’s speeches from the opposite perspective. It investigates Dio’s placement of dishonest speech into the mouths of military figures to make his own distinctive argument about the role of imperialism in the fragmentation of the res publica. Chapter 7 (Speech after the Settlement) argues that Cassius Dio used his three speeches of the Augustan age to demonstrate how a distinctive combination of Augustan virtues directly counteracted the negative aspects of Republican political and rhetorical culture which the previous two case-studies had explored. Indeed, in Dio’s account of Augustus the failures of the res publica are reinvented as positive forces which work in concert with Augustan ἀρετή to secure beneficial constitutional change.

Die vorliegende Studie untersucht mittels eines Diodenlaser (808 nm) zur axillären Epilation, inwieweit eine Reduktion der applizierten Einzelenergie mit angepasster Pulsdauer und repetitiver Pulszahl (Low-Fluence) eine Verträglichkeitssteigerung, bei gleichzeitigem Erhalt der Epilationseffektivität, wie er von traditionelle High-Fluence Applikationen bekannt ist, bewirken kann. Es wurden die Axillae von 21 Patienten des Hauttyps eins bis drei nach zwei unterschiedlichen Protokollen im vierwöchigen Intervall behandelt. Auf der linken Seite erfolgte die Therapie sechsmalig mittels Low-Fluence, wohingegen auf der rechten Seite eine Kombination von dreimalig Low-Fluence- und dreimalig High-Fluence-Modus appliziert wurde. Es konnte hinsichtlich der Effektivität kein statistisch signifikanter Unterschied zwischen beiden Behandlungsmethoden nachgewiesen werden. Die Reduktion zeigte sich konstant und lag am Ende der 24-monatigen Gesamtstudiendauer im Mittel bei 45%. Die Ergebnisse stellen sich damit schlechter dar, als bei konventionellen Studien im High-Fluence-Bereich oder anderen Low-Fluence-Konzepten. Als Ursache ist am ehesten eine unzureichende Einzelimpulsdauer und eine zu gering gewählte Pulswiederholungsanzahl zu sehen. Andererseits ergab sich eine deutliche Verträglichkeitssteigerung, vor allem hinsichtlich des Schmerzempfindens und im Auftreten von Pigmentierungsstörungen zu Gunsten der Low-Fluence-Therapie.