This thesis examines the gendered and racialised representations of social spaces in apartheid and post-apartheid writing. My research methodology incorporates a variety of literary and culture theories, including postcolonial theory, feminism and anthropology. I begin with a reading of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, examining the problematic paradigms of race and gender relations in post-apartheid South Africa which Coetzee represents through rape. Of particular importance is the idea of liminality and in the introduction I establish my interpretation of liminality amongst other theorists. I contend that the very fruitfulness of liminality as an analytical tool lies in its prismatic qualities that give rise to multiple possibilities of meaning. The complex nuances of liminality’s ‘betwixt and betweenness’ and its ‘undefinability’ are conducive to an examination of violence and violation. Simultaneously, however, liminality is also conducive to an examination of communitas or productive social relations predicated on a deep-rooted sense of shared experience. Informed by the analysis of Disgrace and the discussion of liminality in the introduction, each of the three main chapters focuses on a different thematic space. Starting with a discussion of Ruth First’s 117 Days, chapter 2 examines how the prison is a site of deactivation and conversely of collective revolutionary consciousness. I explore how Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter, Kagiso Lesego Molope’s Dancing in the Dust and Mongane Serote’s To Every Birth Its Blood, represent prison as a rite of passage. I also investigate how Antjie Krog in Country of my Skull, Caesarina Kona Makhoere in No Child’s Play and Lauretta Ngcobo in And They Didn’t Die contest deactivation. Chapter 3 considers urban spaces in terms of liminality in Ngcobo’s And They Didn’t Die. This chapter also discusses the potential for anti-apartheid protest in Serote’s To Every Birth Its Blood and Molope’s Dancing in the Dust and the liminality of post-apartheid urban landscapes in Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit and Ivan Vladislavić’s Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked. Finally, analysing the train as a site of mobile incarceration in Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K, chapter 4 also considers the varied representations of the train in To Every Birth Its Blood and Third World Express by Serote, Ngcobo’s And They Didn’t Die, Molope’s Dancing in the Dust, ‘Home Sweet Home’ by Zoё Wicomb and other short stories by Miriam Tlali.

This thesis presents a critical reading of selected Indo-Caribbean prose and poetry and explores their shared concern with issues of madness and insanity. Before approaching literary texts, however, the thesis investigates the colonial treatment of mental illness in Trinidad and British Guiana in order to establish a pragmatic link between the East Indians’ experience of mental illness during indentureship and its later emergence in literature. The study of the development of local colonial psychiatry is based on the examination of original sources, including relevant Parliamentary Papers and previously unexamined material. A critical reading of Edward Jenkins’s writings provides the link between history and literature, whilst contemporary theories on the construction of the collective imaginary help to sustain the argument of a transference of the trope of madness from facts to fiction, from reality to imagination. This project contributes both to the growing field of Indo-Caribbean literary criticism and to the embryonic area of the history of mental health in the Caribbean. Concentrating on the relation between the social history of medicine and literary imagination it suggests a new approach to Indo-Caribbean literature based on the close relationship between health and culture.

<p> This dissertation traces how eugenics came to underpin discourses pertaining to free love, sex and reproduction in 1920s-1930s China. It shows the eugenic and evolutionist limits to radical or liberal intellectuals' understanding of the role of the individual in the pursuit of sex, free love and birth control. The study examines the scientific view of modernity embodied in eugenics, as well as the challenges to this vision based on humanism and sex aestheticism. Bertrand Russell's visit to China in 1920 with his lover Dora Black led to heated discussions surrounding free love and free divorce, where privacy, the eugenic idea of a "robust individual" and science were key. Meanwhile, translations and the reception of Ellen Key and Havelock Ellis's works on eugenics and love underpinned the reconciliation in Chinese liberal intellectuals' thought between individualism/evolutionary humanism and eugenics, particularly in their debates on sexual and emotional ethics in the 1920s. Margaret Sanger's visit to China in 1922 opened up a debate on the suitability of eugenic birth control to solve China's problems, such as overpopulation and venereal disease. By probing into her interactions with Chinese intellectuals in 1922, this study reveals how her eugenic ideas were received, as well as the political tensions regarding her birth control advocacy. The dissertation demonstrates that the sexual reproductive considerations that had been viewed in the 1920s as a problem of the relationship between the individual and nation/race/society, by the 1930s came to completely subordinate the role of the individual to national and racial regeneration concerns. Sanger's continued correspondence with Chinese medical professionals came to shape the birth control movement in the 1930s in more strictly eugenic terms. This research contends that eugenics was not only influential in discourse, but came to be implemented in practice in the fields of sex hygiene, birth control and VD regulation. The agency of pioneer female gynecologists in the 1930s is emphasized by examining how they brought eugenics in practice in their birth control clinics, how they localized global female experience and theories on birth control and hygiene, either through translation or through their attempts to reach working class women with contraceptive sex education. Lastly I argue that eugenics and social hygiene also functioned as a male oriented ideology in VD policies of various colonial powers: British, American, Japanese, and French as part of an economy of empire. By contrast Chinese Nationalist Hygiene Campaigns and female gynecologists' internalizing of eugenics focused on female health.</p>

<p> This thesis is a reflection upon objects of power and their roles in the lives of people through the lens of a single case example: power objects as they appear throughout the narrative, philosophical, and ritual writings of the Tibetan Buddhist ritual specialist Sog bzlog pa Blo gros rgyal mtshan (1552-1624) and his milieu. This study explores their discourse on power objects specifically for what it reveals about how human interactions with certain kinds of objects encourage the flow of power and charisma between them, and what the implications of these person-object transitions were for issues of identity, agency, and authority on the personal, institutional, and state registers in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Tibet. </p><p> My investigation of Sog bzlog pa's discourse on power objects shows how the genres of narrative, philosophy, and liturgy are related around such objects, each presenting them from a slightly different perspective. I illustrate how narratives depict power objects as central to the identity of Sog bzlog pa and his circle, mediating relations that are in turn social, political, religious, aesthetic, and economic in tone, and contributing to the authority of the persons involved. This flow of power between persons and objects, I demonstrate further, is connected to tensions over the sources of transformational power as rooted in either objects, or in the people instrumental in their ritual treatment or use. I show how this tension between objective and subjective power plays out in Sog bzlog pa's philosophical speculations about power objects and in his rituals featuring them. I also trace the persistence of this discourse after Sog bzlog pa's death in the seventeenth-century state-building activities of Tibet and Sikkim, and in the present day identity of Sikkim's Buddhist population. Power objects emerge as hybrid subject-object mediators, which variously embody, channel, and direct the flow of power and authority between persons, objects, communities, institutions, and the state, as they flow across boundaries and bind these in their tracks. Finally, I illustrate how this discourse of power objects both complicates and extends contemporary theoretical reflections on the relationships between objects, actions, persons, and meanings. </p>

<p> Decisions have both short and long-term consequences. Sometimes we cannot see the consequences and do not know the outcomes, but we take a step and make a choice. Some after-effects are irrevocable, and some are fixable. Some decisions affect us immediately and exclusively while others have consequences that are global. When we make decisions, we sometimes doubt our decisions and ask ourselves what might have happened if another choice was made. We make choices daily, small or great, for good or bad. After World War II, South Korean president Rhee Syngman put many alleged Communists in a rehabilitation program known as the National Guidance League. Many of them were executed between 1945 and 1953 to prevent them from joining the Communist north. Rhee's decision affected many families including my own. What we choose to do has intentional and unintentional consequences. Extreme choices produce dire consequences that can subsequently influence future generations and, on a larger scale, an entire nation for decades.</p>

<p> This thesis explores Japanese society through the lens of cultural hybridity and liminality to understand the shift towards nonconformity and hyper-individualism among post-postwar Japanese. This shift reflects an important point in Japan's transculturation process whereby post-postwar Japanese have developed a cultural hybridity of inbetweenness (liminality) juxtaposing their native Japaneseness (<i>wakon</i>) against their adopted Westernness (<i>y<span style="text-decoration:overline"> o</span>kon</i>). This <i> wakon-y<span style="text-decoration:overline">o</span>kon </i> hybrid construct is posing a challenge to Japan's longstanding hybrid modernity philosophy of <i>wakon-y<span style="text-decoration:overline"> o</span>sai</i> (Japanese spirit- Western things), which perpetuated the pre-modern core values and collectivist ethics of Japaneseness for nearly 150 years below its fa&ccedil;ade of Western modernity. The dilemma inherent in Japan's <i>wakon-y<span style="text-decoration:overline"> o</span>kon</i> in-betweenness is foreshadowed in the pioneering works of Abe K<span style="text-decoration:overline">o</span>b<span style="text-decoration:overline"> o</span> and Murakami Haruki, who both illuminated the conflicting juxtaposition of the core values and ethics of Japaneseness (wakon) and <i>seken</i>-Other (the jury-surrounding- the-Self) against the pursuit of the individualist ethics of Westernness (y<span style="text-decoration:overline"> o</span>kon) and Selfhood (<i> shutaisei)</i> within their imaginaries. </p>

This study looks at women's prose narrative representing four major Chinese communities during the last 30 years, and focuses on the depiction of mother-daughter relationships among personae within the narrative texts. The thesis seeks to suggest that mother-daughter relationships within the texts are a reflection of how a text responds to its mother culture in the course of development. Narrative prose ranging from self-professed autobiographies to the fictional, written by Chinese women from American-Chinese communities, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China, are examined in a comparative approach within an ethnical framework. The concept of a national literature is discussed with regard to different fonns of Chinese-ness. It is revealed, in the course of this examination, that each group of Chinese women's writing examined here demonstrates an acute awareness of a link with an original mother culture, the Chinese orientation. However, recent events both inside and outside China have inevitably shaped cultural development in these communities, resulting in splits and diversifications in the individual cultural consciousness. Approached from this perspective, the Chinese mother culture gains a new vitality by virtue of shedding the burden of a long history. Focusing on the intertextual activities of regional writings, it is shown that represented Chinese-ness is no longer an unchanged and unchanging phenomenon, but is redefined each moment through the locus of interactions among independent hybrid communities.

The thesis proposes to address how the tradition of translating Chinese poetry in the English speaking world developed in the early twentieth century and has continued. Problems relating to this issue, such as the great change in poetics and intellectual atmosphere since 1915 when Cathay appeared, its impact on the translation of Chinese poetry, and the universe of discourse of the two cultures involved, those of the Chinese and the English speaking world, as well as the constraints of the target system on the translations, will also be discussed. The introduction provides an overview of the poetics that valued traditional metres at the turn of the century, and applies polysystem theory to explain the lack of enthusiasm for translations of classical Chinese poetry before 1915. Chapter 2 discusses the constraints of language, the poetics and universe of discourse in the target system, suggesting that these constraints handicapped the widespread transfer of classical Chinese poetry before 1915. Chapter 3 examines xing, the poetic device in Chinese poetry that emphasizes the poet's spontaneous response to nature and the merging of scene and feeling. The very nature of xing defies any attempt to make it explicit. The chapter is divided into two parts, discussing xing in the encoding and decoding process respectively. Readerresponse criticism and phenomenology are also incorporated in the discussions. The chapter is followed by an analysis of various attempts to translate poems that are presented with zing in Chapter 4, which shows that there is a tendency on the part of some translators to add logical links between the scene and the feelings expressed. Chapter 5 looks at the translation strategies of Arthur Waley, investigating the traditions of translating classical Chinese poetry that he has helped to build up. The kind of smooth grammatical lines he uses and the Chineseness he conveys have had great influence on subsequent translators. Chapter 6 studies Ezra Pound, with special focus on his innovative work Cathay, and his juxtaposition techniques. Chapter 7 studies Kenneth Rexroth's translations of Du Fu, while Chapter 8 examines Gary Snyder's translations of Cold Mountain. The vehicle of translating Chinese poetry in general-- language and poetics-- was close to that of modern poetry in the target culture. Chapter 9, the conclusion, asserts that various strategies are adopted for various purposes. It tries to place the position of the translators discussed in a polysystem context. In the target system, poems are appreciated more for their charm than their being supposedly faithful to an original. The image of China created through translators remains distant. To the reader in the West, China is always far out "there," not here.

This thesis was motivated by Robert Chard's puzzlement over the translational phenomenon of martial arts fiction in the West. It proposes to address how the translational migration of martial arts fiction took place, first to other Asian countries in the 1920's, but to the West only after a lapse of a few decades beginning in the early 1990's. Adopting a descriptive approach as described by Gideon Toury, the thesis is intended to add further to the limited inventory of case studies in urgent demand to test the polysystem theory propounded by Even-Zohar. The thesis is made up of two parts. Part I is a macro-level study of martial arts fiction, intended to contribute to testing the limits of the polysystem theory. After examining Chinese fiction as a low form in the Chinese literary polysystem and its weak function as translated literature in the Western literary polysystem, the study explores the translational phenomenon of martial arts fiction in the West as well as the concurrent phenomenon as to why so little of martial arts fiction has been translated into Western languages, compared to the copious amount into other Asian languages, to the extent of stimulating a new literary genre or (re)writing martial arts fiction in indigenous languages in Indonesia, Vietnam and Korea, sinicized countries or countries boasting large overseas Chinese communities. Issues and problems related to these translational activities and cultural phenomena are presented as tools to test the limits of the polysystem theory. Part II is a micro-level study focussing on the specifics of rendering Fox Volant of the Snowy Mountain by Jin Yong into English. I will argue, in the main, that many difficulties, inherent in both the translating and reading processes, can be constructed within the theoretical framework of Andre Lefevere's concept of "constraint", particularly that of the universe of discourse. Lefevere's connotation of the universe of discourse will be expanded to embrace different cultural presuppositions and literary assumptions underlying two divergent world cultures, hence different reader expectations in the reading process. It is hoped that the findings and results of this descriptive case history of martial arts fiction as a literary genre in translational migrations will contribute to the accumulation of knowledge.

The aim of this thesis is to examine the concept of virtue ethics in Stanley Hauerwas's understanding of virtue and delineate how that contributes to his ethical reasoning and his comprehension of medical ethics. The first chapter focuses on the shift that occurred in moral theory under the stance of the Enlightenment that eroded the traditional idea of morality as the formation of the self, allowing space for new concepts that dismissed the importance of the agent in the ethical task of seeking the good. In the second chapter, the three main ideas (character, vision, and narrative) that make up Hauerwas' ethical theory are examined with a particular attention to the importance of agency in moral life. The third chapter describes how Hauerwas' medical ethics, informed by his moral theory based on character, vision, and narrative, is relevant to medical ethics. Hauerwas argues that because medicine is a form of human activity with internal goods and standards of excellence intrinsic to its practice, it requires taking into account the notion of agency in the healing relationship. Finally, in the last chapter the specific religious discourse of Hauerwas' ethics is discussed in relation to secular medical ethics. In other words, this thesis raises the question of whether the reduction of medical ethics to a set of principles, as it is mostly the case today, represents a suitable picture of the reality of moral life in medicine.