English travellers and Italian brigands : a narrative of capture and captivity /

With extracts from the diary of Mrs. Moens.

Captain's Cuellar's adventures in Connacht & Ulster A.D. 1588 : a picture of the times, drawn from contemporary sources : To which is added an introduction and complete translation of Captain Cuellar's Narrative of the Spanish Armada and his adventures in Ireland /

Based on the author's paper published in the Ulster journal of archeology, v.1, pt.3, April 1895 under title: Spanish Armada in Ulster and Connacht.

English travelers and Italian brigands. A narrative of capture and captivity.

With extracts from the diary of Mrs. Moens.

The narrative construction va + infinitive in contemporary French:a linguistic phoenix risen from its medieval ashes?

In Old and Middle French (12th-16th centuries), va ["goes"] + inf was used in narrations in the past. A similar usage seems to have reappeared and be spreading today. However, the old construction combined with past Tenses whereas the new one is found only with forms anchored in present and future. We argue that the conTemporary construction derives not from the old one, but from a metanarrative construction. On the basis of its future in Terpretation, va + inf aids the organization of the narration, announcing subsequent events through a hypernymic process. The periphrasis thus approaches a narrative value by projecting the time of events onto that of narration. With the disappearance of all deictic markers, the go-periphrases are no longer hypernyms: they appear on the same temporal line of events as the neighboring situations and are understood as fully completed. © John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Visualising In/Equalities through Contemporary Documentary Cinema. A Diffractive Reading of Feminist Practices in Spanish and Italian Non-Fiction Films

This thesis brings together feminist documentary film theory and feminist new materialism(s) to describe how feminist material-discursive practices in a sample of Spanish and Italian documentary cinema made between 2013-2018 (can) visualise gender in/equalities. The accomplished objectives have been: 1. Building a bridge between feminist documentary film theory and Karen Barad’s diffractive methodology by approaching non-fiction cinema that deals with social inequalities as a diffraction apparatus. 2. Developing a feminist toolbox for a response-able gaze by gathering different insights from feminist film theory. 3. Identifying feminist material-discursive practices in a sample of documentary films produced in Spain and Italy over the last six years (2013-2018). 4. Analysing the effects that these feminist material-discursive practices in documentary cinema have, particularly in terms of visualising gender in/equalities on both sides of the camera and on both sides of the screen. 5. Revealing patterns between the ten case studies by reading through one another (i.e. diffractively) insights raised in each one of them. In ten documentary films/case studies, I identify patterns of continuities and differences concerning feminist material-discursive practices at four levels: content, form, production and reception. In terms of contents, I detect two patterns in which feminist material-discursive practices may operate: enacting the right to appear or enacting the right to look back and/or against the grain. As for the forms, I exemplify how feminism politicises Bill Nichols’s six modes of representation. My analysis of production practices is elaborated along the filmmakers’ self-positions/situatedness, tensions/obstructions, and effects/affects/emotions regarding four key concepts: documentary cinema, equality, gender and feminism(s). And in the case of reception practices, I identify patterns of affective identification and/or intellectual reflections.

Staging the Scientist: The Representation of Science and its Processes in American and British Drama

Dissertação apresentada para cumprimento dos requisitos necessários à obtenção do grau de Mestre em Estudos Ingleses e Norte Americanos

Ghosts in contemporary African diasporic literature : re-visioning history, memory and identity

Starting from the observation that ghosts are strikingly recurrent and prominent figures in late-twentieth African diasporic literature, this dissertation proposes to account for this presence by exploring its various functions. It argues that, beyond the poetic function the ghost performs as metaphor, it also does cultural, theoretical and political work that is significant to the African diaspora in its dealings with issues of history, memory and identity. Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) serves as a guide for introducing the many forms, qualities and significations of the ghost, which are then explored and analyzed in four chapters that look at Fred D'Aguiar's Feeding the Ghosts (1998), Gloria Naylor's Mama Day (1988), Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow (1983) and a selection of novels, short stories and poetry by Michelle Cliff. Moving thematically through these texts, the discussion shifts from history through memory to identity as it examines how the ghost trope allows the writers to revisit sites of trauma; revise historical narratives that are constituted and perpetuated by exclusions and invisibilities; creatively and critically repossess a past marked by violence, dislocation and alienation and reclaim the diasporic culture it contributed to shaping; destabilize and deconstruct the hegemonic, normative categories and boundaries that delimit race or sexuality and envision other, less limited and limiting definitions of identity. These diverse and interrelated concerns are identified and theorized as participating in a project of "re-vision," a critical project that constitutes an epistemological as much as a political gesture. The author-based structure allows for a detailed analysis of the texts and highlights the distinctive shapes the ghost takes and the particular concerns it serves to address in each writer's literary and political project. However, using the ghost as a guide into these texts, taken collectively, also throws into relief new connections between them and sheds light on the complex ways in which the interplay of history, memory and identity positions them as products of and contributions to an African diasporic (literary) culture. If it insists on the cultural specificity of African diasporic ghosts, tracing its origins to African cultures and spiritualities, the argument also follows gothic studies' common view that ghosts in literary and cultural productions-like other related figures of the living dead-respond to particular conditions and anxieties. Considering the historical and political context in which the texts under study were produced, the dissertation makes connections between the ghosts in them and African diasporic people's disillusionment with the broken promises of the civil rights movement in the United States and of postcolonial independence in the Caribbean. It reads the texts' theoretical concerns and narrative qualities alongside the contestation of traditional historiography by black and postcolonial studies as well as the broader challenge to conventional notions such as truth, reality, meaning, power or identity by poststructuralism, postcolonialism or queer theory. Drawing on these various theoretical approaches and critical tools to elucidate the ghost's deconstructive power for African diasporic writers' concerns, this work ultimately offers a contribution to "speciality studies," which is currently emerging as a new field of scholarship in cultural theory.

Tales of the City. Storytelling as a contemporary tool of urban planning and design

Almost thirty years ago, as the social sciences underwent their 'discursive turn', Bernardo Secchi (1984) drew, in what he called the 'urban planning narrative', the attention of planners to the production of myths, turning an activity often seen as primarily technical into one centred around the production of images and ideas. This conception of planning practice gave rise to a powerful current of research in English-speaking countries. Efforts were made to both combine the urban planning narrative with storytelling and to establish storytelling as a prescriptive or descriptive model for planning practice. Thus, just as storytelling is supposed to have led democratic communication off track through a pronounced concern for a good story, storytelling applied to the field of urban production may have led to an increasing preoccupation with staging and showmanship for projects to the detriment of their real inclusion in political debate. It is this possible transformation of the territorial action that will be the focus of the articles collected in this special issue of Articulo - Journal of urban research.

« Autour de la musique narrative » ; « Les musiques de concert, de ballet et de film»

La version intégrale de ce mémoire est disponible uniquement pour consultation individuelle à la Bibliothèque de musique de l’Université de Montréal (www.bib.umontreal.ca/MU).

Éthéréalisation : amorces d'une contre-histoire

Cette thèse est une enquête épistémologique qui s’interroge sur la persistance de « l’éther » dans le champ de la technologie. De façon générale, le mot « éther » évoque un modèle conceptuel de la physique pré-einsteinienne, celui d’un milieu invisible permettant la propagation de la lumière et des ondes électromagnétiques. Or, ce n’est là qu’une des figures de l’éther. Dans plusieurs mythologies et cosmogonies anciennes, le nom « éther » désignait le feu originel contenu dans les plus hautes régions célestes. Aristote nommait « éther », par exemple, le « cinquième être », ou « cinquième élément ». La chimie a aussi sa propre figure de l’éther où il donne son nom à un composé chimique, le C4H10O, qui a été utilisé comme premier anesthésiant général à la fin du XIXe siècle. L’apparition soutenue dans l’histoire de ces figures disparates de l’éther, qui a priori ne semblent pas entretenir de relation entre elles, est pour nous la marque de la persistance de l’éther. Nous défendons ici l’argument selon lequel cette persistance ne se résume pas à la constance de l’attribution d’un mot ou d’un nom à différents phénomènes dans l’histoire, mais à l’actualisation d’une même signature, éthérogène. À l’invitation d’Agamben et en nous inspirant des travaux de Nietzsche et Foucault sur l’histoire-généalogie et ceux de Derrida sur la déconstruction, notre thèse amorce une enquête historique motivée par un approfondissement d’une telle théorisation de la signature. Pour y parvenir, nous proposons de placer l’éther, ou plutôt la signature-éther, au cœur de différentes enquêtes historiques préoccupées par le problème de la technologie. En abordant sous cet angle des enjeux disparates – la légitimation des savoirs narratifs, la suspension des sens, la pseudoscience et la magie, les révolutions de l’information, l’obsession pour le sans-fil, l’économie du corps, la virtualisation de la communication, etc. –, nous proposons dans cette thèse autant d’amorces pour une histoire autre, une contre-histoire.

Émotions et identité : le rôle des émotions dans la formation de l'identité narrative

Cette thèse met en place un modèle permettant d'éclairer les relations entre certaines émotions et la conception que l'individu a de lui-même. En accord avec plusieurs auteurs contemporains, il est ici défendu que la conception que nous avons de nous-mêmes prend la forme d'une identité narrative, c'est-à-dire d'un récit à l'intérieur duquel nous tentons de structurer une image cohérente de nous-mêmes. Dans cette perspective, il est proposé qu'un certain groupe d'émotions, comme la honte, la fierté et la culpabilité, occupe une place cruciale dans la formation et le maintien de cette image de soi. Ces émotions, que nous pouvons qualifier d'auto-évaluatives, conditionnent l'évaluation que nous avons de nous-mêmes et participent ainsi à l'élaboration de la représentation de soi. De plus, cette identité narrative, à travers un certain aspect normatif et motivant, vient à son tour influencer la manifestation et l'interprétation de ces mêmes émotions. Ainsi, la relation entre les émotions auto-évaluatives et l'identité narrative serait une relation complexe d'influences réciproques. L’analyse proposée devrait permettre de clarifier de nombreux aspects de l’économie mentale de l’individu et plus particulièrement de sa motivation morale.