This study examines carnival and ritual in Breyten Breytenbach's dramatic oeuvre and focuses on his Afrikaans drama texts Boklied (1998) and Die toneelstuk (2001). Seeing that these dramas had their debut performances at the Afrikaans national arts festival, the Afrikaans festival phenomenon, as well as Breytenbach's texts will be discussed as framed Events, within a carnival environment, as defined and described by Russian philosopher Bakhtin. The study evolves around three critical questions: 1. How does Bakhtin define the term "carnival" and could Afrikaans national arts festvals be seen as platforms for carnavalesque expression? 2. How does Professor Temple Hauptfleisch define an Event and why can the Afrikaans national arts festivals, as well as the drama texts under discussion, be seen as such Events? 3. How does Breyten Breytenbach's texts link up with Bakhtin's carnival theory and the ritual nature of the Dionysos festivals? / Afrikaans and Theory of Literature / M.A. (Afrikaans)

This research contributes a detailed personal account of a FEMEN activist. It presents an autophenomenographic analysis of cultural artefacts, including a Retrospective Diary, resulting from the activity of Yelena Myshko in FEMEN between 2012 and 2014. Previously FEMEN has been used as raw material for external analysis by press and academics to fit their individual agendas. To counteract this, Myshko’s research proposes an insider perspective on FEMEN activism. She writes herself in response to academics and FEMEN leader Inna Shevchenko who ignore the contribution of FEMEN Netherlands. Myshko merges author/researcher/researched and uses evocative storytelling to provide an introspective account of sextremism, connecting it to relevant embodiment concepts that illustrate its technology of empowerment and unintended side effects.   Through an autophenomenographic analysis of her personal experience, Myshko suggests how FEMEN employs sextremism to create soldiers of feminism. Her research proposes that sextremism is an attitude, a way of life and technology of resistance. For Myshko, sextremism embodies feminist polemic that turns against patriarchy through topless protest. Through personal accounts she illustrates how she internalized this aggressive femininity during physical and mental training. Myshko argues that in protest FEMEN activists communicate to the public and mobilize new activists through feminist snap. In addition, Myshko observes that sextremism produces visual activism that internalizes feminist polemic and transforms it into figurative storytelling. Myshko explains how she reproduced sextremism through body image that made her assertive and empowered her in action.   In turn Myshko demonstrates how personal accounts of sextremist embodiment and problems encountered as a woman in the world reproduce FEMEN’s fight in the media. Myshko analysis interviews with the press where she pinpoints topical feminist issues, making FEMEN real and relevant in Western society. Myshko observes that the media appropriated the spectacle created by FEMEN Netherlands but often distorted it and bend the news to fit its own agenda. In addition, the media criticized FEMEN Netherlands for cross-passing national values and power symbols. For Myshko, sextremism is empowering but also destructive. It promotes an unapologetic self-critical attitude that accumulates collateral damage in battle. The sporadic and restrained relationships between activists does not allow intimacy. Because of the eye of the media, tenderness is perceived as weakness and is not aloud. The combination of criticism, media scrutiny and police persecution hurt Myshko’s feelings. These unresolved feelings of hurt led to resentment and disengagement from FEMEN.

Esta dissertação busca responder a algumas das inquietações e desafios que se instalam com a experiência de se realizar a inclusão digital num telecentro comunitário. Situada no campo da educação não formal, tal experiência se caracteriza pela ausência de parâmetros que norteiem as ações dos atores sociais que dela tomam parte. A pesquisa parte de uma intervenção que propõe o exercício do diálogo com os monitores (jovens responsáveis pelo atendimento à comunidade no telecentro Chico Mendes, em Porto Alegre), através de encontros presenciais e da utilização de um ambiente telemático interativo. A investigação busca caracterizar os modos de ação coletiva, as evidências de autoria e produção de sentidos, considerando os enunciados destes sujeitos na experiência relacional cotidiana de um projeto de inclusão digital. Os pressupostos teóricos de Mikhail Bakhtin e Alberto Melucci orientam a intervenção. O dialogismo, categoria bakhtiniana que conceitua a experiência relacional entre sujeitos e entre discursos, também esclarece a produção do sentido, que ocorre entre um enunciado e outro. A proposta de análise da complexa sociedade contemporânea construída por Melucci contribui para definir o olhar sobre o lugar em que vivem e se manifestam estes jovens, com suas marcas identitárias e modos específicos de ação coletiva. A análise se estrutura a partir de analisadores (momentos de ruptura, situações de conflito, que exigem escolhas e tomadas de posição) e do exercício de mapear sentidos na leitura dos enunciados dos monitores. Esta pesquisa desenvolveu-se junto ao Laboratório de Estudos em Linguagem, Interação e Cognição (LELIC), do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Educação da UFRGS e está inserida na linha de pesquisa O Sujeito da Educação: Conhecimento, Linguagens e Contextos.

Esta dissertação busca responder a algumas das inquietações e desafios que se instalam com a experiência de se realizar a inclusão digital num telecentro comunitário. Situada no campo da educação não formal, tal experiência se caracteriza pela ausência de parâmetros que norteiem as ações dos atores sociais que dela tomam parte. A pesquisa parte de uma intervenção que propõe o exercício do diálogo com os monitores (jovens responsáveis pelo atendimento à comunidade no telecentro Chico Mendes, em Porto Alegre), através de encontros presenciais e da utilização de um ambiente telemático interativo. A investigação busca caracterizar os modos de ação coletiva, as evidências de autoria e produção de sentidos, considerando os enunciados destes sujeitos na experiência relacional cotidiana de um projeto de inclusão digital. Os pressupostos teóricos de Mikhail Bakhtin e Alberto Melucci orientam a intervenção. O dialogismo, categoria bakhtiniana que conceitua a experiência relacional entre sujeitos e entre discursos, também esclarece a produção do sentido, que ocorre entre um enunciado e outro. A proposta de análise da complexa sociedade contemporânea construída por Melucci contribui para definir o olhar sobre o lugar em que vivem e se manifestam estes jovens, com suas marcas identitárias e modos específicos de ação coletiva. A análise se estrutura a partir de analisadores (momentos de ruptura, situações de conflito, que exigem escolhas e tomadas de posição) e do exercício de mapear sentidos na leitura dos enunciados dos monitores. Esta pesquisa desenvolveu-se junto ao Laboratório de Estudos em Linguagem, Interação e Cognição (LELIC), do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Educação da UFRGS e está inserida na linha de pesquisa O Sujeito da Educação: Conhecimento, Linguagens e Contextos.

Esta dissertação busca responder a algumas das inquietações e desafios que se instalam com a experiência de se realizar a inclusão digital num telecentro comunitário. Situada no campo da educação não formal, tal experiência se caracteriza pela ausência de parâmetros que norteiem as ações dos atores sociais que dela tomam parte. A pesquisa parte de uma intervenção que propõe o exercício do diálogo com os monitores (jovens responsáveis pelo atendimento à comunidade no telecentro Chico Mendes, em Porto Alegre), através de encontros presenciais e da utilização de um ambiente telemático interativo. A investigação busca caracterizar os modos de ação coletiva, as evidências de autoria e produção de sentidos, considerando os enunciados destes sujeitos na experiência relacional cotidiana de um projeto de inclusão digital. Os pressupostos teóricos de Mikhail Bakhtin e Alberto Melucci orientam a intervenção. O dialogismo, categoria bakhtiniana que conceitua a experiência relacional entre sujeitos e entre discursos, também esclarece a produção do sentido, que ocorre entre um enunciado e outro. A proposta de análise da complexa sociedade contemporânea construída por Melucci contribui para definir o olhar sobre o lugar em que vivem e se manifestam estes jovens, com suas marcas identitárias e modos específicos de ação coletiva. A análise se estrutura a partir de analisadores (momentos de ruptura, situações de conflito, que exigem escolhas e tomadas de posição) e do exercício de mapear sentidos na leitura dos enunciados dos monitores. Esta pesquisa desenvolveu-se junto ao Laboratório de Estudos em Linguagem, Interação e Cognição (LELIC), do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Educação da UFRGS e está inserida na linha de pesquisa O Sujeito da Educação: Conhecimento, Linguagens e Contextos.

In the present study, the three principal theories of Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin--the carnavalesque, grotesque, and dialogical--are applied to the musical-theatre genre of the Spanish zarzuela. The focus of the study centers on the works of composer Pablo Sorozábal and the various librettists who collaborated with him, among them the renowned literary author Pío Baroja. Within this study, zarzuela is first analyzed on its own in terms of the academic debate surrounding the genre and its importance in terms of both literary and musical criticism. After establishing the particular capacity of the zarzuela to make important cultural contributions, the central theoretical framework of the thesis is established via Bakhtinian theory, and several links are drawn between this theory and the genre of the zarzuela, which is shown to be a body of work often capable of conveying subversive messages, both cultural and sociopolitical. With this critical lens, then, the specific sociopolitical context of Spain between 1931-1942 is analyzed and described in order to illustrate the various extratextual and intertextual elements at play in Sorozábal's zarzuelas. The three works ultimately studied are Katiuska (1931), Adiós a la bohemia (1933), and Black, el payaso (1942). By way of highlighting the Bakhtinian characteristics at play in these three zarzuelas, the composer's intention to challenge and criticize Spain's sociopolitical reality, including Francoist dictatorship, is revealed, illustrating the capacity of the zarzuela to challenge and transgress existing norms--an aspect that many critics have failed to recognize in the genre up to the present day.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The collection of pages spread before you now, this story-thesis, is a collection of stories about my journey from cult member to the place in life I am now, stories about those stories, and stories about the people who lived or read them, talked about them, and were changed by the tellings. Most importantly, the goal of this story-thesis is to illustrate how the process of story-making and -telling changes how we interpret our identities and our lifeworlds. I argue that the stories that we share change our identities, and I also argue that how we perceive our identity and the identities of others affects the stories that we share.

This dissertation examines Russian fantastical travel narratives from 1784 to 1855, an era of substantial imperial conquest, in which authors of various backgrounds, both Russian and non-Russian, wrestled with questions of cultural identity and the prospects for Russia’s development on the global scale, while in a profound but often contentious relationship with the countries of Western Europe. My chapters cover three different categories of fantastic travel. The first includes journeys to undiscovered space, including Antarctica and the Moon (in works by Shcherbatov, Lyovshin, Kiukhelbeker, and Senkovsky), which largely criticize Russian expansionism. The second is stories of travel to or in the distant future (Vilgelm Kiukhelbeker, Faddei Bulgarin, and Vladimir Odoevsky), which project a more positive view of Russian imperial destiny. The third category is metafictional travel, through maps and the written page (Veltman), which deconstructs the very notion of imperial reality. I argue that writers employed the genre of fantastic travel literature, as well as specific devices such as dreams and frame narratives, to critically interrogate and reshape the imperial and national ideologies of their time. These works anticipate modern science fiction by using a wide range of spatial and temporal settings to create new worlds that highlight the possibilities or faults of their own societies, for satirical or didactic purposes—and as such they benefit from the application of recent theories of science fiction. Given the diverse range of authors and time periods I investigate, my work also has a taxonomic purpose, delineating the thematic evolution of fantastic travel narratives in different categories and paving the way for more targeted analyses of these understudied works.

This dissertation argues that Russia’s confrontation with modernity generated a series of sociocultural paradigm crises that gave rise to a modernist grotesque aesthetic tradition, uniting over forty years of artistic production into a coherent literary movement. While close reading the work of Fyodor Sologub (The Petty Demon [Мелкий бес]), Andrei Bely (Petersburg [Петербург]), Evgenii Zamyatin (At World’s End [На куличках]), and Velimir Khlebnikov (“The Crane” [Журавль]), I argue that prerevolutionary modernist writers utilized grotesque modes of representation to depict a world where the former cornerstones of pre-modern Russian identity are fracturing under the pressures of modernity. In contrast to extant scholarship, I argue the 1917 Revolution is not a fundamental break in Russia’s experience of the crisis of modernity, but an extension, and an exacerbation of it. Though discourses of Russian identity formation will be rapidly recodified around the Soviet project, the same underlying grotesque aesthetic devices used by pre-revolutionary authors are taken up by a new generation of Soviet-era modernists. Mikhail Zoshchenko’s parody in Michel Sinyagin (Мишель Синягин) elicits skepticism about yesterday’s unenlightened masses becoming today’s new Tolstoys. Andrei Platonov’s anomalous depictions of the Russian periphery in his Juvenile Sea (Ювенильное море) are still inhabited by monsters, too far from Soviet nodes of power to be assimilated into the national ideological project. And Konstantin Vaginov (in the novel Goat Song [Козлиная песнь]) and Evgenii Shvarts (in the play The Shadow [Тень]) capture the prevalence of superfluous intellectuals with ruptured psyches, frustrated by their unsuccessful attempts to adapt to the new Soviet reality.

This dissertation deploys theories of spatiotemporal experience and organization, most prominently Mikhail Bakhtin’s “chronotope,” to set contemporary literature, film, and music into dialogue with theories of post-Wende social and political experiences and possibility that speak, with Francis Fukuyama, as the contemporary as the “End of History.” Where these interlocutors of Fukuyama generally affirm or intensify his view of the contemporary as a time where historical progress slows to a halt, historical memory recedes from view, and the conditions of subjecthood are rephrased from participation in a struggle for progress to mindless consumption and technocratic tinkering, I engage contemporary artwork to flesh out and ultimately peer beyond the boundaries of the real and the possible these social theories articulate. Through a series of close readings of German films, music albums, and novels published between 1995 and 2021, I examine how German authors, filmmakers, and musicians pursue depictions of the malaises of the End of History while also resolutely pointing to the fissures in liberal capitalist hegemony where history—its past and its future—again becomes visible. Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope, a text’s unified expression of space and time, is central to my method of analysis. In tracing the chronotopic contours of contemporary works of music, film, and literature, I argue, we—as readers, viewers, and listeners—are engaged to think and act alongside the forms and figures that populate the worlds their authors create. In doing so, we ultimately uncover forceful accusations, resolute alternatives, and even hopeful antidotes to the deficiencies of our present that help us both to soberly contemplate the implications the pessimistic formulations of contemporary theory have on our lives, communities, and futures but also to formulate possibilities for them that lie beyond their analytical purview.In a series of close readings of my literary, filmic, and musical primary texts, I engage theorists of the post-Cold War, post-Wende contemporary who write about the political order and social conditions emerging out of the triumph of neoliberalism and market capitalism over socialist, communist, and fascist alternatives. The dissertation begins by establishing a wide view of the contemporary, tracing in its first chapter chronotopic resonances of Hartmut Rosa’s “social acceleration” thesis—which locates the aimlessness and alienation of contemporary society within the accelerationist logic of market capitalist modes of production—across the full temporal arc of the contemporary. Pairing Christian Kracht’s Faserland (1995) with Fatma Aydemir's Ellbogen (2017), I argue that the futilities and frustrations of the modern subject, as foretold in Fukuyama’s “End of History” essay and fleshed out in Rosa’s writings on social acceleration, find resonance not only in the wealthy, educated, white protagonist of Faserland’s 1990s, but also in the impoverished, undereducated, Turkish-Kurdish protagonist of Ellbogen some twenty years later. What connects these two accounts across decades and differences in identities, I demonstrate, is not merely a shared sense of alienation and despair, but a shared, underlying chronotopic characterization of the contemporary. These commonalities appear, I demonstrate, when we connect Rosa’s “social acceleration” thesis to diegetic chronotopes of perpetual motion that depict modern subjects’ inability to avail themselves of the ostensibly liberatory potential of liberal capitalism’s accelerated lifeworld. Chapter 2 then considers Byung-Chul Han’s theory of auto-exploitation and the dilemma of the music novel at a time where the rebellion of punk against social integration has been thoroughly incorporated into capitalism. Reading Marc Degens’ Fuckin Sushi (2015), I examine the novel’s concept of “Abrentnern” as a model for personal and communal fulfillment for those who turn to art as a means self-determination in the age of auto-exploitation. Unlike Kracht and Aydemir, however, Degens sees the closing off of historical possibilities for the good life enjoyed by his punk forbears—here, self-determination through transgressive artistic praxis—not as the contemporary subject’s damnation to cyclical patterns of despair but as a challenge to conceive of the good life anew. Working humorously through its hapless protagonist Niels’ repeated attempts to escape the seemingly inevitable for-profit co-option of his sincere artistic efforts, the novel serves to unveil the persistence of blind spots in this regime of totalizing exploitation. What results is an account of the double-edged logic of capitalist productivity’s ostensible totalization of labor-time. Capitalism, Niels unwittingly discovers, is a logic of production so overwhelming that it continuously drives subjects towards the discovery of new alterities that, for a brief time at least, allow subjects once again to slip between the cracks. The third chapter explores a similar phenomenon of halting resistance to the conditions of the capitalist present through the lens of futurity. Here, I push back against Mark Fisher’s theory of the dominance of “Capitalist Realism” in the contemporary aesthetic imagination, identifying and developing the notion of “subtle futurity”—the modest, yet resolute rephrasing of future possibility beyond the “way things are” of the present—in Leif Randt’s Schimmernder Dunst über CobyCounty (2011) In this light, I argue, Randt’s gestures towards a different future, however halting, mark a significant effort to imagine a benevolent form of future possibility within the context of an era often suspected to have been exhausted of its utopian sentiment. The final two chapters turn to past-minded works that more forcefully repudiate notions of the present as static or closed off from the movement of history. Chapter Four considers W.G. Sebald’s 1995 novel, Die Ringe des Saturn, and The Caretaker’s 2012 album, Patience (After Sebald), developing an account of the chronotopic means by which these works revisit materials of the past within the present. Chronotopic motifs of paraphrase—techniques of sampling in The Caretaker and narrative polyphony in Sebald—come together within macro-level chronotopic frameworks of peripatetic movement—looping repetition in The Caretaker and the retracing of bygone journeys in Sebald—to testify to the unanswered questions and unfinished work of history over and against notions of the present as a time where the past has been relegated to mere museum content or nostalgia for bygone ways of living. Where Chapter Four speaks primarily to the formal mechanisms by which the present rediscovers the past, Chapter Five examines two specific chronotopic innovations for thematically engaging constellations of past-present inter-temporality. Both Sharon Dodua Otoo’s 2021 novel, Adas Raum, and Christian Petzold’s 2018 film, Transit, develop chronotopes wherein past and present are intermingled in increasingly inseparable ways. Adas Raum, I demonstrate, is organized spatiotemporally as a nexus of coiled loops—pasts and presents intertwine, heaven and earth are tangled together, and the fates of human beings and even non-human objects follow spatial and temporal trajectories that weave in and out of conventional linear understandings of space and time. In similar fashion, past and present become inseparable in Petzold’s film, an adaptation of the Anna Seghers’ 1944 novel of the same name, through thematic and formal approaches of blurring that blend the plight of refugees of Seghers’ era with those of Petzold’s present day. History, then, appears remarkably robust in these texts, unfolding accounts of how human beings living through their present might take guidance from the generations that preceded them in the struggle for a better world.