Thesis (Ph.D. (Tshivenda)) -- University of Limpopo, 2022 / The issue of African identity in African literature has been receiving considerable attention in recent times. However, comparatively speaking, the focus has largely been on texts written in English, whereas texts written in (African) indigenous languages have received minimal attention. Moreover, critics who cannot understand the language of indigenous writing ignore such writings in their criticisms, which culminates in the treatment of indigenous writings as palimpsests on which the other records their story. Consequently, perspectives and philosophies shared by indigenous literature are marginalised and only those conveyed in European languages are considered. Against this backdrop, this study aimed to, firstly, attempt to draw Tshivenḓa poetry from the periphery to the ‗centre‘ of conversations on issues of selfhood, identity and culture in the postcolonial context. Secondly, it sought to show that a representative selection of Tshivenḓa poetry can provide indices into the trajectories and nuances of the Vhavenḓa people‘s selfhood, identity and culture. Undergirded by a trifocal theoretical framework, namely Afrocentricity, the hermeneutical approach and postcolonial theory, the study shored up various aspects that were thematised by the selected poets as indices into the Vhavenḓa‘s selfhood, identity and culture. The study employed a qualitative research approach and the descriptive method to analyse sixteen (16) purposively sampled poetry texts. Textual and thematic analyses were relied on in the analysis of the selected texts. The study found that Tshivenḓa poetry demystifies the meta-narratives propounded by colonialists and exponents of apartheid about African people‘s selfhood, identity and culture. Tshivenḓa poetry attains this, firstly, by demonstrating that the indigenes have always had ways through which they expressed their selfhood, identity and culture, and secondly, by agentively challenging hegemonic discourses on selfhood, identity and culture. The analysis of the selected texts also revealed that the Vhavenḓa poets derive their sense of selfhood, identity and culture from two main sources: God (Ṅwali) and their ancestors. It was noted that most of the modern Vhavenḓa poets‘ concept of ‗God‘ gravitates more towards the Judeo-Christian worldview, while those who espouse ‗ancestor veneration‘ promote the Africanist traditional religion as their base for identity formation and articulation. The former observation in particular should be ascribed to the influence of Christian missionaries. Other themes, such as Tshivenḓa mythology, religion, agitations for self-identification and representation, marriage, socio-cultural traditions, selenology, cosmology, cosmogony, dance, and ritual, are mainly anchored to the Vhavenḓa‘s notions of theocentricity and anthropocentricity. This study contributes to the ongoing discourse on politics of identity and discourses interested in how the formerly colonised indigenes seek to assert their presence and agency after decades of marginalisation and repression. The study recommends that aspects of selfhood, identity and culture that are encapsulated in Tshivenḓa poetry should form part of indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) that need to be studied in institutions of basic and higher education. For the sake of knowledge preservation and perpetual transmission, communities should be proactive in passing this knowledge to the younger generations. / National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) and South African Humanities Deans Association (SAHUDA)

In this dissertation, I argue that modern understandings of both technology and gendered selfhood were mutually fashioned across the long eighteenth century. This argument makes a number of interventions in current scholarly narratives by contending, first, that interiorized subjectivity was conceptualized in the eighteenth century as constructed from (and perceptible through) a series of technological objects; second, that as gender difference was increasingly inscribed on bodies thought to be characterized by intrinsic biological variance, the importance of technological supplements to defining bodily capacities meant that this variance was often realized through artificial objects; and third, that the mechanization of the British textile manufacture, which has been identified as the industrial revolution’s catalyst, was premised not on machines’ inherent efficacy, but on the identification of technological ingenuity with a new kind of British masculinity, and a concurrent devaluation of supposedly primitive Indian and British female labourers. In my first chapter, I explore the relationship between optical technologies and stage machinery through a reading of Aphra Behn’s The Emperor of the Moon, arguing that Behn’s play enacts a radical revision of technological empiricism by privileging experiences of feminized spectacular materiality as sites of knowledge. My second chapter traces the afterlife of Restoration mechanical philosophy in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, and explores how Clarissa’s interiority is conceptualized by both Lovelace and Richardson as fundamentally technological. In my third chapter I turn to John Cleland’s pornographic Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, showing how the text’s representations of the technologies of textual production are intimately linked with its eroticism and violence. In my final chapter, I analyse a collection of political pamphlets and popular treatises to show how the industrialization of the British cotton manufacture erected a technological nationalism through the mechanical appropriation of women’s labour. By attending to the material, textual, and conceptual operations of eighteenth-century technologies through readings of a wide range of literary and popular works, this project ultimately demonstrates how the boundaries of modern gender difference were constructed along with and out of the body’s most artificial parts. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p>This thesis explores the notion of selfhood and its relationship to larger philosophical frameworks. In Chapter One the author traces various understandings of the self as they have appeared historically in Western philosophy. This understanding of the self posits it as something static and unchanging. The author argues that this was largely the result of certain ontological or metaphysical commitments of the broader philosophical frameworks in which the self was situated. In Chapter Two Deleuze's ontology is explored as an alternative to what the author takes to be typical Western ontologies. It is argued that Deleuze's 'fractal ontology' is radically different because it begins and ends with multiplicity and becoming. This new understanding of ontology provides the basis for understanding the self as multiplicitous and anarchic rather than static and essentialist. In the final chapter, the author seeks to explore the resulting understanding of selfhood as decentralized and multiplicitous. It is asserted that such an understanding of the self is philosophically compelling given the new Deleuzian ontology. It is further argued that this understanding of the self is practically superior to traditional static understandings of the self because it more fully accommodates personal and societal growth.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

Remembering the Forgotten Beauty of Yeatsian Mythology: Personae and the Problem of Unity in The Wind Among the Reeds

ABSTRACT This project compares and contrasts the ways in which selected texts by William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams render their fictional figures as modern subjects engaged in the complex processes of identity-formation and transformation. These processes are deeply rooted within the context of the American South. The interrelatedness of identity and language is explored by investigating how these texts dramatize selfhood not as an essential or homogenous state, but as a perpetual process of self-fashioning and play amid multiple positionings. The central hypothesis is that identity manifests itself necessarily and continuously as a textual discourse in and through language, and that self-fashioning gives rise to ethical questions, because identity involves not only the subject’s relation to the self, but also his or her relationships with others in closely interwoven personal, familial and communal-cultural bonds. This ethical dimension underscores the relational aspects of selfhood, that is, the notion that the individual is always situated inextricably within the social, and that the fashioning of the self is thus inconceivable without a consideration of the other. The following pairs of texts are compared: As I Lay Dying and The Glass Menagerie; The Sound and the Fury and Cat On A Hot Tin Roof; Light in August and A Streetcar Named Desire.

Gait disturbances such as slow walking speed and step-to-step variability have been reported among people with mild Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and as risk factors for functional decline, dependency, and falls. Additionally, AD-related emotional reactions and decreased initiative can lead to physical inactivity. The aims of this thesis, therefore, were to explore how the ability to be physically active is affected in the early years of AD, and how people with mild AD and their cohabitants reason about physical activity as part of their everyday life. To meet the aims, an approach inspired by mixed methods research was used, covering measurements, observations and subjective experiences. Data were collected from different sources in parallel. Participants with mild AD were recruited at the Memory Clinic, Uppsala University Hospital. In Study I, a case study with two couples in which one member had AD, in-depth interviews and participating interviews were performed. Physical activity such as walking was viewed as a meaningful routine improving well-being. Participants were positive about making adjustments to enable physical activity. In Study II, the 25 participants with AD showed a significant lower walking capacity (10 m comfortable walk test, 6-minute walk test, Timed-up-and-Go test) at baseline compared to controls. The decline continued during the subsequent two years. The influence of a cognitive task on walking was distinct, despite this, participants maintained a health-promoting level of physical activity during the two-year study-period. In Study III, gait testing in the motor laboratory of 21 participants with AD showed a marked impact on gait parameters (e.g. slowed speed, decreased step length) by a cognitive task. Additionally, specific dual-task gait disturbances were frequent. In Study IV, in-depth interviews with 14 participants with AD indicated that physical activity was viewed as a meaningful activity, used as a means to maintain well-being and selfhood, and contributed to continuity in life. In conclusion, walking capacity deteriorates and declines in the early stages of AD. A simple cognitive task can have a substantially negative impact on walking already in mild AD. In contrast, people with AD can also gain “self-promoting benefits” from physical activity beyond the common health-promoting benefits.

At least since the time of Aristotle, it has been widely accepted that “man is by nature a social animal”. We eat, sleep, talk, laugh, cry, love, fight and create in ways that integrally depend on others and the social norms that we collectively generate and maintain. Yet in spite of the widely accepted importance of human sociality in underlying our daily activities, its exact manifestation and function is consistently overlooked by many academic disciplines. Cognitive science, for example, regularly neglects the manner in which social interactions and interactively generated norms canalise and constitute our cognitive processes. Without the inescapable ubiquity of dynamic social norms, any given agent simply could not cognise as a human. In this thesis, I aim to use a range of insights – from phenomenology, social psychology, neuroscience, cultural anthropology and gender studies – to clarify the role of sociality for human life. More specifically, the thesis can be broadly separated into three parts. I begin (chapters 1 and 2) with a broad explanation of how human agents are fundamentally tied to worldly entities and other agents in a way that characterises their ontological existence. In chapters 3 and 4, I criticise two recent and much-discussed theories of social cognition – namely, we-mode cognition and participatory sense-making – for failing to make intelligible the social constitution of human existence. In the later chapters (5-7), I then propose foundations for a more satisfactory theory of social cognition, as well as explicating a view of human selfhood as ‘biosocial', such that even the autonomy of biological bodies is socially codified from a human perspective. Taken together, the aforementioned chapters should contribute to calls for a new direction in social cognitive science, whilst also yielding novel insights into the nature of human selfhood.

Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro / Esta tese é um estudo do imaginário da felicidade no discurso prescritivo/terapêutico de um gênero jornalístico caracterizado por oferecer conselhos, orientações, fórmulas e modelos para a condução da vida em diferentes esferas aqui denominado imprensa conselheira . O objetivo é compreender como daí emerge uma concepção de felicidade cujos aspectos problemáticos seriam abrandados, contrastando com a imagem dessa experiência que emana dos diagnósticos da subjetividade moderna empenhados em denunciar os males da civilização. A partir do exame das imagens dos estados aprazíveis e dos mal-estares elaboradas nesse discurso, dos princípios subjacentes que as organizam e dos aspectos estruturais do aconselhamento midiático à luz da noção de pacificação, formula-se uma interpretação da tendência do imaginário do discurso prescritivo/terapêutico a dissolver os impasses e conflitos identificados como peculiares à experiência moderna da felicidade. Essa interpretação se articula em torno da ideia de controle das emoções e de uma percepção mais geral de que a mídia proporcionaria experiências emocionais num quadro imaginário e que elas seriam caracterizadas pelo abrandamento ou supressão dos aspectos problemáticos. / This thesis contains a study of the imaginary of happiness in the prescriptive/therapeutic discourse of a journalistic style characterized by providing counseling, guidance, formulas and models for people to carry out their lives in different spheres herein named counseling press. The aim is to understand how a concept of happiness, whose problematic aspects would be softened, emerges from it, contrasting with the image of this experience that comes from the diagnosis of modern subjectivity, driven to denounce the illness of civilization. From the analysis of the images of states of easiness and uneasiness , the subjacent principles that underlie them and the structural aspects of press counseling in the light of the notion of pacification, an interpretation of the trend of the imaginary of the prescriptive/therapeutic discourse is formulated to wipe out impasses and conflicts identified as peculiar to the modern experience of happiness. Said interpretation articulates itself around the idea of the control of emotions and of a more general perception that media would provide emotional experiences in an imaginary picture, and that they would be characterized by the softening or suppression of problematical aspects.

This study analyzes the discursive action of media as an identity builder. Globalization and mediatization processes compose the context in which the relations of a free to air TV channel fits in and which content is defined by a broadcast programming that needs to articulate a flux made of national, regional and local broadcasting stations. From this programming, we have researched the production of short time insertion programs lasting no more than 90 seconds, broadcasted during the commercial breaks and supported by sponsors, called programetes in Portuguese. From the data researched in 2006, we could observe the existence of these programs in 5 from 11 broadcasting stations of Rede Brasil Sul de Televisão RBS TV, associated to Rede Globo, all of them locally produced e broadcasted exclusively to cities located away from the capital of Rio Grande do Sul State. This kind of program is considered by TV stations as a way to overcome the short time that can be destined to subjects of local interest, and at the same time it guarantees to the sponsors they area offering a unique kind of product. We have analyzed some short time insertion programs of RBS TV dos Vales located in the city of Santa Cruz do Sul -RS. The program we analyzed was Preserve o que é nosso (Preserve what is ours), which has been broadcasted since 2002 and has more than 40 editions so far. It is broadcasted during the commercial breaks of Globo Repórter (Fridays nights) and Domingão do Faustão programs (Sundays afternoons). This local media has an important role for the remembrance of the European immigration to Brazil from the XIX Century on. Besides that, the concept of narrative identity has been revealed as fundamental and also a way to keep identity alive. Idem-identity or sameness would be related to a substratum through which it would be possible to reidentify a person with himself/herself. Ipse-identity or selfhood secures the concept of permanence in time that happens through the continuous relation with others and it operates through identification with values, models, heroes, etc. The dialectics between sameness and selfhood is inserted in the notion of narrative identity. Narrative is considered a set of stories, registers and imagination, while the discourse is the act of this narrative. The data collected show that short time insertion programs consider the concept of preserving the memory of the former generations giving attention to aspects as conservation and recuperation of the architectural heritage and the narrative that is related to it. Short time insertion programs are lined up with informative and promotional genres and also with documentary and social merchandising subgenres. The discursivity analysis shows that the houses are structuring elements. Through its exposition, at least two perspectives can be cited. Focusing on the triumph of the immigrants who faced a new land with extreme difficulties would strengthen sameness because of the maintenance of the character which identifies a group as a whole. At the same time, regarding the permanence in time, it shows that future generations will be able to access the preserved architectural and cultural heritage, besides these generations are characterized by selfhood, the introduction of others in the constitution of their own identities. / A dissertação analisa a atuação discursiva da mídia como construtora de identidades. Os processos de globalização e de midiatização constituem o contexto em que se inserem as relações de uma rede de televisão aberta, cujo conteúdo é determinado por uma grade de programação que deve articular um fluxo constituído por emissoras nacionais, regionais e locais. Dentro da programação nos detivemos em produções denominadas programetes, produtos veiculados nos intervalos comerciais com o apoio de patrocinadores e com duração máxima de 90 segundos. Em levantamento realizado em 2006, observou-se a ocorrência desse tipo de produto em cinco das onze emissoras da Rede Brasil Sul de Televisão - RBS TV, afiliada da Rede Globo, produzidos e veiculados local e exclusivamente no interior do Rio Grande do Sul. Utilizados pelas emissoras como forma de contornar a situação do pouco espaço reservado à inserção de conteúdos locais, ao mesmo tempo garantem aos anunciantes a oferta de um produto único. Tomamos para análise uma série de programetes da RBS TV dos Vales - situada no município de Santa Cruz do Sul-RS. O programete estudado denomina-se Preserve o que é nosso, está no ar desde 2002 e já foram produzidas mais de 40 edições. Ele é exibido nos intervalos comerciais do Globo Repórter (sextas-feiras à noite) e do Domingão do Faustão (tardes de domingo). A noção de identidade narrativa revelou-se fundamental para a análise, comportando as formas de permanência da identidade no tempo. A identidade-idem, ou mesmidade, teria relação com um substrato pelo qual seria possível reidentificar um indivíduo como o mesmo. Já a identidade-ipse, ou ipseidade, seria a forma de permanência no tempo que é feita na contínua relação com o outro, operando por meio de identificações-com valores, modelos, heróis, etc. A dialética entre a mesmidade e a ipseidade está contida na noção de identidade narrativa. Considera-se a narrativa como o conjunto de histórias, registros e imaginários enquanto o discurso é considerado como a colocação em ato dessa narrativa. A mídia local tem seu papel na rememoração das narrativas da imigração européia no Brasil a partir do século XIX. Dentre os principais resultados, evidencia-se que o programete apresenta como conceito a preservação da memória dos antepassados através da atenção a aspectos como conservação e recuperação do patrimônio arquitetônico e as narrativas a ele vinculadas. A produção está alinhada aos gêneros informativo e promocional e aos subgêneros documentário e merchandising social. A análise da discursividade aponta que a edificação é um elemento estruturante. Por meio de sua exposição, ao menos duas perspectivas são apontadas. Ao enfocar o triunfo dos colonizadores que enfrentaram uma terra que apresentou dificuldades extremas, estaria privilegiando a mesmidade pela manutenção do caráter pelo qual se reconhece um grupo como sendo o mesmo. E ao abordar uma necessidade de permanência no tempo, estaria profetizando que as futuras gerações poderão acessar o patrimônio arquitetônico e cultural preservado, ainda que essas gerações sejam marcadas pela ipseidade, pela introdução do outro na constituição de suas identidades.

Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro / Esta tese é um estudo do imaginário da felicidade no discurso prescritivo/terapêutico de um gênero jornalístico caracterizado por oferecer conselhos, orientações, fórmulas e modelos para a condução da vida em diferentes esferas aqui denominado imprensa conselheira . O objetivo é compreender como daí emerge uma concepção de felicidade cujos aspectos problemáticos seriam abrandados, contrastando com a imagem dessa experiência que emana dos diagnósticos da subjetividade moderna empenhados em denunciar os males da civilização. A partir do exame das imagens dos estados aprazíveis e dos mal-estares elaboradas nesse discurso, dos princípios subjacentes que as organizam e dos aspectos estruturais do aconselhamento midiático à luz da noção de pacificação, formula-se uma interpretação da tendência do imaginário do discurso prescritivo/terapêutico a dissolver os impasses e conflitos identificados como peculiares à experiência moderna da felicidade. Essa interpretação se articula em torno da ideia de controle das emoções e de uma percepção mais geral de que a mídia proporcionaria experiências emocionais num quadro imaginário e que elas seriam caracterizadas pelo abrandamento ou supressão dos aspectos problemáticos. / This thesis contains a study of the imaginary of happiness in the prescriptive/therapeutic discourse of a journalistic style characterized by providing counseling, guidance, formulas and models for people to carry out their lives in different spheres herein named counseling press. The aim is to understand how a concept of happiness, whose problematic aspects would be softened, emerges from it, contrasting with the image of this experience that comes from the diagnosis of modern subjectivity, driven to denounce the illness of civilization. From the analysis of the images of states of easiness and uneasiness , the subjacent principles that underlie them and the structural aspects of press counseling in the light of the notion of pacification, an interpretation of the trend of the imaginary of the prescriptive/therapeutic discourse is formulated to wipe out impasses and conflicts identified as peculiar to the modern experience of happiness. Said interpretation articulates itself around the idea of the control of emotions and of a more general perception that media would provide emotional experiences in an imaginary picture, and that they would be characterized by the softening or suppression of problematical aspects.