Dans la variété des thèmes et des formes offerte par les essais de Marguerite Yourcenar, s’ébauche et s’affine le « portrait d’une voix », incitant le lecteur à réfléchir, à la suite de l’essayiste elle-même, à l’avertissement de Jorge Luis Borges : « Un écrivain croit parler de beaucoup de choses, mais ce qu’il laisse, s’il a de la chance, c’est une image de soi ». Ces essais où s’affrontent des visions contradictoires du temps et de l’identité, retracent l’histoire de la résistance du moi à son extinction, prônée par un je qui reste souverain par-delà les métamorphoses. Des premiers essais, où la jeune « Marg Yourcenar » s’effraie et s’enchante, dans un style « tendu et orné », de la décadence de l’Occident, aux dernières notes jetées dans ses carnets, la métaphore récurrente de l’érosion traduit le travail d’épure auquel est soumis le genre, comme l’autoportrait qui s’y dessine. Ce travail est sous-tendu par une vision du temps qui oscille entre écoulement et permanence, et d’où émerge la valeur accordée à l’instant, premier pas vers la « magie sympathique » qui permet de s’établir en n’importe quel point du temps humain. Ainsi dilaté aux dimensions de la « constellation » universelle née de rencontres aléatoires ou surdéterminées, le moi inextinguible incarne pourtant les résurgences de l’individualité, enfin acceptée comme voie d’accès à l’universel. Au terme de cinquante ans de pratique de l’essai, Marguerite Yourcenar a conquis la liberté propre au genre, aux confins de l’autobiographie longtemps refusée, en acceptant que ses métamorphoses épousent au plus près la fluidité de la vie individuelle. / Through the variety of themes and forms offered by Marguerite Yourcenar's essays, the "portrait of a voice" progressively takes shape, inclining the reader to ponder, after the essayist herself, Jorge Luis Borges's warning : "A writer thinks he is tackling a lot of subjects; what he leaves behind, however - if he is lucky - is an image of himself". The essays, in which two contadictory conceptions of time and identity constantly clash, testify to the way the "self" resists its extinction, strongly recommended by the "I", which remains supreme beyond the metamorphoses. From the first essays, in which the young "Marg Yourcenar", in a tense and ornate style, appears to be both alarmed and enchanted by the decline of the West, to the last remarks jotted down in her notebooks, the recurring metaphor of the erosion conveys the extent to which the form is being refined, as well as the self-portrait that emerges from it. The process involves a conception of time that wavers between the flowing and the permanent, and brings forth the value given to the moment, first step towards the "sympathetic magic" which enables the reader to settle at any point of the human time. Thus expanded to the dimensions of the universal "constellation" born of random, or highly determined, encounters, the irrepressible "self" still embodies the resurgences of the individuality, accepted at last as a path towards the universal. After writing essays for fifty years, Marguerite Yourcenar conquered the liberty that defines the form and borders on the autobiographical, when she finally allowed its metamorphoses to closely match the fluidity of the individual life.

The purpose of the present thesis is to examine the modes of enunciation (“mode d’énonciation”) and the use of text genres in relation to thematic and semantic aspects of Claude Cahun’s book, Aveux non avenus (Disavowals: or, Cancelled Confessions)(1930), which consists of text fragments. Claude Cahun, who is mostly known for her photographic self-portraits, was active on the margins of surrealism in Paris in the 1920s. The text fragments of Aveux non avenus can be compared to a collage technique that she also uses in the photomontages which open each chapter of the book. As an author, Claude Cahun clearly resisted traditional confessional literature (as the title of the book also suggests), and this study focuses on how she creates images of herself through characters borrowed from mythology, the Bible, and popular and literary texts, but also through reflections on specific themes in dialogues, essays and aphorisms. The thesis examines how Aveux non avenus differs from an actual autobiography, how the fragmented self-portrait is constructed, and how the book expresses a critique of contemporary society. The method of the thesis is based on textual analysis, with the support of the concepts of modes of enunciation (”mode d’énonciation”), text genres, and détournement (”détournement”). It also rests on the contextualisation of Claude Cahun’s practice of writing in relation to the history of literary genres, surrealist avant-garde movement, and in relation to sources within cultural history and the history of women. The thesis analyses how Claude Cahun, through the use of different genres and shifting modes of enunciation, creates a fragmented, diverse, and contradictory portrait of herself, in a way that also conveys a critical image of contemporary society. The text functions, simultaneously, as a collage of different text genres. The conclusion thereby underlines the idea that the text is not arbitrarily fragmentary, but constructed on the principles that the analysis of the work has demonstrated. In previous research on Claude Cahun, the indefinite genre of the book has been emphasised. Instead, this thesis wants to show that the diversity of text genres is deliberately explored to develop varying modes of enunciation that give Claude Cahun the opporturity to reflect and give nuance to representations of the self and to convey a radical critique of society.

Uma parada - Antonio Manuel - Entre os artistas contemporâneos no Brasil nos anos 60 e 70, acreditamos que Antonio Manuel foi o que guardou um profundo mistério na sua produção. Mesmo ao ser censurado, trilhou sua trajetória e, aos poucos, ocupou um espaço suficiente para causar uma inversão da representação e encontrar um caminho errático que o fizesse, dinamicamente, atuar. Pela tomada do corpo, como gesto de liberdade, expandiu sua arte. Sua atitude de pensamento se transformou em fotografia. Quando falamos em \"uma parada\", queremos enfatizar a importância da pose pausada no auto-retrato do artista, para justificar a tese de que Antonio Manuel também expandiu a arte contemporânea pela fotografia. Essa ampliação doa to criativo se deu graças à presença constante das imagens fotográficas do corpo nos seus trabalhos, que, inquietos, iniciaram esse percurso, de modo a podermos afirmar que, hoje, a fotografia tem importante significado no conjunto de suas séries. Para corrigir a realidade imposta tão violentamente pela ditadura militar, timidamente, Antonio Manuel abandonou o desenho sobre jornais para se apropriar das fotografias da imprensa, como também transgredir, corajosamente, a gramática dos veículos de comunicação de massa. Interessa-nos apontar para a importância dessa atitude e, para isso, desenvolvemos algumas possibilidades de compreensão. Consideramos as estratégias propostas pelos críticos Mário Pedrosa e Frederico de Morais e, ainda, os diversos teóricos que estudamos para tornar o debate da época, sobre as estratégias da arte contemporânea no Brasil dos anos 60 e 70, plausível. A arte fotográfica de Antonio Manuel, particularmente as imagens fotográficas do corpo, tiveram uma incrível ressonância na crítica de arte nacional e internacional. Porém, não vem sendo exibida como uma das poucas manifestações visuais que soube estar em sintonia com as diferentes tendências da arte fotográfica das últimas duas décadas. Para confirmar sua importância conceitual, delimitamos sua produção entre os anos de 1967 e 1977. A estrutura dos capítulos não segue à risca uma ordem cronológica, mas principalmente, a relação do ato criativo com o conjunto das séries. Destacamos as análises dos auto-retratos e dos retratos, bem como dos filmes do artista, em que a arte da desaparição de Jean Baudrillard sustenta a noção de \"parada\" fotográfica. Uma Parada tem ênfase no retrato, nos objetos inquietantes e nas imagens perturbadoras, que gestaram a relação do artista com o mundo durante um período de crise da arte. Porém, a crise do sujeito em Antonio Manuel é desafiadora, porque subverteu os modelos e desarticulou as referências, por enfrentar o processo de trabalho com luta e criatividade. Da sua liberdade, o espectador-participador se torna cúmplice. / A paused pose - Antonio Manuel - Among the Brazilian contemporary artists of the 60s and 70s we believe that Antonio Manuel has been the one who has kept a profound mystery in his production. Even when he was banned, he managed to make his way and, little by little, take enough place to cause an inversion of representation, finding an erratic path that made him act dynamically. By taking the body as a gesture of freedom, he has expanded art. His way of thinking has turned into photography. When we say a pause, we want to emphasize the importance of the paused pose in the artists self portrait so as to justify the thesis that Antonio Manuel has also expanded contemporary art through photography. This enlargement of the creative act was due to the constant presence of photographic body images in his works, which, in a restless way, started this journey, enabling our statement that, today, photography has a meaning in the complex oh his series. In order to correct the reality so violently imposed by the military dictatorship, Antonio Manuel abandoned drawing over newspapers timidly to appropriated in pointing out the importance of this attitude and, for that purpose, we have developed some possibilities of comprehension. We have considered the strategies suggested by critics Mario Pedrosa and Frederico de Morais, as well as many other theorists we have studied, so as to make plausible the debate on the strategies of Brazilian contemporary art in the 60s and 70s at that time. The photography art of Antonio Manuel, particularly his photographic body images, has had an incredible resonance among the national and international art critic. However, it has not been exhibited as one of the few visual manifestations which knew how to be tuned with the different tendencies of photographic art in the last couple of decades. In order to confirm his conceptual importance, we have delimited his production between the years of 1967 and 1977. The structure of the chapters does not necessarily follow a chronological order, but rather the relationship between the creative act and the complex of series. We have highlighted the analysis oh his self portraits and portraits, as well as the film, where the art of disappearance by Jean Baudrillard supports the concept of photographic pause. A Paused Pose emphasizes the portrait, the disturbing objects and the alarming images which conceived the relationship between the artist and the world during a period of art crisis. However, the crisis of the subject in Antonio Manuel is challenging, for it has subverted the models and disarticulated the references by facing the work process with struggle and creativity. The spectator participant becomes an accomplice of this freedom.

Irony and satire in two of James Joyce's works.

This master's thesis deals with qualitative analysis of nonlinear differential equations of second order. For autonomous equations some basic notions of Hamiltonian systems (mainly construction of phase portrait) are presented. For non-autonomous equations the method of lower and upper functions for periodic boundary value problem is used. These notions are then applied to a model of mechanical oscillator, a question of existence of solutions to autonomous and non-autonomous nonlinear differential equations is studied.

Portrait silhouettes, which are the subject of the present work, are a peculiar and now forgotten type of portraits. They represent a specific part of the visual culture of the second half of the 18th and 19th centuries and a number of contemporary social, cultural, artistic and scientific phenomena intertwine in them. Technically, these seemingly simple monochrome profile portraits are very diverse. The range of silhouetted persons and persons creating them is equally diverse. The aim of this work is a comprehensive mapping of the phenomenon of portrait silhouettes in the Czech lands with an overlap to more general levels concerning the philosophical aspects of this type of portraiture. The text is based on knowledge gained from detailed research of domestic collections of silhouettes, which are part of museum, gallery and castle collections. A large amount of pictorial material has been preserved in the Czech Republic, which made it possible to formulate the necessary more general conclusions. The complex approach mixes from a methodological point of view the approaches of art history with its formal analysis and cultural history, some topics overlap with the content of Bild- Anthropology studies. The oldest Czech specimens of silhouettes come from the turn of the 70s and 80s of the 19th century, which is...

In the dissertation the author presents the analysis of the use of phraseological units in modern political discourse in Russia and the Czech Republic. The author shows that phraseology can be a tool for increasing the expressiveness of a speech, for contacting and influencing the audience in the political discourse. The analysis of cognitive and pragmatic specifics of idioms and metalanguage commentaries in the speech of politicians in a comparative aspect is carried out. As a result the author showes the specifics of the use of phraseological units in describing the speech image of a politician. Key words: phraseology, phraseologism, discourse, political discourse, political linguistics, cognitive linguistics, image of a politician, speech portrait of a politician.

The purpose of this thesis is to provide in-depth knowledge by exploring how image cataloguing provides a context for expressions related to sex, gender, and queerness through metadata and textual descriptions within library databases. This thesis examines how normative conceptions related to sex, gender, and queerness affect the praxis of image cataloguing and how the material’s retrievability is influenced by these aspects. To examine how biases and preconceptions about sex, gender, and queerness are expressed through metadata and descriptive cataloguing the study focuses on catalogued portrait photographs, especially images portraying unknown individuals. The conclusions of this study are that descriptions of images portraying unknown individuals are heavily characterised by a binary view of sex and gender. Unknown individuals are categorised as women or men based on outer appearances, and not in a sex/gender neutral way. Since interpretations are based on clothing, hairstyles, accessories et cetera and not the naked body it may be argued that gender is being categorised, and not necessarily sex. If gender is to be understood as a social construction not attached to any specific physicality it may be expressed in any way by anyone. The assumption of being able to place people in sexed categories based merely on their appearances may therefore be questioned. A further conclusion is that queerness isn’t included when images are being catalogued. The study however shows that heteronormative assumptions may be traced in the way images are described. It may also be concluded that describing portrait photographs mainly through aspects related to sex/gender ignores other informative aspects of them as images, making them less retrievable for users. This is a two years master's thesis in library and information science.

For as long as I can remember, I have struggled with understanding who I am. What makes me is something I try to make sense of through art. When I started working on this my graduation show, the idea behind it was to make a portrait of the Mexico I know, but when the pandemic hit, I found myself locked down at home, completely alone in a new country for the first time. This led me to question my existence and the belief systems I espoused and prompted me to try to understand myself better in the context of a foreign culture. As a result, the concept behind the show evolved from being about the Mexico I know to exploring who I am and how my upbringing has shaped my art and trying to make sense of my existence.

This dissertation makes the case that treating digitized corpora of literary works as cognitive artifacts can provide particular insight into how the reading mind apprehends events within an imagined world and, thereby, provide potentially useful functional models for event perception, emotional memory, and determining what’s “real.” Most essentially, it will make the case that the deepest feature of narrative cognition may involve an “information distribution” assessment, wherein the variation of information density over time cues the mind to attend to denser events with increased attention, potentially saving more of their content for long-term memory. This mimics what cognitive research has frequently established for real-world processing of emotionally stimulating events, wherein emotional memory tends to be better retained over time, with more detail, fewer conflations, and more resistance to fading, while neutral events tend to be relegated to gist or forgotten. Put together, this produces an ordering of autobiographical memory that resembles a glimmering string of pearls: densely detailed memories strung together over time, separated by thinner, looser memories and gist, with a particular cluster of these “pearls” towards the middle for the memory bump of the mid-teens to mid-twenties. While many have argued for larger schemas or socially influenced self-regard as the major driver for memory emphasis in one’s Life Story, if autobiographical memory is anything like a novel, it may prove a bit simpler: most of the bigger pearls mark where one’s sensory array “dilated” in moments of arousal, and their lustrous, persistent “shine” may be a matter of how likely it was that one returned to those memories over time. Chapter 1 examines what we do and don’t know about the reading mind, settling on a narrower definition of immersive narrative reading as an exceptional cognitive state which moves in and out of what cognitive psychologists call “flow” and a more passive, vivid “daydream.” This is an inherently unstable activity that requires a great deal of assistance from the text, thereby providing useful targets of analysis for researchers interested in perception, emotion, and memory, with a particular eye towards embodied cognition. It then discusses key gaps in the scientific literature and literary scholarship around event perception and narrative cognition, some of which this project aims to partially fill through quantitative analysis of literary texts. This chapter will also discuss the promise and perils of treating literary corpora like the novels in Project Gutenberg as cognitive artifacts: the known limitations of using “canon” texts as a representative sample of literature in general, the rarity of reading, and what it means to “backsolve” cognition through its artifacts. Chapter 2 describes a series of experiments conducted on a corpus of a few thousand novels and nonfiction narratives contained in Project Gutenberg and the Nickels and Dimes Project. Leaning on the “string of pearls” metaphor for autobiographical memory organization, this chapter will promote a model of long-form narrative’s fundamental mnemonics as something that mimics that organizational pattern: information density that varies over time, predicting not only the pace of in-narrative time passing, but which “moments” or features of the narrative will be important for the reader to remember over multiple reading events, while others will be forgotten or relegated to gist. This pattern closely mimics models of autobiographical memory in cognitive psychology, not only of so-called “flashbulb memory” or surprising, high-affect events, but also of Life Story in general: vast periods of fleeting detail, with dense memory clusters around events that were encoded in moments of arousal, with curious memory affects just before and after those events, possibility illustrating what Jefferey Zacks presents as a “gating” model of event perception. Drawing on the scientific literature on event segmentation, arousal and memory, and time perception, and likewise drawing on literary scholarship on time and stylistics in the novel, this chapter will explore the implications and limitations of using POS tagging to try and tease out quantifiable units of “information” from large corpora of novels utilizing one-way repeated measures MANOVA. Applications for these findings in literary scholarship will be discussed throughout—for instance, while scenes involving sex or violence are predictably information-dense in most texts in the corpus that were hand-scored for accuracy (and subsequently used as training texts for the algorithm), in-book variation from the norm and from nearby passages is more predictive than a raw density score alone. For example, when Stephen Dedalus has sex in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, imagistic detail goes down compared to nearby scenes and compared to the more detail-dense passages in the text, which seems to be typical of Joyce: while he does vary density according to temporality and that maps roughly to “significant” scenes, the most emotional scenes tend to be written more sparely (spare for that author, that is—Joyce is not Hemingway). That may be an authorial quirk, or it may be that he relies upon a second strategy to stimulate a reader’s emotional response: semantic content that’s normally cued to a strong negative or positive valence. Chapter 3 will attend to the ways some authors resist narrative’s “ease of use” in order to prompt their readers to interrogate what’s Real. This chapter zooms in on a specific period of American and British literature, and a genre within that brief time: the rise of Creative Nonfiction and/or New Journalism, with a close read or “case study” of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. This chapter proposes that the authors set out to create narratives that would reflect the “real” lives of their subjects, with an objective of making those lives feel real to their readership. But were they successful? Drawing on cognitive psychology research in psychosis, metacognition, and temporal sense, this chapter aims to elucidate how literary narratives like these may “aim to fail” at certain features of deep narrative form (as discussed in the prior chapters) in order to “startle” their readers into a less passive state, in order to better mimic the qualia of witnessing something in the real world, and thereby produce a sense that the subjects within the text are Real. These embedded structural failures are often more subtle than anything Brechtian, but nevertheless can be found both quantitatively and in close reading, which may indicate that when a long-form narrative text purposefully aims to make a reader uncomfortably aware of Reality--especially when motivated by known, deep ethical concerns--it may “work” in ways that have less to do with the subject or content of the text and more to do with form.