Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationIn the existing academic literature on "genocide" there is an emphasis on moralistic arguments toward public acceptance of using the term genocide popularly in relation to specific events. This practice is unaccompanied by a recognition that the created genocide discourse is the product of a biased process, and that it is empowered to affect international law without being legally sanctioned to do so. Since the currently available scholarly information on "genocide" is grounded in self-assured presentations that the works of the genocide scholarship are social-scientific and reflective of the conscience of humanity, there is a lack of significant knowledge regarding the political use of the term genocide in the governing of global affairs. By employing a power-based theory, this study offers an interpretive analysis of available historical data to understand how "genocide" has been used as a tool for the advancement of international law. It shows that the term genocide has functioned as soft power through which hard power has been particularized toward legal power. Meaning, "genocide" has been used to bring governance closer to international law by appealing to group identity. Such a view of a dialectical progress identifies the power of "genocide" in the context of international law and invites new considerations of how the idea of international law may yet attain the combined qualities of authority and legitimacy in the quest for unified standards of governance worldwide

Corpus-based and Computational Analysis of Entity Framing

Entity Framing is the selection of aspects of an entity to promote a particular viewpoint towards that entity. Compared to issue framing, it has received little attention in Framing research, and it has also received very little attention in Natural Language Processing (NLP). We investigate Entity Framing of political figures on social media and the news through the selection of objectively verifiable attributes like name, title and background information. Despite indications that they signal the perceived status of the target and/or perceived solidarity with a target, naming and titling have not previously been quantitatively examined in terms of their relation to stance. In this thesis, we collect English and German tweets mentioning prominent politicians and show that naming variation relates positively to stance in a way that is suggestive of a framing effect mediated by respect. We show on the German corpus that this positive relation is impacted by differences in political orientation. Having provided the first quantitative evidence for the relation between stance and the mentioning of the objectively verifiable attributes name and title, we turn to engineering efforts towards automating detection of the selective mentioning of background information. By nature, whether certain information constitutes an instance of Entity Framing depends on the context in which that information is provided. Nevertheless, previous work on detection of framing through background information has not explored the role of context beyond the sentence. We experiment with computational methods for integrating three kinds of context: context from the same article, context from other publishers’ articles on the same event, and inclusion of texts from the same domain (but potentially different events). We find that integrating event context improves classification performance over a strong baseline. We additionally show through a series of performance tests that this improvement over the baseline holds specifically for instances that are likely to be more difficult to classify, as one would expect from a performance boost that is due to leveraging context. The result of these studies is a collection of new data sets, methods and findings with respect to Entity Framing, contributed in the hope that further computational research on this topic will be conducted, in order to improve our understanding of Entity Framing in general and of political figures in particular

THE WRITING ON THE SCREEN: IMAGES OF TEXT IN THE GERMAN CINEMA FROM 1920 TO 1949

By establishing a crucial figural relation between image and text in the cinema, this dissertation offers a detailed analysis of the uses of writing through select canonical works of a significant period in the history of the German cinema. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's theory of allegory and Gilles Deleuze's conceptions of the cinematic image, as well as a Derridean definition of writing, I argue that instances of written text in images of the German cinema are social hieroglyphs rendered as allegorical gestures, which inscribe questions of authority in the form of grammatological constellations within the movement of images. These hieroglyphic configurations, spelled out as writing on the screen, stand in reference to specific modalities which affirm the presence of a larger organizational regime of truth. Instances of writing thus constitute the inscriptions through which such structures of power acquire legibility and, conversely, become visible. Ultimately, this figural regime delineates questions of the political constitution of the state because the struggle for authority and its legitimacy as an organizational system become embodied in allegorical forms of writing that inscribe the body politic into filmic texts as subject positions. This approach is predicated on a subjunctive dimension that redefines the intrinsic relation of the text to its "outside." Chapters discuss the figure of authority in "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" and "Kameradschaft," circularity in Fritz Lang's "M" and his "Mabuse" films, titles and writing in early Weimar film censorship decisions, the star figure of Emil Jannings in the Nazi film "Ohm Krüger," and the postwar films "Die Mörder Sind Unter Uns" and "Rotation." An epilogue investigates the reconfigurations of writing on the screen in R.W. Fassbinder's "Die Dritte Generation" (1979) and the 1998 hacker film "23". In all of these case studies, I contend that writing in film remains significant when the image as such must be augmented by gestures toward a figural language

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationThe claim has been made that the nineteenth century's interest in libertine fiction is merely ""archival."" This dissertation seeks to contest that claim by examining the reuse of certain well-known, if not notorious, characters from European seduction narratives of the fifteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries--Valmont, Don Juan, and Tannhuser--in the work of George Gordon, Lord Byron, Charles Baudelaire, Algernon Swinburne, and Aubrey Beardsley. It finds that these seducers are not static characters deployed for the purpose of allusion or critique, but heroes, reworked and rehabilitated as the central figures of literary seductions intended to entice and control the reader and address the perceived inequities of nineteenth-century morality or politics. By applying a four-phase framework for seduction derived from canonical seduction narratives, the argument demonstrates how the reinvented seducers have been stripped down, personalized, redressed, and recontextualized in narratives that seek to compel through seduction and educate through experience

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationIn medieval England, one of the most popular forms of drama was the saint's play. These plays depicted the lives, martyrdoms, and miracles of Catholic saints. After England's Reformation most of these scripts were lost due to destruction and censorship. In the nineteenth century, a combination of interest in medieval painting and architecture as well as the Oxford and Decadent movements led to a revival of Catholicism and hagiography. The second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century saw a proliferation of plays concerning Catholic saints. This project asserts that these plays constitute a new genre, which I name "modern saints' plays." I argue that these plays represent a new manifestation of medieval saints' plays, subject to the conventions of an international modern theater. The project describes the history of saints' plays as they disappeared from England in the Renaissance and reappeared in the mid-nineteenth century. It analyzes Flaubert's Temptation of St. Antony and Wilde's Salome as examples of decadent saints' plays focusing on the suffering of the saint in a separate spiritual place. An analysis of Maeterlinck's A Miracle of St. Anthony (1904) provides a stylistic transition to the modern saints' plays written between the World Wars, which present saints in a critical dramaturgy. The central chapters consider three responses to popular interest in Catholic saints by George Bernard Shaw, T.S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein. The project defines Shaw's socio-religious critique in Saint Joan, T.S. Eliot's use of several dramatic traditions to convey his meditation on the conflict between religion and political secularism in Murder in the Cathedral, and Gertrude Stein's use of literary cubism in Four Saints in Three Acts to demythologize the impressions of saints that fill the modern world. Finally, a discussion of the privatization of religion reveals a new renaissance of saints' plays in the bountiful DVD offerings of such distributors as the Ignatius Press and the Catholic network, EWTN. I suggest that with this latest iteration of Catholic saints' plays, the Church attempts to regain control over the spiritual image of saints in a desecularization of the twenty-first century

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationWith the introduction of Superman in Action Comics #1 (published June 1938), Americans became fascinated with superheroes. Following the immediate success of Superman, the comic book industry created hundreds of characters that defied and surpassed all human capabilities. Radio, television, advertising, traditional publishing, and the film industry recognized the monetary potential of superheroes and these characters very quickly began proliferating across American popular culture. The economic success of this genre might be unprecedented, but American interest in strong, charismatic, extraordinary figures prefigures the birth of the superhero. In both the political and social arenas of the 1930s and 1940s, not only in the U.S. but also globally, citizens were curious about the human potential to control and transcend physical limitations. As a response to the fascism that threatened to overtake European countries, the United States produced their own strong leaders in mythic, fantastical, serial narratives. Embodying and evoking the sublime, superheroes astounded and terrified. They interact with a sublime aesthetic and paradoxically represent the appeal and irrevocable danger of absolute power. Through close readings of narratives about Superman, Batman, the Lone Ranger, Captain America, and Wonder Woman, I explore the contradictory nature of the sublime superhero, detailing how each character's origin story creates a figure who both celebrates and challenges the moral and political virtues of American society

Northern Crossings

This open access book uses Swedish literature and the Swedish publishing field as recurring examples todescribe and analyse the role of the literary semi-peripheral position in world literature from various perspectives and on meso, micro and macro levels, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. This includes the role of translation in the semi-periphery and the conditions under which literature travels to and from that position. The focus is not on Sweden, as such, but rather on the semi-peripheral transitional space as exemplified by the Swedish case. Consisting of three co-written chapters, this study sheds light on what might be called the semi-peripheral condition or the semi-periphery as an area of transition. As part of the Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in World Literatures series, it makes continuous use of the concepts of 'cosmopolitan' and 'vernacular' – or rather, the processual terms, cosmopolitanization and vernacularization – which provide an overall structure to the analysis of literature and literary phenomena. In this way, the authors show that the semi-periphery is an ideal point of departure to further the understanding of world literature, because it is a place where the cosmopolitan (the literary universal) and the vernacular (the rootedness in a particular culture or place) interact in ways that have not yet been thoroughly explored. The open access edition of this book is available under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond