This thesis is asking whether the television series Community (2009-) can be defined as a Sitcom, combined with a look at how other genres that generally are considered to be non-comic are incorporated in the series and how those are identifiable as well as whether or not they compromise Community’s possible label as a Sitcom. In seeking to define this show’s place in its own genre I found that whilst Community does not follow the archetypal technical conventions of Sitcom, it still does follow some of its setups, tropes and ideas. It does not suffice as a classical Sitcom, but it does lean on some of the genres conventions and has not yet passed over the line where it would be part of a completely different genre. Instead I state that the series fits the term New Comedy, as devised by Antonio Savorelli, not a genre but a term representing the heightened use of metatextuality on four levels in Comedy. Thus Community suffices as a part of an evolved version of the Sitcom genre.

Kithaka wa Mberia (b.1956) is one of the most innovative Kenyan poets. Until now he has published four collections of poems and three plays. His poems contain a strong political and social criticism, sometimes in the form of animal allegories. He condemns various acts of violence done to women, like rapes of schoolgirls or prostitution caused by poverty. Some compositions seem life-stories of real persons, others are overtly didactic and moralizing, but in all the theme of social justice is almost obsessive. Another group of poems highlights the author’s concern with his surroundings and with the “health conditions” of the Earth in general; thus, for instance, he denounces the devastation of Kenyan soil in order to get foreign currency. His love of nature makes him address affectionate verses to animals, insects and plants. Formally the poems have little in common with the poetic tradition of the Swahili coast as they are in free verse. Kithaka exhibits a rich vocabulary of botanical and zoological terms and is fond of various forms of word-playing like chiming and punning; an important role in his poetry is played by parallelism. Moreover, he introduces into Kiswahili visual poems where typography is relied upon to perform expressive effects. Kithaka wa Mberia, together with other East African contemporary poets, proves that Swahili poetry is able to express universal themes and can reach a high artistic value even without repeating traditional models.

Mwanadamu amejaribu kwa vyovyote vile kuvumbua na kunyumbua mambo mapya ambayo yataleta mvuto na kupimia akili yake kiubunifu katika hali ya kutaka kutangamana zaidi na binadamu mwenzake au kutaka kuelewa zaidi ulimwengu wake. Ndiposa washairi wengi wa kisasa wanashikilia kwamba ulimwengu unabadilika na hivyo utamaduni wa ushairi lazima ubadilike. Katika wasilisho hili tunajadili mabadiliko haya ya kimaumbo na athari zake katika ushairi wa Kiswahili. Si lengo letu kushawishi msomaji kujiunga na kikundi fulani cha ushairi bali kuangazia hoja mwafaka zinazotokana na mivutano na mikinzano katika mabadiliko haya, na namna mitazamo hii inavyofanikisha maendeleo ya ushairi.

<p>For more than three decades the Moscow-based conceptual artist group "Collective Actions" has been organizing actions. Each action, typically taking place at the outskirts of Moscow, is regarded as a trigger for a series of intellectual activities, such as analysis, interpretation, narration, and description. The artists have systematically recorded and transcribed these activities, collecting and assembling texts, diagrams, and photographs in a ten-volume publication entitled "Journeys Outside the City." Five volumes of this publication concern the activities of the group before, and five after, 1989. Over the years the "Journeys Outside the City" became an idiosyncratic, self-sufficient aesthetic discourse arrayed along a constellation of concepts developed by those engaged in "Collective Actions." In its elusive hermeticism and self-referentiality the aesthetic framework constructed by these artists formed a closed system, gathering bundles of signs that seldom referred to anything concrete outside the horizon of Moscow Conceptualism. It is in this regard that the early volumes of the "Journeys Outside the City" can be compared to the similarly closed ideological discourse of the Soviet Politburo. After 1989, however, with the transition from socialism to capitalism, the aesthetic and artistic language of this group began to change as its text-based self-sufficient system began to open up under pressure from new socioeconomic conditions introduced by the processes of democratization and liberalization. </p><p> My dissertation "Transition in Post-Soviet Art: `Collective Actions' Before and After 1989" is neither a history of nor a monographical work on "Collective Actions," but rather an analytical exploration of aesthetic, artistic and institutional changes that have transpired in the "Journeys Outside the City" during the transition from socialism to capitalism. As the artists migrated from one art historical category into another (from the status of "unofficial artists" to that of "contemporary artists"), their aesthetics and art revealed a series of stylistic, technical, formal, textual, and aesthetical transformations and metamorphoses that paralleled broader cultural conversions taking place in post-Soviet and Eastern European art during the transition to capitalism.</p> / Dissertation

<p>This study investigates how an ambivalence surrounding men and masculinity has been expressed and exploited in Pop literature since the late 1980s, focusing on works by German-speaking authors Christian Kracht and Benjamin Lebert and American author Bret Easton Ellis. I compare works from the United States with German and Swiss novels in order to reveal the scope - as well as the national particularities - of these troubled gender identities and what it means in the context of recent debates about a "crisis" in masculinity in Western societies. My comparative work will also highlight the ways in which these particular literatures and cultures intersect, invade, and influence each other. </p><p> In this examination, I demonstrate the complexity and success of the critical projects subsumed in the works of three authors too often underestimated by intellectual communities. At the same time, I reveal the very structure and language of these critical projects as a safe haven for "male fantasies" of gender difference and identity formation long relegated to the distant past, fantasies that continue to lurk within our cultural currencies.</p> / Dissertation

<p>This thesis explores the confluence and clashes between local and global cultural flows in Latin America through the multiple literary movements and tendencies for which the Colombian author, Fernando Vallejo, acts as a unifying agent. My analysis pulls from Decolonial, Aesthetic and World Literary theories, in order to analyze how cosmopolitanism and globalization resonate in contemporary Latin American letters through a survey of three geocultural categories: the Colombian local, the Latin American regional, and the literary global. My analysis of the local tracks the formal evolution of the Colombian Novela de la Violencia into the contemporary Novela Urbana and the parallel political challenge to the conventional Lettered City in Colombia after the Violencia. In terms of the regional, I critique the idea of a positive and universally stabilizing cosmopolitanism through a collective analysis of a generation of Latin American writers that were forced to travel to the cosmopolitan center through exile rather than as an act of freewill, a generation that I refer to in this project as the Generation of '72. And my evaluation of the global considers how a singular World Literary aesthetics and political economy of prestige weights negatively on contemporary Latin American authors. Through a survey of the roughly fifty novels and short stories that fall under the purview of both the Colombian Urban Novel and the Generation of `72, I conclude that aesthetic borders - the places where multiple forms of perception converge- open up spaces and forums of critique of rigid cultural models and century old aesthetic formulae, a tendency that I refer to as a poetics of globalism.</p> / Dissertation

Internship experiences in art museums can help students to compare the theories they have learned in school and the tasks in the real working place. Since the researcher is the supervisor of the interns in Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (MOCA), an appropriate internship program should be developed. Therefore, the purposes of this these are to discuss the art museums, interns and school¡¦s attitude toward internship program; to examine the internship program in MOCA; and to provide suggestions to improve internship programs. To achieve these goals, the research conducts a thorough literature review, case interviews and participant observation. MOCA and the other three public art museums are taken as examples to analyze and compare their internship programs. The opinions of MOCA¡¦s interns and the schools¡¦ teachers which cooperated with MOCA are collected. The results show that an internship program has several functions such as education, professional training, museum promotion, and interns can be part of the human resources in art museums. Though art museums provide internship programs to students and schools, they should also plan the programs according to their own characteristics and make the programs flexible to accommodate different situations. As for MOCA, it should strengthen the management of internship, let interns know their assignments and tasks precisely, and keep well communication with students. The thesis raises the following suggestions on internship: 1. Art museums should prepare internship programs to benefit both interns and museums, such as increase intern¡¦s training courses and find out specialties of interns. Furthermore, an internship database should be established in each museum as reference. 2. Interns should learn more about the museums in advance. They should have a positive attitude to learn, and evaluate their tasks and goals frequently during the internship. 3. School and museum should consider themselves as partners to arrange the internship placement properly.

This dissertation investigates representations of betrayal in works by Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie, Irvine Welsh, and Alan Hollinghurst. In rethinking "bad" acts of betrayal as embodying an ethical desire not for the good but for "the better," this dissertation challenges the simplistic good/bad binary as mandated by neo-imperialist, late capitalist, and heteronormative society. In doing so, my project intervenes in the current paradigm of ethical literary criticism, whose focus on the canon and the universal Good gained from it runs a risk of underwriting moral majoritarianism and judgmentalism. I argue that some contemporary narratives of betrayal open up onto a new ethic, insofar as they reveal the unethical totalization assumed in ethical literary criticism's pursuit of the normative Good. The first full chapter analyzes how Kureishi's Intimacy portrays an ethical adultery as it breaks away from the tenacious authority of monogamy in portraying adult intimacy in literature, what I call the narrative of "coupledom." Instead, Intimacy imagines a new narrative of "singledom" unconstrained by the marriage/adultery dyad. In the next chapter on Fury, a novel about Manhattan's celebrity culture, I interrogate the current discourse of cosmopolitanism and propose that Rushdie's novel exposes how both cosmopolitanism and nationalism are turned into political commodities by mediafrenzied and celebrity-obsessed metropolitan cultural politics. In a world where an ethical choice between cosmopolitanism and nationalism is impossible to make, Fury achieves an ethical act of treason against both. The next chapter scrutinizes Mark Renton's "ripping off" of his best mates and his critique of capitalism in Trainspotting and Porno. If Renton betrays his friends in order to leave the plan(e) of capitalism in the original novel, he satirizes the trustworthiness of trust in Porno by crushing his best mate's blind trust in business "ethics" and by ripping him off again. The last full chapter updates the link between aesthetics and ethics in post-AIDS contexts in Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty. In portraying without judgment beautiful, dark-skinned, dying homosexual bodies, Hollinghurst's novel "fleshes out" the traditional sphere of aesthetics that denies the low and impure pleasures frequently paired with gay sex.

This thesis aims to understand how civil society developed and evolved in the modern history of Iran and how it operates in the current day through the eyes of the actors of this realm. The fieldwork of the study was conducted in Tehran in 2006. This study, while questioning the liberal understanding of civil society, endeavours to contemplate a consistent framework in which the Iranian civil society activities could be located. The Iranian case proved the existence of a vivid civil society despite a repressive political climate. However, instead of comprehending the Iranian civil society as constant or developing, this thesis showed that civil society is in fact evolving according to the power relations between the state and civil society. In this sense, Iranian civil society is neither weak or nor strong but rather its strength is changing vis-&agrave / -vis the relations with the Iranian state.

Machiavelli&rsquo / s uniqueness and originality renders his educational direction as pertinent for times and conditions that are similar to and prevalent in ours. On the grand scale, his thought process disrupts the classical sense of philosophy, metaphysics, and religion. This disruption of the classical Western consciousness is an aim in the contemporary realm of political thought, which, starting with the extensive criticism of modernity found in the works of Nietzsche, has been developed in the realm of political thought throughout the twentieth and onto the twenty-first century. Therefore, Machiavelli &ndash / who lived 500 years ago &ndash / is nevertheless the source for productive knowledge, analysis, and prognosis for the contemporary political crisis, a crisis due to the downfall of modernity. The presupposition of latter-day modernity, as being considered the best of all possible worlds, is no longer believable. Modernity, what was once considered as being utterly unique and superior in human history, is responded to today by critiques on class domination, Western imperialism, the dissolution of community and tradition, the rise of alienation, and the impersonality of bureaucratic power. Machiavelli supplants the dominant modern consciousness through being a source for a new artistic revolution, a revolution of consciousness through a humane call for strength in facing reality, in order to re-constitute a divergent set of epistemological and ontological discoveries, which are better aligned to the condition of the present-day than those formulated by the dominant Western modern consciousness.