A cosmodern reading of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas creates a positive vision of the future for readers through various techniques of fragmentation including fragmentation of voice, language, and time. By fragmentation, I have in mind the consistent interruption of the novel’s voice, language, and time that requires an active and aware readership. The reader’s interaction with the text makes the novel re-constructive. In fact, the global nature of Mitchell’s novel, its hopeful ending, and its exploration of the effects of globalization can be considered as a means of exploring the dynamic relationships between the characters, the reader, and Mitchell’s authorial voice. Rather than falling back on familiar postmodernist truisms such as the hopelessness of genuine communication or the impossibility of truth, Mitchell creates a hopeful vision of the future of the world, one that champions the life, agency, and personal narrative of the individual.

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Uppsatsen undersöker på vilket sätt konstnärerna Caspar David Friedrich och Marcus Larsons konst influerats av epoken romantiken samt om deras bildkonst kan ha kopplingar till den gotiska litteraturens tematik.

In recent decades, the art and life of Jacques-Louis David have sparked a renewed surge of interest in the academic community. It is startling, however, that the often prevalent and imposing elements of architecture found in David's paintings have received little scholarly attention. This study fills a lacuna in David studies by providing a new perspective on his passionate engagement with architecture and its impact on his art. I begin by demonstrating that, following his trips to Rome early in his career, architecture became central to many of the artist's most celebrated compositions. Focusing chronologically on an approximately thirty-year period of the artist's career, I explore key paintings by David that serve as principal examples of the emphasis he placed on architecture and its ability to reaffirm, complement, intensify, and contribute layers of meaning to the central themes of his paintings. Throughout the dissertation, I identify principal architectural elements contained within these works and seek to determine their significance. David's engagement with architecture began at a young age. He was born into a family of architects and throughout his adolescence was surrounded by some of the most important thinkers, artists, and architects of the eighteenth-century. This unique upbringing and inclusion within Paris's elite cultural milieu had a tremendous impact on how David would come to understand architecture as an aesthetic vehicle capable of enhancing his works with added narrative and metaphorical meanings. The dissertation takes as its starting point an investigation into David's period as a pensionnaire at the French Academy in Rome where he became profoundly inspired by the Antique. David recorded the impact of the Roman experience on his artistic development within the pages of a dozen albums, which contain a vast number of drawings depicting the Italian landscape, ancient buildings and monuments, and antique sculpture. The Roman albums reveal the importance David placed on architecture during this period and mark the beginning of the transformative effect the medium would have on his subsequent work. David's obsession with the art and architecture of ancient Rome revealed in his Roman albums, for example, combined with his fascination for the popular vedute genre exemplified in compositions by Robert, Panini, and Piranesi, inspired him to reconsider how architecture could be used in new and significant ways in representations of historical subjects. This study investigates the multiple sources of architectural inspiration that served David throughout his career and inspired him to create a powerful architectural language. Comparisons between painting and architecture, including representations of architecture in painting, are fully explored for in the art of David, painting and architecture are not dichotomous. Rather, the two mediums are inextricably linked and together can be understood to embody the thoughts, pursuits, and passions of an epoch.

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In this study of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, I combine the linguistic and literary theories of renowned scholar Mikhail Bakhtin to create a new lens through which to consider Wallace’s thematic project. Combining Bakhtin’s linguistic theories of dialogic conflict and heteroglossia with his literary theories on the grotesque provides an integrated stylistic methodology that illustrates the connections between Wallace’s use of imagery and style. In view of his use of both grotesque liminal imagery and dialogized heteroglossia, Wallace’s seemingly obsessive use of language is recast as a manifestation of grotesque embodiment that reflects the postmodern mileau in which he writes. I propose that Wallace crafts a series of grotesque stylistic devices that shape his words to match his theme. I propose two particular grotesque stylistic devices: narrative bleed in which the seemingly neutral narrative voice begins to reflect particular character discourses and character-to-character voice bleed in which dialogic conflict between characters is dramatically rendered within the novel.

The thesis primarily examines the 1797 trial of David McLane in Quebec City for spying, the steps taken by the British authorities to ensure a conviction, and McLane's activities in 1796 and 1797 in Vermont and Lower Canada on behalf of the French Minister to the United States, Pierre Adet. McLane did not receive a fair trial because the colonial administration in Lower Canada so thoroughly manipulated the legal system that a guilty verdict was assured. But, ironically, McLane was a guilty man, having been hired by Adet to find sympathizers who would help instigate a rebellion in the colony; he was also employed to gather military intelligence and to help the French seize Lower Canada. The paper also looks at the attempts of the French between 1793 and 1797 to stir up unrest in the colony and their intentions to spark a rebellion and/or to invade Lower Canada. Furthermore, the work discusses the fear that the colony's English community felt due to their perception of the French threat and to their belief that the local Francophone population might rise en masse in an insurrection. Finally, the thesis examines the steps that the English took in response to those fears. The transcript of the McLane trial was found at the Willamette University College of Law Library and the pre-trial depositions of the prosecution's witnesses were located in the collection of the Oregon Historical Society. Many of the research materials were obtained from the libraries of Portland State University, Lewis and Clark College, Willamette University, Oregon State University, the University of Oregon, the University of New Brunswick, and the University of Western Ontario or were obtained through the interlibrary loan offices at Portland State University and the Salem Public Library. Materials were also obtained directly from Canadian historian F. Murray Greenwood, the editorial office of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, the National Archives of Canada, the City Archives of Providence, Rhode Island, and Dr. Claire Weidemier McKarns of Encinitas, California. Most of the early Lower Canadian statutes and other information concerning Lower Canadian and British legal history were found at the Oregon Supreme Court Library. Also, most of the biographical information concerning McLane's early years and his family was found at the Genealogical Section of the Oregon State Library and through the family history centers at the Corvallis (Oregon) and the South Salem {Oregon) Stakes of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

This dissertation explores the manner in which theological elements from a biblical literalist perspective undergird and authorize the historical memory texts produced by Christian nationalist advocates in support of conservative Protestant religious establishment. Christian nationalist discourses exploit notions of divine warrant, public remembrance, and "historical evidence" as means to read the nation and contemporary far right ideological commitments as biblically founded, and hence, as binding upon the nation. Focusing on the rhetoric of David Barton, Christian nationalist par excellence and Republican Party operative, I argue that discourses of Christian nationhood mobilize the theologies of providence, inerrancy, inspiration, and literalism as rhetorical strategies to situate God's law as the definitive legal standard through which American law and cultural values are (de)authorized. Drawing upon the presumptions of biblical literalism to present the textual "proof' of a Christian nation, the politics of this memory work (and the many ways these discourses presume to furnish textual proofs of a biblical nation) aims to influence and to shape public memory, opinion, political behavior, and policy formation in favor of far right Protestant hegemonic interests.

The rhetoric of W.E.B. Du Bois contributed both to a sense of group failure among blacks and a sense of individual failure. Du Bois also created a need to explain the reasons for the failure of the group, as well as that of individuals within the group, specifically those within a segment of the black population deemed the talented tenth. Today the talented tenth is more generally spoken of as those occupying positions within the black middle class. Explanations for failure among blacks as a group are generally of two kinds. The first posits that the failure blacks experience as a group is due to the failure of the talented tenth to provide adequate leadership of the race. The second posits that the failure blacks experience as a group is due to the failure of American society to commit itself to establishing not only legal equality but also social, political, and economic equality for all Americans. Members of the talented tenth, not understanding that the root of the problem lies with the impossible situation Du Bois placed them in as saviors of the race begin to attribute perceived failures among blacks to American society. Instead of questioning Du Bois's goal and the possibility for complete 'racial uplift,' members of the talented tenth begin to question American society's commitment to realize the goals of the civil rights movement. Rather than optimism, one finds pessimism among blacks in the post-civil rights era. I examine Shelby Steele, Derrick Bell, and Randall Robinson's texts as rhetorical discourses that respond to the notion of a debt owed to the race, and evidence a sense of group failure among blacks. I illustrate how David Payne's topoi of therapeutic rhetoric provide a context for understanding not only the arguments these authors make about the nature of failure among blacks, but also the possible solutions these authors pose as avenues for consolation and/or compensation.

Tesis para optar al título de Periodista / Con una mirada atónita fija sus ojos en la cámara que se empina dejando de lado el fusil militar. Tenía 23 años y era dirigente sindical de un laboratorio químico. Su imagen ha circulado por el mundo como símbolo de la represión de la dictadura en Chile. “El hombre de la foto” cuenta la historia de Daniel Céspedes, quien fue retratado en 1973 por David Burnett en el Estadio Nacional.