A presente tese visa analisar algumas passagens bíblicas do livro de Êxodo, situadas especialmente entre os capítulos 4 a 14, a partir do referencial teórico do simbolismo mágico-religioso. Para alcançar esse propósito, dividiremos a nossa pesquisa em quatro partes. Em primeiro lugar, buscaremos compreender o significado do símbolo, bem como a sua importância para a Bíblia Hebraica como um todo e, especialmente, para o livro de Êxodo. Em segundo lugar, dissertaremos sobre o significado da magia e da religião, percorreremos as principais teorias antropológicas e sociológicas a esse respeito e, então, justificaremos o emprego do termo composto mágico-religioso em nossa pesquisa. Em terceiro lugar, discorreremos sobre o fenômeno do mágico-religioso na Bíblia Hebraica. Por fim, em quarto e último lugar, com o auxílio do instrumental simbólico mágico-religioso previamente construído, apresentaremos a nossa tradução e respectiva exegese de alguns trechos do livro de Êxodo, compreendidos entre os capítulos 4 a 14. Para isso, nos basearemos no texto hebraico massorético presente na edição crítica padrão do Tanakh, isto é, a Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, editada por Karl Elliger e Wilhelm Rudolph, a qual encontrase atualmente em sua quinta edição revisada. Com esse trabalho pretendemos contribuir para os estudos concernentes à Bíblia Hebraica e, sobretudo, ao livro de Êxodo. / This thesis aims to analyze some biblical passages of the book of Exodus, especially situated between chapters 4-14, from the theoretical framework of magicreligious symbolism. To achieve this purpose, we will divide our research into four parts. First, we will seek to understand the meaning of the symbol, as well as its importance to the Hebrew Bible as a whole and especially to the book of Exodus. Second, we will discourse about the meaning of magic and religion, we will cover the main anthropological and sociological theories about it and then we justify the use of the compound term magical-religious in our research. Third, we will discuss on the phenomenon of the magical-religious in the Hebrew Bible. Finally, in fourth and last place, with the help of magical-religious symbolic instrumental previously constructed, we will present our translation and its exegesis of some excerpts from the book of Exodus, ranging from chapters 4 to 14. For this, we will base on the Hebrew Masoretic text present in the standard critical edition of the Tanakh, that is, the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, edited by Karl Elliger and Wilhelm Rudolph, which is currently in its fifth edition revised. With this work we intend to contribute to the studies concerning the Hebrew Bible and especially the book of Exodus.

A presente tese visa analisar algumas passagens bíblicas do livro de Êxodo, situadas especialmente entre os capítulos 4 a 14, a partir do referencial teórico do simbolismo mágico-religioso. Para alcançar esse propósito, dividiremos a nossa pesquisa em quatro partes. Em primeiro lugar, buscaremos compreender o significado do símbolo, bem como a sua importância para a Bíblia Hebraica como um todo e, especialmente, para o livro de Êxodo. Em segundo lugar, dissertaremos sobre o significado da magia e da religião, percorreremos as principais teorias antropológicas e sociológicas a esse respeito e, então, justificaremos o emprego do termo composto mágico-religioso em nossa pesquisa. Em terceiro lugar, discorreremos sobre o fenômeno do mágico-religioso na Bíblia Hebraica. Por fim, em quarto e último lugar, com o auxílio do instrumental simbólico mágico-religioso previamente construído, apresentaremos a nossa tradução e respectiva exegese de alguns trechos do livro de Êxodo, compreendidos entre os capítulos 4 a 14. Para isso, nos basearemos no texto hebraico massorético presente na edição crítica padrão do Tanakh, isto é, a Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, editada por Karl Elliger e Wilhelm Rudolph, a qual encontrase atualmente em sua quinta edição revisada. Com esse trabalho pretendemos contribuir para os estudos concernentes à Bíblia Hebraica e, sobretudo, ao livro de Êxodo. / This thesis aims to analyze some biblical passages of the book of Exodus, especially situated between chapters 4-14, from the theoretical framework of magicreligious symbolism. To achieve this purpose, we will divide our research into four parts. First, we will seek to understand the meaning of the symbol, as well as its importance to the Hebrew Bible as a whole and especially to the book of Exodus. Second, we will discourse about the meaning of magic and religion, we will cover the main anthropological and sociological theories about it and then we justify the use of the compound term magical-religious in our research. Third, we will discuss on the phenomenon of the magical-religious in the Hebrew Bible. Finally, in fourth and last place, with the help of magical-religious symbolic instrumental previously constructed, we will present our translation and its exegesis of some excerpts from the book of Exodus, ranging from chapters 4 to 14. For this, we will base on the Hebrew Masoretic text present in the standard critical edition of the Tanakh, that is, the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, edited by Karl Elliger and Wilhelm Rudolph, which is currently in its fifth edition revised. With this work we intend to contribute to the studies concerning the Hebrew Bible and especially the book of Exodus.

It is undeniable that literature reflects much about the society that produces it. The give-and-take relationship between a society and its literature is especially interesting when medieval texts are considered. Because most medieval plots and characters are variants of existing stories, the ways that the portrayals change has the potential to reveal much about the differences between medieval societies separated by distance and time. Changes to the treatment of these recurring characters and their stories can reveal how the attitudes of medieval society changed over time. Perceptions of magic and attitudes toward its female practitioners, both real and fictional, changed drastically throughout the Middle Ages among clergy members and the ruling class. Historically, as attitudes toward women became more negative, they were increasingly prohibited from receiving a formal education and from gaining or maintaining positions traditionally associated with feminine magical power, such as healer, midwife, or wise woman. As the power of the Church grew and attitudes changed throughout the Middle Ages, women’s power in almost all areas of life experienced a proportional decrease. Using a combination of historical and literary sources, this paper will explore whether this decrease in power is evident in literary portrayals of magical female characters in medieval literature. Specifically, it will examine the agency and potency, or the intrinsic motivation and effectiveness within the story, respectively, of female characters within medieval narratives, comparing the characters to their earlier iterations. This research will offer a unique perspective on the roles of magical women in medieval literature.

The areas of study in the Proof thesis contain research on the play, the playwright, and the acting style utilized in the performance and character analysis. The acting style in this process focuses on the actor’s creative work in preparation of portraying a female character. This character is a controlling woman that is unable to manipulate others. By using relaxation techniques involving the Alexander Technique, the actor was able to transition into the character with honest emotions and motives. Finding similarities to the character by using personal relationships gave the actor the ability to discover connections with the character in portrayal. These connections are used to motivate the actor’s process in creating an authentic character. The results are found through the actor’s reflections and performances. The findings show discipline and routine in the actor’s process to portray the character.

While Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray depicts the quintessential literary portrait endowed with uncanny life and movement, dozens of such magic portraits are featured in Victorian fiction. From the ravishing picture of the title character in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret to the coveted portrait of a Romantic poet in Henry James's The Aspern Papers, imagined portraits in these texts serve as conduits of desire and fear--windows into passions and repressions that reveal not only the images' external effects but their relation to the unconscious of their viewers. My dissertation turns a critical eye on this gallery of ekphrastic pictures--those not actually visible to the reader but rather visualizable through verbal description--to argue that the meditations on representation and desire that these novels and stories perform not only anticipate but augment theories of the image and the gaze developed primarily since the advent of cinema. Though the dissertation benefits from film theory's models of visual exchange, the distinctions between these portraits and images in film open up fertile analytical terrain. Ekphrastic magic portraits provide a unique opportunity to delve into the intersecting realms of word painting and image perception, the optics of desire and subjectivity, to advance critical discourses in visual studies that are framed both historically and theoretically. Using psychoanalytic and narratological methodologies, particularly those relevant to feminist and queer image theory, "The Ekphrastic Fantastic" demonstrates how the fictional visual exchanges on display in magic portrait stories elucidate various power struggles regarding sexuality and narrative structuring. These literary pictures thereby provide new access to the social and artistic commentaries that often subtend Victorian fiction. Each chapter considers three primary texts and the branch of image theory most relevant to their deployment of magic portraits. Laura Mulvey's foundational essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," provides the point of departure in the first chapter, which looks at Charles Dickens's Bleak House, Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, and Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White. The second chapter addresses Margaret Oliphant's "The Portrait," Thomas Hardy's "An Imaginative Woman," and James's The Aspern Papers with further feminist insights from Vivian Sobchack and Teresa de Lauretis. The final chapter determines the relationship of principles of visual representation and narrative production of the Aesthetic movement to magic portraits in Walter Pater's "Sebastian van Storck," Vernon Lee's "Oke of Okehurst," and Wilde's Dorian Gray, particularly as they relate to the nascent medium of cinema and the theories that soon as well as later arose to account for the impact of its kinetic mirage. The arc of my argument emphasizes how, as the Victorian period advances, the portraits become increasingly animate and subversive in their challenges to patriarchal gender norms and narrative formulas. In this way, they become the mechanisms by which new models of psycho-sexual relations can be expressed and new social and narrative systems can emerge.

The Spirit of Friendship: Girlfriends in Contemporary African American Literature examines spiritual subjectivities that inspire girlfriends in three contemporary novels to journey towards actualization. It examines the girlfriend bond as a space where the Divine Spirit can flourish and assist girlfriends as they seek to become actualized. This project raises epistemological questions as it suggests that within the girlfriend dynamic, knowledge that is traditionally subjugated is formed and refined. Finally, girlfriend epistemology is considered in light of Black Girl Magic, a contemporary social and cultural movement among Black women.

Thesis (Ph.D. (Church and Dogma History))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus in cooperation with Greenwich School of Theology, U.K., 2007.

This PhD thesis presents structural investigations of amorphous inorganic materials: oxide and oxynitride glasses and mesoporous bioactive glasses (MBGs), by solid-state Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR). Lanthanum oxide and oxynitride [La-Si-(Al)-O-(N)] glasses have a large number of potential applications due to their physical properties. In our work we have studied, compared to previous investigations, significantly expanded ranges of glass compositions (for oxynitride glasses, including samples of very high nitrogen content, up to 53 % out of the anions). We have estimated local environments of 29Si and 27Al structural units (their coordination, polymerization degree and number of N incorporated into tetrahedral units) in the materials. We have suggested a random Al/Si distribution along with almost uniform non-bridging oxygen atoms distribution in aluminosilicate glasses. Silicon nitride was used as precursor in the oxynitride glass synthesis. We studied both α- and β-modifications of silicon nitride, 15N-enriched, as well as fully (29Si, 15N)-enriched samples. We have shown that the linewidths of 15N NMR spectra are dominated by J(29Si-15N) coupling in 29Si315N4 sample. Mesoporous bioactive glasses in the CaO-SiO2-P2O5 system show superior bioactivity (the ability to form a hydroxycarbonate apatite layer on the glass surface when exposed to body fluids) compared to conventional bioactive glasses due to their large surface area and uniform pore-size distribution. Previous studies suggested a homogeneous cation distribution over the MBG samples on a 10−20 nm length-scale. From our results, on the other hand, we may conclude that Si and P is not intimately mixed. We propose a structural model, in which the pore walls of MBGs are composed of a silica network, and a phosphate phase is present as nanometer-sized clusters that are dispersed on the pore wall.

La historia de la astronomía de los rayos gammas en los últimos veinte años está marcada por el éxito que los telescopios Cherenkov han tenido en la exploración de la banda de muy altas energías. La ultima generación de telescopios Cherenkov, que incluye los telescopios HESS, VERITAS y MAGIC, ha logrado, en sólo siete años, aumentar el número total de fuentes conocidas de muy altas energías, desde unas pocas hasta más de un centenar. Esta populación de fuentes incluye objetos galácticos y extragalácticos. Los telescopios Cherenkov se han demostrado muy eficientes en el descubrimiento de nuevas emisoras de rayos gammas y también en el estudio detallado de la propiedades físicas de las fuentes bien conocidas, como por ejemplo, la Nebulosa del Cangrejo, el prototipo de los pleriones o Nebulosas de Viento de Púlsar ("pulsar wind nebulae"). Gracias a su brillo a todas las longitudes de onda, el Cangrejo es una fuente astrofísica de referencia. Su espectro ha sido medido en veinte ordenes de magnitud en energía, desde las frecuencias radio hasta las muy altas energías, pero nuevas medidas resultan aún esenciales para entender las contradicciones que surgen cuando se combinan los resultados de diferentes longitudes de onda. Finalizado del commissioning del segundo telescopio en el Otoño del 2009, y tras el comienzo de la toma de datos en modalidad estereoscopica, MAGIC ha mejorado significantivamente su rendimiento y alcanza el umbral en energía más bajo de todos los telescopios Cherenkov. Por lo tanto MAGIC es un instrumento ideal para medir el espectro de la Nebulosa del Cangrejo con una precisión sin precedentes a partir de 50 GeV. Este logro tiene una importancia extraordinaria para el astrofísica de muy altas energías y tiene el potencial de solucionar unos de los misterios aun no resueltos de esta fuente. Este es uno de los asuntos centrales de este trabajo de tesis. Por otro lado, MAGIC ha tenido también un impacto fundamental en el descubrimiento de nuevos objetos astrofísicos, y, con la mejora en sensibilidad del nuevo sistema de dos telescopios , este impacto será aún mas significativo. Entre las fuentes galacticas, los microcuásares constituyen unos de los mejores candidatos a emisores de rayos gammas. Su caracterización a muy alta energía aportaría información muy útil para entender la formación de chorros de partículas en objetos astronomicos. Aunque muchos modelos teóricos predicen esta emisión, aún no ha sido detectada. De hecho hay evidencias de que los tres sistemas binarios que se han detectado hasta la fecha por encima de 300 GeV son binarias de púlsares más que microcuásares. Sin embargo, el hecho que el microcuásar Cygnus X-3 haya sido detectado por encima de 100 MeV por los satélites AGILE y Fermi/LAT confirma que esta clase de objetos sigue siendo un objetivo interesente por la astrofísica de muy alta energía. En los últimos años, MAGIC ha dedicado un esfuerzo muy importante búsqueda de señales desde los microcuásares. Esta tesis presenta los resultados de las observaciones de dos de ellos: Cygnus X-3 y Scorpius X-1. Se han logrado extraer los limites superiores al flujo integral de estas dos fuentes más restrictivos hasta la fecha por encima de unos centenares de GeV. Para Cygnus X-3 en particular, se presentan además las primeras observaciones a estas energías totalmente simultáneas con la emisión detectada por los satélites. / of the Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes (IACTs) in the exploration of the Very- High-Energy (VHE) band. The last generation of IACTs have been capable to increase the total number of known VHE emitting sources from a few to almost one hundred in just seven years of operation. This population comprises galactic and extragalactic objects. IACTs have proved to be very effective in both the discovery of new emitters, as well as in the fine analysis of the physics properties of well established sources. Among them, the Crab Pulsar Wind Nebula is probably the best studied astrophysical object and the archetypal PWN. Due to its brightness at almost all wavelenghts, it is considered as an astrophysical candle. Despite the Crab Nebula broad-band spectrum has been thoroughly studied across twenty orders of magnitudes, from radio frequencies to VHE, further effort is needed to resolve the contradictions in the combination of all the multiwavelenght results. With the commissioning of the second MAGIC telescope in 2009 and the beginning of the operations in stereoscopic mode, the performance of the instrument improved dramatically, allowing MAGIC to reach the lowest ever energy threshold among all the existing IACTs, and describe the Crab Nebula spectrum with unprecedented precision down to 50 GeV. This achievement is of crucial importance for the VHE !-ray astrophysics in the pre-CTA era, since it can cast new light on some of the unsolved mysteries of one of its most established sources. On the other hand, MAGIC made a strong impact in the discovery of new VHE sources and, with the improved sensitivity of the stereoscopic mode, this will be even more so in the future. Among the galactic objects, Microquasars (MQs) constitute some of the best candidates for VHE emission, but despite several well accepted models predict such signal, it has not been detected. There are, in fact, evidences that the three binary systems which have been unambiguously detected at energies above few hundreds of GeV are binary pulsars rather than accreting microquasars. Nevertheless, the recent detection of the microquasar Cygnus X-3 above 100 MeV by both Agile and Fermi satellites, and the claim of short oneday flares from Cygnus X-1 reported by Agile confirmed that microquasars remain interesting targets for VHE telescopes. MAGIC made a strong effort in searching for VHE signals from microquasars, but found only a non-significant evidence of signal from Cygnus X-1 in 80 minutes of observation on September 24, 2006. MAGIC tried to detect similar flares in the following four years but the subsequent hundred more hours of observations were unsuccessful. Besides Cygnus X-1, MAGIC pointed at two other microquasar candidates, whose results are presented in this thesis: Cygnus X-3 and Scorpius X-1. The most constraining UL to the integral flux of these sources at the energy above few hundred GeV are provided. Further investigations are being planned to discover these sources at VHE in the next years.

Aquest treball és una contribució a l'estudi de diferents problemes que sorgeixen de dues àrees fortament connexes de la Teoria de Grafs: etiquetaments i descomposicions. Molts etiquetaments de grafs deuen el seu origen als presentats l'any 1967 per Rosa. Un d'aquests etiquetaments, àmpliament conegut com a etiquetament graceful, va ser definit originalment com a eina per atacar la conjectura de Ringel, la qual diu que el graf complet d'ordre 2m+1 pot ser descompost en m copies d'un arbre donat de mida m. Aquí, estudiem etiquetaments relacionats que ens donen certes aproximacions a la conjectura de Ringel, així com també a una altra conjectura de Graham i Häggkvist que, en una forma dèbil, demana la descomposició d'un graf bipartit complet per un arbre donat de mida apropiada. Les principals contribucions que hem fet en aquest tema són la prova de la darrera conjectura per grafs bipartits complets del doble de mida essent descompostos per arbres de gran creixement i un nombre primer d'arestes, i la prova del fet que cada arbre és un subarbre gran de dos arbres pels quals les dues conjectures es compleixen respectivament. Aquests resultats estan principalment basats en una aplicació del mètode polinomial d'Alon. Un altre tipus d'etiquetaments, els etiquetaments magic, també són tractats aquí. Motivats per la noció de quadrats màgics de Teoria de Nombres, en aquest tipus d'etiquetaments volem asignar nombres enters a parts del graf (vèrtexs, arestes, o vèrtexs i arestes) de manera que la suma de les etiquetes assignades a certes subestructures del graf sigui constant. Desenvolupem tècniques basades en particions de certs conjunts d'enters amb algunes condicions additives per construir etiquetaments cycle-magic, un nou tipus d'etiquetament introduït en aquest treball i que estén la noció clàssica d'etiquetament magic. Els etiquetaments magic no donen cap descomposició de grafs, però les tècniques usades per obtenir-los estan al nucli d'un altre problema de descomposició, l'ascending subgraph decomposition (ASD). Alavi, Boals, Chartrand, Erdös i Oellerman, van conjecturar l'any 1987 que tot graf té un ASD. Aquí, estudiem l'ASD per grafs bipartits, una classe de grafs per la qual la conjectura encara no ha estat provada. Donem una condició necessària i una de suficient sobre la seqüència de graus d'un estable del graf bipartit de manera que admeti un ASD en que cada factor sigui un star forest. Les tècniques utilitzades estan basades en l'existència de branca-acoloriments en multigrafs bipartits. També tractem amb el sumset partition problem, motivat per la conjectura ASD, que demana una partició de [n] de manera que la suma dels elements de cada part sigui igual a un valor prescrit. Aquí donem la millor condició possible per la versió modular del problema que ens permet provar els millors resultats ja coneguts en el cas enter per n primer. La prova està de nou basada en el mètode polinomial. / This work is a contribution to the study of various problems that arise from two strongly connected areas of the Graph Theory: graph labelings and graph decompositions. Most graph labelings trace their origins to the ones presented in 1967 by Rosa. One of these labelings, widely known as the graceful labeling, originated as a means of attacking the conjecture of Ringel, which states that the complete graph of order 2m+1 can be decomposed into m copies of a given tree of size m. Here, we study related labelings that give some approaches to Ringel's conjecture, as well as to another conjecture by Graham and Häggkvist that, in a weak form, asks for the decomposition of a complete bipartite graph by a given tree of appropriate size. Our main contributions in this topic are the proof of the latter conjecture for double sized complete bipartite graphs being decomposed by trees with large growth and prime number of edges, and the proof of the fact that every tree is a large subtree of two trees for which both conjectures hold respectively. These results are mainly based on a novel application of the so-called polynomial method by Alon. Another kind of labelings, the magic labelings, are also treated. Motivated by the notion of magic squares in Number Theory, in these type of labelings we want to assign integers to the parts of a graph (vertices, edges, or vertices and edges) in such a way that the sums of the labels assigned to certain substructures of the graph remain constant. We develop techniques based on partitions of certain sets of integers with some additive conditions to construct cycle-magic labelings, a new brand introduced in this work that extends the classical magic labelings. Magic labelings do not provide any graph decomposition, but the techniques that we use to obtain them are the core of another decomposition problem, the ascending subgraph decomposition (ASD). In 1987, was conjectured by Alavi, Boals. Chartrand, Erdös and Oellerman that every graph has an ASD. Here, we study ASD of bipartite graphs, a class of graphs for which the conjecture has not been shown to hold. We give a necessary and a sufficient condition on the one sided degree sequence of a bipartite graph in order that it admits an ASD by star forests. Here the techniques are based on the existence of edge-colorings in bipartite multigraphs. Motivated by the ASD conjecture we also deal with the sumset partition problem, which asks for a partition of [n] in such a way that the sum of the elements of each part is equal to a prescribed value. We give a best possible condition for the modular version of the sumset partition problem that allows us to prove the best known results in the integer case for n a prime. The proof is again based on the polynomial method.