Thesis (MA)--University of Stellenbosch, 2006. / Bibliography. Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (M.F.A.)--University of Central Florida, 2008. / Adviser: Scott F. Hall. Includes bibliographical references (p. 24).

Thesis (MA (Visual Arts))-University of Pretoria, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references. Available on the Internet via the World Wide Web.

This thesis considers the relationship between literary modernism and visual culture in the work of Caribbean modernist Jean Rhys. Through analysis of a range of visual modes—theatre, fashion, visual art, cinema and exhibition culture—it examines the racialised sexual politics of Rhys’s modernist aesthetics, as represented in her texts of the 1920s—30s. I read Rhys’s four interwar novels—Quartet (1928), After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930), Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939)—in the context of contemporary visual practices and the politics of empire. Rhys’s descriptions of artistic practices, acts of viewing and interpreting art, and the identification of her protagonists as both objects and consumers of art are a crucial aspect of her anti-colonial feminism. The politics of vision and of empire are always intertwined for Rhys. Chapter One studies theatrical spectacle and everyday performances of the self. Chapter Two moves to the fashioning of female identities and sartorial constructions of Englishness. Chapter Three turns to Rhys’s use of ekphrasis to question representational structures as they exist in the modernist, primitivist art context. Chapter Four reads Rhys and cinema, focusing on divided or fractured subjectivities as relayed through allusions to distorted mirrors. This conveys Rhys’s powerful evocation of themes of alienation and dislocation. I conclude by analysing what ‘exhibition’ means for those occupying both subject and object visual positions within the imperial metropolis. Analysis is supported by readings of unpublished short stories, letters and poems, works that are relatively absent from current Rhys scholarship. The conjunction of revolutions in the visual arts and the destabilization of the empire in the modernist period provides clear space for investigation into the creation of new ways of seeing that provided a degree of visual agency for those deemed incapable of aesthetic production. Crucial to this is Rhys’s own Creolité. Situated within and outside of European visual subjectivity, Rhys’s work becomes vital to any study of social acts of seeing, in terms of individual subjectivity and within the wider systems of vision produced through the arts. / published_or_final_version / English / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Wollongong, 2005. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (MA (VA)(Visual Arts))--University of Stellenbosch, 2006. / This investigation uses an object relations psychoanalytic framework to explore ways that art embodies both social and personal meaning. The relationship between the non- verbal experience of art and the pre-verbal realm of infancy is explored and linked to bodily, perceptual and inner forms of non-discursive knowledge which are of value for the subject. The study investigates how this inner experience is related through art to language and representation as aspects of external experience. The study argues that these two dimensions, the inner/bodily and the outer/linguistic, are held together in the art object which, as metaphor, is a conjoined structure that embodies the maternal and paternal realms in paradoxical and dynamic interplay. The art object, which elicits imaginary and phantasied responses from the viewer, serves both the self (through presentational symbols) and social needs (through representational symbols), thus allowing the creation and communication of new meanings.

My thesis exhibition is comprised of approximately eleven large-scale portrait paintings done primarily in oil paint on canvas. This body of work investigates the ways the identity of both artist and subject can coexist in a portrait and evolved from my desire to combine portrait painting with writing as well as to develop methods of using paint to express a merging of myself with the individual depicted in the portrait. My creative research has focused on the traditional form of the portrait as a powerful form of representing an individual and how meaning can be expanded through scale, brushstroke, color, texture, composition and the many variables that portraiture deals with. I expanded on the traditional portrait painting by cataloguing my memories and thoughts along with the thoughts of the subject by painting under, into and over the subject in my own handwriting. My "hand" is visible both in the brushstroke and in the cursive writing, preserving my identity in a "readable" way both literally and through graphology, or handwriting analysis. / by Christina Maya Major. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2010. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2010. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Thesis (M.F.A.)--University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Dept. of Fine and Applied Arts, 2002. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on June 12, 2009) "PG/MFA/98/25302." Includes bibliographical references (p. [138]-143). Also issued in print.

The objective of this dissertation is to establish the notion that art can serve to create and communicate an awareness of the interconnectedness between people and nature. This study debates the theoretical similarities and differences in attitudes toward the planet as interpreted in the artworks of pre-history shamans and traditional societies, 20th century land and urban artists and contemporary environmentally concerned artists. The comparative findings suggest that attitudes of anthropocentricism, greed and power and a denial of Pantheism associated with agriculture, industrial and technological developments, have changed the human-nature symbiosis found in early societies. The creative component of this study has employed the processes of etching and embossing, digital image manipulations and the juxtaposition and layering of images to establish visual metaphors that communicate interconnectedness. Sculptures, billboards, prints and photographs as artworks of the conscience intend to shift socially and personally constructed perceptions from human-centeredness toward a symbiotic worldview. / Art History, Visual Arts & Musicology / M.A. (Visual Arts)

This paper centres in and around words. I have incorporated words into my recent work in a variety of ways including drawing, Letraset, sound and fiction writing. The philosophical questions which arise through any use of language and the various ways of adopting these questions and words within a 'visual art' context is considered in a number of ways. These include The Voyager Interstellar Space Mission which was humankind's first attempt to communicate with other hypothesized populations, conceptual word-incorporating artists, writers of fiction and philosophers within whose work can readily be found an extreme vigilance towards language. Alongside this word exploration I will consider other processes through which I've made and continue to make, works of art. These processes include drawing and film/video. My drawings (which sometimes include words) will be addressed in terms of a crossover between the drawn line and words found in Raymond Carver's story Cathedral. This story made me think about what it means to 'be led' by somebody and how I'm led (by myself or perhaps those mysterious 'populations' the Voyager team of thinkers had in mind) when drawing. It also marks an interesting point in my discussion of a state of being 'without words.' In addition to words an important focus in this paper are the windows through which I've spent a lot of 'my life' looking at 'life pass by' (which are in many ways a physical reality corresponding to the metaphorical 'frame of language'). The time I've spent looking out windows over the past few years has resulted in. several film and video pieces in addition to my latest work (presented as the appendix of this paper) which comprises of a series of short stories. The paper opens with a quote by German philosopher Martin Heidegger: "Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells." The enigmatic broadness of this statement is appropriate to the apprehensive and cautious attitude towards words found throughout the paper (also it mentions 'house' which immediately brings to my mind 'windows')