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Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-02T20:23:11Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 3419.pdf: 1908813 bytes, checksum: 00e2359e53f73b176da4dec0219ba4aa (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010-09-10 / The film Pink Floyd The Wall, adaptation to the cinema of the Pink Floyd´s concept album, tells the Pink´s story, a musician, that was born in England during the World War II final years, he had his father died in a battle and this fact start a process of depression and melancholy that culminate in his total apathy towards life. This research has its focus on the literary content of the songs from the original album, the aim is study the film formal structure, its differences, similarities and complementarities comparing to the album narrative, observing the translation and artistic recreation process from the album to the movie and also confirming the dialogical relations between the different problems, contextualization, languages and representations explored in this art piece. / O filme Pink Floyd The Wall, adaptação para o cinema do álbum conceitual da banda Pink Floyd, narra a história, desde a infância até sua completa alienação, do protagonista Pink, um músico nascido na Inglaterra nos anos finais da Segunda Guerra Mundial, cuja morte do pai durante a guerra lhe desencadeia um processo de depressão e melancolia que culmina em sua total apatia diante da vida. A presente pesquisa, tendo como foco o teor literário das canções do álbum original, tem por objetivo o estudo da estrutura formal do tecido fílmico, suas diferenças, semelhanças e complementaridades com a narrativa musical contida no álbum, observando e constatando os processos de tradução e recriação de uma obra para outra, além das relações dialógicas entre as diferentes problemáticas, contextualizações, linguagens e representações exploradas na obra.

Does the individual really matter in the post-modern world, brimming with countless signs and signifiers? My main objective in this writing is to demonstrate how this happens in Verhoeven's films, exploring his central themes and subtext and doing what science fiction does: hold a mirror up to the contemporary world and critique it, asking whether our species' current trajectory is beneficial or hazardous.; Dutch director Paul Verhoeven is a polarizing figure. Although many of his American made films have received considerable praise and financial success, he has been lambasted on countless occasions for his gratuitous use of sex, violence, and contentious symbolism--1995s Showgirls was overwhelmingly dubbed the worst film of all time and 1997s Starship Troopers earned him a reputation as a fascist. Regardless of the controversy surrounding him, his science fiction films are a move beyond the conventions of the big blockbuster science fiction films of the 1980s (E.T. and the Star Wars trilogy are prime examples), revealing a deeper exploration of both sociopolitical issues and the human condition. Much like the novels of Philip K. Dick (and Verhoeven's 1990 film Total Recall--an adaptation of a Dick short story), Verhoeven's science fiction work explores worlds where paranoia is a constant and determining whether an individual maintains any liberty is regularly questionable. In this thesis I am basically exploring issues regarding power. Although I barely bring up the term power in it, I feel it is central. Power is an ambiguous term; are we discussing physical power, state power, objective power, subjective power, or any of the other possible manifestations of the word? The original Anglo-French version of power means "to be able," asking whether it is possible for one to do something. In relation to Verhoeven's science fiction work each demonstrates the limitations placed upon an individual's autonomy, asking are the protagonists capable of independent agency or rather just environmental constructs reflecting the myriad influences surrounding them.

Ethnographic collections in western museums such as the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM) carry many meanings, but by definition, they represent an intercultural encounter. This history of this encounter is often lost, overlooked, or obscured, and yet it has bearing on how the objects in the collection have been interpreted and understood. This thesis uncovers the hidden history of one particular collection in the RAMM and examines the multiple meanings that have been attributed to the objects in the collection over time. The Richard Dennett Collection was made in Africa in the years when European powers began to colonise the Congo basin. Richard Edward Dennett (1857-1921) worked as a trader in the Lower Congo between 1879 and 1902. The collection was accessioned by the RAMM in 1889. The research contextualises the collection by making a close analysis of primary source material which was produced by the collector and by his contemporaries, and includes publications, correspondence, photographs and illustrations which have been studied in museums and archives in Europe and North America. Dennett was personally involved with key events in the colonial history of this part of Africa but he also studied the indigenous BaKongo community, recording his observations about their political and material culture. As a result he became involved in the institutions of anthropology and folklore in Britain which were attempting to explain, classify and interpret such cultures. Through examining Dennett’s history this research has been able to explore the Congo context, the indigenous society, and those European institutions which collected and interpreted BaKongo collections. The research has added considerably to the museum’s knowledge about this collection and its collector, and the study responds to the practical imperative implicit in a Collaborative Doctoral Project, by proposing a small temporary exhibition in the RAMM to explore these histories and meanings. In making this proposal the research considers the current curatorial debate concerning responsible approaches to colonial collections, and assesses some of the strategies that are being employed in museums today.

This dissertation considers Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) as a painter and as a figure of discourse. It addresses the longstanding concern of Rousseau’s resistance to interpretation and proposes that this derives from Rousseau’s incomplete fulfillment of the professional obligations of the artist, specifically, from his failure to motivate his work through the pursuit of what modern art critics commonly called “a problem.” Rousseau did not practice painting as artists of his day did, and because of this difference—first articulated by Guillaume Apollinaire in 1908 as an absence of artistic inquiétude—he entered the discourse of art with unprecedented susceptibility to reinvention. The Rousseau we know today, the Rousseau who was a miraculous modernist in the interwar period, and the Rousseau who emerged in the context of the avant-garde in the earliest years of the twentieth century share little besides a name, and this frustrates any effort to write a coherent history of the painter and his pictures. Rather than propose once again Rousseau’s recuperation into a traditional art-historical narrative, this dissertation tells the history of a maker who produced admirable images but fulfilled few other author-functions, and it tells the history of writers who, compensating for Rousseau’s authorial deficits, produced a new artist, a new body of work, and widespread puzzlement about the place of each in the history of modern art. / text

This dissertation asserts that the tortuous relationship Spanish American literature had with cosmopolitanism since the Wars of Independence reached a turning point towards the end of the second half of the twentieth century. While the literary production of the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century was centred on the Spanish American nation and the continent, contemporary literature has become increasingly deterritorialized, and has begun to present narrative worlds and discuss issues that transcend this circumscribed universe. The discerning of this articulation of global issues in contemporary literature – which I contend is predicated on the concept of cosmopolitanism – is the primary objective of this investigation. The five novels examined here are Elena Poniatowska’s La “Flor de Lis” (1988), Mario Vargas Llosa’s El Paraíso en la otra esquina (2003) and El sueño del celta (2010), and Jorge Volpi’s El fin de la locura (2003) and No será la Tierra (2006). This study aims to describe and assess an evolving perspective on the treatment of cosmopolitanism in Spanish America. I trace the shift from the previous generations’ main preoccupation with aesthetic cosmopolitanism, which sought to engage Latin American literary discourse with the Western canon, to what I identify as the current political implication of the concept. To this end, I show that whereas mid-twentieth century authors displaced cosmopolitanism in favour of more politically expedient concepts, authors now plot it in their novels as a means of discussing issues of identity and citizenship in an increasingly globalized world.

China has become a major contributor to world science today, with the largest number of qualified scientific publications in the world, a centralized government willing to sponsor the development of science, and pioneering scientists in all disciplines. Where did this scientific power emerge from historically and how did this history connect with the rest of the world? My dissertation suggests that comprehending the Sino-American intellectual exchange network since the early twentieth century is essential for us to grasp the development of science in modern China. It argues that a Sino-American intellectual exchange network through the China Foundation for the Promotion of Education and Culture (ie., the China Foundation) played a critical role in the development of modern scientific research and education from the 1920 to the 1940s. In the first half of the twentieth century, leading American intellectuals of the progressive era such as Teachers College’s educational scholar Paul Monroe and Columbia University’s prominent philosopher of pragmatism John Dewey frequently communicated with prominent Chinese intellectuals, many of whom were their former students in the United States. Such face-to-face interchanges across the Pacific ultimately influenced Chinese choices in shaping modern scientific education and research. The impact was generated primarily through the China Foundation. The China Foundation, financed by the second American remission of the Boxer Indemnity Funds, served as a sponsor of the development of scientific research, teaching and training in modern China. The trustees of the foundation, responsible for the custody and administration of the fund, included prominent Chinese intellectuals (most of whom had received western graduate training) such as Hu Shi (PhD, Columbia), Jiang Menglin (PhD, Teachers College), Zhang Boling (visiting fellow at Teachers College, 1917-1918), Ren Hongjun (H. C. Zen, MA, Columbia), Guo Bingwen (PhD, Teachers College), Ding Wenjiang (aka V. K. Ting, BA, University of Glasgow), Zhao Yuanren (aka Y. R. Chao, PhD, Harvard) as well as the American intellectuals and reformers Paul Monroe, John Dewey, Roger Sherman Greene and John Leighton Stuart. This dissertation researches the history of Sino-American intellectual exchanges in the China Foundation network, which were central to the establishment of science in modern China. It begins by tracing the cohort of leading Chinese intellectuals trained at American universities, who paved the way for its establishment. They invited leading American educators like John Dewey and Paul Monroe to China, and did the translation work that allowed for their reformist ideas of democracy, education and science to become popular in China. While the American intellectuals aspired to transmit a democratic education through introducing science, the Chinese intellectuals also developed their own rationales to pursue China’s scientific modernization. It also examines the political assumptions and tensions wound up in this Sino-American educational exchange network that illuminates the ways in which the intellectuals on both sides of the Pacific were mutually influenced by their intellectual exchanges. In asks the following questions: How did American intellectuals of the progressive era design and pursue a democratic vision for the Chinese scientific development, and what were their political assumptions undergirding the transmission of science? How did the Chinese intellectuals respond to the American knowledge of science, translate, and negotiate this transmission of science to China? What aspects of science did they absorb and incorporate for the Chinese national purposes? What ideas did they absorb from the United States, and what aspects did they deliberately eschew? In posing these questions, part of my goal is to shift the predominant narrative of transnational progressive era US intellectual history from “Atlantic Crossings” to a dense and constitutive set of exchanges of knowledge, ideas and practices of sciences across the Pacific.

The plot twist is a complex narrative surprise in which a revelation retroactively transforms readers’ understanding of the preceding events. Readers discover belatedly that the situation depicted in the narrative had all along been quite different from what they thought. Although the term “plot twist” was first used in the early twentieth century, many of the best-known works of fiction of the nineteenth century were revealed, in retrospect, to be twist narratives. This dissertation studies twist narratives and their readers in the period before the plot twist became a known device. Through case studies of Jane Austen’s Emma, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace” and Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the chapters investigate what kinds of knowledge-making practices readers engage in during first-time readings and rereadings of twist narratives, as well as before and after reading. Across these chapters I make the case that twist narratives demonstrate the crucial and interconnected roles of knowledge and temporality in any narrative experience. What we know, and when, and especially what we don’t (yet) know, is crucial to how narratives work and why we enjoy them.

This thesis explores the late-eighteenth-century movement to end Britain’s transatlantic slave trade through recovering one of the major discourses in favour of abolition, namely that of the evangelical Anglicans. This important intellectual milieu has often been ignored in academia and is discovered through examining the sermons, hymns, and prayers of three influential leaders in this movement: Member of Parliament William Wilberforce, pastor and hymn writer John Newton, and pastor and professor Charles Simeon. Their oral texts reveal that at the heart of their discourse lies the doctrine of Atonement. On this foundation these abolitionists primarily built a vocabulary not of human rights, but of public duty. This duty was both to care for the destitute as individuals and to protect their nation as a whole because they believed that God was the defender of the enslaved and that he would bring providential judgement on those nations that ignored their plight. For the British evangelicals, abolishing the slave trade was not merely a means to avoid impending judgement, but also part of a broader project to prepare the way for Jesus’s imminent return through advancing the work of reconciliation between humankind and God as they believed themselves to be confronting evil in all of its forms. By reconfiguring the evangelical abolitionist arguments within their religious framework and social contexts, this thesis helps overcome the dissonance that separates our world from theirs and makes accessible the eighteenth-century abolitionist discourse of a campaign that continues to resonate with human rights activists and scholars of social change in the twenty-first-century.

This thesis explores the late-eighteenth-century movement to end Britain’s transatlantic slave trade through recovering one of the major discourses in favour of abolition, namely that of the evangelical Anglicans. This important intellectual milieu has often been ignored in academia and is discovered through examining the sermons, hymns, and prayers of three influential leaders in this movement: Member of Parliament William Wilberforce, pastor and hymn writer John Newton, and pastor and professor Charles Simeon. Their oral texts reveal that at the heart of their discourse lies the doctrine of Atonement. On this foundation these abolitionists primarily built a vocabulary not of human rights, but of public duty. This duty was both to care for the destitute as individuals and to protect their nation as a whole because they believed that God was the defender of the enslaved and that he would bring providential judgement on those nations that ignored their plight. For the British evangelicals, abolishing the slave trade was not merely a means to avoid impending judgement, but also part of a broader project to prepare the way for Jesus’s imminent return through advancing the work of reconciliation between humankind and God as they believed themselves to be confronting evil in all of its forms. By reconfiguring the evangelical abolitionist arguments within their religious framework and social contexts, this thesis helps overcome the dissonance that separates our world from theirs and makes accessible the eighteenth-century abolitionist discourse of a campaign that continues to resonate with human rights activists and scholars of social change in the twenty-first-century.