This thesis investigates conceptual networks —systems of organising, understanding and explaining thought and knowledge— and the ways in which they underlie both text and its mise en page across a range of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century French and Catalan literary texts and their manuscript witnesses. Each of the three chapters explores a separate corpus of texts, using two of four interrelated network theories: Michel Serres’ notion of parasites and hosts as the basic interconnecting units that combine to constitute all relational networks; the ubiquitous organizational tree; Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the fold as the primary factor in producing differentiation and identity; and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s unruly, anti-hierarchical and anti-arborescent rhizomatic systems. The first chapter engages primarily with parasites and trees; the second with trees and folds; and the third with folds and rhizomes. However, resonances with the other network theories are discussed as they occur, in order to demonstrate the fundamentally interconnected and often interchangeable nature of these systems. Each chapter includes close analysis of manuscript witnesses of the texts under discussion. The first chapter, ‘Saints Denis and Fanuel: Parasitism and Arborescence on the Manuscript Page’, examines parasitic and arboreal networks in two hagiographic texts: late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century prose redactions of the Vie de Saint Denis, and the thirteenth‐century hagiographic romance Li Romanz de Saint Fanuel. The second chapter, ‘Ramon Llull’s Folding Forests: The World, the Tree and the Book’, addresses arborescent and folding structures in Llull’s encyclopaedic Arbre de ciència [Tree of Science], composed between 1295 and 1296. The third chapter, ‘Transgender Genealogy: Turning, Folding and Crossing Gender’, considers three characters in medieval French texts who can be read as transgender: Saint Fanuel; the King of Torelore in Aucassin et Nicolette; and Blanchandin/e in Tristan de Nanteuil. The chapter explores the ways in which these characters’ queer trajectories can be understood through conceptions of directionality which relate to the fold and the rhizome.

The twenty-first century has seen a resurgence of academic interest in biopolitics: the often oppressive political power over human biology, human bodies and their actions that emerges when political technologies concern themselves with and act upon a population as a species rather than as a group of individuals. The publication of new works by theorists including Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri has furthered academic understanding of biopolitical attempts to ensure an orderly, productive society. Biopolitics bases these attempts upon optimising the majority population’s health and well-being while constructing simultaneously a subrace of unruly, unproductive bodies against which the majority requires securitising. However, despite the still-proliferating and increasingly diverse recent theoretical work on the subject, little material has appeared examining how literature represents biopolitics or how theories of biopolitics may inform literary criticism. This thesis argues for Salman Rushdie’s novels as an exemplary site of fictional engagement with biopower in their portrayal of the increasingly intense and pervasive biopolitical technologies used in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Rushdie has been considered frequently as a novelist who explores political discourses of race and culture. However, analysis of the ways in which he depicts these discourses animating recent biopolitical practices has proven scarcer in Rushdie Studies. This thesis asserts that Rushdie’s novels affirm consistently the desirability of non-racialising polities, but almost always suggest little possibility of constructing such communities. In the process, it will reveal that he represents more numerous and varied forms of racialisation than has been supposed previously. This study considers how Rushdie describes biopolitical racialisation by state and superrace alike, the massacres of subraces that often ensue, how biopower operates and is resisted in space, and the discursive and practical forms this resistance takes. Contrasting Rushdie’s early fiction with his less-studied more recent works, this analysis deploys, critiques and augments canonical theories of biopower in order to chart his generally growing disinclination to depict this resistance’s potential success. This study thus works towards a new biopolitical literary criticism which argues that although the theories of Foucault and others illuminate the ways in which literature represents power and resistance in contemporary politics, narrative fiction indicates simultaneously the limitations of these theories and the practices of resistance they advocate.

Jan Suk The Poetics of Immanence: Performance Theatre of Forced Entertainment Abstract The present dissertation thesis examines the multi-faceted nature of the devised as well as durational works of the British experimental theatre Forced Entertainment via the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The aim of the thesis is to explore the transformation- potentiality of the territory between the actors and the spectators. The transformativity of this interspace, or the territory in-between, is decodable namely via Forced Entertainment's performances' structural patterns, sympathy fostering aesthetics, virtual audience integration and accentuated emphasis of the now. The application of Deleuze's philosophy, chiefly the phenomenon of immanence, results in the definition of the poetics of immanence, whose operation enables the transformativity of theatrical space to be terminologically embraced. After delineating crucial terms, such as performance and theatre, live art, or postdramatic theatre, the initial chapter contextualizes Forced Entertainment as the pivotal experimental theatre group; the chapter further conducts an analysis of relevant critical literature in performance and theatre theory discourse. Chapter two provides a deeper contextualising study of the most significant Deleuzoguattarian...

The Demise of the Picaresque: Dividual Narratives of the Neoliberal Marketplace in Brazil and Argentina (1881-2000) examines the connections between economics, Jewish conversos (or new Christians), mechanisms of desire, and literature from a transatlantic and Luso-Hispanic perspective. Taking as a point of reference the Iberian Golden Age (16th and 17th centuries) and the influential figure of the pícaro from the picaresque novels of the time —a roguish figure living in the margins of society— this project questions the nature, conditions, and problems of renowned writers living in Golden Age times, only to interrogate the reenacting of this genre in Latin America centuries later by way of two Brazilian and two Argentine authors. In so doing, this study announces a post-picaresque aesthetic that formally hearkens back to the rogues of old while establishing a new paradigm from which to observe the neoliberal subject in the information age. / Spanish

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The figure of the cyborg, or more latterly, the posthuman body has been an increasingly familiar presence in a number of academic disciplines. The majority of such studies have focused on popular culture, particularly the depiction of the posthuman in science-fiction, fantasy and horror. To date however, few studies have focused on the posthuman and the comic book superhero, despite their evident corporeality, and none have questioned comics’ readers about their responses to the posthuman body. This thesis presents a cultural history of the posthuman body in superhero comics along with the findings from twenty-five, two-hour interviews with readers. By way of literature reviews this thesis first provides a new typography of the posthuman, presenting it not as a stable bounded subject but as what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) describe as a ‘rhizome’. Within the rhizome of the posthuman body are several discursive plateaus that this thesis names Superhumanism (the representation of posthuman bodies in popular culture), Post/Humanism (a critical-theoretical stance that questions the assumptions of Humanism) and Transhumanism (the philosophy and practice of human enhancement with technology). With these categories in mind the thesis explores the development of the posthuman in body in the Superhuman realm of comic books. Exploring the body-types most prominent during the Golden (1938-1945), Silver (1958-1974) and contemporary Ages of superheroes it presents three explorations of what I term the Perfect Body, Cosmic Body and Military-Industrial Body respectively. These body types are presented as ‘assemblages’ (Delueze and Guattari, 1987) that display rhizomatic connections to the other discursive realms of the Post/Human and Transhuman. This investigation reveals how the depiction of the Superhuman body developed and diverged from, and sometimes back into, these realms as each attempted to territorialise the meaning and function of the posthuman body. Ultimately it describes how, in spite of attempts by nationalistic or economic interests to control Transhuman enhancement in real-world practices, the realms of Post/Humanism and Superhumanism share a more critical approach. The final section builds upon this cultural history of the posthuman body by addressing reader’s relationship with these images. This begins by refuting some of the common assumptions in comics studies about superheroes and bodily representations. Readers stated that they viewed such imagery as iconographic rather than representational, whether it was the depiction of bodies or technology. Moreover, regular or committed readers of superhero comics were generally suspicious of the notion of human enhancement, displaying a belief in the same binary categories -artificial/natural, human/non-human - that critical Post/Humanism seeks to problematize. The thesis concludes that while superhero comics remain ultimately too human to be truly Post/Humanist texts, it is never the less possible to conceptualise the relationship between reader, text, producer and so on in Post/Humanist terms as reading-assemblage, and that such a cyborgian fusing of human and comic book allow both bodies to ‘become other’, to move in new directions and form new assemblages not otherwise possible when considered separately.

The aim of this thesis is to read Bruno Schulz’s The Cinnamon Shops through the theoretical framework of Deleuze and Guattari, focusing on the relation between territorialization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization. This is investigated through examples from the The Cinnamon Shops, focusing on different aspects of how territorialization is portrayed in Bruno Schulz’s corpus. The goal is to show how the stories of Bruno Schulz are structured around various forms of territorializations, be it the home, the family shop or the town in itself. However, those territories are almost always negated through deterritorializing acts. In this act we get to face something new, something temporary and fragile, which in itself creates the essential crack or leakage in the text. Those acts of deterritorialization can’t be allowed to continue undisturbed but must be shut down through various forms of reterritorialization. This form of reading is only possible when the text is seen as a rhizomatic structure, with no clear center or periphery. It is brought forward how each of those texts are segmented in various manners, either binary or linear, which affects how the territorializing acts can be perceived.

The thesis Otherness and Identity deals with the discourse of Gilles Deleuze (Différence et répétition, 1968) and Deleuze in cooperation with Félix Guattari (Capitalisme et schizophrénie: L'Anti-Oedipe, 1972, Mille plateaux, 1980, Qu'est-ce que la philosophie?, 1991). On the basis of their discourse the process of individuation is constructed, and is at first situated into deleuzean space-time. The process of individuation is based on the principle of inner difference that is understood as a generative principle which "makes the difference". In this sense, the concept of individuation represents a concept of otherness unlike the concept of identity. The first and the second part of the thesis present basic principles of thinking of Deleuze and Guattari. In the third part of the thesis the principle of identity is localized in the work of Deleuze and Guattari. This concept is understood as a consequence of illegitimate uses of the synthesis of unconsciousness. On this ground their critique of psychoanalytic reproduction of repressive Oedipal structures is presented. And the Oedipal structure in it's reproductive function is also presented as a construct of sexual identity. The fourth part of the thesis is devoted to confrontation of opinion motivations, views and strategies of Deleuze and Guattari...

In an age of unbridled global capitalism and caustic neocolonial relations to land and life, the question of the aims and approaches of doing counselling with young people, particularly those majoritarian youth who are inheriting the privileges and specters of capitalist and colonial conquest, is pertinent. This dissertation is a collection of three theoretical papers on critical counselling with majoritarian young people in the context of contemporary Empire. A critical lens drawn from decolonial analyses was applied to mainstream counselling practice and theory. By developing a map of how contemporary Empire functions as a permutation of settler colonialism and globalized capitalism, this work investigates the forms of power and discourse that structure contemporary counselling, particularly the bio-medical-industrial-complex of psychiatry and the pharmacology industry, societies of control and digital technology, affective labour, and coloniality. Practices of vulnerability, self-reflexivity, decolonization, accountability, and critique are weaved into a cartographic methodology to redefine counselling as an ethics-driven and politicized intervention in the reproduction of majoritarian subjectivity. In the 21st century, globalized capitalism and settler colonialism seek to push past material limits and appropriate the products of human relatedness—feelings, ideas, cultures, and creations. In resisting this affective extractivism, these papers explore what it might mean to position engagement, living encounter, and relationship in an ethics-based counselling paradigm of resistance and social justice. The challenge of a critical counselling praxis commensurate with such a paradigm is to find avenues to intervene in the majoritarian psyche’s capito-colonial grip on all forms of land and life. Counselling in an Age of Empire proposes that a politicized account of counselling with majoritarian subjects might prove to be a productive space for recrafting subjectivities. Through a careful critique of the majoritarian subject, in the roles of both counsellor and client, a praxis of counselling attentive to political context, based in living encounter, and grounded in a settler ethics of vulnerability and accountability is sketched out. Overall, the work is aimed at majoritarian students and counsellors, their teachers, and those interested in developing a counselling praxis grounded in settler ethics, critique, vulnerability, and the power of living encounter. / Graduate / 2019-09-30

This study was an exploration of the professional identities of secondary school mid-career art educators through arts-based educational research [ABER]. The aim of this research was to gain understandings of mid-career art educators’ perceptions of their professional identities. Inspired by my personal experiences as an art educator, this study engaged other art educators to visualise their professional identities, as secondary mid-career art educators in England, and contribute new perspectives to the research community. Theoretically, this study is aligned with the writings of Dewey (1934, 1944), Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 1994). Deleuze and Guattari’s post-structural concept of the rhizome formed the basis for the development of the ideas associated with identity. As an assemblage, the rhizome is a complex system based on non-linear, reactionary growth patterns. The non-linear growth of the rhizome is facilitated by the activation of the in-between. As such, the rhizome connects to a view of identity as an unstable, flexible and fragmented entity that is in a constant state of becoming (Bauman, 2000). Dewey’s pragmatism was connected with Deleuzian post-structural theory through the writings of Semetsky (2006). Dewey (1944) and Greene’s (1973, 2003) writings associated with democratic education and artistic development connected these theoretical considerations with constructivism, the arts and education. Sachs’ (2003) writing on progressive and bureaucratic education provided a framework for the discussion of professionalism and professional identities. As a contribution to ABER this study was based on a/r/tography (Springgay et al., 2008) as a methodology and actively integrated image and text to the data collection and data analysis. Collage was used as the main arts-based method to develop responses from the participants and to visualise the participant data. This research asked mid-career art educators with busy lives and demanding occupations to consider who they are and express their views through art. These images of identities reflected the complex in-between-ness of professionalism in education.