DSpace Collection:http://hdl.handle.net/10722/385732024-03-29T10:56:00Z2024-03-29T10:56:00ZBeyond likeness : materiality, temporality and the form of portraiture in the nineteenth-century English novelXu, Lingyi Olivia徐灵怡http://hdl.handle.net/10722/3415842024-03-18T09:56:10Z2018-01-01T00:00:00ZTitle: Beyond likeness : materiality, temporality and the form of portraiture in the nineteenth-century English novel
Authors: Xu, Lingyi Olivia; 徐灵怡
Abstract: This thesis examines the ubiquitous presence of fictional portraits in the nineteenth-century English novel, from the Gothic tradition to the Victorian fin de siècle. In highlighting these portraits’ visual qualities and drawing upon the history of nineteenth-century portraiture, this thesis argues against the common scholarly reading of fictional portraits as functional plot devices or auxiliary narrative components. Their presence in the novel, I contend, offers an alternative and equally capable representational mode. Fictional portraits capture, expose and dramatize emotions and desires that the novel is hesitant to acknowledge. Moreover, the ways in which novelistic characters react to fictional portraits--affectively, cognitively and epistemologically--further problematize certain sociopolitical values that the nineteenth-century novel has been said to uphold. This thesis pays attention to moments when fictional portraits introduce alternative, digressive or even competing cognitive modes of reading, knowing, and feeling.
Focusing on Jane Austen’s Emma (1815), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871), the first chapter argues that novelistic portrait-making scenes draw attention to the physical labor of portrait making and the materiality of the resulting art object. Therefore, they invoke affective desires and digressive values that are laid within the novel’s subtext and compete with the values more explicitly advocated. The second chapter explores how the novel complicates its linear narrative timeline by reflecting on different traditions of portraiture in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain. It argues that fictional portraits introduce their own historical and representational associations into the novel’s developmental arc and therefore problematize the notion of progressive history. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), Northanger Abbey (1817), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and Middlemarch (1871) are examined in this chapter to trace the trajectory in which nineteenth-century realist and sensation fictions inherit as well as renovate the Gothic portrait. The final chapter gestures towards a more abstract link between visuality and knowledge explored in Henry James’s and Oscar Wilde’s late-nineteenth-century novels, The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). It argues that portrait art--a term stretched to its broader sense to include the practice of visual framing--is mediated by James and Wilde to tease out the moral, ethical and epistemological implications embedded in the act of seeing.2018-01-01T00:00:00ZGulf migration cartoons in Kerala, South India : dreams, discontents, and emotionsPanhathodi, Rajeshhttp://hdl.handle.net/10722/3415612024-03-18T09:55:57Z2024-01-01T00:00:00ZTitle: Gulf migration cartoons in Kerala, South India : dreams, discontents, and emotions
Authors: Panhathodi, Rajesh
Abstract: This study considers cartoons as key visual narratives of Middle East migration from Kerala, a state in South India. The exodus of more than two million Keralites to oil-exporting Arab countries brought significant socio-economic development to the state following the 1970s. To understand how migrant cartoonists represent this transnational event, I examine their works published in newspapers, magazines, blogs, and social media pages in the last two decades. Gulf migration cartoons depict personal challenges experienced by migrants and their families, as well as broader collective struggles associated with migration. The cartoons provide a critical portrayal of migrant experiences and hold significance in Kerala's migration history. However, the inclusion of these visual-textual sources into broader discussions on cultural depictions of migration has been inadequate. They remain an understudied visual source of Kerala’s biggest transnational experience.
The “Introduction” of the thesis offers an overview of the historical context of migration and its cultural influence on Kerala. It situates migration cartoons within the frameworks of diaspora literature and visual culture studies. I examine the sociocultural transformation of Kerala, focusing on the impact of foreign remittances, commodities, and new forms of communication on its populace. This part of the thesis traces the emergence of a dream of social mobility among Keralites. The first chapter, titled "The Gulf Dream and Migrant Identity in Cartoons," examines the impact of post-migration economic mobility on social identity in Kerala. To understand how cartoons represent these changing identity concerns, I analyse cartoons from Usman Irumbuzhi’s series “Paradesi” (“Foreigner”) and from Noushad Akampadam’s series “Ith Than Da Gulf!” (“This is the Real Gulf!”). The chapter explores the role of foreign remittances in enabling newly rich migrants to assert their identity through consumption. In the second chapter “Migration’s Discontents: Communication, Consumerism, and Globalization in Gulfumpadi P.O”, I investigate the role of cartoons in critiquing the dominant economic narrative of migration in Kerala. I examine migrant artist Sageer’s cartoon series to explore how cartoons juxtapose the stereotypical image of the Middle East against the lived reality of migrants. In the third chapter “Emotions and Gulf Cartoons,” I argue that cartoons foreground the affective dimension of migration. This chapter focuses on analysing the emotional and gendered aspects of migration in select cartoons from the series Gulfumapdi P.O.2024-01-01T00:00:00ZDreams in the late-seventeenth-century British theatreKwan, Rowena關敏怡http://hdl.handle.net/10722/3366422024-02-26T08:30:56Z2023-01-01T00:00:00ZTitle: Dreams in the late-seventeenth-century British theatre
Authors: Kwan, Rowena; 關敏怡
Abstract: The British seventeenth century was a major turning point in the history of modernity, marking the gradual valorisation of scientific rationality. It was also an uproarious period when the relationship between religion and politics was being redefined, alongside transformative understandings of national stability. Under these circumstances, the significance of dreams was subject to vigorous debate and reinterpretation. While dreams were a central element in Christianity through its facilitation of communication between God and humanity, dreaming was also a practice that could generate anxiety for an early modern state seeking to establish boundaries between the divine and the secular in a prolonged period of political turmoil and instability.
This research focuses on the representation of dreams in late-seventeenth-century English drama. Working on John Dryden and Sir Robert Howard’s The Indian Queen written in the early Restoration period, Aphra Behn’s The Young King and Thomas Durfey’s The Injured Princess, both staged around the Exclusion Crisis of 1679-81, and William Congreve’s Love for Love produced a few years after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, this research aims to trace the ways in which dreams were reconstituted and negotiated on the public stage during a period of heightened political turmoil and transformation.2023-01-01T00:00:00ZPerforming the 'woman' artist : social identity constructions in contemporary art discourseRunge, Nickyhttp://hdl.handle.net/10722/3359262023-12-29T04:04:54Z2023-01-01T00:00:00ZTitle: Performing the 'woman' artist : social identity constructions in contemporary art discourse
Authors: Runge, Nicky
Abstract: This study examines how the discursive figure of the woman artist is socially constructed within contemporary art discourse. It does so by applying sociocultural linguistic theory and drawing on the foundational framework of metapragmatic stereotypes. It also applies the sociolinguistic theories of indexicality, registers, stylization and stance. The case studies revolve around three contemporary artists who are professionally active in the contemporary art world: Yoko Ono, Tracey Emin and Marina Abramović. Data was gathered during three archival studies at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Britain in London and M+ Museum in Hong Kong. In the data, the participants displayed a range of linguistic strategies to appear as professional artists but were at numerous times confronted by the discursive constraints of the stereotypes of the woman artist.
The metapragmatic framework was modelled on a database that contained the answers of 601 women artists who were interviewed for three major art magazines between 1995 and 2021. They reported four metapragmatic stereotypes pertaining to the identity of the woman artist. These include the pressure to take up the role of ‘spokesperson’ to advocate for women’s issues in the art world, the desire to be categorized by their gender rather than their professional identity, the need to comment on the supposedly feminine characteristics of their practice and having to discursively legitimize their artistic skill and training. Professional artists from various backgrounds and at different stages of their career index these four stereotypes that are recognized as emblems and have become associated with their gender in the industry.
These emblems become potent through their enregisterment within contemporary art discourse and become recognizable entities for insiders in the field. Their other purpose is to serve as a form of distinction with which social actors (mis)align themselves in order to
differentiate their self-presentation. As such, emblems become a foundational strategy for the women artists to perform their social identities in the contemporary art world.
The three case studies examine how these identity constructions take place during professional interactions in contemporary art discourse. The artists each perform social identity through the use of different linguistic strategies, with the goal to construct a unique public persona for insiders in the field, e.g. art experts and audiences. Comparing the case studies with the metapragmatic framework reveals the underlying trend in which the recurrence of emblems connected to the gendered stereotype of the woman artist are either introduced during interaction by art experts or artists themselves. These emblems are then used as form of identity construction by the artists, influencing the linguistic styles and strategies the artists perform in order to present themselves and their professional, yet unique artistic personas. As such, the three women artists are impacted by the persisting stereotypes surrounding the woman artist yet benefit from the emblematic enregisterment of such features in order to further their self-presentation in the discourses surrounding their work.2023-01-01T00:00:00Z