No description available.

Thesis--PlanB (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Stout, 1998. / Description based on microfiche version record. Includes bibliographical references.

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published_or_final_version / Public Health / Master / Master of Public Health

This thesis studies Oscar Wilde’s encounter with the idea of China in late nineteenth century Britain. After Marcartney’s embassy to the Qing court and the two Opium Wars, “China” became an increasingly negative idea in nineteenth century Britain. Wilde’s sympathy with China under such historical circumstances induces reconsiderations of the relationship among aestheticism, orientalism, and modernism. The story of how Wilde utilized and appropriated Chinese culture is at the same time a story about how orientalism was used by British aestheticism to protest against the late Victorian middle-class ideology and invent the politics of modernist aesthetics. This thesis contributes to the study of the idea of China in nineteenth century Britain in general and to the scholarship on Oscar Wilde, aestheticism and modernism in particular. Wilde’s reading of Chuang Tzu and his appreciation of the anti-realist Chinese aesthetic and visual power embodied in patterned blue and white china helped him articulate his aestheticism. The thesis examines Chinese influence on his aesthetic, social and political ideas against British middle-class ideology. The historical contexts of Wilde’s encounter with Chinese philosophy and material culture are also scrutinized to show that China, as an exotic-familiar antithesis to British bourgeois ideology, became a critical point of reference for Wilde to launch his trenchant criticism of Western society. Works and collections by other proponents of British aestheticism, such as James McNeill Whistler and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, are also included to further demonstrate China’s role in the British Aesthetic Movement. The thesis is based on three interrelated central arguments: first, British aestheticism was a reaction to the social problems and consumer culture in late Victorian Britain, and it aims to aestheticize not only art, but also life and society; second, the nineteenth-century British construction of China, especially in the translation and deciphering of Chuang Tzu in early British sinology in Chapter one, and in Chapter Two, blue and white china’s visual anti-realism widely discussed and condemned in the late Victorian mass media, crucially participated in Wilde’s theory of art and British aestheticism in general; third, Wilde’s aestheticism, by incorporating Chinese thought and aesthetics, had experimented with modernist aesthetics before it came to be known as such. Although Wilde and other British aesthetes were complicit in the orientalist construction of China when placing China and the West into a binary position, they revised the nineteenth-century British imperial discourse that subjugated and denigrated the Orient and invested in the kind of Sino-British communication advocating and incorporating the aesthetic values of Chinese culture. / published_or_final_version / English / Master / Master of Philosophy

This thesis explores cross-cultural encounters between China and three British left-wing writers – Harold Laski, W. H. Auden and Joseph Needham. The motivations underlying this study are the diversity and intensiveness of the British left’s engagements with China’s search for modernization in the twentieth century. Laski, Auden and Needham were all prominent British left-wing intellectuals, and each exerted a remarkable influence on the Chinese pursuit of modern democracy, literature, and science, the three important pillars of China’s modernization since the May Fourth period. Grouping them together, the thesis makes a contribution to the study of the international impacts of the British left in general and the study of Sino-British cultural exchanges in particular. The conventional view emphasizes Western influences on China in modern times as unilateral knowledge transplantation from the advanced West to the backward East, thus the important role of the Chinese intelligentsia as cultural agency is often marginalized. This thesis, by contrast, interprets the British left’s encounters with China as a process of interactive, dynamic, even dialectical transformation, from which both sides derived intellectual benefits. It not only demonstrates the initiative taken by the Chinese intellectuals in translating, interpreting, and applying Western knowledge to address their own particular problems, but also attempts to show the inspirations the British left-wing writers took from China in their own humanitarian struggle for a more liberal, equitable and peaceful world. The thesis is organized in chronological order with the earliest encounter discussed first. Chapter One examines Laski’s impact on Chinese liberals’ imagination and construction of an equitable and democratic China. It shows that the Chinese applications of Laski’s political theory to their local concerns were highly selective, and it was difficult for Chinese liberals to fully embrace Laski’s thought because of the inner conflict between the liberal and Marxist aspects of Laski. Chapter Two discusses Auden and Isherwood’s co-authored book Journey to a War (1939) in the critical tradition of travel writing. It argues that their ironic self-consciousness of the travel book genre itself makes the book unique in Western representations of China, but exposes them to the critical charge of immature frivolity. It also shows that Auden worked towards a symbolic solution for the conflicting demands of the public and private worlds by interpreting the China war into a global human history in his sonnets. Chapter Three focuses on the reception of Auden’s poetry in China. Exposing the limitations of the prevailing formalist-aesthetic approach, it unearths Zhu Weiji’s Marxist interpretation of Auden and proposes an ideological criticism to re-examine Auden’s influences on Chinese modernist poets. Chapter Four explores Needham’s conversion to Chinese culture and his influences on China’s understanding of its own science. By tracing various Chinese responses to the Needham Question, it argues that although Needham’s research boosted the confidence of Chinese in their scientific tradition, the Chinese hunger for modern science is closely associated with nationalism, which is contradictory to the socialist universalism that behind Needham’s intellectual project. / published_or_final_version / English / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

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Magistro darbe susistemintas teorinis savivaldybių finansinės struktūros, biudžeto sudarymo, finansinės atskaitomybės traktavimas, daugiau įsigilinta į savivaldybių biudžeto planavimo, tikslinimo ir vykdymo etapus, savivaldybių pajamų ir išlaidų analizės principus. Darbo teorinėje dalyje naudoti Lietuvos ir užsienio šalių mokslininkų darbai, straipsniai, tyrimai, neapseita ir be atitinkamų LR įstatymų, LR Vyriausybės nutarimų, LR finansų ministro įsakymų. Darbo praktinėje dalyje analizuoti 2002 – 2007 metų Šiaulių rajono savivaldybės tarybos sprendimai dėl biudžeto. Atliktos Šiaulių rajono savivaldybės biudžeto pajamų ir išlaidų dinaminė, struktūrinė, koreliacinė analizės. Patvirtinama autorės suformuluota mokslinio tyrimo hipotezė, kad savivaldybėms trūksta finansinio savarankiškumo, todėl formuojant pajamas ir vykdant asignavimus, reikšmingiausia tampa išorinių ekonominių veiksnių įtaka. / The budget of Siauliai district municipality, the processes of budget planning, correction and performance, the structure and dynamics of incomes and expenditure have been analyzed in this Master thesis. The analysis of scientific literature, the laws of the Republic of Lithuania, acts and decisions of Siauliai district council are presented in the work. The laws of the Republic of Lithuania regulating the activities of municipal institutions have been evaluated. Works of Lithuanian and foreign authors on local self–government, municipality functions as well as an institutional structure of the municipality have been analyzed and systematized and a model institutional structure of the municipality in Lithuania has been presented and analyzed. The activities of Siauliai district municipality in the municipal general institutional system have been discussed in the work. Having done the analysis a conclusion was made that budgets formation in municipalities should be improved.

The impetus for this study was my own curiosity about how seasoned entrepreneurial women were able to stay the course. As someone who has experienced the world of the employee and that of the entrepreneur, my goal was to better understand how, within their varied personal contexts, the lifelong learning experiences of seasoned entrepreneurial women were shaped by socio-cultural influences, significant individuals, gender, and learning challenges. Theories and research on lifelong and biographical learning, entrepreneurial learning, women's learning, and entrepreneurial women's learning helped to frame the study. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews and focus groups with eight women entrepreneurs between the ages of 40 and 60, with 16 to 30 years' experience in running their service-oriented enterprise were conducted. These women's stories illustrate how serendipitous their careers were, that is, they did not begin their working lives thinking they would become entrepreneurs, rather, it became the path that best supported their desires, independence and creativity. They were shaped by and sometimes resisted parents' messages about the role that education, work and marriage with children should play in women's lives. How they faced and learned from adversity and from the support of business mentors and friends were also significant. As they reflected back on their lives, they have a strong sense of mastery. Success for them did not focus on finances, rather, their autonomy, freedom, and control over the direction of their lives and the development of strong caring relationships with others, were key. Their learning was dynamic and experiential, it was both self directed and drew on others' knowledge. Women contemplating an entrepreneurial path may find this study of interest as they can learn how others, particularly family, shape their dreams, how they might meet challenges and learn from adversity, and overall, how central lifelong learning is to the development of their entrepreneurial careers. Educators and policymakers need to appreciate the serendipitous nature of entrepreneurship, how they can create entrepreneurial experiences for students, and expose the learners to not only essential skills required to run a business, but also to the stories regarding the self-development of successful entrepreneurs

This study represents the scandal of current colonial racist ideologizing by focusing on the American Orientalizing project in Singapore. It argues that, in the era of global capitalism and post-colonial theory, the new colonialist epistemologies rely on collaborations between the ruling classes of the 'third world' and 'first world' as well as a rhetoric of 'native' nationalism to contain threatening non-Western economic success and to create 'third world' populations and governments that will not resist the continuation of the Western/American colonizing project. Using a Marxist-Lacanian psychoanalytical theory of hegemony, of a "libidinal politics" which focuses on the role of desire in national culture, this thesis shows that the Singapore government has used American Orientalist ideology to effect disempowering cultural changes in the people. Examining political and literary texts, I argue that the Singapore government quotes American notions of 'Oriental' difference to keep "dangerous Western (liberal) influences" from 'ethnically contaminating' the nation, and that it has hegemonized an 'Asian'/'Confucianist' nationalism by hystericizing and repressing the people's desire, leading Singaporeans to disavow their location in a post-modern world. The Orientalizing of Singapore, where Chinese identity has been produced as a masquerade of Western culture, has also generated a crisis in male identity, involving an inward-looking escapist cultural narcissism that blocks a positive response to historical realities. Paradoxically, the claim to a non-Western modernity has also been used to suppress ethnic difference by producing ethnicity as 'fetish.' The East/West discourse that emerged from the caning of an American teenager, Michael Fay, in Singapore is used to reveal the entrapment of Singapore's 'Oriental' national identity in American colonial desire, and to argue that the perceived East Asian 'cultural confidence' often spoken about today overlooks the fact that such cultural certitude accrues from the East entering into the West's fantasy scenarios and staging itself as the other's object of desire. This thesis suggests that current 'post-colonial' claims to "ethnic, non-Western" modernisms be viewed with some skepticism as possibly involving the ventriloquistic 'passing' of Western colonial ideology as the voice of the 'racial other.'