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The poet of this cycle, Sydney Vernon Petersen, was a man who faced great adversity during Apartheid. The title of this cycle, Alleenstryd, is an Afrikaans term for 'a struggle alone.' Petersen was of mixed heritage or "Coloured" and born in South Africa in 1914. He died in 1987. His most important works in Afrikaans poetry were published between 1948 and 1965. This cycle specifically focuses on the relationship between the poet and his community, the isolation he endured within that community, the depths of despair he felt and how he overcame those obstacles to finally achieve a sense of self-worth. This group of poems, first published as an anthology by Tafelberg Press in 1979, became the source of inspiration for the composer Hendrik Hofmeyr. The purpose of this research is to identify the significant social, political and musical influences on the composer which contributed to the composition of Alleenstryd (1996), especially the significance of his self-imposed exile. Also, the Afrikaans language, a derivative of 17th century Dutch, is a language dear to its speakers but not widely accessible or familiar to most other nations. Hopefully this research will provide more information and make the language, its composers and the story of the dark history surrounding Apartheid and specifically the individuals who excelled through hardship, available to more people.

The purpose of this essay is to examine how a critical view of contemporary France is transmitted in the best-selling novel in three parts, Vernon Subutex by Virginie Despentes. The theoretical base will be the notion ”littérature engagée”, made famous by Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1940s, but re-interpreted in several steps since then. Although Sartre’s definition of ”engagement” is considered outdated and too dogmatic, many researchers argue that there are reasons to redefine the meaning of ”engagement littéraire” to analyse contemporary fiction writing with an interest in human and social issues. This study will examine how the notion ”engagement” can be applied on Vernon Subutex as regards the description of characters and the depiction of a neoliberal society, and its effects on human beings.

Thesis (M.A.)--Florida State University, 2005. / Advisor: Dr. John O. Perpener III, Florida State University, School of Visual Arts and Dance, Dept. of Dance. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed June 8, 2005). Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 87 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

What can the study of Victorian literature gain from approaching primary texts explicitly as processing, storing, and transmitting data? I suggest that, by applying tools and methodologies from German media history that are usually reserved for technical and digital media, we can illuminate how individual texts operate and better understand Victorian texts as media, which remains an underdeveloped aspect of materialist literary study. In analysing how Victorian texts depict encounters with traditional plastic art-objects, I develop new applications of Friedrich Kittler’s ideas of recursion and transposition, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s method of reading for Stimmung, and the theory of cultural techniques (Kulturtechniken). I also propose new concepts to further our understanding of how encounters with art-objects function, such as the observer effect: the simultaneous perception of past and future meanings of an art-object. Close readings of Michael Field’s Sight and Song and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Ballads and Sonnets suggest that both volumes acknowledge encounter as a cultural technique, rather than a spontaneous, independent action by the subject. Yet they propose different roles for themselves within that technique. Michael Field’s poems purport to halt the process of recursion, but Rossetti’s demand that readers experience their own observer effects. Meanwhile, Vernon Lee’s Hauntings: Fantastic Stories and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray demonstrate the agency of art-objects vis-à-vis the cultural technique of encounter. Lee’s stories reveal the threat to an individual subject’s production of future meanings that art-objects pose, in particular through their effects of presence. In Dorian Gray, the art-object’s own data processing circumscribes the subject’s observer effect. Each text thus evidences its operations as a medium and its complicated relationships with other media in the form of art-objects. Each processes data; recurs to art-objects, tropes, or themes and transmits future meanings thereof; and participates in the cultural technique of encounter. In so doing, these texts resisted the threats of marginalisation that faced ‘old media’ from the rise of photography and the incipient development of film at the fin de siècle.

La détection directe des ondes gravitationnelles par de grands détecteurs interférométriques<br />fait l'objet d'un effort international très intense. Au delà des signaux recherchés par ces détecteurs, l'existence<br />de fonds d'ondes gravitationnelles s'étalant sur une large plage de fréquences est prédite par les modèles<br />astrophysiques et cosmologiques décrivant l'Univers. Ces fonds d'ondes gravitationnelles sont un élément important<br />de notre environnement gravitationnel. Dans cette thèse, on étudie leur effet sur les propriétés de cohérence des<br />systèmes physiques. Cette interaction est à l'origine d'une décohérence que l'on étudie théoriquement à l'aide de<br />la fonctionnelle d'influence de Feynman-Vernon. L'effet est petit pour des systèmes microscopiques comme des atomes<br />ou des photons circulant dans des interféromètres, mais il devient dominant pour les systèmes macroscopiques comme<br />par exemple le mouvement du centre de masse de la Lune. Au vu de ces résultats, il est important de se demander si<br />cette décohérence gravitationnelle pourrait être mise en évidence expérimentalement à l'aide par exemple d'un<br />système mésoscopique dont on pourrait suivre la perte de cohérence. Cette question correspond à un modèle<br />complètement calculable de transition classique-quantique induite par les fluctuations intrinsèques de<br />l'espace-temps.

The Victorians saw more portraits than any generation before them. While the eighteenth century has been named 'the age of portraiture', portraits pervaded nineteenth-century society like never before. With the invention of photography, coupled with technological advancements in low-cost printing methods, the medium in which faces could be recorded was revolutionised, the classes of society that could afford to be immortalised expanded, and the spaces in which portraits were seen proliferated. These spaces included the public gallery, photography studio shop windows, and personal photograph albums. They also included the art periodical, biography, fiction, and poetry as the experience of portraiture became distinctly textual as well as visual. This thesis draws upon art history alongside literary, museum, and material studies to explore the creative exchange that developed between portrait viewership and reading practices in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Taking the establishment of the National Portrait Gallery in 1856 as its starting point, the thesis tracks the changing idea of the portrait gallery through its literary reception. It takes the portrait gallery to mean the physical space in which portraits were exhibited, and the conceptual idea of collecting, arranging, and interacting with portraits that permeated into the literary world. By focussing on the work of Edmund Gosse, Walter Pater, Thomas Hardy, and Vernon Lee, the thesis forms a 'gallery' of nineteenth-century tastemakers, each of whom looked to the democratic art of portraiture to reflect upon their literary art. How did portraits and texts interact in the mid- to late nineteenth century? In what ways did writers adapt the conventions of portraiture and the portrait gallery for the written text? This thesis seeks to answer these questions and provide new narratives about the complex relationship between the visual and the verbal in nineteenth-century culture. It observes the Victorian 'culture of art' with a more focussed eye to illuminate how the conditions of viewing, circulating, and collecting portraits specific to the period allowed the portrait gallery to serve as a particularly compelling arena for the literary imagination. Gosse, Pater, Hardy, and Lee tested the inherent limitations of portraiture as an art of imitation to realise its imaginative capacity for communicating with close and distant, contemporary and historic figures. They recognised that writing offered a valuable way of constructing the affective conversations that could be had with - and the stories that could be told about - portraits and portrait collections. With the proliferation of portraits came the problem and the opportunity of organising them.

The purposes of this study were to identify criteria which influence students' decisions to attend specific colleges and to determine whether different groups of students use similar criteria. The following groups were compared: white students and minority students, males and females, older students and younger students, university-bound students and vocational students, and full-time students and part-time students. The sample used for this study was taken from the students enrolled in freshman English classes at Vernon Regional Junior College, Clarendon College, and Grayson County College. Approximately 100 students at each college were selected to participate in the study. Each student in the study received instruction, provided demographic information, and completed a two-part survey. The survey asked respondents to evaluate each of twenty items on a Likert-type scale. The data provided were compiled and organized into groups by a data base computer program. Data obtained from specific groups of respondents were compared, first through an examination of means, then through a chi-square test of independence. It was determined that the most important college selection criteria to these respondents were the cost of attendance, the availability of specific programs, the size of the college, the size of individual classes, the location of the school, and the availability of financial aid. Further, the research revealed that two comparison groups differed significantly in their choices of important college selection criteria. Younger students appeared to use different selection criteria than their older counterparts, and vocational students differed from university-bound students in their choice of criteria.

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