This thesis engages with Taiwanese history by offering a reading of Hou Hsiaohsien???s A City of Sadness (1989), making reference to the film???s historical dimensions, cultural representations and gender issues in the period 1945 to 1949. In addition, Hou???s cinematography is detailed with comparison to Yasujiro Ozu and the influences of Japanese colonisation. Hou???s immense contribution to Taiwanese film consists principally in a Taiwanese trilogy that traces Taiwan???s history in the 20th century. In The Puppet Master (1993) Hou details the era of Japanese colonisation from 1895 to the restoration of Taiwan by the Kuomintang in 1945. Later, A City of Sadness focuses on the fate of the Lin family from 1945 to 1949, which epitomises people???s life in Taiwan during the initial stages of Kuomintang domination. Finally, Good Men, Good Women (1995) highlights two different eras in Taiwan: the political movement in the 1950s and the pop culture in the 1990s. The thesis uses illustrations from all three films to explore Hou???s historical, cultural and gender representations. In order to understand Hou???s ideology and beliefs in greater depth, I also review his autobiographical film, A Time to Live, and A Time to Die (1985). This thesis examines Taiwan???s indigenous culture and the impact of Japanese and Chinese cultural practices in A City of Sadness through the post-colonial theories of Perry Anderson, Homi Bhabha, and Chris Berry. I draw on their theories of cultural hegemony and my empiricism to investigate Hou???s representation of the political situation in Taiwan. Finally, the thesis evaluates gender issues in A City of Sadness, with reference to Julia Kristeva???s notion of ???feminine time??? and the debate between Emilie Yeh and Mizou concerning ???whether women can really enter history???. In evaluating A City of Sadness I argue that Hou Hsiao-hsien???s use of a family???s microhistory to parallel the national macro-history of the February 28th Incident opens an important historical window through which the audience may re-encounter and reflect on Taiwan???s past, and think positively about its future.

My critical essay uses Foucault???s theory of discursive formation to chart the emergence of the figure of the single modern woman as she is created by the various discourses surrounding her. It argues that representations of the single modern woman continue a tradition of perceiving the female body as a source of social anxiety. The project explores ???chick-lit??? as a site within the discursive formation from which the single modern woman emerges as a paradoxical figure; the paradoxes fundamentally linked to her sexuality. This essay, then, essentially seeks to investigate representations of female sexuality within chick-lit, exposing for scrutiny the paradoxes inherent in and around the figure of the single modern woman. My fictional piece is a work of erotica. It is divided into four sections: The Reader, The Writer, The Muse and The Critic. Essentially it explores the relationships between female sexuality and literature; between female sexuality and feminist, post-feminist and patriarchal values and between literature and issues of truth, perspective and representation. The two works complement each other to illuminate the paradox of female sexuality: one from a theoretical perspective and the other from a fictional perspective. The critical work focuses on female sexuality and its relationship to, and development within, the current social context. Chick-lit, as a new and immensely popular genre of fiction which holistically explores the lives of single modern women was useful for examining the relationship between the sexual persona of the single modern woman and society. The fiction is concerned with a narrower focus: specifically the sexual life of the single modern woman. Through the creative process, it became apparent that working within the genre of ???erotica??? would be not only more useful than working within chick-lit, but more powerful in exploring the themes I was interested in. The creative work draws on numerous points of interest raised in the critical work from, for example, the grander notions of the relationship between object and discourse ??? in this case female sexuality and literature ??? and the female body as a source of social fascination and anxiety to finer observations such as what it means to have sex ???like a man.??? In essence, the creative work seeks to examine the many faces of the single modern woman as a sexual being and to illuminate, on an intimate level, the many conflicts between and surrounding those faces and to suggest that while paradox remains in female sexual ideology, the single modern woman will remain suspended in a kind of sexual paralysis.

This thesis engages with Taiwanese history by offering a reading of Hou Hsiaohsien???s A City of Sadness (1989), making reference to the film???s historical dimensions, cultural representations and gender issues in the period 1945 to 1949. In addition, Hou???s cinematography is detailed with comparison to Yasujiro Ozu and the influences of Japanese colonisation. Hou???s immense contribution to Taiwanese film consists principally in a Taiwanese trilogy that traces Taiwan???s history in the 20th century. In The Puppet Master (1993) Hou details the era of Japanese colonisation from 1895 to the restoration of Taiwan by the Kuomintang in 1945. Later, A City of Sadness focuses on the fate of the Lin family from 1945 to 1949, which epitomises people???s life in Taiwan during the initial stages of Kuomintang domination. Finally, Good Men, Good Women (1995) highlights two different eras in Taiwan: the political movement in the 1950s and the pop culture in the 1990s. The thesis uses illustrations from all three films to explore Hou???s historical, cultural and gender representations. In order to understand Hou???s ideology and beliefs in greater depth, I also review his autobiographical film, A Time to Live, and A Time to Die (1985). This thesis examines Taiwan???s indigenous culture and the impact of Japanese and Chinese cultural practices in A City of Sadness through the post-colonial theories of Perry Anderson, Homi Bhabha, and Chris Berry. I draw on their theories of cultural hegemony and my empiricism to investigate Hou???s representation of the political situation in Taiwan. Finally, the thesis evaluates gender issues in A City of Sadness, with reference to Julia Kristeva???s notion of ???feminine time??? and the debate between Emilie Yeh and Mizou concerning ???whether women can really enter history???. In evaluating A City of Sadness I argue that Hou Hsiao-hsien???s use of a family???s microhistory to parallel the national macro-history of the February 28th Incident opens an important historical window through which the audience may re-encounter and reflect on Taiwan???s past, and think positively about its future.

This thesis engages with Taiwanese history by offering a reading of Hou Hsiaohsien???s A City of Sadness (1989), making reference to the film???s historical dimensions, cultural representations and gender issues in the period 1945 to 1949. In addition, Hou???s cinematography is detailed with comparison to Yasujiro Ozu and the influences of Japanese colonisation. Hou???s immense contribution to Taiwanese film consists principally in a Taiwanese trilogy that traces Taiwan???s history in the 20th century. In The Puppet Master (1993) Hou details the era of Japanese colonisation from 1895 to the restoration of Taiwan by the Kuomintang in 1945. Later, A City of Sadness focuses on the fate of the Lin family from 1945 to 1949, which epitomises people???s life in Taiwan during the initial stages of Kuomintang domination. Finally, Good Men, Good Women (1995) highlights two different eras in Taiwan: the political movement in the 1950s and the pop culture in the 1990s. The thesis uses illustrations from all three films to explore Hou???s historical, cultural and gender representations. In order to understand Hou???s ideology and beliefs in greater depth, I also review his autobiographical film, A Time to Live, and A Time to Die (1985). This thesis examines Taiwan???s indigenous culture and the impact of Japanese and Chinese cultural practices in A City of Sadness through the post-colonial theories of Perry Anderson, Homi Bhabha, and Chris Berry. I draw on their theories of cultural hegemony and my empiricism to investigate Hou???s representation of the political situation in Taiwan. Finally, the thesis evaluates gender issues in A City of Sadness, with reference to Julia Kristeva???s notion of ???feminine time??? and the debate between Emilie Yeh and Mizou concerning ???whether women can really enter history???. In evaluating A City of Sadness I argue that Hou Hsiao-hsien???s use of a family???s microhistory to parallel the national macro-history of the February 28th Incident opens an important historical window through which the audience may re-encounter and reflect on Taiwan???s past, and think positively about its future.

published_or_final_version / English / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Chinese / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Philosophy

Poetry by Russian women which has been published since the fall of the Soviet Union reveals that the quest to explore female identity and experience is no longer inviolable in Russian literature. This thesis examines female personae, gender and cultural identity in the work of Russian poets Nina Iskrenko (1951--1994), Tatiana Voltskaia (b. 1960), and Iuliia Kunina (b. 1966). Although the poetics of these writers' texts are broad-ranging, all of their work takes up the subjects of gender and cultural identity. Their poems explore identity as a discursive practice, rather than a fixed construct within the strictures of authoritative metanarratives' binary oppositions (male/female, feminine/masculine, Russian/non-Russian). This lends their poetry to postmodern analysis, an approach that heretofore has rarely been applied to poetry by Russian women. Within this theoretical framework, Judith Butler's formulation of "performativity" and Mikhail Epstein's theory of "transculturalism" are particularly well-suited to the task, as each entails non-essentialist conceptions of identity. Donna Haraway's formulation of "woman" as cyborg" is also a fitting theoretical complement, as it suggests the hybridization of identity, as well as the increasing role of the Internet in contemporary and future developments in Russian literature. The rapid changes in the late- and post-Soviet cultural landscape have engendered in contemporary poetry by Russian women powerful, new expressions of gender and cultural identity, which are resulting in startling subversions of authoritative discourses while at the same time forging coalitional "transmodern" identities.

Canada's first Parliament Buildings, built in 1859--65 and destroyed by fire in 1916, were the nation's most prominent symbol of national identity and its most celebrated public space. Built into its fabric was an exclusively masculine definition of public persons, one which, at the end of the nineteenth century, women challenged in both subtle and overt ways. / This research examines the design of the Parliament Buildings as a multi-faceted building type, a complex mix of domestic, office and legislative design where both public and "private" spaces intersected. It overlays official documentation of the buildings with a rich variety of sources---archival photographs, newspaper articles and women's columns, letters, journals---to show how women transgressed the architectural prescription which placed them on the political periphery in the Ladies' Gallery, as observers and objects of observation. These sources show that, in fact, women altered and created spaces and initiated influential networks of their own both in and outside of the Parliament Buildings. By illuminating the primacy of the "political hostess," this research argues that women were not relegated to the sidelines, but appropriated---and practiced politics from within---the most privileged of spaces. / This methodology, by examining the interior organization and actual use of the Parliament Buildings, opens new possibilities for the study of legislative buildings and public buildings in general as dynamic systems of relationships rather than uni-dimensional building types. By showing how women challenged the spatial demarcations of gender and power and transformed the meanings associated with parliamentary and public spaces not initially intended for their use, we can draw a picture of the larger role women in Canada played as "public architects."

This thesis represents the first extended study of South African poetry in English from a gender perspective. It is conceived in two parts: firstly, a deconstructive analysis of the dominant tradition of South African English poetry in order to reveal its masculine or androcentric base; and secondly, the reconstruction of an alternative gynocentric tradition that gives primacy to women and the feminine in poetry. The first section consists of an examination of the ways in which the feminine has been. excluded from the poetic tradition in historical terms by means of social and economic constraints on women. The study begins with a brief reference to the beginnings of cultural gender discrimination in British poetry, from which South African English poetry derives, and then moves to a more extended consideration of the ways in which this discrimination has manifested itself in the South African context in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is followed by an analysis of the "poetics of exclusion", the ways in which the tradition genders itself as masculine by defining its central speaking position or subjectivity as male and masculine, and so excludes women and the feminine. The second section commences with the reconstruction or recovery of a gynocentric tradition of women's poetry in English in South Africa by means of a gynocritical "map" or survey, followed by a discussion of the nature of the feminine discourse or "poetics" required to provide the critical context for this poetry. The preliminary "map" is given greater detail by in-depth discussion of the women poets considered to be major contributors to the gynocentric tradition: Mary Morison Webster, Elisabeth Eybers, Tania van Zyl, Adele Naude, Ruth Miller, Ingrid Jonker and Eva Bezwoda. The study ends with an examination of the work of contemporary women poets in South Africa, especially the black women poets of the 1970s and '80s, and the poets - both black women and white women - who wrote from exile in the 1980s. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1993.