Modern states and genocides: the fate of Turkish Armenians and European Jews This thesis primarily explores the relationship between modernity, modern thinking and modern state on one hand and the Holocaust, Armenian genocide or other genocides, on the other. The purpose of my thesis is to answer the question whether a modern state can be considered a perpetrator of both these tragedies. Furthermore, in my thesis I investigate the causes of these genocides and mainly the influence of nationalism, bureaucracy and racism. The first part of the thesis is devoted to genocide and implementation this concept in international criminal law. I deal with the emergence of this concept and its subsequent development as an independent crime under international law. In the second part I deal with the classification of genocides. First, I deal with the typology of genocides by individual authors. I also examine the differences between traditional massacres and modern genocide, name the pivotal features of modern genocide and try to answer the question of whether it makes sense to use the term "traditional genocide" at all. In the next chapter I focus on the Armenian genocide. This part begins with a short introduction of the Armenians, a quick overview of their history and a description of the Armenian situation in the...

In 1927 the Central Electricity Board began to oversee the building of the national grid. In the early development of electricity, electrical power was consumed by those privileged enough to be able to afford their own generators. A small number of local undertakings were established in urban centres during the 1920s but it was the nationalisation of electricity supply that gradually made electric power available to the masses. The electrical supply industry marketed electrical appliances as economical, efficient and clean alternatives to gas and coal, and, as time and labour saving appliances to the housewife. This thesis employs an interdisciplinary approach to the consumption of electricity and electrical technologies within the domestic environment, drawing upon the methodology of social construction of technology, historical geography, material culture studies and oral histories. It aims to compare and contrast constructions of the ideal modern electric home and electrical appliances with the lived reality of experiences of electricity in different homes across Britain to draw out the tensions between the two and explore how they mutually constructed and shaped each other. Using case studies of electric cookers, refrigerators, electric irons, vacuum cleaners, electric toys, radios, electric razors and hairdryers, it explores how the electrical industry constructed modernity and the ideal modern home in advertising material, the construction of the ‘housewife consumer’ and other users in the home, and the fluid nature of domestic space and its relationship with electricity.

Les figurants sont omniprésents mais invisibles au cinéma. S’ils sont partout pour incarner la foule ou le peuple, on ne les voit paradoxalement pas à cause de leur insignifiance manifeste, dans un récit basé sur le modèle de la rationalité causale. Cependant, dans le cinéma de Jean Renoir, les figurants nous dévoilent la modernité des anonymes. Il s’agit de la « politisation de l’art » proposée par Walter Benjamin, qui trouve sa source non seulement dans la singularité de la trivialité des romans de Flaubert, mais surtout dans les révoltes trimillénaires de la Mimésis, selon Erich Auerbach, contre la domination du modèle hiérarchique d’Aristote. Au travers de la mise en scène de l’insignifiance dans son cinéma, se révèle la méthode de l’égalité du cinéaste. Malgré le fait que les figurants soient un parfait exemple au cinéma de l’« exclusion inclusive » analysée par Giorgio Agamben, la mise en scène des figurants dans les films de Jean Renoir manifeste une praxis de la singularité quelconque. / The extras are omnipresent but invisible. If they are everywhere in films because of their indispensability to incarnate the people, we don’t see them paradoxically because of their insignificance in the narration of the model of cause/effect theorized by Aristotle. However, in the films of Jean Renoir, the extras show us the with the modernity of the anonymous. It is part of the “politicization of art” theorized by Walter Benjamin, which recalls its source not only with the singularity of the triviality in the novels of Gustave Flaubert, but especially in the revolts of Mimesis, according to Erich Auerbach, against the domination of the hierarchical model of Aristotle through three thousand years. Through the splendor of insignificance in his films, there is a method of the equality of Jean Renoir. Although the extras are the perfect example in the fiction films of the “inclusive exclusion” observed by Giorgio Agamben, the mise-en-scène of extras in the films of Jean Renoir demonstrates the praxis of the singularity of anyone.

In this dissertation I intervene in and challenge already-existing critical studies of Virginia Woolf's The Waves (1931) that focus on ideas of imperialism, empire and subject-making practices in the novel by arguing for a revisionist reading of The Waves as a Bildungsroman. Unlike the Bildungsroman of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, which utilised standard novelistic conventions to explore the relation between form and reality, I contend that The Waves is a thoroughly modernist reinvention of the Bildungsroman form designed to capture a rapidly industrialising and modernising English society. To capture the socio-political unrest in twentieth-century England at this time, Woolf deviates from the convention of a single-protagonist narration, using multiple perspectives to expose the contradictions in processes of self-formation, especially with regard to the relation between the self, nation and national identity. The correspondence between self, nation and national identity is explored through the silent seventh character, Percival, who I argue is characterised as a hero in the medieval romance tradition to expose the romantic and heroic fictional narratives that provided the framework for ideas of empire and imperialism, then at the core of nationhood and national identity in England. Conversely I argue that the character who narrates a third of the novel's narrative, Bernard, provides us with an alternative to empire and imperialism in subject-making practices. I argue that in the final section of The Waves Bernard deviates from the direct-speech narrative of preceding sections of the novel and engages the reader directly. The reader is thus alerted not only to his or her role as a reader, but also to Bernard's overarching role as primary protagonist in the novel. The reader has progressed alongside Bernard through the narrative in keeping with the genre designation of the Bildungsroman which encourages the progression of the reader alongside the progression of the primary protagonist. The reader is further encouraged in his or her progression by an aesthetic education present in the music and poetry that Woolf incorporates not only in the content, but in the very structure of the text. Two of the novel's characters, Louis and Neville, use poetry to locate their subjectivities within larger historical narratives, while Beethoven's String Quartet No. 13 in B♭ major, Opus 130, informs the structure of the text, contributing to the interactive sonic and non-sonic landscape that actively invites the participation of the reader. The reader's participation in the novel is most fully realised when Bernard addresses the reader directly in the final section of The Waves. This interaction explains and thus concretises Woolf's overarching critiques of empire and imperialism in the novel alongside her proposed methods - which directly oppose the ideology of imperialism - for developing a subjectivity formed in relation to the common, and the individual experience of the common as a historically and materially determined phenomenon. The common in this sense is a community of 'common reading subjects', who like Woolf are not formally educated, but develop a subjectivity through reading premised on an equality of intelligence which enables them to engage critically with, order and make sense of the society and politics of their surrounding world. In this way, I show that Woolf challenges the already existing subject-making practices in twentieth-century England by exposing the contradictions - the exclusion of the marginalised, the poor and women - in ideas of Englishness. She proposes an alternative form of subject-making that is as diverse as her reading public and premised on a non-exclusionary acknowledgement of an equality of intelligence that defies class, gender and social boundaries.

Includes abstract. / This study examines literature by Zimbabwean women that explores evictions and migrations of people from 2000 to 2009 when the crisis subsided with the enactment of the Global Political Agreement (GPA).

The Thousand and One Nights is often brushed aside as a manifestation of a long-ago past, its stories recast in orientalist tropes and scoured for clues to the secrets of foreign cultures. Yet, increasingly, scholars are engaging with the text in more complex ways, realising that to read it in this manner is to chain it to a context with which it was never entirely familiar. Born out of centuries of dissemination and cross-pollination, the Nights is better understood as a dynamic thing, a work produced in its movement through time and place. It therefore asks that we find a mode of reading suited to its restlessness, one that accounts for what, in The Limits of Critique, Rita Felski identifies as "the transtemporal liveliness of texts". Such a reading draws us towards a discussion of the text not simply as something that we can hold but as a phenomenon, as more thing than object. By looking at the text-as-thing alongside the things in the text, we can see the many ways in which the Nights can be considered what Marina Warner describes as a world of stories "lodged in goods" that are alive and sentient. Making use of Warner's insightful study of the text, Stranger Magic, together with Felski's literary reworking of Actor–Network Theory, this thesis explores the thing-culture of the Nights, looking at how the saturation of the text's historical and fictional worlds with objects, both worldly and otherworldly, reveals more than simply the artefacts of bygone eras. By recognising the agency of things, the thesis proposes, it is possible that we come closer to a method of reading that treats the text with neither reverence nor suspicion and, in doing so, reveal the ways in which the Nights is able to contribute to understandings of our own thing-culture and current literary praxes.

This thesis examines the impact of urbanisation on Zimbabwean culture, particularly the Shona culture as it is represented in Zimbabwean literature. My main argument in this thesis is that Zimbabwean literature suggests that urbanisation is harmful and destructive to the Shona culture and the way of life of the Shona people.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 82-86). / This dissertation explores the construction of the subject via a relationship of power in two poem sequences, 'The circle game' and 'Two-headed poems', by Margaret Atwood. I argue that Atwood proposes a subject similar to the kind of subject found in psychoanalysis. Like the psychoanalytic subject, Atwood's subject is formed in relation to its other. This relation is essentially a power relation and can become unbalanced, forcing one of the two parties into a subjugated position. Atwood not only exposes these skewed relations of power, but also explores possible solutions for escaping or reconfiguring these relationships. The first chapter briefly discusses theories of the subject by Freud, Lacan and Kristeva. I use Hegel's dialectic between the 'master' and 'bondsman', and subsequent psychoanalytic and postcolonial applications of it, to examine the construction of the subject in terms of an other in Chapter 2. Postcolonial map theory and Kristeva's ideas on the abject are used to verbalize the divisions, but also the interactions, between the subject and its other as well as possibilities of escape. Chapter 3 demonstrates these power relationships, and their expression in cartographic terms, in 'The circle game'. In Chapter 4, I show how processes analogous to the eruption of poetic language into the symbolic order are described in the poetry. Even though these processes do not provide a clear-cut solution to the position of the subjected, their presence signals the possibility of renegotiating unbalanced relationships of power.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 96-97). / Larkin's place in the genealogy of English poetry is significant since, unlike many of his predecessors, his work lacks the hope or possibility of redemption offered by faith. Larkin countered the void created by his agnosticism by appealing to the power both of ritual and of the English landscape, and yet ultimately these attempts - although not wholly unsuccessful poetically - appear fruitless philosophically. Larkin's awareness of English society is not explicit, and yet his preoccupation with death and nothingness is inexorably linked to the political despair and religious questioning of post-war England. Through the use of the many' Englishes' of his time Larkin manages to construct a passable means by which to fill the lacuna left by godlessness. A thorough review of the critical opinion of Larkin is undertaken here, in order to sketch out the landscape of English letters and Larkin's place within, or in relation to, English poetry. His interrogation of the dominant societal structures is rigorous, and while his habit of constantly contradicting himself and his insistent ambiguity may seem to undermine his efforts, on closer inspection this lack of clarity complements his aims precisely. This dissertation will demonstrate how Larkin's use of cliche epitomises this struggle, and that in his poetry the often-assumed emptiness of such language is turned on its head. Larkin, it will be argued, deploys common English expressions as a modem substitute for the social links provided to earlier poets by means of reference to classical mythology.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 61-65). / The tale of 'Sleeping Beauty' offers a familiar fairy tale narrative that features a beautiful sleeping princess, a wicked witch and a dashing prince who saves the day. This formulaic narrative has its roots in oral tales that date back to thousands of years ago. The fact that this narrative has survived so many different centuries, combined with the simplicity of the fairy tale model which makes it particularly accessible and thus particularly applicable, is perhaps why contemporary scholars argue that the literary fairy tale model might be seen as an ahistorical urtext that moulds the fabric of society and acts as a metaphor for navigating shared human experiences.