Evolution of System, Modelling and Control Concepts in Ancient Greece

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the historical origins of system, modelling, and automatic control concepts as well as to follow their development. An attempt is made to place the early formation and evolution of these concepts within the framework of their current understanding. Our research focuses on ancient Greece and involves searching through the primary sources and the literature on archaeological findings related to system, modelling and control ideas. Nowadays, the application fields of system, modelling, and control concepts are mostly associated with complex, industrial or business processes and problems. However, the emergence of the system and modelling concepts is to be found in the early scientific and technological human thought, when the under consideration issues are the creation and the structure of the world, the natural processes and phenomena, or the functions of human body. On the other hand, the mythical intention of constructing automatic machines that imitate the living beings at the beginning, and the realisation of them in the Hellenistic times, give birth to the concept of feedback and control. The study of the primitive appearance of system, modelling, and control concepts and their evolution from the Mythical period to the Hellenistic era serves the purposes of: a) the in depth understanding of these concepts, b) placing them in a proper historical setup, c) highlighting aspects of the current advanced system theories, modelling methodologies and control methods from a historical perspective, and d) expanding their application in more and more complicated problems

Body Language: Ballet as Form in Literary Modernism, 1915-1935

ABSTRACT This dissertation undertakes an examination of the evolving relationship between text and dance via the ballet texts of literary modernism. My selected texts illuminate a spectrum of performativity, ranging from the blueprints for performance used in the collaborative enterprises of European ballet companies like the Ballets Russes and the Ballets Suédois to later unperformed works by canonical writers. Some texts serve the utilitarian purpose of instructing production, but others independently claim their own aesthetic importance. My study reveals how text infiltrated ballet in the 20th century, and, in turn, how ballet came to serve new expressive purposes on the page. As most of these texts have never been performed, a new question arises: what does it mean to read a ballet? Ballet texts invite a method of reading unique to their own formal experiment: the stylistic range of these texts invites a study of the borders between types of language in a given piece, the materiality of dance, and the word-play that implicated the human body into the space of poetry and prose so intricately in the modernist period. In the contexts of literary modernism and dance and performance studies, I propose my project as a unique and useful tool with which to appreciate and interrogate historical and continuing relationships between text and performance. Critics, scholars, and dance and theatre practitioners have avoided confronting these works, but I propose that it is precisely through their challenging nature that they are essential to a more comprehensive study of individual careers and an expansion of the boundaries of modernism. From Jean Cocteau in 1915 to E. E. Cummings in 1935, the climate that turned writers to ballet demonstrates the value of tradition in a specifically nuanced modernist project that negotiated a concrete cultural past in the context of artistic revolution

Grown-up toys: aesthetic forms and transitional objects in Vernon Lee's supernatural tales.

PhDThis thesis examines the fantastic tales of the marginalized writer Vernon Lee (Violet Paget 1856-1935), focusing on such confections as Hauntings: Fantastic Stories (1890), Pope Jacynth and Other Fantastic Stories (1904), and For Maurice: Five Unlikely Stories (1927). It traces the influence of European Romantics such as Hoffmann and Heine on her writings and juxtaposes Lee's work with that of fin-de-siecle contemporaries such as Walter Pater, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde. Her stories often depend on the supernatural properties of art objects for their uncanny effect, and this study traces the contradiction between Lee's concern with form in her aesthetic treatises, and the 'formless' and metamorphic qualities of the 'ghostly' objects that come to fife in her works. The resultant conflict is explored in the context of D. W. Winnicott's 'transitional object' theory which suggests that a child's subjectivity is formed in a 'potential space', a space existing in a developmental 'limbo' in which the child plays with items or toys while negotiating its separation from the mother, and recognizing its individuality. According to Winnicott, in adulthood, this childhood process is re-experienced in the illusory realm of art and cultural objects. With this premise in mind, this thesis argues that, in Lee's tales, the supernatural functions as a 'potential space" in which Lee 'plays' with the art object or 'toy' in order to explore alternative subjectivities that allow the expression of her lesbian subjectivity. Using an interdisciplinary approach which combines literature with psychology, aesthetics, mythology, religion, and social history, this thesis demonstrates the contemporary validity of Lee's tales, and its importance for the study of gender and sexuality in the nineteenth-century fin de siecle

“Things are not separate”: literary symbiotic metamorphoses in the fiction and critical work of A. S. Byatt

My critical project in this dissertation examines the way Byatt’s work productively moves across, and in and out of apparently conflicting theoretical debates, such as Leavis’s views on reading and writing in the light of poststructuralist and feminist theoretical approaches; or the establishment of a separate female literary tradition within the male literary canon; or the postmodernist resistance to/ rejection of realist representation, to name but a few of the debates examined in this dissertation. Hence, it is not my intention to superimpose a particular theoretical view on my analysis of Byatt’s work, but rather analyse their particular relevance in the light of Byatt’s own politics of writing. I propose the term “literary symbiotic metamorphosis” to investigate Byatt’s negotiation of apparently conflicting theoretical debates, in which she examines the validity of each individual theory vis-à-vis their symbiotic relationship, and then reshapes them into a unique poetics of writing which combines the understanding of a text’s symbiotically creative as well as theoretical relationships with the capacity to rearrange them into a practice of writing which is much more than the sum of the different parts which constitute it. My term is also informed by the Hegelian dialectic as the critical investigation of “a process of change in which a concept or its realization passes over into and is preserved and fulfilled by its opposite” (Merriam Webster) in which “some assertible proposition (thesis) is necessarily opposed by an equally assertible and apparently contradictory proposition (antithesis), the mutual contradiction being reconciled on a higher level of truth by a third proposition (synthesis)” (Thesaurus). It is in light of all these interconnected threads that I will investigate Byatt’s creative and critical work.O meu projeto crítico nesta dissertação examina a forma como o trabalho de Byatt se move produtivamente em debates teóricos aparentemente conflituosos, como as opiniões de F. R. Leavis sobre a leitura e a escrita à luz de abordagens teóricas pós-estruturalistas e feministas; ou o estabelecimento de uma tradição literária feminina separada dentro do cânone literário masculino; ou a resistência pós-modernista à representação realista, para citar apenas alguns dos debates examinados nesta dissertação. Por conseguinte, não é minha intenção sobrepor uma visão teórica específica à minha análise do trabalho de Byatt, mas sim analisar a sua particular relevância à luz das próprias políticas de escrita de Byatt. Proponho o termo crítico “metamorfose simbiótica literária” para investigar o modo como Byatt se posiciona em debates teóricos aparentemente conflituosos, em que examina a validade de cada teoria individual, remodelando-as depois numa poética única de escrita que combina por simbiose as relações criativas e as relações teóricas de um texto com a capacidade de as reorganizar numa prática de escrita que é muito mais do que a soma das diferentes partes que constituem o produto final. O meu termo crítico também é informado pela dialética hegeliana como a investigação crítica de uma tese, necessariamente oposta por uma antítese, sendo a contradição mútua reconciliada num nível mais elevado de verdade por uma terceira proposta, ou síntese. É à luz de todos estes fios interligados que investigo o trabalho criativo e crítico de Byatt

From Soderini's Cenotaph to the Cazzuola's Spectacles: Subverting Medicean Mythopoesis with the Macabre

This dissertation argues that the macabre, an estranging language of death-based motifs involving somatic doubling between uncorrupt body and putrefying corpse, was polemically employed during the first three decades of the sixteenth century to oppose, to subvert, and to satirize the idealizing mythography of the Medici, which has itself long held sway over Florence’s history and historiography. Part one discusses Benedetto da Rovezzano’s marble cenotaph (1505-1512) for Piero Soderini, Florence’s premier and sole gonfaloniere a vita. I argue that the triumphal crown on the tomb’s monumental skull satirizes the heraldic device used by the Medici and by the Rucellai – Soderini’s deadliest enemies – and that the memorial’s proliferating and foliated skulls recast the Medici’s dynastic metaphors of an eternally regenerative Golden Age as the unnatural rule of revenants. I further demonstrate how Benedetto used the macabre to present Soderini’s tenure as the embodiment of a just and lawful Republican government, and thereby the antithesis of previous Medicean regimes. Part two argues that the hellish banquets produced by the Companies of the Cauldron (Paiuolo) and the Trowel (Cazzuola) during the Medici’s de facto rule of 1512 to 1527 served as macabre reflections on the Medici’s triumphal spectacles, and that their deadly re-interpretations of Medici magnificence echoed contemporary criticism of the Medici and their feste. Death was employed to characterize the experience of living under Medicean rule, and to expose the Medici’s fraudulent propaganda of peace and prosperity. The conclusion examines Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel (1519-1534) and Antonfrancesco Grazzini’s final novella of the Cene (1540s) as the respective “afterlives” of Soderini’s cenotaph and the companies’ festivities. I detail how the chapel’s frenzied masks echo Benedetto’s screaming skulls in ridiculing Medicean ambitions, and how Michelangelo similarly subverts Medicean temporal metaphors of dynastic renewal. I then evince that Grazzini’s use of the Cazzuola’s Maestro Manente for the victim of a sorcerous Lorenzo de’ Medici’s malicious beffa demonstrates the macabre’s enduring appeal for expressing dissent, and underscore the affinities between the dining sodalities and the transgressive Academia degli Umidi (1540-1541). Whether conveyed through marble or through meals, the macabre proved an ideal means to oppose Medicean supremacy