In the years between 1950 and 1965, three significant developments in American culture left women struggling to merge the housewife archetype of the Cold War era with changing attitudes toward sexuality. Because of these cultural shifts, the developments that dominate the research presented here are; first, the changing elements in the lives of the women who pass through the halls of academia during this time of societal flux; second, the impact of the development of the birth control pill; and third, the impact of the publications of Playboy magazine and Sex and the Single Girl. These developments mark a shift from an age of idealism that permeated the consciousness of postwar Americans to an age of realism concerning American sexuality.

In her book The Hidden Machinery: Essays on Writing, Margot Livesey uses the phrase "the hidden machinery" to refer to two different aspects of novel making: on the one hand, how certain elements of the text characters, plot, imagery work together to make an overarching argument; on the other hand, how the secret, psychic of life of the author, and the larger events of his or her time and place, shape the argument (29). To me, the interconnected craft elements of fiction remains an ongoing enigma. I will delve into the hidden machinery of two authors with whom my own stories feel in alignment, Claire Vaye Watkins and Denis Johnson. Specifically, I will argue that Watkins subverts reader expectation and compose stories that are raw and peculiar and beautiful. Denis Johnson writes with such masterful control of voice, and expertly navigates unreliable narrators throughout his stories.

My thesis examines the connection between scripture and contemporary American poetry. Scripture is inherently poetic, employing devices that require analysis and explication. Poets drawing from scriptural text for narrative, language, or form are not looking to replace scripture, or even enhance it. Poets create new experiences in language, and their writing can illuminate the poetics of scripture. My thesis will examine work by three contemporary poets who have imitated, alluded to, and re-created scripture: Jacqueline Osherow's "Scattered Psalms" from 1999 collection Dead Men's Praise; Louise Glück's 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winning collection The Wild Iris; and Morri Creech's "The Testament of Judas" from his 2001 collection Paper Cathedrals. Each of these texts investigates the metaphor "Man is like God"—a metaphor which Allen Grossman argues is the most important in Western civilization—from a unique and yet scripturally archival point of view. At the same time, each features a strong individual speaker, one of the hallmarks of contemporary poetry. Osherow identifies the speaker of her psalms as a version of herself, explicitly personalizing her poetry. Glück's speaker is isolated, and is defined as she speaks to both God and her garden but is heard by neither. Creech's Judas is concerned solely with his personal experience with and understanding of Jesus. Emphasizing the individual makes poetry a personal rather than shared experience. It becomes the individual speaker's responsibility to establish his/her relationship with God based on how they perceive God and how they represent him through language.

There is currently need for reform in art programs of all kinds, in regards to use of and focus on contemporary art and current practices. Teaching about art of our time and place enables students to understand and make connections to their world, and facilitates art making that is creative and relevant. This thesis describes theory and rationale for basing curriculum on contemporary art practices and presents a jewelry workshop, for all skill levels, that teaches contemporary art themes and practices. There are two units. The first teaches metal texturing, shaping and simple soldering skills while, focusing on art that deals with spectral and compensatory remembering themes. The second unit teaches bezel setting while focusing on alternative to the establishment art themes. The lessons in the workshop were also created using contemporary art teaching techniques and new principles and elements of design.

String Music is a composition for string orchestra, percussion, and tape in three movements. The work exploits both traditional and contemporary polyphonic techniques (e.g. imitation, inversion, canon, stretto, fugue, collage). In addition, each movement employs a different musical elementas the focus of organization (timbre, pitch, rhythm/meter). The duration of the entire work is approximately eighteen and a half minutes.

This dissertation defines and analyzes the primary attributes of a new sub-genre of contemporary fiction: the Henry James novelization. Novels by Colm Tóibín, Cynthia Ozick and Alan Hollinghurst, among dozens of others, turn James into a fictional protagonist, while drawing upon his distinctive literary style, treatment of human psychology, and personal history. James as represented in these fictions is secretive, cripplingly self-aware and obsessed with others' opinions. Above all, he is preoccupied with controlling narratives. Because these works combine biographical and thematic approaches, the Jamesian author-protagonist displays aspects of James's own life, while sharing attributes of his own fictional creations. Thus a principal character type in these works is the addictive personality, as authors like Tóibín invoke the history of alcoholism in the James family, as well as the manipulative yet self-divided creations for which James was famous. The Introduction traces the literary representation of historical authors from the Greek epic through the postmodern novel and explains why Henry James is such an attractive subject for novelization. Chapter One discusses Colm Tóibín's The Master, which represents James gathering material for The Golden Bowl and other late novels. Both Tóibín's James and James's Maggie Verver display personalities that bear the imprint of family pathology, specifically, alcoholism and abuse, and both inhabit communities where moral culpability becomes difficult to assign. Chapter Two treats Cynthia Ozick's "Dictation," a novel about the composition of The Jolly Corner which portrays the Jamesian author as one among various technologies of writing. As James loses control over his narrative, The Jolly Corner becomes a trauma dream in which Spencer Brydon uncannily prefigures the alcoholic in recovery. In Chapter Three, Alan Hollinghurst replaces James with a flawed stand-in, shifting the focus to James's legacy and the state of humanities study today: Nick Guest is engaged in writing a dissertation on James and a screenplay adaptation of The Spoils of Poynton. At the end of The Line of Beauty, Nick Guest has learned the lesson taught by all these novelizations: that James's texts remain deeply, urgently relevant.

This dissertation examines the four novels published to date by Milton Hatoum, a contemporary Lebanese-Brazilian author from the Amazon region. There are a great number of critical readings of his work that foreground the postmodern dissolution and fragmentation of the self, of human relationships, and also of national identity. In contrast to such approaches, I propose what I call a reading of hope. I argue that Hatoum is at the forefront of a shift in sensibility in Brazilian literature, one that simultaneously demonstrates certain aspects of postmodernism, but also breaks with other elements of it. In order to illustrate this issue, I analyze how Hatoum's characters forge personal identities, utilizing the mythological symbol of the uroboro (the snake that bites its own tail) as the organizing structure of my analysis. The uroboro has historically been used to represent circularity in the cycles of nature, communal and personal renewal, the return to origins, and self-reflection. In addition to circularity, the symbol has also been visually depicted as half black and half white, creating a duality that stresses interdependence rather than binary logic. With the above characteristics of circularity and duality in mind, the postmodern aspect that I analyze in Hatoum's work is its break with binary logic. First, I identify a variety of dualities extant in the novels, from language and silence to myth and reality, that instead of canceling each other out complement one another and emphasize identity's inherent ambiguity. Next, I analyze the rupture with postmodernism, which comes with Hatoum's characters' perpetual search for a more meaningful relationship with others, the environment, and themselves. As a consequence, the postmodern rootless and unstable characters give way to individuals that express more humane concerns (the recovery of the past as a value, self-reflection, and the search for familial bonds as well as for a connection with beauty and aesthetic pleasure through the arts). The symbol of the uroboro thus provides a graphic means of metaphorically representing not only the characters' identity as ambiguous and self-reflective, but also Hatoum's novels as simultaneously working within and breaking with postmodernism.

The principal research question of this study is framed as: Do prevailing, industrially and politically sourced definitions of Digital Exhibition faithfully represent the phenomenon¿s position within the contemporary media theory framework? Within this work Digital Exhibition is defined as: The practice of presenting moving images, either live or pre-recorded, to paying audiences, in public spaces, by means of digital distribution and projection. The majority of established literatures concerning Digital Exhibition are aimed at producing categorical definitions of the phenomenon. These ¿meaning making¿ discourses commonly stem from potentially ideologically affected sources. To address this issue, the author has investigated the political economy of key commentators, and Digital Exhibition has been impartially researched following a ¿case studies¿ methodology; with an analytical framework based upon a series of ¿plausible rival hypotheses¿. These hypotheses include that Digital Exhibition isM ¿ a form of the cinema ¿ a form of television ¿ a new (new media) medium ¿ multiple media ¿ not a medium It is presented that each investigated hypothesis can be argued to be legitimate when employing established media theories as the means of rationalisation. Nevertheless, the author concludes that individual industrially / politically charged definitions still do not provide an adequately comprehensive account as to the wealth of interpretations that can be drawn for Digital Exhibition. The author also presents his own perspective as to the subjective nature of contemporary media taxonomies, and ultimately proposes that Digital Exhibition is not a medium, but is a designation offered to a subjectively defined collection of events made possible through the transmission of computational binary pulse signals.

The word 'myth' appears frequently in contemporary theological and exegetical writing. Unfortunately, it is used with a variety of meanings by different authors, and this gives rise to the layman’s general misunderstanding of what is really a technical term. This thesis is an essay in the clarification of the notion of myth, through the use of the techniques of logical analysis of language. / Thesis / Bachelor of Divinity (BD)

<p> This work explores the importance anti-capitalist protest in the contemporary international system. In doing so, I address some of the practical, philosophical and ethical considerations of academic depictions of protest through examples in Toronto, Canada and Seoul, South Korea. Drawing on fieldwork at protest sites in both places, I focus on forms of contemporary anti-capitalism through a political economy of 'Capital' and the inherent contestation of contemporary political decision making. I outline how it is important to develop subjective accounts of political protest that utilize ethical and psychoanalytic insights to come to terms with the tension between conformity and resistance. Contrasting what I call 'militant masculinties' of protest with 'alternative masculinities' of anticapitalism, I problematize some of the commonly held assumptions about the distinction between activism and academic efforts. Instead, I demonstrate how the methodological insights of an 'ethnographic sensibility' can benefit International Relations scholarship by discussing the possibilities and limits of political participation in the contemporary capitalist system. This research seeks to contribute to debates about political subjectivity and political activism through an examination of the efforts to challenge economic decision making power that rests in the hand of a few supposed experts. This thesis is an effort to democratize the way we think about participation in the site of protest, in order to encourage popular and academic engagement with the local and global struggles taking place across the world.</p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)