This arts-based thesis will explore ethnic identity and narrative in symbolic self-portraiture as themes for a body of work. This paper will discuss how identity and narrative play an important role in the empowerment of the artist and viewer. It will also show how this can be incorporated into an art classroom engaged in multicultural learning and the study of visual culture to empower students and give them opportunities to narrate their life stories.

Though an installation, the exhibition Four Corners Gateway, examines how history and memory construct us as individuals and construct our national and personal identities and worldviews. All such constructions are ultimately fragmented and fictional. This body of work points at how ideologically formed, subjective narratives are made into ‘truths’. Connecting the personal with the public is my way of playing with history and its paradoxes. The resulting landscapes that I construct can be read as archives of fragments.

This dissertation examines the treatment, forms, and representations of spirituality in contemporary American fiction. Drawing on recent theories in cultural and critical theory, sociology, and rhetoric, I argue that postmodern fiction finds sacredness in creative memory and information systems. I analyze E.L. Doctorow’s (2000) City of God, Leslie Marmon Silko’s (1991) Almanac of the Dead, Richard Powers’(2006) Echo Maker, and William Gibson’s (1948) Neuromancer. In their quest for the sacred, these works acknowledge the mystic along with the rational as a legitimate vehicle of knowledge; accordingly, the mysterious and the incomprehensible are accounted for within the epistemological structure of such spirituality. Contrary to the disparaging views of postmodern discourse as depoliticized, the fiction examined in this dissertation redefines the relationship between the sacred and the secular to engender social change and transformation. The dissertation stresses the significance of reconsidering the role of literary spiritualities as a vehicle of transformation. By advancing such reconsideration, the dissertation achieves two goals. First, it argues for the impurity of the secular as a construct and sees in this impurity a chance for theory to transcend diagnosis and deconstruction and move toward transformation. Second, by revealing a redemptive sensibility within postmodern discourse, the dissertation challenges Hutcheon's characterization of postmodern culture and discourse as "complicitous critique," showing how culture weaves narratives of restoration to counteract the pressure of fragmentation brought about by global capitalism.

Grand Central is a twenty-minute multi-media work for chamber orchestra, live audio processing, and video projections. The piece was commissioned by the San Francisco Conservatory of Music's New Music Ensemble, and will be premiered in March 2013. Composing a multi-media work poses many challenges, including the methodology of how to work with diverse components, the interplay between these elements, and how to best utilize the performance space to its full potential. The work is inspired by my experiences at Grand Central Terminal during my childhood and the musical material is derived from the building’s infrastructure and rich cultural history. The first chapter of this treatise examines the genesis of the composition, Grand Central’s history, and technical considerations related to the integration of technology, orchestration, and staging. The second chapter is encompassed by a thorough movement- by-movement analysis, complete with explanations of pitch derivation, formal principals, and programmatic considerations. / text

This practice-as-research project discusses modes, processes and aesthetics of contemporary dramaturgy, as practiced in experimental theatre and dance works in Europe from the 1990s onwards. In order to do this, the project draws particularly on discourses around ‘drama’ and suggests that the term can be redefined and usefully rehabilitated for both analysis and the creation of experimental performances. More specifically, this project defines drama (deriving from the Greek dro=act) as stage action, and dramaturgy (deriving from the Greek drama + ergo= work) as a practice that works endlessly for the creation of this drama/action on stage and is therefore always connected with it. In order to approach the newly proposed notion of ‘experimental drama’, this research uses the six main dramatic elements offered by Aristotle in his Poetics: plot, character, language, thought, the visual and music. Furthermore, it adds a seventh element: the spectator and contemporary understandings around the conditions of spectatorship. It then offers an analysis of dramaturgical processes and aesthetics of experimental stage works through these elements. Given that this is a practice-as-research project, it is accordingly multi-modal and offers its perspectives on dramaturgy and experimental drama through both critical and performance texts, documentation traces (photographs and video recordings) of artistic practice – all present in this thesis – and a live event; all these modes complement each other and move constantly between the stage and the page to proceed with the research’s inquiries. The current thesis has borrowed the dramaturgical structure of two artistic projects, created within the frame of this research practice, to generate its writings. The introductory parts of this text place the work within the discourse on practice-as-research and discuss the project’s proposal for an analysis of contemporary dramaturgy through drama. The Short (Research) Stories that follow analyze experimental works, created both within the frame of this research practice and outside it, by other artists, following the Aristotelian model. The element of spectatorship intervenes in this analysis instead of standing separately in the thesis. The project’s closing live event returns from the page to the stage to continue and add to discussions around central issues of the work, in its various distinct modes.

In the last twenty years, Italian female literature has been characterized by a tendency to resort to a transgressive code for creating its fictional discourse. The transgression consists of desecrating those themes that Italians intimately continue to honor as taboo: menstruation, female ugliness, eating disorders problems, the refusal of maternity–or better its degradation to a mere biological fact–and homosexuality. Those issues go beyond what Italians recognize as normal and reassuring. Transgressing them is as a powerful and creative act able to awaken women, and promote their emancipation. These authoresses’ goal is to create a new dynasty of women different from their mothers–examples of women considered models of obedience and submission to the rules of patriarchy. Their aim is to have women conquer the right to talk about topics that have always been invisible and unspeakable. The meaning of transgression, taboos and the “the uncanny” is outlined upfront. The most representative transgressive authoresses in the Italian literary scene are analyzed: Elena Ferrante (L’amore molesto and I giorni dell’abbandono), Mariapia Veladiano (La vita accanto), Alessandra Amitrano (Broken Barbie), Valeria Parrella (Lo spazio bianco) and Elena Stancanelli (Benzina). Each chapter focuses on an author and her work. Historical, cultural, and social background of taboo is offered. An analysis of the text is provided to explain the violation of the taboo, while offering an interpretation of the transgression. The conclusion alludes to the way in which Italian literary criticism still struggles not to condemn works that are inconsistent with what it is determined to be the norm. / Romance Languages and Literatures

Contemporary interactive computer-based artworks are examined, with particular reference to the problems and opportunities presented by their relationship to their audience in conventional gallery settings. From an anecdotal starting point, the research uses a series of observational case studies of exhibited works, the production of an interactive artwork, and the curation of an exhibition of interactive artworks, to explore pragmatic questions of the artwork/audience relationship in real-world situations. A range of existing taxonomies for kinds and levels of interactivity within art 'are examined, and a `common-language' taxonomy based on the metaphor of `conversation' is developed and applied. -The case studies reveal patterns of use of interactive artworks including the relation of use-time to gender, aspects of intimidation, and social interaction. In particular, a high frequency of collective use of artworks, even when the artworks are designed to be used by one person, is discovered. This aspect of collective versus individual use, and interaction between audience members is further explored by several strands of research: The development of an interactive artwork specifically intended to be enhanced by collective usage and interaction between users; the application of a metaphor of 'conversation/host' to the making of the artwork; further, more specific, case studies of such artworks; and the further development of the taxonomy into a graphic form to illustrate differences in artwork-audience, and audience-audience relationships. The strands of research work together to uncover data which would be of use to artists and curators working with computer-basedin teractive artworks, and explores and develops tools which may be useful for the analysis of a wide range of artworks and art production

In June 2013 the Vancouver International Song Institute (VISI) hosted its inaugural Contemporary Performance Studies program. The ten-day event offered student and emerging artist singers and pianists the opportunity to study and perform contemporary works both of their own selection and assigned by the program directors. Among the pieces assigned were works by Vancouver composers, both established professionals and rising talents, that showcased astonishing variety, depth, and excellence in their styles and artistry. The composers at VISI represented the latest generation in a long tradition of art song composition in Canada, but outside of the country's borders, Canada's composers and works are largely unknown. Lack of presence in the international musical canon has unfortunately been a historical issue for Canada. However, as compositional trends have shifted toward neo-tonality, art song in Canada has experienced significant growth in production and performance, particularly in Vancouver. Aided by organizations such as VISI, Canadian art song has been primed to take a prominent position on the international stage.

The object of this work is the poetry subject of the last decade of the XXth century, it‘s bodily expression. Various structuralistic and poststructuralistic litherary theory material is used about subject‘s body and being (and his anthrophomorphical form), and also it‘s conjunctions in popular culture with cult of body. We need to ascertain who connect confronting theories, which look at the essence of subject and also to authors connections to his institution. The object of analysis is texts of Lithuanian poets and the expression of corporeality in it. In this analysis we hold on the semiotical postulates – immanence and discourse, narathology and semantical level assumptions, plus lingvistical individual cathegory aspect. We come to the conclusion that popular culture in the revival period didn‘t make the substantial effect on bodily expression of Lithuanian poetry, though corporeality became one of the leading text dimesions.

Following World War II the novel faced a crisis in its mode of address. How could the human and humane function of language and artistic representation be lent to the depiction of historical terror or trauma? Who has the right to speak on behalf of – or to assume the voice of – victims of such real atrocity? And to what extent can a writer attend to another's pain without aestheticising extreme vulnerability, or losing the reader to indifference or repulsion? The difficulties confronted by the writer of fictional works when addressing such issues as war, rape, domestic abuse, colonisation, slavery, even genocide are not rooted in an inadequacy of syntax; rather they are borne out of the disjunction between the idealistic assumptions that linked language to a sense of humanity, intelligence and the pursuit of goals beneficial to society as a whole, and the extremity of recent acts of human atrocity as conducted not by the savage Other but by modern societies with which the reader would otherwise identify. Since the mid-twentieth century a number of writers have responded to these challenges by forgoing the traditional dialogic form of the novel and electing characters that cannot or will not speak in order to convey, through their speechlessness and – at times – their damaged physicality, the extent of the violence and oppression to which they have been subjected, and the difficulty of assimilating such violence into the stories by which communities, indeed whole nations, define themselves. The unexpectedly large cast of mute characters suggests that silence has a vital role in the literary portrayal of historical trauma. The prevalence of silence in contemporary fiction related to the Holocaust, for example, shows how this group of writers recognises the extent to which this event tested and continues to test literary exploration. Writers the world over continue to refuse to ignore these subjects – indeed, the broken images and fragmented forms common to many of the novels studied in the following pages can be seen as an apt response to the chaos of war and human aggression – but, as is evident from the number of contemporary works of fiction incorporating a mute character, silence has become an accepted and effective tool for the portrayal of historical events of terror or trauma that continue to challenge the ethical boundaries of the imagination.