Waking the White Goddess: a novel

Abstract (Jill Nudelman) This dissertation presents a novel that charts the progress of the white protagonist, Rose, whose mysterious origins have rendered her disconnected and alienated. In addition, moulded by her sheltered and privileged lifestyle she experiences guilt faced with the suffering and poverty that she encounters in post-apartheid South Africa, but lacks the strength to act. The novel opens with Rose, now 30, bereft and alone. When she discovers a box of mysterious objects which hint at her origins, she is lead to Oberon, a fictional village in the southern uKhahlamba-Drakensberg. Here, Rose’s search becomes more than a search for her biological parents as she experiences events that lead her to an identity beyond whiteness and help her to find rootedness in African soil. A reflexive essay follows. The essay is a personal reflection of the writing process, and includes the inspiration and development of the story line, problems encountered around the narrative voice and the contribution of the Masters programme workshops to the project. It also explores and expounds on the theoretical underpinnings of the novel, such as white identity in post-apartheid South Africa, the use of Western mythologies in an African context, and a discussion of San culture, including concerns around its inclusion in the text. The use of the heavily-loaded signifier, “White Goddess” as in the title, is also touched upon

1998 NASA-ASEE-Stanford Summer Faculty Fellowship Program

This report presents the essential features and highlights of the 1998 Summer Faculty Fellowship Program at Ames Research Center and Dryden Flight Research Center in a comprehensive and concise form. Summary reports describing the fellows' technical accomplishments are enclosed in the attached technical report. The proposal for the 1999 NASA-ASEE-Stanford Summer Faculty Fellowship Program is being submitted under separate cover. Of the 31 participating fellows, 27 were at Ames and 4 were at Dryden. The Program's central feature is the active participation by each fellow in one of the key technical activities currently under way at either the NASA Ames Research Center or the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center. The research topic is carefully chosen in advance to satisfy the criteria of: (1) importance to NASA, (2) high technical level, and (3) a good match to the interests, ability, and experience of the fellow, with the implied possibility of NASA-supported follow-on work at the fellow's home institution. Other features of the Summer Faculty Fellowship Program include participation by the fellows in workshops and seminars at Stanford, the Ames Research Center, and other off-site locations. These enrichment programs take place either directly or remotely, via the Stanford Center for Professional Development, and also involve specific interactions between fellows and Stanford faculty on technical and other academic subjects. A few, brief remarks are in order to summarize the fellows' opinions of the summer program. It is noteworthy that 90% of the fellows gave the NASA-Ames/Dryden- Stanford program an "excellent" rating and the remaining 10%, "good." Also, 100% would recommend the program to their colleagues as an effective means of furthering their professional development as teachers and researchers. Last, but not least, 87% of the fellows stated that a continuing research relationship with their NASA colleagues' organization probably would be maintained. Therefore, the NASA-ASEE- Ames/Dryden-Stanford Program has met its goals very well and every effort will be made to continue to do so in the future

The Sense of An Ending : The Destabilizing Effect of Performance Closure in Shakespeare\u27s Plays

What makes a good ending? How do we know when something ends? In performance, it is difficult to characterize that nebulous and highly subjective — yet nonetheless theatrically powerful — “sense” of an ending. Previous scholarly work on Shakespearean endings, even when emphasizing performance, has largely focused on understanding endings from a narrative viewpoint, questioning how endings reach textual closure. These works examine the lingering questions or problems at the end of Shakespeare’s texts, and discuss how performance tackles these issues. This dissertation takes performance as its starting point. It argues that Shakespearean performance endings naturally trouble textual conclusiveness, as Shakespeare’s endings are generally open to new analysis. Thus, this dissertation analyzes ten Shakespearean productions to demonstrate how aspects like performance ephemerality, textual adjustments, or affectual signifiers can change the meaning of closure — textual or performance — and disrupt the sense of a play’s ending. Chapter One sets out my methodology, drawing upon Susan Bennett’s inner and outer frames and Hans Robert Jauss’s range of expectation. Chapter Two tackles four individual outlier performances with endings that deviated significantly from the rest of their respective productions, creating an altered experience for the audience in attendance that night. Chapter Three examines three productions which textually modified the expected or established ending in order to pursue a particular political or social message. Chapter Four analyzes three productions by director Des McAnuff whose endings attempted to evoke an emotional response from the audience through the inclusion of a visual or auditory stimulus, while interacting with the political, racial, or gendered questions of each play. Through the analysis of these ten productions, this work concludes that due to the nature of performance, performed endings of Shakespeare’s works can destabilize the established or intended readings of a production. Thus, the closing moments reinterpret the rest of the play according to the images, sensations, or questions brought to the forefront. Within a performance’s final moments, any presumption of a static nature of the text — of an “authentic Shakespeare” — is fractured so that new meanings, new ideas, and new “senses” can be found onstage

Spinoff, 1986

The major programs that generate new technology and therefore expand the bank of knowledge available for future transfer are outlined. The focal point of this volume contains a representative sampling of spinoff products and processes that resulted from technology utilization, or secondary application. The various mechanisms NASA employs to stimulate technology utilization are described and in an appendix, are listed contact sources for further information

The writing of Betty Miller: 1933-1949

This thesis is the first comprehensive study of the writing of the author, journalist, reviewer and scholar Betty Miller (1910-65). As such it seeks to develop a language with which readers might think about her work. Analysing the ways in which commentators have redrawn the critical maps of the 1930s and 40s provides a crucial context for an understanding of Miller’s work as a product of its cultural inception. Exploring the dynamics of the various socio-historic and institutional forces that have come to bear on the availability and readability of women’s writing from this period, The Writing of Betty Miller looks at the recuperative practices of feminist publishing houses as well as the near annihilation of Miller’s work in the Second World War. Betty Miller’s bestselling biography of Robert Browning and her non-fiction writing for journals such as Twentieth Century and Horizon in the 1950s, begin to suggest a literary context that draws out the allusions in and influences on her fiction. The seven novels that she wrote between 1933-49, read chronologically, situate her amongst contemporaneous debates on the gendered dynamics of marriage, the politics of the Anglo-Jewish experience and the familial impact of war. They also confront literary experiments of writing timeliness, boredom and violence. Close reading interrogates her texts’ most prevalent imagery and aesthetics, asking what makes her writing particularly Millerian, whilst positioning a readership that pays attention to the thoughtful examination of the morality of everyday decision-making that underlies Miller’s work

Your Change Is Still Behind: Futurity in Early Modern Literature

A study of Renaissance literature\u27s engagement with temporality, my project is a critical evaluation of the concept of early modern futurity, of which I propose three categories: Material futurity ; Biological futurity ; and Political futurity. In the moments that I identify in texts composed during the Tudor and early Stuart reigns in England, I demonstrate that the future--as an idea--structures individuals\u27 actions and ruptures social formations. Futurity, which I define as a play of multiple desires that exist simultaneously within our present beings, is a volatile agent of imagination in early modern literature. Futurity collides with the cultural sites of memory and pulls characters in different directions, destabilizing the organized spaces defined by their bodies, kingdoms, and locations. While the characters in these texts may return to regulated forms of thought and being, it is in their moments of flux, I argue, that they present the most complex engagement with futurity. In A Midsummer Night\u27s Dream, for example, Helena initiates a material futurity when she chases down the scornful Demetrius in the woods outside Athens and promises him that she will write a story that shall change the future of female lovers (2.1.230). It is precisely because Helena resists material conditions--the silence and immobility imposed upon Athenian women, who cannot act and fight for love as men may do --that she strives to transform the future of female subjectivity and citizenship (2.1.241). The Changeling\u27s Beatrice-Joanna, on the other hand, appropriates a futurity that is biological, when she plans carefully to avoid the virginity and pregnancy tests designed for her by her new husband Alsemero. Having lost to De Flores her virginity, that loved and loathed passage to the site for the generation of patriarchal futures (1.1.125), Beatrice-Joanna sabotages her own marriage bed as well as others\u27 bodies, thereby avoiding her fundamental sexual responsibility to patriarchs--her husband and her father--of legitimate biological propagation. In my third example, Paulina in The Winter\u27s Tale relies on political futurity to topple Leontes\u27 absolutist monarchy. As she orders the king to [c]are not for issue but follow the example of the Great Alexander, who died and left his kingdom to no particular heir (5.1.46-47), Paulina instigates in Sicilia such a politics of unpredictability as will culminate in the succession of a new kind of political leadership. Through these and other examples, I establish the various means by which characters in Renaissance literature operate within one or more categories of futurity, and I argue that the future in these works is a persistent if problematic source of inspiration and agency. Futurity, that condition of our present experience in which we want, need, wish, hope, and plan for diverse objects and states to be realized in our future, initiates in characters such as Helena, Beatrice-Joanna, and Paulina a contradictory desire that often leads to their perverting (making monstrous) the social apparatuses of their past and present. Through such manipulations, characters in early modern literature not only imagine the future as a controllable component of time, but also amend the seemingly concrete elements of temporality--their historical past and present--in order to propel change

J R R Tolkien\u27s lecture On Fairy -Stories : The qualities of Tolkienian fantasy

Tolkien\u27s 1939 lecture, On Fairy-stories, is viewed by fantasy critics as a statement of Tolkien\u27s aesthetics, rather than a critical framework for interpreting Tolkienian fantasy. This work will attempt to show that this lecture by Tolkien actually creates a framework for interpretation, the four qualities of Tolkienian fantasy, that will be applied later on to four contemporary fantasies by David Eddings, Roger Zelazny, Stephen R. Donaldson, and J. K. Rowling, along with Tolkien\u27s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings; After surveying fantasy criticism from George MacDonald\u27s late 19th Century essay to the present, we look at Sir Philip Sidney\u27s Defence of Poesy and his place in fantasy criticism. Following the lead of Italian humanist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Sidney responds to critics of his day, arguing that the poet should not be subject to the restraints reality, but rather, should be free to go as far as his or her imagination will carry him or her. He also borrows from neo-Platonist ideas as also Aristotle, creating a space for the poet to operate outside of the limits of our world. Joseph Addison\u27s Spectator essays on the pleasures of the imagination, expands upon Sidney, noticing the power of words to create images of things not present, requiring a reader of equal imagination. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his Biographia Literaria, posits that this ability to create on the part of the author is a reflection of the creative act of the divine creator who made man. Oscar Wilde\u27s essay, The Decay of Lying, defends imaginative literature against the realists of his day, arguing for a return to the art of lying, which is the creation, through art, of beautiful, untrue things. Tolkien seems to respond to Wilde\u27s challenge, picking of the threads of Sidney and Coleridge to explain his idea of sub-creation on the part of the author, who creates through writing secondary worlds that contain fragments of the truth, which is, for Tolkien, the truth of his Catholic beliefs in God and his creation of man. If the author does his work well then he creates in the reader secondary belief in the secondary world of the narrative, taking up Addison\u27s ideas and taking exception to Coleridge\u27s willing suspension of disbelief. The reader believes the created world is real, in the sense that it exists while the reader is inside the narrative world; These ideas lead Tolkien to give the four qualities of a fairy-story, as he names them, fantasy, recovery, escape, and consolation. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

Performing dreams in England and Spain, 1570-1670

This thesis investigates the performance of dreams and dreaming in a few early modern English and Spanish plays, namely William Shakespeare’s 'The Taming of the Shrew' and 'A Midsummer Night’s Dream', Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s 'Life Is a Dream' and 'Sometimes Dreams Come True' and Aphra Behn’s 'The Young King'. Chapter 1 introduces the cultural milieus in which my case studies operate and validate my comparative approach by calling attention to the fact that both dramas attend to similar preoccupations regarding traditional rank and gender hierarchies. Furthermore, it provides an account of the dream theories in force at that time and underscores that dreams are seen as either negligible or very significant entities. Chapter 2 elucidates why I have chosen to study the dreams within the selected plays focusing on their phenomenal, generic and ideological attributes. Phenomenological analysis allows me to prove that the dreams I consider are deeply sensory occurrences that look and feel like reality and vividly expose disturbing (male) habits of power attainment and safeguarding. The plays at issue predictably terminate with the celebration of the (socio-political or religious) values of the patriarchy; nonetheless, I argue that the lifelike dreams have throughout cast doubt on the legitimacy of the beliefs that prevail on- and off-stage and, hence, cannot be simply set aside at the end of the performance. Chapter 3 considers 'The Taming of the Shrew' and 'A Midsummer Night’s Dream' in order to: 1) show that in these two comedies powerful male figures exploit dreams to shape the visual/ideological perceptions of socially inferior characters; and, 2) verify that the simultaneously illusory and tangible quality of dream (and performance) is not easily dismiss-able as ‘airy nothing’. Chapter 4 and 5 respectively explore 'Life Is a Dream' and 'Sometimes Dreams Come True' and demonstrate that the dreams in question paradoxically endorse and query the philosophical and religious core of these two plays. In fact, life may be a dream, but in it the acquisition of political authority matters very much; Catholic dogma may be true, but it only comes to life via (supposedly insubstantial) dreams. By investigating 'The Young King', the last chapter of this thesis again proves the phenomenal and cultural weight dreams acquire on early modern stages: the dreams within this tragicomedy intensely reveal the artificiality of established gender positions and powerfully portray ‘natural’ male pre-eminence in an equivocal light