This study consist of a comparative analysis of the nostalgic female characters in Pai Hsien-yung's two short stories: "Wandering in a Garden, Waking from a Dream," and "A Celestial in Mundane Exile," and Tennessee Williams's two plays: The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire. Beginning with a brief discussion of the socio-historical background of Pai's Republican China and Williams's American South, a general analysis of previous scholarship on Pai and Williams's works follows. The analysis of the selected works focuses on the stylistic and symbolic features in Pai and Williams's characterizations, such as Pai's use of stream-of-consciousness, reference to the k'un opera Peony Pavilion, elaboration over descriptive details of the setting, symbolic use of clothing and accessories, and Williams's symbolic use of music genres: "Blues Piano" and the "Varsouviana Polka," and his use of rhythm and other poetic elements in his characters' speech, in the style of "personal lyricism." My study is based on a close-reading analysis of the selected works by Pai and Williams. Their humanistic approach to their respective declining aristocratic cultures and their sympathy for the nostalgic female characters' tragedies will be more apparent when the study focuses mostly on the texts themselves. Their similar belief in the universal values, such as compassion, sacrifice, and courage, has made their works comparable. In the discussion of themes, the idea of the humanistic role of literature articulated by William Faulkner in his Nobel Prize Speech is also used to connect Pai and Williams's sympathetic approach to their characters. / Arts, Faculty of / Asian Studies, Department of / Graduate

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Modern understandings of nostalgia sharply distinguish it from memory and often construe its relationship to the past as reactionary, fanciful, or retrograde. This dissertation reconsiders that valuation by engaging the formative sources that contribute to philosophical understandings of nostalgia and provide resources for thinking it otherwise. It reexamines time and memory in continental philosophy and U.S. cinema to argue that nostalgia does important work often overlooked in present conceptions, work that repositions relations with the past to generative, animating effect. The project analyzes the temporal issues nostalgia elicits, highlights its affective contours, and repositions its power to mediate and rework memory. It maintains that the role nostalgia plays in human experience is more propulsive than regressive, making it more attuned to time’s tensions and demands than previously thought. Chapter one narrates the history of nostalgia, beginning with the work of Johannes Hofer. Origins in medical nosology establish a diagnostic frame of reference that grounds nostalgia’s reception as pathology while also revealing its persistent instabilities. Martin Heidegger and, especially, Jacques Derrida bring the temporal vectors of those instabilities into sharper focus. Chapter two shows how Heidegger’s work provides a useful understanding of time and moods, but ultimately remains tethered to a nostalgia for presence (nostos). Chapter three brings Derrida’s thinking on time and the trace into conversation with psychoanalysis to isolate a more capacious approach, one that indulges nostalgic desire but also frustrates it (algos). The remaining chapters turn to film and develop an understanding of the moving image based on its ability to capture passing time, the eminent object of modern nostalgic experience. Chapter four engages critical literature on the uses of nostalgia in film and reconsiders George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973), a pivotal work often reproached by critics and scholars. Chapter five advances a close reading of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011) and his estranged relationship with philosophy. That relationship informs his work and often takes nostalgic recollection as an orienting concern. The film in question situates nostalgia as a propulsive screen affect that facilitates the work of mourning in the wake of loss and discontinuity. The dissertation concludes by sketching out horizons for future research and turning to insights contained in Augustine’s Confessions that further illustrate the form of nostalgia explored throughout.

Memoria para optar al título profesional de Grabador / El desarrollo de la obra se basa en la representación gráfica y pictórica de diapositivas digitalizadas, utilizando las técnicas de serigrafía y pintura en aguadas como medio con el objeto de mezclar ambos lenguajes para interpretar emociones. Estas diapositivas son extraídas de una caja de recuerdos fotográficos familiares. Es en este contexto en donde entra en juego el concepto de nostalgia, el cual fue explorado en el proceso de creación de las obras recurriendo al uso del color e imágenes indefinidas. La obra tiene como sentido que el espectador pueda percibir estas representaciones asociándolas a recuerdos y vivencias personales despertando una emoción. A partir de distintos trabajos de las asignaturas de la carrera, comienza el interés en la utilización de la fotografía familiar como referente y la experimentación en el uso de técnicas. Esto constituye el fundamento de la creación de la obra y del origen del proceso artístico. La primera transformación de la imagen real a imagen digital gatilla la utilización de la serigrafía y la pintura como un recurso gráfico-pictórico representativo siendo influenciada por el estilo y temperamento del artista principalmente en el uso del color y pintura en aguadas creando imágenes poco definidas, pretendiendo evocar en el espectador alguna vivencia personal emotiva

Magister Artium - MA / This portfolio of poems, prose poems and short fiction pieces is quasi-autobiographical and tracks the trajectory of my life, from childhood in Cape Town (‘pre-exilic’) to emigration abroad (‘exilic’) and return to Cape Town in late middle age (‘post-exilic’). Themes explored include the deceptive nature of memory and the risk of imbuing a childhood recollected in later life with affective or narrative nostalgia; the psychologically dislocating nature of exile on personal identity and notions of home; and Cape Town as both an imaginary construct and a multi-layered reality: specifically, ‘my’ Cape Town – now as well as half a century ago – and ‘other’ Cape Towns, reflecting a diversity of highly unequal experiences within this city. The dominant mode of expression chosen to explore these largely personal themes is confessional.

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“The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love, and death.” – Forster, E.M., 1927, Aspects of the Novel.We might all have something to say about love, but we are certain about food.The thesis aims to develop a perspective on food, its role, and traditions as possible a tool of identification among first and second generation East-African migrants in Sweden, in the area of Falun. Particularly, I focused on the concept of gastronomic identity and the relation between food and nostalgia. The intention is to explore whether a gastronomic identity can be identified, and the importance of nostalgia by answering the following questions:1. How do the people interviewed refer to their gastronomic identity? How is it related to their country of origin, to Sweden, or a hybridization of the two?2. How do first and second generation of immigrants adapt their food traditions in the local context?3. What is the role of food, its tradition, and how is it related to the feeling of nostalgia for these people?In order to answer to these questions, I made use of an extensive academic literature research on food and gastronomic identity on both the historical and anthropological perspective and variety of multimedia materials (such as blogs, YouTube videos). I have also conducted semi-structured interviews with East African immigrants in Falun. Through the use of both literature and, above all, the interviews, I concluded that gastronomic identity takes on a much more personal and individual meaning than nationalistic or ethnic identity, and almost always emerges as a transculturalization of the two countries: Sweden and the country of origin. In the responses of the interviewed migrants from East Africa, it also emerges that food is an element to define our identity as individuals and it is linked to memory and influenced by the nostalgia of home. Therefore, according to the respondents, anywhere one may be, when feeling nostalgia, one will be looking for a taste of home, whatever and wherever it is.

In 2014, Switzerland was ranked seventh among the most successful nations in exerting what political scientist Joseph Nye calls "soft power": the ability to exercise power by attracting favor through economic and cultural influence rather than through coercion. This ability is partly due to the way Switzerland redefined its national identity following an economic decline in the 1970s and rapidly changing demographics, resulting in its repositioning on the international market. Indicative of this shift is the adoption of the pseudo-English word "Swissness" into the Swiss-German language in the late 1990s. The notion of Swissness, initially used in marketing Swiss products, has become instrumental in reframing and reshaping the cultural landscape of the nation. This dissertation examines a particular case of cultural nation re-branding through an ethnographic analysis of the revival of Streichmusik (string music). Streichmusik, which was once a localized musical practice of the mountainous region of the Appenzell and the Toggenburg, has become identified as quintessentially Swiss. By considering the role of domestic cultural tourism, I ask how Streichmusik, a visual and sonic representation of Swissness, is promoted and at times commercialized, and how commodification of the musical practice has affected its performance, reception, and cultural significance locally and nationally. In my analyses, I focus particularly on two keywords, Heimat (homeland) and Heile Welt (ideal or idyllic world), as well as local terminology denoting authenticity to argue that Streichmusik and the region offer a restorative platform for Switzerland. The resultant notions of nostalgia and reclaiming a rural utopia, position Appenzell and Toggenburg as an embodiment of Swissness. Based on participant observation and interviews, this study focuses on the voices of performers, cultural institutions, and tourist organizations to demonstrate how the tensions between cultural preservation and marketing practices at a local and national level provide a reimagined heritage in their attempt to (re)brand both the region and the nation at large. I further argue that having found a new place in the cultural imaginary through Swissness, Streichmusik performers articulate differing relationships with domestic cultural tourism and globalizing market forces at a time of shifting discourses of Swiss national identity. / 2017-05-31T00:00:00Z

The main purpose of the study was to develop information which would be useful to the counselors of the Reed College Counseling Service in their practice. Specifically, information was sought on the outcomes of one to one counseling sessions. The aim of the inquiry was to determine some of the dynamics and results of individual counseling with Reed students. The goal was to discover information about successful and unsuccessful counseling sessions which would benefit the counselors in the provision of their services. A review of the literature on outcome research in psychotherapy suggested that focusing the study on the treatment of a single problem would yield the most useful information. In this light the literature seemed to point to the necessity of limiting the scope of research in studies of psychotherapy outcomes because of the complexity of psychotherapy. The development of the research design was guided by these insights. This study focuses on the dynamics and results of the treatment of a single problem: homesickness. Homesickness was chosen as a problem whose treatment would be studied for two reasons. First, it was selected because the counselors suggested it as a problem whose treatment they would be willing to explore. Secondly, homesickness was chosen because of the feasibility of conducting a study of it. According to the counselors homesickness has been a frequently occurring problem in the Reed student populace. In the past the severity of homesickness symptoms has led many students each year to seek help at the counseling service. Homesickness was therefore feasible as a problem for study because it appeared to be a problem frequently encountered in counseling sessions. In addition the time of the greatest incidence of homesickness problems, the fall term, coincided with the most convenient time for research data collection. Thus, the treatment of homesickness became the focus of the study's efforts to develop information which would be useful to the counselors. Given this focus it was hypothesized that homesick students receiving counseling would evidence improvement as defined by the dimensions of measurement used in this study. A secondary purpose of the study was to develop an understanding of how to conduct research in a functioning treatment setting. Although more diffuse than the first purpose of the study the second nevertheless instilled much of the work of the study with a certain attitude. The attitude was one of trying to maximize the potential learning experiences possible in the study.

This degree work is investigating nostalgia and the social and environmental sustainable aspects of upcycling. It aims to explore nostalgia as a progressive design tool, through storytelling, by means of upcycling materials and memories. It is developed by using creative writing methods with trigger words, translated to a visual fashion design process. To gain understanding and depth in the storytelling, different memory triggers have been introduced in each example. It suggests a multidimensional take on nostalgia and highlights its importance in everyday life, as well as in the design and art fields, and how storytelling can be actively used in a fashion design process. It also looks at communication in dress and the relationship between the private and the public identity. The importance of this investigation has been to look beyond today’s upcycling field of fashion, in order to develop it further and broaden the perspectives of the field. With the theme of ’the act of eating’, this degree work is seen as an abstract comment to the fashion industry’s influence on bodies and eating habits.