This thesis theorises the practice of three female British dance artists, Miranda Tufnell, Helen Poynor and Hilary Kneale. It engages with the central idea that a combined practice of creative writing and movement improvisation enhances the artist's articulation and assimilation of the experience of dance, consequently developing a deeper connection to the experiences of the body in relation to one's environment. Refuting common perception that the inadequacy of language fails to embody the experience of dance, I argue that the approaches used by these women contribute to a distillation of experience thus revealing the essence of movement. Importantly, it focuses on practices that have been born of the feminist consciousness that facilitated the development of both British postmodern dance and women's writing since 1970. As a result, I utilise Elizabeth Grosz's notions of freedom and writing otherwise, and David Abram's Merleau-Pontian ideas on participation to underpin theoretical endeavours. Fieldwork, in the form of interviews and the participation in/observation of various performances, workshops and training programmes, run by each of the dance artists studied, is presented. The development of my own practice resulting from these enquires is documented, analysed and appraised throughout the thesis. The Introduction outlines research questions addressed and methodological approaches undertaken before considering the historical context of each artist's unique practice. Each case study is preceded by a chapter that identifies biographical circumstances, creative choices, and socio-political conditions that have influenced the careers of these dance artists. The function of writing as a bridge between the subjective embodied experience and objective analysis of that experience is examined alongside an assessment of the scope of each practice as a method of harvesting a [re]connection with nature and its power to generate self-affirming stories. Finally, the conclusion offers thoughts on the difficulties of such an endeavour within the framework of contemporary thought that maintains its stance on the split between [body]dance and [mind]written language.

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This thesis demonstrates the aesthetic impact of crisis on Ingeborg Bachmann's late verse and prose. It examines poetic drafts written during a period of personal breakdown in the 1960s, which have largely been received as documents of personal suffering, and identifies these texts as a radical stage of writing that was to prove formally significant for Bachmann's development of the prose "Todesarten"-Projekt. This thesis draws on the new material made available with the publication of these poetic drafts to chart the genesis of Bachmann's acclaimed late oeuvre. By selecting and grouping lyric fragments, the thesis defines recurrent features in this verse and accounts for the texts as a body of writing that forms a radical, yet undocumented, part of this oeuvre. In terms of both their form and of their content, the fragmentary drafts are shown to reflect new engagement with aspects of experience conventionally excluded from High Art. In light of Bachmann's growing preoccupation with the need for aesthetic engagement in the post-war era, close readings reveal how she set about taking her subjective suffering as a basis for a critique of the social order. The thesis outlines how, during the 1960s, Bachmann pioneered a symptomatic expressive mode that - in the disrupted form of the writing - found an indirect means of manifesting the wider origins of subjective disturbance. The ambiguous aesthetic status of these poetic drafts, which were never finished by Bachmann, is related to an inability to establish structural distance from crisis in lyric form. Building on its readings of the poetic drafts, the thesis traces Bachmann's prose experimentation with the same motifs. It identifies how, ultimately, the prose medium enabled the author to resolve problems of aesthetic form raised in the verse. Parallels with the work of other writers and thinkers illuminate the development of a reflexive mode where sophisticated aesthetic strategies enable the oblique expression of cultural critique.

Formulated as a feminist project, written as a pulp fiction, Architectural Flirtations: A Love Storey begins with our claim that the architectural discipline is centered around a culture of critique, which is based in what bell hooks calls “a system of imperialist, white supremacist, heterosexist, capitalist, patriarchy,” and that the values instilled by this culture not only begin with, but are reinforced and reproduced by, the education of young architects. Sounds serious. Right? In a move toward a more vulnerable, ethical and empowering culture of architecture, the project aims to displace the culture of critique, by questioning and undermining relationships of power and privilege through practices that are explicitly critical, queer feminist, and Campy. In other words, it takes seriously, in an uncertain, improper and playful way, what is usually deemed unserious within the architectural discipline, in order to undermine the usual order of things. All of the (love) storeys take place on March 21st, the spring equinox, in and around a 1977 collaborative row house project called Case Unifamiliari in Mozzo, Italy, designed by Aldo Rossi and Attilio Pizzigoni. Beda Ring, PhD researcher, constructs a Campy renovation of one of these row houses, full of theatricality, humor, and significant otherness; while architectural pedagogue, Brady Burroughs, guides a student group from KTH in an Architecture and Gender course; and Henri T. Beall, practicing architect, attends to the details upstairs. / <p>QC 20161025</p>

The purpose of my thesis is to analyze notions of the sublime in James Joyce’s Ulysses and how the sublime is evoked and presented in Joyce’s work. The present work will examine concepts of the sublime from the Classical and Medieval period, through the Enlightenment, and into the Romantic era to develop my own definition. Placing the sublime in a historical perspective allows me to discover how the sublime is at work through Joyce’s creative use of complex narrative approaches. The beauty of aesthetic perfection was achieved by employing all of Joyce’s artistic faculties. My thesis investigates how Ulysses’ experimental writing technique, unique structuring, and difficult prose created a work of genius which evokes the sublime. By analyzing Joyce’s use of language, unconventional narrative, and ambiguity in Ulysses I will explore how the sublime is aroused.

This thesis examines key examples of materially experimental writing (B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, Marc Saporta’s Composition No. 1, and Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch), hypertext fiction (Geoff Ryman’s 253, in both the online and print versions), and video games (Catherine, L.A. Noire, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and Phantasmagoria), and asks what new critical understanding of these ‘interactive’ texts, and their broader significance, can be developed by considering the examples as part of a textual continuum. Chapter one focuses on materially experimental writing as part of the textual continuum that is discussed throughout this thesis. It examines the form, function, and reception of key texts, and unpicks emerging issues surrounding truth and realism, the idea of the ostensibly ‘infinite’ text in relation to multicursality and potentiality, and the significance of the presence of authorial instructions that explain to readers how to interact with the texts. The discussions of chapter two centre on hypertext fiction, and examine the significance of new technologies to the acts of reading and writing. This chapter addresses hypertext fiction as part of the continuum on which materially experimental writing and video games are placed, and explores reciprocal concerns of reader agency, multicursality, and the idea of the ‘naturalness’ of hypertext as a method of reading and writing. Chapter three examines video games as part of the continuum, exploring the relationship between print textuality and digital textuality. This chapter draws together the discussions of reciprocity that are ongoing throughout the thesis, examines the significance of open world gaming environments to player agency, and unpicks the idea of empowerment in players and readers. This chapter concludes with a discussion of possible cultural reasons behind what I argue is the reader’s/player’s desire for a high level of perceived agency. The significance of this thesis, then, lies in how it establishes the existence of several reciprocal concerns in these texts including multicursality/potentiality, realism and the accurate representation of truth and, in particular, player and reader agency, which allow the texts to be placed on a textual continuum. This enables cross-media discussions of the reciprocal concerns raised in the texts, which ultimately reveals the ways in which our experiences with these interactive texts are deeply connected to our anxieties about agency in a cultural context in which individualism is encouraged, but our actual individual agency is highly limited.

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