This thesis offers an account of how verse drama, despite the entrenched cultural significance of Shakespeare, came over time to occupy a marginal, often maligned position within English theatre. The introduction establishes its critical-creative methodology: I approach the question not only as a critic, but as a practitioner exploring what T. S. Eliot called ‘the possibility of a poetic drama’ in the modern world. The first chapter demonstrates how verse dramatists over the last thirty years have been inhibited by continuous comparison to Shakespeare. The remainder of the thesis argues more broadly that verse drama between the Restoration and the present day has articulated itself directly in response to an evolving understanding of Shakespearean drama. Chapter Two examines Shakespeare’s own dramatic verse as a model which skilfully exploits the dialectic between norm and variation made possible by a shared metrical framework to stage conflicts between individuals and communities. Chapters Three to Five explore in turn how verse dramatists between 1660 and 1956 engaged with the same dialectic, both politically and prosodically. The thesis closes with an extended reflection on my own practice as a contemporary poet-playwright, discussing three scripts where I experimented with counterpointing individuals and communities through dramatic verse.

This thesis focuses on the Kurdish people of Turkey, who have struggled and advocated for a separate nation-state of their own. The Turkish state’s denial of Kurdish identity, and its heavy assimilation and oppression of the Kurdish people have turned some Kurds into political activists, both in Turkey and in the diaspora. In addition, the historical ban and current stigmatization of the Kurdish language have crystallized the importance and centrality of the language, particularly for both Kurdish identity and the Kurdish movement. This thesis explores the forms of political activism in Canada of the Kurds originating in Turkey, and the role of the Kurdish language in their activism. Using a qualitative research design, interviews with activists and participant observations were conducted in the cities of Toronto and Montréal. The findings draw attention to the significance of community centres as umbrella institutions for political activism, and as sites for the enactment of different forms of collective resistance. The study also illustrates that the role of the Kurdish language in activism is more salient at a representational level. That is, the Kurdish language is represented as the main identity marker fuelling activism, implying that speaking Kurdish is an act of resistance and thus political. In daily life, however, the usage of the Kurdish is far more attenuated and nuanced.

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For the past fifty years, critics and scholars have been searching for a critical language to explain the work of Britain’s most successful playwright, Harold Pinter. One of the richer paths of enquiry has been to analyse the plays using a psychoanalytic vocabulary. In general terms, however, most of these studies have been restricted to using a Freudian terminology. This study develops the psychoanalytic tradition of Pinter studies by applying the theories of one of Freud’s successors, Melanie Klein. The study has been undertaken through an analysis of play texts to develop a synthesis of Kleinian theory and Pinter. Klein’s work develops Freudianism by exploring the primitive building blocks of the infant’s mind. Chapter 1 introduces the thesis argument and gives a detailed introduction to Pinter’s background and his work as writer. Chapter 2 provides an examination of the fundamental elements of Klein’s theories in the context of Freud’s own ideas. Chapter 3 uses Klein’s theory of dreams to analyse Pinter’s earlier work and argues that the plays explore complex unconscious phantasies of relations to bad and good objects. A further contribution is made to psychoanalytic vocabulary with the introduction of the notion of the split object. Chapter 4 explores the manic- depressive aspects of The Dwarfs, whilst Chapter 5 is a close reading that argues that The Caretaker can be read through the lens of the characters’ anxious attempt to repair ‘objects’ damaged in phantasy. Chapter 6 provides a detailed Kleinian exegesis of The Homecoming and then Pinter’s later work in considered: his memory plays, and his work after 1980, including his overtly political work and his last plays including Ashes to Ashes and Celebration. In this chapters Kleinian lexis is employed to get at the unconscious undercurrents of the plays. Throughout, along with a specific emphasis on the characters’ unconscious anxieties and relations to objects, the relationship between society, the historical moment and the text are considered.

The Hessenberg representation is a representation of the symmetric group afforded on the cohomology ring of a regular semisimple Hessenberg variety. We study this representation via a combinatorial presentation called GKM Theory. This presentation allows for the study of the representation entirely from a graph. The thesis derives a combinatorial construction of a basis of the equivariant cohomology as a free module over a polynomial ring. This generalizes classical constructions of Schubert classes and divided difference operators for the equivariant cohomology of the flag variety.

Voting theory as been explored mathematically since the 1780’s. Many people have tackled parts of it using various tools, and now we shall look at it through the eyes of a representation theorist. Each vote can be thought of as a permutation of the symmetric group, Sn, and a poll is similar to a linear combination of these elements. Specifically, we will focus on translating and generalizing the works of Donald Saari into more algebraic terms to discover not just one space, but a whole isotypic component essential to positional voting.

In voting theory, simple questions can lead to convoluted and sometimes paradoxical results. Recently, mathematician Donald Saari used geometric insights to study various voting methods. He argued that a particular positional voting method (namely that proposed by Borda) minimizes the frequency of paradoxes. We present an approach to similar ideas which draw from group theory and algebra. In particular, we employ tools from representation theory on the symmetric group to elicit some of the natural behaviors of voting profiles. We also make generalizations to similar results for partially ranked data.

This paper explores artistic interpretation of a script's theme to its visual, estetic representation and meaning. The purpose is to reflect on the topic, and to enhance our understanding of how an interpretation from written intention to visual representation can form. The aritstic production used in this artistic research is an animated feature film for children 10+ and the character design of its lead female character.

Irreducible representations of a finite group over a field are important because all representations of a group are direct sums of irreducible representations. Maschke tells us that if φ is a representation of the finite group G of order n on the m-dimensional space V over the field K of complex numbers and if U is an invariant subspace of φ, then U has a complementary reducing subspace W . The objective of this thesis is to find all irreducible representations of the dihedral group D2n. The reason we will work with the dihedral group is because it is one of the first and most intuitive non-abelian group we encounter in abstract algebra. I will compute the representations and characters of D2n and my thesis will be an explanation of these computations. When n = 2k + 1 we will show that there are k + 2 irreducible representations of D2n, but when n = 2k we will see that D2n has k + 3 irreducible rep- resentations. To achieve this we will first give some background in group, ring, module, and vector space theory that is used in representation theory. We will then explain what general representation theory is. Finally we will show how we arrived at our conclusion.

There are a variety of chromosomal abnormalities such as translocation, duplication, deletion, insertion and inversion, which may cause severe diseases, e.g., cancers and birth defects. Multi-color fluorescence in-situ hybridization (M-FISH) is an imaging technique popularly used for simultaneously detecting and visualizing these complex abnormalities in a single hybridization. In spite of the advancement of fluorescence microscopy for chromosomal abnormality detection, the quality of the fluorescence images is still limited, due to the spectral overlap, uneven intensity level across multiple channels, variations of background and inhomogeneous intensity within intra-channels. Therefore, it is critical but challenging to distinguish the different types of chromosomes accurately in order to detect the chromosomal abnormalities from M-FISH images. The main contribution of this dissertation is to develop an M-FISH image analysis pipeline by taking full advantage of spatial and spectral information from M-FISH imaging. In addition, novel image analysis approaches such as the sparse representation are applied in this work. The pipeline starts with the image preprocessing to extract the background to improve the quality of the raw images by low-rank plus group lasso decomposition. Then, the image segmentation is performed by incorporating both spatial and spectral information by total variation (TV) and row-wise constraints. Finally image classification is conducted by considering the structural information of neighboring pixels with a row-wise sparse representation model. In each step, new methods and sophisticated algorithms were developed and compared with several popularly used methods, It shows that (1) the preprocessing model improves the quality of the raw images; (2) the segmentation model outperforms than both fuzzy c-means (FCM) and improved adaptive fuzzy c-means (IAFCM) models in terms of correct ratio and false rate; and (3) the classification model corrects the misclassification to improve the accuracy of chromosomal abnormalities detection, especially for the complex inter-chromosomal rearrangements. / 1 / Jingyao Li