This thesis is about the body and about how medical discourses conceptualise the body in health and in illness. However, any inquisitiveness about the body is determined by historical, social and political environment that nurtures the discursive formations of knowledge. I focus particularly on the conceptualisation of the body in the two distinct medical traditions of Western and Chinese medicine. I examine Michel Foucault's analysis on the medical gaze and on the external technologies of power deployed on the body of the individual and on the social body. The knowledge generated from the medical gaze is articulated through a normalising and prescriptive discourse. The gaze of Chinese medicine that looks at the workings of the cosmos to define the truth about the body generates similar authoritative knowledge that targets the individual and the social body. However, this effect of power, although it never disappears entirely, undergoes significant transformations when it enters the arena of human activities and the potential for improvisation in the behaviour of the human actor. There is always a gap between the text and the practice.

This thesis is an analysis as to whether or not Subcultural Theory may be utilized to understand how self-identification is configured within a subculture such as rave. Typically, subcultural membership requires various performative rites that express and maintain a group sensibility and identity. Rave, however, is a subculture that involves a relationship to space and technology that changes the nature of group affiliation within the subculture. This thesis focuses on how a body immersed in subcultural practices, and organized around varying technologies, must look toward an analysis of individual and subjective adaptations of those technologies. In essence, rave allows for identification that is shaped and altered by the participant, but only at each moment of interaction with the technologies of the club. Highly individualistic, dynamic, and technology-driven, the rave subculture offers the potential to examine the body as the site for identification, and escape, within an abstracting technological world.

'Skin-Deep' Impressions: Somatic Sense in an Age of Simulated Significance illuminates a variety of bodily modes of expression, ranging from body-art and popular body-fixation, over body-mutilation, body-play, and self-mutilation, to psycho-somatic patterns of behaviour. The question governing the work concerns the extent to which the physical orientation, currently characterizing our society, is to be considered a productive response to the so-called "crisis of representation." / A reading of Kerstin Ekinan's novel Blackwater (1996) is woven into and through the body of the work, indicating the shortcomings of theoretical understanding, the limitations of literary analysis, and the strength of literary narrative with respect to the issue in question. The distinction traditionally drawn between fashionable, transgressive and pathological ways of turning toward the body no longer holds. The blurring of the boundaries between self-making and self-destruction opens for a rather unexplored field of possibilities. / 'Skin-Deep' Impressions takes as its point of departure the claim made by some postmodern thinkers, that the cultural climate in the Western part of the world has turned "schizophrenic." The enthusiasm with which the arrival of the "schizo" has been received, ironically and tragically, is out of touch with reality. The suggestion emerging from my work is that the bodily phenomenon serves as a request for the reinstitution of more common frames of reference. The focus on the texture of the flesh, on physical wounds, and on the experience of physical pain, is viewed not as a manifestation of a general sense of victimization but rather, as the manifestation of a need to reinvent forms of representation allowing for the realization of emotionally intense and often ambiguous experience. The violent turn toward the body, finally, is viewed as a collective means of coping with the social unconscious, that is with the guilt associated with the crimes committed in the name of progress in the Western world. In this manner, physicality comes to substitute for what is lacking, namely a more suitable metaphysics. Paradoxically then, body-fixated subjects, commonly perceived as being self-absorbed and asocial may in fact represent a most serious attempt at introducing respect for other living beings in a culture characterized by an increasingly split between notions of humanity and conditions of living.

The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate that the "blason corporel" is a useful tool for understanding Paul-Marie Lapointe's poetry. Lapointe himself recognises that the variations of the "blason" that we can find in his poems are not the result of formal experimentation, but of a vision of the universe. The "poete quebecois" is seeking the unchanging: the human body and its place in the cosmos are two of the things that do not change, and thus, they are an important part of Lapointe's poetry. / In our introduction, we define the "blason corporel" as it emerged in France, during the Renaissance. We use the concept of the eternal return, as developed by Neitzsche, to try and understand how the same vision of the universe can perpetuate itself through the centuries. In our first chapter, we study the presence of the "blason" in Bouche rouge. In our second chapter, we examine the presence of the "blasons" in all of Lapointe's works. To do so, we use the rhetoric of figures, which enables us to evaluate the effect of the presence of the "blason" on the form. We come to the conclusion that the "blason" are structured by an accumulation of metaphors. This figure, the metaphor, abolishes all limits ("un decloisonnement") which brings us, in our conclusion, to concepts related to psychoanalysis and the study of myths.

No description available.

This dissertation examines the representations of the body in the completed dramatic works of Heinrich von Kleist (1777--1811). While taking into account the psychoanalytical and philosophical approaches to Kleist, this project has Heiner Miller's words as its point of departure: that the theater represents the collision of ideas with the body. The forces of power, gender and authority leave their traces of this collision on the bodies of his characters, whose metaphorical and literal falls, wounds and recoveries speak their own gestural language. / This study is organized on the principle of Kleist's use of genre designation, the approximate chronological order of his plays, and the representation of the body. Chapter one focuses on Die Familie Schroffenstein, Der zerbrochne Krug, and Amphitryon and the notion of bodily authenticity and integrity; chapter two, on Die Hermannsschlacht and Penthesilea, looks at the spectacle of violence and its effect on the body mobilized by emotional extremity; the third chapter, on Kleist's most celebrated works, Prinz Friedrich von Homburg and Das Kathchen von Heilbronn, examines aspects of gender and vulnerability. The conclusion views his essay "Uber das Marionettentheater" not as a key to understanding his works, but rather as a culmination of them, and investigates Kleist's writing on the wounded body and its connection to grace.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago Divinity School, December 1997. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2008. / Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2004. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 390-428). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, The Divinity School, August 2002. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.