Geometry and topography in James Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake

Following the development of non-Euclidean geometries from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, Euclid’s system had come to be re-conceived as a language for describing reality rather than a set of transcendental laws. As Henri Poincaré famously put it, ‘[i]f several geometries are possible, is it certain that our geometry [...] is true?’. By examining Joyce’s linguistic play and conceptual engagement with ground-breaking geometric constructs in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, this thesis explores how his topographical writing of place encapsulates a common crisis between geometric and linguistic modes of representation within the context of modernity. More specifically, it investigates how Joyce presents Euclidean geometry and its topographical applications as languages, rather than ideally objective systems, for describing visual reality; and how, conversely, he employs language figuratively to emulate the systems by which the world is commonly visualised. With reference to his early readings of Giordano Bruno, Henri Poincaré and other critics of the Euclidean tradition, it investigates how Joyce’s obsession with measuring and mapping space throughout his works enters into his more developed reflections on the codification of visual signs in Finnegans Wake. In particular, this thesis sheds new light on Joyce’s developing fascination with the ‘geometry of language’ practised by Bruno, whose massive influence on Joyce is often assumed to exist in Joyce studies yet is rarely explored in any great detail

Porównawcza analiza korpusowa angielskiego i polskiego specjalistycznego słownictwa jeździeckiego z zakresu ujeżdżania i terningu koni

Niniejsza rozprawa doktorska jest analizą angielskiego i polskiego słownictwa jeździeckiego z zakresu ujeżdżenia i treningu koni przeprowadzoną z zastosowaniem porównawczego korpusu tekstów. Wpisuje się ona w nurt badań języków specjalistycznych, którym dotąd poświęcano niewiele uwagi w językoznawstwie i powiązanych dziedzinach. Specjalistyczny język jeździecki, którego jądro stanowi badane słownictwo, wymaga zarówno teoretycznej (badania), jak i praktycznej (leksykografia) pracy językoznawczej, szczególnie w Polsce, gdzie poświęcono mu jak dotąd pojedyncze artykuły oraz nieaktualny już słownik. Jest to wysoce niewystarczające z uwagi na rosnącą popularność jeździectwa jako sportu i rekreacji w Polsce i na świecie. Niniejsza praca ma stanowić przyczynek do poprawy tego stanu. W opisanej sytuacji wstępne oczekiwania mają charakter ogólny: celem jest formalna i semantyczna charakterystyka dwóch zestawów słownictwa (angielskiego i polskiego) pozyskanych z wiarygodnych źródeł w celu odkrycia zawartego w nim językowego obrazu przedmiotowej dziedziny. Następnie badane jest występowanie terminów w korpusie złożonym odpowiednio z angielskich i polskich tekstów z zakresu ujeżdżenia i treningu koni. Każdy z dwóch podkorpusów podzielony jest dodatkowo na dwie części według rozróżnienia ważnego dla danego języka: podkorpus angielski zawiera część dotyczącą jeździectwa klasycznego (angielskiego) oraz jeździectwa w stylu western (amerykańskiego), zaś podkorpus polski – część oryginalną oraz złożoną z tłumaczeń. Pozwala to na porównanie występowania słownictwa w zależności od obszarów językowo-kulturowych oraz weryfikację jakości i aktualności źródeł słownictwa w kontekście planowanego projektu leksykograficznego, do którego wprowadzeniem teoretycznym ma być niniejsza praca. Rozprawa składa się z czterech rozdziałów teoretycznych oraz dwóch badawczych. Rozdział 1 przedstawia historię badań języków specjalistycznych, a rozdział 2 opisuje współczesne funkcje tych języków. Rozdział 3 przybliża pojęcie języka specjalistycznego, omawiając jego nazwy stosowane w językoznawstwie, jego stosunek do języka ogólnego, powiązane pojęcia wiedzy i specjalisty oraz typologie języków specjalistycznych. Rozdział 4 przedstawia badania języków specjalistycznych podejmowane przez szereg powiązanych dyscyplin: językoznawstwo, terminologię, dydaktykę, leksykografię, translatorykę i planowanie językowe. Rozdział 5 stanowi bezpośrednie wprowadzenie do badań, opisując rozwój przedmiotowej dziedziny specjalistycznej, tj. jeździectwa, oraz jej stan obecny, z naciskiem na grupę użytkowników. Rozdział 6 zawiera właściwe badanie podzielone na etapy: wytyczenie zakresu tematycznego i utworzenie dwóch zestawów słownictwa, ich wstępną formalną i semantyczną charakterystykę, uformowanie korpusu, badanie występowania terminów w korpusie za pomocą oprogramowania WordSmith 5.0 oraz analizę frekwencyjną, formalną i semantyczną wyników. Przeprowadzone badanie wykazuje znaczną zależność występowania słownictwa od obszaru kulturowego, reprezentowanego przez style jeździeckie i języki narodowe. Angielski podkorpus jeździectwa klasycznego zawiera więcej terminów niż podkorpus jeździectwa westernowego, co odzwierciedla pozajęzykową wiedzę o tradycji i charakterze obu tych stylów. Z kolei znaczna część terminów polskich jest nieobecna w tekstach, potwierdzając przewidywane niedostatki jednego z wykorzystanych źródeł słownictwa oraz zasadność planowanego projektu leksykograficznego. Podkorpus polskich tłumaczeń wykazuje wyższe nasycenie słownictwem niż podkorpus oryginalny, sugerując różnicę jakościową między zagranicznym a polskim piśmiennictwem jeździeckim przy jednoczesnej wysokiej jakości przekładów. Niniejsza rozprawa stanowi zatem kolejny dowód na powiązanie języków specjalistycznych z ich dziedzinami, a tym samym na pożyteczność z jednej strony opisowych badań językoznawczych przed praktycznymi pracami terminologiczno-leksykograficznymi, z drugiej zaś uwzględniania wiedzy pozajęzykowej i opisu pojęć w badaniach językoznawczych

The palace at Revere and the earlier architectural patronage of Lodovico Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua (1444-78)

After a brief introduction providing some general information about Lodovico Gonzaga and the reasons for the palace's interest to the student, Chapter II discusses the location of Revere in the territory and gives an account of works done there in the 1370s. The third chapter continues consideration of how older remains conditioned the form of the work of the 1450s. Here, planning is of primary interest and the courtyard is discussed at length. It is suggested that its present layout differs from another proposed earlier using some of the same materials. The traditional attribution of design work to Luca Fancelli is disputed. As elsewhere in the palace, two styles meet in the courtyard. This stylistic discontinuity persisted through the history of construction of the palace. Chapter IV deals with the application of stone-carved all'antica detail to the building, and Lodovico's understanding of the classicizing Tuscan style in the 1450s is discussed. The general order in which walls were built, interior spaces were enclosed and the building grew is the subject of Chapter V. Discussion of the functions of the palace leads to the question of typological identifications of the building as castle, town house and country house. The next chapter seeks to consider contemporary and near-contemporary buildings in Mantua and the t erritory. The influence of the palace is discussed. The size of the Mantuan building trade and the many projects of Lodovico Gonzaga are also indicated in Chapter VI. Among the rewards of Lodovico's work at Revere were the praises of the building bycontemporaries. These are discussed in Chapter VII. Lodovico is also considered, as a patron of architecture: how he used the visual arts as a means of political expression; how he was constrained to occupy the role of patron; and how it served as an exercise of princely erudition. In a real sense, Lodovico created many of his buildings. A conclusion follows

The Art of Anthropology/The Anthropology of Art

Selected Papers from the Annual Meeting of the Southern Anthropological Society, Richmond, Virginia, March, 2011https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_sasproceed/1001/thumbnail.jp

Influence and Contributions of Speculative Row House Developers on the Architecture and Urban Design of New York City's Upper West Side: 1879-1908

The history of the architecture and development of New York City’s Upper West Side row-houses is a subject that has been written upon extensively but never specifically looked at from the point of view of the speculative real estate developer and how he influenced and marketed design. When making the case for historical significance of a building, one generally looks only to the architect or any notable inhabitants or users of that building to fulfill National Register of Historic Places criteria. Why has the real estate or speculative developer been excluded so often in the discussion of a place’s significance? Arguably, these men helped to shape design, space, and even entire neighborhoods on equal footing with the architects whom they chose to hire and probably more so than those who purchased their homes. October 27th, 1904 marked the opening of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company’s (IRT) subway-line for New York City, which resulted in highly escalated land values near the line and effectively, for developers, rendered speculative row-houses uneconomical compared to high-rise apartment construction. Concentrating on speculative row-house construction between 1879 and 1905, the duration of such construction on the Upper West Side, this thesis seeks to examine what developers of the period saw as standard amenities or novelty selling-points for the designs of row-houses in order to keep them desirable but also competitive when compared with apartment living. The turn of the century speculative real estate developer, particularly those active on the Upper West Side, had an array of media through which he was able to market his rows. Week after week completed and projected designs appeared in the Real Estate Record and Guide, in advertisements in the city’s newspapers, or through private publications and prospectuses produced by the developer himself. Ultimately, the speculative row house developer with his desire to make both the neighborhood in which he built and the houses which he sold beautiful and desirable directly impacted the feel and atmosphere of the Upper West Side. Perhaps in light of this investigation we can begin to assign and evaluate new areas of significance for historic row houses. Those being not the ties to famous residents or acclaimed architects, but also to the previously rather anonymous speculative developers which shaped the history, architecture, and development of New York City’s Upper West Side and, indeed, row-house neighborhoods across the country

Marlow Moss (1889-1958)

Merged with duplicate record 10026.1/831 on 15.02.2017 by CS (TIS)This thesis is the first full-length academic study of Marlow Moss in English. The methodology of this research has been to combine biographical, historical, and analytical approaches, and the chapters (a literature review; a biographical account; an examination of gender I identity issues; a European art historical perspective; a British art historical perspective; and a critical analysis of Moss's oeuvre), function as thematic lenses through which to view Moss. It could seem that Moss's historical position, a British artist working in Europe and a European-influenced artist working in England, should have secured her a more prominent role in the history of British Constructive Art. Moss's subsequent neglect provokes questions about the construction of that history. The impetus of this research has been the retrieval of a lost personality in British and European Modernist Art. This thesis represents the most complete account of Moss's life and work to date, and the most sustained examination of her aesthetic. Gathered in the Catalogue Raisonne in appendix to this thesis are over a hundred recorded works by Moss, with images whenever possible, with all currently available information and details of provenance. Also accompanying this thesis are reproductions of photographs, of Moss and of her works, hitherto inaccessible in private collections. This research has gathered and collated extensive archival material, ranging from contemporary reviews of Moss exhibitions, to all known manuscript material relating to Moss, including unpublished letters such as those held in the Paule Vezelay Collection of the Tale Archives, which remain un-catalogued at the time of writing. Moss's relationship with Mondrian, the focus of much previous research, is addressed and clarified in this thesis. The significance of Moss's connections to Paris, the Academie Moderne and Leger, and Abstraction-Creation, and her relationship to her contemporaries, particularly Georges Vantongerloo and Max Bill, are traced. Her position in British art history is mapped, with particular attention to her exhibitions in London during the fifties. Beyond establishing Moss's absence from art historical narratives, and examining the circumstances of her neglect, this thesis primarily seeks to retrieve the position she did occupy, by exploring her working aesthetic and situating it within a specific historical and theoretical context. This context includes Moss's sexuality and the questions it raises for a critical evaluation of her achievement. Although both feminist and Queer Theorist paradigms are pertinent to this research, and are indeed included in this study, Moss is found to problematise existent theoretical categories. Moss's neglect may thus be explained by her lack of fit with prevalent historical and theoretical approaches to Constructivism, to British Modernism, and to the gendering of arts practice

Cultural Context-Aware Models and IT Applications for the Exploitation of Musical Heritage

Information engineering has always expanded its scope by inspiring innovation in different scientific disciplines. In particular, in the last sixty years, music and engineering have forged a strong connection in the discipline known as “Sound and Music Computing”. Musical heritage is a paradigmatic case that includes several multi-faceted cultural artefacts and traditions. Several issues arise from the analog-digital transfer of cultural objects, concerning their creation, preservation, access, analysis and experiencing. The keystone is the relationship of these digitized cultural objects with their carrier and cultural context. The terms “cultural context” and “cultural context awareness” are delineated, alongside the concepts of contextual information and metadata. Since they maintain the integrity of the object, its meaning and cultural context, their role is critical. This thesis explores three main case studies concerning historical audio recordings and ancient musical instruments, aiming to delineate models to preserve, analyze, access and experience the digital versions of these three prominent examples of musical heritage. The first case study concerns analog magnetic tapes, and, in particular, tape music, a particular experimental music born in the second half of the XX century. This case study has relevant implications from the musicology, philology and archivists’ points of view, since the carrier has a paramount role and the tight connection with its content can easily break during the digitization process or the access phase. With the aim to help musicologists and audio technicians in their work, several tools based on Artificial Intelligence are evaluated in tasks such as the discontinuity detection and equalization recognition. By considering the peculiarities of tape music, the philological problem of stemmatics in digitized audio documents is tackled: an algorithm based on phylogenetic techniques is proposed and assessed, confirming the suitability of these techniques for this task. Then, a methodology for a historically faithful access to digitized tape music recordings is introduced, by considering contextual information and its relationship with the carrier and the replay device. Based on this methodology, an Android app which virtualizes a tape recorder is presented, together with its assessment. Furthermore, two web applications are proposed to faithfully experience digitized 78 rpm discs and magnetic tape recordings, respectively. Finally, a prototype of web application for musicological analysis is presented. This aims to concentrate relevant part of the knowledge acquired in this work into a single interface. The second case study is a corpus of Arab-Andalusian music, suitable for computational research, which opens new opportunities to musicological studies by applying data-driven analysis. The description of the corpus is based on the five criteria formalized in the CompMusic project of the University Pompeu Fabra of Barcelona: purpose, coverage, completeness, quality and re-usability. Four Jupyter notebooks were developed with the aim to provide a useful tool for computational musicologists for analyzing and using data and metadata of such corpus. The third case study concerns an exceptional historical musical instrument: an ancient Pan flute exhibited at the Museum of Archaeological Sciences and Art of the University of Padova. The final objective was the creation of a multimedia installation to valorize this precious artifact and to allow visitors to interact with the archaeological find and to learn its history. The case study provided the opportunity to study a methodology suitable for the valorization of this ancient musical instrument, but also extendible to other artifacts or museum collections. Both the methodology and the resulting multimedia installation are presented, followed by the assessment carried out by a multidisciplinary group of experts

Congo style: from Belgian Art Nouveau to Zaïre’s Authenticité

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, In fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Art History), September 2017This thesis analyzes how the Congo has been represented in modernist design situations, from colonial depictions to variegated forms of Congolese self representation. Architecture and art exhibitions in Euro-America and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are approached as points of contestation and intersection. The aim is to look at mutual dependencies and interrelations in modernist forms and spatial practices that migrate and mutate across huge distances and time spans. Links and recurring tropes are located in Art Nouveau total artworks in Belgium (circa 1890 -1905), Congolese objects in 20th century gallery space (from MOMA in the 1930s to 1970s Kinshasa), imperial remains from the early 1900s (in present day Mbanza Ngungu and Kinshasa) and the Africanist aesthetics of Mobutu Sese Seko’s era of retour a l’authenticité (1970s). In revisiting historic representations of the Congo, certain forms and spatial practices emerge, whose meanings are revealed according to how they engage with and are acted upon by their different contexts and temporalities.XL201