The origin, evolution, and function of the myth of the white goddess in the writings of Robert Graves

This is a study of the development of the myth of the White Goddess in the work of Robert Graves, a subject related to the wider field of the place of myth in modern culture. It begins by looking at the conditions which promoted Graves' interest in myth, principally his experience of the Great War. The responses of other writers are examined to provide a context for understanding Graves' transition from Georgianism to myth, as reflected in his early poetry, autobiography and writings on psychology. Before looking at how Graves' myth was formed, the history of the concept of myth is examined, from primitive peoples to civilized religion. Focus is centred upon the dual tendency of myth to reinforce and to undermine authority. Some of the figures behind Graves' interest in myth and anthropology are subject to scrutiny. An account of the relations between myth, literature and psychology permits the survey of Graves' gradual transition from psychological theory to mythographic speculation. The gradual emergence in his poetry of devotion to a Love Goddess can also be traced. Detailed interpretation of The White Goddess, its arguments and procedures, brings to light Graves' theories of the single poetic theme and the primitive matriarchy, both of which can then be evaluated and set in the context of his dedication to non-rational forms of thought. This leads into a close reading of Graves' major mythological poems, followed by reflections upon the myth's application in his critical writings and cultural commentaries. Finally, consideration is given to Graves' later writings, especially his attraction to Orphism and the adoption of mythic personae in his verse. The influence of the Black Goddess of Wisdom over these later works is interpreted and assessed

Excellentia Eminentia Effectio

"In these pages you will learn about the fascinating research endeavors that each of our faculty members is undertaking. We have divided their research into the broad categories of health, sustainability, information, and systems. While we recognize the imperfect nature of categorizing research that, by its very nature may be interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary, we nonetheless believe it will be helpful as a way to see the depth and breadth of our research endeavors within each grouping. As you read the profiles on these pages, I know you will begin to appreciate that, taken as a whole, the research spectrum at Columbia Engineering is exceptional and that, as our professors go about their work, they are at the cusp of making breakthroughs that will have a major impact on the way we live our lives today and tomorrow.

Utopian Discourses Across Cultures

The term Utopia, coined by Thomas More in 1516, contains an inherent semantic ambiguity: it could be read as eu topos (good place) or ou topos (no place). The authors of this volume analyze this polysemous notion and its fascination for scholars across the centuries, who have developed a variety of visions and ways to explain the «realization» of utopian discourses. The experts in the fields of sociology, political science, economics, computer science, literature and linguistics offer extensive studies about how utopian scenarios are realized in different cultural contexts

Food - Media - Senses: Interdisciplinary Approaches

Food is more than just nutrition. Its preparation, presentation and consumption is a multifold communicative practice which includes the meal's design and its whole field of experience. How is food represented in cookbooks, product packaging or in paintings? How is dining semantically charged? How is the sensuality of eating treated in different cultural contexts? In order to acknowledge the material and media-related aspects of eating as a cultural praxis, experts from media studies, art history, literary studies, philosophy, experimental psychology, anthropology, food studies, cultural studies and design studies share their specific approaches

Les écrivaines autochtones contemporaines au Québec : re/connexion avec le soi, la communauté et la Terre par la narration résurgente

Abstract : This dissertation explores contemporary Indigenous women writers who crafted their cultural productions in the geo-political territory we now call Quebec between 1976 and the present. My main argument is that contemporary Indigenous women’s writing in Quebec constitutes an expression of Indigenous resurgence. I understand Indigenous resurgence as a movement of transformation that is grounded in Indigenous worldviews and seeks to revitalize Indigenous ways of knowing and being. My corpus is comprised of the artistic and literary texts of seven Indigenous women in Quebec. More specifically, I investigate Kanien’kehá:ka artist Skawennati’s machinima project TimeTravellerTM (2008-2013), selected poems from Maya Cousineau Mollen’s debut collection Bréviaire du matricule 082 (2019), Natasha Kanapé Fontaine’s poetry collections Manifeste Assi (2014) and Bleuets et abricots (2016), Rita Mestokosho’s multilingual collections How I See Life, Grandmother / Eshi uapataman nukum / Comment je perçois la vie, grand-mère (2011) and Née de la pluie et de la terre (2014), and Manon Nolin’s debut collection Ma peau aime le Nord (2016), as well as the autobiographically-based narratives Eukuan nin matshi-manitu innushkueu / Je suis une maudite Sauvagesse (1976) by An Antane Kapesh and Kuessipan: à toi (2011) by Naomi Fontaine. My methodological approach juxtaposes contemporary Indigenous women’s writing with Indigenous feminist and decolonizing theories. In Chapter 1, I argue that Skawennati’s main objective is to empower Indigenous women by sharing and celebrating decolonial alternatives of the past, present, and future. In Chapter 2, I contend that Innu women poets use what I refer to as “Indigenous herstory” to lyrically transcribe their transformation into “Innushkueu,” meaning Innu or Indigenous woman. Chapter 3 discusses Indigenous women’s autobiographically-based narratives as “tipatshimuns:” Innu traditionally oral stories testifying to the storyteller’s lives experiences. In Chapter 4, I propose that Innu women’s poetry and environmental activism merge into what I call “land-based poetic activism:” activist poetry that voices opposition to environmental exploitation, destruction, and injustice and is thus instrumentalized in a political manner to protect Indigenous land and Rights.Cette thèse explore l’élaboration de productions culturelles d’écrivaines autochtones contemporaines dans le territoire géopolitique que nous appelons présentement le Québec entre 1976 jusqu’à présent. Mon argument principal est que l’écriture contemporaine des femmes autochtones au Québec constitue une expression de la résurgence autochtone. Je comprends la résurgence autochtone comme un mouvement de transformation qui est fondé sur les visions du monde autochtones et qui cherche à revitaliser les modes de connaissance et d’existence autochtones. Mon corpus est constitué des textes artistiques et littéraires de sept femmes autochtones du Québec. Plus précisément, j’étudie le projet machinima TimeTravellerTM (2008-2013) de l’artiste Kanien’kehá:ka Skawennati, le premier recueil de Maya Cousineau Mollen Bréviaire du matricule 082 (2019), les recueils de poésie de Natasha Kanapé Fontaine Manifeste Assi (2014) et Bleuets et abricots (2016), les recueils multilingues de Rita Mestokosho How I See Life, Grandmother / Eshi uapataman nukum / Comment je perçois la vie, grand-mère (2011) et Née de la pluie et de la terre (2014), le premier recueil de Manon Nolin Ma peau aime le Nord (2016), ainsi que les récits à caractère autobiographique Eukuan nin matshi-manitu innushkueu / Je suis une maudite Sauvagesse (1976) d’An Antane Kapesh, et Kuessipan: à toi (2011) de Naomi Fontaine. Mon approche méthodologique juxtapose les écrits de femmes autochtones contemporaines avec les théories féministes autochtones et décolonisatrices. Dans le chapitre 1, j’avance que l’objectif principal de Skawennati est de rendre le pouvoir aux femmes autochtones en partageant et en célébrant les alternatives décolonisatrices du passé, du présent et du futur. Dans le chapitre 2, je soutiens que les poètes innues utilisent ce que j’appelle « l’histoire autochtone au féminin ou Indigenous herstory » pour transcrire de façon lyrique leur transformation en « Innushkueu », qui signifie femme innue ou autochtone. Le chapitre 3 traite des récits autobiographiques en tant que « tipatshimuns » : des histoires innues traditionnellement orales qui témoignent des expériences de vie de la narratrice. Dans le chapitre 4, je propose que la poésie des femmes innues et l’activisme environnemental fusionnent dans ce que j’appelle « l’activisme poétique territorial ou land-based poetic activism » : une poésie activiste qui exprime une opposition à l’exploitation, à la destruction et à l’injustice environnementales et qui ainsi est instrumentalisée de manière politique pour protéger la Terre et les droits autochtones

A Journey of Spectacle between London and Shanghai: (An)Other Hermeneutics of Spectacle

This thesis is aimed at exploring a different interpretation of the spectacle. The existing literature is based on Situationism and the Frankfurt School’s interpretation within which the society of spectacle is demonstrated to not only visually encapsulate the subjects in an enchanting commodification but also restrict the perceptual experiences to regular boredom through such repetitive and exclusive rendition. This criticism rests on a Hegelian and Marxist reading and suggests that the alienating and un-lifelike phantasmagoria of commodification haunts people's daily lives and subjugates the personal struggle that emancipates the subject from being reified in alienation to being unitary in intimacy. The dialectical negation imposed upon the spectacle is challenged in this work by a divergent hermeneutics, which relocates the spectacle in an epistemological complex drawing inspiration from Bataille’s general economy of excess expenditure, Foucault/Deleuze's genealogy, Benjamin's historiography, Barthesian semiological analysis, and Baudrillard’s hyperreal simulacra. Illuminated by this different hermeneutics, the spectacle is rather a kind of unproductive expenditure, which is heterogeneous to dissipate the excess restrictively exuded from the homogeneous mechanism of production in utility as irreducible to realistic production. Thus, the society of spectacle is not negative to the productive mechanism but inhabits it to have incapacity wherein an unreserved play of images is restricted by utility and territorialised fragmentarily by different political-sociological milieus to prohibit the channel of excess towards an unconditional expenditure as an unruly and destructive torrent. The solution is to blur and transgress the restriction, rather than negate it, whereby to fuse the prohibited and the allowed in restriction as a visual hybridity of incompatibilities. Then, a journey of spectacle between London and Shanghai is a concrete method of substantiating this visual fusion as an experiential and incommensurable distribution that drifts between different spatiotemporal fragments on the surface of multiple images. This optical disparity is not restricted to a bourgeois-ruled phantasmagoria but transgressive to uncover time flow to recollect and merge the hidden and accursed heterogeneities outpoured from revolution

Reinventing bodies and practice in medical education

Thesis (Ph. D. in History and Social Study of Science and Technology (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, June 2004."May 2004."Includes bibliographical references (p. 247-253).This dissertation recounts the development of graphic models of human bodies and virtual reality simulators for teaching anatomy and surgery to medical students, residents, and physicians. It considers how researchers from disciplinary cultures in medicine, engineering, and computer programming come together to build these technologies, bringing with them values and assumptions about bodies from each of their disciplines, values and assumptions that must be negotiated and that often are made material and embedded in these new technologies. It discusses how the technological objects being created privilege the body as a dynamic and interactive system, in contrast to the description and taxonomic body of traditional anatomy and medicine. It describes the ways that these technologies create new sensory means of knowing bodies. And it discusses the larger cultural values that these technologies reify or challenge. The methodology of this dissertation is ethnography. I consider in-depth one laboratory at a major medical school, as well as other laboratories and researchers in the field of virtual medicine. I study actors in the emerging field of virtual medicine as they work in laboratories, at conferences, and in collaborations with one another. I consider the social formations that are developing with this new discipline. Methods include participant observation of laboratory activities, teaching, surgery, and conferences and extensive, in-depth interviewing of actors in the field. I draw on the literatures in the anthropology of science, technology, and medicine, the sociology of science, technology, and medicine, and the history of science and technology to argue that "bodies of information" are part of a bio-engineering revolution.(Cont.) that is making human bodies more easily viewed and manipulated. Science studies theorists have revealed the constructed, situated, and contingent nature of technoscientific communities and the objects they work with. They also have discussed how technoscientific objects help create their subjects and vice versa. This dissertation considers these phenomena within the arena of virtual medicine to intervene in debates about the body, about simulation, and about scientific cultures.by Rachel Prentice.Ph.D.in History and Social Study of Science and Technology (HAST

Intelligence, Creativity and Fantasy

UID/HIS/04666/2019 This is the 2nd volume of PHI series, published by CRC Press, the 4th published by CRC Press and the 5th volume of PHI proceedings.The texts presented in Proportion Harmonies and Identities (PHI) - INTELLIGENCE, CREATIVITY AND FANTASY were compiled with the intent to establish a multidisciplinary platform for the presentation, interaction and dissemination of research. The aim is also to foster the awareness and discussion on the topics of Harmony and Proportion with a focus on different visions relevant to Architecture, Arts and Humanities, Design, Engineering, Social and Natural Sciences, and their importance and benefits for the sense of both individual and community identity. The idea of modernity has been a significant motor for development since the Western Early Modern Age. Its theoretical and practical foundations have become the working tools of scientists, philosophers, and artists, who seek strategies and policies to accelerate the development process in different contexts.authorsversionpublishe