Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Notre Dame, 2009. / Thesis directed by Ralph McInerny for the Institute of Medieval Studies. "April 2009." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 380-393).

The focus of this thesis is the Visio Baronti (VB), an account of a seventh-century monk's journey to the other world. This text serves as a metaphoric fulcrum to support a more extensive study of early medieval conceptions of the other world and the historical context in which visionary accounts were produced. Chapter 1 contains an introduction to ideas of the other world, a survey of types of visionary experiences, their uses, imitations and historiographical responses to them. Chapter 2 focuses on medieval and modern responses to visions. This chapter includes a survey of the terminology for dreams and visions found in theoretical writings, compares dream theory with otherworld visions and identifies medieval methods of determining the validity of a visionary experience. Chapter 3 investigates the manuscript tradition of the VB, in order to illuminate medieval receptions and treatments of this text. Because the text appears unusual for the seventh century, chapter 4 provides an analysis of the grounds for dating the VB to the seventh century, while chapter 5 treats the VB in its seventh-century monastic context and assesses what influences shaped this text. Chapter 6 compares Barontus's vision with ninth-century visions and other Carolingian writings to consider Carolingian interest in the VB in light of their contributions to the genre. Chapter 7 examines the artistic response to this text through an examination of the illustrations which accompany the text in the ninth-century St Petersburg manuscript. A brief conclusion to this study follows.

by Leong Hang-Tat. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 105-110). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter One --- The Concepts of Utopia and Dystopia in Literature --- p.7 / Chapter Chapter Two --- The Early H. G. Wells: The Time Machine --- p.30 / Chapter Chapter Three --- From Dystopia to Utopia: Wells's Ambivalence in When the Sleeper Wakes --- p.50 / Chapter Chapter Four --- Utopia and the Scientific World State: A Modern Utopia --- p.68 / Conclusion --- p.91 / Notes --- p.97 / Works Cited --- p.105

李淑文. / "2001年1月" / 論文 (哲學碩士)--香港中文大學, 2001. / 參考文獻 (leaves 114-121) / 附中英文摘要. / "2001 nian 1 yue" / Li Shuwen. / Lun wen (zhe xue shuo shi)--Xianggang Zhong wen da xue, 2001. / Can kao wen xian (leaves 114-121) / Fu Zhong Ying wen zhai yao. / 撮要 --- p.i / Abstract --- p.ii / 目錄 --- p.iv / Chapter 第一章 --- 導論 / Chapter 一´Ø --- 引言 --- p.1 / Chapter 二´Ø --- 硏究方法 --- p.4 / Chapter 三´Ø --- 六朝志怪的特性 --- p.6 / Chapter 1´Ø --- 志怪小說的內容 / Chapter 2´Ø --- 志怪小說的寫作手法 / Chapter 3´Ø --- 志怪小說的寫作動機 / Chapter 四´Ø --- 選擇《搜神記》的原因 --- p.14 / Chapter 1 ´Ø --- 從文學角度看 / Chapter 2´Ø --- 從內容看 / Chapter 五´Ø --- 本文結構與內容 --- p.16 / Chapter 第二章 --- 《搜神記》的成書與流傳 / Chapter 一´Ø --- 成書 --- p.18 / Chapter 1 ´Ø --- 資料來源 / Chapter 2´Ø --- 寫作目的 / Chapter 二 ´Ø --- 流傳 --- p.22 / Chapter 第三章 --- 《搜神記》中「死而復生故事」內容分析 --- p.30 / Chapter 一´Ø --- 死而復生的原因 --- p.32 / Chapter 1´Ø --- 被司命誤召 / Chapter 2´Ø --- 未當死 / Chapter 二´Ø --- 死而復生的詮釋 --- p.36 / Chapter 1´Ø --- 精誠所至 / Chapter 2´Ø --- 徵兆 / Chapter 三´Ø --- 死後的去處及生活 --- p.41 / Chapter 1´Ø --- 死後往天上及其生活 / Chapter 2´Ø --- 死後往泰山及其生活 / Chapter 第四章 --- 《搜神記》中「鬼故事」內容分析 --- p.47 / Chapter 一´Ø --- 鬼顯現的原因 --- p.50 / Chapter 1´Ø --- 死於非命 / Chapter 2´Ø --- 安葬不宜 / Chapter 3´Ø --- 未嫁而死 / Chapter 二´Ø --- 死後的去處及其生活 --- p.58 / Chapter 1 ´Ø --- 死後的去處 / Chapter 2 ´Ø --- 死後的生活 / Chapter 三´Ø --- 死者與生者的關係 --- p.60 / Chapter 第五章 --- 《搜神記》中死後世界的承傳與轉變 --- p.65 / Chapter 一´Ø --- 死而復生與漢代流行思想 --- p.67 / Chapter 二´Ø --- 《搜神記》中死後世界的承傳與轉變 --- p.74 / Chapter 1 ´Ø --- 死後的去處 / Chapter 2´Ø --- 死後世界的官僚架構組織 / Chapter 3´Ø --- 死後的生活 / Chapter 4´Ø --- 死者與生者的關係 / Chapter 第六章 --- 總結 --- p.109 / 參考書目 --- p.114

In this paper I will examine the sources for the tradition of the address of the soul to the body or the dialogue between, the two. I will consider the Old and Middle English poetic expressions of the body-and-soul legend in terms of the criticism of the ten poems which specifically belong to that tradition and the elements which constitute that genre. I will also deal with those poems written at the same time which exhibit one or more of those elements, with the body-and-soul tradition in English morality plays, with the Ars Moriendi, and with the Dance of Death. I will demonstrate that a shift occurs in the consideration of death from a concern for the soul to a preoccupation with the grotesque and gruesome aspects of death. The address and dialogue forms fall into disuse as a vehicle for theological argument concerning the responsibility for sin, and the view of death reflected by the popular pictorial representations of the Dance of Death becomes prominent.

This dissertation examines Russian fantastical travel narratives from 1784 to 1855, an era of substantial imperial conquest, in which authors of various backgrounds, both Russian and non-Russian, wrestled with questions of cultural identity and the prospects for Russia’s development on the global scale, while in a profound but often contentious relationship with the countries of Western Europe. My chapters cover three different categories of fantastic travel. The first includes journeys to undiscovered space, including Antarctica and the Moon (in works by Shcherbatov, Lyovshin, Kiukhelbeker, and Senkovsky), which largely criticize Russian expansionism. The second is stories of travel to or in the distant future (Vilgelm Kiukhelbeker, Faddei Bulgarin, and Vladimir Odoevsky), which project a more positive view of Russian imperial destiny. The third category is metafictional travel, through maps and the written page (Veltman), which deconstructs the very notion of imperial reality. I argue that writers employed the genre of fantastic travel literature, as well as specific devices such as dreams and frame narratives, to critically interrogate and reshape the imperial and national ideologies of their time. These works anticipate modern science fiction by using a wide range of spatial and temporal settings to create new worlds that highlight the possibilities or faults of their own societies, for satirical or didactic purposes—and as such they benefit from the application of recent theories of science fiction. Given the diverse range of authors and time periods I investigate, my work also has a taxonomic purpose, delineating the thematic evolution of fantastic travel narratives in different categories and paving the way for more targeted analyses of these understudied works.

This dissertation deploys theories of spatiotemporal experience and organization, most prominently Mikhail Bakhtin’s “chronotope,” to set contemporary literature, film, and music into dialogue with theories of post-Wende social and political experiences and possibility that speak, with Francis Fukuyama, as the contemporary as the “End of History.” Where these interlocutors of Fukuyama generally affirm or intensify his view of the contemporary as a time where historical progress slows to a halt, historical memory recedes from view, and the conditions of subjecthood are rephrased from participation in a struggle for progress to mindless consumption and technocratic tinkering, I engage contemporary artwork to flesh out and ultimately peer beyond the boundaries of the real and the possible these social theories articulate. Through a series of close readings of German films, music albums, and novels published between 1995 and 2021, I examine how German authors, filmmakers, and musicians pursue depictions of the malaises of the End of History while also resolutely pointing to the fissures in liberal capitalist hegemony where history—its past and its future—again becomes visible. Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope, a text’s unified expression of space and time, is central to my method of analysis. In tracing the chronotopic contours of contemporary works of music, film, and literature, I argue, we—as readers, viewers, and listeners—are engaged to think and act alongside the forms and figures that populate the worlds their authors create. In doing so, we ultimately uncover forceful accusations, resolute alternatives, and even hopeful antidotes to the deficiencies of our present that help us both to soberly contemplate the implications the pessimistic formulations of contemporary theory have on our lives, communities, and futures but also to formulate possibilities for them that lie beyond their analytical purview.In a series of close readings of my literary, filmic, and musical primary texts, I engage theorists of the post-Cold War, post-Wende contemporary who write about the political order and social conditions emerging out of the triumph of neoliberalism and market capitalism over socialist, communist, and fascist alternatives. The dissertation begins by establishing a wide view of the contemporary, tracing in its first chapter chronotopic resonances of Hartmut Rosa’s “social acceleration” thesis—which locates the aimlessness and alienation of contemporary society within the accelerationist logic of market capitalist modes of production—across the full temporal arc of the contemporary. Pairing Christian Kracht’s Faserland (1995) with Fatma Aydemir's Ellbogen (2017), I argue that the futilities and frustrations of the modern subject, as foretold in Fukuyama’s “End of History” essay and fleshed out in Rosa’s writings on social acceleration, find resonance not only in the wealthy, educated, white protagonist of Faserland’s 1990s, but also in the impoverished, undereducated, Turkish-Kurdish protagonist of Ellbogen some twenty years later. What connects these two accounts across decades and differences in identities, I demonstrate, is not merely a shared sense of alienation and despair, but a shared, underlying chronotopic characterization of the contemporary. These commonalities appear, I demonstrate, when we connect Rosa’s “social acceleration” thesis to diegetic chronotopes of perpetual motion that depict modern subjects’ inability to avail themselves of the ostensibly liberatory potential of liberal capitalism’s accelerated lifeworld. Chapter 2 then considers Byung-Chul Han’s theory of auto-exploitation and the dilemma of the music novel at a time where the rebellion of punk against social integration has been thoroughly incorporated into capitalism. Reading Marc Degens’ Fuckin Sushi (2015), I examine the novel’s concept of “Abrentnern” as a model for personal and communal fulfillment for those who turn to art as a means self-determination in the age of auto-exploitation. Unlike Kracht and Aydemir, however, Degens sees the closing off of historical possibilities for the good life enjoyed by his punk forbears—here, self-determination through transgressive artistic praxis—not as the contemporary subject’s damnation to cyclical patterns of despair but as a challenge to conceive of the good life anew. Working humorously through its hapless protagonist Niels’ repeated attempts to escape the seemingly inevitable for-profit co-option of his sincere artistic efforts, the novel serves to unveil the persistence of blind spots in this regime of totalizing exploitation. What results is an account of the double-edged logic of capitalist productivity’s ostensible totalization of labor-time. Capitalism, Niels unwittingly discovers, is a logic of production so overwhelming that it continuously drives subjects towards the discovery of new alterities that, for a brief time at least, allow subjects once again to slip between the cracks. The third chapter explores a similar phenomenon of halting resistance to the conditions of the capitalist present through the lens of futurity. Here, I push back against Mark Fisher’s theory of the dominance of “Capitalist Realism” in the contemporary aesthetic imagination, identifying and developing the notion of “subtle futurity”—the modest, yet resolute rephrasing of future possibility beyond the “way things are” of the present—in Leif Randt’s Schimmernder Dunst über CobyCounty (2011) In this light, I argue, Randt’s gestures towards a different future, however halting, mark a significant effort to imagine a benevolent form of future possibility within the context of an era often suspected to have been exhausted of its utopian sentiment. The final two chapters turn to past-minded works that more forcefully repudiate notions of the present as static or closed off from the movement of history. Chapter Four considers W.G. Sebald’s 1995 novel, Die Ringe des Saturn, and The Caretaker’s 2012 album, Patience (After Sebald), developing an account of the chronotopic means by which these works revisit materials of the past within the present. Chronotopic motifs of paraphrase—techniques of sampling in The Caretaker and narrative polyphony in Sebald—come together within macro-level chronotopic frameworks of peripatetic movement—looping repetition in The Caretaker and the retracing of bygone journeys in Sebald—to testify to the unanswered questions and unfinished work of history over and against notions of the present as a time where the past has been relegated to mere museum content or nostalgia for bygone ways of living. Where Chapter Four speaks primarily to the formal mechanisms by which the present rediscovers the past, Chapter Five examines two specific chronotopic innovations for thematically engaging constellations of past-present inter-temporality. Both Sharon Dodua Otoo’s 2021 novel, Adas Raum, and Christian Petzold’s 2018 film, Transit, develop chronotopes wherein past and present are intermingled in increasingly inseparable ways. Adas Raum, I demonstrate, is organized spatiotemporally as a nexus of coiled loops—pasts and presents intertwine, heaven and earth are tangled together, and the fates of human beings and even non-human objects follow spatial and temporal trajectories that weave in and out of conventional linear understandings of space and time. In similar fashion, past and present become inseparable in Petzold’s film, an adaptation of the Anna Seghers’ 1944 novel of the same name, through thematic and formal approaches of blurring that blend the plight of refugees of Seghers’ era with those of Petzold’s present day. History, then, appears remarkably robust in these texts, unfolding accounts of how human beings living through their present might take guidance from the generations that preceded them in the struggle for a better world.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 123-127) / This dissertation examines how three dystopian texts, namely Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Jasper Fforde’s Shades of Grey and Veronica Roth’s Divergent trilogy, exhibit social conformity as a disciplinary mechanism of the ‘carceral’ – a notion introduced by poststructuralist thinker Michel Foucault. Employing poststructuralist discourse and deconstructive theory as a theoretical framework, the study investigates how each novel establishes its world as a successful carceral city that incorporates most, if not all, the elements of the incarceration system that Foucault highlights in Discipline and Punish. It establishes that the societies of the texts present potentially nightmarish future societies in which social and political “improvements” result in a seemingly better world, yet some essential part of human existence has been sacrificed. This study of these fictional worlds reflects on the carceral nature of modern society and highlights the problematic nature of the social and political practices to which individuals are expected to conform. Finally, in line with Foucault, it postulates that individuals need not be enclosed behind prison walls to be imprisoned; the very nature of our social systems imposes the restrictive power that incarcerates societies / English Studies / M.A. (English Studies)