This thesis examines the violent punishments undergone by various martyrs in Prudentius’ Peristephanon. In particular, it explores how the poet’s depiction of this violence and suffering might affect readers of the collection. Four poems (poems II, III, IX and XI) are studied from the point of view of the emotions they are likely to evoke in the reader. The question of whether different types of readers might undergo different emotional experiences while reading these poems arises as a result of the proposed study. The first chapter of this thesis thus examines the nature of emotions, focussing on their sources and composition. This examination suggests that an individual’s emotional experience can be influenced both by biological factors and by social and cultural environment. With this in mind, an examination follows of various aspects of Roman society and culture which were likely to influence the ways in which its citizens, in particular, reacted to the violent scenes in the poems. We will also consider how our own specific cultural milieu may influence modern readers to sometimes react differently to Roman readers. In particular, it is proposed that most readers of the Peristephanon will react with varying shades of disgust and horror. These two emotions are thus used as a framework for discussing reader reactions to the poems. Disgust and horror are understood in a very broad sense, allowing for different varieties of these emotions, which at times even give rise to contradiction and paradox. The remaining chapters of the thesis are devoted to examinations of the four chosen poems which explore the various ways in which they might evoke horror and disgust among both Roman and modern readers. Often, there is considerable overlap between these two groups. These examinations provide a way of understanding why these poems are so striking, and have impacted so strongly on readers through the ages. / Thesis (M.A.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2009

This thesis examines the violent punishments undergone by various martyrs in Prudentius’ Peristephanon. In particular, it explores how the poet’s depiction of this violence and suffering might affect readers of the collection. Four poems (poems II, III, IX and XI) are studied from the point of view of the emotions they are likely to evoke in the reader. The question of whether different types of readers might undergo different emotional experiences while reading these poems arises as a result of the proposed study. The first chapter of this thesis thus examines the nature of emotions, focussing on their sources and composition. This examination suggests that an individual’s emotional experience can be influenced both by biological factors and by social and cultural environment. With this in mind, an examination follows of various aspects of Roman society and culture which were likely to influence the ways in which its citizens, in particular, reacted to the violent scenes in the poems. We will also consider how our own specific cultural milieu may influence modern readers to sometimes react differently to Roman readers. In particular, it is proposed that most readers of the Peristephanon will react with varying shades of disgust and horror. These two emotions are thus used as a framework for discussing reader reactions to the poems. Disgust and horror are understood in a very broad sense, allowing for different varieties of these emotions, which at times even give rise to contradiction and paradox. The remaining chapters of the thesis are devoted to examinations of the four chosen poems which explore the various ways in which they might evoke horror and disgust among both Roman and modern readers. Often, there is considerable overlap between these two groups. These examinations provide a way of understanding why these poems are so striking, and have impacted so strongly on readers through the ages. / Thesis (M.A.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2009

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 173-180).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wyoming, 2009. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on June 15, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 61-62).

An act of violence, be it personal or institution is an event that would distress most witnesses. Yet the representation of violent acts in fictional forms as literature, drama and film often aestheticises that violence, with the result that it is possible to experience it without such distress. However, despite various conjectures being offered, no single and universal theory is possible. An aesthetic response to a representation of violence is influenced to a large extent by the degree of aestheticisation produced by the author and/or director. In addition, the aestheticisation of violence is dependent upon, and an inevitable consequence of, the representation of the violent. This dissertation is an endeavour to explore the issues that the paradox makes evident, to critique various hypotheses that have been offered as a solution, and to speculate upon a more comprehensive theory ofthe representation and aestheticisation of violence / English Studies / M.A. (English)

The present thesis examines the fraught relationship between the sixteenth-century formulations of the theories of sovereign violence, tyranny and usurpation and the manifestations of these ideas on the contemporary English stage. The thesis will attempt to trace an evolution of the poetics of English and Scottish political drama through the early, middle, and late decades of the sixteenth-century in conjunction with developments in the political thought of the century, linking theatre and politics through the representations of the problematic figure of the usurper or, in Machiavellian terms, the ‘New Prince'. I will demonstrate that while the early Tudor morality plays are concerned with the legitimate monarch who becomes a tyrant, the later historical and tragic drama of the century foregrounds the figure of the illegitimate monarch who is a tyrant by default. On the one hand the sudden proliferation of usurpation plots in Elizabethan drama and the transition from the legitimate tyrant to the usurper tyrant is linked to the dramaturgical shift from the allegorical morality play tradition to later history plays and tragedies, and on the other it is reflective of a poetic turn in political thought which impelled political writers to conceive of the state and sovereignty as a product of human ‘poiesis', independent of transcendental legitimization. The poetics of political drama and the emergence of the idea of ‘poiesis' in the political context merge in the figure of the nuove principe: the prince without dynastic claims who creates his sovereignty by dint of his own ‘virtu' and through an act of law-making violence.

This dissertation offers a history of the perilous American present. Through a series of timely case studies I investigate the constitutive force and present-day regeneration of political and racial violence in the United States. Drawing on a range of contemporary critical thought, "Afterlives of Violence" constellates scenes from recent works of memoir, fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and film, my principal interest in each case being to excavate the temporalities, the effects, and the disavowals of American carnage—understood less as a damaging deviation from a “great” past than as precisely that past’s unceasing, pernicious fallout. Where often violence continues to be conceived of as an event, my research and readings draw on examples from twenty-first-century American literature, politics, law, and culture to present it instead as a haunting structure that is enduring at least in part because of the very illegibility and deliberate obscuring of its aftermaths under certain idioms of thought and norms of representation. Bookended by discussions of a white supremacist’s massacre at a Charleston church (in July 2015) and of the national memorial to racial terror lynching established in Montgomery (in April 2018), the dissertation offers a series of figures for thinking through history’s afterlives—both in the grim renewal of its violences in the U.S. today and in the imaginative arts of refusal which its inheritance inspires. In the first two chapters of the dissertation, I critically explore the ways that recent African American and Native American literature maps, respectively, the residual afterlives of slavery and ongoing menace of antiblack animus, and, the blind spots in settler colonial law that simultaneously conceal and extend the violence of occupation, in particular exposing the lives of Native women to harm across time. Through extended readings of texts including Saidiya Hartman’s "Lose Your Mother," Dionne Brand’s "A Map to the Door of No Return," Louise Erdrich’s "The Round House," and Layli Long Soldier’s "WHEREAS," I demonstrate how the wounding attachments of history and the longing for a different future they prompt are, in turn, exacerbated and thwarted by injurious mnemonic and political legacies that the authors present as essentially unfinished with their lives. I also show how these texts perform a fundamental critique of liberal gestures of redress and apology, as well as concomitant invocations of closure associated with the politics of recognition. Here, the present is celebrated for its being newly distanced from a past we have come to identify as imprudent, with the meaning or substance of race additionally believed to have been at long last left behind. Quite to the contrary, the texts I analyze have us understand that these efforts too often only seek to acknowledge the traumatic specters of history in order to more quickly forget the tenacious continuing hold of their traces on modern American life. In the work of Hartman and Brand, for instance, the physical and metaphorical abyss which is the Door of No Return ensures that the losses of history remain irreparable, while Erdrich and Long Soldier each demonstrate how the precedents and aporias of settler law guarantee that they survive. Where the opening chapters are in some fashion concerned with the aftereffects of a violence often interpreted as historical, the later chapters of the dissertation shift to examine two emergent technologies of state violence: the drone and the border wall. Beyond the immediately notable racial dimension that ties them to the preceding case studies, these forms of violence also have their own genealogies, too, which I read back into them. Further, I propose that their ominous afterlives are prospectively prefigured in our own destitute times, even as I also insist the future necessarily remains undecided. Concentrating, in the first case, on the visual and temporal regimes of extraterritorial drone killing—which I argue can be revealingly likened to the death penalty in the conception of “future dangerousness” each shares—and, in the second, on the brutalist aesthetics and political rhetoric of walling plans for the U.S.-Mexico border—which in specific ways derealize the lives that this architecture is intended to target—these chapters use primary legal documents to draw out the logic and justification of preemptive and protective violence. I pay particular attention to how these respective forms of harm are frequently legitimated on the basis of their being humanitarian in character. In an extended analysis of a trio of Hollywood “drone films” I show how they troublingly come to adopt this same frame, staging targeted execution as a regrettable necessity and lesser evil, while in readings of executive orders and government reports pertaining to the southern border I unweave the misleading mobilization of human rights discourse to justify wall construction. With the assistance of decidedly more critical texts, including Solmaz Sharif’s "LOOK" and, in the context of the militarized borderlands, Sara Uribe’s "Antígona González" and Valeria Luiselli’s "Tell Me How It Ends," I provide a distinct rejoinder to this mode of thinking. I highlight the authors’ formal efforts to bring back into view, first, the ways of seeing and types of narrating that make possible the conversion of calculated erasure and cruel destitution into ethical action, and, just as importantly, the bodies affected and existences wrought in the wake of political violence. Beside its sustained insistence on the need to truly reckon with the fact that everything which has happened will never not have happened, ultimately at stake in the symphony of reflections offered by "Afterlives of Violence" are questions of how we recognize, think, describe, and, perhaps finally, refuse or resist violence. Inspired in large part by the multitemporal geographies of loss and hope, of suffering and flourishing, traced in the work of American studies and feminist scholars including Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Colin Dayan, Avery Gordon, Patricia Williams, and Judith Butler, I wager to break the hold of the past—or to derail the perils of the present—in the service of a more just future, at minimum their multifarious and continuing afterimages of violence must first be properly pictured. Insofar as law, photography, and history must be understood as other names for the transmission of the past, I have found them useful instruments to think with in this endeavor, while literature, broadly conceived, I have interpreted as a site for the performance of thought’s suspension, its undoing, its reinauguration.

This dissertation seeks to explore the perceived intricate relationship that exists between constructed identity, discrimination and violence as portrayed in Bessie Head's trilogy from varying perspectives, including aspects of postcoloniality, materialist feminism and liminality. Starting with a background to some of the origins of racial hybridity in Southern Africa, it looks at how racial identity has subsequently influenced the course of Southern African history and thereafter explores historical and biographical information deemed relevant to an understanding of the dissertation. Critical explorations of each text in the trilogy follow, in which the apparent affinities that exist between identity, discrimination and violence are analysed and displayed. In conclusion the trilogy is discussed from a largely sociological perspective of hope in a utopian society. / English Studies / M.A.(English)

In this thesis I argue that Cormac McCarthy's 1985 novel Blood Meridian serves as a critique of the American Western mythos by collapsing aspects of myth, ideology, and the sublime into the question of violence's relationship to language. In explicating the novel, I demonstrate how the ironies staged between the character of the kid and the novel's narrator and the ironies represented in the language and characterization of Judge Holden reveal McCarthy's critique by pointing toward the violence inherent in the language of myth. Along with this discussion of myth and ideology, I also analyze how the figuring of violence as sublime in the novel gets coupled with moments where characters exhibit either an unconscious desire for language or a marked absence of language. The significance of these moments, I contend, extends McCarthy's critique of the American mythos by undermining the Western genre's trope of the stoic hero while also exposing the ways in which the novel draws together the nature of language and the nature of violence. Blood Meridian thus serves not as a libratory revisionist critique that seeks to re-write the American mythos but as a much darker meditation on the ubiquity of violence—a violence that manifests itself all too often in textual form. / Graduation date: 2012

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2009. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 207-216).