This dissertation is a collection of poems preceded by a critical preface. The preface considers the major changes within the elegy from the traditional English elegy—the touchstone poems for this genre being Milton's "Lycidas," Shelley's "Adonais," and Tennyson's "In Memoriam"—to the contemporary elegy and argues that many of these changes showcase contemporary elegists' active refusal and reversal of the time-honored traditions of the form. The preface is divided into an introduction and three sections, each of which recognizes and explores one significant alteration—or reversal—to the conventions of the form as established by early English elegists. The first discusses the traditional elegiac tradition of consolation in which the speaker, after displaying a series of emotions in reaction to the death of a loved one, ultimately finds comfort in the knowledge that the deceased lives eternally in heaven. This convention is contrasted with a common contemporary rhetorical movement in which the speaker not only lacks comfort by the end of the poem, but often refuses any kind of consolation, preferring instead to continue his grief. The second recognizes and explores the traditional elegiac tradition in which the speaker, listing the virtues of the beloved, replaces the real, historical person with a symbol which represents what society has lost due to this death. This convention is contrasted against a common contemporary theme in which the speaker, in an attempt to evoke authenticity, portrays the deceased subject not as a romanticized symbol, but as a real human being. The final section discusses the definition of the traditional elegy as a reaction to the literal death of a loved one and contrasts this with the more fluid contemporary understanding of the elegy as a poem about loss—either a literal or metaphorical death—and a poem which need not display conventional aspects of mourning but rather a wide variety of responses to the problem of loss.

This dissertation is composed of two parts. Part I discusses the evolution of meditative poetry as a genre, with a particular emphasis on the influence of women poets and feminist critical theory. Part II is a collection of poems. Although several popular and critically-acclaimed poets working today write meditative poems, meditative poetry as a genre has not been systematically examined since M.H. Abrams’s essay on the meditative mode in Romantic poetry, “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric.” Because one of the driving forces of meditative poetry is a longing for, or recognition of, a state of perception that lies between individual being and some form of universal ordering principle, meditative poetry might seem to be antithetical to a postmodern world that is fragmentary, contingent, and performative; indeed, earlier definitions of meditative poetry, tied to historical and cultural understandings of the individual and the Universal, no longer reflect “how we know” but only “how we knew.” However, this essay argues that there is a contemporary meditative structure that allows for a continued relationship between the individual and the Universal without resorting to the essentialism implicit in the genre as traditionally described. This new structure owes much to feminist theory, in particular écriture féminine, which models a method for recovery of self in language that would seek to efface it. In order to expose the boundaries of the contemporary meditative mode, and to outline its relationship to écriture féminine, this essay analyzes meditative poems from four contemporary poets: Kay Ryan, Jorie Graham, Linda Gregerson, and Linda Bierds, and contrasts contemporary variations on the genre with earlier traditions, identifying an evolved form that better reflects a postmodern rhetoric.

The following thesis explores the complexities of visual representation in relation to women’s experiences of sexual trauma, focusing on Gita Hashemi’s durational performance, Grounding: States of Gender (2017). Specifically, I look at the prolonged psychic pain that stems from the infinite negotiating of traumatic memory and the simultaneous struggle to have these experiences be seen, heard, and validated. With reference to theorizations of mourning (Butler, 2004; Fitzpatrick, 2013) and feminist approaches to psychotherapy (Herman, 1992; Magnet, 2017) my study of Grounding responds to a contemporary turn towards embodied and autobiographical feminist research methods. Using critical methodologies of visual analysis and narrative inquiry, I seek to explore the therapeutic value of the aesthetic or, what I refer to as an aesthetic of healing. Acknowledging how subjectivity functions as both a site of knowledge and as a record of lived experience, I ask how Hashemi’s forms of narrative embodiment work strategically, revealing traumatic realties while simultaneously orienting the viewer towards a position of reflexive engagement within broader sociocultural contexts.

<p>John Metcalf has been living and writing in Canada for twenty-five years. During that time he has demonstrated phenomenal energy in editing anthologies and textbooks of Canadian writing, in promoting the work of Canadian writers, in writing perceptive and provocative assessments of the Canadian literary establishment and, most importantly, in making his own significant contribution to literature in this country. And yet ... Critics of Metcalf' s fiction tend to preface their examinations by noting and attempting to explain the relatively small amount of scholarly activity his works have generated. In the burgeoning industry of CanLit, this lack seems indeed remarkable. Reingard Nischik and Barry Cameron attribute it in part to Metcalf 's preference for the short story, which is too often regarded by Canadian readers as a dry run for the novel, rather than a genre in its own right (Nischik, "The Short Story in Canada" 236; Cameron, "An Approximation of Poetry" 17). Robert Leeker writes: "Another reason Metcalf' s stories have been overlooked is that they are, by contemporary standards, relatively traditional in form" (Leeker 59). This, I think, is an important point: because his stories have been perceived as "relatively traditional in form," Metcalf has remained outside, for example, the coterie of Canadian postmodernism (one which he would no doubt be loath to join but within which his work might have been granted a wider field of reception). In The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction (Hutcheon explains in the introduction that "fiction" here means "novel"), Metcalf merits a one-line reference: his two novels are listed in a parenthesis in the Appendix. This despite the fact that a number of his stories comply with the definition of postmodernism Hutcheon outlines. What I intend to argue here is that Metcalf 's stories are by no means exclusively traditional in form, and that many of them employ techniques generally associated with the postmodern.</p> / Thesis / Bachelor of Arts (BA)

In this dissertation, I argue that the debate between contemporary legal positivism and contemporary natural law philosophy must be understood in terms of underlying assumptions about the nature of philosophy. Despite differing conclusions about the nature of law and legal theory, contemporary legal theorists generally approach the study of law in a similar way. Generally speaking, contemporary legal theorists attempt to provide general accounts of law which are theoretically valuable. They believe that a general and theoretically valuable account oflaw can be achieved by bracketing-off metaphysical questions and focusing on the analysis of concepts. However, it is ultimately because contemporary legal theorists share assumptions about the nature of philosophy that they share similar problems. Because of these share assumptions, contemporary philosophers of law must choose between two alternatives which have limited theoretical value, namely, an overly formal account of law or a relativistic account of law. Thus, this dissertation is not only a critique of specific contemporary legal theories (those of Dworkin, Hart, Raz and Finnis), but also a more general critique of contemporary legal philosophy as a whole. Only by changing the basic assumptions which underlie contemporary legal philosophy can we hope to provide accounts of law which are both general and theoretically valuable. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

No

My thesis is dedicated to the study of popular, commercial cinema as a force within the discourse of national and personal identity in the rapidly changing mega-economies of India and China, and their diasporas, since the watershed year of 1990. Its purpose is to reveal the unique pattern of like and unlike that exists between the "Social Representations" (Serge Moscovici 2000) of contemporary India and China on screen through a juxtapositional comparative approach, close visual analysis, and the development of original theoretical tools. Tense networks of fantasy and anxiety emerge as popular culture actively circulates their shared experiences of changing global status, uneven economic growth (Gong Haomin 2012), and social change. Transnational subjects, Hua and Desi, arrive on screen ready to carve out culturally inflected modernities, in search of "tradition" and "values" to suit contemporary cultural-nations-beyond-borders. I treat film as consumer product, diegetic entity, and text: hence narrative, visual, linguistic and contextual aspects of over fourteen popular commercial films ("Bollywood" and "Yulepian"), are explored. My analysis comprises two interlocking halves: the first two chapters focus chiefly on identities - Hua and Desi, and diasporic persons. The former, conduits for the cultural nation to re-think modernity, the latter a dreamed vanguard of "claim-staking" ethnicised global consumers, defenders of the cultural nation in the "host" country. Chapters Three and Four focus on genres - comedy and history films. Through comedy, these films create state-serving heterotopias or challenge the status quo; perhaps they build cultural nationalist mythos, or lace cynical questions through lavish history film. To understand internecine relationships between economics, society and the imagination, entertainment film cannot be dismissed - in India and China, where change has had intended and unintended consequences unfolding even as uncertainty looms, I show that fresh study, especially in comparison, is absolutely essential.

Contemporary Chinese ink art is often seen as a part of an ongoing history in the Western art world, as opposed to a part of the contemporary. This thesis addresses the history of Chinese ink, the Westernization of the Chinese art world, and the major exhibitions of Chinese contemporary ink artwork that have been held in the Western world.

Finally, this dissertation connects practitioners' autonomy in the production process to the independent production mode of local CCM. Although this production mode presents practical obstacles for local CCM practitioners, it has also allowed practitioners relative autonomy in their decision-making. This thus also bears implications for local CCM's contingent future including the possible scenario of mainstream co-optation. / For 30 years, the local CCM production community has been trying to find the right mix for the genre and push the music to a secular audience since CCM took shape in Hong Kong in the 1980s. CCM is more widely known as gospel music or contemporary hymnal songs in Hong Kong. This study examines the past and present shape of the local CCM scene to provide a historical perspective for interpreting its trajectory. This study sketches a brief history of local CCM in Hong Kong from the late 1960s to 2010 which helps to understand how local CCM has interacted with the commercial music scene including popular music trends and the pop industry environment throughout its development as well as church responses along the evolution of local CCM. / Practitioners' negotiations in CCM production are discussed on three dimensions: song text, performance and stardom. Each of these dimensions highlight common and unique opportunities and tensions in the mediation process, including commercialization, creativity, entertainment, hyperindividuality, evangelism, ministry efficacy and religious piety. Practitioners' negotiations between these interpenetrating and contesting elements shape CCM on the three dimensions. / This study investigates how the local CCM production community grapples with the complexities of fusing religion and media and negotiates the tensions and opportunities that arise between media conditions and assumptions and the religious sensibilities of CCM. By doing so it also engages in a current theoretical discussion about mediation and mediatization in the field of media and religion. This dissertation approaches CCM production as part of the process of mass mediation of religion, through which religious meanings are constantly constructed, negotiated, and reconstructed as practitioners negotiate the multiple conflicting, integrating and interpenetrating forces. In specific, this study addresses practitioners' negotiations between the media-based orientation frame, which include such factors as commercialization, industrial norms, cultural values in the media environment, and the religious orientation frame, which include a range of symbols, moral codes, doctrines, and resources that are religiously meaningful to individuals. / Ho, Wing Ki. / Adviser: Anthony Fung. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 73-01, Section: A, page: . / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 253-266). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [201-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract also in Chinese; appendix C-D in Chinese with some English.

This dissertation focuses on novels and films produced in the second half of the twentieth century that critique traditional notions of home in contemporary America to expand on the large body of work on American domesticity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These texts demonstrate the damaging power and overwhelming force of conventional domesticity, complicating traditional notions of home by speaking from positions of marginality. In each text, key figures react to limited ideologies of domesticity that seek to maintain sameness, silence, and servitude by enacting embodied resistance to domestic entrapment. The areas of convergence between the figure of the conventional, middle-class home, and the material and psychic reality of home disavow the expectations of the middle-class home ideal and offer real resistance to narrow, and often damaging, visions of home. These spaces allow for new conceptions of home and suggest that it may be possible to conceive of home as something other than fixed in place, governed by family and community, or created by prolific consumption of goods. In this way, this dissertation intervenes in the established binary of home/stability in opposition to mobility/freedom, which maintains the limits of appropriate ways of establishing and enacting domesticity along gender and class lines. By considering portraits of domesticity that are often left out of discussions of home in the United States my research intersects with a broad range of theoretical fields and discourses about mobility, historical and popular culture representations of the tramp, the body and surveillance, the home as spatial construct, and housekeeping as both oppressive and subversive. Drawing on historical and theoretical examinations of women within the home space, coupled with literary criticism and close-readings, I seek to determine the nature of confining domesticity and examine the varied ways that different groups of people respond to their entrapment. At stake in this dissertation is a deeper understanding of the ways that literary and filmic representations of home at the end of the twentieth century suggest a conflict between the ways that home and houses, are popularly represented and the fact that home remains a contested and dangerous space.