This thesis suggests that problematic dualistic frameworks are challenged in writing that, in engaging issues of embodiment, does not overlook the biological sciences. This thesis first introduces a brief history of dualistic frameworks, especially in the context of critical animal studies. Each chapter that follows engages a core theme of embodiment: Jacques Derrida's concept of autoimmunity; Sigmund Freud's work on depression, hysteria, and PTSD, along with Elizabeth Wilson's reading of Freud’s work as psychosomatics; and the work of David Wills, whose theory of dorsality suggests an original technicity, or automaticity, at work at the origin of the human species and at the origin of biological life itself. Significant in each chapter is the way in which each theorist draws on concepts, research, or analogies that come from biology in order to strengthen his or her concepts of embodiment.

Thesis (M.Com.)(Informatics)--University of Pretoria, 2006. / Includes summary. Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis explores a pedagogical enquiry that has transformed the way I think and the way I teach. I used a variety of critical and theatre theories to frame my enquiry and for four years consecutively, visited a non-government organization (NGO) in India that uses theatre as an alternate pedagogical tool. I reflected upon the methodological differences between the theatre practices of the NGO and my practices. I then turned my enquiry inward to consider how my learning informed my teaching practices. I then created an alternate theatre project for some students in the American Midwest with Ashok, an artist from India. Ashok spent twelve days training the students in what I refer to as action theatre, while I coordinated, observed and reflected. This theatre is a form of social activism; it is designed to provide a forum for the students to express their socio-political views and raise individual and collective social awareness in the process. After the training period, the students presented a play using these theatre methods. They engaged in discussion with their audience directly after their play. After the training period, Ashok returned to India. He took on the role of mentor and informant to my ongoing enquiry. My enquiry then shifted from an introspective one to a practical one. Some of the students who wished to do so continued creating plays in this fashion. I took over the leadership of the group at their school. A new theatre troupe was created and I used the concepts learned at the NGO and from Ashok in an American suburban context. The theatre troupe created plays for three years. When I moved back to Canada, the troupe stopped its operations. Some students in the group continued activist work using art as a medium by finding other opportunities. I turned my enquiry inward once again to reflect upon how these processes have changed the way I think and the way I teach. / Thesis (Master, Education) -- Queen's University, 2010-01-11 12:23:08.053

Of the major literary modernists writing in English in the early years of the twentieth century, arguably the most misunderstood and critically neglected has been Wyndham Lewis. It is the contention of this dissertation that Lewis should be reassessed, not only as a vitally important writer and artist, but also as one the most significant critical theorists of modernity. Accordingly, the central aim of this dissertation is to demonstrate that Lewis, whose oeuvre extended from fiction, drama, poetry and literary criticism to radical experimentation in painting and drawing, to a considerable range of non- fictional, political and philosophical writings which would now be classified as critical and cultural theory, was not only a highly significant theorist of his own period, but also, pre-emptive of many of the concerns that have come to be identified with postmodernism and its aftermath. The essence of this untimeliness, it is argued, lies firstly with his consistent engagement with the nihilism hat he believed to be the engine of modernity, and secondly, with his creative deployment of the ideas of a range of continental philosophers from Kant and Schopenhauer to Nietzsche and Bergson to counter that nihilism and in Nietzsche's terminology to "overcome" it. In the process, and particularly in his exploration of temporality and spatiality as they configure human identity, Lewis provided a philosophical commentary on the modern that in many ways paralleled and prefigured the intellectual trajectory of major twentieth century thinkers such as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and subsequently, Gilles Deleuze and Jean Baudrillard. The genealogy of these parallels and pre-figurations will be traced through the use of the concept of repetition as it is deployed by Lewis in his critical theory and fiction, from his early short stories to his final theological fantasies.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Cleveland State University, 2008. / Abstract. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Oct. 7, 2008). Includes bibliographical references (p. 412-464) and appendices. Available online via the OhioLINK ETD Center. Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1998. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 466-494). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

No description available.

D.Phil. (English) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

Contemporary methods of food production in the United States have become undeniably destructive ecologically.  Two of the strongest symbols of that destruction from corporate industrial agriculture are CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) and monoculture crop production.  This thesis seeks to find examples of producers refusing these methods as well as what motivates those producers to refuse, and what that refuse could mean politically.  The project is grounded theoretically in the work of critical theorists, especially Herbert Marcuse, because the Frankfurt School\'s criticism of instrumental rationality and understanding of domination functions to elucidate the societal conditions that allow for agricultural (over)production to be swept up in problematic methods in the name of efficiency. Part I starts by analyzing academic as well as popular discourses of CAFOs and the historical process of industrializing meat production and agriculture in the United States.  Here both corporate capitalism and enlightenment rationality are indicted and Marcuse\'s theories are put to work to set up what is being refused. Part II uses examples of organic and local food to provide an understanding for how consumption centered refusals can be co-opted by corporate interest.  Part III seeks out contemporary refusals that go past \'green consumerism\' and foster a "new sensibility" that is grounded in a sense of place, ecological cooperation with nature, and refuses corporatism.  In this new sensibility there is a direct rejection of the instrumental rationality, the profit motive and exploitation of nature. / Master of Public and International Affairs

published_or_final_version / Law / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy