Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Melbourne, School of Culture and Communication, 2008. Thesis by dissertation and creative work. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references.

Mémoire (M.E.L.)--Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, 2001. / Document électronique également accessible en format PDF. CaQCU

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 1999. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 356-371). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users. Address: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p9947971.

Universiẗat, Diss., 2004--Bonn.

This mini-thesis is situated in the discourse on patriarchy, nationhood and its artistic forms. It is argued that an uncritical pursuit of commonality as a political aesthetic strategy for dance in South Africa repeats the metaphysical foundationalism of this discourse. It is further suggested that a postmodern ethos subverts this heritage, while at the same time offering a viable alternative for accommodating and representing the cultural diversity and plurality characteristic of current theatre dance in South Africa. Chapter One examines the way dance has historically structured its patriarchal form the postmodern discourses Chapter Two as a site and practice through explores the potential of deconstruction and destabilisation of this dance heritage. This chapter also assesses the relevance of a postmodern alternative in a South African dance context. Chapter Three analyses the postmodern choreographic strategies of two South African choreographers, Gary Gordon and Robyn Orlin, in order to reveal how their dance vision to patriarchal aesthetic form and offers an uncritical alternative notions of commonality. In conclusion, it is argued postmodern ethos embodied in the work that the of these choreographers provides viable directions for formulating and articulating new dance directions for theatre dance in South Africa while, at the same time, bearing witness to the diversity that will always structure expressions of commonality in South African dance.

The purpose of this study was to explore how master jazz pedagogues and artist-level jazz musicians used pedagogical content knowledge to sequence their instructional methods when teaching jazz improvisation. Pedagogical content knowledge served as the theoretical framework for this study. To gain insights into how they used their knowledge when teaching jazz improvisation, I first sought to explore how they learned to improvise. For this study, an overarching research question “How did the participants learn to improvise in jazz?” aided me with contextualizing how they learned content and pedagogy when they began to improvise. Then, the following questions guided my investigation into how these participants used their pedagogical and content knowledge when they taught jazz improvisation: (1) How, if at all, did the participants’ curriculum knowledge influence their approaches to teaching jazz improvisation? (2) How, if at all, did the participants’ pedagogical knowledge influence their approaches to teaching jazz improvisation? (3) How, if at all, did the participants’ content knowledge influence their approaches to teaching jazz improvisation? In this study both the artist-level musicians and master jazz pedagogues all subscribed to an organic mode of teaching jazz improvisation, and not a one size fits all approach that many published jazz materials espouse. Most of these participants did not utilize an established curriculum for teaching, but rather relied on the knowledge of their students and their own content knowledge of what they know and how they learned for the best practices of teaching. Based on the pedagogical content knowledge they provided in this study, I devised a model for teaching jazz improvisation to undergraduate students. I organized this model by developing an eight-semester, or four-year sequence, of pedagogy and content for instruction. For each academic year, I present a description of what I learned from the participants, and how this pedagogical content knowledge can be used with students to learn how to improvise in jazz. I then present a two-semester outline (one academic year) that demonstrates how the pedagogical principles and content knowledge shared by the participants in this study can be sequenced. Each of the participants in this study taught their students based on their own content knowledge and the knowledge of their students. In order to teach jazz and jazz improvisation, preservice teachers need more than just a casual experience with jazz pedagogy, and should look to increase their own content knowledge in the area of jazz through both formal and informal educational opportunities. Furthermore, the scope of this study was limited to world renowned jazz musicians and educators who taught at the university level and only considered the perspectives of jazz educators. Additional studies could focus on active school music teachers who identify as jazz educators or could involve researchers studying the perspectives of the students regarding how they learn pedagogy and content and how they use/retain this knowledge with improvisation. Keywords: jazz, jazz pedagogy, jazz improvisation, pedagogical content knowledge, jazz education

Gary Snyder has offered, in poems and essays, ways to acknowledge the interrelationships of humans with the more-than-human. He questions common notions of selfness as well as understandings of what it is to be human in relationship to other species and ecosystems, and he offers new paradigms for the relationship between cultures and the ecosystems in which these cultures reside. These new paradigms are rooted in a reevaluation of our attitudes toward our physical bodies which impacts our relationship to the earth and raises new possibilities for an ecological spirituality or philosophy. The sum of Snyder's endeavors is a foundation for an understanding of ecopoetics. Snyder's poem "The Trail is Not a Trail" is an interesting place to begin examining how human perceptions of the self are central to the kinds of relationships that humans believe are possible between our species and everything else. In this poem there is a curious fusion of the speaker and the trail. In fact, with each successive line they become increasingly difficult to separate. The physical self is central to Snyder's poetry because his is a poetry of the self physically rooted in ever-shifting relationship with the biosphere. The relationship of the self to the biosphere in Snyder's poetry also points toward a spiritual experience that can be called ecomysticism, by which I mean the space where new ecological paradigms and mystical understandings of the world overlap. Ecomysticism goes beyond mysticisms that describe a spiritual being longing for supernatural experience while being "unfortunately" trapped in a physical body. Ecomysticism emphasizes the spiritual and physical interrelatedness or interconnectedness of all matter, the human and the more-than-human. The integration of the spiritual and physical aspects of the self is only possible through an awareness of the interrelatedness of the self and the non-human. New paradigms for the self are thus central to ecopoetics, a poetics that seeks to heal the rift between humans and the biosphere.

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This thesis is concerned with the two AIDS-era novels of Gary Indiana, a long-neglected yet essential literary figure who, as the critic Christian Lorentzen has argued, “connects the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in ways readers and critics are only beginning to apprehend” (xii). Beginning chronologically with a study of Indiana’s first two novels, Horse Crazy (1989) and Gone Tomorrow (1993), this thesis attempts to realize Lorentzen’s call to action, attending particularly to the ways in which Indiana’s novels write the neoliberal subject. More than exploring life under the AIDS crisis and embodying a radical queer approach to narrative, I contend, through the repurposed frame of noir and thematic explorations of kitsch, the novels of Gary Indiana radically interrogate neoliberal subjectivities, offering a remarkably stark vision of interior lives completely colonized by capitalism, commodified subjects incapable of intimacy.