Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

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Female identity in Sylvia Plath’s Ariel collection (first published in 1965) is a complex site of being and becoming within a 1950s culture of performance. From a twenty-first century perspective, this dissertation bridges traditional and contemporary readings of Plath and the Plath archive through a referencing of motifs such as celebrity, ‘the gaze’, ventriloquism and clothing. The inter-discursive approach used – literary, psychoanalytic, cultural – attempts to underline the ongoing significance of Plath’s place as a woman poet in literary studies. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2010.

The notion, which has persisted over many years, of Mary Shelley as the conservative daughter of a radical, proto-feminist mother can be traced to the views of Edward Trelawney, a contemporary and fair-weather friend of Shelley. This study, by exploring female identity, largely in terms of modern feminist psychoanalytic theory, in several of Shelley's lesser-known novels, attempts to contribute to the efforts of those who have challenged such notions and who have strived to render a more accurate portrait of Mary Shelley. / Anne Mellor's discussion of female identity in Shelley's sentimental novels, Mathilda, Lodore and Falkner, (in her book Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters) does much to dispel the notion of Shelley's apathy with regard to gender politics. Mellor convincingly argues that these novels celebrate what she terms the "relational" identity of their heroines, and thus "support a feminist position which argues that female culture is morally superior to male culture." She further maintains, however, that these novels simultaneously reveal the damage that such an identity can do to a woman's personal development. / My paper challenges Mellor's assertion that Lodore and Falkner Shelley's last novels, portray relational identity with ambivalence. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

This study uses mixed methods to examine the experiences of African American women in doctoral programs. 102 African American women completed an on-line survey, and twenty women participated in one-on-one interviews. As an African American female, the researcher is interested in comparing the experiences of African American women: critiquing, analyzing and interpreting similarities and points of divergence in their experiences, and articulating stories of triumph and struggle, using a narrative style. This study confirms that Black women have experienced success in doctoral programs. Some of the participants had meaningful and supportive mentors. They have had limited exposure to Black faculty and/or scholarship. The participants in this study illuminate the dynamics inherent in their relationships with their dissertation committee members, particularly the chairs of their respective committees. In addition, this study explores the discordant relationship between Black female graduate students and Black female dissertation committee members. A majority of the participants were unfamiliar with the term Afrocentricity. They did not fathom that Afrocentricity could be used as a methodological or theoretical framework. All the participants exhibited at least one tenet of Afrocentricity. They are testimonies of the veracity of the Sankofian principles of looking back, reclaiming, and retelling their collective stories. These stories serve as inspiration for some and models of commitment for others.

Martin Buber's diagnosis of modern politics points to the disengagement of citizens from direct and personal encounters as a central contributing factor to the increasing politicization afflicting human life. Buber sees meaning situated in actual life with the world, with others, and with God. The living reality is encounter; living truth, hence, cannot be possessed, only actualized in mutual encounter. The importance of Buber's work to political problems lies in his ability to negotiate paradoxes in three cases: between being and becoming, between individualism and collectivism, between personal relationships and the real demands of an existent condition. In the first case, a radical openness to relation exposes human interlocutors to the surprising mutuality of genuine dialogue, hence allowing them to be changed by the encounter. Existential being is made present through encounter, but in doing so, interlocutors set towards a path to human becoming in dialogue. Social education, the embrace of social spontaneity through mutual encounter, resists the grip of propaganda over interhuman life by challenging and testing the "ready-made truths" often peddled in modern politics. In the second case, he contends that actual life cannot be found in the individual simply as individual, or the individual who surrenders himself to a collective. Human life,for Buber, is actualized in partnership. Hence, there is no presentness for the individual or the collective. This alienation leads to a situation where political illusion dominates - where real conflicts that invariably do arise between groups of people are obscured by "political surplus conflicts", conflicts that are exaggerated and possibly fabricated for the sake of politics. In the third case, people work towards transforming a shared existent condition by providing honest and direct address to persons - to confront the world in its presentness, rather than continuing to live under political illusions. Buber provides us a rebellious spirit who knows he cannot act alone. Buber's rebellious spirit understands that the most effective form action is immediate human togetherness, when genuine address is responded in kind. It is in the direct and immediate encounter, the genuine word between persons, that interhuman trust can weaken the presumed vice grip of distrust on human existence. Once people can dare to trust, they can once again renew actual life - a life of partnership.

There exists a staggeringly large set of metaphysical problems associated with the identity of particular things. These problems range from difficulties with deciding what ought to be included in the static identity of a thing to those concerned with how things exist overtime. There are questions about how we are to understand the boundaries of thing's identity, about whether things can overlap, about whether things have their properties necessarily, or whether particular things are necessary beings. These difficulties are multiplied when we begin to think of identity over time. Questions are raised regarding the continuity of objects, whether they endure or perdure, whether objects are continuous or contiguous time slices. Many of these problems have historical roots, but have been somewhat exacerbated by shifts toward quantum physics and theories of relativity. In light of our current understanding of the physical nature of the universe, we can no longer analyze things in terms of primary and secondary qualities so to forestall these concerns: even the extension of a thing is relative to its environment. Considerations about the diachronic nature of identity, causality, possible worlds, and their modal supervaluations, detract from our ability to think of things as static and exact, in spite of our experience. Basic to all of these problems are worries about relations. I shall not offer any complete solutions to these problems here, but propose a philosophical treatment to ameliorate their standing, to begin to show the fly the way out of the bottle, as it were. My aim is to provide a means by which we can deal with the role of relations in identity and begin to dissolve these seemingly intractable debates. The treatment I shall proffer follows on a rising trend in the literature on personal -identity. Some authors have suggested that a criterion for personal identity ought to be the narrative particular individuals negotiate with their community and with themselves. Perspective is what matters for narrative theories of identity. It is the focus on perspective that grants a subject ownership of her identity, a feature unavailable to most theories that focus on physical or psychological continuity. Unlike traditional accounts which focus on memory, the role of memory in the narrative account is dynamic in the sense that memory it is a process of construction, a dialectic in the Greek sense. But more of interest to my purposes here is how the narrative account allows relations to be included in personal identity: a person's identity is not constructed in a vacuum, but developed within the context of a community. This means that contingent, relations are addressed as part of a person's identity and that the relevant community is "written" into person's identity. In the narrative theory of personal identity we have a way of understanding the internal and external relations that constitute a person's identity, which allows us to get at persons `as we know them.' I intend to detail a theory for the identity of particulars in terms of narrative identity. In this, I shall consider the perspectives of things and hope begin to address the relational components of identity, which have hitherto given rise to so many metaphysical worries, at get at the nature of particularity.

Among Marston's earliest works are two books of verse satires (Certaine Satyres and The Scourge of Villanie, both 1598) and three plays (Antonio and Mellida, Antonio's Revenge and What You Will, all between 1600-1602) in which he explored the composition of human identity. From the initial premiss that the self is socially constructed and tends always to be dependent on the social and material contexts in which it exists, he developed a conception of existential struggle, in which the individual self either succumbs to the influence of its environment, or else achieves an authentic autonomy by imposing its own reality on the world around it. The thesis is in five main parts. Chapter I reviews theories of identity in the sixteenth century, analyses the Roman verse satires on which Elizabethan satires were modelled, and gives an account of the developments in English society at the end of the sixteenth century that helped to generate a satirical discourse in which anxiety as to the stability of the self was prominent. Chapter II examines these satires, focusing on Marston but paying close attention also to such other authors as Donne, Hall, Guilpin, Lodge and the anonymous author of Micro-Cynicon. Chapters III and IV are a close reading of the three plays named above; it is argued that in them Marston developed the ideas about identity which he had first conceived in the satires into a considered anatomy of the self. Chapter V looks briefly at Marston's later plays, especially Sophonisba (1606) with the same principles in mind. As will be apparent, the emphasis of the thesis is on Marston as a thinker, rather than as a poetic technician or man of the theatre, although these aspects of him are considered where they are relevant.

The main purpose of the thesis is: on the basis of an analysis and interpretation of Plato's Dialogues, to describe his personal characteristics in its relation to his pedagogic reality, and, on the basis of these descriptions, to analyse and interpret his teaching methods as a result of two different processes. The scientific perspectives of the thesis are inspired by hermeneutic philosophy of history and especially by the theories of Paul Ricoeur and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Furthermore, the perspective is grounded on three concepts of pedagogics, by the help of which both explicit and implicit pedagogic processes are analysed. In order to interrelate the interpretations some analytical and interpretational models have been used, based on Ricoeur's mimesis concept and his theory of narrative identity. The final interpretations maintain that a particular line runs through Plato's teaching, and that its goal is intellectual autonomy and a change in the pupil's whole view of the world, which implies a fusion between intellect and existential experience. This line shows that Plato teaches in both a sensual and spiritual dimension and that these processes, though contrasted, function in parallel. The goal of intellectual autonomy demonstrates how Plato breaks with his culture and by doing so recommends solitude - something quite revolutionary in an age when the group, a strong sense of community and of being one of Us sets its stamp on everyones mentality. An interpretation of the Symposium shows how any change in world view calls for a combination of existential experience and thought. The main principal features in Plato's teaching methods are presented as preparation, change, liberation and wisdom.

This thesis tries to distinguish kitsch and art with the help of philosophical hermeneutics by reading it in the light of Derrida&rsquo / s interpretation of Hamlet in Specters of Marx. It defines kitsch as experience in order to go beyond both of the two main approaches, namely, the one that sees kitsch as an object and the one that reduces it to the behaviour of the subject. It tries to show that kitsch is not just an aesthetic problem, but also, a political one.