Thesis (M.A.)--Catholic Theological Union, 1987. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 261-274).

Fast Enough is a collection of poems that plays on the potential implications of its title when thinking about history, time, place, nationality, religion and culture. These things are always in flux, there are no fixed systems, no solutions can be endorsed. There is a nagging anxiety and sense of being overwhelmed by these forces as the poems negotiate and come into contact with them. Formally the poems are interested in the possibility of the stanza, a controlled but arbitrary use of line and rhyme, the use of enjambment and variations in tone or delivery, from the colloquial to the intellectual. They use both urban and bucolic imagery, interspersing this to disorientate and confuse. The collection aims to unsettle, to propose and reject when thinking about the relationship of poetry to historical and contemporary pressures; the result is an unattached individualism. The poems offer a critique and inform. Distance and detachment are important elements for these poems as they move between England, Ireland, America and Europe. This is both a search for subject matter, and a signal of their interest in peripherality, the margins, the interstices and an angular or askance approach to place. Often a composed outsiderliness can be sensed in the subject matter, or in alienated but open speakers who are strangers in their own country or another, and existentially aware (or alert – alert to the dangers of past, present and future events/selves) observers. The critical element of this thesis, Places Where a Thought Might Grow: Culture, Liminality and the Troubles in Derek Mahon’s Lives (1972) and The Snow Party (1975), is a long piece of academically engaged literary criticism that assesses Mahon’s second and third collections of poetry. Using a theoretical filter of liminality, the work argues that Mahon strategically or deliberately writes the liminal into his poetry as a form of dissent against the cultural fixity apparent in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s. This derives from a profound sense of alienation from his Northern Irish, Protestant/Presbyterian inheritance and a reluctance to assume a role akin to that of a communal spokesperson. To do so the work considers important and specific poems from both collections. These are contextualised around the Troubles, an era when unique and overwhelming political and religious extremes decisively and long lastingly impacted Mahon’s poetry. It reads these collections as a two-part project in which Mahon implements liminal, peripheral and interstitial ideas (through the use of place, objects, subject matter and form) to interrogate absolutism and tribalism in the province. The work also argues that Mahon’s poems, influenced by existentialism, millenarianism and postcolonialism, are liminal zones where identity and subjectivity can be freely re-conceptualised and the unwieldy, prescriptive influence of such things as nationalism and history broken down. The poetry of some of Mahon’s Northern Irish contemporaries (notably Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Paul Muldoon) is considered. The study also proposes that the influence of the writers Samuel Beckett and Louis MacNeice (key literary catalysts in Mahon’s divorce from his Northern Irish origins) are simultaneously at work in both collections, creating unresolvable tensions and paradoxes in these poems.

Biography and Derek Six's big five ideas on compliance

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Manitoba, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references.

Derek Jarman’s Blue has a complicated reception and exhibition history. Stuck between his past representational queer cinema and the inability to represent the suffering and death from AIDS, Jarman crafted a film of radical stylistics. It is in Blue’s striking color that a transversality of form, sensation, and visuality occurs, and in so doing, produces a space for synesthetic affectivity and collective desire. This thesis will use those radical formal elements and the history of Jarman and Blue to position color away from the phobic tradition of color theory and towards a flowing site of political rupture.

This thesis takes the linguistic concept of metonymy and examines its potential as a creative structural principle both in poetry and in music. I explore the role of metonymy in the work of the poet J.H. Prynne, the improvising guitarist Derek Bailey, and the composer Helmut Lachenmann. I have also deployed some of the ideas arising from this exploration in a modular composition for improvisers entitled Representations, recordings of which accompany this thesis. My argument is that metonymy provides a means by which a work of poetry or of music can be highly sensitive to the world which it inhabits, but can do so by itself being an inextricably linked part of this world, rather than an attempt to reproduce or represent it, or to simply pass judgement from the sidelines. In my introduction I outline the literary theory of metonymy. I discuss the way that metonymy encompasses relationships both of contiguity and causality, and make the case that the many limitations inherent in metonymy (which have often led to its being perceived as inferior to metaphor) can in fact be seen as advantanges, because of the way that they can bind the work of art to the real. I briefly discuss some previous applications of metonymy to music, and outline an understanding of musical metonymy based on linear dissimilarity, historical and social contiguity, the origins and agency behind particular sounds, and an occlusion of the structural middleground. The first chapter discusses the work of J.H. Prynne. I argue that a use of metonymy as a productive constraint is illuminated by a philosophical position according to which the world is known to be real because of the resistances it presents to the actualisation of our desires. I discuss the role of metonymy in the development of Prynne’s poetic oeuvre, before illustrating my argument with a detailed analysis of the 2001 sequence Unanswering Rational Shore. In the second chapter I turn to the work of Derek Bailey. Drawing heavily on unpublished items from the Incus archive, I demonstrate the meticulous way in which Bailey constructed his improvisational vocabulary, and the senses in which that vocabulary and its deployment could be characterised as metonymic. I explore the influence on Bailey of Stockhausen, Beckett and Musil, and show how form and material in his work are inextricably entwined. The third chapter examines the work of Helmut Lachenmann and in particular the 1992 composition „... zwei Gefühle ...“, Musik mit Leonardo. I examine the role of the listener and the productive activity that metonymic structures require of them. I focus on Lachenmann’s deployment both of actual and pseudo-causality in his music, as well as his use of historical reference in an indexical fashion. In my fourth chapter I present my composition for improvisers, Representations. I discuss its mechanics, development, and influences, and I set forth its relationship to the concepts of musical metonymy I have elucidated in the body of this thesis, under the headings of “arbitration”, similarity, referentiality and the relationship between material and the middleground. In a short concluding chapter I take another angle on the links between the themes of this thesis by discussing the role of rubbish in the work of Prynne, Bailey and Lachenmann, and its apparently paradoxical relationship with a certain concept of purity. This allows me to conclude by considering the relationship of metonymic structures to a conception of truth which, I believe, has a certain urgency in the contemporary artistic climate.

Lim Wai-Man Jenifer. / Thesis submitted in: December 2002. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 102-105). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.i / Acknowledgements --- p.iii / INTRODUCTION --- p.1 / Chapter 1. --- The Problem of Personal Identity --- p.1 / Chapter 2. --- Personal Identity: A Review --- p.3 / Chapter 3. --- Different Versions of the Theory of Personal Identity --- p.6 / Chapter 3.1 --- Different Versions of the Physical Theory --- p.6 / Chapter 3.2 --- Different Versions of the Memory theory --- p.8 / Chapter 4. --- Cases of Exchanging Bodies --- p.14 / Chapter 5. --- Conclusion --- p.17 / Chapter CHAPTER ONE --- THE REDUPLICATION ARGUMENT --- p.19 / Chapter 1. --- Introduction --- p.19 / Chapter 2. --- Shoemaker's Brownson Case --- p.21 / Chapter 3. --- The Reduplication Argument --- p.22 / Chapter 4. --- "Memory Claims, Bodily Presence and Reincarnation" --- p.27 / Chapter 5. --- Objections to the Reduplication Argument --- p.31 / Chapter 5.1 --- The Two Cases are Different --- p.31 / Chapter 5.2 --- A Counter-Example by Robert Coburn --- p.33 / Chapter 5.3 --- A Too High Standard Set by the Reduplication Argument --- p.36 / Chapter 6. --- Conclusion --- p.38 / Chapter CHAPTER TWO --- THE NONDUPLICATION ARGUMENT --- p.40 / Chapter 1. --- Introduction --- p.40 / Chapter 2. --- Story 1: The Memory Theorist's Understanding of 'Exchanging Bodies' --- p.41 / Chapter 3. --- Story 2: Williams' Analysis of the Experiment --- p.44 / Chapter 4. --- Conventionalist Decision and the Best Candidate Theory --- p.49 / Chapter 5. --- Conceptual Undecidability --- p.51 / Chapter 6. --- The Relationships between Criteria and Perspectives --- p.52 / Chapter 7. --- Conclusion: 'Exchanging Bodies' as an Artificial Neatness --- p.55 / Chapter CHAPTER THREE --- PARFIT'S THEORY --- p.56 / Chapter 1. --- Introduction --- p.56 / Chapter 2. --- The Nature of Personal Identity --- p.57 / Chapter 2.1 --- The Basic Teletransportation Case --- p.60 / Chapter 2.2 --- The Branch-Line Teletransportation Case --- p.62 / Chapter 2.3 --- Physical Spectrum and Combined Spectrum --- p.65 / Chapter 2.4 --- Personal Identity: A Conceptual or Linguistic Issue --- p.68 / Chapter 3. --- The (Un)-Importance of Personal Identity --- p.71 / Chapter 3.1 --- Cases of Brain Operation --- p.71 / Chapter 3.2 --- Cases of Duplication --- p.73 / Chapter 3.3 --- Survival and its Moral Significance --- p.76 / Chapter 4. --- Conclusion --- p.78 / Chapter CHAPTER FOUR --- CONCLUSION: THE IMPORTANCE OF ONE'S IDENTITY --- p.79 / Chapter 1. --- Introduction --- p.79 / Chapter 2. --- The Dependence on External Facts Versus the Principle of Intrinsicness --- p.81 / Chapter 2.1 --- The Non-Branching Memory Theory --- p.81 / Chapter 2.2 --- The Best Candidate Theory --- p.86 / Chapter 3. --- The Importance (or Unimportance) of Personal Identity --- p.92 / Chapter 3.1 --- Unimportance: ´بPersonal Identity' as a Linguistic Issue? --- p.92 / Chapter 3.2 --- Importance: Subjective Linkage of the First Person --- p.94 / Chapter 4. --- Conclusion --- p.98 / References --- p.102

Developing portable mass spectrometry systems is an active area of research due to its broad range of useful applications, including environmental monitoring, threat detection, and space exploration. The mass analyzer is one of the key elements of the mass spectrometry system to develop for a portable system. Ion traps are a good candidate for the mass analyzer in a portable mass spectrometry system because the operating pressure scales with size. This allows for scaling down the other components of the system including the vacuum and electrical systems. Researchers at BYU are making an effort to develop miniature ion traps based on a planar geometry. The ion traps are made using microfabrication processes. A summary of the plates developed at BYU is presented in this work. Results from experiments to test the effects of pitch alignment on one design of planar ion trap plates are also presented. Conventional ion traps use a sinusoidal waveform to drive them. Driving the ion trap with a digital waveform has many benefits including extended mass range, lower voltage, and more control over the waveform. One of the difficulties involved in using a digital waveform is creation of a high voltage, high frequency waveform. This work details the design of a digital circuit capable of outputting a waveform with an amplitude of 100 VP-P at a frequency of 5 MHz and lower. This waveform was applied to a new ion trap design based on wire electrodes instead of planar electrodes. This trap offers many benefits over the planar ion traps developed at BYU. This work presents mass spectra obtained using a square digital waveform applied to the wire ion trap.

I consider Derek Parfit's claim that our partial and impartial reasons are only roughly commensurable. Parfit's philosophy draws heavily on Henry Sidgwick's dualism of practical reason, and I examine how well Parfit's arguments in Reasons and Persons and On What Matters handle the difficulties that come with Sidgwick's dualism. I also defend Parfit's conclusions against Allen Wood's accusation that he relies on intuitions about cases that lack morally relevant information. This charge overlooks the more fundamental differences in their two moral theories. I conclude that if we accept Parfit's conception of what reasons we have, we ought to accept his further claim that our fundamental reasons cannot be weighed against one another. If this is the case, we will always have sufficient reason to be both moral and self-interested in most situations.

Diss.--Marburg, 1999. / Bibliogr. p. 397-415.