Using similar disjunctive writing styles, Michael Ondaatje and Daphne Marlatt create characters who defy stability, consistency, and predictability. Both authors undermine the notion that the self is a unified entity determined to resist an ambiguity in the search for univocal meaning. Rather, the worlds inhabited by Buddy Bolden, Lalla Dickman, Mervyn Ondaatje, and Ina as found in Coming Through Slaughter, Running in the Family, and Ana Historic subscribe to uniformity by valourizing social and textual conventions. Within these contexts of closure, all characters succumb to some degree of hysteria, madness, or death. In Ondaatje's novels scandal becomes a release from the monotony of a unified self, while in Ana Historic Annie Anderson's continual displacement of pronouns effectively suspends female identity. Ondaatje and Marlett fictionalize the post-structuralist work of Roland Barthes in "The Death of the Author" in that both authors create characters whose boundaries are never fixed, but always shifting according to the contexts in which they find themselves. On this basis the self as embodied in the pronoun "I" contains not a set persona, but a network of competing voices. In the final chapter of this thesis, I examine the implications for authorship which Ondaatje and Marlatt raise in their contention that the self exists without a central core. During moments of autobiography, Ondaatje and Marlatt implicitly contest the defacement of their signatures on novels which call for an obfuscation of identity, but arrest that movement when it folds back on the author's domain--the outer cover of the text. Because Ondaatje and Marlett elide themselves with their characters, they, too, are pulled into a vertigo of language that knows not identity, but the endless positing and erasure of tropes. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

In this dissertation, I explore the ways in which contemporary theatre stages possibilities and crises of embodiment. In order to penetrate the complex relationships between character, performer, text, and production, I coin a critical term: theatrical bodysnatching. This term refers to a dissonance or power struggle made manifest in performance, in which a performer’s body seems to resist the character it inhabits in ways that enhance, rather than detract from, the thematics of a theatrical production. In order to demonstrate the power of theatrical bodysnatching, I analyze playtexts, theatrical performances, reviews, and performer interviews. I argue that theatre is a medium optimally suited for staging sociopolitical dialogue because it models a kind of self-reflexive critique, in which performing bodies both embrace and resist the demands of the playtext. As a result, theatre creates a provocatively charged experience for spectators and performers, in which both parties are thematically implicated in the aims and preoccupations of a given play. Just as the performer’s body does not dissolve but instead accomplishes the crucial work of ideological exposure, the audience also becomes a marked, integrated presence and source of commentary in these bodysnatching plays. In this dissertation, I harness a particular selection of Anglophone drama from the late 20th to early 21st century in order to demonstrate how the often uncanny, subversive nature of live performance allows for radical reconsiderations of embodiment. By examining the ways in which these strangely iterated characters— and the performers who portray them— unfold onstage, theatrical bodysnatching poses urgent questions of exploitation, agency, and resistance.

This study aimed to show the variety and skill of Browning's portrayal of character and to prove that the unifying forces in his treatment of character is the development of the poet himself.

No description available.

This essay explores how adolescent girls in two pieces of children’s fiction are portrayed in children’s literature from the start and end of the 20th century to examine how they perform their gender in relation to expectations as informed by the Angel in the House discourse. Anne of Green Gables and the Harry Potter series were published at the start and end of the twentieth century, and both texts engage with the discourse. Using Judith Butler’s theory of Gender Performativity, this essay demonstrates that the Angel in the House discourse continues to influence expectations of how adolescent girls should behave, particularly with regards to being responsible for upholding the moral code to ensure the social standing of their family. However, they differ in regard to other aspects of the discourse, indicating that parts of the discourse appear to have lessened over the course of the 20th century.

Datorspel har växt i popularitet för vart år som gått och involverar idag flera miljarder aktiva spelare världen över. Idag visar statistik på en nästintill jämlik fördelning av män och kvinnor som spelar men ändå anses fortfarande den stereotypiska gamern som manlig. Detta har lett till att det finns problem med representativa kvinnliga spelkaraktärer i många spel då problem kring hypersexualiserade karaktärer, karaktärer i stereotypiska könsroller samt även exkludering av kvinnliga karaktärer har förekommit under många år. Detta kan till viss del tänkas vara på grund av att spelindustrin länge varit fylld av en majoritet av manliga utvecklare och arbetare som även utvecklar spelkaraktärer gentemot en manlig publik. Men i och med vikten av karaktärs identifiering när de kommer till en bra spelupplevelse är de viktigt att ta reda på var kvinnliga gamers anser är bra kvinnliga spelkaraktärer och vilka attribut som borde fokuserar på vid utvecklingen av kvinnliga spelkaraktärer. Genom en webbenkät som riktade sig mot kvinnliga gamers världen över och frågeställningen “Vad kännetecknar bra kvinnliga spelkaraktärer enligt kvinnliga gamers?” samlades kvalitativ data in som gav djupare insikt i vad som krävs i den framtida utvecklingen av kvinnliga spelkaraktärer. I resultatet finns trender om vikten av välskrivna, utvecklade och mångfaldiga karaktärer men även att karaktärernas personlighet och roll verkar ha större betydelse än dess utseende när det kommer till aspekter om vad som gör en bra spelkaraktär. Det uttrycktes många åsikter om att översexualisering av kvinnliga karaktärer inte är önskvärd. Däremot tyckte majoriteten att en förbättring skett inom spelindustrin de senaste åren när det kommer till kvinnliga representation men att det finns mycket som fortfarande måste göras på den fronten. Därför rekommenderas det med framtida studier inom området för att ytterligare navigera vad som kan göras för att förbättra spelindustrin i samband med spelkaraktärer. / Videogames grow in popularity every year and today there are several billion active users around the world. Todays statistics show an almost equal distribution between men and women that play videogames but the stereotypical gamer is still seen as male. This has lead to some representative problems for women in videogames where, for many years, many games have female characters that are oversexualised, in stereotypical gender roles or even exclude female characters all together.This can partially be because of the fact that the gaming industry have been dominated by male developers for many years and they develop games to a generally male audience. With the importance of character identification when it comes to a good gaming experience and the negative effects these representation issues can have on girls and women it is now important that we find out what female gamers considers make a good female game character and what attributes should be the focus when developing good female game characters. With the help of a web survey, a target of female gamers around the world and the research question “What characterizes good female game characters according to female gamers?” qualitative data was collected that gave a deeper insight into what it takes to develop good female game characters. The results show trends about the importance of well written, developed and diverse characters but also the fact that the characters personality and role is more important than their appearance when it comes to making good female game characters. Many opinions on oversexualisation were expressed and the fact that this was not a desirable trait for female characters. Many also expressed the opinion that the female representation in videogames has become better in the last couple of years but that there is still a long way still until it can be considered good. That is why future research within the field is encouraged so that we can navigate what it takes to improve the gaming industry when it comes to game characters.

No description available.

Technical advancements allow for embodied virtual agents to not only be increasingly human-like, but also to behave and look like particular individuals. As biases towards self-similarity have been found in human-human studies, it is of interest to explore to what extent this applies to virtual characters (VCs). This work set out to extend on previous research that has investigated the effects of facial self-similarity in VCs, and explore it in the context of empathic emotion. For this aim, a method for creating facially similar virtual characters was developed and a user study conducted where 13 participants were told autobiographical stories by a virtual character that either did or did not resemble them facially and/or in gender category. The participants' first impressions and emotional responses were measured. The results showed that even though similarity was not explicitly perceived, a bias might exist towards more positive impressions of self-similar characters, especially in terms of gender category. Regarding the emotional responses, the results did not allow for discovering any difference between conditions but pointed to some interesting differences in comparison to what was hypothesized. The immense ways in which the appearances of virtual characters can be altered provides possibilities to influence the interaction with them. However, although biases might exist on a general level, it is difficult to predict the human responses in individual cases. Virtual characters might make possible a more human-like interaction with technology, however, it might also mean that our reactions to them are influenced by more parameters and our relations to them become even more like those with other humans: complex. / Den tekniska utvecklingen möjliggör numera att virtuella agenter kan göras inte bara människolika, utan även lika specifika individer i hur de beter sig och ser ut. Då tidigare studier påvisat att människor ofta föredrar personer som i någon mån liknar dem själva, är det intressant att utforska i vilken utsträckning detta även gäller virtuella karaktärer. Detta arbete hade som mål att undersöka effekterna av visuella likheter mellan människor och virtuella karaktärer, med fokus på ansikten och genus och i en kontext där empati är betydande. En metod för att konstruera virtuella karaktärer som hade visuella likheter med specifika användare utvecklades, och en användarstudie med 13 deltagare genomfördes. I det konstruerade scenariot berättade en karaktär, som hade likheter med användaren antingen gällande ansiktets utseende och/eller genus, självbiografiska historier. Intrycket av karaktären och den emotionella responsen mättes. Resultaten visade att den visuella likheten inte uppfattades explicit. Dock fanns tendenser som pekar på att likheter framför allt när det gäller sociala kategorier som genus, kan ha en positiv påverkan på hur virtuella karaktärer uppfattas. Det gick inte att upptäcka några skillnader mellan betingelserna gällande den emotionella responsen, men resultaten påvisade intressanta avvikelser från de förväntade reaktionerna. Möjligheterna att designa och anpassa virtuella karaktärer till olika individer och situationer ökar, vilket kan utnyttjas för att försöka påverka hur människor förhåller sig till och interagerar med dem. Det är dock svårt att förutsäga hur människor kommer att reagera och relatera till en virtuell karaktär utifrån generella tendenser, vilket denna studie visar. Virtuella karaktärer kan möjliggöra en mer människolik interaktion med teknik, men det innebär också att många parametrar är inblandade och att relationerna med tekniken blir liksom relationerna mellan människor: komplexa.

Creating engaging, interactive, and immersive synthetic characters is a difficult task and evaluating the success of a synthetic character is often even more difficult. The later problem is solved by extending Turing's Imitation Game thusly: computational construct should be evaluated based on the criteria of how well the character can mimic a human. In order to accomplish a successful evaluation of the proposed metric, synthetic characters must be consistently believable and capable of role-appropriate emotional expression. The author believes traditional synthetic characters must be improved to meet this goal. For a synthetic character to be believable, human users must be able to perceive a link between the mental state of the character and its behaviors. That is to say, synthetic characters must possess intentionality. In addition to intentionality, the mental state of the character must be human-like in order to provide an adequate frame of reference for the human users' internal simulations, to wit, the character's mental state must be comprised of a synthetic model of personality, of personality dynamics, and of cognition, each of which must be psychologically valid and of sufficient fidelity for the type of character represented. The author proposes that synthetic characters possessing these three models are more accurately described as synthetic personalities. The author proposes and implements computational models of personality, personality dynamics, and cognition in order to evaluate the psychological veracity of these models and computational equivalence between the models and the implementation as a first step in the process of creating believable synthetic personalities.

The constant development of new plays is vital for theatre to stay relevant. There is a desire, a yearning, a need to see the issues we face in our lives on stage in current contexts, and to watch characters living with them. The ability, as an Actor, to be an asset to the process of creating new works is invaluable. For my thesis, I discuss the role of the Actor in the process of developing new plays for the stage. I say “discuss” because I venture to guess that this role is constantly evolving. There may be as many ways to approach the process as there are collaborative teams. Therefore, I do not suggest there is one right way in which an Actor can play a part in the process of new play development, nor do I intend this to be a comprehensive look at all the roles an Actor can play. However, I discovered some best practices, which I put into a list and seized this opportunity to cultivate my skills in these areas. My intent was to work and speak with Playwrights and Directors, learning from them what they value in an Actor at the various phases of new play development, and to nurture these skills within myself. I utilized my discoveries in the World Premiere of Triangle Logic by Debbie Lamedman. As theatre is a collaborative art, I learned to shift and adapt my role, depending on the other collaborators. While Triangle Logic was the larger focus of my thesis work, I also sought additional smaller projects, such as the workshop productions of Steven Christopher Yockey’s play, Heavier Than…, part of Orlando Shakespeare Theater’s PlayFest 2010, and Orlando Repertory Theatre’s devised play Writes of Spring, I thinK his NamE Was rick. I applied iii techniques I learned while working on Triangle Logic to the other new projects, where appropriate. I endeavored to evaluate each experience objectively, while recognizing that they were, by nature, subjective experiences.