It is June 2001, in a small church in deepest Arkansas. ‘Brother John’ is speaking at a youth service. The text he has chosen: Judges 19. ‘This is the story of a woman who left her husband. She disrespected authority and leaders. She got what she deserved. This is what will happen to you if you disobey your leaders.’ This is by far the worst sermon I have ever heard, and it started my journey with Judges 19-21. It is the only time I have ever heard this text referred to in public worship. There was nothing in my Christian journey until then that could have given me the skills to deal with that text, or that sermon. At the same time, it is a text that burrowed its way into my consciousness, because I have consistently worked with women (and men) who have experienced sexual abuse over the years. How can they read this text? Why is it there? In what sense can it be Scripture? While the text has been used oppressively, can it be read differently, and redeemed from oppressive interpretations? Has it got anything to offer, beyond a reading in memoriam?

During the second half of the seventeenth century, alcohol and tobacco were consumed at all levels of the social strata in the Dutch Republic. These products and their consumption were important to long standing traditions and were vital to the Dutch economy. Paradoxically, however, moralists and ministers attempted to curb intoxication by associating it with the loss of one's masculinity or femininity. Intoxicated men and women were stigmatized as morally inept, unruly, and a threat to the family, community, and even the nation. Dutch genre paintings depicting alcohol and tobacco consumption are often described as moral warnings or didactic messages, but these images were more than teaching aids for Dutch youth. The intoxicated characters in these paintings represented a larger social anxiety towards the threat of foreign invasions. Foreign labor, including soldiers, sailors, and maidservants, held a precarious position within the Republic and in Dutch homes, and these foreign workers became easy targets for moralists and ministers who sought to perpetuate the Dutch national myth of superiority through allegories of foreign otherness. There is a large body of scholarly work that explores seventeenth-century Dutch society; however, little attention has been given to the significance of alcohol and tobacco consumption. This paper addresses these concerns with a special emphasis on paintings created during the True Freedom (1650-1672). Through the examination of paintings, moral treatises, and religious sermons, I will discuss depictions of alcohol and tobacco consumption and juxtapose them to the ideal man and woman as described by moralists and ministers. For the seventeenth-century Dutch, images of alcohol and tobacco represented an insidious infection in a pristine community. But these condemnations tell us much more about the anxieties of seventeenth-century Dutch society than about the inherent evils of intoxication.

My thesis explores the relation of philosophy and theatre that originates in a speech that the German philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels delivered in 2009 at the National Sun Yat-sen University. The title of the speech is Theatre as Scene of Otherness, in which Waldenfels applies the key notion of his philosophy ¡V Othernesss ¡V to an analysis of theatre. Based on his work The Question of Otherness I first explore his viewpoints of otherness from the experience of Otherness, the question of violence to the dimension of time and body in relation to Otherness. In Waldenfels¡¦ view whenever we effort to get hold of Otherness, the latter just flees us. As a result we can never really get the full knowledge of Otherness. Yet, so long as we cannot but face the challenge of Otherness all the time, the theatre provides us with an opportunity to get a glance at what Otherness is all about. The theatre offers us so to speak a possibility to encounter what is not displayable. In sum, theatre demonstrates itself as a field of Otherness. According to Waldenfels, as long as the theatre is full of experimental traits, it can be hardly generalized. I thus endeavor to explore the Brutal Theatre of Artaud on the basis of Waldenfels¡¦ understanding of theatre. A brief explanation on the local experimental theatre is also illustrated in connection to the notion of Otherness. Keywords: Otherness, theatre, scene, violence, time, body

The Return Home : Mongo Beti's Late OeuvreIn 1991 amid the wave of democracy sweeping Africa, Mongo Beti returned to his native country of Cameroon to continue his literary career after 32 years of exile in France. My dissertation investigates the originality of his homecoming discourse. I explore how this prominent writer's late oeuvre illustrates his struggle to re-discover the country he left decades earlier as well as how his experience of returning shaped a new literary perception. His work after returning home reflects his gradual re-acquaintance with and re-integration into his native country. I argue that at the outset, his perception is initially guided by a backward glance on the past and that his assessment of the present aims at resisting pessimistic representations of Africa. In his later works, however, one cannot but notice the same sentiments of dissatisfaction and disillusion that were based on his first hand experience. To this extent, Mongo Beti's post-return literature can be considered dynamic as it evolved over time. A diachronic approach allowed me to examine his changing perceptions and representations of Africa based on the magnitude of his comprehension of his environment at each point in time. His post-return writing demonstrates a progressive redefinition of some of his previous narrative techniques as regards such elements as political resistance, authoritative narrators, linear unfolding of the plot, time and space, and character development. My analysis also questions the concept of "home" as a place of safety and refuge just as his post-return novels portray exile as an ambiguous state of being in-between worlds, as an expression of a simultaneous connection to the "new old" home and the distant former one abroad. Therefore, there is a shift in Mongo Beti's post-return discourse away from questions of national responsibility and social progress rooted in a consciousness of belonging to a defined community. The conceptual organization of my dissertation is derived from my reading of each of the four texts of the post-return era, and the way they illustrate the author's process of re-discovery of postcolonial Cameroon.

Stigma was defined by Goffman (1963) as a mark of discredited identity or inhumanity and recently, by Link and Phelan (2001), as a process of labelling, stereotyping, separating, discrimination, and status loss. These phenomena demonstrate the means by which a group can become a representation of “otherness” to another group. During the Rwandan Genocide, Radio Television Libre des Milles Collines (RTLM) broadcast messages which negatively stereotyped the Tutsi people (Straus, 2007). This investigation used Critical Discourse Analysis to investigate RTLM broadcasts during the Rwandan Genocide and to determine how stigmatization influenced the portrayal of the Tutsi people as social “others.” This investigation found that the historical context of the Rwandan Genocide influenced the formation of the Tutsi stigma and this stigma was used as a justification for the otherness of the Tutsi people. These results indicate that stigma can be used to facilitate the formation of social “others.”

Although many in the contemporary academic world would avoid themes such as solitude, love, and, in the context of “francophone” literature, exile, I have decided to give these all the attention they deserve based on the importance they hold in the works themselves, and based on the depth they possess. It is thus from the perspective of the renewed light they bring on these topics that the following three works will be analysed: À vol d’ombre (1966) by Jacqueline Beaugé, Transparence en bleu d’oubli (1979) by Renée Marie-Ange Jolicœur, and La Fidélité non plus… (1986) by Yanick Jean. In order to contextualize these three works, I first provide a brief history of Haitian poetry in which particular attention is given to the contributions of women writers. This overview illustrates how Jean, Jolicœur and Beaugé use very general themes such as love and solitude, but also how they manage to set themselves apart. Indeed, their works are unparalleled in Haitian literature because they constantly play with the conventions of love poetry and redefine the notion of absence. In order to establish how every absence contains traces of presence, my analysis bases itself in part on the theories of Derrida. I also explore how, in each of the collections of poems under consideration (although for different reasons), absence stifles any possibility of contact with the other. In order to understand this problem and underscore its importance, I refer to Hegel’s conception of the relationship to the other. Based on these premises, I conclude by showing how exile is a space that is at once filled with absence and with presence, and how the staging of the act of writing, in all three works, makes poetry and absence inseparable. / Thesis (Master, French) -- Queen's University, 2008-09-26 15:50:00.063

The discourse regarding contemporary comic book studies has become increasingly concerned with the apocalyptic potential of the power of comic book superbeings. While many consider Superman to be a morally upright and hopeful figure worth emulating, the idea of a creature as powerful and uncannily similar to human beings as Superman is produces a type of paranoia, distrust, and unease. This type of disruptivity is a result of the combination of two foundational aspects of the character's being namely, its power, and its uncanny Otherness. Recent trends in the discourse concerning the cinematic depictions of the unavoidably destructive aspects of Superman's power indicate that the disruptive aspects of the character's being cannot be ameliorated by conventional appeals to dialectical arrangements of moral categories including good and evil. This also applies to nostalgic interpretations of the character that seek to dissolve the inextricable connection between the utopian and dystopian potential inherent in its power and Otherness in an idealized history. Situating itself between the aesthetic and historical comic book theory of Thomas Inge, Peter Coogan, Danny Fingeroth, Christopher Knowles, Clive Bloom, and Greg McCue and the philosophies/xenologies and critical approaches of Robert Freitas Jr., Michel Foucault, and Fredric Jameson, this project uses the concepts of the character's power, body, and Otherness to examine the existential and socio-political consequences of Superman's disruptivity on a diegetic earth.

This thesis works as a means for exploring the role of dreams and otherness within performance practice. By building upon the work of French intellectual Georges Bataille, I work to propose a method by which dreams may be incorporated through a phenomenological lens intended to invite openness to interpretation as a means of engaging the otherness of the audience. To aid in this theoretical aim, I highlight In Quiet Search of a Universal Gesture (a show featured in the Marion Kleinau Theatre directed by myself and Jason Hedrick) as an example of dream art as a means of exploring otherness.

Ma réflexion s’ancre dans un double constat : le développement de la fiction d’épidémie dans les années 1980 et la moindre reconnaissance d’une oeuvre canonique mais figée dans sa lecture allégorique : La Peste de Camus. Mon projet de recherche se fonde sur la volonté d’ériger le récit d’épidémie en genre à part entière et sur l’hypothèse d’une intertextualité camusienne dans le récit contemporain. Travaillés par cette forme de contagion, les récits du corpus (García Márquez, Le Clézio, Stewart O’Nan, Saramago, Goytisolo) autorisent une approche « allégorique » au sens où Walter Benjamin entend ce terme : écriture de la ruine, de l'éclatement et de la fuite du sens. En retour, cette relecture de La Peste à l’ère contemporaine doit favoriser une approche renouvelée du roman. Plus largement, il s’agit d’évaluer dans quelle mesure la contagion est une métaphore pertinente pour représenter le phénomène littéraire. De fait, le récit d’épidémie se présente comme un espace dialogique où s’entrelacent l’imaginaire de l’auteur et des imaginaires sociaux variés, notamment celui de la « crise postmoderne ». On peut alors considérer ces fictions allégoriques comme des « forme-sens » puisque la contagion y constitue à la fois un thème, un principe esthétique et un enjeu éthique. De ces multiples interactions entre le réel et la fiction émerge alors une dernière forme de contagion : celle qu’implique l’acte de lecture. Dans quelle mesure le lecteur contamine-t-il l’oeuvre ? Comment la fiction peut-elle constituer un « pharmakon » face à la « crise » du monde contemporain ? / My reflexion is rooted in two observations: the development of epidemics in fiction literature in the 80s and the unsatisfying recognition of a work, canonical but frozen in its allegorical reading: La Peste by Camus. My research project is based on the will to build the epidemic story as a genre in its own right and on the assumption of a Camusian intertextuality in contemporary narratives. Under the influence of this form of contagion, the stories of the corpus (García Márquez, Le Clézio, Stewart O'Nan, Saramago, Goytisolo) allow an “allegorical” approach, according to the modern definition of the term offered by Walter Benjamin: the writing of wreck, of break-up, and of the loss of meaning. In return, reading La Peste in the contemporary era must encourage a renewed approach of the novel. Broadly, we want to estimate to what extent the contagion can be a pertinent metaphor to represent the literary field. In fact, the narrative of epidemics appears as a dialogic space where the vision of an author can interact with various social imaginaries, in particular with the idea of a “postmodern crisis”. That’s why we can consider these allegorical fictions as “form-meaning” so far as contagion constitutes a theme, an aesthetical principle and an ethical perspective. From these multiple interactions between reality and fiction, a last form of contagion emerges, implied in the act of reading. To what extent does the reader contaminate the novel? How can fiction constitute a “pharmakon” against the “crisis” of the contemporary world?

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