This project asserts that much of the cultural anxiety found in Gothic-infused late-Victorian fiction derives from literary revelations of the nested spaces, shifting identities, and spontaneous connections inherent to the late-Victorian metropolis. The three literary texts studied here – The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle, Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman by E.W. Hornung, and The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan – all depict London as fundamentally suitable for those who seek to evade the disciplinary gaze and to pursue menacing schemes of criminality and invasion. Doyle’s text illustrates the interconnectedness of the spaces within London as well as the passable threshold between London and the English countryside; both the villain Stapleton and the hero Sherlock Holmes use these connections to attack and defend, respectively, the city and its inhabitants. Hornung’s stories depict the machinations employed by the gentleman-thief Raffles as he alters his identity and his codes of behaviour in order to free himself to pursue criminal ends and thus as he challenges cultural barriers. Buchan’s text, building on the others, explores the dissolution of cultural boundaries and identities incumbent upon the spontaneous connections made between those who attack English culture and those, like Richard Hannay, who defend it. There emerges in these texts a vision of London (and by extension Great Britain) as a swirling vortex of motion, an unknowable labyrinth perpetually threatened by menacing agents from without and within. I have employed Victor Turner’s theories of liminality and communitas to describe how criminal agents, and their equally menacing “good-guy” pursuers, separate themselves from structured society in order to move freely and to gain access to the contested thresholds they seek to infiltrate. I also invoke theories of the Gothic, surveillance, and travel, as well as Jeffrey Cohen’s monster theory, to characterize the anxiety embedded in such invasions. / The transformation of contested space : Baker Street, Grimpen Mire and the battle for thresholds in The hound of the Baskervilles -- Hornung's code-switching monster : threatening ambiguity and liminoid mobility in Raffles, the amateur cracksman -- Towards a more inclusive Britishness : Richard Hannay's transformative connections and evolving identity in The thrity-nine steps. / Department of English

This dissertation examines the relationship between wisdom and identity in Old English and Old Norse-Icelandic literature. At present, the study of medieval wisdom is largely tangential to the study of proverbs and maxims. This dissertation makes wisdom its primary object of study; it sees wisdom not just as a literary category, but also as a cultural discourse found in texts not usually included in the wisdom canon. I therefore examine both wisdom literature and wisdom in literature. The central characteristic of wisdom, I argue, is its liminality. The biblical question “Where is wisdom to be found?” is difficult to answer because of wisdom’s in-between-ness: it is ever between individuals, communities, and times (Job 28:12 Douay-Rheims). As a liminal discourse, wisdom both grounds and problematizes identity in Old English and Old Norse-Icelandic literature. After a preliminary chapter that defines key terms such as “wisdom” and “wisdom literature,” I examine heroic wisdom in three characters who are defined by their wise traits and skills and yet who are ultimately betrayed by wisdom to death or exile. The implications of this problematic relation to wisdom are then examined in the next chapter, which analyzes the composition of wisdom in proverb poems. Like the wise hero, the poets represented in these poems blend their own voices with the voice of community, demonstrating that identity is open and therefore in need of constant revision. Next I examine how the liminality of wisdom is embodied in the figure of the wise monster, who negatively marks the boundaries of society and its desires. This then leads to a study of the reception of wisdom in chapter six, which focuses on instruction poems. Like narratives of wise monsters, these texts present lore as the nostalgic remnant of a tradition that defines identity, in this case the identity of a community. However, nostalgia assumes loss, and these texts also reveal an underlying fear that wisdom, the basis of the community’s identity, will be forgotten. Whether communal or individual, identity in this literature is both formed and threatened by liminal wisdom. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2014-05-08 15:35:46.885

This study explores the possibilities of rewriting the text of a complex novel as a film script. Film is an important contemporary artform but the actuality of the thematic content of contemporary Afrikaans novels is not well represented in current films. In this study an adaptation of the novel, The long silence of Mario Salviati by Etienne van Heerden (2000) ,t o a script is made in an attempt to provide the Afrikaans scriptwriter with a workable method. The theme which features prominently in the adaptation is the experience of identity in the post-colonial and/or post-apartheid era in South Africa. Theoretical reflection on the problem of adaptation is essential before the chosen novel can be turned into a script, since the scriptwriter has to make certain adjustments during the process of adaptation. The adaptation of a novel to a script implies the translation of a written, descriptive text into a visual text. When a complex novel such as The long silence of Mario Salviati is rewritten as a script, a detailed analysis of the novel must be undertaken in order to identify the relevant ideological content, the important themes and underlying meanings which should be retained in the film script. In order to find appropriate visual images for the thematic content of the novel, contributions of semiotics to film studies are studied and implemented in the process of visualisation. The chosen theme for the script of The long silence of Mario Salviati is "Identity, hybridity and liminality in the Tallejare community". This theme features prominently in many narratives about post-colonial and post-apartheid issues; therefore theoretical reflections on the concepts of liminality and hibridity are included in the study. There are two main sections in the dissertation. In the first section aspects of scriptwriting are analysed and discussed in order to develop a workable method for scriptwriters. The study entertains the hope that more contemporary Afrikaans novels will be adapted for the big screen or television by the film industry. This is necessary to ensure that the experience of South African identity is represented adequately in the Afrikaans film industry. The second section of the dissertation contains the film script, which is an adaptation of the novel The long silence of Mario Salviati by Etienne van Heerden. The script forms an integral part of the study as well as of the dissertation. / Thesis (M.A. (Afrikaans and Dutch))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2007.

This study explores the possibilities of rewriting the text of a complex novel as a film script. Film is an important contemporary artform but the actuality of the thematic content of contemporary Afrikaans novels is not well represented in current films. In this study an adaptation of the novel, The long silence of Mario Salviati by Etienne van Heerden (2000) ,t o a script is made in an attempt to provide the Afrikaans scriptwriter with a workable method. The theme which features prominently in the adaptation is the experience of identity in the post-colonial and/or post-apartheid era in South Africa. Theoretical reflection on the problem of adaptation is essential before the chosen novel can be turned into a script, since the scriptwriter has to make certain adjustments during the process of adaptation. The adaptation of a novel to a script implies the translation of a written, descriptive text into a visual text. When a complex novel such as The long silence of Mario Salviati is rewritten as a script, a detailed analysis of the novel must be undertaken in order to identify the relevant ideological content, the important themes and underlying meanings which should be retained in the film script. In order to find appropriate visual images for the thematic content of the novel, contributions of semiotics to film studies are studied and implemented in the process of visualisation. The chosen theme for the script of The long silence of Mario Salviati is "Identity, hybridity and liminality in the Tallejare community". This theme features prominently in many narratives about post-colonial and post-apartheid issues; therefore theoretical reflections on the concepts of liminality and hibridity are included in the study. There are two main sections in the dissertation. In the first section aspects of scriptwriting are analysed and discussed in order to develop a workable method for scriptwriters. The study entertains the hope that more contemporary Afrikaans novels will be adapted for the big screen or television by the film industry. This is necessary to ensure that the experience of South African identity is represented adequately in the Afrikaans film industry. The second section of the dissertation contains the film script, which is an adaptation of the novel The long silence of Mario Salviati by Etienne van Heerden. The script forms an integral part of the study as well as of the dissertation. / Thesis (M.A. (Afrikaans and Dutch))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2007.

This practice-led research enquiry examines the form and experience of postdramatic theatre and intermediality. Through three practice-led enquiry cycles, the performance, Unstable Acts, was created. The study was designed to introduce the practitioner to a new process of practice within a postmodern aesthetic and to investigate the theory and practice of intermedial performance. Accordingly, Unstable Acts generated moments of praxis concerning postdramatic theatre and intermediality. By analysing this praxis an increasingly complex understanding of de-representational performance, the liminal experience, percipience, reflection and intermediality in postdramatic theatre was developed. In responding to Unstable Acts, the study proposes a working model for the poetics of postdramatic theatre which places intermediality as a formal recurrence of the postdramatic form. The model also proposes that the postdramaturgical strategy of de-representational performance is a central stylistic quality of postdramatic form, and that the liminal experience is central to the postdramatic theatre experience. Connecting de-representation and liminality through queer theory, the model contends that reflection is an important aspect of both the form and experience of postdramatic theatre. In so doing, the study provides a clearer understanding for theorists and practitioners of the poetics of postdramatic theatre and the position of intermediality in postdramatic practice.

Using an analysis of the creation of the character Dan Kelly in my play, risk, I argue that fairytale characters work as more than personage representations. They function on a big canvas for the audience; they carry large chains of association. Given this, I then propose that the human response is to infer additional meaning, meaning beyond the scope of plot and immediate character interaction - the audience infers symbolic meaning, ‘amplifying’ what is there into more. They enter a ‘generative empty space’ within the play where they infer or ‘unfold’ more meaning. In creating this ‘greater tale’, they are engaged beyond their personal ‘horizon of understanding’, and so, ‘take in’ the work through a heightened perceptual acuity. Therefore, I pursued the idea of making space for the operation of this process, of leveraging the creation of meaning around a character. My inquiry led me to believe that a powerful way to do this was through absence rather than presence and silence rather than sound; and this had a profound impact on my choice of form for Dan Kelly: he progressed, through a number of stages, from reportage to a digital representation.

‘Becoming Animal’: Motifs of Hybridity and Liminality in Fairy Tales and Selected Contemporary Artworks serves as a theoretical examination of the concept of the hybrid. My research unpacks the liminal aspect of hybridity, locating the hybrid in the imaginative world of popular fairy tales, folk lore and mythology. In my accompanying MFA exhibition, Becoming(s), I explore these motifs through an installation of mixed-media sculptures which are based on the hybrid creatures that populated the fantasy world of my childhood. The written component of my MFA submission will relate directly to my professional art practise, developing it further and situating it within a relevant context. In my mini-thesis I will consider the liminal in relation to the ‘animal turn’ in contemporary art, with a particular focus on relevant artists working with the motifs of hybridity, such as Nandipha Mntambo, Jane Alexander and Kiki Smith. The ‘animal turn’ is a term used by Kari Weil (2010: 3) to describe a contemporary interest in issues of the nonhuman, and in the ways that the relationship between humans and nonhumans is marked by “difference, otherness and power”. Of key concern to my research will be Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of ‘becoming animal’. Rather than describing a transition from one stable state to another, ‘becoming animal’ suggests a radical dissolution of boundaries – not just between species (such as ‘human’ and ‘animal’) but between any essentialising binaries. As such, ‘becoming animal’ suggests a conception of identity as being fluid and mutable, rather than stable and fixed.

In this study, the intersections between Equine Assisted Psychotherapeutic interventions and adolescence are explored. Equine Assisted therapeutic work has recently gained much popularity in the field of psychology, due to many reported benefits, which include the value of the use of the horse as a tool in psychotherapy. Adolescence is acknowledged to be a difficult transitional phase, punctuated with many challenges, such as identity development. As this study is conducted by a trainee psychotherapist and researcher, the work also contains a reflexive exploration of these fields, with personal reflections regarding the researcher‟s own experience in the fields. This study is framed as a transtheoretical bricolage, which includes elements of reflexivity, heuristics, transpersonal, and phenomenological research approaches. Data was gathered from individual interviews with co-researchers, focus group interviews, personal reflections, and inclusion of non-verbal information from the horses who formed part of this study. Data analysis was done by means of a Thematic Data Analysis. The research findings reflect themes on different levels, which are: content themes, process themes, meta-reflections on the research process, and a meta-analysis of the research and individual developmental process which took place in the production of this work / Psychology / M. A. (Clinical Psychology)

Fondé sur les bases de la sociocritique des textes, ce mémoire a pour objectif d'étudier le traitement du néolibéralisme dans la trilogie Vernon Subutex de Virginie Despentes. L'analyse dégage d'une part l'uniformisation de l'espace romanesque, lequel est réduit à l'opposition des villes et des périphéries, et d'autre part l'uniformisation du temps romanesque causé par l'imposition des lois du marché, qui donne lieu à l'abolition de la distinction entre le temps de travail - production - et le temps de loisir - consommation. Cette suppression est plus amplement explorée par l'étude de l'insistance permanente du texte sur l'enracinement et la stabilisation de l'économie de l'attention. Le mémoire fait ressortir les conséquences de ces modulations sur la société romanesque, lesquelles sont la disparition des filets de protection sociale, l'atomisation d'une société livrée aux intérêts privés des individus, la normalisation d'une violence sociale et institutionnelle systémique, ainsi que la labilisation de la frontière entre le privé et le public sous l'effet d'une instrumentalisation des processus cognitifs, de l'intimité, des affects, des identités individuelles et des identités collectives. Ainsi, la lecture des romans de Despentes met en évidence la dimension téléologique de la conjoncture historique actuelle. Elle se propose également de démontrer le caractère liminaire du personnage de Vernon Subutex, le personnage éponyme de la trilogie et le noyau de la genèse textuelle autour duquel gravitent une multitude de personnages marginaux. La "mise en texte" (Duchet) du personnel romanesque est telle qu'elle saisit un moment dans le devenir historique, social, économique et culturel et qu'elle confère au motif symbolique du seuil un rôle capital dans la poétique du roman. / Founded on the basis of "sociocritique", this thesis aims to study how neoliberalism is present in the Vernon Subutex trilogy written by Virginie Despentes. The analysis reveals on the one hand the standardization of the textual space, which is reduced to an opposition between cities and peripheries, and on the other hand the standardization of the textual time caused by the enforcement of the laws of the market, which causes the abolition of the distinction between working time - production - and leisure time - consumption. This deletion is more fully explored by studying the text's permanent insistence on the rooting and stabilization of attention economy. The thesis highlights the consequences of these transformations on the society of the novel: the disappearance of social safety nets, the atomization of a society abandoned to individuals' private interest, the normalization of systemic social and institutional violence, as well as the blurring of the border between the private and the public due to an instrumentalization of cognitive processes, intimacy, affects, and individual and collective identities. The analysis thus brings to the fore the teleological dimension of the current historical conjuncture. It also intends to demonstrate the liminality of Vernon Subutex, the eponymous character of the trilogy and the core of the textual genesis around which revolve a multitude of marginal characters. The "mise en texte" (Duchet) of the novels' characters is such that it captures a moment of the historical becoming of the social, the economical and the cultural, as well as it identifies the crucial role of the symbolic motif of the threshold in the poetics of the novel.

Identity always presupposes a sense of location and a relationship with others and the representation of identity most often occurs precisely at the point when there has been a displacement (Bhabha cited in Papastergiadis 1995:17, emphasis added). In this study I focus on the condition of displacement, placing emphasis on the disjunctures of identity arising from temporal and physical dislocations and relocations in historical and postapartheid South African contexts. Displacement, and the attendant senses of dislocation and alienation it may evoke, is explored with reference to three selected female personae. For each persona, displacement is shown to provoke transmutations in subjectivity and identity, resulting in disjunctive identities and relationships with place. Their individual narratives raise questions around the consequences of displacement for a sense of (un)belonging and the (re)making of identities across geographical, cultural, temporal, ethnic and environmental borders. The pivotal role displacement plays in the processes of formation and transformation of subjectivity and identity is foregrounded. Familial histories of diasporic displacement, together with colonial legacies that have shaped my subject position as a white, middle-class, female South African woman, are interlaced with a recounting of personal experience of displacement in postapartheid South Africa. This personal sense of displacement, experienced between the years 2000 to 2006, is extended to a discussion on what is argued to be collective forms of white, English-speaking South Africans’ dislocation during the same time period. I suggest that their sense of displacement was experienced in relation to the uncertainty of their subject positions in postapartheid South Africa. In the practical and theoretical components of the degree, I consider how the three personae’s subjectivities are practiced and lived from their different space-time continuums. This exploration prompts further questions around how the effects of displacement on subjectivity and new identity formations are contingent upon each persona’s relation to the Other of colonial discourse, or the other-strangerforeigner within. Although there are marked differences between their colonial, diasporic and postcolonial contexts, a central theme that underpins the study is that the three conditions of displacement are linked by disjunctures arising from processes of dislocation, alienation, relocation and adaptation. Each persona’s epistemological reality is shown to comprise multiple ambivalences and ambiguities, and is marked by processes of cultural contestation and inner conflict. Their ambivalences and ambiguities encompass slippages between positions of inclusion and exclusion; insider and outsider; inhabitant and immigrant; alienation and belonging; placelessness and locatedness; homely and unhomely that the experience of uprooting and relocating foregrounds. While displacement is understood in terms of trauma and conflict, this condition is also regarded as a generative space of possibility for the emergence of new identity formations. Using my experiences of self-transformation and renegotiation of my identity through processes of cultural contact and exchange as a departure point, I consider ways in which collective white, English-speaking South Africans’ cultural identities are being reformulated, renegotiated or ‘hybridised’ in postapartheid South Africa as a transforming, postcolonial society. / Thesis (DPhil)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Visual Arts / unrestricted