Thesis (M.S. in Operations Analysis)--Naval Postgraduate School, June 2003. / Thesis advisor(s): Thomas W. Lucas, Samuel E. Buttrey. Includes bibliographical references (p. 73). Also available online.

This dissertation is about the ways in which modern war, modern medicine, and modern theatre have reciprocally shaped attitudes towards bodies. I argue that the rise of theatrical realism, taking models and metaphors from newly technologized war and medicine, gives viewers the power to see into others, and envisions this force as a mark of superior humanity. I show how this gaze is engaged in performance events that dramatize war-as-medicine: from WWI theatre-for-the-troops depicting enemy soldiers as microbes, to the 2003 televised medical exam of Saddam Hussein. I argue that the tools and rhetoric of realism are instrumental in imagining distanced killing as a medicinal and sanitizing act, thus naturalizing violence-as-care. Over the same period, I study the work of military veteran theatre makers who have practiced theatre as an alternative medicine: healing not by distance and separation, but through a visceral connection between performers and spectators. Starting with Antonin Artaud’s theatrical “surgery,” I progress through chapters on Edward Bond, David Rabe, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, the Riot Group, and Sylvia Khoury. Taking theoretical frameworks from medical humanities and disability studies, and integrating methods from cognitive science and phenomenology, I explore how their theatre opens up corporeal space for resonance, receptivity, and transformation. I conclude by looking at current applied theatre projects bringing together groups of military service members and civilians, and healthcare providers and receivers. I argue that theatre is uniquely able to heal the selective numbing involved in military and medical training, by resensitizing bodies and relearning ways of caring for oneself and others.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität, Münster, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references and index.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2008. / "Graduate Program in Art History." Includes bibliographical references (p. 499-510).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2010. / Title from first page of PDF file (viewed March 30, 2010). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Georgia, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 217-223).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 444-468).

Basiert auf der Diss. Univ. Brüssel, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references and index.

From Preface: This is not a history of the Boer War; nor is it an exclusively literary study of the poetry of that war. If the work that follows has to be defined generically at all, it may be called an exercise in cultural history. It attempts to assess the impact of a particular war on the literary culture, especially the poetry, of both the participants and the observers, whether in South Africa, in Britain and the rest of the English-speaking world, or in Europe. An assumption made throughout this study is that war poetry is not only verse written by men who are or have been under fire. Just as 'War poetry is not to be confused with political, polemical, or patriotic verse, although it can contain elements of all of these, so it is also the work of observers at home as much as that of soldiers at the front. It follows that I have not allowed myself the academic luxury of selecting, on the basis of literary merit only, a handful of outstanding war poems for rigorous analysis and discussion. "Doggerel can express the heart" wrote one of these late-Victorian soldierly versifiers, and I have roamed widely in the attempt to assemble the material which, I believe, records the full range of the impact that the Boer War made not only on Briton and Boer, but on the worId at large. A major thesis of this study is that the Boer War marked the clear emergence of the kind of war poetry which we have come to associate almost exclusively with the First World War. Poems in the style and spirit of "The Charge of the Light Brigade" were written in profusion, but the work which serves as this study's masthead, Hardy's "Drummer Hodge," clearly has --like many of its contemporaries-- more in common with Owen's verse than with Tennyson's. The reasons for the appearance of such poetry are discussed in Chapter 1; the rest of the book provides the evidence of it.

This thesis examines the relationship between the photographic archive of the First World War and Canadian war memory through an analysis of the production of photographs depicting the ruins of Ypres, Belgium and their postwar appropriation. Taken by official photographers in the employment of the Canadian War Records Office, the photographs were intended to act as both historical documents and, paradoxically, as publicity and propaganda images. Both functions of the photographs work to construct a unified image of the war and are similarly characterized by a repressive structure. Ypres, almost entirely destroyed during the war, was both the site of Canada's first battle and major victory as well as a contentious site connoting military mismanagement and wasteful loss of life. Resultantly, representations of the city's ruins are suggestive of a corresponding shift from a mythic to a horrific war in First World War historiography that took place in the decades proceeding it. Images of Ypres' ruins were filtered through both material censorship enforced by the military to elicit high morale and psychic censorship. Photographers made mechanized war conform to their visual expectations. However, the repressive structure literally contains that which it represses as an uncanny double and invariably allows for the possibility of its return. I argue that the anodyne and conventionalized image generated by official photographs of ruins also contains and signifies the destructive violence of modern warfare. Finally, I examine the construction of these conflicting narratives as they develop around the simultaneous processes of archivization and circulation ever-widening circles of mnemonic constructs such as postcards and tourist brochures at the same time that they were being archived. I argue that rather than contaminating and damaging the archival meaning of the photographs, the archive is an accumulative institution capable of incorporating a variety of conflicting narratives without ruining its authority.