Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1997. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [242]-246).

Zugl.: Leipzig, Univ., Diss., 2009

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1965. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Bibliography: l. 56-57.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 1994. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 134-138).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1974. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

The linking short narratives explored in this study-- Anna Jameson's Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, Sara Jeannette Duncan's The Pool In the Desert and Mavis Gallant's Home Truths— employ first-person narrators to both comply with and subvert dominant ideas of the gendered female subject. In addition, these representative linking narrative texts demonstrate that choices to do with form, as well as subject and theme, may both support and subvert the discourses of the time and place in which they are written. My exploration of these three representative texts draws from W.H. New's fragmentation theory of short narratives, Gérard Genette's narrative theory of voice and mood, Paul de Man's problematization of generic distinctions between autobiography and fiction, and Julia Kristeva's theory of the speaking subject as text in process and vice versa. Jameson's Romantic "I" uses the miscellany's flexible form of linking short narratives autobiographically to both reify and recuse nineteenth-century genre conventions of travel narrative and the gendered position of women in Europe and Canada. As the Recusant "I," first person narration in Duncan's quartet of stories figures splits not only between female desire and gender codes, but also between creative imagination and conditions of exile. With a psychopoetics of the unsaid, the Remembering "I" of Gallant's linking narratives figures female subjectivity as a process of both psychology and history. These women-authored linking narratives challenge assumptions that first-person narration is univocal, and therefore problematize distinctions between autobiography and fiction. In their uses of the linking narrative form, they also challenge aesthetic criteria that privilege wholeness and unity— of the novel, for example— in concepts of mimesis dominating representations of reality in their respective periods. These first-person linking narratives use the voice of the "I" subversively, telling the doubled position of the female subject in the discourses of genre and gender. / Graduate

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In this essay I analyze the performative aspects relating to Marina Abramović's The Artist Is Present, which took place in spring 2010 at MoMA in New York, from the context of the artist and work, institution and documentation. In this performance work, for the duration of the exhibition, Abramović sits completely still opposite another chair where anyone from the audience may sit. The art arises through this participation. The audience are not only viewers, but also the observed, thus becoming part of the work and the negotiation of this exchange of living gazes. The performative pervades this work on multiple levels. The Artist Is Present reached a surprisingly large public, of over 500,000 visitors and continues to circulate in the form of blogs, documentary film and photography long after the exhibition duration. In order to conduct a performative analysis of The Artist Is Present I apply the theories of Peggy Phelan, regarding the relationships between the political and representative visibility in contemporary culture. Phelan's explanation of the unmarked field reveals the importance of the 'other' to see oneself. This is especially relevant in Abramović's performance which challenges and revolves around self reflection in the other. Phelan's theories are also pertinent in analyzing what Abramović as the performer and her work create for re-negotiations around positions and the gaze. The assertions of Carol Duncan in considering the Art Museum as a place of ritual are applied to the ritualistic context of The Artist Is Present, which may well build up a form of liminality. Duncan's claims of the museum as ritual in combination with Phelan's theories provide interesting grounds to further investigate the effect and eventual mythology of the performance work and artist. How do these contexts of institution, documentation, artist and art, which I propose contribute to a kind of myth creation, operate in a ritualized performance art work? This essay analyses these contexts together in order to find a connection between the performative aspects and the effect that they have on the viewer and receiver, which have contributed to the public success of this exhibition. Despite that we now live in an era of reproduction, perhaps the wishes of our era still revolve around a cult value? That even in this post industrial age of reproduction, new needs are recreated for mythology and cult? Or can it be that the reverse is true, that the rites and symbols speak to us before the mythology has fully arisen?

Being Isadora is a story of possession. Isadora Duncan, the founder of modern dance, was an intensely creative, free-spirited woman. Her life experiences early last century were as fascinating and tragic as her achievements. In New York in 1985, Isadora's last surviving pupil and adopted daughter, ninety-year old Anna Duncan, is searching for a way to fulfill a long held promise. Isadora wished to control the way she was remembered and had made Anna promise that any remaining film of her dancing would be destroyed. But one film survives and Anna is running out of time to find it. A young Australian journalist, Tamsin Doyle, attends a dance class at the Isadora Duncan Studio and meets Anna, unknowingly becoming part of the quest. Initially the stories of Isadora and Tamsin run parallel, then as Tamsin gets to know Anna, she becomes immersed in a dream world of dramatic incidents from Isadora's life. The dreams become waking experiences and she fears her will is gradually being taken over. She ends up in places - in fact other countries - that she had no intention of being, pursuing an agenda that is not her own. In the second part of the book, she finds herself in Russia, where Isadora lived after the Revolution. She meets and falls in love with Vladimir, the grandson of Isadora's former dance collaborator. Unable to prevent herself being possessed while visiting the school Isadora founded, Tamsin is arrested by the authorities. A Russian KGB officer has his own plans and abducts her, keeping her prisoner in a dacha outside Moscow. He shows her a film of herself dancing and then the surviving film of Isadora. The two are almost identical and a dramatic climax ensues. Themes in the book explore the nature of memory and how it is influenced by photographic and filmic record, love and loss and the way patterns repeat in people's lives in an attempt to change outcomes.

Despite high rates of unemployment in South Africa, there is little consensus about its origins and solutions to the problem. Job search (how and when people search for work) is one aspect of the unemployment problem. Job search is shown to be a complex process strongly linked to the endogenous structure of the labour market. The flaws in traditional methods (theoretical and measurement) highlight this. Using data from a tailor-made survey in Duncan Village (a peri-urban area in Buffalo City, South Africa) the research examines factors that influence the effectiveness of job search. The results show that mode of search (how people look for work) is used as a signal by employers. Degrees of success are stratified amongst searchers using either ‘word of mouth’, place-to-place or formal modes of search. The thesis provides a method-test to reveal a complex body of evidence that has yet to be fully explored by practitioners in this field.