This dissertation examines how contemporary Irish women writers dismantle national conceptions linking Irish women to the hearth and home by offering an alternate version of women’s lived experience, which nationalist ideologies have simplified. I consider how these writers define “home”—the domestic, the familiar, the intimate—as complicated by sexuality, exile, and violence. Using Freud’s theory of the uncanny as a lens, I analyze how these writers question established social relations in order to uncover uneasy relationships to self, home, and homeland. In my project, postcolonial theory and transnational feminisms, coupled with trauma theory, facilitate the contextualization of the uncanny as a response to the hybrid identities, dislocations, and effects of violence on gender roles within the nation. The first two chapters examine Edna O’Brien’s later fiction, which unsettles conceptions of the nation by emphasizing the experiences of marginal figures, thereby questioning who belongs within the nation’s borders. The next two chapters on the fiction of Jennifer Johnston and Mary Beckett reveal how the crossing of the public into the private sphere exposes a paradoxical homespace that is both haven and prison for rich Anglo-Irish Dubliners and working-class Catholics in Belfast. The final chapter on Kate O’Riordan’s novels explores issues of exile, alienation, and trauma through a multi-generational lens, revealing how memories of “home” and fraught parent-child relationships at once hinder and facilitate identity formation. In the epilogue, I briefly discuss how contemporary Irish poetry could address the issues raised by the works of fiction examined in my project.

This phenomenological study was conducted in order to understand the everyday experiences of contemporary mystics in the Jewish traditions of Kabbalah. This author could find no available information about psychological research of this topic in psychological, educational or psychiatric databases. She used the applied phenomenological methodology of Howard Pollio and the Research Groups at the University of Tennessee. Interviews were conducted by this author with eight volunteer, living, adult participants who lived throughout the United States and ranged in age from 37 to 60+ years. These mystics were found through various means after they had described themselves, by their own definitions, as mystics in the Jewish traditions(s) of Kabbalah. There were six men and two women who participated; four were Jewish and four were not. The interviews ranged from one to three hours in length, were recorded, and later transcribed for confidential analyses. After analyzing the results, the Ground of the participants’ experience was determined to be Being Aware. The Thematic Structure of the participants’ everyday experiences of living with their mystical events and processes contained six themes: 1) Divine/Sacred, 2) Receiving/Calling/Gift, 3) Knowing/Realizing, 4) Practices/Body, 5)Developing/Stages, and 6) Struggling: Self/Others/World. Implications for this study suggest that the everyday experiences of these mystical participants are different in many ways from everyday experiences of non-mystics. There is some support for the ideas of spiritual intelligence, spiritual giftedness, consciousness advancement. Appreciating intuition, higher emotional states, and the deeper, yet usually hidden parts of human experience, along with learning to identify and support young people who are having mystical experiences is a worthwhile goal for psychologists.

A movement in literature has evolved out of the aftermath of 9/11 to confront the spectacle of terrorism perpetuated by the corporate news media and find a way to respond to terrorism in a more ethical manner. In this dissertation, I examine the influence of the media on literary production in the post-9/11 environment and how writers push back against the foreclosure of the media spectacle of terrorism. I examine a particular practice, infotainment, which crosses over from television news into literature that focuses on terrorism, and I lay out the theoretical framework for understanding literary responses to this practice. Since 9/11, the corporate media has been fixated with terrorism, and the vast amount of literature produced since the tragedy that focuses on terrorism demonstrates terrorism?s influence on literary production. I expose a theoretical basis for how literature intervenes in the spectacle of terrorism, offering a challenge to media foreclosure through an ethical engagement. Then, I examine texts in both the American and global contexts to determine how they intervene in the foreclosure and form more ethical responses. Writers like Don DeLillo and Moshin Hamid confront the unified definition of terrorism the corporate media presents by opening the subject to unanswered questions and in-depth examinations from all angles that enable responses rather than close off diverse perspectives. Literary writers strive to respond to the singular nature of each event, while positing an understanding of the plight of victims and perpetrators alike. The texts I examine each engage the foreclosure of the media spectacle of terrorism, creating a critical discourse by opening gaps, imposing ethical hesitation, reinstituting singularity, and responding to terrorism in an ethical manner. Don DeLillo posits an exemplary challenge to writers issued by terrorism in an often quoted line from Mao II: ?What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought.? DeLillo, along with other contemporary writers, takes up this challenge in order to ethically respond to the spectacle of terrorism.

Ireland has long been famous for its rich traditional music. Yet the recent global success of Irish pop, rock and traditional music has transformed the Irish music scene into a world centre attracting musicians, tourists, fans and the music industry from both Ireland and abroad. This ethnographic study of young musicians in Dublin and Galway in the late 1990s analyses the Irish music scene in terms of identity, authenticity and transnationality contextualised in contemporary Ireland. The study explores the making of Dublin and Galway into central places in the Irish music scene. It identifies musical links between the cities, and how for the young musicians, Dublin has become a 'springboard' and Galway a 'playground'. These cities provide the local arenas where young folk and popular musicians negotiate individual and collective lifestyles, identities and musical genres. By developing the concept of 'musical pathways', the study shows how these mobile musicians constantly interact with different musical sounds and scenes. The idea that Irishness has to emanate from traditional music is challenged by a diversity of musical genres and pathways of the musicians. Some musicians embrace a certain construction of Irishness while others reject it, but they are all involved in this process in one way or another. Contrary to older generations of traditional musicians, a global awareness is more important among the young musicians than a 'restricted' view of Irishness. As the young musicians are interested in multiple musical ideas and influences, they are often reluctant about a 'narrow nationalism'. They make use of the fact that the musics of the contemporary world are very much interconnected. This study discusses transnational processes of the Irish music scene in the late 1990s primarily on local and national levels in Ireland. This reveals how globalisation has contributed to the popularity of Irish music, yet without controlling its pathways completely. In Ireland the past is still in the present.

This phenomenological study of John Banville’s fiction exhibits the way in which Doctor Copernicus, Kepler, The Newton Letter, and Mefisto persistently present air as a constituting factor. Air occurs as a phenomenological oasis permitting constitution to effectuate disclosure ex nihilo. As a self-constituting field of forms rather than as a system or arrangement of signs, Doctor Copernicus promotes a vision of reality that bypasses a world of scientific or aesthetic representation where objective or subjective deciphering has precedence over immediate revelation as immanent showing. In Kepler, air’s aseity marks a process of constitution intense enough to erase any sense of separation between the flight-paths of discovery and the thing discovered—thus producing the impression of an intriguing parity between the constituting and the constituted. Phenomena of aviation outline the experience of air’s constituting capacity as a prehuman directedness with no source outside itself. The scientist is drawn into an airborn or airborne allure recasting his life in more profound ways than those made available in cosmological inquiry. By means of the slightness of its constituting touch, air is shown as giving birth to apparently insignificant phenomena highlighting an explorability that cannot be defined in terms of mathematical models or logical postulations. In The Newton Letter penurious phenomena gain ascendancy over the scientist through a process defined as autochthonous substantiation. As in Mefisto, the destructive power of accidental fire reduces material and immaterial worlds to an empirical nothing where air, almost indistinguishable from that emptiness, becomes a form of saying facilitating recovery, or the semblance thereof. Finally the study elucidates the phenomenon of monozygotic gemination in Mefisto, a constituting force that allows a phantom brother or phantom limb to function as a regenerating resource rather than as a missing entity.

This thesis aims to analyze contemporary art market in terms of auction sales carried out bySotheby’s and Christie’s in London and New York in 2007 and 2009. The study deals withinvestigating the cases when artworks’ prices exceeded their estimates. A model testing therelationships between hammer price, auction house, artist, form of art, the year of object’screation and its current owner along with the year of sale and performance of stock marketwas developed according to the theoretical framework, which includes such concepts as artobjects and their value, gatekeepers and investment and auction theories. Regression analysis revealed that the presence of a pre-lot note published in auctioncatalogue and specifying the collector putting the artwork for sale and the year of art piececreation have a significant contribution to predicting their hammer price. Moreover, theanalysis identified that paintings and sculptures typically reach high prices while drawings,watercolors and gouaches appeared to be less expensive objects. As far as the artists areconcerned, the study showed that pieces by such top artists as Andy Warhol, Jean-MichelBasquiat, Gerhard Richter, Willem de Kooning and Jeff Koons tend to achieve outstandingresults more often. The cases of over-performance were identified according to the model, which provided anopportunity to estimate predicted hammer price and compare it to the one achieved duringthe sale. Analysis did not reveal a clear pattern among over-performers, however, it can beobserved that objects sold at Sotheby’s tend to over-perform slightly more often; AndyWarhol and Damien Hirst appeared to be the artists whose artworks reach prices higherthan the estimates; and watercolors, drawings and gouaches along with sculptures, statuesand figures and photographs and prints turned out to be the over-performing forms of art.

Can the female feel at home in nature, myth and on screen, realms where she is so often laid to rest? "Pictures in an Exhibition" is a pastiche that exposes popular culture and art historical tropes in which ambiguous signifiers have become lost in a chain of referents. An installation of videos documents durational performances—filmed, edited and performed by the artist unaccompanied—that are humorous, satirical, aesthetic, historical, philosophical and psychological. Making simultaneous reference to art history, mass media, literature and mythology, "Pictures in an Exhibition" exposes the conflicted condition of a postfeminist 'self' striving to arrive at an exhibition of subjectivity.

<p>Responding to African American literary criticism's recent engagements with contemporary U.S. imprisonment, <italic>From Slave Ship to Supermax</italic> traces the development of a heretofore un-theorized tradition in African American literature in which fiction writers bring to light the voice, critical thinking, and literary production of actual prisoner abuse survivors. This dissertation treats novelists James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, and Ernest Gaines as the contemporary prison's literary intermediaries, as writers whose fictional narratives of jailhouse beatings, rape and wounding on slave ships, and state-sponsored execution are inspired and haunted by the critically-unexamined abuse stories of late-twentieth century prisoners. Drawing from the field of African American literary theory, political prisoners' writings, as well as prisoners' low-circulating zines, journals, and pamphlets, I argue that the production and distribution of abuse narratives by African American fiction's captive characters illuminate the clandestine and insurgent literary practices of actual abused prisoners. This revelatory work accomplished by Baldwin, Morrison, Johnson, and Gaines demonstrates the radical utility of African American fiction at a moment in which prisoner abuse is widespread, underrepresented, and rarely documented in a way that affords the abused prisoner any measure of authorial control. In contradistinction to the victimization narratives that typify mainstream prisoner abuse stories, stories which appear in the human rights literature of advocacy organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, this dissertation concludes that contemporary African American novelists emphasize the authorial control of abused captives and thus make apparent the rich complexities of their interior lives and the way in which the repressive spaces to which</p><p>they are confined are also generative sites for reimagining the self and community.</p> / Dissertation

One major question in the area of Feminist Media Studies is to analyze the stereotypical female role portrayals in media. Researchers in this area have examined diverse media including television, radio, films, textbooks, literature and so on. Empirical evidence provided by these studies shows that women in media are often underrepresented or stereotypically portrayed in traditional roles such as housewives or mothers associated with feminine values, such as dependent, submissive, and passive. Using content analysis and semiotic analysis, this study is designed to examine the portrayals of female roles in a sample of contemporary (1949-2010) Chinese films. Content analysis is employed to examine how women have been portrayed in films, with the primary focus on the frequency of three types of female roles including (1) traditional roles, (2) modern role, and (3) ideal role. Results suggest that during this long period of time, representations and constructions of women in films have shifted from promotion of gender equality, to diminishing and erasing gender difference, and finally regressed to confining them to traditional roles while emphasizing traditional feminine values and expectations. In using semiotic analysis, this research is able to outline the connotative meanings of the female characters as well as the implicit cultural values and messages of gender that are embedded in films. On this cultural analysis, the findings reveal that female role portrayals in films, which are influenced by political, cultural, and social changes, remained associated with traditional feminine stereotypes, values, and expectations.

Globalization and the advancement of technology have made the world smaller. Boundaries that define nations and nationalities have blurred and the resulting sense of displacement has undermined assumptions of identity and conversely made the search for identity more urgent. This thesis investigates the dialogue between the contemporary arts and architecture through the lens of the Filipino culture as a way to recapture and bring to the surface the contemporary identity of Filipinos and the Philippines. It proposes an understanding of history, geography and culture as a complex floating archipelago out of which our identity as individuals and nations emerge. It suggests that the events of history and the characteristics of geography are the grounds out of which art, myths and legends continue to be formed and sustain their relevance. Today, these compelling narratives emerge through the works of contemporary artists. They help us view and understand our flaws, struggles, triumphs, and future as a society in a way that speaks of our culture and time. Architecture, as a container and stage for culture must be sensitive to this artistic contemporaneity if it is to be indexical to our time. The Philippines, as a culture of hybrid and regional identities, has long struggled to make sense of the Contemporary in a largely Traditional society. The thesis proposes a new Centre for Contemporary Arts in Manila to bring the diverse artistic activities of the country into focus. It intervenes at interface between the Traditional and the Contemporary, which bridges the gap between the two, thus heralding a Cultural Renaissance and help generate a sense of contemporary nationalism.