No description available.

The indole alkaloids, a class of natural products, have received much synthetic attention for years due to their diverse structures and interesting biological properties. We are particularly interested in synthesizing some of the yohimbine alkaloids extracted from the bark of a tall evergreen African tree (Corynanthe yohimbe, commonly known as fringe tree). Yohimbine and its stereoisomers have been tempting targets for synthetic organic chemists for more than fifty years. These compounds feature a pentacyclic ring system with two heteroatoms and five stereogenic centers. Broadly, the fifteen different synthetic approaches that led to the successful completion of yohimbine alkaloids relied only on two basic synthetic strategies. In the first strategy, the last step almost always was the formation of the C(2)-C(3) bond by either Pictet-Spengler reaction or by Bischler-Napieralski reaction with the concomitant formation of the C ring. The second strategy involved the annulation of the D and E rings onto the intact ABC ring system. With our double annulation methodology, herein, we report a completely different synthetic approach to access the yohimbine alkaloids, and our disconnections are not even remotely close to the synthetic designs used in the past. Our key steps include double Michael reaction to construct the E ring, an intramolecular cyclization to construct the D ring, and finally, the functionality on the D ring can be elaborated to form the C ring of the yohimbine alkaloids.

Michael King is an acclaimed writer, author and communicator. When he died in a car accident he was eulogised as one of New Zealand's leading citizens for his literary contribution. He is celebrated as a writer who communicated history in a way that was palatable and comprehensible to all New Zealanders. He is also remembered for his commentary on New Zealand as a bi-cultural society. This thesis debates whether his years as a journalist gave him the skills to write, argue and communicate better. King was not a journalist for long and then he taught journalism, but those years served as a bridge between academia and a life in everyday New Zealand. Good writing and good journalistic writing have been analysed and refined down to basic rules which are then measured against King's work. Drivers to good writing have also been identified and these relate to the emotional and psychological characteristics of a good writer. Anecdotal evidence about King's work as a journalist and then as a writer has been gathered and tested against the rules and drivers. Two key themes have emerged. One that King was born with a natural ability to write and this was fuelled by strong reading and writing habits early in his life. The second is that King worked at being a good journalist, he learned rules and disciplines which improved his writing and these stayed with him throughout his literary career. The issue of objectivity is a moot point for journalists and there is debate about how objective journalists can realistically be. One of the reasons King left daily journalism was because he became frustrated with the constraints of objectivity. The thesis debates how this impacted on his writing and the direction of his later work.

This study incorporated the framing theory—specifically, human interest, conflict, episodic, and thematic framing—to show how four newspapers in different regions framed the dogfighting controversy of former National Football League (NFL) quarterback, Michael Vick. Content analysis was conducted to determine if the newspapers’ embedded interest and cultural proximity to him impacted their coverage of the controversy. The results revealed that the type of dominant frames in culturally proximate newspapers to Vick could not be confidently predicted, but that cultural proximity could be a determinant of the amount of coverage a newspaper produces about an individual or event. The findings also indicated that newspapers with embedded interest in the Vick Controversy produced more episodic, human interest frames. In addition, the researcher provided definitions for cultural proximity and embedded interest, based upon previous literature and the study’s results, to extend knowledge in these minimally researched areas. / Department of Journalism

This article sets out to explore the hermeneutical problems in the narrative therapeutic theory of Michael White by investigating his understanding of "story" within its interpretative context. In both White's interpretative approach and his “story" are inconsistencies rooted in a meta-theoretical tension based on his account of the autonomy of a person. This tension lies between the postulation of contingency and the pressure of stability. This is shown by testing the sustainability of White's therapeutic approach against the logical consistency of the underlying theoretical and philosophical foundation. The fundamental meta-theoretical tensions are brought to the fore by means of these contradictions. / Thesis (M.A. (Philosophy))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2005.

No description available.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis examines a new kind of literary history developed in four postmodern historical romances: Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient, and Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs and True History of the Kelly Gang. By foregrounding their intertexts, these novels expose acts of violence and terror directed against scapegoats, particularly those constructed as criminals, who are perceived to threaten social stability. The novels of Ondaatje and Carey transform these criminals from social transgressors to heroes, from victimizers to victims. They first reconstruct and expose the social dynamics of specific historical contexts drawn from their precursor texts, The Epic of Gilgamesh, Herodotus’s Histories, Great Expectations and Lorna Doone, and then create a form of communal history, which for the first time voices the suppressed narratives of the disenfranchised. The theoretical framework used in the analysis of each text and its intertextual “double” is developed through analyses of desire and imitation in space as well as time. The thesis links René Girard’s theory of rivalry and violence in mimetic desire to Julia Kristeva’s and Susan Friedman’s theories of reading at the point of intersection between a text and its precursors, newly allowing the application of Girard to the complex intertextual dynamics of the sub-genre of metahistorical romance. This approach reconfigures this sub-genre as a form of simultaneous and paratactic history. It adapts Amy Elias’s and Brian McHale’s theories of spatial tropes as literary techniques which collapse, onto one plane, or juxtapose, different historical periods, characters and events, as a means to examine the ����dark areas” of history. In this process the thesis considers each modern text and its precursor to explore the role of Girard’s rivalrous doubles within and across texts in activating or interrupting cyclical violence. The historical scapegoats, given the opportunity to recognize and tell their histories in the modern texts, generate a new form of communal history, which challenges earlier depictions and celebrations of violence and the persecution of scapegoats. These new histories recoil from violence and reconstruct scapegoats through attention to the complex intersection of political and legal policies, cultural values and practices informing their previous historical representation. They allow Girard’s cycles of violence to be broken, reimagining the scapegoat not in terms of singular identifications as anarchist, spy, convict and outlaw, but as multi-faceted, able to be renewed in multiple identifications as heroic.

Zugl.: Wien, Univ., Diplom-Arbeit, 2003

Thesis (M.A.--Church Hist.)--Catholic University of America, 1986. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 100-103).

Zugl.: Rostock, Hochsch. für Musik und Theater, Diss., 2005