This study will look at fantasies of the mechanical body in a series of close readings of key modernist and contemporary texts. It will argue that these texts are sites of resistance or repression, in which unconscious and / or cultural narratives about the death drive have left their traces. Part One, Chapters 1-3, explores the links between war and fantasy, and between fantasy and gender. Chapter One looks at the art and writings of the Italian Futurists and English Vorticists, with the focus on Marinetti and Lewis, to consider how the rationalized bodies of the soldier and worker might be seen as the covert problems underpinning the fantasy, returning to it in the form of the repressed. Chapter Two concerns the writings of Ernst Jünger, where war, modern labour, the incursion of danger into everyday life, and photography are seen to provide signs of the emergence of the Typus, an organic construction, who has learnt to see himself as devoid of feeling, turning the death drive into the will to power in acts of aggression, and for whom the function of the eye is the same as that of the weapon. Chapter Three investigates the problem of war-shock and the shocks of cinema in First World War film footage of shellshocked soldiers, Lang's Metropolis, and Chaplin's Modern Times. It shows how discourses of hysteria, feminization and commodity relations form the common ground between the cultural reception of both shelishock and cinema, and how film-makers and critics responded to both sets of debates. Part Two, Chapters 4-5, explores the links between the machine, the maternal body and the death drive in the Terminator and Alien films, and considers the question of affect, mourning, and identification in Cronenberg's Crash.

Chan, Hin Sin Cindy. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2013. / Includes bibliographical references. / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts also in Chinese.

In the last decade, tremendous advances have been made in the effort to understand mind wandering, yet many questions remain unanswered. Chief among them is how mind wandering relates to learning. Insofar as mind wandering has been linked to poor learning, finding ways to reduce the propensity to mind wander could potentially improve learning. Two experiments were conducted to examine this. The first experiment evaluated how difficulty of the to-be-learned materials affected one’s tendency to mind wander and revealed that people mind wandered when there was a mismatch between their level of expertise and the difficulty of materials studied. The second experiment compared whether participants were more likely to mind wander in blocked or interleaved conditions and showed that participants were more likely to mind wander when materials were presented in a blocked fashion. Together, these results indicate that techniques such as studying materials specific to one’s own level of mastery or changing the way in which one studies might reduce mind wandering and improve learning. Of equal importance is the question of what happens on in the brain when a person mind wanders. While the effect of mind wandering on early sensory processing is known, the impact it has on learning-related processing is not. In two event-related potential (ERP) experiments, participants were asked to report whether they were mind wandering or not while studying materials they were later tested on. Analyses revealed that elaborative semantic processing – indexed by a late, sustained slow wave that was maximal at posterior parietal electrode sites – was attenuated when participants mind wandered. Crucially, the pattern when people were on task rather than mind wandering was similar to the subsequent memory effect previously reported by other memory researchers, suggesting that mind wandering disrupts the deep level of processing required for learning.

This thesis seeks to examine time in the secondary world fantasies of Patricia A. McKillip. Very little work has been done previously on McKillip, and none examines such a broad range of her works. Taking a strict definition of secondary world, I investigate McKillip’s fantasy books that fit within this parameter to see whether there is a unifying principal behind time, in all its forms, in her work. Although time has been examined in fantasies that are obviously about time, very little has been done in the style of Mark Currie or Paul Riceour, who examine time in books that contain time but do not seem to be about time. I investigate time in terms of an overall chronotope, and argue that this seems to be one of the past. I argue that McKillip’s works and other fantasy books like hers have a grammar of the past, and that everything in their works is influenced, to a degree, by this grammar. Thematically organised chapters examine sixteen of McKillip’s immersive fantasies. The thesis begins with an investigation of the overall chronotope of McKillip’s books and the influence this has on her works. It then examines “active time”: time which is used in an active way to undo and heal wrongs of the past. McKillip’s use of legends to add depth and age to her stories is explored. Her pastoral works, those with a nostalgic connection with nature, are examined. The sometimes counterpoint of the pastoral, cities, are then investigated and found to be places of influenced by time passing in the form of age and political era. Lastly, several of McKillip’s characters are examined to show how time has affected them and affected their interactions with those around them.

Most pianists and music scholars consider Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy his most virtuosic piano work. The piece was written in November 1822 when the composer was twenty-five. By that time, Schubert was known for his lieder and some four-hand piano works, which were written in a very lyrical style. In comparison to these works, the Fantasy was written with a demanding technique requiring a richer, orchestral sound. The technical demands of the Wanderer Fantasy at times cause pianists to injure their arms. Even if this does not happen, the instrument, nonetheless, can sound harsh. This type of thick texture may have prompted Robert Schumann's comments in his 1828 review of the Fantasy (M.J.E. Brown, Schubert, A Critical Biography [London: Macmillan & Co., 1958], 124.): Schubert would like, in this work, to condense the whole orchestra into two hands... This essay will address two main subjects: first, the Fantasy will be considered from an orchestral perspective with reference to Schubert's own symphonic writing; second, this essay will seek to assist the pianist in producing a better sound, as well as avoiding injury. It is this essay's thesis that Schubert, when composing the Wanderer Fantasy, was actually constructing an orchestral plan under the guise of a piano score. In order to analyze Schubert's orchestral writing, this essay will be divided into four chapters. Chapter one will offer the historical background of the Wanderer Fantasy, chapter two will discuss Schubert as a symphonist as well as the Unfinished Symphony, which was written only two weeks before the Fantasy. Chapter three, based on the parallel orchestral elements found in the Unfinished Symphony piano sketch, will discuss the relationship between the piano sketch of the Symphony and the Wanderer Fantasy. Following this comparative analysis, chapter three will also offer practical performance suggestions based on previously discussed orchestral elements for the pianist. Chapter four presents conclusions offered by the author. The conclusions reached in this essay are presented in the hope that they will assist the pianist to achieve a more meaningful performance when performing the Wanderer Fantasy.

This thesis uses the short story form to examine the influence of myth, magick, and the supernatural on the interstitial areas of the United States. The power of words as a force for change figures prominently in these stories. This thesis looks at the monstrous as it moves in the darkness and in the minds of humans, but also at the tremendous depths of compassion and courage we find in ourselves when faced with monstrous situations.

A New World, At Last is set on a distant colony world, many thousands of years into the future. The path there has not been direct or bloodless. The humans who colonized this New World are the descendants of an Earth that has suffered cataclysmic climate change, collapse, and a subsequent millennia-long reconstruction. They stand on the shoulders of giants, uncovering and exploiting the technology of the Old Earth in order to ensure that such a collapse, once discovered, can never happen again. These new people, Colonials, set about making the New World in the image of their own. A scant hundred years after they settle the world, the Ecumene arrive. The Ecumene are humans as well, our own descendants, refugees who packed onto massive, life-sustaining generation ships that left Old Earth, burning a slow and steady path towards distant, potentially habitable worlds. The journey for the Ecumene took nearly a thousand years; in this time, a cult of destiny and destination fomented aboard a ship they began to see as their ark. They follow The Path, the way to the promised land of the New World, known to their distant ancestors as their ultimate destination. Due to the realities of space travel, time passed differently for the Ecumene than it did for the Colonials. What was a thousand year journey on the ship translates to a more than six thousand year period of time back on Earth. The massive gulf in time and experience makes for a difficult reunion between these two disparate relatives. Tensions arise as the Colonial Administration attempts to process these sudden arrivals and to integrate them into their system to prevent a complete collapse of their nascent biome. They hold the revelatory memory of a world subjected to poor stewardship and shy away from continuing down that path again. They see themselves as outnumbered and unfairly burdened, the sudden caretakers of a vast population of the children of the humans who sent the Old Earth into a long, terrible dark age. The bulk of A New World, At Last takes place thirty years after the arrival of the Ecumene ark, the Armstrong. A New World, At Last follows Edison Moss, the young son of a Colonial farmer ("agrineer"). Ed has recently discovered that he was adopted illegally; he is undocumented, from an unwanted class. In an act of rebellion, he leaves home on a quest of discovery, only to find that the answers he gets are not necessarily the answers to the questions he wanted to ask. His decade-long journey takes him from the heart of the colony to the frontier; along the way he befriends an agent of the Ecumene's more violent resistant group and becomes a participant in the movement. A New World, At Last also follows the story of an artist contemporary with Ed's time. Victor James Custodio, famous sculptor and crafter of prosthetic bodies for the rulers of Earth, flees to the New World in a quest to outrun a fate that has been chasing him through all of his lives. Victor's story parallels Ed's in a sense as both are, ultimately, pilgrimages; attempts to ask and have answered that ultimate question: who am I, where do I belong, and what do I do about it?

The thesis presents a critique of the nature of 13 to 15 year-old students' images of futures. Arguments are made for their importance to the individual community and culture and their value and use in a science learning setting.This study of the nature of futures images is based upon data collected from small samples in two school settings between 1990 and 1999 using a guided fantasy approach. The diversity of student hopes and fears for futures is categorised using several research tools developed from the futures literature. The results identify a range of futures scenarios ranging from highly utopic to highly dystopic and themes including human interactions, the natural and built environment and the nature and use of futuristic technologies.The importance of student images of futures is discussed from the personal perspective of the students and then considered in the broader context of society and Western culture. The data are examined through a number of theoretical frames including psychology, history and the futures field of enquiry. The consensus seems to be that expectations of the future are inseparable from human nature and influential in determining the viability of cultures.The value of student images of futures in science learning is explored through a case study of one of my own Year 9 classes. In teaching this class I used the technique of futures imaging integrated into a critical futures teaching approach utilising a constructivist planning model. I found that students' futures images revealed a broader aspect of student worldviews than is usual in science learning environments, and were valuable in exposing student prior knowledge, interests and concerns. Student learning seemed to be enhanced using this futures oriented approach.

In my thesis I argue that the return of the religious in contemporary culture has been in two forms the rise of so-called fundamentalisms in the established faiths-Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, even Buddhist-and the rise of a New Age style spirituality that draws from aspects of those faiths even as it produces something distinctively different. I argue that this shift both produces post-modern media culture, and is itself always-already mediated through the realm of the fictional. Secular and profane are always entangled within one another, a constant and pervasive media presence that modulates the way that contemporary subjects experience themselves and their relationship to the spiritual. I use popular culture as an entry point, an entry point that can presume neither belief nor unbelief in its audiences, showing that it is “unreal” texts such as Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Matrix and so on that we find religious symbols and ideas refracted through a postmodernist sensibility, with little regard for the demands of “real world” epistemology. I argue that it is in this interplay between traditional religions and New Age-ised spirituality in popular culture that the sacred truly finds itself in postmodernity.

<p>Uppsatsen undersöker huruvida det finns gotik i Bulgakovs Mästaren och Margarita. Eftersom jag inte vill placera in romanen i den gotiska genren tas även problematiken med genreindelning upp. I analysen tas händelser från boken upp och prövas mot olika teoretikers definitioner av gotik som litterär genre. Där framgår det att det finns en mängd gotiska inslag men att mycket av det beror på vilken teoretiker man väljer att följa och hur man som läsare tolkar de olika händelserna. Det framkommer även att det finns problem med att sätta in en roman i endast en genre och därför väljer jag att inte kategorisera romanen som gotisk utan endast kalla händelserna för gotiska inslag.</p>