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ABSTRACT SHAKESPEARE&rsquo / S HAMLET AS A PRECURSOR OF THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD Dogan, Buket M.A., in English Literature Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Dr. &Uuml / nal Norman May 2008, 121 Pages Being regarded as a dramatist of all times, Shakespeare and his work is studied with a modern view point by many critics. Every historical period finds in him what it is looking for and what it wants to see. Shakespeare is part of a modern tradition trying to mirror human psychology and condition in all its absurdity. The innovations that the theatre of the Absurd has brought to the stage not only provide an influence for the works of the later generations but also, they make it possible to look back at the past works of the theatre with a contemporary critical eye. Shakespeare&rsquo / s vision of the world is similar to that of the absurdists, mainly due to their shared confidence in humanity&rsquo / s capacity to endure, and the precarious nature of human existence. This thesis analyzes Shakespeare&rsquo / s masterpiece Hamlet, mainly the drama of its protagonist, as a precursor of Absurd drama. In Hamlet, Shakespeare represents man&rsquo / s existential anxiety and precarious condition in a nonsensical world, which is stripped of all logical explanations and accounts. To examine the play in the context of the theatre of the Absurd, it will be discussed in relation to Samuel Beckett&rsquo / s Waiting for Godot and Endgame with regard to their common concerns for the themes of the theatre of the Absurd such as uncertainty and inertia.

Transformation optics, a recently booming area, provides people a new approach to design optical devices for manipulating light. With transformation optics, a lot of novel optical devices are proposed, such as invisibility cloaks, optical wormholes, optical black holes, illusion devices. The present thesis is devoted to investigate transformation optics for manipulating light. Firstly, an introduction to transformation optics is given. This part includes: (1) introducing differential geometry as the mathematical preparation; (2) expressing Maxwell’s equations in an arbitrary coordinate system and introducing the concept of transformation media as the foundation stone of transformation optics; (3) discussing light from the geometry perspective as the essence of transformation optics; (4) showing how to use transformation optics to design optical devices. For our works on invisibility cloaks, we analyze the properties of arbitrary shaped invisibility cloaks, and confirm their invisibility abilities. The geometrical perturbations to cylindrical and spherical shaped cloaks are analyzed in detail. We show that the cylindrical cloak is more sensitive to the perturbation than a spherical cloak. By imposing a PEC (PMC) layer at the interior boundary of the cylindrical cloak shell for TM (TE) wave, the sensitivity can be reduced dramatically. A simplified non-magnetic cylindrical cloak is also designed. We show that the dominant zeroth order scattering term can be eliminated by employing an air gap between the cloak and the cloaked region. We propose a compensated bilayer by a folding coordinate transformation based on transformation optics. It is pointed out that complementary media, perfect negative index lens and perfect bilayer lens made of indefinite media are well unified under the scope of the transformed compensated bilayer. We demonstrate the applications of the compensated bilayer, such as perfect imaging and optical illusion. Arbitrary shaped compensated bilayers are also analyzed. Nihility media known as the media with ε =μ= 0, are generalized from transformation optics as transformation media derived from volumeless geometrical elements. The practical constructions of nihility media by metamaterials are discussed. The eigen fields in the nihility media are derived. The interactions between an external incident wave and a slab of nihility media in the free space background are analyzed. A new type of transformation media called α media is proposed for manipulating light. Light rays in the α media have a simple displacement or rotation relationship with those in another media (seed media). Such relationship is named α relationship. The α media can be designed and simplified to a certain class of diagonal anisotropic media, which are related to certain isotropic media by the α relationship. Several optical devices based on the α transformation media are designed. Invisibility cloaks obtained from the coordinate transformation approach are revisited from a different perspective. / QC 20101102

This paper examines the role played by death in the philosophy of Nishitani Keiji, through the nondual logic of contradictory identity developed by his teacher and founder of the Kyotoschool of philosophy, Nishida Kitarō. I explore Nishitani’s understanding of how Nothingness, nihility, through our awareness of death penetrates and nullifies existence itself, how the irreality of all being comes to the fore to make being itself unreal. The nullifying nothingness of nihility, however, is still nothingness represented as a something; it is a reified nothing, defined as the antithesis to being and thus still seen as a corollary of being itself. A truly absolute nothingness, what Nishitani calls Śūnyatā, emptiness, must be a nothingness so devoid of being as to not even be nothing; it must be absolutely nothing at all, and thus nothing else than being itself. The final chapter of my paper seeks to apply this nondual understanding of being and nothingness to the question of death itself; to understand the ontological meaning of death - the passage from being to non-being - when being and non-being have been one from the very beginning. The paper also seeks to blur the lines between what has traditionally been considered philosophy and religion, using the thinking of the Kyoto school to point to the deeper ties between the two in the borderland that is buddhist philosophy.