This thesis investigates the manner in which the action sequences of contemporary Hollywood cinema reflect and constitute ways of imagining space. The thesis proposes that these sequences are highly spatialised presentations of bodily interaction with the world, and as such manifest cultural anxieties regarding the relationship between the individual and the built environment, and work to assure their viewers of the capacity of the human form to survive the disorienting spaces of contemporary architecture, globalisation and technology. In order to demonstrate this, the aesthetic and formal properties of action sequences are read alongside critical work exploring how space shapes social life, including influential texts by Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, Fredric Jameson and others. These readings reveal that both action sequences and critical spatial theory are similarly attentive to the difficulties, contradictions and possibilities of built space. A range of action sequences from Hollywood films of the last fifteen years, including sequences from Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, The International, The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum, Jumper, Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, Sucker Punch, Inception, Swordfish, The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded, TRON: Legacy, Resident Evil, Resident Evil: Afterlife and Dredd 3D are analysed for how they depict space and spatial agency. Rather than concentrating upon the narratives of these films, the chapters of the thesis deal in turn with the ways in which action sequences express contemporary developments within the built environment; the consequences of globalisation; the impact of these spatial changes upon mental life; the challenges to bodily engagement raised by digital technology and cyberspace; and the modifications to representing space on film prompted by stereoscopic exhibition. Examinations of these sequences are used to build a model of the action sequence that suggests spatial appropriation and ideas around place-creation are crucial elements of the form.

In the early to mid-twentieth century, many novelists in the Arab world championed Arab nationalism in their literary reflections on the social and political struggles of their countries, depicting these struggles primarily in terms of spatial binaries that pitted the Arab world against the West, even as they imported Western literary models of progress and modernity into their own work. The intense experience of national awakening that infused their writing often placed these authors at a literary disadvantage, for in their literature, all too often the depth and diversity of Arabic cultures and the complexity of socio-political struggles across the Arab world were undermined by restrictive spatial discourses that tended to focus only on particular versions of Arab history and on a seemingly unifying national predicament. Between the Arab defeat of 1967 and the present day, however, an increasing number of Arab authors have turned to less restrictive forms of spatial discourse in search of a language that might offer alternative narratives of hope beyond the predictable, and seemingly thwarted, trajectories of nationalism. This study traces the ways in which contemporary Arab authors from Egypt and the Sudan have endeavoured to re-think and re-define the Arab identity in ever-changing spaces where elements of the local and the global, the traditional and the modern, interact both competitively and harmoniously. I examine the spatial language and the tropes used in three Arabic novels, viewing them through the lens of thawra (revolution) in both its socio-political and artistic manifestations. Linking the manifestations of thawra in each text to different scenes of revolution in the Arab world today, in Chapter Two, I consider how, at a stage when the Sudan of the sixties was both still dealing with colonial withdrawal and struggling to establish itself as a nation-state, the geographical and textual landscapes of Tayeb Salih‟s Season of Migration to the North depict the ongoing dilemma of the Sudanese identity. In Chapter Three, I examine Alaa iii al-Aswany‟s The Yacoubian Building in the context of a socially diseased and politically corrupt Egypt of the nineties: social, political, modern, historical, local, and global elements intertwine in a dizzyingly complex spatial network of associations that sheds light on the complicated reasons behind today‟s Egyptian thawra. In Chapter Four, the final chapter, Gamal al-Ghitani‟s approach to his Egypt in Pyramid Texts drifts far away from Salih‟s anguished Sudan and al-Aswany‟s chaotic Cairo to a realm where thawra manifests itself artistically in a sophisticated spatial language that challenges all forms of spatial hegemony and, consequently, old and new forms of social, political, and cultural oppression in the Arab world. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2011-09-27 13:18:25.303

<p>  </p> <p>This dissertation builds on a shift in literary studies as scholars sought to develop new approaches to examining locations in literature. These approaches help scholars address the full spatial dimensions of a narrative, such as architectural features or social constructions of space. I argue that authors use homes to not only meditate on how individuals construct a sense of self, but also to consider the ways individuals interact with their community. I examine works by twentieth and twenty-first-century authors to address four different uses of homes: how homes engage with historical memory, serve as performative spaces, shape experiences of trauma, and address the effects of colonization and diaspora. By addressing different ways homes can be affected and, in turn, affect their occupants, I unpack concerns of housing security and the often-complex relationship between a person and their sense of home. Through a discussion of domestic space, we can further understand how social and political changes affect individual identities and familial structures. This dissertation contributes to scholarship on these authors, as well as develops an interdisciplinary framework for examining space and place in literature by synthesizing spatial theory, architectural theory, and narratology.</p>

The Roman witch is a uniquely powerful female figure, capable of threatening the lives and wellbeing of anyone she chooses to make her target. Symbolically, she embodies the idea of the ‘other,’ the essence of everything un-Roman. This dissertation argues that a major symbolic threat witches represent is their ability to disrupt, control, reidentify, and distort space. Major aspects of the witch’s characterization that contribute to her symbolic use are her profound and supernatural connection to nature, her power over liminality, her boundarylessness, and her total spatial access. Her relationship to space undermines the political effort to construct a unified social identity based on spatial organization, because she refuses to adhere to social prescriptions of spatial behavior. She undermines the effect of the project to reidentify space, and she represents the fragility of social constructs of space through the ease with which she transcends supposedly impenetrable boundaries. This dissertation will look at the witch as a subversive representation of the different challenges that threaten total control over Roman space at the beginning of its imperial transformation and throughout its imperial expansion. Witches pose a threat in many different ways: in Horace and Juvenal they destroy concepts of control over Roman space and menace the stability of Roman place-identity and the spatial existence of individual Romans throughout the empire. In Ovid’s Medea story, the power of the witch to infiltrate space at will and destroy a city or kingdom’s rulership represents the threat of the other. Written several decades later, Seneca’s Medea uses Medea as a symbol of imperial expansion to critique the increasing vulnerability of spatial control that comes with overexpansion; at the same time, her reflection of imperial conquest highlights the fear of the exposure of Roman space to penetration and domination by an outside force. Lucan uses the incredible power and efficacy of Erichtho’s spatial command in Pharsalus to underscore the peril of the imperial system, wherein control of Roman space depends on one individual. While Erichtho and Thessaly have a perfect, mutually defining relationship of place-identity, Lucan portrays Roman identity as lost to the chaos of civil war, and forewarns that the existential crisis of imperial leadership’s impact on Roman identity will be perpetual throughout the course of its empire’s progression. Finally, in Apuleius, witches’ repeated ability to immobilize men and force men into social exile acts as a reminder of the harsh reality of the forced displacement and lack of agency over their own movement for a vast number of those living in imperial space.

On the subject of what affect voters¡¦ vote choice, political scientists for a long time emphasize three answers: party identification, candidate orientation, and issue orientation. About issue orientation, Rational Choice Theory assumes that human are rational pursuing maximizing self- interests. When voters are making their vote decisions, they would observe the issues positions of competing parties or candidates, comparing with their own positions, and then vote the party or the candidate who can represent their own positions best. Spatial Theory, from Rational Choice Theory, takes those abstract issue positions into some issue space. Both the issue positions of voters and parties could be presented by some points in the space, and the length and direction between the points can represent the differences between issue positions. There are several different models in Spatial Theory, and different models advocate different ways about how voters use the points in issue space to form their evaluations to competing parties or candidates. In this paper, we take the viewpoints of Spatial Theory to research the issue voting behavior of Taiwanese voters. First, we try to know the spatial distribution of voters¡¦ issue positions. Then we inspect the association between voters¡¦ social back- ground elements and issue position. Finally, we test three models of Spatial Theory, proximity model, directional model, and RM mixed model, to know how Taiwanese voters use issue positions to form their party-evaluation.

“Reading, Writing, Roaming: The student abroad in Arab women’s literature” details new developments in a sub-genre of Arabic travel literature, the study abroad narrative. An increasing number of female writers, and particularly female writers born after the colonial period, study in Europe and write about their experiences in memoirs or fictionalized accounts. Their intervention in the genre offers alternative modes of cultural interaction to the binaries of power detailed in earlier narratives. They suggest a move away from earlier texts such as Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, where the binary between colonizer and colonized is inverted rather than demolished. The protagonists of Fadia Faqir’s My Name is Salma and Somaya Ramadan’s Leaves of Narcisuss deconstruct this binary by creating specific spaces of multiplicity and heterogeneity. These spaces can be physical, as is the cottage in which Salma rents a room, or they can be literary, like the traditions of British and Arabic literature that Ramadan’s novel brings together. The women in these narratives embark on not just travel but education, developing tools of reading and writing to help them re-construct a literary and political history. The traditions and places produced by feminine narratives alter the framework of canons and spaces defined by national terms, creating what Jahan Ramazani calls transnational “alliances of style and sensibility.” Using Kristeva’s work on women’s and monumental time, I argue that women participate in specific modes of time and space, modes defined by dynamic, cyclical changes, that allow them to create these kinds of projects. Through shared living spaces and hybridized literary traditions, Faqir and Ramadan re-write the study abroad narrative to include for a greater possibility of experiences and interactions. They appropriate a structure originally available only to privileged young men and apply it to women, even to an impoverished refugee in Salma’s case. These novels encourage readers to move beyond the colonial and even the postcolonial discourse by developing new vocabularies for discussing traditions, cultures and the value of education. / text

In September of 2011 Zuccotti Park, located in the heart of downtown Manhattan, became a site of political contestation when several hundred activists pitched their tents, set up their signs, and began to occupy the park, in what later became known as Occupy Wall Street. Occupy Wall Street became part of the larger Occupy moment, in which public parks in most major cities and college towns across the nation were occupied for several months by protestors contesting a range of issues including the growing disparity in wealth, corporate influence on democracy, and deepening social injustices. By the end of 2011 the nationwide eviction of most Occupy encampments resulted in the assumed failure of Occupy to challenge successfully contemporary politics and to organize a clear list of demands. In this thesis, I draw on ethnographic material collected in 2012 to interpret the spatial strategies and spatialities of Occupy and argue that for Occupy, this lack of focus is a strength in that it creates a space for alternative political discussions and practices otherwise less visible or nonexistent in the current political system. I examine the spatialities of Occupy, by which I mean the networks, mobilities, and places of Occupy, and argue that such an analysis offers an entry point in which to consider the ways in which space and politics are co-produced. In order to examine the relations between space and politics, I locate the specific spatial practices and strategies utilized by participants both in the highly visible occupation of public parks and direct actions and less visible organization spaces.

Realist depictions of bad housing are pervasive in the canon of twentieth-century American literature. Insufficient abodes crisscross the literary map of the United States, appearing regularly in settings from New York to Los Angeles and from Alaska to Florida. This dissertation examines three case studies that themselves crisscross the map, and represent the diverse contexts of this common thematic concern. Anzia Yezierska writes of the deplorable housing in New York’s East Side tenements, Richard Wright tells of life in South Side Chicago’s kitchenettes, and N. Scott Momaday depicts dark and cold apartments in Los Angeles as well as emptying homes on the reservation. What is shared by all three writers is their use of realism to depict abject housing, their clear engagement with public discourses about living spaces, and the way their works expose the production of space by social, economic, and legislative factors. All three published works that were widely received by the reading public and thereby contributed to the discourses in powerful and surprising ways. All three literary authors of this dissertation register a sense of space that is produced by power. Yezierska, Wright, and Momaday provide fictional, narrative modes of engagement that employ a particularly material-spatial register to depict spatial injustice. In order to read the production of space in these texts, I draw on the work of the theorists Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and Edward Soja to help explain the wider circumstances causing disenfranchisement, exploitation, and disempowerment that all three authors investigate. What is at stake here is a more complete picture of social crisis. By illustrating how bad housing is a result of political, economic, and social powers rather than the result of an individual’s laziness or lack of character, Yezierska, Wright, and Momaday add another perspective to prominent social discourses about housing in the twentieth century. The literary houses they depict uncover a history of systematic inequality in which prevalent national attitudes led to policy that put lower-classes and minority populations in bad housing and consequently foreclosed their potential to partake in the supposed full possibilities of citizenship. / 2020-11-07T00:00:00Z

<p> In this work the direct, kinematic, small-displacement theory has been developed for the analysis of thin, elastic members which are curved and twisted in their natural configurations. Principles of continuum mechanics have been used to derive the equations of equilibrium. Throughout this investigation the three-dimensional aspect of the problem is preserved. Local kinematic compatibility of the displacement field has been investigated by the formal Saint-Venant's method. This development serves to substantiate the validity of the kinematic tridimensional approach. By the judicious neglection of small terms of higher order throughout this analysis, the basic system of equations arrived at by the author admit favourable comparison with the existing equations by other authors.</p> / Thesis / Master of Engineering (MEngr)

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