Outlines of Ulster. The spatial politics of contemporary Northern Irish fiction and film

This study investigates the ways in which contemporary Northern Irish fiction and film have responded to the socio-spatial challenges of conflict and peace. It focusses on the representations of spatial change in the context of thirty years of conflict, the recent redistribution of political power and the ongoing negotiation of what peace might look like in social and political terms. I contend that the interpretations of space and place put forward in fiction and film on Northern Ireland are extremely effective incursions into what human geographers call the 'geographical imagination' as the concept that determines “how the place should be thought of, how it should be represented” (Jess and Massey, 1995). Participating in the negotiation of shared spaces, peaceful spatial practices and of truth and reconciliation, they challenge the outlines of what A.T.Q. Stewart (1977) has called “the narrow ground of Ulster” and enrich the political discourse by imagining alternative socio-spatial narratives for the North. In my analyses, I demonstrate this capacity by reading the primary texts against the texts of political agreements, acts of law, journalist commentary and historical observation

Lex Orandi, Lex Legendi: A Correlation of the Roman Canon and the Fourfold Sense of Scripture

While the correlation between the liturgy and the Bible was vital in the patristic-medieval period, a dichotomy grew up between them in modern times. Starting with the assumption that a fuller retrieval of the correlation today requires forms of engaging texts which are not exclusively linear or historico-critical, the dissertation argues that the dichotomy between liturgy and Bible is overcome within a correlation of the Eucharist and spiritual exegesis that retrieves a typological reading of Scripture and that attends to the liturgical relationships memorial, presence, and anticipation. The structure of reading the Bible parallels the structure of praying within the liturgy. In order to make a theological correlation between Eucharist and spiritual exegesis, the study first seeks to establish the supra-linear nature of each. In regard to the Eucharist, this study presents an analysis of the text of the Roman Canon (Eucharistic Prayer I in the current Roman Missal), demonstrating that it has the structure of a chiasmus, requiring a helical reading. This anaphora\u27s chiasmus and its rhetorical helix convey a rich eucharistic theology of exchange and communion. With respect to spiritual exegesis, this study establishes a supra-linear approach to Scripture by developing insights of Henri de Lubac into the reciprocal interiority of the four senses of Scripture. An analysis of the fourfold sense reveals that spiritual exegesis is governed by the two ways figure and fulfillment are perichoretically related; this mutual indwelling is displayed in the figural trading of idioms. The final part of the study brings together eucharistic exchange and communion exemplified by the Roman Canon, on the one hand, and the communal immanence and exchange of idioms exhibited by the two cycles of spiritual exegesis in the fourfold sense of Scripture, on the other hand. It concludes that the admirabile commercium et connubium between head, body, and members in the earthly and heavenly dimensions of the totus Christus lies at the heart of the theological correlation between Eucharist and spiritual exegesis

Life and Economy at Early Medieval Flixborough, c. AD 600-1000

Between 1989 and 1991, excavations in the parish of Flixborough, North Lincolnshire, unearthed remains of an Anglo-Saxon settlement associated with one of the largest collections of artefacts and animal bones yet found on such a site. In an unprecedented occupation sequence from an Anglo-Saxon rural settlement, six main periods of occupation have been identified, dating from the seventh to the early eleventh centuries; with a further period of activity, between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries AD. Volume 2 contains detailed presentation of some 10,000 recorded finds, over 6,000 sherds of pottery, and many other residues and bulk finds, illustrated with 213 blocks of figures and 67 plates, together with discussion of their significance.It presents the most comprehensive, and currently unique picture of daily life on a rural settlement of this period in eastern England, and is an assemblage of Europe wide significance to Anglo-Saxon and early medieval archaeologists

Chinese Stardom in Participatory Cyberculture

As Chinese performers have become more visible on global screens, their professional images - once the preserve of studios and agents - have been increasingly relayed and reworked by film fans. Web technology has made searching, poaching, editing, posting and sharing texts significantly easier, and by using a variety of seamless and innovative methods a new mode of personality construction has been developed. With case studies of high-profile stars like Jet Li, Jackie Chan and Donnie Yen, this ground-breaking book examines transnational Chinese stardom as a Web-based phenomenon, and as an outcome of the participatory practices of cyber fans

Chinese Stardom in Participatory Cyberculture

As Chinese performers have become more visible on global screens, their professional images - once the preserve of studios and agents - have been increasingly relayed and reworked by film fans. Web technology has made searching, poaching, editing, posting and sharing texts significantly easier, and by using a variety of seamless and innovative methods a new mode of personality construction has been developed. With case studies of high-profile stars like Jet Li, Jackie Chan and Donnie Yen, this ground-breaking book examines transnational Chinese stardom as a Web-based phenomenon, and as an outcome of the participatory practices of cyber fans

Memorial landscapes: a phenomenology of grief

Roadside memorials are rebel spaces situated outside normative locations for sites of commemoration. The lived experience of grief opens the gaze of the inquirer toward the poesis of death and traces of sorrow found in the most ordinary of landscapes. A place that initially appears commonplace becomes, under a phenomenological gaze, a location that provides revelatory insights into the relationship between people and landscape. Grounded in the existential phenomenological methodology of Max van Manen (1990), themes emerging from this inquiry into the relationship between grief, death, and landscape align with existential lifeworld themes of spatiality, corporeality, temporality, and relationality. These in turn evolve into a series of experiential strategies of utility to landscape architects interested in expressing the lived experience of grief, death, and landscape in commemorative sites. The experience of reenchantment is advanced as an overarching theme within the inquiry. In the first instance, reenchantment is directed towards the restoration of the lived world following the experience of traumatic death. Reenchantment is also directed towards the development of an expanded field of knowledge that acknowledges the importance of experience in designing memorial landscapes. Finally, reenchantment refers to the reciprocal relationship between people and landscape. Grief brings attention to the redemptive capacity of landscape in the wake of tragic death. Memorial landscapes demonstrate extensive phenomenological breadth -- existing as physical region, an imaginary space of depth and darkness, and a cosmological location of lightness and unification. This spatial complexity allows the commemorative site to host fluctuating conditions within the lifeworld of the bereaved and to provide potentially significant experiences for casual visitors to a given site. Mind, body, and spirit are invited to enter into a state of intertwining -- ecstatic, redemptive, or otherwise -- within the reenchanted memorial landscape

Picturing Number in the Central Middle Ages.

Numeracy was as highly valued as literacy in the schools of Latin-speaking Europe around the year 1000, and the skills inculcated by masters, engendering specific modes of seeing and imagining, had demonstrable impact on contemporary visual culture. The trivium—grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic—continued to be taught as the foundation of learning, but the quadrivium, the four disciplines of number—arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music—received new emphasis. Two of the era’s greatest intellects, Gerbert of Aurillac (Pope Sylvester II; c.940–1003) and Abbo of Fleury (c.944–1004), gained renown for their mathematical prowess and charismatic teaching. They educated a generation of Europe's powerful elites—including Emperor Otto III—and a host of anonymous clerics, monks, and priests. In the closed economy of the central middle ages, these men were also the primary patrons, makers, and viewers of objects. Works of the time, like the Pericope Book of Henry II, reveal new qualities when examined through the lens of number. This project is located at the cathedral school of Reims and the monastery school of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire (Fleury)—where Gerbert and Abbo were masters, epicenters of a pan-European network of exchange linking monastic, episcopal, and lay institutions. Numeric knowledge was drawn from late antique and early medieval tracts by such figures as Boethius, Calcidius, Macrobius, Martianus Capella, Cassiodorus, Isidore of Seville, and Bede. Manuscript copies of these works produced and used at Reims and Fleury c.1000 give evidence of active engagement with their content, visual as well as verbal. Diagrammatic images earlier devised to explicate numeric concepts were now adapted and artfully elaborated for classroom use. This is evident in important introductions to the quadrivial disciplines prepared by Abbo (Explanatio in Calculo Victorii), Abbo’s student Byrhtferth of Ramsey (Enchiridion), and Gerbert (Isagoge geometriae). Accompanying images to these tracts are witness to contemporary notions of materiality, sight, and the limits of representation. Students of arithmetic became freshly attuned to placement and order. Computistic study developed an active, agile, and "curious" eye, while the practice of geometry exercised the intellectual eye, sharpening it, according to Gerbert, "for contemplating spiritual things and truths."PHDHistory of ArtUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116774/1/mcnameme_1.pd