Thomas Mitchell and the Wellington caves: The relationship among science, religion, and aesthetics in early-nineteenth-century Australia

THOMAS MITCHELL (1792–1855), explorer and Surveyor-General in New South Wales between 1828 and 1855, was a talented and competent draughtsman who was responsible for the original sketches and even some of the lithographs he used to illustrate his two journals of exploration, published in 1838 and 1848. In this paper, I will be concerned with the 1838 journal, entitled Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia; with descriptions of the recently explored region of Australia Felix, and of the Present Colony of New South Wales. On the whole, it is a detailed and lavishly illustrated account of the land Mitchell encountered, along with its inhabitants and natural history. My particular interest is in offering an explanation for differences between a sepia sketch depicting a cave at Wellington, NSW, that Mitchell prepared as one of the illustrations for geological material included in this journal, and the final lithograph.

'Looking good, feeling better': Consumption, Control and the Aesthetics of Exclusivity in the Service Encounter

The majority of ‘service’ literature has focused on the production side of service work (i.e. employees and management), while treating the role of the customer and/or consumer as secondary (Korczynski and Ott, 2004). Those authors who have addressed the role consumption plays in shaping and maintaining individuals' self- identity have tended to overemphasize the dominance of consumer culture in shaping ‘our consciousness’ (Ritzer, 1999), with little in the way of empirical evidence to support these assertions. This paper develops the conceptualization of service work and consumer culture literature, by placing more emphasis on the customer in the service encounter. Using an ethnographic study of a ‘high class’ department store, this paper addresses employee and customer identity and the nature of managerial, employee and customer control within this ‘exclusive’ context. Of particular interest is how employees and customer’s ‘embody’ this control. Using Bourdieu’s (1986) conception of class and habitus, the concept of exclusivity goes beyond the management /service worker dyad by providing a means of investigating identity control by the organization over both customers and service workers. However, an organization’s exclusivity is not a closed normative pursuit of control, and shows this enterprise is part of a contested terrain, while revealing the ambiguity and ‘openness’ of control practices and pursuits. In order to uphold the ideal of exclusivity, management, service workers and customers must all engage in a precarious quest for establishing and maintaining a sense of control and/or identity. This paper demonstrates the continuing contradiction between bureaucratic practices of control and consumer culture, and highlights the need for research that investigates the context -dependent nature of control in service-related and consumer studies.

Ser-tão de Buriti: o corpo de noturno rumor (a poética de Guimarães Rosa e o pensamento literário contemporâneo)

This thesis is to analyze the fictional texture of Buriti, novella by Guimarães Rosa, which makes part of Corpo do Baile. Gilles Deleuze‘s philosophical background as well as similar theorists such as Mircea Eliade, Derrida, Bataille, Foucault, Blanchot and Nie-tzsche constitute the main reference, as example of Guimarães Rosa‘s problematizing writing, since they present as basic element of thought the desterritorialization of con-cepts, standards and institutionalized knowledge by the dominant literary language. Along with the theoretical perspective of current alterity on these authors, Buriti is crossed by one aesthetics substantiated with a multiplicity of narrative points of view, opening gaps to other non-sacralized, nomadic voices, using polyphony as a way of breaking and destabilizing crystallized truths related to the canons of mother tongue. Interwoven by a poetic side of transgression, the narrative of Buriti finds especially marked by the signs of the backlands and of the night, which rhizomatically point to a sense of infinity, eternity, loneliness, vertigo before the abyssal, evoking the singularity of a ser-tão before the night, "the body of nocturnal rumor." The nights in the backlands in Buriti give rise to the emergence of a state of subjectivity, the ser-tão, whose nature is shown as a space of communion of the various beings that humans put on the same level of other living beings, setting up a sharing cosmic territory, enjoyment between pain and pleasure, between death and life. It is the night in the darkness, the shadows, the ser-tão is exposed, the being in his depth, facing himself with his internal rumors, which project themselves through the noise, the sound amplified by the vastness of the night at the desert backlands. "The backlands is the night." (ROSA, 1988, p.92).

Ser-tão de Buriti: o corpo de noturno rumor (a poética de Guimarães Rosa e o pensamento literário contemporâneo)

This thesis is to analyze the fictional texture of Buriti, novella by Guimarães Rosa, which makes part of Corpo do Baile. Gilles Deleuze‘s philosophical background as well as similar theorists such as Mircea Eliade, Derrida, Bataille, Foucault, Blanchot and Nie-tzsche constitute the main reference, as example of Guimarães Rosa‘s problematizing writing, since they present as basic element of thought the desterritorialization of con-cepts, standards and institutionalized knowledge by the dominant literary language. Along with the theoretical perspective of current alterity on these authors, Buriti is crossed by one aesthetics substantiated with a multiplicity of narrative points of view, opening gaps to other non-sacralized, nomadic voices, using polyphony as a way of breaking and destabilizing crystallized truths related to the canons of mother tongue. Interwoven by a poetic side of transgression, the narrative of Buriti finds especially marked by the signs of the backlands and of the night, which rhizomatically point to a sense of infinity, eternity, loneliness, vertigo before the abyssal, evoking the singularity of a ser-tão before the night, "the body of nocturnal rumor." The nights in the backlands in Buriti give rise to the emergence of a state of subjectivity, the ser-tão, whose nature is shown as a space of communion of the various beings that humans put on the same level of other living beings, setting up a sharing cosmic territory, enjoyment between pain and pleasure, between death and life. It is the night in the darkness, the shadows, the ser-tão is exposed, the being in his depth, facing himself with his internal rumors, which project themselves through the noise, the sound amplified by the vastness of the night at the desert backlands. "The backlands is the night." (ROSA, 1988, p.92).

Eventual benefits : kristevan readings of female subjectivity in Henry James’s Late Novels

“Eventual Benefits: Kristevan Readings of Female Subjectivity in Henry James’s Late Novels” examine la construction de la subjectivité féminine dans les romans de la phase majeure de Henry James, notamment What Maisie Knew, The Awkward Age, The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove et The Golden Bowl. Les personnages féminins de James se trouvent souvent dans des circonstances sociales ou familiales qui défavorisent l’autonomie psychique, et ces subordinations sont surtout nuisibles pour les jeunes personnages de l’auteur. Quant aux femmes américaines expatriées de ces romans, elles éprouvent l’objectification sociale et pécuniaire des européens : en conséquence, elles déploient des tactiques contraires afin d’inverser leurs diminutions et instaurer leurs individualités. Ma recherche des protocoles qui subventionnent l’affranchissement de ces femmes procède dans le cadre des théories avancées par Julia Kristeva. En utilisant les postulats kristeviens d’abjection et de mélancolie, d’intertextualité, de maternité et de grossesse, du pardon et d’étrangeté, cette thèse explore les stratégies disparates et résistantes des femmes chez James et elle parvient à une conception de la subjectivité féminine comme un processus continuellement ajourné.