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Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / Mediante narrativas de casos de aparição de fantasmas em um complexo de águas termais localizado no Barreiro de Araxá, em Minas Gerais, que mudou sua imagem de lugar de cura e saúde para ambiente de lazer e beleza, este trabalho buscou seguir pistas sobre: a ascensão, queda e renascimento do termalismo no Brasil; o problema da contaminação das águas minerais do Barreiro; as incongruências nas ações das Políticas Públicas. Tais aspectos produziram efeitos múltiplos nos trabalhadores das Termas e na população local, tais como: fantasmas, medos, silêncios, disputas e adoecimentos. A pesquisa toma como inspiração metodológica os trabalhos de Alessandro Portelli com a História Oral, para obter e acompanhar as narrativas; a genealogia de Michel Foucault, para apresentar as mudanças no conceito de saúde e de terapêutica no tempo; a Teoria do ator-rede de Bruno Latour, para seguir os actantes, humanos e não-humanos. Chama atenção para o cuidado de si como forma ética de estar no mundo, tendente a tornar a vida potente, criativa, abrindo uma possibilidade de alguém se tornar médico de si mesmo. Entende, nesse sentido, que podem ser viáveis, desde que em ruptura com meras práticas de renovado controle da vida das populações, as novas terapêuticas implantadas no SUS ? Terapias Alternativas e Complementares, dentre elas, em particular, o Termalismo Social. / Through reports of ghost apparitions at a thermal waters resort (located in Barreiro de Araxá, State of Minas Gerais) which had gone from a place of cure and health treatment to a place of leisure and beauty, this work has sought to follow leadson the rise, fall and rebirth of thermalism in Brazil; on the problem of Barreiro's mineral waters contamination; and on the public policies'incongruencies. These aspects have had multiple impacts on thermal resorts' workers and on the local population, provoking the occurrence of manifestations such as fear, apparition of ghosts, quarrels and loss of health. The researcher adopts as methodological inspiration the works by Alessandro Portelli with Oral History to obtain and follow upon the reports; Michel Foucault's genealogy is also used in order to introduce the changes in the concepts of health and of therapy in time; at last, Bruno Latour's Actor Network Theory (ANT) is employed to follow up both human and non-human. The work also underlines "self-care" as an ethical form of being in the world, with atendency to make life powerful and creative, thus making it possible for someone to become his/her own doctor. This way, it is understood that the new therapies being implemented by the SUS - Altenative and Complementary Therapies - may be viable, specially the one called Social Thermalism, as long as a break from the simple practices of life control of populations is assured.

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / Mediante narrativas de casos de aparição de fantasmas em um complexo de águas termais localizado no Barreiro de Araxá, em Minas Gerais, que mudou sua imagem de lugar de cura e saúde para ambiente de lazer e beleza, este trabalho buscou seguir pistas sobre: a ascensão, queda e renascimento do termalismo no Brasil; o problema da contaminação das águas minerais do Barreiro; as incongruências nas ações das Políticas Públicas. Tais aspectos produziram efeitos múltiplos nos trabalhadores das Termas e na população local, tais como: fantasmas, medos, silêncios, disputas e adoecimentos. A pesquisa toma como inspiração metodológica os trabalhos de Alessandro Portelli com a História Oral, para obter e acompanhar as narrativas; a genealogia de Michel Foucault, para apresentar as mudanças no conceito de saúde e de terapêutica no tempo; a Teoria do ator-rede de Bruno Latour, para seguir os actantes, humanos e não-humanos. Chama atenção para o cuidado de si como forma ética de estar no mundo, tendente a tornar a vida potente, criativa, abrindo uma possibilidade de alguém se tornar médico de si mesmo. Entende, nesse sentido, que podem ser viáveis, desde que em ruptura com meras práticas de renovado controle da vida das populações, as novas terapêuticas implantadas no SUS ? Terapias Alternativas e Complementares, dentre elas, em particular, o Termalismo Social. / Through reports of ghost apparitions at a thermal waters resort (located in Barreiro de Araxá, State of Minas Gerais) which had gone from a place of cure and health treatment to a place of leisure and beauty, this work has sought to follow leadson the rise, fall and rebirth of thermalism in Brazil; on the problem of Barreiro's mineral waters contamination; and on the public policies'incongruencies. These aspects have had multiple impacts on thermal resorts' workers and on the local population, provoking the occurrence of manifestations such as fear, apparition of ghosts, quarrels and loss of health. The researcher adopts as methodological inspiration the works by Alessandro Portelli with Oral History to obtain and follow upon the reports; Michel Foucault's genealogy is also used in order to introduce the changes in the concepts of health and of therapy in time; at last, Bruno Latour's Actor Network Theory (ANT) is employed to follow up both human and non-human. The work also underlines "self-care" as an ethical form of being in the world, with atendency to make life powerful and creative, thus making it possible for someone to become his/her own doctor. This way, it is understood that the new therapies being implemented by the SUS - Altenative and Complementary Therapies - may be viable, specially the one called Social Thermalism, as long as a break from the simple practices of life control of populations is assured.

This thesis argues for performative ways to write trauma, ghosts and silence against the particularities of German post-war experiences. It begins with the re-discovery of a photographic image that provides a starting point. I unfold linguistically uncalibrated yet embodied knowledge into insecure or uncertain registers of traumatic intergenerational reverberations. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory of trauma, I chart a trajectory from individuated self towards one pledged on intersubjective conditions for an iteratively-emergent subjectivity. Trauma framed in terms of interrelational silence is woven into the material fixicity of the image, with its fleetingly evoked and fragmented slivers of memory. Positioned on the cusp of an inquiry that troubles the coherence of a subject-who-knows, I argue for an eruptive heterogeneity that speaks creatively to possible ways of re-presenting the significance and specificity of familial and national silence in the aftermath of an abject war. The discreetness of trauma, ghosts and silence is reconfigured in terms of an in-betweenness of generational reverberations; these echoes form the layers into and against which I write silenced, repressed and marginalized voices, voices shaped predominately by absence from dominant discourses. The transgressive nature of writing against the grain, of writing against the primacy of certainty is developed further through the chapters, mapping a complex methodological and theoretical possibility. I trouble notions of ‘data’ in light of contestations that favour ambiguous possibilities pertaining to hauntings and ghosts, aware of the paradoxical nature of linearly constructed arguments in support of fragmentary and fragmented knowledge claims. The complexities are further accentuated through texts written in different genres, which seek to mirror context and emergent content. The thesis builds into an enmeshment of reverberations within which space is given over to Other, drawing fictitious and fictionalized voices into contestations around narrativization and finitude.

This question usually arises out of Derridean deconstruction: what is the relationship between writing and death? This dissertation, however, explores Jacques Derrida's evocation of the living-dead for purposes of theorizing what might be thought of as Derrida's "poetics of the crypt." The first section, "The First Partition: Without the Door," proposes the term "cryptomimesis" to describe how, in Derrida's writing, (the) "crypt" functions as the model, method and theory of a formal poetics based upon the fantasy of incorporation. Cryptomimesis is a writing practice that leads one to understand language and writing in spatial terms of the crypt-a contradictory topography of inside/outside. Such writing also produces a radical psychological model of the individual and collective "self" configured in terms of phantoms, haunting and (refused) mourning. This dissertation also argues that Derrida's poetics of the crypt exist in a certain relationship of correspondence with the Gothic and examines how Derrida's writing intersects or "folds" into that genre, taking as a premise that each is already inhabited, even haunted, by the other. Sections such as "'Darling,' It Said": Making a Contract With the Dead," and "The Question of theTomb," develop this notion of "correspondence" by examining a set of texts written by two American Gothic writers. The discussion posits that the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King give insight into Derrida's preoccupation with inheritance and legacy while illuminating his concern, in terms of writing, with the uncanny institution of architecture. This dissertation attempts to theorize Derrida's writing practice in spatial terms by drawing upon Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok's theory of the phantom and the crypt. It demonstrates how cryptomimesis involves the production of an uncanny imaginary space by playing with thetic referentiality. Final sections, "An Art of Chicanery" and "Inscribing the Wholly Other: No Fixed Address," develop the notion that to suspend the thetic relation is to confound (classical) distinctions between subject and object or "self" and "other." Above all, this dissertation attempts to demonstrate how, in Derrida's work, cryptomimesis is about writing the other and how such writing, predicated upon revenance and haunting, problematizes notions of the "subject," "autobiography," and "transference" and, therefore, problematizes textuality itself. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This thesis is concerned with the conditions of generating a livable Karoo landscape and the arts of living on a damaged Karoo veld. It takes place in a context where the anthropogenic influences on land degradation, desertification and biodiversity loss continues to haunt the Karoo in the present. The Karoo is a semi-arid region that spans the interior of South Africa. It is also region that has been subject to ongoing and widespread concern of the impact of overgrazing, threatening the livability of the Karoo landscape. This is a result of human/nonhuman relations that have been grounded in a colonial mastery of the land, whereby the advent of private property regimes, modernist technologies and capitalist extraction has allowed for the land to be cheapened, exhausted and severely degraded in a process of colonial dispossession. This research is a qualitative ethnography interacting with farmers and nonhumans on rangelands in the Great Karoo. This thesis shows how the earlier degradation of the Karoo has demanded farmersto pay attention to the relationalities between ecology and economy, since their economic/ecological survival depends entirely on the ongoing multispecies assemblages of which humans form a part. Infrastructures and technologies have become grounds for new ontological practices of regenerating the Karoo veld. Infrastructures (namely fencing) and sheep are used in ways that mimic the earlier migration of large herds of antelope. Here, the bodies of sheep are curated and moved in order to perform a particular ordering of a Karoo ‘nature’. This movement is believed to instigate multispecies liveliness. Sheep, who were once destroyers of the veld, are now enrolled in practices that are believed to bring back the ‘natural’ vegetation of the Karoo. The thesis problematises the ongoing Western ways of knowing that separate the world into binaries of ‘nature’/’culture’, ‘human’/’non-human’, ‘subject’/object’, ‘domestic’/‘wild’, ’economy’/‘ecology’, ‘life’/‘death’. Rather, it argues that a concern with ontological plurality is a process of paying attention to the mutual ecologies and multiple species that gather in human/nonhuman worlding projects on rangelands in the Karoo.

This thesis presents an analysis of the ghosts in Samuel Richardson’s 1747-48 novel Clarissa, and synthesizes traditional literary criticism on that novel with British folklore and ghost traditions. It examines the novel historically and demonstrates that Richardson’s novelistic approach changed between 1740 when he wrote Pamela and 1747 when he began writing Clarissa in that he relies on the ghost image to discuss the complexities of individual identity. In Clarissa, Richardson outdoes his previous attempt at depicting reality in Pamela because his use of the ghost motif allows the audience to see beyond the physical reality of the plot into the spiritual depths of the human heart. Clarissa involves the journey of a young woman attempting to establish a sense of identity and selfhood, and the ghosts of the novel supply a lens for interpreting her course toward a sense of self that transcends the material world, its wants, its objectives, its myriad institutions, and the identity she has constructed by association with those entities.

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The plasma membrane Ca2+-pump (PMCA) is a Ca2+-Mg2+- ATPase that expels Ca2+ from cells to help them maintain low concentrations of cytosolic Ca2+. Four genes (PMCAl to PMCA4) encode various isoforms ofthis pump. Caloxin is a novel peptide that was selected for binding to the second putative extracellular domain of PMCAl. Caloxin inhibits the Ca2+- Mg2+-ATPase in human erythrocyte leaky ghosts which primarily contain PMCA4. The objectives of this thesis are to delineate the mechanism of this inhibition and to determine its PMCA isoform selectivity. Caloxin inhibition of the PMCA pump in erythrocyte ghosts is non-competitive with respect to the substrates Ca2+ and ATP and the activator calmodulin. This was expected because the high affinity binding site for Ca2+ and sites for ATP and calmodulin are intracellular whereas caloxin is a peptide selected for binding to the second extracellular domain of the pump. In the reaction cycle, PMCA forms a 140 kDa acylphosphate enzyme intermediate from ATP (forward reaction) or orthophosphate (reverse reaction). Caloxin inhibits the acylphosphate formation in the forward but not in the reverse reaction. These results suggest that caloxin inhibits conformational changes required during the reaction cycle of the pump. In COS-M6 cells overexpressing PMCA4, caloxin inhibited the Ca2+ -Mg2+ATPase but with a marginally lower affinity than in the erythrocyte ghosts. Caloxin inhibition was also observed in insect cells overexpressing PMCA2. Several unsuccessful attempts were made to overexpress functional PMCAl. The work on isoform selectivity would require high level of expression of various PMCA isoforms and problems related to this requirement are discussed. Caloxin appears to inhibit the PMCA pumps by binding to the second putative extracellular domain and thus affecting the conformation of the protein. This is the first identified role of an extracellular domain of a PMCA pump. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)

Though the cinematic genre of horror was not designated until the twentieth century, elements of this genre have appeared onstage since the time of the Greeks. Theatre history is rife with examples of theatrical ghosts and horrors, whose ever-changing representation indicates society's evolving relationship to and expectation for horror onstage. In 2019, Virginia Tech presented the installation Poe's Shadows, which combined elements of traditional theatre, original art, and innovative technology to present an immersive experience of Edgar Allan Poe's work. This production was a unique collaborative work that combined the creative labor of both faculty and students, while also invoking past horror theatre techniques and technologies. The properties of the Cube performance space allowed the Poe's Shadows creative team to imitate hand-cranked panoramas, magic lantern shows, and shadow plays, while also using sound effects and narration that combined elements of theatrical tradition and ghost shows. By studying the history of Poe's Shadows, as well as the reception of the installation, one can see how the theatre's evolving relationship with horror is effected by audience demand and expectation, as well as newly available technologies. / Master of Arts / Though the horror genre is most often associated with books and films, elements of the genre have been present onstage for thousands of years. Furthermore, studying these theatrical ghosts and ghouls—and how they were represented onstage— can help contemporary audiences understand historical anxieties and expectations. In 2019, Virginia Tech presented the installation Poe’s Shadows, which combined elements of traditional theatre, original art, and innovative technology to present an immersive experience of Edgar Allan Poe’s work. This production was a unique collaborative work that combined the creative labor of both faculty and students, while also invoking past horror theatre techniques such as hand-cranked panoramas, magic lantern shows, and shadow plays, accompanied by with sound effects and narration that combined elements of theatrical tradition and ghost shows. By studying the history of Poe’s Shadows, as well as the reception of the installation, one can see how the theatre’s evolving relationship with horror is effected by audience expectation and newly available technologies.