Representing the Unrepresentable: The Photographs of Lee Miller at Buchenwald and Dachau

This article proposes a reflection on what the historian Saul Friedlander called “the limits of representation” of the massacres and genocides, in order to provide evidence to help settle the old debate about the Holocaust unrepresentability. To achieve this, we will carry out a textual analysis of five of the most painful images that the American photographer Lee Miller realized in the Nazi concentration camps of Buchenwald and Dachau, in April 1945. The war correspondent, who had been Man Ray’s assistant photographer, muse and lover, witnessed the horror, and if she knew how to represent it, that was, in a great extent, thanks to its surreal look.

Quintus Curtius before his sources: the episode of Alexander and the Scythians on the Tanais

Quintus Curtius found in his sources a speech where a Scythian censured Alexander, followed by the King’s reply. Curtius drastically abridged this second discourse in order to highlight the criticism of the Macedonian. The Scythian’s words have a striking rhetorical language and some allusions taken from Greek literature, in addition to possible indirect references to Caligula. Curtius declares that he follows his source word-for-word aiming to justify these inconsistencies, but also trying to hide the manipulations he has done to achieve his own narrative purposes.

The Collusion of Feminist and Postmodernist Impulses in E.L. Doctorow’s "Ragtime"

Many critics of Doctorow have classified him as a postmodernist writer, acknowledging that a wide number of thematic and stylistic features of his early fiction emanate from the postmodern context in which he took his first steps as a writer. Yet, these novels have an eminently social and ethical scope that may be best perceived in their intellectual engagement and support of feminist concerns. This is certainly the case of Doctorow’s fourth and most successful novel, Ragtime. The purpose of this paper will be two-fold. I will explore Ragtime’s indebtedness to postmodern aesthetics and themes, but also its feminist elements. Thus, on the one hand, I will focus on issues of uncertainty, indeterminacy of meaning, plurality and decentering of subjectivity; on the other hand, I will examine the novel’s attitude towards gender oppression, violence and objectification, its denunciation of hegemonic gender configurations and its voicing of certain feminist demands. This analysis will lead to an examination of the problematic collusion of the mostly white, male, patriarchal aesthetics of postmodernism and feminist politics in the novel. I will attempt to establish how these two traditionally conflicting modes coexist and interact in Ragtime.

A literature review to Examine the Validity and Reliability of group poster presentations as an assessment method of a module in an undergraduate nursing degree programme

The introduction of a poster presentation as a formative assessment method over a multiple choice examination after the first phase of a three phase “health and well-being” module in an undergraduate nursing degree programme was greeted with a storm of criticism from fellow lecturers stating that poster presentations are not valid or reliable and totally irrelevant to the assessment of learning in the module. This paper seeks to investigate these criticisms by investigating the literature regarding producing nurses fit for practice, nurse curriculum development and wider nurse education, the purpose of assessment, validity and reliability to critically evaluate the poster presentation as a legitimate assessment method for these aims.

The Republican Movement, 'Disappearing' and Framing the Past in Northern Ireland

Despite a rich body of research on the conflict and peace process in Northern Ireland, the ‘disappearances’ carried out by Republican armed groups have so far escaped scrutiny. In this article I examine how the Republican movement has framed the rationale behind ‘disappearing’ as a rational response to informing and as an example of historical continuity. In doing so, Republicans appear to attempt to confer legitimacy on their choice of target and normalize the use of the practice within a Republican framework. However, these rationales incorporate techniques of neutralization and attempts to contextualize the ‘disappearances’ in such a way as to distance the Irish Republican Army from agency. Such distancing speaks to a third, overarching rationale for ‘disappearing’: the avoidance of an embarrassment that has continued into the postconflict period. I consider why Republicans persist in claiming the ‘disappeared’ were legitimate targets, killed by a method for which there is historical precedent, when such framing left them open to criticism at a time when they were seeking to demonstrate that they had left violence behind. I conclude that Republican attempts to satisfy two audiences resulted in a gulf between their engagement in the process of recovering remains and their rhetoric surrounding this issue. In so doing, light is shed on some of the challenges the Republican movement faced in their transition away from violence. More broadly, the value of unpicking the framing of key actors in transitional processes is illuminated.

Digital collaborations and entrepreneurship – the role of shareconomy and crowdsourcing in the era of smart city

The thesis begins with the classical cooperation and transfers it to the digital world. This work gives a detailed overview of the young fields of research smart city, shareconomy and crowdsourcing and links these fields with entrepreneurship. The core research aim is the finding of connections between the research fields smart city, shareconomy and crowdsourcing and entrepreneurial activities and the specific fields of application, success factors and conditions for entrepreneurs. The thesis consists of seven peer-reviewed publications. Based on primary and secondary data, the existence of entrepreneurial opportunities in the fields of smart city, shareconomy and crowdsourcing could be confirmed. The first part (publications 1-3) of the thesis are literature reviews to secure the fundamental base for further research. This part consists of newly created definitions and an extreme sharpening of the research fields for the near future. In the second part of the thesis (publications 4-7), empirical field work (in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs) and quantitative analyses (fuzzy set/qualitative comparative analysis and binary logistic regression analysis) contribute to the field of research with additional new insights. Summarizing, the insights are multi-layered: theoretical (e.g. new definitions, sharpening of the research field), methodical (e.g. first time application of the fuzzy set/qualitative comparative analysis in the field of crowdfunding) and qualitative (first time application of in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs in the fields of smart city and shareconomy). The global research question could be answered: the link between entrepreneurship and smart city, shareconomy and crowdfunding could be confirmed, concrete fields of application could be identified and further developments could be touched upon. This work strongly contributes to the young fields of research through much-needed basic work, new qualitative approaches, innovative methods and new insights and offers opportunities for discussion, criticism and support for further research.

Writing Violence: the legal, moral and aesthetic Implications of creative non-fiction.

This essay began as a hybrid critical/creative paper that was presented as part of an all-female panel discussing the intersections between writing and extreme violence. My own paper was on the relationship between my creative nonfiction novel The Museum of Atheism and the real life murder of six-year-old beauty queen, JonBenet Ramsey. This essay is an attempt to represent the writing process of the creative nonfiction author, and to consider the ways in which critical theory can be used to highlight, or conversely obscure, fictional writing. In addition to considering the effect of using a real story, a true crime, as the basis for a semi-fictional work, this essay will also consider the relationship I had as a writer to my publisher, editor and agent, and their interventions in the writing process to ensure that facts were deliberately skewed or warped in order to avoid litigation. Finally, I will consider my own relationship to the material, and the impact that this had on the writing process.

Inside out and outside in. Thinking a Tagorean Future of Education.

Rabindranath Tagore’s ideas can still inspire education in the East as well as in the West today. In this paper, I survey Tagore’s philosophical anthropology and argue that there is more coherence to his philosophy and pedagogy than is usually seen. For Tagore, the highest goal is to make the world one’s own, as well as to enlarge one’s self to encompass the world. The educational practices through which this ideal can be reached can be classified as “creative action,” “love,” and “freedom.” On the basis of such an ideal, realms such as the arts, nature, and movement no longer remain expendable additions to the kind of knowledge-driven education that aims primarily at making everyone economically productive.One of the problems with such a pedagogical strategy is that it treats human beings as means and not as ends. Tagore’s educational approach (his “method of nature”) refrains from turning children into adults as soon as possible and accepts the deceleration of learning and the simplification of living asmost forward-leading approach to a successful and comprehensive education.

‘Tenshillingland’: Community and Commerce, Myth and Madness in the Modern Scottish Novel.

While ‘community’ as a concept has come under increasing attack in a neoliberal era, it has remained in Scotland a mythic, though not unexamined, signifier of resistance to perceived threats to national identity. Community, central to the Scottish novel since the Kailyard, continues to be a prevalent theme in the many important novels of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries explored here. Yet, while often disturbingly oppressive in tenor, many of these representations of community actually attack the myth of Scottish communalism to critique, and often expose as forms of madness, the conventional values of social class, capitalism, patriarchy, and religion.

Humankindness: Illness, Animality, and the Limits of the Human in the Victorian Novel

This project posits a link between representations of animals or animality and representations of illness in the Victorian novel, and examines the narrative uses and ideological consequences of such representations. Figurations of animality and illness in Victorian fiction have been examined extensively as distinct phenomena, but examining their connection allows for a more complex view of the role of sympathy in the Victorian novel. The commonplace in novel criticism is that Victorian authors, whether effectively or not, constructed their novels with a view to the expansion of sympathy. This dissertation intervenes in the discussion of the Victorian novel as a vehicle for sympathy by positing that texts and scenes in which representations of illness and animality are conjoined reveal where the novel draws the boundaries of the human, and the often surprising limits it sets on sympathetic feeling. In such moments, textual cues train or direct readerly sympathies in ways that suggest a particular definition of the human, but that direction of sympathy is not always towards an enlarged sympathy, or an enlarged definition of the human. There is an equally (and increasingly) powerful antipathetic impulse in many of these texts, which estranges readerly sympathy from putatively deviant, degenerate, or dangerous groups. These two opposing impulses—the sympathetic and the antipathetic—often coexist in the same novel or even the same scene, creating an ideological and affective friction, and both draw on the same tropes of illness and animality. Examining the intersection of these different discourses—sympathy, illness, and animality-- in these novels reveals the way that major Victorian debates about human nature, evolution and degeneration, and moral responsibility shaped the novels of the era as vehicles for both antipathy and sympathy. Focusing on the novels of the Brontës and Thomas Hardy, this dissertation examines in depth the interconnected ways that representations of animals and animality and representations of illness function in the Victorian novel, as they allow authors to explore or redefine the boundary between the human and the non-human, the boundary between sympathy and antipathy, and the limits of sympathy itself.

'Yes, the century is an ashen sun': poem and subject in the philosophy of Alain Badiou

This thesis examines the relation between philosophy, the poem and the subject in the mature philosophy of Alain Badiou. It investigates Badiou’s decisive contribution to these questions primarily by means of comparison, especially to Martin Heidegger, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Theodor Adorno, as well as by analysing Badiou’s readings of poems and prose by Paul Celan and Samuel Beckett respectively as sites of potential dialogue with his immediate predecessors. The thesis stresses the importance of French philosophy’s German heritage, emphasising not only Badiou’s radical departure from Heidegger and his legacy, but also the former’s wholesale rejection of philosophies that would, in the wake of twentieth-century violence and beyond, proclaim their own end or completion. The thesis argues Badiou’s innovative readings of Celan and Beckett to be crucial to understanding this endeavour: for Badiou, both writers use the poem to affirm novel conceptions of subjectivity capable of transcending the historical conditions of their presentation. The title quotation from Badiou’s The Century, ‘Yes, the century is an ashen sun’, anticipates both the affirmative nature of these subjective figures, and their presience, beyond the bounds of a twentieth-century ‘ashen sun’ pervaded by melancholy, for the ‘new suns’ of the twenty-first. The thesis is in four chapters. The first chapter unfolds the central concepts of Badiou’s departure from Heidegger using Paul Celan’s poems to focus the enquiry. It is guided by two of Badiou’s most condensed declarations about the poem, that, firstly, ‘the modern poem harbours a central silence’, and secondly, that ‘Celan completes Heidegger’. The second chapter exposes the political implications of Heidegger’s writings on Friedrich Hölderlin and the role of the subject therein, offering at its close some thoughts about what Badiou calls, following Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, the poem’s ‘becoming-prose’. It concludes by drawing the poem and politics into relation by way of the philosophical category of the subject. The third chapter reads Badiou’s concept of ‘anabasis’ against Heidegger’s ‘homecoming’ in order to think the possibility of a collective political subject’s formation in the wake of Auschwitz. The final chapter examines the imbrication of the Two of love and the ‘latent poem’ in Badiou’s reading of Samuel Beckett’s late prose, contrasting this ‘affirmative’ reading of Beckett to Theodor Adorno’s earlier emphases on negation. Following its investigations of subjectivity, poem and prose throughout, the thesis concludes by returning to the title quotation in order to unfold the particular relations between subject, affirmation and negation Badiou’s philosophy enacts, and to offer further routes forward for research regarding Badiou’s philosophy and aesthetic figuration.

The Historical Thesaurus and the sentimental language of Robert Burns

This thesis demonstrates a new methodology for the linguistic analysis of literature drawing on the data within The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (2009). Developing ideas laid out by Carol McGuirk in her book Robert Burns and the Sentimental Era (1985), this study offers a novel approach to the cultural connections present in the sentimental literature of the eighteenth century, with specific reference to Robert Burns. In doing so, it responds to the need to “stop reading Burns through glossaries and start reading him through dictionaries, thesauruses and histories”, as called for by Murray Pittock (2012). Beginning by situating the methodology in linguistic theory, this thesis goes on firstly to illustrate the ways in which such an approach can be deployed to assess existing literary critical ideas. The first chapter does this testing by examining McGuirk’s book, while simultaneously grounding the study in the necessary contextual background. Secondly, this study investigates, in detail, two aspects of Burns’s sentimental persona construction. Beginning with his open letter ‘The Address of the Scotch Distillers’ and its sentimental use of the language of the Enlightenment, and moving on to one of Burns’s personas in his letters to George Thomson, this section illustrates the importance of persona construction in Burns’s sentimental ethos. Finally, a comprehensive, evidence-based, comparison of linguistic trends examines the extent to which similar sentimental language is used by Burns and Henry Mackenzie, Laurence Sterne, William Shenstone and Samuel Richardson. This thesis shows how this new methodology is a valuable new tool for those involved in literary scholarship. For the first time in any comprehensive way the Historical Thesaurus can be harnessed to make new arguments in literary criticism.