The purpose of this thesis is to look into the Leavis-Eliot relationship, connecting it with the broader discourse of English Studies as a university subject that developed in the first half of the twentieth century. It surveys all the many writings of Leavis on Eliot, to see how Eliot is formative for the theory and practice of Leavis’s literary criticism in both positive and negative ways. It conducts a detailed investigation of D. H. Lawrence’s significance in relation to Leavis’s changing attitude to Eliot, and examines how profound differences in social, cultural, religious and national thinking strengthened Leavis’s alliance with Lawrence to the detriment of his relationship with Eliot. These differences are presented as dichotomies between nationalism and Europeanism or internationalism, ruralism or organicism and industrialisation or metropolitanism, and relate to the differences between the two men’s views about literary education, the subject of English and the position of the classics in the curriculum. Leavis’s increasingly conflicted feelings towards a figure to whom he owned an enormous critical debt and inspiration, but whose various beliefs and literary affiliations caused him much misgiving, results in a deep sense of division in Leavis himself which he sought to transfer onto Eliot.

This central premise of this thesis is that Lars von Trier is a political director. Through a detailed formal analysis of five films I proceed to discuss the political implications of form, something that has not been acknowledged by scholarship so far. In this thesis, I employ Brecht as a methodological tool so as to discuss the shift from a dialectical cinema devoted to the production of knowledge effects, to a post-Brechtian one that brings together points of tension that remain unresolved. Chapter 1 proceeds to a historical evaluation of Brecht's reception in film theory and considers the ways that Brecht's theory and practice can address the cinematic and political concerns of the present. The chapter also locates von Trier under the rubric of the post-Brechtian by comparing him to past film practices. Chapter 2 moves to a discussion of von Trier's Europa trilogy and focuses on issues of historical representation. Emphasis is placed on formal elements that challenge the narrative laws of classical cinema. The chapter argues that von Trier follows Brecht's mistrust of a historical representation based on pictorial verisimilitude, without however sharing his forward-looking politics and his view of history as Marxist science. Chapter 3 discusses Dogme 95 and The Idiots (1998). Firstly, the chapter discusses Dogme's combination of a political modernist rhetoric with a realist one and places Dogme's return to the past in a historical context. Secondly, the chapter considers the role of performance as a formal and thematic element in The Idiots. I draw attention to the ways that the camera becomes performative and brings together material of dramaturgical importance with moments that are the product of cinematic contingency. My discussion is very much informed by contemporary post-Brechtian performance and film studies invested in the discussion of ‘corporeal cinema'. Chapter 4 discusses Dogville, a film with obvious references to Brecht. Unlike previous readings, I shift the emphasis from the film's assumed ‘Anti-Americanism' and proceed to a formal analysis that can rethink the film's politics and innovations. While Brecht has been thought to be as a fleeting presence in von Trier's films by most critics, this thesis suggests that our knowledge of von Trier's formal innovations can be deepened and enlivened by discussing them in conjunction with Brecht's theory. By returning to Brecht, we can also rethink the importance of form as the key to a film's politics.

This thesis engages in analysis and interpretation of certain ideas within the critical theory of Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969). These analyses are placed into a constellational relationship with some filmic works of Andrei Tarkovsky and Michael Haneke. In doing so, I aim to highlight the ongoing relevance and validity of at least some core elements of Adornian theory in a contemporary context. The thesis consists of four substantive chapters. The first chapter functions as an extended introduction to and justification for the thesis as a whole, and it provides the theoretical background to the project before explicating the idea of a constellational method. The second chapter explores the notion of mimesis in Adorno's thought and Tarkovsky's films as a crucial rejoinder to the prevailing ‘communicative' paradigm instituted in large part by Jürgen Habermas' work. The third chapter considers the importance of marginality to the task of social critique by analyzing Adorno's theoretical reflections on the matter and how these can be related to and supported by Haneke's filmic work. The fourth and final chapter examines the relationship between humanity and nature within two preeminent ecological discourses, in contrast to Adorno's critical theory and some of Tarkovsky's films, with the intention of showing how the latter offer a more nuanced and dialectical understanding of this relation. Throughout the analyses herein, I defend and demonstrate the fertility and pertinence of Adornian theory, for both the interpretation of film and robust criticism of extant social and political conditions. The thesis shows that by constellating Adorno's critical theory with film one may bring out important insights that enhance and enable people's capacity to critically respond to the woefully inadequate status quo.

A study of the development of the critical thought Paul Elmer More (1864 – 1937), the American journalist, essayist and Christian apologist.

This thesis argues that in the plural cultural context of the twenty-first century the value of Shakespeare resides in his identity as a free and flexible resource. This adaptable Shakespeare is valuable to theatres because they are dialectical spaces. Free-resource Shakespeare is able to contain a range of different cultural values and theatres provide a space for producers and consumers of culture to negotiate between them. It has been established that tensions of cultural value, for example innovation/tradition or commercial/non-commercial govern the production, dissemination and critique of culture. Building on this idea, this work shows that when tensions are dealt with as negotiations rather than confrontations, new cultural value is generated. It identifies Shakespeare as a site for the debate of value tensions and contends that he can be simultaneously commercial and non-commercial, traditional and innovative. Cultural value is thus created because Shakespeare is reinvigorated and redefined through a process which negotiates between tensions. In publicly-funded theatre this process manifests itself in an ambiguous relationship to the market, myriad adaptations and a move towards event-theatre. The cultural value of Shakespeare in publicly-funded theatre mirrors the continual redefinition of the Shakespearean object and, rather than being a concrete ‘thing’, is better defined as a constant process.

This thesis examines the way dramaturgical techniques in Shakespeare's late plays are used to create a complex and radical exploration of the relationship between ideology and interpretation. It links such concerns via the multiple meanings of "construction", illustrated using the scene of reading at the end of Cymbeline, centred upon the prophetic label. In Part I, major reservations are expressed about the standard interpretative paradigms applied to late Shakespearian drama, and their effect on critical understanding. The deficiencies of a "Romance" reading and the problems with traditional attitudes to chronology, authorship, and collaboration are stressed; elements often marginalized as aesthetically inferior are defended; and two related areas of dramaturgical technique, theatrical spectacle and reported action, are emphasized. Part II focuses on reading individual late plays, with special emphasis on Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen. It adopts a reconstructed, politicized close reading, concentrating on issues relating to the problematics of interpretation within the plays. Individual chapters highlight different forms of "construction": art, history, truth, authority, display, narrative. Attention is drawn to how reading and interpretation are shown to be always inscribed within power relations and the performative dynamic of language.

This study attempts to provide a theoretical framework for the criticism of colonial and post-colonial African cinema. Emphasis is placed on the extent to which the nature of colonial cinematic policies and practices have influenced post-colonial African cinema, especially with regards to forms of subjectivities constructed through cinematic representation. The study begins by examining some of the methodological problems in the criticism of African cinema. It relates the concept of African cinema to debates dealing with Third Cinema theories, cine-structuralism and psychoanalytic critical theories, and argues that any of these theories can be applied to the criticism of African cinema so long as it is moderated to suit the specific nature of the African condition. It also defines the nature of African cinema by relating it to the notions of national cinema, the question of African personality and identity, emergent genres and film styles, and proposes a general cinematic reading hypothesis, anchored on the concept of subjectivity, for the criticism of African cinema. With respect to the colonial period, the main argument which I pursue is that two divergent cinematic practices existed side by side in Africa. First, there was a governmental and non-governmental agencies sponsored, non-commercial cinema, which treats the medium as a vehicle for popular instruction. Throughout this study, I refer to this cinematic practice as colonial African instructional cinema, and argue that it represents Africans as knowing and knowledgeable people, able and willing to acquire modem methods of social planning and development for the benefit of their communities. Second, there was the commercial cinematic practice which chose, and still chooses, to recycle popular images of people of African descent in the European imagination, as projected through literature, history, anthropological and scientific discourses, etc., in the representation of Africans. I refer to this cinematic practice throughout this study as colonialist African cinema. The main argument which I pursue with respect to this practice is that the images of Africans projected in it have a genealogical history stretching as far back in time as the classical era. In the modem period, the contact between Europe and Africa, and the subsequent slave trade, colonialism and their popular literatures, and the nineteenth century racial theories, are some of the factors which have reinforced the canonical authority of these images. I argue that this cinematic practice represents Africans by employing various metaphors which draw associations between Africans and animals, to suggest African savagery and barbarity, and that by drawing on such associations, they devalue African humanity, legitimise the colonial enterprise and all its attendant cruelties, and absolve Europeans of any moral responsiblities over actions supposedly carried out in the name of spreading civilisation. Though post-colonial African historical texts located in the colonial period respond to the whole colonial enterprise, my argument is that they are inspired, first and foremost, by the desire to refute the images of Africans identifiable with the discursive tradition of colonialist African CInema.

No description available.

This thesis examines the subject in Popular American Metal music and culture during the period 1994-2004, concentrating on key artists of the period: Korn, Slipknot, Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails, Tura Satana and My Ruin. Starting from the premise that the subject is consistently portrayed as being at a time of crisis, the thesis draws on textual analysis as an under appreciated approach to popular music, supplemented by theories of stardom in order to examine subjectivity. The study is situated in the context of the growing area of the contemporary gothic, and produces a model of subjectivity specific to this period: the contemporary gothic subject. This model is then used throughout to explore recurrent themes and richly symbolic elements of the music and culture: the body, pain and violence, the grotesque and the monstrous, and the figure of the child, representing a usage of the contemporary gothic that has not previously been attempted. Attention is also paid throughout to the specific late capitalist American cultural context in which the work of these artists is situated, and gives attention to the contradictions inherent in a musical form which is couched in commodity culture but which is highly invested in notions of the ‘Alternative’. In the first chapter I propose the model of the contemporary gothic subject for application to the work of Popular Metal artists of the period, drawing on established theories of the contemporary gothic and Michel Foucault’s theory of confession. The second chapter focuses on instances of violence to the body and the recurrent themes of pain and violence, which are explained through the model of corporeal verification and consensual violence. In the third chapter I explore the contemporary gothic subject in the tradition of the grotesque and the monstrous, drawing on theories of the gothic monster, to suggest that the subject is engaged in a negotiation of the boundaries between self and other. The fourth chapter concentrates on the figure of the child, drawing on theories of horror film and fiction and the tradition of the Evil Innocent and the Gothic child. The final chapter is a case study of Marilyn Manson, exploring his role as a paradigmatic example of contemporary gothic subjectivity.

This thesis examines imagery of the subconscious throughout the works of Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevskii and how it can be used to analyse the psychology of his characters and the author himself. While studies exist on the role of, for example, dreams in Dostoevskii’s works, this thesis aims to comprehensively examine the author’s experience and use of subconscious phenomena as a whole, and their most important role in his texts: their effect on the characters who experience them. In each chapter, one form of this imagery in Dostoevskii’s works is explained and analysed with respect to individual characters or themes, and then Dostoevskii’s own experiences of the relevant subconscious phenomenon are explored. Chapter 1 looks at imagery arising through characters’ daydreams, while the author’s recurrent theme of childhood memories is also analysed as a type of nostalgic daydream. Chapter 2 examines the ‘greyer’ area of dreamlike reality, which in itself operates at two poles: confusion between dream and reality; and reality so intense as to appear unreal. The role of the ‘unreal’ city of St Petersburg is also analysed, as well as Dostoevskii’s narrative mode of ‘fantastic realism’. Chapter 3 looks at characters’ hallucinations, while Chapter 4 focuses on the character of Goliadkin in Двойник and his decline into split personality. Chapter 5 analyses the imagery of dreams, be they of anxiety and warning, of catharsis and peripeteia, or those featuring Dostoevskii’s recurring motif of the ‘Golden Age’ of mankind. The final chapter differs slightly in form by focusing on the overarching condition of epilepsy. Analysis of the author’s principal epileptic character, Prince Myshkin in Идиот, reveals the ‘deepest’ point of subconscious imagery, the ecstatic aura. Upon examining the condition’s recorded effects on Dostoevskii, epilepsy is ultimately discerned as the origin of many of the author’s experiences of subconscious phenomena and, in turn, the imagery of the subconscious used in his works. Moreover, experiences of subconscious phenomena are found to be a vital source of literary inspiration and motivation for Dostoevskii; so the correlating imagery of the subconscious is thus able to reveal fictional characters’ deepest drives and can be used as a means to glean vital, otherwise unseen, insights into their psychology.