Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2004. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 272-295).

No description available.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Biblical Theological Seminary, 2008. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 151-157).

This ethnography re-elaborates omertà as something more than a code of honor enforced through an oath of secrecy among members of the Neapolitan camorra and ordinary underemployed individuals in their midst. On appearance, this study is a fetishized and even eroticized search for determinacy or "meaning" performs what Sedgwick (1997) calls "strong theory" or a hermeneutics of suspicion bent on exposure. Having arrived, it seems, at the center of determinacy, the ethnography hints at now being able to tell the "real" story of the camorra and omertà. However, the stories it tells along the way take the camorra and omertà as not only "real", concrete objects (institution and code, respectively), but also (and primarily) their scattered, radial effects/affects in the surrounding zone where the the camorra and ordinary Neapolitans make contact. These stories do not sum these fragments up as omertà's constituent parts with the goal of capturing them in a singular, sovereign, minimalist and generalizing "conceptual economy". Rather, they maintain contact with the everyday grain in which these fragments are embedded. This ethnography takes omertà as a part of everything rather than an objectifiable, identifiable thing. It tracks its livelihood across various domains and registers, everywhere all the time in everyday life for ordinary individuals living in the zone of contact with the camorra. It loiters in this zone where scarce resources, fierce competition, volatile power balances and unreliable state authority render day-to-day life particularly indeterminate. It participates in the practices of negotiating personal livelihood under such constraints--practices that ordinary individuals call the art of making do. This ethnography follows and engages individuals as they perform the art of making do. It pays simultaneous attention to that art's aesthetic, economic and affective dimensions by looking specifically at the moral/political economy of two potent popular performance genres, the sceneggiata and its contemporary descendant, neomelodica music. It finds that for ordinary Neapolitans affects and interests are inextricably intertwined in shared sensibilities, in popular style, and more broadly in the aesthetics of everyday life. It finds that this everyday aesthetics is bound in complex ways to its excessive limit, the camorra. These accounts describe this complex bond as an affective community. / text

No description available.

La présence culturelle française en Italie du sud s'est développée durant l'entre-deux guerre, sous l'ère délicate du fascisme, à travers la création et le développement de l'Institut Français de Naples. La première partie dresse le portrait de Naples : malgré sa déchéance politique, cette ville reste attractive culturellement et économiquement. Sa tradition cosmopolite est envisagée à travers les récits de voyageurs depuis le Grand Tour. Elle est dotée d'institutions locales capables de répondre aux défis lancés par un institut étranger. La description des principales communautés étrangères montre par contraste la faiblesse de l'enracinement français. La deuxième partie s'attache à décrire la création puis l'évolution de l'Institut entre 1914 et 1925. Les pouvoirs publics français considèrent sa création comme le moyen de s'assurer une zone d'influence sur les régions méridionales italiennes et en Méditerranée. Son développement est considérable, surtout en considérant l'ascension du fascisme et la menace de la "dictature légale". Le charisme des professeurs, l'intérêt croissant des services officiels français et les motivations inhérentes à la nature même du fascisme méridional sont des facteurs favorables à ce succès. La troisième partie se penche sur le développement paradoxal de l'Institut, menacé par un fascisme triomphant et radicalisé. Il apparaît comme une institution inadaptée face aux exigences d'un nouvel équilibre mondial et à la précarité des relations politiques franco-italiennes. Malgré la réorganisation des Instituts d'Italie en 1938, l'établissement,démuni, subit une lente agonie avant d'être séquestré par les autorités en 1940. / French cultural presence in Southern Italy grew during the in-between wars period, against the tricky backdrop of fascism, through the birth and development of the French Cultural Institute in Naples. The Opening part of this work is about Naples, a city which, in spite of political decline, remained culturally and economically attractive, while its ever cosmopolitan tradition is best depicted borrowing the words of travelers who visited the region, starting with the Great Tour. Local institutions live up to challenges set by the foreign institute. Closer scrutiny of the main foreign communities however, reveals how shallow-rooted France is, over there. The second part focuses on the creation and evolution of the Institute between 1914 and 1925. The French government sees it as way of starting an area of influence in the Southern Italian regions and across the Mediterranean. The Institute develops at quite an impressive pace, especially considering the contemporaneous rise of fascism and the threat of a "legal dictatorship". Charismatic professors, a increasing interest of the French officials and the very motivations of fascism in the South contributed to its success. In the third part, we shall see how paradoxical the development of the Institute is. An institution faced with an all conquering radicalized Fascism, unfit to meet the needs of a new world order and the poor relation between France and Italy. Despite the 1983 reshaping of all Institutes in Italy, the one in Naples is literally slowly dying ans will end up hostage of the Italian government in 1940.

This dissertation examines the practice of embedding devotional objects, such as relics and painted panels, into mural images in Italy between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. Examples can be found as far south as Amalfi, and as far north as Lombardy, and in a variety of ecclesiastical institutions, ranging from urban cathedrals, remote hermitages, and influential monastic centers. Yet despite its widespread application—found even in the Arena Chapel in Padua—the practice has never been systematically studied. Older studies of the sites taken up in this dissertation generally omit mention of their embedded objects altogether, either because the objects were seen as incidental to the larger image in which they were set, or because their inclusion did not follow certain post-medieval parameters of artistic progress. The works of this study elide traditional divisions within the study of medieval art, traversing the categories of icon and narrative, portable and monumental, and “image” and “art.” This study contends that medieval image-makers engaged the aesthetic and symbolic potential of mixing diverse media. The introduction gives an analysis of the notions of “medium” and “mixture” in the Middle Ages in order to elaborate the heuristic concepts that drive the ensuing chapters. Chapters 1-3 each examine a specific type of embedded object, and consider the various modes of combination exhibited therein. Chapter 1, “Assimilation,” examines relics that were embedded within mural images, and focuses on the apse mosaic of San Clemente in Rome, ca. 1120. Chapter 2, “Fragmentation,” analyzes the insertion of circular wooden panels in murals, and centers on the apse fresco of Santa Restituta in Naples, ca. 1175. Chapter 3, “Mediation,” considers the rectangular panel of God in the Arena Chapel in Padua, produced by Giotto between 1303 and 1305. To recuperate the intermedial practice of embedding objects in mural images, I examine the technical and aesthetic features of mixed media murals in relation to coeval understandings of mixture, media, and mediation. It was a practice that involved an understanding of the mural image not just as a flat surface for pictorial elaboration, but as a physical and spatial entity that could be manipulated and thematized within the image itself. By incorporating relic or panel into a mosaic or frescoed mural, medieval image-makers nested objects traditionally viewed as portable and venerable, into one understood as fixed and site-specific. This maneuver gave the mural a stratified quality of assemblage, producing registers of difference and ambiguity between container and contained, image and object, surface and depth. Throughout the dissertation, I explore these dialectics, demonstrating how and to what ends embedded objects establish difference, only to transcend it. The ambivalent understandings of mixture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—sometimes a hybrid, at other times, a metamorphosis— inform my analysis of the mixed representational systems of this study. The period may be characterized by a growing intellectual interest in the observation and manipulation of physical substances, the study of which was seen to reveal the connective fabric of God’s cosmic order. The works studied here participate in this broader attention to the processes of the natural world. I therefore consider how medial combinations were seen to signal analogous behavior in the mixtures discussed by theologians, natural philosophers, and artists. Attending to both the constituent parts and the symbolic value of their combination, I show how the act of embedding worked by analogy to figure the theological processes of assimilation, fragmentation, and mediation.