Este trabalho apresenta um estudo detalhado de alguns relatos publicados na América Latina durante o pós-guerra, período em que as concepções dominantes sobre o humano entram em crise e nota-se um inegável interesse em problematizar os conceitos sobre humanidade e animalidade, por meio da ficção. A análise desses contos, considerados pertencentes ao modo fantástico da literatura, indaga sobre como o sentimento perturbador que caracteriza esse estilo pode surgir a partir da peculiar relação que se estabelece entre o humano e o animal, e mais especificamente, da transgressão das fronteiras que separam esses dois universos, que sob uma perspectiva logocêntrica moderna - parecem tão distanciados: a cultura e a natureza. Os relatos escolhidos pertencem aos seguintes livros: Bestiario (1951) de Julio Cortázar, Confabulario (1952) de Juan José Arreola, Mundo Animal (1953) e Cuentos Claros (1957), de Antonio Di Benedetto, e dois contos de Felisberto Hernández, \"Cocodrilo\" (1949) e \"La mujer parecida a mí\" (1949). Ainda que não faça parte do corpus, é importante mencionar El libro de los Seres Imaginarios (1967), de Jorge Luis Borges, por sua importância na investigação do tema. / This work presents a detailed study about some specific short stories published in Latin America during the postwar period, when the dominant conceptions about the human being fall in crisis and it is observed an undeniable interest in problematizing concepts of humanity and animality, through the fiction. The analysis of these reports, considered part of the fantastic literature, aims to investigate how the disturbing feeling that characterizes the fantasy can arise from the peculiar relationship established between the man and the animal, and more specifically, from the erosion of the boundaries separating these two worlds, which under a modern and logocentric perspective - seem to be so distant: culture and nature. The cited stories have been selected from the following books: Bestiario (1951) by Julio Cortázar, Confabulario (1952) by Juan José Arreola, Mundo Animal (1953) and Cuentos Claros (1957), by Antonio Di Benedetto, and two tales of Philibert Hernández, \"Crocodilo\" (1949) and \"La mujer parecida a mí \"(1949). Although it is not part of the corpus, El libro de los Seres Imaginarios (1967) by Jorge Luis Borges, is mentioned due to its importance to the investigation of the subject.

Concentration camp scholarship has been impacted by an ‘island syndrome’: most research limits itself to one site, focuses either on its life or afterlife, and overlooks interactions among functionaries, inmates, and local people. Central themes connected to the camps thus remain shrouded in popular misconceptions. This study breaks with historiographical orthodoxies and addresses common confusions through a new framework. Drawing on Ebensee and the Loiblpass, two forced labour outposts of the Mauthausen complex, it presents the first integrated account of the divergent factors that shaped the legacies of these sites and the fates of their subjects. A focus on Ebensee shows how gravely the local bureaucracy, relief workers, and US Army impacted on the early postwar lives of former camp inmates. Victim groups were marginalised by local and Allied actors precisely because of a broad awareness and continued survivor presence. The Loiblpass figured less prominently in the postwar lives of its surrounding communities. At the core of postwar views lay pre-1945 experiences. Living in an epicentre of territorial struggles, Loibl Valley inhabitants did not externalise a strong political agenda and instead communicated a binary ‘selective association process’. The memory of the camp prompted a positive association in socioeconomic terms; political allusions provoked a relativizing of brutality and a claim to personal victimhood. The local context and postwar dimension constitute a missing link in our understanding of these sites, their neighbouring communities, and the early postwar period more broadly. While the causal relationship between a social reintegration of Nazis and a re-marginalisation of genuine victims has thus far been viewed chiefly through the lens of federal politics, this development was already long under way—aided by all local actors—when amnesty laws encouraging the rehabilitation of former National Socialists came into effect; national and Allied policy decisions in the wake of the burgeoning Cold War only further catalysed this development from 1947 onwards.

This study fills a critical gap in research on the immediate postwar history of Japanese American community culture in Los Angeles and South Bay. The purpose of this thesis is to contribute research and literature of the immediate postwar period between the late 1940s resettlement period and the 1960s. During the early to mid-1940s, Americans witnessed World War II and the unlawful incarceration of over 120,000 Japanese Americans. In the 1960s, the Sansei (third generation) started to reshape the character and cultural expressions of Japanese American communities, including their development of the Yellow Power Movement in the context of the Black and Brown Power Movements in California. The period between these bookends, however, requires further research and academic study, and it is to the literature of the immediate postwar period that this thesis contributes. Furthermore, this thesis contributes to the nearly absent literature of Japanese American community redevelopment in the transboundary Los Angeles/South Bay area. It is in this area that we find the largest and fastest growing postwar Japanese American population in the country. This community built lasting networks and relationships through the revival of cultural celebrations like Obon and Nisei Week, sport and recreation – namely baseball and bowling, and ethnic resources in the form of food and ethnic markets. These relationships laid the foundations for later social activism and the redefining of the Japanese American community. Far from a period of silence or inactivity, Japanese Americans actively shaped and reshaped their communities in ways that refused to allow the wartime incarceration experience, so fresh in their minds, to define them.

In this inquiry I pursue two tasks. First, I locate the roots of Heidegger's philosophical project historically within a specific theological discourse bent on redefining the relation between religion and politics. Heidegger's main, if covert, intent was to combat the egalitarian, pluralistic impulses carried by a tradition of critical Christology, which leads from F.W.J. Schelling's (1775-1854) Philosophy of Revelation to the work of the radical theologian-philosopher Paul Tillich (1886-1965). These egalitarian impulses spring from a broadened understanding of religious community as a material communication community unified through the use of shared symbols into a community of understanding, knowledge, and interests. The theoretical expansion and deepening of such a communication model, I detect in the writings of the renegade Neogrammarian, Hermann Paul, here considered in light of the "neo-Idealist" initiative of one of Paul's most prominent critics, the Romanist Karl Vossler. Prior to the advanced theological exposition of symbolically mediated communication, in works such as Tillich's book Dynamics of Faith (2001; Engl. orig.1957), the Neogrammarian movement in language studies, I argue, holds the key to accessing the cloaked Christological subtext of Heidegger's thought. Second, after thus locating Heidegger's philosophical agenda within its intellectual-historical context, I expose how Heidegger manipulates philosophical rhetoric to achieve the suspension of Schelling's theological legacy. My analysis of Heidegger's rhetorical behavior is focused on his Letter on Humanism (written 1946, published 1949), a text very overt in both its philosophical biases and its politics. The Humanismusbrief comes the closest to revealing Heidegger's own self-positioning within his generation. The work's conclusion provides a brief look ahead, or Ausblick, to indicate the main features of how these findings about the Letter can be brought to bear on Heidegger's masterpiece fragment, Being and Time. Through this approach, Heidegger's inherently political philosophy gains a much clearer profile in the context of its formative phase in the waning days of the Weimar Republic and opens a new perspective on later attempts by its author to "re-apply" his philosophical program to the cultural situation of postwar Germany, as well as to the ethical-epistemological problems remaining after twelve years of German isolationism. / text

After World War II in the United States, the household refrigerator and freezer became interwoven into a domestic reality defined by consumption, mechanical innovation, and a tension between spatial isolation and cultural interconnectivity. This thesis positions narrative Hollywood cinema, television and print media as the dominant sites where the refrigerator and freezer’s social identities were formed and negotiated. These productions employ the devices to explore postwar family gender roles, the influence of culture industries and consumer economies within the home, and technological fantasies and fears. They also illustrate a fertile conversation between household media technologies and kitchen accessories. As a result, viewing the refrigerator and freezer through film and television representations substantially alters existing conclusions over who interacted with the objects on an everyday basis, and their effect for a culture increasingly reliant upon appliances to provide basic human needs and generate a satisfying, entertaining lifestyle. / text

Mad Pursuits: Therapeutic Narration in Postwar American Fiction examines three mid-century American novels—J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963)—in relation to the rise and popularization of psychoanalytic theory in America. The study historicizes these landmark novels as representing and interrogating postwar America’s confidence in the therapeutic capacity of narrative to redress psychological problems. Drawing on key concepts from narrative theory and the multidisciplinary field of narrative and identity studies, I argue that these texts develop a multi-layered, formal problematization of therapeutic narration: the narrativization of the self through modes of interpretation based on character action and development. The study, thus, investigates how the texts both critique the purported effectiveness of being healed through narrative means, as well as how they problematize their society’s investment in this method. I propose that the novels ultimately explore submerged possibilities for realizing what I call fugitive selves by creating self-representations that negotiate and exceed the confines of the paradigmatic models of plot and character of the period. In Chapter One, I argue that the ego and pop psychological movements during the postwar era encouraged the American public to define and realize psychological health, success and happiness through narrativized means. I show in Chapter Two how careful differentiation between narrative levels of interpretation in The Bell Jar reveals the novel’s complication of the self created in narrative, with and against the socio-cultural scripts and therapeutic assumptions of the period. Chapter Three concentrates on The Catcher in the Rye’s various methods of de-composing the narrative identity of the subject created through developmental and therapeutic narration. In the final chapter, I read Invisible Man as a satire of postwar psychoanalytic theory and method specifically concerning racialized narrative identities, and as a reflection on a method of enduring psychological illness. The Conclusion brings together several argumentative strands running throughout the dissertation regarding what the novels contrastively reveal about the perils, and even the possibilities, inherent in the narrativizing of the self in early postwar America.

This thesis is located at the intersection of several bodies of literature. While material exists on the histories of tourism, the automobile and the family, this combination of literature is previously uncharted territory in the history of British Columbia. By looking at the articles and advertisements published in newspapers and magazines, this work focuses on the dominant discourse surrounding the family and the automobile in postwar British Columbia. Conceptually, it is divided into two sections. The first discusses the role of the automobile in the postwar family, examining ways in which cultural producers framed it as a site of family togetherness and an essential component of modern fatherhood and masculine domesticity. This discourse correlated the automobile’s gendered dynamics with roles of modern parenthood and the experience of childhood, effectively blurring the distinction between the domestic and the public. The second section brings the family automobile into the natural environment, exploring ways in which the automobile and other outdoor technologies shaped the family’s relationship to nature. Through the gendered consumption of goods associated with the outdoors, cultural producers portrayed facilitation of the family’s access to the outdoors as a fundamental component of modern fatherhood.

This thesis examines the role of democracy in British, French and American visions of global order in the 1940s. It argues that 'democracy' in a global context did not reflect 'Wilsonian' or 'Cosmopolitan' dreams, nor did it refer to the questions of state representation and institutional accountability that dominate contemporary debates. Instead, it shows that building a 'democratic' global order in the 1940s meant, above all, an attempt to address the challenge of democratic modernity, summarised by Karl Polanyi in 1944 as the search for 'freedom in a complex society', in the new global environment of the mid-century. This challenge was composed of five core concerns, ranging from the protection of the individual from the modern state and the transformation of democratic participation, to the use of expert planning and modern technology to secure economic justice. Achieving a balance between these competing and at times contradictory imperatives was seen as the key to securing a new democratic order that could resist the temptations of nationalism and totalitarianism and secure peace. Crucially, it was only through the structures of a new global order that, internationalists argued, there could be any chance of success. The task was not an easy one, and the historical investigation shows how the choices and trade-offs internationalists made in relation to these imperatives entailed costs in terms of inclusivity, participation and even rights within visions of democratic global order. The thesis has both historical and conceptual goals. First, it recovers important ideas about global order that have been largely written out of the history of this period by taking the language of democracy in world order debates seriously and understanding these visions in context. Conceptually, its aim is to contest and transform how we think about global order and democracy in the history of international thought and in the present day. Instead of Cosmopolitan, Wilsonian, liberal or other normative blueprints for a democratic world order, the conclusion argues that we should, following the example of the 1940s, reconceptualise the relationship between global order and democracy today in relation to the persistent dilemmas of democratic modernity. In a global context, these continue to have interlocking domestic and international dimensions and, more importantly, continue to require choices that entail normatively contestable costs in the construction of a democratic global order. Only then, it argues, will it be possible to think about how these shortcomings can be mitigated and whether and what kind of democratic order we want to pursue at all.

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The current scholarly literature on the international mediation of armed conflicts predominantly draws on a rationalist-materialist perspective. This perspective suggests that the ticket to mediation success is the material manipulation of the bargaining environment by third parties with a high degree of economic and military resources. In this dissertation I argue against those that highlight material power when explaining outcomes of international mediation processes. Indeed, this dissertation shows that legitimacy, far more than capacity, determines outcomes of mediation. The reason why legitimacy matters so much is that if a mediator has legitimacy, it can continue to look for a mutual satisfactory outcome and try to pull the conflict parties towards compliance, but if a mediator loses legitimacy, no amount of material resources will prove sufficient in mediating the conflict. In other words, material capacity in the form of economic and military resources may be useful to successfully mediate a conflict, but it is rarely sufficient. Through scrutinising international mediation processes in civil wars in Africa, I develop a theory that explains how mediators are effective because of a high degree of legitimacy rather than military or economic capacity. More specifically, I show how legitimacy matters through comparing the effectiveness of African and non-African third parties. African third parties are typically referred to as ineffective because of a low degree of economic and military capacity. However, African third parties are effective in mediating civil wars in Africa because of a high degree of legitimacy, which is a result of a strong conviction within the African society of states that African mediation is the most desirable type of mediation in conflicts in Africa. Drawing on data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program supplemented with unique data, which together cover all mediation efforts in Africa between 1960 and 2012, I find quantitative evidence supporting the effectiveness of African third parties. Compared to non-African third parties, African third parties are far more likely to conclude peace agreements and these peace agreements are more likely to be durable. Two case studies, in which several mediation efforts in civil wars in Sudan are examined, further probe the causal mechanisms that I put forward to explain the effectiveness of African mediation. While I do not claim causal generalisability on the basis of these two case studies, the mediation efforts in Sudan nevertheless suggest that third party legitimacy is central to mediation success. This is the first systematic study that compares African and non-African mediation efforts. Theoretically, this study deviates from much of the literature that solely puts forward rationalist-materialist explanations of mediation success. By bringing legitimacy to the forefront, this dissertation overcomes key limitations in the current mediation literature, in which material sources of power are emphasised and social structures are ignored.