This thesis centres on the twin discourses of hysteria and theatre, and contends that an examination of hysteria, which is above all a performative disease, can illuminate our understanding of performance on the public stage. My analysis of the history of hysteria shows that our modern understanding of the condition developed out of the interactions between the physician/analyst and the live body of the hysteric, with all its symptomatic acts, this thesis, which has as its central concern the live body of staged performance, uses the history of those interactions to re-centre attention on the symptomatic acts of the performing body on stage, and on the process of reading such acts. Drawing its material from a number of stage performances from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - from the texts of melodrama such as The Dumb Man of Manchester(l837) or The Bells (1871) through the work of the American actress Elizabeth Robins in Ibsen's Hedda Gabler (1891) and her own play Alan's Wife (1893) to modem texts such as Helne Cixous's Portrait of Dora (1976) - this thesis reads those performances, and the relationship of those performances to their audiences, through the lens of hysteria: using an understanding of hysteria to read those texts anew and, in reverse, using the texts to develop, and critique, a model of hysterical performance rhetoric. Such a model, this thesis argues, with its very basis in a condition of rejection of or failure to fit into the dominant discourses of society, is not limited in application to performance texts which take hysteria as their subject. Instead it can be more widely employed as a key part of a radical theatrical politics by those who today find themselves silenced by the dominant discourses and values of our own era.

This thesis examines the strategy of re-visioning myth within contemporary European feminist theatre, a strategy which has proved popular over time and across cultures but which has received insufficient critical attention. This study seeks to fill that gap by offering a framework through which this practice can be considered, exploring the diverse motivations of individual playwrights, and evaluating the achievements of particular plays in context. Twelve case studies are included, grouped together to demonstrate a variety of approaches to re-visioning ranging from utilisation of myth as pretext for examination of social issues, to an apparent abandonment of contemporary reality for a utopian otherworld. However, it is argued first that mythical, social and psychological strands remain intertwined, and second that the diversity of approaches reflects the importance for feminist theatre of selecting strategies to meet specific needs, and that these strategies can thus be viewed as complementary rather than in conflict. Chapter One introduces selected critical perspectives on myth, re-visioning and feminist theatre, framing these within Rita Felski's model of the feminist counter-public sphere. Chapter Two discusses plays by Hella Haasse, Franca Rame and Sarah Daniels, which examine myth as ideological narrative. Plays by Maureen Duffy, Caryl Churchill and David Lan, and Timberlake Wertenbaker, considered in Chapter Three, investigate myths of female violence. Chapter Four looks at plays by Andree Chedid and Angela Carter which use myth to confront women's complicity in maintaining the status quo. Plays by Serena Sartori, Renata Coluccini and Helene Cixous, discussed in Chapter Five, offer psychological investigations into women's relationships with myth, language and power. The thesis concludes with a summary of the research findings, and assesses their significance.

No description available.

Let $F$ be a non-Archimedean local field and $G$ be the general linear group $\mathrm{GL}_n$ over $F$. Bushnell and Henniart described the essentially tame local Langlands correspondence of $G(F)$ using rectifiers, which are certain characters defined on tamely ramified elliptic maximal tori of $G(F)$. They obtained such result by studying the automorphic induction character identity. We relate this formula to the spectral transfer character identity, based on the theory of twisted endoscopy of Kottwitz, Langlands, and Shelstad. In this article, we establish the following two main results. (i) To show that the automorphic induction character identity is equal to the spectral transfer character identity when both are normalized by the same Whittaker data. (ii) To express the essentially tame local Langlands correspondence using admissible embeddings constructed by Langlands-Shelstad $\chi$-data and to relate Bushnell-Henniart's rectifiers to certain transfer factors.

No description available.

It is orthodoxy in contemporary philosophy of cognitive science to hold that the human brain processes information, both about the body in which the brain is located and about the world more generally. The internal states of the brain that encode this information are known as mental representations. Two matters concerning mental representation are interwoven here: the role of representational content in cognition and the format of mental representation. Robert Cummins, among others, argues that content is intrinsic to mental representation, rather than involving matters external to a representation, such as the use to which the representation is put. He also holds that resemblance accounts of representation best make sense of this fact. Thus, according to Cummins, the content of a mental representation is determined by its form. This thesis argues that an account of representation requiring that representations possess resembling structure is unlikely to be correct given (a) the minimal requirements that something must meet in order to count as a mental representation, (b) the tasks required of representation in cognition, such as capturing abstract properties, combining with other representations, and tracking change, and (c) the possibility that content stands in a different relation to form and cognition from the one Cummins has in mind. In criticising Cummins, however, this thesis explores possible implementations of resemblance theories in connectionist representation. It also redraws his map of the psychosemantic field to suggest that classical theories of cognition, which posit concatenative schemes of symbolic representation, share some of the benefits of tying content to orm. Finally, in exploring various notions of the role of form in representation, this thesis also advocates a pluralistic approach to the mental representations implicated in human cognition. / Thesis (M.A.)--School of Humanities, 2004.

This project explores the notion of a world experienced and mediated through the image. The focus is on issues related to representation of that world to self through image-based narrative. Central to the creation of these worlds is imagery published in various public access media such as television, the internet, print publishing. Although filtered and interpreted personally, because of their ubiquity and familiarity, these images collectively constitute representation of our culture. Our construction of the world (the way we represent it to ourselves) is contingent on our encounter with such images.Sited within the milieu of a media-fixated age, the project aims to deal with our desire to make sense of the litter of images that people our visual horizon. The project seeks to employ these images as objects of direct experience and to consider the subjective frameworks and cultural narratives through which they are filtered.The work will play on the desire to make relational sense of images, often by invoking narrative. Painting will be used as a means to provoke encounter between imagery, with the performative act of painting, itself a narrative, both being and representing a process of mediation

Master of Visual Arts / Studio work The Postgraduate Degree Show is held from 6PthP December 2005 to 17PthP December 2005 and my work is installed in the Sculpture Studio (as a gallery space) at Building 29 of Sydney College of the Arts, Sydney. There are three installations of work, each with a series of paintings and object-models. The media I am using are oil on canvas for the paintings and wood for the models. The titles of my exhibition pieces are Project Studio (Stairs), Project Rented Room (Chair), Project Rented Room (Bed), and Project Object. Together they are entitled Project: Spanning the Space of Dislocation. The project explores the perception of space and its representation through painting and installation. The starting point is the image of familiar architectural objects to which I displace the experience of it from one site (my painting studio) to another (the gallery space) through painting as index. I use the technique of ambiguous linear forms in painting and the reflexive reading of orthogonal projective planes in installation to further extend the viewer’s perception of space and objects. The aim is to show that space has a meaningful relationship to objects and bring about a renewed awareness of habitual practice in seeing and representing space. UResearch paperU I have divided my research paper in two chapters. Chapter one explores the issue of spatial representation through ambiguity of simple linear forms and painting as index. My concern is on space being less important to objects in the distinction between space as ground and object as figure. Within this chapter I argue for an extended and a reflexive mode of seeing and representing space and objects instead of for a ground-figure contrast. By mapping my experience on a usual working site and displacing it to another space, I show that my perception of space is extended such that the boundary between the familiar and foreign (that is, space-object distinction) is blurred. Chapter two explores the method of presentation through painting and installation in a gallery and addresses the viewer’s space of perception with the work. I also discuss possible reflexive readings on the projective planes of the work which further extend the perception of it.

Doctor of Philosophy / The alternating Hecke algebra is a q-analogue of the alternating subgroups of the finite Coxeter groups. Mitsuhashi has looked at the representation theory in the cases of the Coxeter groups of type A_n, and B_n, and here we provide a general approach that can be applied to any finite Coxeter group. We give various bases and a generating set for the alternating Hecke algebra. We then use Tits' deformation theorem to prove that, over a large enough field, the alternating Hecke algebra is isomorphic to the group algebra of the corresponding alternating Coxeter group. In particular, there is a bijection between the irreducible representations of the alternating Hecke algebra and the irreducible representations of the alternating subgroup. In chapter 5 we discuss the branching rules from the Iwahori-Hecke algebra to the alternating Hecke algebra and give criteria that determine these for the Iwahori-Hecke algebras of types A_n, B_n and D_n. We then look specifically at the alternating Hecke algebra associated to the symmetric group and calculate the values of the irreducible characters on a set of minimal length conjugacy class representatives.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Ohio University, August, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 96-107)