This dissertation explores the transmission, reception, and appropriation of Franz Kafka in Czechoslovakia during the Cold War, against the background of the contemporary international readings of Kafka, especially in West Germany. The first chapter examines Paul Eisner's translation of the Trial in the context of his influential triple "ghetto theory" and from the perspective of his contemporary translation discourse as well as recent translation theories. The second chapter focuses on the reception of Gustav Janouch's Conversations with Kafka, and the reasons why this controversial text was welcomed in the West and dismissed in the East as a forgery. The chapter uses new archival discoveries about Janouch and discusses questions of witness and testimony. The role of "witness" took an ominous turn in the case of Eduard Goldstücker, who is the focus of the third chapter. Goldstücker was tried in the Slánský show trials in the early 1950s and forced to testify against Slánský. The chapter explores how Goldstücker attempted to come to terms with his past through reading of Kafka. The secret police files that were kept on him provide new insights on Goldstücker's published texts, public persona, and the Liblice Conference that succeeded in rehabilitating Kafka in 1963. The last chapter examines the samizdat publications of Kafka's works. This chapter spans the 1960s to the 1980s Underground culture and examines the appropriation by Ivan Jirous of the "ghetto" topos and Kafka for the Czech Underground. I address the following topics: the status of witness as a legitimization of an "authentic" reading, censorship, the interplay between politics and literature, and the construction of authorship.

This dissertation examines images of China produced in early Soviet culture, focusing in particular on the mid-to-late 1920s, a period of heightened Soviet involvement in Chinese politics. It argues that China became in this period the primary testing ground for the creation of an "internationalist aesthetics": a mode of representation that might express horizontal solidarity over vertical dominance, and inscribe China into the global map envisioned by Marist-Leninist theories of revolution. Seeking to produce a new China to replace the exotic Orient, Soviet artists and writers experimented with multiple genres and media--reportage, film, theatre, biography--in their search for the correct mode for internationalist aesthetics. The struggle over how to represent the world for a revolutionary society thus coalesces, in this period, around the question of how to represent China. Such an aesthetics is inevitably interconnected with politics, and internationalist aesthetics encountered and expressed the same ambiguities as the political project of Soviet internationalism: a liberatory, anti-imperial ideology that simultaneously sought to control political and historical narratives from the world revolution's proclaimed centre in Moscow. Consequently, these disparate images are united by an insistence on the privileged position and perspective of the Soviet observer, who looks at Chinese reality with a combination of advanced modern knowledge, sympathy with oppression, and revolutionary experience that is purportedly inaccessible to other Europeans, or indeed to the Chinese themselves. This privileged perspective on China undergirds the claims of internationalist aesthetics to present a true image of the world. The search for an authoritative mode for internationalist aesthetics is hampered, however, by recurrent issues of access, mediation and translatability, and by lingering parallels between this avowedly anti-imperialist discourse and the imperial systems of knowledge production it supposedly replaces.

This dissertation explores how the imagined semiotic mode of the unconscious, illiterate "savage" was instrumental to twentieth-century technologies of production in two respects: firstly, in the context of a global division of labor, as a way to disqualify certain groups' intellectual products from the category of intellectual property; and, secondly, in disciplines of aesthetic production, as an imaginary model on which to base new technologies of design and communication. In my dissertation, Savage Mind to Savage Machine: Techniques and Disciplines of Creativity (1870-1985), I argue that class inequalities under capitalism have been linked to the ongoing formulation of two distinct--albeit tacit--categories of epistemic subjectivity: one whose creative intellectual processes are believed to constitute personal property, and one whose creative intellectual processes--because these are deemed rote or unconscious--are not regarded as the property of those who wield them. This epistemic apartheid exists despite the fact that the unconscious psyche or, as I call it, the "Savage Mind," was, at the same time, repeatedly invoked by modernist designers in their efforts to formulate creative technologies, ones that tended increasingly towards digital modes of production. The history I examine in the dissertation reveals how modernist design has implicitly constituted itself as the process through which unconscious, magical creativity becomes consciously systematized and reified as technological, scientific forms of production. The dissertation is structured around four disciplinary paradigms of design, which collectively span the late nineteenth to late twentieth centuries--industrial design, architecture, environmental design, and media arts--and asks how and why each of these sub-disciplines invoked "savage thought" to develop new methods of creativity. While it is well-known that Europe's avant-gardes often imitated the visual forms of so-called primitive societies, there is scant scholarship accounting for how the alleged thought processes of an "originary" intelligence--gleaned from the theories of anthropologists, psychologists, and other social scientists--were translated into modernist design methods. Designers in fact hoped to discover in "primitive" and magical thought specific intellectual mechanisms for linking designed things to larger contexts of signification, a search that dovetailed with early endeavors in the field of Artificial Intelligence to devise computational languages and environments. The Savage Mind thus lies at the heart of new media technologies, even while intellectual property in those technologies remains the purview of a scientific elite.

This dissertation offers a new perspective on the birth of modern Chinese literature by investigating the following question: How did literature come to be understood as an effective vehicle of national salvation? The following chapters locate the answer to this question in intertwining ideas on religion and realism. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw an upsurge of vernacular literature portraying contemporary life in China alongside deliberations on the meaning of a newly introduced term: “religion” (zongjiao). This process launched a long lasting perception of literature as effective—capable of turning a country in flux to a strong nation. The story of modern Chinese literature’s rise to such prominence forms part of a transnational history, linking national literatures and Christian modernity. Across the colonial world, Protestant missionaries introduced the idea that a true-to-life literary portrayal can mobilize readers into action by appealing to their natural sympathy towards human suffering. These theories found a seedbed in China, Japan, India and Africa, where various authors modified the Christian evangelical message into a thorough critique of imperialist thought. Chapter One begins with the global rise of “Life” in the 1910’s as a new epistemology for understanding the human. In China, deliberations over the meaning of life hinged upon interactions with social Darwinism, American Protestant ideas on religious experience, Bergsonian vitalism, critiques of materialism in German Lebensphilosophie, and Chinese Neo-Confucian ethical thought. “Life” became the main axis pivoting debates on how to save China from its plight: Could evolutionary biology account for the truth of life? Could religion explain aspects of life that biology cannot? The task of representing the truth of life was entrusted upon the fledgling modern Chinese fiction and poetry. Chapters Two and Three trace this conviction in the powers of literature to nineteen-century missionary essay contests. Held in sites of imperial encroachment around the world, these contests promoted fiction writing as a miraculous endeavor. Similar to the way that reading the scriptures was supposed to produce a sense of connection to the great beyond, so too was the spiritual message of literary texts believed to ignite a “sympathetic resonance” (gongming) between authors and readers that would propel the latter to social action. The religious concept of sympathy inspired Chinese authors to further explore the connections between man and the universe in search of the perfect representation of life. This search led to an important encounter with the Bengali Renaissance Movement, explored in Chapters Four and Five. Rabindranath Tagore’s visit in China (1924) serves as a point of departure to investigate how prominent Chinese authors experimented with concepts such as “Eastern Spirituality” “The Poet’s Religion” and “Folktales”. Such literary interactions added important dimensions to the formation of Chinese realism, by envisioning Pan-Asian literary sympathies, which redefined the meaning of religion, life, and the nation. By foregrounding the transnational collaborations and interactions of religion, realism, and Asian solidarity in shaping Chinese literature, this dissertation offers a multi-sited perspective on the unmatched significance of modern literature to China’s national revival and, in turn, delivers a new understanding of China’s role in a global deliberation over the meaning of human life.

This study tracks tensions between different modes of knowledge in a body of eighteenth-century fictions centered around themes of detection and punishment of crimes, exemplary among which are Aphra Behn’s The History of the Nun (1689), Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (1724), Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748), Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), and William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794). Focusing on crimes as varied as forgery, rape, and murder, this set of fictions raises important questions about eighteenth-century narrative techniques and formal elements. For example, why is the narrator of Aphra Behn’s The History of the Nun at once omniscient and limited? Why does the ending of Defoe’s Roxana seem abrupt and inconclusive? Critics struggle to find satisfactory answers to these questions because they often read intrusive narrators, abrupt conclusions, and disconcerting tonal shifts as stylistic faults or as ineptitude at realistic narration. I argue that formal peculiarities of eighteenth-century fiction about criminal investigation are in fact revealing narrative symptoms of an attempt to resolve conflicts between competing theories of knowledge rooted in theology, empirical philosophy, probabilistic reasoning, and other modes of understanding.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2010. / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / "June 2010." Cataloged from student submitted PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 233-235). / How does one design a game to make change? How can I design a game that engages players in ethical gameplay? For this project, I used multiple methodologies--research through design, background research, iterative game design, playtesting, and player interviews--to explore strategies that game designers might use to accomplish goals that involve affecting change in players. I designed a pervasive game adaptation of Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo, through which I explored ways to engage players in ethical decision making. I playtested the game, Civilité, with a group of fifteen Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) students and affiliates during MIT's Independent Activities Period (IAP) in January 2010. The game ran around the clock for seven days and took place throughout MIT campus. Supported through a variety of media, including a website, audio podcasts, physical props, hidden tupperware boxes, and a variety of paper documents, Civilité transformed the players' everyday campus environment into an imaginary nineteenth century Paris on the eve of Napoléon's Hundred Days. Along with the ethical decisions confronting players' fictional characters, players also had to make ethical decisions regarding what was acceptable gameplay behavior. After the playtest, players participated in a group post mortem and individual thirty minute interviews. This thesis discusses the methodologies that I employed in this project to engage Civilité players in ethical and unethical behavior and to encourage ethical reflection both during and after gameplay. It also addresses the thorny question, "what are game ethics?" by crafting a rough framework for ways that game designers can think about game ethics. Using observations from the playtest, players' daily reports, the group post mortem, and the individual player interviews, this thesis argues that the ethical issues that players identified fall into three ethical domains: the procedural domain, the diegetic domain, and the magic circle's domain. / by Michelle Moon Lee. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 105-111). / This thesis explores the evolving nature of independent music practices in the context of offline and online social networks. The pivotal role of social networks in the cultural production of music is first examined by treating an independent record label of the post-punk era as an offline social network. This develops a useful framework for then considering the similar and distinctive ways in which contemporary independent practices are enabled and/or shaped by online social networks. Analysis is based on close, comparative readings of the structures and affordances of two case studies: the UK-based Rough Trade record label (1978 - 1991) and MySpace (2003 - present). Numerous examples of artists and their practices are drawn upon to illustrate how discursive meanings of independence are negotiated within each network. Investigated are potentials for realizing not only autonomy from the mainstream music industry, but also a range of other post-punk ideals tied to a broader independent ethos concerned with issues of access and participation, artistic control and freedom, as well as desires to engender more diverse music cultures. The intersection of offline and online networks in the context of today's dynamic, transitional music industry further provides new opportunities for more meaningful artist-to-artist, artist-to-fan, and artist-to-company/label interactions. By emphasizing the centrality of social networks, conceptions of autonomous, "do-it-yourself" music making are problematized in favor of "do-it-together" understandings that foreground cooperation. / by Evan Landon Wendel. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 110-115). / This thesis examines how Marcel Duchamp's artwork Fountain has been reproduced and evaluated over time. The original piece was made in 1917 and was lost soon after it was created. Fountain has become renowned through its representations, descriptions, and copies and replicas of various scale; consequently, any later artistic critique was directed at the reproductions, rather than the original piece. Considering the fact that the original no longer exists, Fountain's reproductions somewhat reflect the artistic aura of the original, especially when Duchamp was personally involved in their creation. Fountain's reproductions may be viewed as originally (re-)produced artworks on their own. This thesis studies the processes of artistic evaluation applied to Fountain's reproductions. Fountain is a special example for the following reasons: When it first appeared in 1917, it openly posed the question of whether objects mass-produced by manufacture can be given artistic value. Moreover, since Fountain's artistic evaluation has been attributed to the reproductions, Fountain extends the question of attributing artistic value to reproduced objects, to artistic value attributed to reproduced art, in turn also raising questions about the relationship between original and copy. / (cont.) Finally, the artistic evaluation of Fountain has changed radically over time, further evincing the inherently ambiguous and subjective character of artistic evaluations, interpretations and debates. In order to respond to these subjects, this thesis compares the documentary information we have about Fountain, from photographs to descriptions and replicas, in order to analyze how artistic interpretations of the reproductions have gradually qualified Fountain's artistic reputation. A close examination of these reproductions raises dilemmas in regards to Fountain's artifactual status, as these may also be extended to reconsider its characterization as a ready-made. This thesis highlights the dilemmas underlying the interpretations and evaluations about Fountain and questions any presumption of direct analogy or similarity between the original and the reproductions. It explains these presumptions as the outcome of mechanisms of artistic evaluation and support. These mechanisms express the art system, operating each time in order to promote, or to suppress, any artwork. Over time, new artistic standards were being introduced transforming the art system in which Duchamp's artwork would be artistically appraised. / by Ioannis Zavoleas. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2001. / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 120-123). / Introduction: Zoo, garden, arcade--three places emblematic of European society's pleasure in and subjugation of animal and plant nature, of the texture of civilized life in a world created by Industry and Progress. This triad, it seems, would stand in opposition to Lummis' oft-repeated formula of "sun, silence, and adobe," and the vision of stillness in the Southwestern hinterland that it evokes. Indeed, few other regions of the United States have so consistently nurtured the cult of the primitive and the peasant that inheres in Lummis' simple paean to adobe. Indian and Hispano both build from adobe; and it, being earth, absorbs these populations back into the land, wedding artisanal, agrarian, and pastoral lives into an integrated vision of ethnicity and region, a spirit of the desert and of the sky. Here only, the modernist regional aesthete would argue, could the authentic American pastoral be found: "there is that genuineness of unfettered simplicity; the closeness to elemental realities in peasant life, which only in New Mexico, of all states, is indigenous." Hence the modernist Southwest was manifestly not a place of Victorian zoos, picturesque gardens, or Parisian shopping arcades. And yet, I would like to argue, the evanescent afterimages of these places--the ways of being and relating that they nurtured and expressed--appear before and behind the crystalline pictures of snow-blanketed desert and azure sky, the lines of Pueblo dancers, the Hispano santero with his wood and his knife, distorting and fragmenting any purely localist vision of Southwestern regionalism. The scent of piñon smoke mingled in the nose of the newly-arrived traveler with smog from factories in New York, Chicago, or Boston, and smelled all the more pungent because of this mixture. / by Christopher W. York. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 100-105). / After years of strict bans on the media, local radio in post-Taliban Afghanistan is undergoing an intense period of reconstruction. This thesis uses a multi-sited ethnographic investigation to examine local Afghan radio's various relationships with women in Afghanistan. In examining both the production and consumption contexts of local radio, it pinpoints areas of disjuncture that can and do lead to breakdowns in communications with the Afghan woman audience. Societal constructions of "cultured" tastes in the production room tend to obstruct female-friendly radio in favour of elite, male-oriented textual encodings. Consequently, women's radio transmissions are often at odds with the genre preferences and high levels of illiteracy of women in Afghanistan, failing to communicate with large segments of their intended audience. Radio producers face real and perceived penalties for disrupting cultural rules on what is and is not done on the air, thus the current system propagating ineffective women's radio is highly resistant to change. / by Sarah Kamal. / S.M.