May Fourth society encouraged the female writers to progress and requested them to play the role of "an understanding wife and loving mother". This conflicting expectation made "the love and marriage" a major trial for the educated female at that time. The May Fourth women's liberation movement had this characteristic: women were utilized as a tool rather than liberated human beings. Sharing a common background, the May Fourth female writers tried to find a family of ¡¨her¡¨ own besides the father's family and the husband's family. This dissertation tries to study and compare ¡§the love and marriage issue¡¨ in the novels of the May Fourth female writers such as Chen Hengzhe¡]³¯¿Å­õ¡^¡BLu Yin¡]ÃfÁô¡^¡BSu Xue-Lin¡]Ĭ³·ªL¡^¡BBing Xing¡]¦B¤ß¡^¡BLin Shu-hua¡]­â¨ûµØ¡^¡BFeng Yuan-Jun¡]¶¾¨J§g¡^Shi Ping-Mei¡]¥Ûµû±ö¡^.It is this author¡¦s hope that through this study we can understand more what these female writers thought on the issue of gender subjectivity.

Thesis (M.A.)--Denver Seminary, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [104-108]).

Thesis (M.A.)--Catholic Theological Union at Chicago, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [183]-203).

The purpose of this essay is to examine Judith Butler’s approach to the problem of ethics, and the ways in which she attempts to reformulate notions of morality and responsibility based on an understanding of the subject as inherently bound to others within a context of normative structures that exceed its own influence. For Butler, this bond implies that the subject’s constitution is structured within what she calls a ”scene of address,” where it emerges into a social field by being appealed to by others, and replying to that appeal by giving an account of itself. By setting out to examine the way in which she puts two influential thinkers—namely Foucault and Levinas—to work, I will examine her notion of scenes of address more closely, and try to show how it enables her to pose the problems of ethics and morality in novel ways. I will argue that her ethics should be understood as one of relationality, since it moves away from the self-sufficient, autonomous subject as the outset for ethics, towards an understanding our very being as dependent on the being of others. This, I propose, puts it in contrast with many established ways of thinking about ethics, both within the Western philosophical tradition, and in views of ethics more generally. Thus, I hope to show that Butler’s ethics constitutes a valuable resource with regard to the question of ethical responsibility. Finally, I will propose that it carries significant implications that point towards ethical nonviolence, and that these are of increasing importance to us today.

Vita Sackville-West's autobiographical novel The Edwardians lends itself to a double reading: both Freudian and Foucauldian. The Freudian conflict between desire and prohibition plays out in the unresolved Oedipus complex of its protagonist Sebastian, son of the Duchess of Chevron; repression drives Sebastian's behavior in all his relationships. The novel also depicts an upper-class Edwardian society incited to discourse in a Foucauldian sense--a society in which sexual gossip functions as a discourse of power. From a psychoanalytic perspective, this incitement is produced by repression, and functions as a symptom of it. The relationship between repression and incitement suggests the possibility of a theoretical rapprochement between Freud and Foucault.

The privileging of man in African societies has involved an erasure of identities and subjectivities of many women, holding them to an assumption of female inferiority. To counter the injustice, African women writers have engaged in rhetorical and performative strategies designed to reconstitute the cultural erasure as they try to claim status as individuals. But in the process, various cultural expectations such as their maternal roles act as constant bottlenecks to return them back to their prescribed roles as subordinate beings. This dissertation, “Imagined Realities, Defying Subjects: Voice, Sexuality and Subversion in African Women’s Writing” explores the methodologies of cultural resistance and the complex ways in which African women have articulated their subjectivity, challenged societal roles, negotiated tradition and formulated a literary and feminist aesthetic. As inventors invested in creating narratives that speak to the concerns of an African female aesthetic, these authors work in, through and toward what Gloria Anzaldua calls a “mestiza consciousness,” whose work is to “break down the subjectobject duality that keeps her [woman] a prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended” (102). Embracing the framework of African Feminism or what Obioma Nnaemeka calls “Nego Feminism,” each chapter articulates the sites of enunciation in which the characters engage with their fragmented conditions. Though with differing methodologies, for each writer, the act of seeking a space through which a self with an “outline” is negotiated and articulated allows the women to become aware of the need to speak their own truths and realities. I examine how authors like Flora Nwapa, Mariama Ba, Yvonne Vera and Calixthe Beyala construct textual strategies that go beyond the marginalized figures and articulate themselves so that they escape society’s sanctioned external definitions. My dissertation proffers a fresh insight that goes beyond the descriptions of how women are represented, superseding this kind of criticism with more complex analysis of gender and women’s oppression.

I locate my dissertation at the critical intersection of philosophy, medical discourse and literature, and anchor it around five intertwining concepts: modernity, subjectivity, masculinity, immunity and Frenchness. I contend that immunity, as a concept at which life and law converge, offers an alternative and largely overlooked episteme shaping contemporary French literary consciousness as a primary regulator/negotiator between health and sickness, belonging and not belonging, volition and involition, and, finally, self and other. I treat immunity metaphorically and scientifically, and then trace the episteme through the works of three French authors—Émile Zola, Albert Camus and Hervé Guibert—all of whom adopt the medical novel as a way of addressing the relationship of the individual to society and to the self. Anne-Marie Moulin frames the immunological revolution as an ever-evolving "semantic event." In this vein, I devote my first chapter to examining how immunity instituted itself as a common trope of "becoming" embraced—and left naturalized—by post-structural thinkers grappling with their corporal limits. This rhetorical turn culminates in Jean-Luc Nancy's characterization of the immune system as the body’s “physiological signature," inhibiting the potential of man to transcend his biology. In my second chapter, I move from the metaphor of immunity to a brief exposition of the history of the science, ending my survey with Elie Metchnikoff (and his legacy), the "father" of cellular immunology who envisioned the internal body as a dynamic, every-changing structure. I focus the next three chapters of my study on literary examples where the male protagonist’s immunity has been compromised. For my first two examples—Le Docteur Pascal by Emile Zola and La Peste by Albert Camus—I analyze the portrait of the supposedly immune doctor, considering what the “costs and benefits" of this immunity are and how this "exceptional status" is destabilized. Then, in my last chapter, I switch perspectives from the doctors to the patient, examining the texts of Hervé Guibert who, I argue, models his writing strategy on the retrovirus’s tactics, challenging literary conventions so as better to exteriorize his experience and “contaminate” (in the etymological sense as "touch together") his readers. / Romance Languages and Literatures

Based on twenty months of fieldwork in Beijing and Shanghai, my dissertation intends to examine the psycho-boom, or the distinct cultural and social formation that the rise of Western psychotherapy has taken in the new hosting environment of urban China. I argue that the psycho-boom, while involving a new psychological modality or a new mental health profession, should not be narrowly conceived of as such. Instead, it is more akin to a popular movement that blends the elements of professional training, popular healing, consumer fad, and entrepreneurial pursuit. The networks and activities associated with psychotherapy training have constituted a massive social world in which various interests and aspirations can be pursued and realized. I further argue that experiences, either individual or interpersonal, have been a critical element of being in this social world. Many people learn to appreciate the psychological dimensions of experience through participating in it, turning one's involvement with psychotherapy a therapeutic journey in its broadest sense. / Anthropology

Drawing upon critical interpretive medical anthropology (Lock and Scheper-Hughes 1996) and Judith Butler’s (1990) concept of performativity, this thesis investigates the empowerment potential and effect on well-being of a community sewing group located in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. This project was conducted using the methods of narrative ethnography, including semi-structured individual interviews, focus groups, and participant observation and finds that the Saskatoon Mothers’ Centre Sewing Circle contributes to well-being in three major ways. First, learning to sew shapes women’s self-perceptions, resulting in more capable, productive, and self-sufficient subjectivities. Learning to sew also enables women to act with more agency in their daily lives, empowering them through the opportunity to express identities, enhance social networks, and act within financial limitations. Finally, the Sewing Circle creates an environment of empowerment, an emotionally and physically safe space in which mothers are supported and nurtured, resulting in the formation of a supportive and encouraging community of practice. The Sewing Circle therefore supports women’s well-being by instilling them with the confidence and ability to act in their daily lives and to fulfill their potential. This research contributes to an understanding of the way in which sewing can contribute to the holistic well-being of older mothers by linking empowerment to performativity, and may contribute to the development of similar empowerment programming in the future.

This dissertation explores the role of ignorance in the process of early modern self-fashioning. Renaissance historiography has, by and large, been based on a Cartesian-cum-Hegelian understanding of the subject as a subject of knowledge. An individual's recognition of her self-motivated agency, her power to act as an independent self, has been read as the product of the generation of knowledge and epistemologies that assert human ability to pursue and master knowledge. Critical theories of subjectivity have challenged the humanist subject and its epistemological foundations, but ignorance and the unknown have rarely been theorized as anything more than empty spaces to be invaded and filled by knowledge. Building on recent philosophical and cultural materialist investigations into knowledge, ignorance, and the subject, my work studies how ignorance can operate as a positive force in the production of the self and how, paradoxically, knowledge can erode the epistemological foundations of subjectivity. Primarily focused on the literature of early modern Europe, this dissertation advances the study of early modern subjectivity as well as the relationship between epistemology and the self as perceived in contemporary theory by tracing the hitherto ignored operations of ignorance and complicating the assumption of a teleological connection between knowledge and subjectivity. In particular, the major areas of study are: how hegemonic discourses produce not only knowledge but also ignorance in order to stabilize the existence and authority of social hierarchies and empowered subject; how the creation and pursuit of knowledge outside of these demarcations can erode the foundations of social identity and individual subjectivity by revealing the fiction of cultural "truths"; how cultural spaces of ignorance can provide disempowered individuals opportunities for resistance and self-fashioning against socially prescribed norms; and how submission to or acknowledgment of one's own ignorance can become internalized as an essential part of a subjectivity that does not rely on knowledge as a form of power.