Dissertations / Theses: 'An essay on abjection'

1

Howsam, Melissa Anne. "Reading Through Abjection." NCSU, 2003. http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/theses/available/etd-11212003-195541/.

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In this thesis, I read through Kristeva?s theory of the abject as a way of interpreting Cristina Garcia?s Dreaming in Cuban (1993) and interrogating common psychoanalytic readings of Christina Rossetti?s Goblin Market (1859) and Bram Stoker?s Dracula (1897). The purpose of each of these readings has been to gauge the usefulness of Kristeva?s theory as a critical tool and to determine what it allows us to achieve as literary critics and, even, as readers. Although Kristeva is clear about her desire to see women liberate themselves from the confining roles ascribed to them by psychoanalytic theory and patriarchal norms, she is not clear about how her theory can be used. Therefore, I apply her theory, specifically that of the abject, to these three fundamentally different texts in order to both investigate its usefulness and to determine what is, if anything, the triumphant result of its application (in terms of feminism).

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Tackitt, Alaina Dyann. "The Abjection of the Pythia." Scholar Commons, 2011. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/3375.

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Recent academic research has garnered considerable popular interest on the matter of whether the Pythia, the Oracle of Delphi, was high. Current findings aim to prove that vapors emitted from beneath the tripod on which the Pythia prophesied were intoxicating, thereby causing her frenzied state and statements. Contemporary scientists' intense interest in proving that the Pythia was not prophetic evokes the question of why the once widely accepted, now generally rejected, idea that a female body can serve as a vessel for the words of the immortal deity holds such significance for modern science. When this curiosity is considered in light of Julia Kristeva's writings on abjection, numerous possibilities are made available. At its simplest, examining the abjection of the Pythia could explain why the voice of modern science is so interested in the words of these ancient women. At best, to consider an active process of abjection nearly three millennia in the making provides an opportunity to expand understandings and interpretations of both the Pythia and her role in the world, past and present, and the abject and its role in abjection beyond literature and theory.

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Ghita, Cristina. "Pastiche and Abjection in American Psycho." Thesis, Malmö högskola, Fakulteten för kultur och samhälle (KS), 2014. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-23314.

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4

Wenk, Christian. "Abjection, madness and xenophobia in gothic fiction." Berlin : wvb, Wiss. Verl, 2008. http://d-nb.info/989569101/04.

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Muller, Lavonne Elorie. "Racism and Abjection in the (Post) Colony." Diss., University of Pretoria, 2020. http://hdl.handle.net/2263/77484.

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This study examines Kristeva’s notion of abjection to understand the workings of colonial racism. Given the limitations of her Eurocentric standpoint, reference will also be made to the critiques and engagements with abjection by various other scholars. Abjection, when appropriately rethought, could prove to be a beneficial tool to diagnose the interior problems of racism within the historical context of settler-colonialism and apartheid with specific focus on racism within the contemporary South African context. Reference will also be made to the film, Get Out, to illustrate the persistence of the historically informed system of abject racism and to place emphasize the deficiencies of narrow interpretations of racism which overlook the broader domain of the psycho-social and institutionalised practices of racial abjection. I will elaborate on the proposed critical investigation by drawing parallels between film, specifically the 2017 horror film Get Out, and legislation, Prevention and Combating of Hate Crimes and Hate Speech Bill. In this sense, Get Out, will be considered as a narrative which questions South Africa’s contemporaneity as a (post)colonial and (post)apartheid state and the limits of the law by comparing and contrasting the film to, the recently approved, Prevention and combating of Hate Crimes and Hate Speech Bill. I intend to argue that the Prevention and Combating of Hate Crimes and Hate Speech Bill operates on a narrow level and that it is incapable of responding to structural racism as it fails to recognise the psycho-social dimension of racism and that abject racism continues into the (post)colonial context.
Dissertation (LLM)--University of Pretoria, 2020.
Jurisprudence
LLM
Unrestricted

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6

Crous, Matthys Lourens. "Abjection in the novels of Marlene Van Niekerk." Doctoral thesis, University of Cape Town, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/10311.

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Includes bibliographical references.
In this thesis, three of Marlene van Niekerk's novels, translated from Afrikaans into English, are examined, with the focus on the representation of abjection in the texts under discussion.The theoretical point of departure of this study is Julia Kristeva's essay Powers of horror (1982), which addresses, in particular, the notion of abjection and how certain abject elements play a pivotal role in people's everyday lives. From a psychoanalytic perspective, abjection is viewed as a revolt against the mother and foregrounds particularly the influence of the maternal body over the subject. In this instance, the subject desires liberation from the hold of the maternal and seeks to subject the mother to abjection. Bodily fluids seeping out of the body, diseases, viruses, dirt and death (and in particular the corpse) are all elements that are encompassed in the concept of abjection. Manifestations of abjection in the form of the abject mother, abject spaces, abject bodies and the link between abjection and filth are comparatively analysed in the three texts. The thesis concludes by showing that Van Niekerk deliberately inscribes elements of the abject into her texts so as to transgress and deconstruct the norms associated with a patriarchal and racist society in South Africa. Van Niekerk also undermines the norms that underpin such a society: religious indoctrination, gender oppression and Othering. By writing her novel Triomf (1999) in a demotic register, Van Niekerk furthermore questions the prevalent assumptions about what is deemed proper language for writing a novel. Writing, for her, thus serves the purposes of abjecting, of rejecting the impositions of the symbolic order. Following the publication of her first collection of short stories, Die Vrou wat haar verkyker vergeet het [The woman who forgot her binoculars] in 1992, there was general consensus that the baroque nature of the language resulted in reader resistance to the text. This explains why she decided to write her first novel in the crude and obscene language of a low-class family, the Benades of Triomf.

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Porter, Whitney B. "John Waters: Camp, Abjection and the Grotesque Body." Ohio University / OhioLINK, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1292345547.

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Norin, Karl. "Master essay." Thesis, Kungl. Konsthögskolan, 2013. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kkh:diva-68.

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Mitt examensarbete består av en nerkyld utställning och en skriftlig essä som behandlar mejans arkitektur ur ett rättviseperspektiv.
[I examensarbetet ingår utställningen "Hobby deluxe/blood web/Schengen tour":] Jag ställer ut tre målningar av syntetisk päls som är bestrukna med båtepoxy och gjutna i en vakuumpåse. Dessa visas på en svampmålad vägg.

Examensarbetet består av en skriftlig del och en gestaltande del. Alternativ titel anger namnet förden gestaltande delen.

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Pagojienė, Daiva. "Essay style." Doctoral thesis, Lithuanian Academic Libraries Network (LABT), 2009. http://vddb.library.lt/obj/LT-eLABa-0001:E.02~2009~D_20090623_100350-16939.

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According to such functional stylistic features as social preserves, content and the prevailing function Lithuanian essays can be ascribed to three variations: publicistic, scientific and literary style. The major part of essays is dominated by the features of expressive and analytical sub-style of the publicistic style. Essays are also written in the field of liberal arts and natural sciences. In the analysed period the Lithuanian essay surpassed the dividing line between the publicistic and creative literature – texts of fictional content may be called essays.
Pagal tokius funkcinius stilistinius požymius kaip visuomenės veiklos sritis, turinys ir vyraujanti funkcija lietuvių esė galima priskirti trims atmainoms: publicistiniam, moksliniam ir meniniam stiliui. Didžiojoje jų dalyje vyrauja publicistinio stiliaus ekspresyviojo bei analitinio postilio požymiai. Rašoma esė ir humanitarinių bei gamtos mokslų srityje Tiriamuoju laikotarpiu lietuvių esė peržengė ribą, skiriančią publicistiką ir meninę literatūrą – esė pavadinami fikcinio turinio tekstai.

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Stjerne, Olle. "Master essay." Thesis, Kungl. Konsthögskolan, 2018. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kkh:diva-332.

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In this essay my aim is to understand the machinations of the action of taking a photograph and putting it in circulation, and what the role of a sculpture becomes in a world where this is possible. In a general sense, how does instant representation through photography activate sculpture? Can sculpture change photography, or is the connection a one-way feed? Can it be that this connection determines our lives to such an extent that the success of one medium informs the strength of the other?
Nej

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Cornelius, Jerome. "Reflexive Essay." University of the Western Cape, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/11394/8197.

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Magister Artium - MA
His brown hands, tanned darker than they already were from hours of supervising men shoveling sand and mixing concrete on building sites, gripped the steering wheel. Hendrick Vermeulen drove down Voortrekker Road after a long day's work. He had dropped off the last of the guys with his bakkie and was looking forward to resting. He was enjoying the cool night air blowing up his arm. And there it was, that mountain. There was nothing more to think about it. It meant nothing to him; a big rock, a marker to remind where he was. The rich people were there by the mountain; he was not. He drove on. The sun had gone down and he was making his way home. He looked at his eyes in the rear view mirror, the lines on his forehead more visible than they had ever been. He lived close to the university that he dropped out of thirty years ago. He drove past it often - a reminder of a life he could have had. He was supposed to be a teacher and help his mother move out of the coloured townships and into a nice house, nessie wit mense, like the white people, she would say. She always said that and she laughed, with a cough at the end as she slapped her knee. That was a long time ago. He often thought of the past, but he always made sure he snapped out of it soon enough. No time for that, he thought. And then he saw her, the young· lady walking down the street. He slowed the car. What do you think you are doing, he thought to himself as he idled down the main road. She had a plastic shopping bag and was probably on her way home from the Pick 'n Pay. Student life, he thought. He hardly had a taste of it before the riots and state of emergency and all that. Now he was a contractor. Men like him are not supposed to look at girls walking down the streets going home to their flats. Jissus she was beautiful though, he thought as he stopped at the intersection and she crossed the road. She ran across and as she walked under a street light, he got a better view. A thick, brown coat and black pantyhose and not much else. Heshook his head and laughed. These kids of today. But that's how Chalita used to dress. When they were young themselves and fell in love. They were free. When they had dreams and hopes and she thought that things were still decent and they were going to have a double story and everything will be ...

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12

Crockett, Andrew Philip 1956. "An essay on the rhetoric of the postmodern essay." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/290677.

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Beginning with an inquiry into the tension between modernism and postmodernism, the dissertation claims that the essay is and always has been postmodern in its uncanniness--its refusal of generic and disciplinary boundaries, its capacity to bring together multiple voices and discourses, its skepticism, and its personal, experiential epistemology. Part I concludes with rhetorical analyses of late modern (in content and residual formal attributes) and postmodern essays. The affinities and contradictions between the normalized essay originating with Montaigne and feminist essays focuses the three chapters of Part II, "Gender and the Essay." In the first chapter, "Logos, Montaigne, and Feminism," I explore the tensions between the essay as Montaigne created it and the appeal of that form to contemporary feminist writers. In the second chapter, "The Essay's (Feminine?) Form," I show how the essay has functioned as both a vehicle for the oppressive logocentrism of its traditionally male, genteel authors and as a vehicle for women writers striving to disrupt or overthrow that tradition. In the third chapter, "Rhetoric and the Practice of Style: A Gathering of Essays by Women," I pursue the rhetoric of the other aesthetic into the realm of psychoanalytic theory, where the foundation of Lacanian symbolic order troubles the "other" aesthetic's claim to an alternative discourse. To close this extensive chapter I provide an array of essays written by women that are particularly innovative. My own creative nonfiction is the subject of Part III. "What Rhetoric Means" brings postmodern elements into an academic essay. On the other hand, "Life Drawing" does not address an academic subject or employ academic conventions. Instead it offers charcoal drawing as an analog to writing, with both acting as ways to revise and reclaim my life from my father's troubled legacy. Finally, in "Reflection," the third chapter of Part III and the dissertation's closing chapter, I claim that the essay, postmodernism, and rhetoric share a deep affinity for one another. In that the three terms signify freedom from absolutes, they also force us to contend with ethical responsibilities.

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Chan, Wai-chung, and 陳慧聰. "The discourse of the body, abjection, melancholia and carnival." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2000. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31952562.

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14

Zhang, Jiachen. "Representations of food and abjection in Asian American fictions." Thesis, University of Leeds, 2018. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/22722/.

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This thesis explores how Asian American literature constructs and negotiates Asian American cultural identities through a series of encounters with food tropes. By looking into images of food preparation, serving and consumption in Asian American fictions, I investigate the ways in which Asian American subjects respond to US racial views of Asian American ethnicity in relation to body, gender, sex and class. In particular, as it considers the ways in which these fictions handle dominant US culture, the thesis focuses on their response to this culture's longstanding tendency to regard Asian culinary habits and conventions as exotic and disgusting. I argue that Julia Kristeva's theorization of the abject illuminates the complex ways in which Asian American literary culture negotiates US hegemonic representations of Asian culinary tradition. I suggest that the abjection of Asian foods, bodies and subjectivities works against the received modes of racial othering in US culture, allowing new identity formations to emerge. The Asian foods and immigrants that are deemed exotic and loathsome come to provide a discursive space through which Asian American writers can begin to unsettle the boundaries that maintain US white supremacy. The thesis looks into how the literary representations of food tropes by Amy Tan, Gish Jen, Ruth Ozeki, Monique Truong and David Wong Louie reinvigorate and challenge the varied exoticization and repulsion of Asian foods and subjectivities. Through intersectional readings of the alimentary scenes, and avoiding causational links between food and identity, I examine how these fictions delineate a metaphorical and metonymic process of incorporating and disavowing Asian American characters by interlinking food with a set of critical terrains such as gender, class, sex, colonialism, domesticity and nationhood. But these texts also share a central determination to interrogate how the abjection of Asian American food and subjectivities provides Asian American characters with suggestive material through which they seek to displace stable racial categories and challenge dominant reductive clichés about ethnic food. In this body of fictional work, the diverse presentations of the subjects' strategies of resistance and subversion further draw attention to the complicated workings of a set of Asian American cultural politics, including inter-generational reconciliation, feminist alliance, transnational feminism, queer diaspora, culinary authenticity and collective cultural memory.

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Chan, Wai-chung. "The discourse of the body, abjection, melancholia and carnival." Hong Kong : University of Hong Kong, 2000. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record.jsp?B22199676.

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16

Brink, Joram ten. "The essay film." Thesis, Middlesex University, 1999. http://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/6876/.

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This thesis on the essay film is written from the film maker's point of view, following the production of the film The Man Who Couldn't Feel and Other Tales, (54 min, 16mm). The film and the thesis together form the PhD submission. Examination of the completed film led to the definition of the essay film as an avantgarde, non-fiction film genre. The thesis rejects the current positioning of the essay film as a part of the documentary genre. The essay film creates an aesthetic coherence through the use of image and sound fragments, narrative and nonnarrative structures, 'methodically unmethodically' edited together. The essay film follows Vertov's and Astruc's steps in 'writing' fragments as they occur to the film maker, which are in turn put together using the editing traditions of the film avantgarde and modernist poetry. The film maker's presence in the essay film results in the cinematic 'text' becoming the 'reflective text' - the mediating medium between the film maker and the spectator. Beside its avant-garde roots, the genre owes much to the literary essay tradition established since Michel de Montaigne. Many of the literary essay's aesthetic, thematic and structural elements are to be found in the essay film genre. Each and every essay film is unique in its structure, and the genre as a whole does not conform to a pre-determined cinematic construction. Nevertheless, the thesis charts some useful characteristics and definitions for the establishment of an independent essay film genre.

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Heim, Felix Tvedegaard. "Felix' Exam Essay." Thesis, Kungl. Musikhögskolan, Institutionen för jazz, 2015. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kmh:diva-1856.

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Porter, Jack Ray. "Essay in econometrics." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/10677.

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Brandt, Shawn Patrick. "Chamber Essay #4." University of Akron / OhioLINK, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=akron1383913640.

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Roberts, David Michael 1983. "Essay for Orchestra." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/9981.

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1 score (viii, 83 p.). A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.
Essay for Orchestra is a one-movement concert piece scored for full orchestra. Since the definition of the genre "orchestral essay" is unclear, the composer has considerable latitude while still claiming a connection to a musical tradition. I have used the term "essay" to suggest a formal function. The piece is structured around the interaction between three main themes, each of which is derived from the same basic motivic material and corresponds to an element of a prose essay: an introduction; the advancement of a main argument; and the statement and eventual refutation of a counterargument. Each theme appears first in its own section and later in conjunction with the others, the coda functioning as a confirmation of the primary idea and a synthesis of all three. Harmonically, Essay for Orchestra is an attempt to blend the languages of Prokofiev, Hindemith, Shostakovich, Schnittke, and in deference to the title, Barber.
Committee in Charge: Dr. David Crumb, Chair; Dr. Robert Kyr; Dr. Jeffrey Stolet

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McCabe-Remmell, Patricia A. "Joyce...Beckett...Dedalus...Molloy : a study in abjection and masochism." [Tampa, Fla] : University of South Florida, 2006. http://purl.fcla.edu/usf/dc/et/SFE0001585.

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22

Watlington, Emily. "Pretty gross : aestheticized abjection in feminist video art, 1996-2009." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/118496.

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Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture, 2018.
This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.
Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 124-135).
This thesis examines the work of three video artists -- Pipilotti Rist, Marilyn Minter, and Mika Rottenberg -- who all make work that is simultaneously mesmerizing and repulsive. While Immanuel Kant has argued that beauty and disgust are opposed, these works complicate this binary, as does my choice of the more minor terms "pretty" and "gross." My weaker descriptors encapsulate the desensitization to seductive and disgusting imagery that, in the media-saturated context of the late 90s/early 2000s, is the result of their pervasiveness and thus banality. These artists respond to abject feminist performance art of the 1960s and 70s, which some critics at the time worried attracted the male gaze while setting out to avert it. Theorists of disgust, however, have long understood seduction as always already part of disgust, which the artists in "Pretty Gross" set out to tool strategically. They respond to representations of women as objects of fascination on screen by borrowing resources and formal devices from mass media created to seduce viewers and consumers, but train their lenses instead on traditionally disgusting imagery, from menstrual blood to saliva-coated caviar. Rendering the disgusting palatable, these artists have attracted massive popular audiences and revenue. Yet all have raised a number of ethical quandaries for their critics, who struggle to defend their attempts to reclaim representations of women's bodies from an abusive history. The widespread visibility and influence of their work makes this critical interrogation especially urgent. Ultimately, I argue that Rist, Minter, and Rottenberg reflect, rather than resolve, tensions between ethics and aesthetics, gender and image, as well as attraction and aversion.
by Emily Watlington.
S.M.

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Steyn, Christine. "After birth : abjection and maternal subjectivity in Svea Josephy's "Confinement"." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/85724.

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Thesis (MA)-- Stellenbosch University, 2013.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In this thesis I investigate the radical reframing of maternal representation in the photographic series by Cape Town-based artist Svea Josephy (b. 1969), entitled Confinement 2005-ongoing. Using Julia Kristeva’s theorisation of the maternal body’s relation to abjection, as well as its imperative to the remodelling of the relationship between the corporeal and the cultural, I explore how Josephy’s images explicitly engage with the Kristevan abject in order to disrupt cultural inscriptions of maternity and ‘motherhood’. I contend that Confinement situates Josephy’s experience of ‘becoming-mother’ against the dominant discourses of maternity and birth, and thereby uses the maternal subject as a means to interrogate broader issues of gender and identity.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: In hierdie tesis ondersoek ek die radikale herberaming van die moederfiguur in Confinement (2005 tot op hede) – ‘n fotoreeks van die Kaapse kunstenaar Svea Josephy (geb. 1969). Julia Kristeva se teorieë oor die moederlike liggaam, en in besonder die moederliggaam se verhouding tot abjeksie, word aangewend om die verband tussen die liggaamlike en die kulturele te herbedink. Ek ondersoek hoe hierdie fotoreeks Kristeva se konsep van die abjekte benut, ten einde kulturele voorskriftelikheid oor moederskap en 'ma-wees' te ontwrig. Ek argumenteer dat Confinement Josephy se ondervinding van 'wordend-moederskap’ die dominante diskoerse van moederskap en geboorte uitdaag, en sodoende die moederlike subjek gebruik om breër aspekte rondom geslag en identiteit te bevraagteken.

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Sloss, Eric J. "Homeless Abjection and the Uncanny “Place” of the National Imagination." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2014. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc500028/.

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This project examines the effects of the homeless body and the threat of homelessness on constructing a national imaginary that relies on the trope of locatability for recognition as a citizen-subject. The thesis argues that homelessness, the oft-figured specter of public space, functions as bodies that are “pushed out” as citizen-subjects due to their inability maintain both discursive and material location. I argue that figures of “home” rely on the ever-present threat of dislocation to maintain a privileged position as the location of the consuming citizen-subject. That is, the presence of the dislocated homeless body haunts the discursive and material construction of home and its inhabitants. Homeless then becomes the uncanny inverse of home, functioning as an abjection that reifies home “place” as an arbiter of recognition in a neoliberal national imaginary. The chapters proceed to examine what some consider homeless “homes,” focusing on the reduction of the homeless condition to a place of inhabitance, or the lack thereof. This attempt to locate the homeless body becomes a symptom of the desire for recognition as a placed body. The thesis ends on a note of political possibility, figuring the uncanny as a rupture that evacuates language of signification and opens up space for a form of recognition without an over-determined identity.

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Chare, Nicholas John. "On nothing : a Kristevan reading of trauma, abjection and representation." Thesis, University of Leeds, 2004. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/1945/.

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This doctorate provides a critical reassessment of Julia Kristeva's work on abjection, focusing on the abject as a form of writing. It brings Kristeva's work on abjection into dialogue with the writings of Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Paul Celan and Charlotte Delbo, the music of Diamanda Galas, the paintings of Francis Bacon, and a series of photographs taken by the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz. The overarching argument of the thesis is that these different mediums access the realm of the abject in distinct and effective ways. Centrally, I argue that Celine writes `towards, ' Celan from `within' and Delbo `back from' this realm. I begin the thesis with a consideration of the ethical ramifications accompanying Kristeva's decision to use the works of Celine as the primary exemplar of writing as a process of abjection. The chapter includes an engagement with Celine's anti-Semitic pamphlets. It also compares the work of Celine and Jean-Paul Sartre in terms of the sexual economy of their writing. In my second chapter, I argue for understanding the abject as a kind of noise that exists as the underside to language. I track the way noise manifests itself in language through detailed readings of works by Bacon, Galas and Celan. The third chapter explores Delbo's conception of anamnesis, drawing particularly on the works of Didier Anzieu and Brian Massumi to think through the notion of the `skin of memory'. I make a case for understanding Delbo's prose as a conduit for sensation as well as a mode of description. In my conclusion I consider the status of four photographs taken by a member of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz as a form of bearing witness to atrocity. I argue that these images can be understood as a visual correlative to the writings of Celan and Delbo.

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Wittmeier, Carmen. "A half-closed book, abjection in John Berryman's the dream songs." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp01/MQ40019.pdf.

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Wing, Jennifer Mary. "Resisting the Vortex: Abjection in the Early Works of Herman Melville." unrestricted, 2008. http://etd.gsu.edu/theses/available/etd-04192008-191516/.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Georgia State University, 2008.
Title from file title page. Robert Sattelmeyer, committee chair; Janet Gabler-Hover, Calvin Thomas, committee members. Electronic text (215 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed June 10, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 207-215).

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Vicks, Meghan Christine. "The postmodern ORANUS: Carnival and abjection in Victor Pelevin's "Homo Zapiens"." Connect to online resource, 2007. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:1448682.

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Hunt, Anna Louise. "Abjection & aesthetics : bodies, space & subjectivity in contemporary women's writing." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2007. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.437471.

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Compton, Alice. "Waste of a nation : photography, abjection and crisis in Thatcher's Britain." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2016. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/65974/.

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This examination of photography in Thatcher's Britain explores the abject photographic responses to the discursive construction of ‘sick Britain' promoted by the Conservative Party during the years of crisis from the late 1970s onwards. Through close visual analyses of photojournalist, press, and social documentary photographs, this Ph.D. examines the visual responses to the Government's advocation of a ‘healthy' society and its programme of social and economic ‘waste-saving'. Drawing Imogen Tyler's interpretation of ‘social abjection' (the discursive mediation of subjects through exclusionary modes of ‘revolting aesthetics') into the visual field, this Ph.D explores photography's implication in bolstering the abject and exclusionary discourses of the era. Exploring the contexts in which photographs were created, utilised and disseminated to visually convey ‘waste' as an expression of social abjection, this Ph.D exposes how the Right's successful establishment of a neoliberal political economy was supported by an accelerated use and deployment of revolting photographic aesthetics. My substantial contribution to knowledge is in tracking the crises of Thatcher's Britain through reference to an ‘abject structure of feeling' in British photography by highlighting a photographic counter-narrative that emerged in response to the prevailing discourse of social sickness. By analysing the development and reframing the photographic languages of British documentary photographers such as Chris Killip, Tish Murtha, Martin Parr and Nick Waplington, I demonstrate how such photography was explicitly engaged in affirmative forms of social abjection and ‘grotesque realism'. This Ph.D examines how this renewed form of documentary embodied an insurgent photographic visual language which served to undercut the encompassing discourses of exclusionary social abjection so pervasive at the time.

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Harris, Julian. "Metronome : a narrative essay /." [St. Lucia, Qld.], 2005. http://www.library.uq.edu.au/pdfserve.php?image=thesisabs/absthe18527.pdf.

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Torres, Nuñes del Prado Paola. "Aphopenial Codex : Master Essay." Thesis, Kungl. Konsthögskolan, 2013. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kkh:diva-294.

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SANTIAGO, EDSON PESSOA. "ESSAY ABOUT MINOR HAMLETS." PONTIFÍCIA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO DE JANEIRO, 2016. http://www.maxwell.vrac.puc-rio.br/Busca_etds.php?strSecao=resultado&nrSeq=28104@1.

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PONTIFÍCIA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO DE JANEIRO
COORDENAÇÃO DE APERFEIÇOAMENTO DO PESSOAL DE ENSINO SUPERIOR
PROGRAMA DE SUPORTE À PÓS-GRADUAÇÃO DE INSTS. DE ENSINO
A presente pesquisa analisa criticamente os espetáculos Ham-let, dirigido por José Celso Martinez Corrêa, e Ensaio.Hamlet, dirigido por Enrique Diaz. Reflete sobre os diferentes modos como essas duas montagens transformam e reatualizam o clássico de Shakespeare, no contexto do chamado teatro pós-dramático, favorável a obras fragmentárias, híbridas, abertas a pesquisas de novas linguagens e interferências performáticas. A referência teórica principal da pesquisa é o pensamento de Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari, com ênfase nas reflexões que estes desenvolveram acerca das relações entre arte e devir. Sustenta-se que as duas encenações instanciam de formas distintas o expediente de minoração de obras maiores, assim como descrito por Deleuze em obra sobre a dramaturgia de Carmelo Bene. Além de apresentar e discutir convergências e divergências nas estratégias de minoração adotadas nas duas encenações, esta dissertação inclui também uma exploração pontual dos lugares ocupados em cada caso pela personagem Ofélia, partindo da hipótese de que esta pode ser produtivamente tomada como força de minoração atuante já própria na peça de Shakespeare. O conceito de tradução enquanto transcriação, do poeta e ensaísta brasileiro Haroldo de Campos, e o conceito de ensaio, do filósofo alemão Theodor Adorno, são também referenciais teóricos utilizados na pesquisa.
This dissertation critically analyzes two dramatic works: Ham-let, directed by José Celso Martinez Corrêa, and Ensaio.Hamlet, directed by Enrique Diaz. It reflects about the different ways in which these two plays transform and renovate the Shakespeare s classic in the context of the so-called Postdramatic theater, a milieu that favors fragmentary, hybrid works, open to the research of new languages and to performing interferences. The main theoretical framework is the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, emphasizing the reflections they developed on the relationship between art and becoming. It is argued that the two stagings instantiate, in different ways, the procedure of minoring a major work, such as described by Deleuze in his work on the dramaturgy of Carmelo Bene. In addition to presenting and discussing general convergences and differences in the strategies of minoration adopted by the two directors, this dissertation also includes a specific address to the places occupied by Ophelia in each case, assuming that this character can be productively taken as a force of minoration already at work in Shakespeare s play. The concept of translation as trancreation, from Brazilian poet and essayist Haroldo de Campos, and the concept of essay, from German philosopher Theodor Adorno, are also theoretical references used in the research.

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Lamb, Christopher. "Blueline Concerto: Critical Essay." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2013. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc283800/.

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The purpose of this critical essay is two-fold. First, the essay presents a detailed critical analysis of my original composition, Blueline Concerto for bass trombone and wind ensemble. Second, using Blueline Concerto, the essay presents preliminary findings of my study to develop an approach to composing that takes into account the musicians' health, specifically regarding noise induced hearing loss (NIHL). Through various hypothesized composition- and orchestral-based approaches, I test effectiveness on changes in NIHL risk while also noting that artistic merit and compositional integrity is preserved.

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Svetich, Kella de Castro. "Flesh and blood : colonial trauma and abjection in contemporary Filipino American fiction /." For electronic version search Digital dissertations database. Restricted to UC campuses. Access is free to UC campus dissertations, 2005. http://uclibs.org/PID/11984.

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Widén, Carl. "A Monumental Transgression : Incest, Abjection and the Unrepresentable in Paul Auster's Invisible." Thesis, Högskolan i Halmstad, Sektionen för humaniora (HUM), 2011. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hh:diva-15814.

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This essay offers an analysis of Paul Auster's novel Invisible. The main focus of the essay is on the incestuous love affair between Adam Walker and his sister Gwyn. It is argued that the novel via this incestuous affair is addressing the issue of the unrepresentable, what Lacan termed the “real” that lies beyond the symbolic order. It is shown that the concept of the unrepresentable has been a central theme in Auster's work throughout his career. The main theoretical foundation of the essay is Julia Kristeva's theories regarding the “abject.” A summary of Kristeva's theories is therefore offered, as well as a summary of research into the incest taboo.

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Ross, Dusty K. "Readings of Zwelethu Mthethwa's South African Photographs: Postcolonialsim, Abjection, and Cultural Studies." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2012. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_theses/140.

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South African painter turned photographer, Zwelethu Mthethwa, was born in Durban during Apartheid. In 1980 Mthethwa began taking his photographs in the shanty towns on the outskirts of Cape Town and later took pictures in Mozambique and New Orleans. His work has global significance. Using art and literary theory and criticism, I expand upon the significance of his photographs in the contemporary world. I do “readings” of eight photographs from eight different series of Zwelethu Mthethwa’s work using postcolonial theory, abjection, and cultural studies as theoretical constructs to provide three different angles for interpreting his work.

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Trench, R. "Towards abjection: the loss of selfhood in the plays of Marina Carr." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.487464.

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Towards Abjection: The Loss ofSelfhood in the Plays of Marina Carr Ã‚Â• This dissertation examines the condition and nature of repressed subjectivities in Marina Carr's plays, from 1988-2002. The plays explore painful processes of identity through the lens of Carr's initial absurdist style to the more naturalistic Irish theatrical style, which typically concerns the familiar issues of oppression, repression and rural Ireland. For Carr, the processes of identity are ingrained in the past, but the impact of these processes is always present and significantly powerful in her plays. This dissertation examines the ways in which loss of selfhood and repressed identities are embedded in Carr's works, and how this links to Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection. The abject self and its development can be traced from play to Play. Aspects of identity in the works, whether that of Traveller woman, corrupt politician, traitor or displaced mother figure present the subject as occupying a position of marginality, experiencing the analogous culpability and exclusion. Her characters depict the confluence of contradictory forces, seeking to belong and yet bereft of a spiritual and emotional belonging that may enable them to do so. While this dissertation explores the power ofthe past in terms of the present in Carr's plays, it necessarily refers to and contextualises cultural and historical references. The plays reveal characters' individual estrangement and its effect on their relationship with others in the world around. Kristeva's theory applied to Carr's plays problematise individual states of abjection beyond the subject's encounters with borders within oneself to include borders in society. Recognising this reasserts the possibility of confronting and coming to terms with abjection as a whole, meaning that confronting individual problems is relevant to the transformation of society in general.

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Holland, Daniel L. "Abjection, Telesthesia, and Transnationalism: Incest in Park Chan-wook's Oldboy." Scholar Commons, 2015. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/5492.

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Many consider Oldboy be the defining film of the most recent wave of South Korean cinema, with scholars such as Terrence McSweeney and Kim Kyun Hyun arguing the film's representation of South Korean culture through collective memory, trauma, and Westernization. However, most of the current scholarship that surrounds the film does not adequately address the film's prominent theme of incest. My thesis explores the anxious implications of the film's incestuous imagery and reads it as a figure for the film's transnational presence. Specifically, in my project, incest is the nucleus on which I build each argument outward. First through abjection and desire for self and other, onto telesthesia and desire for private and public, then finally, transnationalism and the desire for national and global. These desires we typically take as binaries, but in fact, we experience an anxiety of being simultaneously on both sides of the binary. I argue that attentiveness Oldboy`s representation of the incest taboo brings necessary nuances to the current scholarship that surrounds it: Contemporary South Korean culture cannot be a primary focus, as South Korea has always been entangled within an "other", be it through Colonization, Westernization, or more recently telecommunications. In conclusion, by closely examining the incest taboo in Oldboy, this project sheds light on the simultaneity within the desires of self and other, private and public, and finally, national and global.

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Earley, Deja Anne. "Keeping Gardens: Poetry and Essay." Diss., CLICK HERE for online access, 2005. http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/ETD/image/etd943.doc.

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Söderberg, Bo. "Essay in real estate appraisel." Doctoral thesis, KTH, Real Estate and Construction Management, 1999. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-2882.

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This is an academic dissertation submitted in partialfulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor ofTechnology. The dissertation consists of a short summary anddiscussion of seven enclosed essays. All seven papers aredevoted to central issues within real estate appraisal andvaluation, with emphasis on the market for income property.

Essay Ianalyses the market prices for mixed-use incomeproperties, with mainly residential use. A hedonic priceequation is estimated based on market transactions. The timeperiod under study is 19921994. The geographicalsub-market analysed is the city of Stockholm. The hedonictechnique is also used for estimating an assessment equation.Certain types of properties were found to be systematicallyunder-assessed.

Essay IIis an inquiry into the topic of choosing arelevant functional form for the hedonic equation applied toincome property. Certain characteristics of two common modelspecifications are identified. The shortcomings and advantagesare illustrated through the application of the two models toempirical data.

Essay IIIinvestigates if the distance to CBD affectsthe property prices, i.e. if there are (negative) distancegradients. The sub-market analysed is that of mainlyresidential income properties, though the residential market issubject to a rent control system. The distance gradient onrents was insignificant. However, there is a significantnegative price gradient. With one exception (direction east),there is also a significant negative assessment gradient.

Essay IVdeals with cycles on the market for incomeproperty. The time-period under study is 19791992, whichincludes the Swedish property crisis. The use of the grossincome multiplier (GIM) as an indicator of the phases of theproperty cycle is suggested. The analyses indicate that theproperty boom during the late 1980s may have been partly drivenby a speculative price bubble.

Essay Vanalyses the determinants of the rent level andthe rent drift on the residential rental market, which issubject to rent control. Furthermore, the rate of return oninvestment, as well as maintenance input (for increasing thequality of the property) is estimated. The micro-location isfound to affect the rent level, but not the age of thebuilding. The return on quality-improving investments andmaintenance was found to be reasonable. The rent increases wereslightly larger than what was agreed upon in officialnegotiations.

Essay VIanalyses the total rate of return (TRR) overthe time-period 19791997 within a portfolio of mixed-useincome property. Different definitions of TRR were estimated.The results do not vary over definitions used. The determinantsof the TRR are identified in regressions using panel datamodels. The TRR may be separated into a commercial and aresidential component, respectively. The average values forthese two components are found to be almost equal for the wholetime-period under study, however, the evolution over time isfound to follow patterns that show important differences.

Essay VIIpresents a literature review of studies whereprice equations on the property market are estimated byregression analysis. In all, 145 papers are investigated. Theessay analyses how the methodological procedures, andparticularly those related to econometrics, are presented inthe papers.

Keywords: property, real estate, real estate economics,appraisal, assessment, income property, hedonic technique,model specification, distance gradients, property crises,speculative bubble, gross income multiplier, GIM, rent control,total rate of return, Sweden.

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Guðmundsdóttir, Helga Sif. "Images of time : master essay." Thesis, Konstfack, Textil, 2009. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:konstfack:diva-3561.

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Reflections and thoughts about time and materialization is my main theme in this essay. I start with introducing my background as a musician and how I moved from there into art. My search in wanting to build a bridge between these two art forms and discussing the differences between thenature of music and art. Since music is a time-based art- form I compare it with the nature of myworks being also time-based, but unlike music, dealing with space. How I moved into making art with impermanent materials such as food and the influence I have from John Cage and his philosophy of silence or nothingness and chance. I discuss Fluxus-art in order to connect my work to the fact that often it has leads into no-products and being event-based. The influence I have had from the artist Andy Goldsworthy which has led me even further into thoughts about the inherent nature of the material, dealing with the concept of time and nature. From Goldsworthy I move into discussions about the method of using intuition as a tool, and howthat has led me into creating works like my Bachelor graduation piece, allowing myself to take risks and not always be in control of the result. Between contradictions in material and thought, letting it go as it will, these are all facts about the art of Eva Hesse, who's works I discovered in Konstfack and how that was like finding my parent within art. The coating, surrounding and wrapping have repeatedly appeared in my art, I discuss this way of expression as a metaphor of different images of time, connecting to the Icelandic artist Sigurdur Gudmundsson and his lecture held in 1969 about time. The environment has become my platform in the masters project. There I have created both visual and aural works that are circling in one way or the other, around the subject of time and materialization. I ask myself, if I will be able to gather the result of that work in a space and create acertain balance between these different elements? I point out the fact that centuries ago music mixed with art in the church. From there I move into discussing a sound performance I made that had no visual contact and was made instantly in one hour. In the context of working instantly I discuss the chaotic order in Jessica Stockholder's works and how she allows chance and dreamlike ideas to exist in her installations. Finally I move into the part of my present work, where I am using sound. The reflections about creation with hardly any involvement of myself, partly letting the result solve itself.
Textil formgivning / Master 2009 Textile in the Expanded Field

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Gohill, Neil. "Spirit in Schelling's Freedom essay." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1998. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/tape15/PQDD_0002/MQ30805.pdf.

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House, Jud Laraine. "Madame Pele novel & essay /." Connect to thesis, 2006. http://portal.ecu.edu.au/adt-public/adt-ECU2007.0009.html.

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Östling, Robert. "Automated Essay Scoring for Swedish." Stockholms universitet, Avdelningen för datorlingvistik, 2013. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-89642.

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We present the first system developed for automated grading of high school essays written in Swedish. The system uses standard text quality indicators and is able to compare vocabulary and grammar to large reference corpora of blog posts and newspaper articles. The system is evaluated on a corpus of 1 702 essays, each graded independently by the student’s own teacher and also in a blind re-grading process by another teacher. We show that our system’s performance is fair, given the low agreementbetween the two human graders, and furthermore show how it could improve efficiency in a practical setting where one seeks to identify incorrectly graded essays.

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Brunsdon, Edward. "Critical rationalism : a critical essay." Thesis, London Metropolitan University, 1994. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.480836.

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Black, Peter. "Explanatory essay and seven articles." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2016. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/7726/.

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The essay accompanied the submission of 5 books and seven articles for the degree of PhD by publication. It explains that the common thread that links the various publications is research into prints and drawings.

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LaBarge, Emily. "The essay as art form." Thesis, Royal College of Art, 2016. http://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/1789/.

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Beginning with Montaigne’s essayistic dictum Que sais je? — ‘What do I know?’ — this PhD thesis examines the literary history, formal qualities, and theoretical underpinnings of the personal essay to both investigate and to practice its relevance as an approach to writing about art. The thesis proposes the essay as intrinsically linked to research, critical writing, and art making; it is a literary method that embodies the real experience of attempting to answer a question. The essay is a processual and reflexive mode of enquiry: a form that conveys not just the essayist’s thought, but the sense and texture of its movement as it attempts to understand its object. It is often invoked, across disciplines, in reference to the possibility of a more liberal sense of creative practice — one that conceptually and stylistically privileges collage, fragmentation, hybridity, chance, open-endedness, and the meander. Within this question of the essay as form, the thesis contains two distinct and parallel strands of analysis — subject matter and essay writing as research. At the core of the study lie two close-readings: Ana Mendieta’s Labyrinth of Venus (1982) and Le Couvent de la Tourette (1959) by Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis. In each case, the writing draws, in its tone and texture, on a range of literary influences, weaving together different voices, discussions, and approaches to enquiry. The practice of essay writing is presented alongside, part and party to, research: a method of interrogation that embraces risk and uncertainty, and simultaneously enacts its own findings as a critical-creative mode of study-via-form, and form-via-study. The thesis is presented as a book-length essay, in which the art in question is equal and intimately connected to the writing used to address it. Method and form are designed to respond to the oft-cited challenge of the essay as fundamentally unmethodical, ranging, and diverse. Research, critical study, writerly description, and storytelling are combined to elucidate and expose each other based not on surface continuity, but on a deep interconnection among ideas that, through language, cohere and become related — imbued with an affinity for one another. The consummate product is the argument, as it works across genres, disciplines, descriptive and critical models, to challenge the narrative structure and language used within contemporary writing about art.

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Choi, Chi Hung. "An essay on exotic floaters /." View Abstract or Full-Text, 2002. http://library.ust.hk/cgi/db/thesis.pl?FINA%202002%20CHOI.

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Victor, Suzann, University of Western Sydney, College of Arts, and School of Humanities and Languages. "Abjection : weapon of the weak." 2008. http://handle.uws.edu.au:8081/1959.7/39710.

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This research considers the performance of situated subjectivity where the state and the individual vie for dominion over the drives that construct the body as what one has (the body as object), as what one is (the body as subject), and as what one becomes (the absent body). To turn power into pain, the State prospects the body of the subject to anchor its power through abjection. In so doing, it compels that body to channel the abject as a power to be wielded as a weapon of the weak, thus forcing into view the true interior of the State. Sections I and II position a discourse of trauma in Singapore using a parenthetical framework that is constructed by and mediated through the criminalized and punishable bodies of two young Asian males. The first discusses the carefully constructed ob-scene (off-stage) nature of the obscene (abhorrent) execution of convicted drug trafficker Van Nguyen in 2005 (the body as object); the second examines its inverse – the public spectacle of creative ‘death’ imposed upon artist Josef Ng (the body as subject) through government condemnation and expulsion for an alleged obscene (immoral) performance at 5th Passage in 1994. To do this, the thesis engages with the enforced interchangeable processes of disembodiment (for the display of symbolic violence) and embodiment (for the exertion of physical violence). Comparisons are also made of the way the State demonstrates its preparedness to turn the display of power into a process of exacting the ultimate pain from the punishable body. This is perpetrated on the one hand via a spectacle of invisibility that keeps the mandatory death penalty a secretive process, and on the other, its inverse, the publicly staged media spectacle of persecuting performance artist/s and 5th Passage. The events that follow led to the defacto banning of performance art and 5th Passage’s demise in 1994, ending my role as its artistic director. By relocating the performance of death from the high courts and offices of Singapore’s Home Affairs Ministry (the site of symbolic violence) and Changi Prison (site of physical violence) into plain sight in the Australian media, the press is discussed as an instrumental force in deploying a penal counter-aesthetic to pierce through Singapore’s veil of secrecy surrounding its executions. The thesis demonstrates how this engendered a ‘seeing through’ that galvanized acts of intersubjectivity and the performance of social witnessing in Australia as an attempt to save Van Nguyen from the gallows. The institutional censorship of an artwork about the execution in 2005 is discussed to show how signifying practices such as visual art continued to agitate the state’s performance to construct itself as a “global city for arts and culture” on one hand while crushing artistic subjectivity when it is perceived as dissent on the other. This glimpse into the fragility of the Singapore nation’s divergent desires, where one performance portrays the disintegration of another, recalled the originary cultural rupture at 5th Passage in 1994 when artists engaged in performance were sensationalized in the Singapore media as social deviants. As an extension of state apparatus, the media is shown to repress artistic subjectivity through its creation of a controversy that led to the illegitimization of scriptless performance art, thus producing a distinctively Singaporean cultural artefact – the absent body. Out of the personal and social trauma framed by this confrontation with the state, Section III presents a body of visual work that I have since produced in the period marked by these two events (between 1994 to 2008) as a reply to the state. From this place of banishment, the thesis traces its evolvement into the body machine (Rich Manoeuvre series) as part of a practice that sees it for what it is within the paternal order, to locate the points where fragility occur.
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'An essay on abjection'

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