Special Libraries, November 1949

Volume 40, Issue 9https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1949/1008/thumbnail.jp

Spartan Daily, September 1, 1998

Volume 111, Issue 3https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/9291/thumbnail.jp

The art of destruction: An ethnographic study of the urban graffiti subculture in London and New York

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.This thesis examines the urban graffiti subculture within the cities of New York and London. It was undertaken in an attempt to move beyond some of the negative stereotypes that characterise this subculture, its members and their illegal activities as inherently problematic, pointless and inane. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in London and New York, it argues that graffiti is not senseless and mindless vandalism, but a pursuit that grants its mainly male and adolescent practitioners important and substantial rewards. Most notably these include fame, respect, autonomy, self direction and some sense of masculine status. Illegality is identified as the subcultural element underpinning these identity enhancing affordances. It is presented, firstly, as a masculine resource; a tool which young men can use to confront risk and danger and gain, through this, the recognition and respect of their peers and the defining elements of their masculine identities. Secondly, it is argued that adolescent subcultural members use their illegal status to promote societal rejection, discourage adult intervention and secure their subculture as a 'world apart'. This free space grants them autonomy, self direction and a chance to escape 'real life' and the problems and restraints which they may, as adolescents, experience there. On the basis of this, it is argued that three analytic revisions must be made if we are to understand this and other 'illegal' subcultures. First, we must move away from a passive model of delinquency. In this study, deviance is depicted as deliberate, functional and, thus, more than the consequence of an externally applied label. Second, we must move towards a more active model of identity construction. graffiti writers build and mould their identities through their illegal activities. This defines them as active agents rather than textual subjects who have merely taken up an inscribed position in a provided text or discourse. Third, we must look at what is being done in conjunction with who is doing it. Subcultural studies of the past have presented the subculture as a working class vehicle of resistance. However, they have rarely problematised its characteristically adolescent and masculine membership. Failure to include and analytically weave together factors of age, gender and illegality will, it is contended, result in a theoretically incomplete subcultural account

The New Hampshire, Vol. 70, No. 21 (Nov. 20, 1979)

The student publication of the University of New Hampshire

The Pan American (1993-02)

https://scholarworks.utrgv.edu/panamerican/1579/thumbnail.jp

Central Florida Future, Vol. 39 No. 08, September 8, 2006

https://stars.library.ucf.edu/centralfloridafuture/2923/thumbnail.jp

Muriel Spark's postmodernism

This study explores the shifting notions of postmodernism developed through Muriel Spark’s fiction, and thereby clarifies this artist’s own postmodernism. I use Jean-François Lyotard’s definition of the notion in his The Postmodern Condition (1979), that there is no grand narrative, as my starting point, and deploy various postmodernist theories, which can illuminate Spark’s art and can in turn be illuminated by her art, in my arguments. Throughout the thesis, I focus on two of Spark’s most important themes as crucial keys to understanding her postmodernism: the theme of individual subjectivity and the theme of the interplay of life and art. The thesis begins with the claims Spark makes for her individuality and her individual art through the voice of “I”. Chapter I considers issues about being a woman and an artist, which Spark raises around the narrator-heroine of a fictional memoir, A Far Cry from Kensington (1988). Here I present this heroine as a definition of the strength of Sparkian women who liberate themselves by practicing art. Chapter II discusses Loitering with Intent (1981), a fictional autobiography of a fictional woman novelist, alongside Spark’s own autobiography and her various biographical works. This section illustrates Spark’s notion of the “author” in relation to the “work” - and an author in control in her sense - by investigating the dynamic interplay of life and art in the form of this novel. Chapter III analyses The Driver’s Seat (1970), the novel which most shockingly elucidates the postmodern condition according to Spark and demonstrates her postmodernist narrative strategies. Her concern with the crisis of the “subject” in the world in its postmodern phase is observed in the figure of the heroine, a woman who has tried and failed to be an author in control. I argue that Spark here theorises the notion of subject, by providing her own version of the psychoanalytical “death drive” and also represents the Lacanian real as the unfigurable with this figure. Chapter IV and Chapter V follow the developments of Spark’s discussion of the crisis of the “subject” in two of her later novels. Chapter IV concentrates on the theme of Otherness in Symposium (1990). Chapter V discusses Reality and Dreams (1996), in which Spark pursues the theme of excess and opens up the contradictions inherent in this notion to bring about a new philosophy of life by art as excess