Playing the Villain argues that the portrayal and punishment of terrorists in the Western media perpetuates colonialist attitudes, due to the visual connections between these modern images and past or fictional representations of iconic, punished villains. A theory of scapegoating related to intervisuality supports this argument, by explaining that as a ritual dependent on and developed by cultural history and mythology, scapegoating requires engagement with recognisable visual motifs that repeat and perpetuate Western, colonialist attitudes. Underlying, repeated narrative patterns ensure that the scapegoating ritual functions in a way that is cathartic and builds national unity following social crisis. This need for catharsis requires that there be a scapegoated villain whose demise may be celebrated, and that the villain is objectified and fetishised through visual representation and spectacle.

This thesis draws on practice-as-research (PaR) and its documentation to investigate experimental theatre as transdisciplinary performance. I include case studies from my practice with Fail Better Productions and consider multi-/inter-/trans-disciplinary methods in theatre studies. Examples of twentieth-century experimental theatre are studied to define ‘three problems’ in performance: the organic/mechanical, theatrical/scientific and playful/experimental. The concept of ‘entanglement’ further develops my understanding of PaR methodology. In Chapter 1, Samuel Beckett’s later dramatic works are explored as ‘theatre machines’, with a particular focus on George Devine’s 1964 production of Play. Following an analysis of the Fail Better’s Discords (2010), Beckettian embodiment is articulated as ‘organic machinery’. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Beckett’s ‘corporeal hereditaments’ and ‘plasticity’ in performance. Chapter 2 investigates Artaudian ‘theatre laboratories’, in particular Peter Brook’s 1964 Theatre of Cruelty experiments. This is compared with Fail Better’s interdisciplinary project Endlessness (2011). The final section develops an analysis of ‘scientific’ theatre and experimentation–as–performance, focusing particularly on forms of ‘reflexivity’. Chapter 3 examines participatory performance, specifically focusing on corporeal movement within installations such as Fail Better Fragments (2012). Joan Littlewood’s experimental performance practices are analyzed, specifically her Fun Palace project (c.1961–8), for the influence of Rudolf Laban upon her work. The potential for community engagement within these ‘experimental playgrounds’ will be explored in relation to ‘permeability’ in performance and Laban’s ‘effort attitude’ of flow. Finally, the thesis re-articulates the ‘three problems’ in terms of play and discipline, which are interrogated via the concepts of failure, ludus, and embodiment. I will demonstrate how a historiographical approach to PaR can re-invigorate methodology, before considering transdisciplinary performance in relation to ‘playfulness’ and Csikzsentmihalyi’s ‘flow’. The thesis concludes by briefly developing an understanding of performances as ‘epistemic things’, PaR as ‘unfinished thinking’, and experimental theatre practice as a transdisciplinary phenomenon of ‘not-yet-knowing’.

This thesis investigates the practice of two contemporary theatre directors. Thomas Ostermeier in Germany, and Katie Mitchell in Britain, have forged careers that have brought them recognition across Europe, and Mitchell is now a regular guest director at Ostermeier’s Schaubühne theatre in Berlin. Crossing cultural borders, their work affords the opportunity to investigate national discourses and compare critical trends. This thesis considers their trajectories over the last twenty years, from their training in a newly unified Europe through to prestigious invitations to bring their mature work to national and international festivals. More importantly, it argues that these are directors whose creativity remains rooted in the literary and dramatic canon. At every turn their innovations have been stimulated by new textual sources, prompting them to develop work that investigates politics, gendered subjectivities and issues of form. Examining their uses of Chekhov and Ibsen to probe questions of perception and cognition, this thesis tracks their developing interest in consciousness. Whereas Ostermeier focused his exploration using early modern text (Shakespeare), Mitchell used the modernist literary novel (Virginia Woolf) as the basis of an intermedial reinvention of form. Through the close analysis of key productions, this thesis explores issues of production as well as reception. It investigates why their particular uses of text and technology have bemused or antagonised critics and scholars, and interrogates their commitment to drama, to realist praxis, and to modernist concerns in a cultural moment where postdrama and the postmodern predominate. Although these are practitioners committed to the investigation of interests that many regard as untimely, this thesis argues that the reactionary, in their hands, is the radical.

Magister Artium - MA

This thesis is concerned with three distinct, but closely related, research topics focusing on the unipotent elements of a connected reductive algebraic group G, over an algebraically closed field k, and nilpotent elements in the Lie algebra g = LieG. The first topic is a determination of canonical forms for unipotent classes and nilpotent orbits of G. Using an original approach, we begin by obtaining a new canonical form for nilpotent matrices, up to similarity, which is symmetric with respect to the non-main diagonal (i.e. it is fixed by the map f : (xi;j) -> (xn+1-j;n+1-i)), with entries in {0,1}. We then show how to modify this form slightly in order to satisfy a non-degenerate symmetric or skew-symmetric bilinear form, assuming that the orbit does not vanish in the presence of such a form. Replacing G by any simple classical algebraic group, we thus obtain a unified approach to computing representatives for nilpotent orbits for all classical groups G. By applying Springer morphisms, this also yields representatives for the corresponding unipotent classes in G. As a corollary, we obtain a complete set of generic canonical representatives for the unipotent classes of the finite general unitary groups GUn(Fq) for all prime powers q. Our second topic is concerned with unipotent pieces, defined by G. Lusztig in [Unipotent elements in small characteristic, Transform. Groups 10 (2005), 449-487]. We give a case-free proof of the conjectures of Lusztig from that paper. This presents a uniform picture of the unipotent elements of G, which can be viewed as an extension of the Dynkin-Kostant theory, but is valid without restriction on p. We also obtain analogous results for the adjoint action of G on its Lie algebra g and the coadjoint action of G on g*. We also obtain several general results about the Hesselink stratification and Fq-rational structures on G-modules. Our third topic is concerned with generalised Gelfand-Graev representations of finite groups of Lie type. Let u be a unipotent element in such a group GF and let Γu be the associated generalised Gelfand-Graev representation of GF . Under the assumption that G has a connected centre, we show that the dimension of the endomorphism algebra of Γu is a polynomial in q (the order of the associated finite field), with degree given by dimCG(u). When the centre of G is disconnected, it is impossible, in general, to parametrise the (isomorphism classes of) generalised Gelfand-Graev representations independently of q, unless one adopts a convention of considering separately various congruence classes of q. Subject to such a convention, we extend our result. We also present computational data related to the main theoretical results. In particular, tables of our canonical forms are given in the appendices, as well as tables of dimension polynomials for endomorphism algebras of generalised Gelfand-Graev representations, together with the relevant GAP source code.

We study a family of three-dimensional Lie algebras that depend on a continuous parameter. We introduce certain quivers and prove that idempotented versions of the enveloping algebras of the Lie algebras are isomorphic to the path algebras of these quivers modulo certain ideals in the case that the free parameter is rational and non-rational, respectively. We then show how the representation theory of the introduced quivers can be related to the representation theory of quivers of affine type A, and use this relationship to study representations of the family of Lie algebras of interest. In particular, though it is known that this particular family of Lie algebras consists of algebras of wild representation type, we show that if we impose certain restrictions on weight decompositions, we obtain full subcategories of the category of representations that are of finite or tame representation type.

Recent scholarship on the representations of Jews in British Romantic fiction has explored the relationship between the radical changes in Jewish characterization of the period and shifting cultural values. Judith Page, for example, considers the effect of Romantic notions of sentiment, detailing especially how Jews test the limits of sympathetic feeling, and Michael Ragussis has linked the surge of interest in Jews to their value as rhetorically useful subjects in relation to debates surrounding English and British identity. Such studies at times draw attention to the impact of older characterizations of Jews on the new, typically to reinforce claims that relate changing Jewish portrayals to particular cultural and historical developments. Yet, the impact of literary precedent itself has not been fully considered as a leading factor in inspiring new ideas about Jewish characterization. This study takes as its centrepiece the development of the sympathetic or benevolent Jew in the Romantic period, best characterized by Richard Cumberland’s sentimental comedy The Jew (1794), and the historical novels Harrington (1814), and Ivanhoe (1819) by Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott respectively. These works draw heavily on pre-existing Jewish-themed texts, notably Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1598). While the play’s Jewish villain Shylock exerts a powerful and well-documented influence on later Jewish characters, the relevance of these Shylockian imitators merits more minute investigation in terms of their impact on the gradual transformation of ideas about Jews in fiction. For this reason, this dissertation takes a long period of history as its subject in order to emphasize that innovation in Jewish portrayal results not from ongoing social change alone, but equally from the interplay of past literary influences and developments in style and genre.

Orientador: Luise Weiss / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Artes / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-26T15:14:36Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Freitas_LiviaDinizAyresde_M.pdf: 192959261 bytes, checksum: 6f5b051e45d519fcc885cc50dd2a6812 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014 / Resumo: Esta dissertação consiste no desenvolvimento de uma pesquisa teórico-prática acerca da identidade na contemporaneidade. Explorando graficamente a temática da autorrepresentação, a pesquisa apresenta paralelos entre o trabalho prático produzido e outros trabalhos que têm sido desenvolvidos no país e no mundo sobre a temática em questão. A pesquisa engloba, também, questões referentes às técnicas experimentadas, que transitam entre gravura e processos fotográficos antigos. O percurso dessas técnicas coincide com a história da imagem impressa, partindo da xilogravura até experiências com fotografia analógica. Foram feitas cerca de quatrocentas impressões diferentes, durante um período de, aproximadamente, dois anos, em que todas as imagens produzidas são autorretratos. A partir dessas impressões, foi possível estabelecer um diálogo entre teoria e prática, sendo que cada conjunto de imagens corresponde a uma ou mais questões levantadas ao longo da pesquisa / Abstract: This dissertation is to develop a theoretical and practical research on identity in contemporary society. Graphically exploring the theme of self-representation, research shows parallels between the produced handy work and other work that has been developed in the country and the world on the topic in question. The survey also includes questions relating to the experienced technical, transiting between printmaking and old photographic processes. The route of these techniques coincides with the history of the printed image, starting from the woodcut to experiment with film photography. About four hundred different impressions were made over a period of approximately two years in which all the images produced are self-portraits. From these impressions, it was possible to establish a dialogue between theory and practice, with each set of images corresponds to one or more issues raised during the research / Mestrado / Artes Visuais / Mestra em Artes Visuais

This study set out to answer how and to what extent the gendered effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are addressed in parliamentary debates in the Southern African regional context. As both the proportion of women in parliament and the level of democracy have been established by previous research as important conditions for women to be able to act for women as a group, four countries with varying combinations of these factors are examined. By conducting both a quantitative and a qualitative text analysis on Hansards from South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Zambia, the study analyses the extent to which the gendered effects of the pandemic are addressed and how they are addressed respectively. The results reveal that a combination of a high proportion of women in parliament and a high degree of democracy is the most favourable condition for enabling the substantive representation of women. A democracy with a low proportion of women in parliament is shown to be more allowing for the substantive representation of women than an electoral autocracy with a high proportion of women in parliament. Moreover, the qualitative frame analysis sheds light on the different issues which are in focus on the framing of the gendered effects of the pandemic in different parliaments depending on their level of democracy. Particularly, the issue of gender-based violence in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic is found to have reached the political agenda in the democratic cases, whereas MPs in the less democratic parliaments are more likely to feminize their cause by focusing more on traditionally feminine policy issues such as the health effects of women within the context of the pandemic.

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Arts in fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree Of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of African Languages at the University of Zululand, 2016 / In this thesis, the research focused on representation of women images in the selected isiZulu literary texts. From the late 1940’s up to 1994 South Africans struggled under the apartheid regime. During this period of time Black women were doubly oppressed by their patriarchal and traditional cultures as well as by the apartheid system of government. With the change of government in 1994, a new era in the history of South Africa was ushered in. The underlying foundations of the new constitution were democratic values of gender equality, non- racial, non sexist society. It is against this backdrop that the thesis focused on exploring the effects and or impact of perceptions about women within a changing and transforming society in Africa in general and South Africa specifically. The isiZulu texts selected that were analysed are works of transitional period partly because they were published during the time of political and social transformation. Whilst other texts that were analysed were published during the post-independence period. The rational behind this was to give a broader spectrum that reflects the reality; as well as to establish whether the socio- political transformation has had an impact on how male authors represent women in isiZulu literary texts. Literary feminist philosophy was employed to highlight whether their depiction is real or idealized. The study concluded that gender inequality was still prevalent in the depiction of women images in selected isiZulu literary texts authored by males. There was no transformation that had been made by male authors in their portrayal of women characters to reflect the current political and social order