No description available.

No description available.

Arising from the complications of an underprivileged and impoverished background this thesis focuses on exposing the grotesque consequences of conflicting ideologies through personal and societal suffering while in search of universal connections to showcase the need for compassion and understanding. My artistic practice is utilized as an entry point to have difficult discussions, a tool for teaching themes of injustice, inequality, and mistreatment. The traumatizing experience of poverty or corruption has the potential to be transmuted into something beneficial. I utilize discarded, low valued, unwanted, and damaged materials in my artmaking to symbolize transfiguration, an advanced state of former self. What seems hideous has its own beauty. What seems rotten and ugly has the potential to be adapted into something beneficial, any suffering we have experienced should not and has not gone to waste. The wisdom and resilience that arose from the experience will serve you in the future. This attempt at an honest, unflinching exploration of self and society is to shift perspectives away from apathy, towards thoughtfulness for other's struggles.

The aim of this thesis is to analyze the function of visual art in Torgny Lindgren's novels Till sanningens lov (1991), Dorés Bibel (2005) and Klingsor (2014) and the short story collection I Brokiga Blads vatten (1999). Visual art in Lindgren's prose is approached both as an instance of description and in terms of an activity and artefact to be viewed, created and interacted with. By studying ekphrases and "iconic projections" based on intermedial theory, the verbal descriptions of art are shown to have a narrative function, whereby the characters viewing or creating the artwork are reflected. A conspicuous trait of the ekphrases and iconic projections are their focus on details.  The area of creation as an activity relates visual art to crafts, cooking and alchemy, with an emphasis on its material aspects. The creation of art investigates the dualism of genuine versus fake, as well as the relationship between art and commerce. Lindgren's stories depict the market as an arbitrary yet powerful force, alongside individual creative forms of resistance to it.  The manner in which artefacts are described evokes the notion of an enchanted object, in accordance with research on the function of art-objects in contemporary fiction. Being able to discern enchantment in Lindgren's works is based on the conversion of one's vision, which in turn is related to one's view of the world as a whole. Conversion is engendered by methods of irony, ambiguity and the elevation of the humble.

Focusing on works between the 1960s and the early ’80s, this thesis sets the literature of Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) and J.G. Ballard (1930–2009) within the context of twentieth-century architectural theory and history (written), design (drawn), productions (built), professional practice (managed), and pedagogy (taught). The primary aim of this study is to explore the discursive exchange between literature and architecture, while probing the putative association between postmodernity and architecture. By introducing a broader set of social phenomena into debates about postmodernity, my thesis enables a revaluation of how the architectural idiom is interpreted in literature. Using textual and visual analysis, this thesis argues that Barthelme’s and Ballard’s literary works operate at an intersection of the visual arts and mass media. Responding to American and European twentieth-century visual avant-gardes and socio-cultural transformations, architecture participates in the formulation of avant-garde conceptual frameworks. Critically, architecture is not only an aesthetic discipline; it is also a social discourse. Through the discipline’s alignment with ‘new’ and ‘old’ avant-gardes, Barthelme and Ballard use architecture as a point of creative departure to undertake formal and thematic literary experiments. For both authors, contact with the architectural avant-garde has literary consequences. This thesis considers four interconnecting ways literature and architecture ‘speak’ to each other: representation, discourse, formal comparisons, and influence or inspiration. Within my study these topics are examined through critical meditations on architecture from geographical (Fredric Jameson, David Harvey), architectural (Robert Venturi, Charles Jencks) and visual cultural (W. J. T. Mitchell, Marshall McLuhan) sources. Also figuring prominently are epitextual materials, especially archival documentation from the Donald Barthelme Literary Papers at the University of Houston and the Papers of J. G. Ballard collection at the British Library. This thesis opens up new ways of understanding the interart pluralism that characterises the postmodern.

This study explores the interrelationship between spatiality and subjecthood in the work of Stéphane Mallarmé, Guillaume Apollinaire, Maurice Maeterlinck, and Alfred Jarry. Concerned with various modes of poetry and drama, it also examines the cross-pollination that can occur between these modes, focusing on a relatively narrow corpus of core texts: Mallarmé’s Igitur (c. 1867-70) and Un Coup de dés (1897); Apollinaire’s “Zone” (1912) and various of his calligrammes; Maeterlinck’s early one-act plays—L’Intruse (1890), Les Aveugles (1890), and Intérieur (1894); and Jarry’s Ubu roi (1896) and César-Antechrist (1895). The poetic and dramatic practices of these four authors are assessed against the broader cultural and philosophical contexts of the fin de siècle. The fin de siècle witnessed a profound epistemological shift: the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm, increasingly challenged throughout the nineteenth century, was largely dismantled, with ramifications beyond physics, philosophy and psychology. Chapter 1 introduces three foundational notions—Newtonian absolute space, the unitary Cartesian subject, and subject-object dualism—that were challenged and ultimately overthrown in turn-of-the-century science and art. Developments in theatre architecture and typographic design are examined against this philosophical backdrop with a view to establishing a diachronic and interdisciplinary framework of the authors in question. Chapter 2 focuses on the spatial dimension of Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés and Apollinaire’s calligrammes—works which defamiliarise page-space by undermining various (naturalised) conventions of paginal configuration. In Chapter 3, the notion of liminality (the experience or condition of the betwixt and between) is implemented in an analysis of character and diegetic space as constructed in Jarry’s Ubu roi and Maeterlinck’s one-acts. Chapters 4 and Chapter 5 undertake a more abstract investigation of parallel inverse processes—the subjectivisation of space and the spatialisation of the subject —manifest not only in the works of Mallarmé, Maeterlinck, Apollinaire and Jarry, but in the period’s poetry and drama more generally.

Erik Satie (1866-1925) lived, worked, walked, and died in Paris. The key locations of his career – all within a single urban region – are well known and well researched. Yet he has often been presented as an eccentric individualist far removed from any social or geographical context. This thesis seeks to address – and redress – the decontextualisation of Satie’s career by re-imagining his music and biography in terms of the places and mobilities of turn-of-the-century Paris. To that end, it draws on a range of documentary and fictional material, including journalistic and scholarly reception texts, illustrated musical scores, chanson collections, contemporary visual culture, and cinematic representations of the people, place(s), and period(s) in question. These diverse primary and secondary sources are discussed and interpreted via a set of on-going debates at the intersection of historical musicology, cultural history, and urban geography. Some of these debates can be traced through existing research on the geography of music. Others are more local to this project and derive their value from suggesting alternative approaches to familiar problems in the study of French musical modernism. The main aim throughout is to develop a better understanding of the relations existing between Satie’s musical life, his compositional strategies, and the changing urban environment in which he plied his trade. Chapters One and Two focus on the working-class suburb of Arcueil and the ‘bohemian’ enclave of Montmartre. Chapters Three and Four are organised thematically around issues of musical humour and everyday life. By using the particular example of Satie’s Paris, the thesis proposes that more general avenues of enquiry are opened up into music and the city, thus demonstrating the potential benefits of incorporating the urban-geographic imagination into historical musicology more broadly, and bringing musicological thinking to bear on inter-disciplinary discussions about space, place, and mobility.

This thesis examines the novels of George Sand (1804-1876) and analyses representative examples from her entire œuvre. Its overall aim is to re-evaluate Sand’s standing as a writer of intellectual interest and importance by demonstrating that she is engaging with a cultural and intellectual phenomenon of particular relevance to the nineteenth century: the link between different ways of seeing and knowledge or understanding, which I term ‘insight’. The visual dimension of Sand’s novels has so far been overlooked or reduced to a rose-tinted view of the world, and my study is the first to examine vision in her work. I argue that Sand demonstrates a continuous commitment to ways of engaging with the world in visual terms, incorporating conceptual seeing, prophetic vision, as well as physical eyesight. Contesting the prevailing critical view of Sand’s œuvre as one which declines into blandness and irrelevance after the 1850s, this thesis uncovers a model of expansion in her writing, as she moves from her focus on the personal in her early novels, privileging internal vision, to wider social concerns in her middle period in which she aims to reconfigure reality, to her final period in which she advocates the physical observation of the natural world. Rejecting the perception of Sand as a writer of sentiment at the expense of thought, this study argues that her writing constitutes a continuous quest for understanding, both of the physical world and the more abstract, eternal ‘vérité’. I show that Sand transcends binary divisions between science and art, the detail and the whole, the material and the abstract, and that she ultimately promotes a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the world. This also enables me to reassess Sand’s poetics by arguing that her rejection of the mimetic model is founded on her conception of the world as multiple and constantly evolving.

This thesis investigates the morphology and the purpose of palaces in major and minor kingdoms of the Hellenistic World. Elements of architecture, spatial organisation and decoration are analysed in the attempt to clarify issues of chronology and in order to identify function. The analysis places the material into its social and ideological context by taking into consideration the role of kingship ideologies in the formation of space used by royal courts. Comparison with residences of the elite demonstrates the reception of palaces not only as architectural models, but also as mechanisms of power manifestation. Macedonia is the starting point of the discussion as the homeland of the first Hellenistic kings. In the light of evidence recovered in the last twenty years and not comparatively studied before, the chapter brings together various chronological phases of the buildings. Questions of definition and on sources of inspiration are clarified further in the following chapters. The third chapter uses textual evidence and finds from the royal district of Alexandria to understand the meaning of palace architecture for the Ptolemies, while the seat of a local official in Transjordania reveals mechanisms of emulation. In chapter four the case of Pergamene palaces and their relationship with residences in the city demonstrates that formation of these royal seats corresponded to ideals of Attalid kingship. Seats of officials in the Seleukid Empire and palaces in Bactria and Kommagene, the subject of the fifth chapter, provide an insight into the position of palace architecture in processes of hybridisation in material culture. The last chapter is a synthesis of patterns of form and function and unifies the conclusions for each separate region. It emerges that shifts in power relations and the structure of the royal court, especially towards the end of the third century BC, were a crucial factor in shaping palace forms. The concluding chapter also provides a view from the West: examples from the late Roman Republic indicate that the role of Hellenistic palaces as models for power display went beyond the limits of royal courts.

This dissertation focuses on images of Christ that date from the first half of Late Antiquity, defined as the three centuries between AD 200 and 500. The cultural dynamics of this period left a distinct impression on Christian art, and this dissertation traces that impact. Unlike other studies that attempt to resolve ambiguity within the corpus of Christ images, the argument here maintains that ambiguity was a key component in the creation and subsequent interpretation of the Late Antique Christian iconography. The dissertation proceeds in three parts, each comprising two chapters. In the first section, the history and historiography of the image of Christ is explored, and a methodology capable of accommodating the diverse meanings assigned to the Christ’s discrepant and ambiguous iconographies is developed. In order to better understand the socio-religious environment in which the first images of Christ were produced and interpreted, the second section of the dissertation moves away from material culture and towards method and theory. The notion that interpretation is a group level phenomenon is critiqued, and a model explaining how individuals in Late Antiquity could have made sense of ambiguous images of Christ is advanced. The final section turns back to the material culture and applies the framework developed in the second section to two artworks: (1) the sarcophagus of Junius Bassus and (2) the floor mosaic from the Hinton St. Mary Roman Villa now in the British Museum. By complementing the standard analyses of Christian art with interpretations grounded in the diverse interactions viewers had with artworks, new perspectives will emerge that provide a fuller picture of Late Antique Christianity and the iconography of its godhead alike.