This thesis examines the recent emergence of corporeal protest art in Russia. Through analyses of cultural, social, and economic shifts in the post-Soviet Era, I observe how this corporeal turn reflects a significant cultural transition away from the literary text, which has traditionally held a role of major importance in Russian culture. Detailed analysis of the contemporary performances of Pussy Riot and Petr Pavlensky are conducted in order to elucidate the social and political causes and implications of such a shift. Manifestation of oppositional discourse on the site of the human body is understood theoretically through Giorgio Agamben’s biopolitics, Mikhail Bakhtin’s grotesque body, and Inke Arns’ and Sylvia Sasse’s theory of subversive affirmation. Interestingly, this artistic divergence has coincided with the rise of relative economic and social wellbeing in Russia – conditions that tend to foster the development of a burgeoning public sphere, now standing at odds with an increase in political repression. Oppositionists and protest artists are, therefore, exploring new and unconventional ways of expressing dissent. My study contextualizes these new methods of expression within the larger tradition of the cultural expression of political will, examining the ways in which these works are readable through Russian cultural norms and to whom they speak. / Graduate

As early as 1954, families of children who had been segregated into separate spaces fought and succeeded in having their concerns heard in the landmark Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education. In 1975, P.L. 94-142, Education for the Handicapped Children Act (EAHCA) was important because it exposed the history of family-school relations, addressing the multiple forms of inequity, particularly the exclusion of children with dis/abilities from U.S. public schools (Valle & Connor, 2011). Although EAHCA legislation was created to provide solutions to the problems of special education, it appeared to have provided an unequal environment in which the families with the most economic resources could advocate for their children and obtain access to better educational opportunities (Ong-Dean, 2009). Goodwin, Cheruvu, and Genishi (2008) described these policies as based on the “culturally deprived paradigm that compares racially, culturally, linguistically, and socioeconomically diverse peoples to a White, middle-class standard” (p. 4). In this manner, these educational legislative policies are problematic as they have defined parent involvement as meaning families of culturally and linguistically different backgrounds are expected to act or interact with school professionals in particular ways. Moreover, these conceptualizations of parent involvement continue to privilege and perpetuate professional viewpoints based on a Eurocentric middle-class standard (Sleeter, 2001). Bakhtinian theories of language are used to understand how families describe their experiences as they encounter the deficit discourse of parent involvement used by school professionals. This is important because professional jargon or “stratified language” presents a danger in that it is replete with value judgments and beliefs (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 293), assuming power that then comes to inform the ways families understand their experiences and their selves in school contexts. This tells us that it is imperative to know how families of children with dis/abilities experience their communication with school professionals as there is a danger that the discourse of parent involvement will continue to perpetuate particular definitions of family participation that disqualify family knowledge by silencing the potential strengths and contributions of minoritized families (Lareau & Munoz, 2012). Moreover, the way minoritized families experience school professionals and how this is connected to how they come to be involved in their child’s education is not clear. This study, conducted just before and during the coronavirus pandemic, drew from Disability Studies (DS), disability critical race studies (DisCrit), and Intersectionality theories. It examined family-school communication being fully inclusive of all the ways families engage in the education of their children with dis/abilities at the crossroads of race, ethnicity, dis/ability, class, language, and culture (Hernández-Saca et al., 2018; Annamma et al., 2013). To rethink traditional notions of what counts as knowledge, pláticas (personal exchanges) revealed critical raced-gendered epistemologies that allowed the experiential knowledge of Latinx mothers of children with dis/abilities to be viewed as a strength (Delgado Bernal, 2002).

Thesis Intertextuality in the work of Milan Kundera deals with intertextuality facets in his novels theoretically and practically. This work deals with the text and the relations between one and other - with intertextuality and with novel genre theories. I work with four important theorist, Michail Bachtin, Julia Kristeva, Gerard Genette and Roland Barthes. I examine their concepts of polyphony or Socratic dialogue and apply them on Kundera. Practical part explores Milan Kundera, intertextuality relation of his work his novelistic and theoretical approaches. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

The diploma thesis Milan Kundera and Intertextuality deals with aspects of relations between the texts in his novels. The first part outlines the intertextuality, theory of the novel and the approaches of some literary theorists towards this issue. The second half of the thesis analyzes the intertextuality in Kundera's works in various forms, mainly based on the themes of dreams and physicality. The greatest emphasis is placed on examining the legacy of Kafka in the context of Kundera's works, particularly in the novels The Joke and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

Submitted thesis follows up clowning as phenomenon that can be approached in different ways and understood from different points of view. The perspective depends on a theoretical base and methodological tools, including a conceptual apparatus. Because the viewpoint of the phenomenon is the core of submitted theses, I have decided to use as a methodological tool discoursive analysis, particularly bakhtinian analysis. Theoretical background is provided by Mikhail Bakhtin's theories and concepts (dialogism, heteroglossia, speech genres) and Julia Kristeva's theory of intertextuality (that was inspired by bakhtinian thinking). One of key terms of this theses is the concept of transgression which relates to supposition that transgression is one of principal features of clowning. The theses submits confrontation of two different approaches to the phenomenon of clowning. First one is provided by structuralist model by Paul Bouissac. Bouissac describes clowning as an abstract system, relatively static and closed code, which is builded of stabilized signs. His conception presents clowning as a phenomenon firmly tied up with the circus structure. Although Bouissac defines transgression as a characteristic feature of clowning, from his point of view is this transgression limited by borders of circus. Crossing...

In this bachelor’s essay, I examine the importance of place in Marguerite Duras’ The Lover from 1984. By using an ecocritical approach I find that the concepts of “culture” and “nature”, or “human” and “environment”, are made undistinguished. I also find that colonialism is highly present, and the novel accords to the theories of the overlapping literary fields of ecocriticism and postcolonialism. Ecocritical postcolonialism maintains that non-white people have historically been likened to animals and thus have a similar relationship with colonisers as humans have with the non-human. In addition, I apply Michail Bachtin’s concept of the chronotope to the novel and conclude that the Mekong River, the Cholen district, the mother’s home, the desert, and France are the most significant chronotopes. They all represent time in some way – usually in the form of cultural history or the protagonist’s lifetime – and each one plays into the novel’s overarching views of colonialism and nature.

The inability of language to convey complete meaning and truth is a central point of address for much post-structuralist literary theory and criticism. When these theories are applied to a first-person narrative structure, whether it is a work of fiction or non-fiction, certain specific incongruities arise. When a narrative seeks to recall certain events, a presupposed reexamination takes place as the narrative unfolds text comes into being. If a narractice is contructed in this way then the intent of the text then is to convey comprehensive meanings or truths of those cataloged experiences. According Deconstructive Theory, it is language's inherent nature to resist ultimate meaning. This focus on the articulation of truth is futile because meaning, like language, is always already in a state of fragmentation. This project explores five individual works from different literary traditions-ranging from the canonical to the relatively obscure. The works exhibit various approaches to articulation; including varying degrees of self-definition, personal fiction, and narrative movement toward inarticulation.

This thesis investigates the rhetorical features of blogs that lend them dialogic strength as an online genre through the lens of Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of speech genres, utterances, and dialogism. As a relatively new online genre, blogs stem from previous genres (in print and online as well as verbal), but their emergence as a popular form of expression in our current culture demands attention to how blogs also offer us different rhetorical opportunities to meet our changing social exigencies as online subjects in the 21st century. This thesis was inspired by questions about how blogs redefine the rhetorical situation to alter our textual roles as readers, writers, and respondents in the new generic circumstances we encounter--and reproduce--online. Applying the framework of Henry Jenkins' Convergence Culture and Pierre Levy's Collective Intelligence, this thesis analyzes how blogs enable us as online subjects to add our utterances to our textual collective intelligence, which benefits from our personal experience and the epistemic conversations of blogs as online texts. In addition, it is also an inquiry into how the rhetorical circumstances of blogs as textual sites of collective intelligence can create a reciprocal learning environment in the writing classroom. I ultimately examine blogs through the lenses of alternative pedagogy--informed by David Wallace and Helen Rothschild Ewald's Mutuality in the Rhetoric and Composition Classroom and Xin Liu Gale's Teachers, Discourses, and Authority in the Postmodern Composition Classroom--to suggest the potential consequences of a writing education that includes how we are currently writing--and being written by--our culture's online generic practice of blogs.

<p>This thesis employs Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of architectonics to examine the poetry of Nima Yushij, the father of “New Persian Poetry.” The architectonic structure of Nima’s poems presupposes an authorial position situated outside the whole of the work. Outsideness provides the author with the distance that is necessary for consummating the hero and all other elements inside the work’s environment in determinate spatial and temporal boundaries. As Bakhtin puts it, only in this way can the author acquire a surplus of seeing that is required for adopting a valuational stance in relation the hero and the work as a whole. To Bakhtin, the author’s valuational stance toward the hero is the essence of the aesthetic product. This valuational position vis-à-vis the other, which generates what Michael Holquist calls the “structure of authoring,” is enacted on multiple levels in Nima’s poems as the hero, and sometimes the narrator, also perform the authorial function vis-à-vis other characters inside the poem, i.e., fixing them in determinate spatial and temporal boundaries. Of course, from the author’s perspective, the hero and the narrator are also situated inside the poem and occupy specific horizons in its environment. In this sense, their authoring activity is not a precisely aesthetic activity. Nevertheless, Nima utilizes the hero and the narrator’ activity to foreground the structure of authoring inside the poem, to make its dynamics “viewable.” This is a point that I will try to elucidate fully in the course of this study.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This project seeks to make a contribution to contemporary theories of affect by putting the work of theorists Brian Massumi, Sara Ahmed, Jane Bennett, and Donovan Schaefer in conversation with the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. At the same time, it relies on these theorists’ conceptualizations of embodied affect to explore the role of the body in Bakhtin’s understanding of selfhood and freedom. In particular, I show how Bakhtin’s incorporation of aesthetics into processes of self-creation and relationality adds to scholarship on interpersonal affective dynamics; sociocultural economies of affect; ethically potent experiences of wonder and generous behaviors; and religious impulses. Further, I demonstrate that the principles of dialogism and polyphony can be conveyed through cinematic means, and argue that Bakhtin’s concept of carnival can inform analyses of sensory impact of cinema, revealing its potential to challenge politics and ideologies on an embodied and affective plane. Finally, I argue that Bakhtinian polyphony is the aesthetic modality proper to cultivation and manifestation of ethics of generosity, whereby sensations of awe, wonder, and curiosity stimulate attentive and open-minded engagement with the world.