Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-11, Section: A, page: 4325. Adviser: Karen L. Fresco. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 319-339) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wyoming, 2007. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on Dec. 1, 2008). Includes bibliographical references (p. 59-60).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1976. / Vita. Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-07, Section: A, page: 2565. Adviser: Marianne Kalinke. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 203-211) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

<p> This dissertation explores the work of author Jonas Hassen Khemiri and filmmaker Ruben &Ouml;stlund, examining the ways both artists consistently negotiate racial identification and &ldquo;Swedishness&rdquo; in neoliberal economic contexts that are often at odds with other Swedish, exceptionalist discourses of social justice. Khemiri and &Ouml;stlund represent contrasting perspectives and tonalities, yet both artists identify the successful competition for capital as a potentially critical component in achieving access to &ldquo;Swedishness.&rdquo; Khemiri and &Ouml;stlund recognize that race and economics are intertwined in neoliberal arguments, even in Sweden, something their works help to elucidate. The implications of such similar observations from very different artists might go overlooked if discussed in isolation. </p><p> I argue that it is crucial to analyze the negotiation of identity in these works not merely in abstract economic terms, but through their use of a very specific neoliberal economic discourse. In Khemiri&rsquo;s and &Ouml;stlund&rsquo;s work, characters-of-color and white characters alike employ and internalize this neoliberal discourse as they compete in a highly racialized Swedish society filled with increasing economic precarity. I will also discuss the ways Khemiri and &Ouml;stlund continually undermine these characters&rsquo; attempts to succeed in this economic competition, and what this may say about the need for the ultimate deconstruction of normative categories of identity. </p><p> Another aim of this dissertation is to explore the ways Khemiri and &Ouml;stlund use queerness as a conceptual strategy to mediate the understanding of race and economics. Nearly every one of &Ouml;stlund&rsquo;s films and most of Khemiri&rsquo;s novels and plays feature queerness in the form of homosexual characters, homoeroticism, and/or homosociality. The ubiquity of queerness in their work helps us understand the connection between masculinity and the maintenance of economic privilege. Queering this connection can generate narratives that undermine normative categories and present new ways of thinking about neoliberal ideology. </p><p> However, both Khemiri and &Ouml;stlund frequently undermine the potential positives of what Jack Halberstam calls &ldquo;queer failure&rdquo; and portray what appears as actual failure (Halberstam 2011). Khemiri and &Ouml;stlund leave queer characters or characters who experience queerness in ambiguous positions, in which their queerness either fails to rescue them from toxic hetero-masculinity and/or becomes a symbolic manifestation of the dissolution of stable sense of selfhood amid competing discourses of &ldquo;Swedishness.&rdquo; This dissertation will examine the implications of actual queer failure in relation to neoliberalism in these works. The tension between competitive success or failure becomes even more pointed for a spectator or reader when the competitors are children, potential symbols of Sweden&rsquo;s future. In both artists&rsquo; work, the figure of the child continually represents this tension between competing, social-justice and neoliberal discourses. </p><p> Chapter One examines Khemiri&rsquo;s first two novels, <i>Ett &ouml;ga r&ouml;tt</i> (2003) and <i>Montecore &ndash; en unik tiger</i> (2006), as well as his play <i>Invasion!</i> (2006), exploring the way characters interpret and perform neoliberal economic values and how success and/or failure either jeopardizes or enhances a stable sense of identity. Chapter Two shifts attention to &Ouml;stlund&rsquo;s earlier films, focusing on his first widely-released and controversial films <i>De ofrivilliga </i> (2008), <i>Play</i> (2011) and <i>Turist</i> (2014), considering how characters embody or challenge notions of the neoliberal subject of capacity. In &Ouml;stlund&rsquo;s films, this struggle with &ldquo;Swedishness&rdquo; is often portrayed as a Nietzschean tension between individual will and social pressure. Chapter Three will compare and contrast &Ouml;stlund&rsquo;s and Khemiri&rsquo;s most recent works &ap;<i>[ungef&auml;r lika med]</i> (2014), <i>Allt jag inte minns</i> (2015), and <i>The Square </i> (2017). In this final chapter, I argue that Khemiri&rsquo;s and &Ouml;stlund&rsquo;s most recent work demonstrates a departure from their previous plays, novels, and films in two critical ways. First, all three works situate capitalism as the overarching cause of internalized tensions between the individual and society. Second, characters in these later works who embody neoliberal values symbolize the ultimate fractured identity. &Ouml;stlund and Khemiri appear to have followed a similar arc toward representing actual physical and mental embodiment of the effects of economic systems. The dissertation&rsquo;s conclusion suggests additional perspectives on the above works and offers ideas for potential future scholarship.</p><p>

This dissertation explores certain attitudes towards Jews and Judaism in Old Norse literature. Regardless of an apparent lack of actual Jewish settlement in the Nordic region during the Middle Ages, medieval Icelanders and Norwegians frequently turned to the image of 'the Jew' in writing and in art, sometimes using him as an abstract theological model, or elsewhere constructing a similar kind of ethnic Other to the anti-Semitic tropes we find in medieval societies where gentiles really did live alongside Jews. The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the differing histories and functions projected onto the absent Jew in medieval Scandinavia. / Germanic Languages and Literatures

The Independent Theatre's production of Ghosts at the Royalty Theatre, London in 1891 precipitated one of the most famous theatrical quarrels in European theater history. Although many have commented on the extremity of the response from the conservative reviewers, few have remarked on the fact that the majority of these reviews were laden with disease metaphors. Ibsen, in the age of the classic epidemic, comes to be perceived by his English hosts as a contagious entity. The importance of Ghosts , then, lies in its ability to "introduce into the cultural matrix a germ, a foreign body, that cannot be accounted for by its existing codes and practices" (Attridge 55–6). In this dissertation, I examine the theatrical reviews as serious cultural artifacts in order to avoid reducing them to mere entertaining invective. In "Myth Today," Barthes powerfully concludes that "[h]owever paradoxical it may seem, myth hides nothing: its function is to distort, not to make disappear" (121). The myth of Ghosts was all about "making public" to such a degree that it quickly overshot its usefulness. Thus I reconsider the myth of Ghosts in order to engage with the distortions of Ibsen, of theater, of disease and of England itself in the early 1890s. Ultimately, I trace the transmission of modern dramatic innovation from Ibsen to Arthur Wing Pinero. Pinero writes a series of plays in the 1890s distinctive both for their seriousness and their seeming similarity to Ibsen. The Second Mrs. Tanqueray and The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith establish Pinero as both a popular and a serious writer, something Ibsen could never quite accomplish. Although it is unfair to lay the "improvements" in Pinero's method solely at the feet of Ibsen, it is fair, I think, to demonstrate that without Ibsen's boundary-breaking work, Pinero could never have produced these important plays.

As the capital of Belgium and the headquarters of the European Union, present-day Brussels is a paradoxical city, defined by its multitude of governmental functions and characterized by its cultural and linguistic ambiguity. The city's history is marked by a unique linguistic metamorphosis that in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries transformed Brussels from a historically Dutch-speaking city into a predominantly Francophone urban setting with an official bilingual status. This study presents a comparative and historically situated analysis of the literary representations of Brussels produced in Flemish literature between 1830 and 1932. It concentrates on the changing position of Dutch in Brussels as a result of the frenchification of the city and the creation of a socio-linguistic urban hierarchy, in which French was the language of the ruling elite and Dutch became considered as an unsophisticated idiom, spoken by the lower classes. The investigative focus of this dissertation is on how Flemish authors have responded to these socio-linguistic developments and in what way these events have shaped their narrative construction of the city. The Flemish urban narratives are examined within the context of Brussels' linguistic, political and cultural history and within the framework of a linguistically polarizing Belgium. The chronological scope of this research begins in 1830 with Belgian independence and ends in 1932 when Brussels officially becomes a bilingual city. Its methodological approach is based on notion of the city as representation and on Michel Foucault's concept of 'heterotopia.' Considering these works of urban literature as heterotopian texts that hold up a critical mirror to the existing urban complexity enables one to recognize their ability to challenge and intervene in dominant urban discourses and to generate new and critical perspectives on the city. The literary representations of Brussels studied in this dissertation represent powerful narrative interventions in the socio-linguistic and political hierarchies that came to define the urban order in Brussels after 1830. The inextricable connection between language and class in Brussels makes these Flemish urban novels imaginative expressions of resistance to the linguistic inequality and social and political discrimination of the city's Dutch-speaking population.

Using data collected in the Icelandic community of Manitoba in the summer of 1985, this thesis outlines an alternative approach to the understanding of ethnicity in North America through analysis of the Icelandic Festival held each summer in Gimli, Manitoba. The Festival provides an entree through which the dynamics of the production, reproduction and transformation of West Icelandic identity are revealed. It is argued that when ethnic identity is conceived as being resident in the possession of particular attributes or characteristics, change becomes a threat to the continued existence of the ethnic group. As defined in this thesis, ethnic identity is an ideological representation of social relations which is contextualized in a particular historic formation. It involves a constant negotiation of the symbolic representation of identity through social interaction, and is contingent upon the consequences of these actions. Change, therefore, is a normal process of ethnicity which does not necessarily end in assimilation. Though the content of identity changes according to changing circumstances, it must retain the appearance of an "authentic" representation of the past. The Festival is a location of the political negotiation of Icelandic identity, as seen in the debates which exist in the community regarding the relevance of its Icelandic cultural content. It is argued that, while the Festival continues to address a public image of how the organizers believe the community should be perceived by the larger society, it is also a time when a private celebration takes place. This latter aspect of the Festival is where the perpetuation of the meaningfulness of Icelandic identity occurs. It is contained within the family reunions which take place during the Festival and the return to a sense of the past which is linked to a shared West Icelandic history. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

This dissertation explores case and verbal agreement in Icelandic. Case and agreement generally pattern together, but there are exceptional instances in which case and agreement come apart. In Icelandic, verbs agree with Nominative DPs. However, in some constructions, agreement with a Nominative is optional. In the standard account of case and agreement (Chomsky 2000), both types of features are determined simultaneously via the same syntactic operation. The standard theory, therefore, predicts that case and agreement should pattern the same way, and that neither should be optional. Moreover, based on fieldwork conducted at the University of Iceland, I present data that has not heretofore been reported. I argue that the likelihood of agreement depends on the type of construction. My research builds on other work which addresses optionality in Icelandic agreement (e.g. Sigurðsson and Holmberg 2008). This dissertation makes a substantial contribution to the literature on Icelandic agreement in that the rate of agreement across various types of constructions has not been examined. I illustrate that this type of optionality is not only robust, but also systematic. This dissertation contributes to the larger literature on case and agreement in several important ways. First, I argue for a departure from the standard proposal that case and agreement are established via the same syntactic operation. I propose that it is possible for the probe which assigns case to be in a relationship with a DP, even though the probe which establishes agreement is not in a relationship with that DP. Second, I provide empirical support for Multiple Agree. I argue that the survey findings reported in this dissertation provide evidence that a probe can enter into a relationship with more than one goal. Third, I provide empirical evidence for the optionality of Multiple Agree. I argue that agreement is optional only in constructions in which there is an item intervening between T and the Nominative, and Multiple Agree is, thereby, required in order for an agreement relationship to be established.