Call number: LD2668 .T4 1958 H86 / Master of Science

Where the Dead Remain is a murder mystery set in a Post-Katrina New Orleans where the gods, magic and monsters of various world mythologies actually exist. The story follows a week in the life of Jude Duboisson, a once magician who is struggling with the loss of his magic and the life he had known in the wake of the storm, as he is pulled out of his torpor and into the affairs of the mighty once again. He is tasked with discovering who murdered Dodge Renaud, the fortune god of New Orleans. What he discovers, though, are some surprising truths about the fundamental nature of things: about loss, about New Orleans, and about himself.

Julia Margaret Cameron, Alfred Tennyson, and Virginia Woolf: three major figures of British art and letters who have received much critical attention individually, but have not yet been studied together. In this project I consider the valedictory works of these artists at their convergence, first through their obvious geographic, familial, and aesthetic relationships, then in more subtle, deeper, and overarching dimensions. The chief texts that are the focus of this dissertation are Tennyson's Idylls of the King, plus five of the Laureate's most popular poems; Cameron's photographic illustrations of these poems; and a selection of Virginia Woolf's late work, with a focus on "The Searchlight," Three Guineas, Between the Acts, and Anon. The dissertation also makes use of apposite poems, essays, life writing, and fiction created by these artists. Since "The Theatre of Anon" focuses primarily on Cameron's Illustrations, a chapter containing photographs of all the books' pages concludes the dissertation text. An additional selection of images is included as an appendix, in support of the central thesis of this project. The complex friendship between Tennyson and Cameron inspired the latter's only published book, a collection of poetic excerpts accompanied by images of his poems staged as scenes from amateur theatricals. The photos, with the photographer acting as their playwright-director, evoke the literary pageant in Woolf's last novel. In photographing the Illustrations, Cameron took control of the Laureate's poetry, metaphorically assuming the role of Vivien stealing Merlin's poetic spells. This dissertation traces Woolf's perception of her great aunt as it evolved over the decades, beginning with the eccentric, affected, and comical Cameron of Freshwater (1926) and ultimately portraying her as a dynamic, determined, and creative artist who helped provide inspiration for the character of the playwright-director Miss La Trobe of Between the Acts (1940). I argue that her great aunt's work influenced Woolf to create the figure she called Anon as a counterpart to Tennyson's King Arthur, and to place La Trobe's pageant-play at the center of her last novel, Between the Acts, as a final act of homage to Cameron. An aggregate of all anonymous minstrels, artists, and authors who ever lived, Anon appears in the guise of Miss La Trobe, whose communal, participatory art demonstrates how the traditionally monocular "eye" of history can be enlarged in community theatre from a single "I" to a collaborative project accommodating multiple perspectives. The Arthurian chivalry to which the ideology of Anon is set in counterpoint represents a conservative point of view based on the belief in a divinely-ordained social order headed by a monarch, with prescribed roles for each of its members. Valor in combat and devotion in courtly love, chivalry's two chief expressions, are the basis of Arthur's knightly code, which has influenced British national character and identity from the country's founding. Arthur reached his Anglophone apotheosis in the nineteenth-century's Gothic revival, epitomized in Tennyson's Idylls of the King. At the end of her career, at the start of the Second World War, Woolf came to believe that theatrical performance offered a better paradigm for social organization than the chivalric hierarchy at the root of the patriarchal British Victorian culture in which she had grown up. She saw in the community theatre a gathering place that could foster moments of transcendent unity, intellectual freedom, and imaginative inspiration, and in drama an art form resilient enough to withstand an audience's interruption and disillusionment. Performance provided a collaborative alternative to the conservative constraints that were her Victorian legacy; history, she felt, could be more accurately portrayed through the accretion of expressive theatrical performances than by the monolithic, linear narrative it had become as the official transcript of the nation's past. The theatricals scenes of La Trobe's pageant and Cameron's Illustrations - both composed of scraps and fragments of quotidian life rearranged and recombined - offer a new visual conception of the past. Working at the level of what Walter Benjamin has called photography's optical unconscious the dissertation demonstrates how Cameron's photographs reveal a reconstellation or reconfiguration, of the dominant British narrative from defamiliarized versions of the past that resonate with La Trobe's pageant. I propose that Cameron's photos re-envision canonical texts, inspiring a new mythology for Woolf, one that reflects a fluid and elastic version of the British national story. Challenging the received Carlylean conception of history as the biographies of great men, Woolf's counter-history, like Cameron's book of illustrations, features ordinary men and women playing extraordinary roles. The legendary Arthur, traditionally credited with uniting the country's thirteen tribes, founding Britain, and shaping the nation's identity, is but one actor among many in Woolf's pageant of history; his starring role in Tennyson's Idylls of the King is reduced to a few key scenes in the Illustrations and a cameo appearance in Between the Acts. Woolf implies that though there may still be room in history's narrative for heroic men, they will no longer dominate it. With its evolving, democratic nature, the community theatre created by Anon offers a paradigm of citizenship and social organization that Woolf believed could encompass British history, re-envision it, and offer the world's citizens hope for the future.

Este trabalho se propõe a traçar o cenário em que se desdobraram os acontecimentos que instigaram o gênio de Montesquieu a buscar um padrão cientifico para os fenômenos sociais e políticos que tão argutamente observava. Combinando as nuances doutrinárias de Montesquieu, pretende o estudo abordar as premissas conceituais básicas de federação e a ideia clássica da separação de poderes para, em seguida, examinar as atribuições da chefia de Estado numa república que adote o modelo federativo e a separação de poderes como seus nortes estruturais, no contexto de um sistema presidencialista de governo. Com base nas premissas deduzidas examina-se o alinhamento do modelo brasileiro àquelas premissas institucionais que o inspiraram. / The purpose of this research is to depict the events that unfolded within the scenario that provoked Montesquieu to search for a scientific pattern in order to explain the social and political phenomena that he carefully observed in his time. Drawing on the variations of Montesquieu’s doctrines, The work aims to explore the basic conceptual argument of federation as well as the classic idea of separation of powers. Thereafter, It intends to examine the roles of state leadership in a republic whose foundation lies upon the federative model and the separation of powers in a presidentialist system of government. Based on this, the study is going to consider the alignment of the Brazilian model to those institutional propositions that initially provoked Montesquieu’s mind.

This dissertation analyzes the discourse of three infotainment television shows built around their hosts – characters who have gained considerable importance and influence in their respective countries: American Jon Stewart (host of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart); British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen (the actor who incarnates the popular characters Borat, Bruno, and Ali G in the Da Ali G Show), and Peruvian Jaime Bayly (host of the Peruvian TV show El Francotirador/The Sniper). These three shows responded to their specific national, cultural, social, and political contexts, while simultaneously demonstrating important similarities: they parody journalistic genres while questioning traditional journalism authority and arbitrary media norms; they use humor to develop political, social, and cultural critiques; and they revolve around a talented character who is a media celebrity. Drawing upon theory and literature related to media spectacle, infotainment, tabloidization, celebrity, and the carnivalesque, this research analyzes the three media characters’ discourse and critiques within their respective national and cultural contexts in order to understand their role in those societies and how they negotiate discursive power in the public sphere. This analysis also seeks to reveal how Stewart challenges the mainstream news media by exposing the difficulties of debate in the U.S.; how the subaltern voices of Ali G, Bruno, and Borat position Sacha Baron Cohen to confront hegemonic culture and identity; and how ambiguity and contradiction allow Bayly to be a transgressor in a society where entertainment has a particular political history. This research establishes commonalities and differences among these three representative cases in relation to the broader, global phenomenon of satiric infotainment, and introduces the notion of “critical infotainment” to characterize this satiric trend that combines entertainment, comedy, journalism, popular culture, and politics to develop social critique. Critical infotainment is interpreted as a result of and a transgressive reaction to the process of tabloidization and the cult of celebrity in the media spectacle era. Finally, this dissertation includes recommendations for future critical infotainment experiments to fill the gap left by the traditional press in today’s mediascape. / text

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This thesis addresses the nineteenth-century art collection of Donald Alexander Smith, Lord Strathcona (1820--1914), in relation to intersecting questions of imperialism, colonial relations, and cultural status. Both the formation of the collection and its dispersal are linked to a dialectic of cultural hegemony and national identity in nineteenth-century Canada. Smith came penniless to Montreal from Scotland in 1838, became the wealthiest man in Canada by the end of the century, and is known as Lord Strathcona after being raised to the peerage by Queen Victoria in 1897. My discussion of the rise and fall of Strathcona's collection is informed by postcolonial theory and its critical re-reading of imperialism. While British imperialism was the ideology that governed Strathcona's activities, Anthony Giddens's structuration theory is introduced to account for how personal agency remains operative within this dominant ideology. / Strathcona formed a significant collection of European paintings and Asian art, which was, however, largely dispersed by the institution charged with its care, thus reducing its significance. Krzysztof Pomian's concept of collectors as select individuals who mediate symbolic cultural power through semiotic constructs provides an important methodological anchor for an analysis of the collector and his collection, as does Carol Duncan's work on the motivation to collect art and to structure cultural identity through control of museums. As well, the princely model of collecting reveals the humanist values operative throughout the centuries by comparison of Strathcona to the Medici in terms of the deployment of spectacle. / This thesis makes use of primary source materials to compare Strathcona's collection to several of his peers in order to place him in his cultural milieu during a time in Canadian history when Montreal was a British enclave in a French province. Analysis of fragmented primary source inventories, catalogues, personal letters, and records held by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the National Archives of Canada, identification of paintings documented in the Notman photographs of 1914--1915, and my tracing of the public portraits of Strathcona by Robert Harris still on view in Montreal institutions allowed me to create useful inventories that previously did not exist.

This dissertation analyzes melodrama as a common mode of mid-nineteenth century cultural expression. The dissertation centres on the melodrama in Bulwer Lytton's novels, emphasizing Lytton's use of melodrama as a form of radical social criticism. The first novels expose contemporary social inequities, but employ melodramatic techniques sparingly. Later, Lytton shows complete understanding of the melodramatic method and the 'political' basis of melodrama, resulting in novels such as Paul Clifford and Night and Morning. Other novels, though, display, uneasiness with the one-sided analysis of life presented in melodrama, while Zanoni attacks the naivety of melodramatic social criticism. Most of the last novels condemn melodrama for its simple-mindedness, or falsification of human experiences. In addition, 'reactionary' novels such as The Parisians reject the radical social vision of melodrama as neither attainable nor desirable.