Thesis (D.M.)--Northwestern University, 2003. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 64-12, Section: A, page: 4264. Adviser: Rex A. Martin.

Thesis (M.A.) -- Central Connecticut State University, 2006. / Thesis advisor: Aimee L. Pozorski. "... in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 57-61). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Adaptive reuse, as an alternative approach to the treatment of existing old buildings and urban areas, is being received more concerns in contemporary China. Taking Shanghai as an example, this thesis attempts to assess the practice of reuse of historical buildings in the urban context of Shanghai from 1990 to 2008. / In this research, the practice of adaptive reuse is studied with a focus on improving dynamic urban life through giving old buildings an advisable new use. With the aim of finding out what makes a lively and dynamic city, I employ the theory of city diversity from Jane Jacobs into my research as a theoretical basis to be tested in the research. / These investigations of Shanghai were conducted during a fieldwork in Shanghai. The case includes three types, which are respectively located in different areas in contemporary Shanghai. The first one is an alteration and upgrading of old industrial buildings on the waterfront. The second is a reuse of clusters of commercial buildings built in the colonial era on the Bund, with the ‘Bund 18’ building as a critical example. The third one is an urban renewal through adaptive reuse of traditional residential buildings in an inner city area, with a focused study on the Xintiandi area. / Through empirical analysis of these three cases, I try to examine the relationship between the buildings transformed through adaptive reuse and the urban surroundings in terms of participation or use by the various urban populations, and further explore how adaptive reuse may contribute to the generation and sustaining of diverse urban life in the urban context. / We may assume that the relationship between the city and the user is linked by urban activities, and that diversity of urban life can contribute to the healthy growth of cities. Given these assumptions, the empirical studies in this thesis suggest that the principal condition in adaptive reuse of historical buildings, for generating diverse and active urban life, is a potential in the old buildings to be ‘divided’. This includes ‘divisions’ of space, function and the category of users. Consequently, the design principles, as I would propose at the end of this study, are as follows: extracting spatial potential, creating mixed and small-scale businesses, and expanding categories of users to attract participation of a broad spectrum of the population with a diverse social background. Based on this, the practice of adaptive reuse of historical buildings can help reviving a close and dynamic relationship between the user and the physical setting, people and the city, facilitating the generation and sustaining of a diverse and healthy urban life.

Zugl.: Bielefeld, Univ., Diss., 2007

The intention of this dissertation is to examine the writings of three South African women authors who are active in the post-apartheid era. Work by South African women writers, mainly English-speaking, has been emerging at a remarkable rate in the first 10 years of democracy. The three women authors chosen for examination here have been selected because of their different racial and social backgrounds. In different ways, they attempt to recuperate an alternative past by using a voice previously denied them through sexist and racial discrimination during apartheid South Africa. Post-apartheid writing has not received its due attention. In the main, the treatment of the works of post-apartheid authors has been slight and superficial. Unsurprisingly, the writers whose works are examined here reveal a cultural awareness of a society previously dominated by racial discrimination. However, their creative responses to the period of transition and the new social and political realities have been diverse, and this makes for revealing and enlightening analysis, criticism and comparison.

Thesis advisor: Peter Skerry / The most important political fault line in American politics today is marked by the postwar liberal consensus itself. What is often overlooked, however, is that both liberals and anti-liberals assume a modern, progressive view of history in which the world is growing up to become more secular, technologically advanced, and egalitarian. Liberals celebrate this trajectory as they see themselves “on the right side of history.” They consider their opponents backward holdouts or, more generously, those not yet enjoying the goods of modern life. Anti- liberals on the right see the world according to liberalism proceeding apace to undo traditional morality, globalize economies, automate jobs, replace the nation-state, and undermine cultural norms. A nostalgic politics of reaction aspires to reverse the course of history and return to an unmolested golden age. In the words of one recent variation on this theme, only such a reversal can “Make America Great Again.” This dissertation offers intellectual portraits of three American social critics: Christopher Lasch, Paul Goodman, and Jane Jacobs. Each was a critic of progressive habits of mind in different ways, but all three offer an alternative to the progressive optimism and nostalgia for the past at work in today’s debates. If, then, these thinkers were reactionaries in resisting progressive programs of their times, they were enlightened reactionaries insofar as they rationally resisted the deeper assumption of inevitable progress that animates both left and right. While I address a specific concern in the work of each writer, I draw out three points common to their thought. First, each thinker dissolves the dichotomy between past and future that is central to progressive history. The progressive view of history shared by liberal and anti-liberal alike points toward, alternatively, an inevitably improved future or a past that is slipping away. Lasch, Goodman, and Jacobs, however, point to the continuity of past and future and resist subsuming the present in a deterministic account of history. Second, the thought of each embodies a defense of tradition – historically conditioned ways of knowing, as opposed to supposedly trans-historical universal reason. That defense is expressed not only in each thinker’s view of the past as a resource for the present, but in his or her resistance to the very idea of an Archimedean point that is assumed by claims to have seen the end of history. Indeed, each thinker’s arguments are presented explicitly as part of a tradition, and the work of each points to the importance of tradition as an indispensable lens on the world. Each author shows how the assumption of progress, despite progressives’ claims to have escaped tradition, does not reflect an inescapable law of history but is itself part of a modern tradition that we are free to modify. This in turn points to the political possibilities of recovering tradition as the basis of common discourse. To the extent we are conscious of the decisive role of tradition, we will be aware of the degree to which we are responsible agents: responsible for the contingent way we see the world, and for the contingent choices made by the light of our traditions. Finally, I argue that Lasch, Goodman, and Jacobs’s use of tradition stands in contrast not only to transcendent, objective reason but also to an understanding of traditions as closed language games, coherent in themselves but rationally inaccessible to one another. Lasch, Goodman, and Jacobs present a view in which traditions are dynamic, self-correcting, ongoing arguments within and between themselves. Their use of tradition-bound arguments to develop counter-traditions against dominant progressive perspectives exemplifies the way in which traditions might confront and correct one another. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Notre Dame, 2003. / Thesis directed by Antonette Irving for the Department of English. "September 2003." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 36-37).

A study of intonation problems in the clarinet.

This thesis contributes to critical theoretical interpretation of Sophocles' Antigone. Analyzing texts by Kelly Oliver, Jacques Lacan, and Judith Butler, the thesis demonstrates how the work of these writers re-installs oppositional binarism, the form of thought that undergirds the hierarchical structure of Western metaphysics as exemplified in the dialectical philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel. Focusing on texts by Carol Jacobs, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida, the thesis analyzes the performative effect of Antigone, as sister figure, in the graphics of these works. Employing a deconstructive and performative critical approach, the thesis explores the theoretical productivity of a "sororal" graphics, that, dispersing and subverting binarism, opens the texts and their interpretation to alterity. The thesis demonstrates how critical reading of the performativity of Antigone as sister figure implicates ethicological discussion on justice in relation to family, genre/gender, classification, and inheritance.

Zugl.: Bielefeld, Univ., Diss., 2007.