This thesis seeks to identify, explain, and differentiate the problems of existential doubt and the burden of choice in today’s world versus the previous epochs of human existence. It will attempt to discern the relevant differences in the types of existential doubt, illustrate how these differences came about, and analyze the strength of a potential solution to these problems. My aim is to critique Dreyfus and Kelly’s portrayal and solution to these problems in a way that can further promulgate discussion on an increasingly relevant topic in philosophy, mental health, and science. The conclusion will provide a novel understanding of contemporary nihilism that might be of use in combating this epidemic.

This paper establishes the pivotal role and irreplaceable value of painting in the technology-driven, image-saturated contemporary culture today. Particularly in my work, painting old childhood photographs creates a contemplative platform where I can deconstruct and reconstruct relics of my formative past as means of better understanding my multicultural upbringing. Inspired by both Chinese Communist propaganda posters and the ’85 New Wave Contemporary Chinese Art Movement, my senior project confronts the façade of perfection staged in Chinese family portraits through convoluted layers of imagery and Chinese text that build up the painting. The amalgamation of bold outlines, expressive brushstrokes, and disciplined grids, challenges the stifling values of discipline, order, and homogeneity in traditional Chinese culture.

This dissertation critically evaluates the portrayal of the doctrine of inaugurated eschatology in an identified core repertory, the most-used contemporary congregational worship songs in churches in the United States from 2000 through 2015. Chapter 2 explores views on the role of congregational singing as it relates to the presence of God and the spiritual formation of the believer. It compares Edith Humphries’ concept of the worship service as “entrance” with Ryan Lister’s view that God’s presence is both a goal and a means of accomplishing his purposes. Then, using the work of James K. A. Smith and Monique Ingalls, chapter 2 explores the role congregational song plays in forming the identity of churches and believers. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the aesthetic paradigm of Nicholas Wolterstorff has useful implications for the manner in which congregational singing serves as the occasion for entering the divine presence. Chapter 3 maps a typology of themes related to the doctrinal umbrella of “inaugurated eschatology,” as codified by George Ladd and now a widely-used term in evangelical scholarship, so as to provide nuanced categories by which one can evaluate the content and scope of eschatological thought in American evangelical life. After a brief survey of the doctrine’s historical development, tracing the contributions of George Ladd, Anthony Hoekema, and “progressive dispensationalism,” the dissertation traces the biblical data to highlight ways in which Scripture speaks of the kingdom of God’s current presence (the “already”) and future arrival (the “not yet”). The chapter then considers believers’ experience of the “already” and the “not yet” in language of affection, spatiality, and chronology. Chapter 4 traces these eschatological themes in American evangelical hymnody from ca. 1700 through 1985, addressing a few representative hymns from each hymnic era by way of illustration. Drawing upon the work of Stephen Marini, Eric Routley, Richard Crawford, and others, the chapter surveys select examples of American evangelical hymnody from four time periods in US history (beginning in 1737) and finds that many of these historic hymns contain substantive reflections upon robust eschatological themes. Chapter 5 surveys the core repertory of CWM across the span of years from 2000 to 2015 for a portrayal of the themes of inaugurated eschatology. Using Richard Crawford’s concept of “core repertory,” it synthesizes CCLI reports of song usage over a defined recent period (2000 to 2015) to identify a core group of songs for analysis, and derives a body of 83 songs. Using the lens of inaugurated eschatology developed in chapter 3, it concludes that elements of “not yet” are underrepresented in contemporary evangelical congregational song. Chapter 6 proposes practical ways that church leaders of worship can better represent these themes as they plan services for the health and sustainable growth of their churches. Chapter 7 summarizes each of the chapters, draws implications, and suggests areas for further research.

This thesis examines how hip-hop has become a meaningful cultural movement for contemporary artists in Hamburg and in Oldenburg. The comparative analysis is guided by a three-dimensional theoretical framework that considers the spatial, historical and social influences, which have shaped hip-hop music, dance, rap and graffiti art in the USA and subsequently in the two northern German cities. The research methods entail participant observation, semi-structured interviews and a close reading of hip-hop's cultural texts in the form of videos, photographs and lyrics. The first chapter analyses the manifestation of hip-hop music in Hamburg. The second chapter looks at the local adaptation of hip-hop's dance styles. The last two chapters on rap and graffiti art present a comparative analysis between the art forms' appropriation in Hamburg and in Oldenburg. In comparing hip-hop's four main elements and their practices in two distinct cities, this research project expands current German hip-hop scholarship beyond the common focus on rap, especially in terms of rap being a voice of the minority. It also offers insights into the ways in which artists express their local, regional or national identity as a culturally hybrid state, since hip-hop's art forms have always been the result of cultural and artistic mixture. The theoretical focus on spatiality, historicality and sociality moreover reveals different and even contradicting manifestations of cultural hybridity and identity in hip-hop. In particular, this thesis looks at the formation of post-hybrid identities, with which hip-hop artists aim at expressing their multiculturality as an inherent part of their life in Germany.

The aim of this study is to compare characters in classical and contemporary japanese storytelling rakugo. Classical rakugo presents cultural tastes of merchant class in the Edo period (1600-1867) while the pattern of storytellers attending lords turned to performance in public and brought several amusing characters to idealize the medieval or rather premodern world. Contemporary rakugo carries on this popular tradition spontaneously with great expectations for its future appearance. As society phenomenons effect the appearance of rakugo characters, it is possible to observe the difference between this representation of life in community in past and nowadays. To compare classical and contemporary rakugo characters I analyzed them first according to their or storyteller's utterances and defined them as literary types.

The aim of my thesis is to approach the specifics of current Dutch drama. First part of my paper is based on the theoretical work of Hans-Thies Lehmann, Hugo Brems and Anja Krans describing the development of drama in Netherland covering the year 1969 to the turn of the millennium. Moreover, I am focusing on the major events, trends and characteristics following this period as well as explaining the term "post-dramatic theatre ", which I closely characterize. I've been following the change of the cooperation between dramatists and theatre groups regarding contemporary drama. In the second, practical part of my work I investigate whether or not the thoughts of the above mentioned theatre scientists and theorists are valid (and if so to what extend). I have examined this on a few pieces of work of four selected Dutch dramatists (Esther Gerritsen, Rob de Graaf, Maria Goos, Gerardjan Rijnders). I shortly describe the content and identify the most significant ideas of their work. I use information obtained from studying the theoretical work, newspaper articles, reviews, interviews with the artists and even their dramas. In the conclusion of my thesis, I then gather all the knowledge obtained by readings and analysis in the practical part. Moreover, I am describing the position of the Dutch dramatists in...

Concurrent with a bloom of interest in the archive within academic discourse, an intense cultural fascination with museums, archives, and memorials to the past has flourished within the United States. The ascendency of digital technologies has contributed to and magnified this “turn” by popularising and habituating the archive as a personal memory tool, a key mechanism through which the self is negotiated and fashioned. This dissertation identifies a sustained exploration of the personal archive and its place in contemporary life by American novelists in the twenty-first century. Drawing on theories of the archive and the collection, this dissertation analyses the parameters of the curated self through close-readings of recent novels by five US authors. The first two chapters read Paul Auster’s Sunset Park through trauma theory and Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved through psychoanalysis, noting that in each the system of archiving generates moments of catharsis. The two chapters argue that, for the subject shattered by trauma, archiving activates and fulfils psychoanalytic processes that facilitate the self’s reintegration and prompts a discursive revelation about the painful past. The texts, thus, discover in the archive strategies for achieving, however provisionally, a kind of stability amongst unexpected change. The next two chapters reveal the complicity of archival formations with threats posed in the digital age and articulate alternative forms of self-curation that counteract these pernicious forces. To ward off information overload, E.L. Doctorow’s Homer and Langley advocates the ethical flexibility of “blind” narration that, wending through time, accommodates a broad range of perspectives by refusing to fantasise about its own ultimate and total claim to accuracy. Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, meanwhile, diagnoses the cultural anxiety over increasingly invasive surveillance measures. While the novel situates the digital archive, or database, at the heart of this new dataveillance, it recommends investing the self in material collections, where personal meaning is rendered in the inscrutable patois of objects that disintegrate over time. For Egan, the material archive thereby skirts the assumed readability and fixity of data on which this surveillance thrives. The conclusion analyses Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia, observing within it and the other novels a consistent concern with archival destruction, erosion, and stagnation. Together, the texts suggest that the personal archive is persistently stalked by disintegration and failure. Yet, within this contemporary moment in which curation has become a widespread means of self-fashioning, they also show how these hazards can be creatively circumvented or actively courted, can threaten the subject or be harnessed by it.

Literature by authors from the GDR has often been read with a focus on its sociopolitical context ‒ before and after the fall of the Wall. This rather one-dimensional approach has resulted in a lack of engagement with the more complex issues raised in many of those texts. Frequently, they address broader theoretical questions and delve into universal themes, which tend to be overlooked or sidelined. This PhD thesis concentrates on a selection of post-Wende texts by Monika Maron and Jenny Erpenbeck, two authors from the former East Germany. Starting from the premise that both authors' oeuvres serve on one level as critical investigations of the GDR and the significant aftermath of its collapse, I aim to demonstrate that these narratives have more to offer. My analysis brings to light the complexity of the examined works by addressing what it regards as their central themes: the exploration of questions around the topics of Heimat and memory. This research project draws attention to the texts' representation of underlying issues such as dislocation and fragmentation, and in doing so it examines how both authors depict concerns that go beyond the GDR and its demise. A key task is the analysis of the ways in which Monika Maron and Jenny Erpenbeck portray the symptoms of a wider ‘modern conditionʼ, a state characterized by instability and uncertainty. Based on the concept of ambivalence, introduced to the debates about modernity by Zygmunt Bauman in the early 1990s, this original comparative approach explores the failure and the ultimate collapse of the socialist utopia as a paradigm for the breakdown of the ‘grand narrativesʼ in modern, Western pluralist societies. Thus, this PhD thesis illuminates how both authors position themselves in relation to competing discourses about the GDR, and it simultaneously alerts the reader to the texts' inherent complexity by revealing their strong ties to topical issues regarding the much-debated term of modernity. Ultimately, I claim that Maron and Erpenbeck set out to investigate the impact of larger processes of fragmentation, and try to establish the possible role of and a ‘placeʼ for the individual that is exposed to historical forces and the rapid changes of spatio-temporal parameters within modernity, of which the GDR experience forms one part.

This thesis investigates the problem of historical representation in the context of the contemporary turns to trauma and memory visible in cultural theory and in wider popular culture and contemporaneous with post-Cold war ‘end of history’ discourse. Rather than apply the theories of trauma to readings of contemporary texts, the present study proposes that trauma theory be seen as part of the wider cultural tendency towards memorialization, characterized by a privileging of the notion of witnessing, an emphasis on the punctuality of the traumatic moment, and the fetishization of the historical trace. This thesis argues that what unites these various features of memorial culture is a notion of history that emphasises both the impossibility of comprehension and representation and yet a sense of proximity to a literal past through the traces that remain. If postmodernism designates a ‘crisis of historicity’ which delegitimizes the authority of representations of history, to think history through the prisms of memory and trauma reasserts a notion of historical truth, albeit relocated in the traumatic memory of the survivor, in the ethical imperative to bear witness, or in an aesthetics of the aporia. The parallel discourses of history as trauma and history as memory conflate the problems of historical representation with problems of historical witnessing, and in doing so conceptualize a notion of an historical event with no actor, proposing instead a passive subject without agency and thus without politics. The thesis is organized through close readings of four key texts, each of which can be read to be in dialogue with wider memorial culture, but which also problematize the orthodoxies of contemporary trauma theory in its application to the literary text—Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Robert Harris’s Fatherland, Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock and Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project. Focusing on notions of witnessing, testimony, traumatic memory and the trace, and drawing on the work of Slavoj Žižek and Jacques Rancière, this thesis sets out to resist the theoretical creep that would see all history as trauma and all text as testimony, and instead reasserts the necessary role of fiction and the imagination in constructing a relationship to the past.

This thesis is a description and analysis of work that I produced during my Gradate studies at the University of New Orleans. The central theme of these works is the common human experience of inner dialogue, an interior experience. Through prints and sculpture I produce stand-ins for the body. These objects are meant to invite the viewer to sense recognizable human traits and to experience the works as having been "lived in."