Thesis (MPhil (Philosophy))--University of Stellenbosch, 2006. / This study constitutes a conceptual analysis and critique of the notion of the subject, and the concomitant notion of responsibility, as it has developed through the philosophical history of the modern subject. The aim of this study is to present the reader with a critical notion of responsibility. This study seeks to divorce such a position from the traditional, normative view of the subject, as typified by the Cartesian position. Following Derrida, a deconstructive reading of the subject’s conceptual development since Descartes is presented. What emerges from this reading is that, despite various re-conceptualisations of the subject by philosophers as influential and diverse as Nietzsche, Heidegger and Levinas, their respective positions continue to affirm the subject as human. The position presented in this study challenges this notion of the subject as human, with the goal of opening-up and displacing the ethical frontier between human and non-human. It is argued that displacing this ethical frontier introduces complex responsibilities. These complex responsibilities resist the violence inherent to normative positions that typically exclude the non-human – particularly the animal – from the sphere of responsibility.

MFA Thesis for Shanell B. Papp on Loners, textiles, video/film, re-purposing and pattern breaking.<p> w/ work from Marcel Duchamp, Edward Keinholz, Rene Magritte, Joseph Beuys, Eugene Atget, Arthur Fellig (Weegee), David Hoffos, Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin, Mike Kelly, Allyson Mitchell, Madonna, Weird Al.

MFA Thesis for Shanell B. Papp on Loners, textiles, video/film, re-purposing and pattern breaking.<p> w/ work from Marcel Duchamp, Edward Keinholz, Rene Magritte, Joseph Beuys, Eugene Atget, Arthur Fellig (Weegee), David Hoffos, Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin, Mike Kelly, Allyson Mitchell, Madonna, Weird Al.

Rene Drouard de Bousset (1703-1760) was an admired composer and an organist of renown. This thesis examines this musician's life and work, and attempts to bring Bousset's music, hitherto largely unknown, to the attention of musicologists and performers today. Primarily a source study, the thesis makes a survey of all known copies of Bousset's published works, addressing questions of dates, reprints and corrections. Historical context and musical style are also discussed. Particular emphasis is given to Bousset's sacred music in the French language two volumes of sacred cantatas and eight settings of Odes sacrees by Jean-Baptiste Rousseau - and its place within the French tradition of Psalm paraphrase settings. The figure of J.B. Rousseau is also examined, as the librettist of Bousset's Odes, and as an important literary contributor to French music at the turn of the eighteenth century. The source study is supplemented by a catalogue in the style of the Philidor Oeuvres database produced by the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles, containing all Bousset's known works, extant and lost. This exposition of Bousset's compositional output is prefaced by a biographical overview assembled principally from eighteenth century publications and archival documents. Volume II of this thesis comprises a critical performing edition of Bousset's first volume of Cantates spirituelles (1739).

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This dissertation examines lesbian and queer desire in texts in Catalan and Spanish written in Barcelona, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires from the 1960s to the present. In the texts, desire includes but is not limited to the erotic; it encompasses issues of queer textuality, relationality, and literary transmission. I focus on the works of three authors who have spent the majority of their lives in Barcelona. However, the city appears almost incidentally in their works; the genealogies that the authors trace are transnational. The texts combine literal movement (through exile or diaspora) and a metaphorical sense of being “out of place” that prompts writers to take refuge in writing. I demonstrate that despite depicting affinities beyond the family and nation, the works reveal the persistence of familial and national ties, albeit in spectral or queer ways. Rather than tracing continuous lines of descent that emphasise origins, the works are principally concerned with futurity and fragmentation, as in Michel Foucault’s reading of genealogy. Chapter One on Maria-Mercè Marçal’s La passió segons Renée Vivien (1994) traces a literary genealogy from Sappho to Renée Vivien in fin de siècle Paris to Marçal. The novel represents a merging of literary desire and erotic desire; Marçal’s search for symbolic mothers turns out to be a search for symbolic lovers that is oriented towards the present and future. In Chapter Two, I posit that in Cristina Peri Rossi’s La nave de los locos (1984) “happiness” consists of being open to chance and unpredictability unlike in conventional “happy” scripts in which a valuable life is believed to consist of (heterosexual) marriage, children, and property ownership. In Part II I argue that through fragmentation, allegory, and ambiguity, Peri Rossi’s El libro de mis primos (1969) contests authoritarian discourse without itself becoming a site of hegemonic meaning. In inviting the reader’s collaboration, it ensures authorial legacy. Part I of Chapter Three is an analysis of the temporality of obsession in Flavia Company’s Querida Nélida (1988). I propose that obsession and melancholia may point to a utopian future rather than signalling an entrapment in the past. My study of Melalcor (2000) in Part II suggests that queer forms of relationality that are not centred on procreation and monogamy offer ethical models of sociality. Part III focusses on Company’s return to biological family in Volver antes que ir (2012) and Por mis muertos (2014). The resurgence in these texts of family members who have died signals that just as the queer haunts the family, the family haunts the queer.

Bibliographical references at end of each chapter / Philosophy, Practical and Systematic Theology / M.A. (Philosophy)

This thesis seeks to understand how we read and understand the use of depictions of violence by examining its rhetorical presentation. Although the media gives us a mixed understanding of the way that experiencing violence secondarily (that is, through all types of media) affects us, scholarship in this area has proved clear connections between viewing/experiencing depictions of violence and raised levels of aggression. On the other hand, there is a clear difference between gratuitous depictions of violence and socially useful depictions of violence (i.e., the difference between a slasher movie and a holocaust movie) that that area of scholarship does not expressly take into account. I argue that the language of trauma studies has the ability to evaluate the impact of violent texts on audiences and that Kenneth Burke's Dramatistic Pentad has the ability the examine depictions of violence to uncover explicit and hidden ideologies that affect the presentation of the violence and, thus, our reception and interpretation of that violence. Working in conjunction, these two theories can help audience's understand depictions of violence on an ideological level and help them to assess the violence's potential traumatic impact on themselves and others within certain contexts. To demonstrate this theory of understanding violence, I make two short analyses of Native Son and The Lovely Bones and demonstrate an in-depth analysis of Fight Club and Blood Meridian in order to give an example of the type of reading I am advocating and its potential for understanding and interpreting depictions of violence in ways that uncover both social benefit and harm. In the end, I hope that this theory of reading violence might extend beyond the sample readings I have done and into other types of media, so that we can all understand the ways that violence is used rhetorically for social and political purposes and be able to both use it and interpret it responsibly.