With new technology come new possibilities for the creation of artistic works. The invention of sound recording at end of the nineteenth century enabled musical performances to be “written” in the same manner as traditional, printed literature. The status of records as a form of writing and, moreover, as the material for further writing is demonstrated in the work of two hip hop artists, DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist, who assemble new, heteroglossic texts out of a wide array of sampled records. Two concerts, Product Placement (2004) and The Hard Sell (2008) – both of which have been memorialized on DVD – serve as fruitful examples of the potential for artistic production enabled by technology. Indeed, the genre of turntablism, which involves the live manipulation of vinyl records, requires the usage of technology in ways not intended by its original developers – a recurrent theme throughout the history of sound recording. By transforming the turntable from a passive playback device into an active compositional tool, turntablism collapses the distance between consumption and production and so turns the listener into a performer. Furthermore, the exclusive usage of 45 rpm records as the source texts for the two sets dramatizes theories of intertextuality while simultaneously tracing the constraints placed on such artistic piracy by the copyright regime. These texts entail more than just their cited musical content; they also involve visual components. These include not only the video imagery that accompanies and comments on the records being played, but also the physical performance of the DJs themselves and the spectacle of the attending crowds whose response to the music constitutes part of the text itself. Following a theoretical and historical background that will situate these works within the history of hip hop and literature in general, this study will explicate these two multimedia texts and reveal how they demonstrate a concern not only with the history of sound recording, but also such issues as the influence of technology on cultural production, the complication of authorship through intertextuality, and the relationship between culture and commerce. Above all, however, both the form and content of these two performances also serve to highlight the value of physical media as historical artifacts in the face of increasing challenges from incorporeal digital media.

French writer, editor, and literary critic Jean Paulhan (1884-1968) stands out as a remarkably ambiguous figure in the period following the Second World War, when interpretations of the war tended to create clear divisions between resisters and collaborators. Shortly after Paris was occupied by Germany in 1940, Jean Paulhan became one of the leading figures in the intellectual resistance to Nazi occupation. During the purges that followed the war, however, he was one of the principal protectors of writers deemed collaborationist and, therefore, treacherous by Resistance writers. This thesis examines the controversial position that Paulhan held regarding the post-war purges by describing the historical context to which he was reacting, and by engaging in a close and comparative reading of three of his key texts. His two texts which deal explicitly with the purge, <i>Of Chaff and Wheat</i> and <i>Letter to the Directors of the Resistance</i>, are read alongside his key work on language and literature,<i>Flowers of Tarbes or, Terror in Literature</i>. His commentary on the purge of writers was a nexus in which his literary and political concerns were conjoined. Uniting his literary and political writings to the context of the purge was an intricate argument against the process of purification. To Paulhan, the relationship that various modern literary movements had to literature and language was based, like the post-war purge, on an ideal of purity and renewal which required a dishonest and violent association with the past. Ultimately, this thesis argues that the seemingly uncomfortable contradictions revealed in the roles that Paulhan played during and after the Occupation actually formed the core of a consistent ethical position, one that responded to a real political situation of national trauma while remaining grounded in a wider understanding of the complex relationships between literature, language, national identity and political action.

French writer, editor, and literary critic Jean Paulhan (1884-1968) stands out as a remarkably ambiguous figure in the period following the Second World War, when interpretations of the war tended to create clear divisions between resisters and collaborators. Shortly after Paris was occupied by Germany in 1940, Jean Paulhan became one of the leading figures in the intellectual resistance to Nazi occupation. During the purges that followed the war, however, he was one of the principal protectors of writers deemed collaborationist and, therefore, treacherous by Resistance writers. This thesis examines the controversial position that Paulhan held regarding the post-war purges by describing the historical context to which he was reacting, and by engaging in a close and comparative reading of three of his key texts. His two texts which deal explicitly with the purge, <i>Of Chaff and Wheat</i> and <i>Letter to the Directors of the Resistance</i>, are read alongside his key work on language and literature,<i>Flowers of Tarbes or, Terror in Literature</i>. His commentary on the purge of writers was a nexus in which his literary and political concerns were conjoined. Uniting his literary and political writings to the context of the purge was an intricate argument against the process of purification. To Paulhan, the relationship that various modern literary movements had to literature and language was based, like the post-war purge, on an ideal of purity and renewal which required a dishonest and violent association with the past. Ultimately, this thesis argues that the seemingly uncomfortable contradictions revealed in the roles that Paulhan played during and after the Occupation actually formed the core of a consistent ethical position, one that responded to a real political situation of national trauma while remaining grounded in a wider understanding of the complex relationships between literature, language, national identity and political action.

Since Plato first banished poets from his Republic, the relationship between the aesthetic and moral value of literature has been subject to philosophical, critical, and pedagogical debate. In this philosophical investigation, I sought to explain how the evocation of the senses during literary transactions shapes the phenomenal experience of the reader. Recent developments in neuroscience (Damasio, 1999, 2003; Edelman, 1992) provide strong evidence in support of embodied theories of cognition in which imagery and affect play a central role. The purposes of this philosophical investigation were to describe the structure and function of imagery and affect in the cognitive act of reading, to provide a detailed account of how we exercise our capacity for imaginative thought in order to achieve literal, inferential, and critical comprehension, and to explore the implications of an embodied mind for reading and responding to literary texts. The investigation yielded a critical review of contemporary theories of reading (Kintsch, 1998; Rumelhart, 1977; Sadoski & Paivio, 2001) to examine their ability to explain the phenomena associated with the literary experience. Dual coding theory (Sadoski & Paivio, 2001) which maintains an empirical and embodied view of the mind was shown to have considerable theoretical advantages over rationalist computational theories of cognition in explaining phenomena associated with reading and responding to literary texts. A neurobiological account of consciousness provides support for the idea that literature can engage readers imaginatively in the process moral deliberation (Dewey, 1932/1985). In addition, I concluded that considerable evidence exists to suggest that somatic and visceral changes experienced as a result of undergoing the text can potentially incite individual and social change.

This dissertation examines the intersection between theories of body and of genre through the lens of cognitive science. It focuses, in particular, on representations of bodies in exemplars of fabliaux in Old French and Middle English, chivalric romance that feature the figure of Sir Gawain, and the Latin Chronicle of Bury St Edmunds. This dissertation establishes genre theory on cognitive-scientific ground by considering how embodied cognition influences both theories of genre and the representations of bodies. It argues that, rather than a container into which works fit, genre is a network of associations created in the minds of authors and audiences. This network finds expression in the bodies of characters, which differ across genres. It argues, moreover, that genre and bodies influence, in fundamental ways, interpretations of literary works. Finally, this work discusses the possibilities for future research using methods for quantitative textual analysis and data visualization common in the digital humanities. / text

Del folletin al reality: una aproximacion teorica a modelos de lectura y consumo sobre la ficcion y la realidad (From the Serialized Story to the Reality Show: a Theoretical Approach to Models of Reading about Fiction and Reality) discusses and combines three hypotheses. In the introduction, this research intends to expand Reader Response theories proposing that the reading experience occurs in a concrete frame of time and space. This has been called the 'spatial condition of reading acts.' The premise is that literary artifacts manipulate the reader, not only by their content, but also through their form.Chapter I examines how reality and fiction are both constructed as cultural discourses, and reviews how fictitious texts negate their invented nature. Simultaneously, it evaluates the formal structure of an audiovisual narrative, and identify another level of manipulation over a spectator, in this case, through film montage. Chapter II studies a third facet of literary domination exerted by popular culture artifacts; this is the production and distribution of the serialized novel. Additionally, its presents the second hypothesis of this research: the consumption of fiction works as a synecdoche regarding the consumption of exchange goods in a consumerist society.Chapter III, then are the previous chapter is more focused on content. It reviews a necessity of fiction in contemporary society to explain daily life experiences, motivating a cultural sense that reality pretends to imitate fantasy. Therefore serialized stories become models for interpreting real life. Finally, Chapter IV states the third hypothesis of this investigation: serialized stories and reality shows share a similar structure of distribution and content to present its message. Consequently, the tenuous boundary between reality and fiction becomes a becomes an experience manipulated by mass media which turns out, turning out serialized stories as valid referent for a hyper-media and hyper-consumer society.In sum, this dissertation examines Hispanic culture from the most abstract of the literary phenomena, to the consumption of hyper-real symbols of contemporary culture. The theoretical and practical contribution of this perspective is to extend literary, to media studies; reviewing economical and popular phenomena from discourse perspectives.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis explores theoretical aspects of the affective dimension of literature. Beginning with Aristotle's tying of katharsis to the drama, the pattern of affective relations is completed through the establishing of terms for each of the three broad traditional genres. These relations can be expressed in the ratio: as katharsis is to the genre of the dramatic, so kenosis is to the genre of the lyric, so kairosis is to the genre of the epic. Within each of these affective relations, further relations are determined for the identity structures within each genre. In defining these identity structures, the philosophical, theological, psychological and literary aspects of katharsis, kenosis and kairosis are explored. Of particular use in mapping these identity structures and literary affects were the philosophical theories of Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre, and Wittgenstein; the theological views of D.G. Dawe, John Macquarrie, Charles Pickstone, and Ernest F. Scott; the psychological theories of C.J. Jung, Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva; the literary theories of Mikel Dufrenne, Stanley Fish, Toshihiko and Toyo Izutsu, Hans Robert Jauss, W.R. Johnson, Frank Kermode, William Elford Rogers, and D.T. Suzuki; and the literary works of Homer, Shakespeare, George Herbert, S.T. Coleridge, Charles Baudelaire, Wallace Stevens, and James K. Baxter. Taking up Aristotle's project to grant cognitive value to the experience of art, this thesis argues for the centrality of identity structures within the dimension of the affective. The thesis further determines that literature's affective dimension is the domain within which aesthetic identity is established. Such imaginative identity structures amount to a cultural catalogue of identity possibilities. As the keepers of this catalogue, the three interpretive genres amount to a body of affective knowledge that is its own dimension.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Note: This version has been edited to remove names for privacy reasons. For a full copy please contact the author. / Writers of PhDs have a unique, personal and in-depth relationship with their subject-matter, which develops over a number of years. What happens when life intrudes so much into the research and writing that it takes over the subject matter, so that the original struggle for objective scholarship threatens to become subsumed in emotion and self-discovery? How does the supervisor, forced to keep a certain distance from an intimate and tumultuous relationship, still teach? The supervisor can do worse than guide their student towards the genre of Life-Writing, within which a flourishing of sub-genres may be accommodating to such a journey. For a closed-records adoptee caught up in the reunion processes sparked by the 1990 changes to the Adoption Act, critical readings of Peter Carey and Janette Turner Hospital developed into the invention of the Adopted Body, the Subject Adoptee and a new way of seeing: ado/aptive reading and writing. Perhaps in the field of ado/aptive theory, the stolen generations, intercountry adoptees and the white closed-record adoptees of Australia can re-invent themselves, develop their identities and create a genre of academic theory unique to Australia.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis explores theoretical aspects of the affective dimension of literature. Beginning with Aristotle's tying of katharsis to the drama, the pattern of affective relations is completed through the establishing of terms for each of the three broad traditional genres. These relations can be expressed in the ratio: as katharsis is to the genre of the dramatic, so kenosis is to the genre of the lyric, so kairosis is to the genre of the epic. Within each of these affective relations, further relations are determined for the identity structures within each genre. In defining these identity structures, the philosophical, theological, psychological and literary aspects of katharsis, kenosis and kairosis are explored. Of particular use in mapping these identity structures and literary affects were the philosophical theories of Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre, and Wittgenstein; the theological views of D.G. Dawe, John Macquarrie, Charles Pickstone, and Ernest F. Scott; the psychological theories of C.J. Jung, Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva; the literary theories of Mikel Dufrenne, Stanley Fish, Toshihiko and Toyo Izutsu, Hans Robert Jauss, W.R. Johnson, Frank Kermode, William Elford Rogers, and D.T. Suzuki; and the literary works of Homer, Shakespeare, George Herbert, S.T. Coleridge, Charles Baudelaire, Wallace Stevens, and James K. Baxter. Taking up Aristotle's project to grant cognitive value to the experience of art, this thesis argues for the centrality of identity structures within the dimension of the affective. The thesis further determines that literature's affective dimension is the domain within which aesthetic identity is established. Such imaginative identity structures amount to a cultural catalogue of identity possibilities. As the keepers of this catalogue, the three interpretive genres amount to a body of affective knowledge that is its own dimension.

[pt] Em Estudos em vermelho: caminhos do enigma, estabelecemos um diálogo entre o romance policial em sua configuração clássica e narrativas contemporâneas que se apropriam de elementos estruturantes fundadores, reinventando um novo estatuto e novas funções para a figura do narrador, do personagem do detetive e o seu objeto de investigação, o enigma. Neste diálogo são aprofundados os pressupostos que sustentam as motivações e os caminhos privilegiados na busca de soluções para desvendar enigmas em analogia à função do cientista, comprometido com diversas formas de construção de conhecimento. / [en] In Studies in scarlet: roads to the enigma, our aim is to propose a dialogue between the Poesque detective story and its elaborations and the subversion of the classical genre by a contemporary form that reshapes the seeeming dead-end racionality and its basic elements, such as the narrator, the detective and his object of investigation, the enigma. Throughout this dialogue the basic motivations and means privileged in the search for solutions to the enigma are paralleled to that of the cientist´s in his commitment to the distinct modes of construction of knowledge.