VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Why They Are Not Painters: Ekphrasis and Art Criticism in the Twentieth Century
Keywords: ekphrasis
Frank O'Hara
Marianne Moore
W. C. Williams
W. H. Auden

This study of twentieth-century poetry proposes a re-examination of how we interpret ekphrasis, or poems that address existing works of visual art, by tracing a historical trajectory of these poems as responses to the art and critical climate of their time. Though much scholarship has elaborated the stakes of ekphrasis as a confrontation between the "sister arts," between narrative time and visual stasis, and between desiring self and its enigmatic other, many modern iterations of the genre suggest its hybridity as a work of art and of criticism that poets use to consider the value and function of images in their world. The representative poets in this study - Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, William Carlos Williams and Frank O'Hara - were not only adapting strategies gleaned from their encounters with Cubist, Surrealist, Dadaist, Abstract Expressionist, Neo-Dadaist, and Pop art and artists, but were also actively involved in critical debates about how this art was being interpreted, at times in their prose essays, but more frequently in their ekphrastic poems. These poets were especially interested in, and often suspicious of, the critical trend of formalism, which became increasingly orthodox in its interpretation of modern art in the postwar period. The intervention of this study is to demonstrate how these ekphrastic poems function as an alternative discourse to formalism, challenging not only the orthodoxy of its increasingly rigid tenets, but also its underlying preoccupation with values of order, purity and unity. These poetic appraisals of art exploit the resources of their medium, such as Moore's literary and archeological allusions to jars, which critique Roger Fry's separation of form from function, Auden's parody of the art critic that suggests the dangerous allure of art divorced from political life, Williams' resistance to interpretation through pastiche and O'Hara's blending of ekphrasis and elegy to expose the emotional repression inherent in Clement Greenberg's authoritarian rhetoric. These poets suggest that writing about visual art often reveals as much about the observer as it does about the art, and thus they turn to ekphrasis for its potential to multiply the lenses through which to do that seeing.
The Dependence of Global Chromatin Architecture on the Histone Chaperone DAXX
Keywords: DAXX
Heterochromatin
Hisone variants
Microscopy
Nuclear organization

An essential component of gene regulation is the organization of eukaryotic genomes into functionally and spatially discrete domains. One such domain is the chromocentre, which is a cluster of pericentric heterochromatin enriched in methylated histone H3 (H3K9me3), major satellite repeat DNA, and the histone variant H3.3 specifically deposited by the death-domain- associated protein (DAXX) chaperone. While studies relying on biochemical-based approaches have provided insight into the mechanistic details of the DAXX-dependent chromatin assembly pathway, they have not yielded a comprehensive model of the consequences of this deposition on global chromatin organization. Using electron spectroscopic imaging (ESI), I show that in the absence of DAXX, there is a breakdown in chromocentre structure and a loss of morphological distinction between the repressive histone modification H3K9me3 and chromatin compaction. In addition, I demonstrate that the structural integrity of the nucleolus requires DAXX-dependent heterochromatin organization as its loss causes an increased number of "mini" nucleoli and the dispersal of ribosomal DNA genes. As well, I investigated the role of DAXX in the C2C12 muscle differentiation model and found that concomitant with the formation of terminally differentiated myotubes is the relocalization of DAXX from promyelocytic leukemia nuclear body (PML NBs) to constitutive heterochromatin domains. Taken together, these data reveal that DAXX is a regulator of heterochromatin organization and for the first time, shows the direct consequences of its loss on the global nuclear landscape.
State Repression and Political Deportation in Canada, 1919-1936
Keywords: communism
deportation
national security
Section 98
state of emergency
state of exception

Section 98 of the Criminal Code of Canada was in force from1919 to 1936. The dissertation traces the way in which Canada incorporated emergency law, created during the First World War under the War Measures Act, into the Criminal Code as Section 98 after the war to combat political radicalism from 1919 to 1936. In contrast to existing scholarship, this work not only explains how a liberal democracy like Canada can legally use emergency legislation outside of a state of emergency through a process of `normalization' but it also examines the effects of such laws on their human targets through case studies of criminal trials and deportation hearings. Targets included political activists, immigrants and women. It makes contributions to Canada's legal, immigration, labour and intelligence history. The study also examines the international influences on Canadian policy makers in creating such laws and the complex international identities of the transnational activists at whom these laws were often directed. The work examines how culture played a crucial role in underpinning the intelligence cycle that led to the prosecution of leading Communist Party of Canada (CPC) members. It also complicates our understanding of the CPC during Moscow's `Third Period.' It was a party that both marginalized and welcomed immigrant workers. The dissertation provides an in-depth examination of the trial of Rex v. Buck et al and the ways in which political ideology was interpreted by the court as a criminal act. It examines cases of deportation that resulted from the trial, such as the case of the `Halifax Ten,' and traces what happened to the deportees after their deportation making use of Finnish, Polish, Croatian, and German primary sources. In addition, this work demonstrates how the communist led organization, the Canadian Labour Defense League (CLDL) initiated Canada's civil rights movement by joining with moderate leftists during the `Third Period,' and before the Communist International's shift to the `United Front' policy, to repeal Section 98. It demonstrates how the normalization of emergency law continued after Section 98's repeal when its core elements were retained and folded into Canada's sedition laws where it remains today.
Le maschere della scrittura. Appunti linguistici sulla narrativa di Tommaso Landolfi.
Keywords: Italian
Landolfi
Language
Prose
Style

This study seeks to provide a linguistic and stylistic analysis of the narrative of Tommaso Landolfi, one of the most productive Italian writers of the twentieth century. Critics and scholars alike have always considered the narcissistic elegance of Landolfi's prose as one of the most fascinating aspects of his literary work, and many studies have explored the characteristics of his language. Our analysis aims to complement the information provided by the existing literature by examining a corpus that covers Landolfi's entire career and includes the following publications: Dialogo dei massimi sistemi (1937), II mar delle blatte e altre storie (1939), La pietra lunare (1939), La spada (1942), Le due zittelle (1946), Racconto d'autunno (1947), Cancroregina (1950), LA BIERE DU PECHEUR (1953), Ombre (1954), Ottavio di Saint Vincent (1958), Landolfo VI di Benevento (1959), In societĂ  (1962), Scene dalla vita di Cagliostro (1963), Rien va (1963), Tre racconti (1964), Un amore del nostro tempo (1965), Racconti impossibili (1966), Des mois (1967), Un paniere di chiocciole (1968), Faust 67 (1969), Breve canzoniere. Dialoghi e poesie (1971), Le labrene (1974), A caso (1975). The results of our survey indicate that three major forces shape Landolfi's linguistic and stylistic choices. The first one is the compulsion to the use of a first person narrator, a constant to which Landolfi frequently opposes either the adoption of dialogic - hence purely mimetic - structures, or the use of textual forms that traditionally require, and therefore justify, the presence of a first person narrator (i.e. diary, letter, confession). The second force is the tendency to use extremely refined, literary vocabulary and morphosyntactic structures. The third force is the natural inclination of Landolfi's narrative to enter a metadiscursive dimension: not only is Landolfi's prose constantly subject to the merciless metalinguistic criticism of the author, it is also exposed to the risk of collapsing under the burden of excruciating metanarrative experiments. Overall these three forces keep Landolfi's prose irrevocably separated from the ideal plainness and simplicity of expression to which he aspires.
Attention and Distraction in Middle English Literature
Keywords: attention
Augustine
Chaucer
distraction
Julian of Norwich
Middle English

This dissertation explores the representation of attention and distraction in late medieval literary culture. The Middle Ages have been largely overlooked in recent efforts by scholars to chart the history of attention. Combining the methods of phenomenology and cognitive science with contemporary medieval accounts of perception, I argue that medieval thinkers developed complex theories and descriptions of attention that can help to historicize and complicate current debates about the nature of attention and distraction. Beginning with Augustine, who argued that attention is the prerequisite for perception, I trace how the vocabulary of attention evolved through the later medieval period. I concentrate on texts written in Middle English, the language of the distracted, according to one fourteenth-century translator. I conclude that these texts investigate the phenomenological and ethical qualities of attention and, in doing so, articulate a relationship between attention and distraction that cannot be reduced to a simple opposition. Chapter One describes Augustine's influential model of attention. It then considers how this model is complicated by the descriptions of distraction in
Disrupted Ugi Reaction: Synthesis of Cyclic Peptides and Peptidomimetics
Keywords: Chemical biology
Cyclic peptide
Macrocycle
Multicomponent reaction
Peptide
Peptidomimetic

Cyclization is a technique often employed in the design of therapeutic agents and molecular probes to increase a molecule's affinity and selectivity towards enzyme or receptor target. Recent efforts have yielded a new method of piperazinone formation and peptide cyclization using unprotected aziridine aldehydes. The counterintuitive combination of a nucleophile and an electrophile in one molecule facilitates stitching of amino acids or linear peptides at high concentrations, thereby reducing reaction times. The scope of this reaction has been investigated with a variety of amino acids and peptides. The results differ from the initial studies and a new mechanism has been proposed that takes into account the substrate-dependent reactivity and formation of side-products. A variety of functionalization reactions, through aziridine ring-opening, have been reported. The ring-opened products have exhibited unique structural properties which have been investigated by ab initio calculations, X-ray crystallography, and NMR spectroscopy. Finally, the elements of scaffold design and aziridine ring-opening chemistry have been applied to the creation of inhibitors for Calpain, a disease-causing protease.
Enactive Democracy
Keywords: Democratic theory
Indigenous politics

This dissertation describes the consequences of identifying democratic ideals of reasoning and reciprocity with political dialogue across difference. In contemporary pluralistic societies, many marginalized groups are faced with a choice between incurring the risks of participating and exposing vulnerable cultural practices to scrutiny within dominant institutions or the risks of withdrawing from participation. I argue that Indigenous peoples experience this `deliberative ultimatum' most forcefully as they seek to protect land-based forms of life through litigation and political negotiation. The dilemma arises because prevailing conceptions of reciprocity only extend to individuals, mutual reason-giving, or, in some models, to practices of mutual care that serve as the pre-conditions of mutual reason-giving. To illustrate, I show how within Canadian political and legal institutions, Indigenous modes of reason-giving suffer from systemic forms of denigration and dismissal. Moreover, some forms of Indigenous practical understandings either cannot be articulated or are culturally prohibited from being communicated. Hence, Indigenous peoples often formulate `proxy claims' aimed at strategic protection of Indigenous forms of life. Proxy claims aimed at gaining jurisdiction or title over land suffer form additional distortions, however, as officials who are authorized to preside over a jurisdiction vis-Ă -vis the territorial sovereignty of the state must reconfigure claims to fall under their purview. The ensuing regulations can be more harmful than when practices were enacted without regulated sanction. As a corrective, this dissertation takes initial steps in developing a theoretical and institutional model that preserves the democratic ideals of reasoning and reciprocity without imposing dialogue on vulnerable communities or incurring risks related to the deliberative ultimatum such as the strategic formulation of proxy claims. What I call `enactive democracy' takes practices and forms of life themselves as objects of reciprocity and attends not to speech but to the reasoning that inheres in embodied practices when norms of conduct are establish, contested and modified non-discursively. From here we can see that institutions of cultural autonomy captured in such arrangements as `treaty federalism' or `subsidiarity' can be justified on democratic grounds as a pre-condition of effective reasoning both within and between different cultural forms of life. I conclude with a discussion the application of enactive theory to the emerging fields of deliberative systems and comparative political theory.
A Medieval New World: Nation-making in Early Canadian Literature, 1789-1870
Keywords: Adaptation
Canadian nationalism
Medievalism
Multiculturalism
Transnationalism

This thesis examines how medievalist narratives of nationhood developed in the early days of English Canadian literature, from 1789-1870. Early Canadian authors imagined a past for Canada tied not to the land but to cultural memory; they created a medieval history for Canada by adapting European medieval myth and legend. Adaptation was a powerful tool in the hands of authors struggling to negotiate North America's multiple colonial relationships: it allowed them to embrace European cultural histories, to stake a claim to those Old World cultural inheritances, while simultaneously appropriating those histories into new narratives for the New World. This project, as the first large-scale study of medievalism in Canada, involved finding and cataloguing instances of medievalism in Canadian literature. The trends explored in this thesis are based on 443 works of Canadian medievalism published between 1789 and 1870. Chapter One analyzes Canada's first literary magazines in the late eighteenth century. Responding to revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic, these magazines advocated a revolution not of arms but of manners, with medieval chivalric codes as the exemplar. Chapter Two turns to the literary aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812. These wars instilled in many Canadian authors anxieties not only about France and the United States, but also about the role of empire in the modern world. In this new world order, medievalism became a source of validation, a keystone that held together a nation or empire's history from antiquity to the modern day. Chapter Three examines the reemergence of French-oriented medievalism after the failed rebellions of 1837-1838 and the ensuing unification of the Canadas. In the hands of English Canadian authors, even sympathetic French characters were stuck in the past, thus relegating their roles in Canada to those of cultural progenitors but not modern political participants. Chapter Four, on the period leading up to and immediately following Confederation, examines the expansion of racialized narratives of Canadianness to include pan-British and pan-northern conceptions of Canadianness. This northern identity particularly embraced Canada's history of Viking contact as integral to the nation's hardy northern character.
Laser Spectroscopy of Mass-selected Protein Ions: Biological Fluorescence in the Gas Phase
Keywords: Fluorescence Spectroscopy
Gas-phase
Laser Spectroscopy
Mass Spectrometry
Protein Structure

The combination of electrospray ionization (ESI) and mass spectrometry (MS) has enabled studies on ionized biological molecules such as proteins in the gas phase. In the last two decades, interest has been placed on understanding the intrinsic conformational preferences, dynamics, and energetics of fully de-solvated proteins. The motivation for this is two-fold. Practical need is derived from the new-found prevalence of MS analysis in the biological sciences. This is especially true for the suite of so-called “native” ESI methods, which rely on a concrete understanding of the relation between solution- and gas-phase protein properties. Secondly, on a more fundamental level, the study of intrinsic properties provides a basis from which to understand the balance of intra- and inter-molecular forces governing protein folds. While the existing MS-based techniques have given significant insights into the structures of gaseous protein ions, the level of structural detail is limited. This dissertation describes a body of work towards the development of fluorescence-based techniques for the structural characterization of gaseous proteins. Chapters 2 and 3 showcase results from experiments exploring non-covalent fluorescent strategies applied to the analysis of gaseous protein ions. The photophysical properties of the two non-covalent probes acridine orange and anilinonaphthalene sulfonate are characterized in isolation, and when in complex with model binding partners, including macrocyclic host molecules and proteins. By comparing gas- and solution-phase measurements of model dyes and their non-covalent complexes, the modulating effects that are intrinsic to binding can be separated from those arising from solvent removal. In Chapters 4 and 5, it is shown that fluorescence (Förster) resonance energy transfer (FRET) can be used to obtain ångström-scale intramolecular distance constraints in gaseous protein ions. Gas-phase FRET experiments on two engineered variants of the protein GB1 indicate that the hydrophobic core of the protein disintegrates in the gas phase—forming a variety of new structures, both compact and elongated, depending on the number of charges carried by the protein. This work represents important early steps in the co-application of MS and fluorescence spectroscopy for analyzing desolvated biological molecules.
Geo-spatial Patterns and Associated Risks of Iron Deficiency and Infection among Young Ghanaian Children: Implications for the Safety of Iron Supplementation in Malaria Endemic Areas
Keywords: Bayesian
children
geostatistics
infection
iron deficiency

Background: The safety and effectiveness of iron supplementation in malaria endemic areas may partly depend on host iron status; however, current methods for assessing iron deficiency risk tend to be confounded by infection and are infeasible to implement at a population level. Determining the geographical patterns of iron status and infection may provide a practical alternative means of identifying high risk populations for whom integrated anaemia and infection control programs are needed. Objective: Determine the geo-spatial factors associated with iron status and infection risk among 1943 Ghanaian children (6-35 months of age) before and after participating in a randomized iron home-fortification trial. Methods: Secondary spatial analyses of iron status and infection outcomes were conducted. Iron status was defined as serum ferritin concentration corrected for inflammation (C-reactive protein, CRP) using a regression-based method. Malaria and non-malaria infection outcomes were defined using four combinations of inflammation (CRP >5 mg/L) and malaria parasitaemia (with and without reported history of fever or concurrent axillary temperature >37.50 C). Analyses were performed using a geographical information system (GIS) and generalized linear geostatistical modelling with a Matern spatial correlation function. Results: After adjusting for demographic characteristics such as age, sex, and maternal education, none of the geo-spatial factors included in the iron status models (including elevation, and distance to a health facility) demonstrated associations at baseline or endline; however, there was significant residual spatial variation across the study area. Conversely, malaria parasitaemia at baseline was associated with greater distance to a health facility and lower elevation. These relationships did not remain at endline, nor when infection was defined using CRP only. Mapping the model outputs showed defined low-risk areas that tended to cluster around villages, particularly near the District centre. Conclusions: In a malaria endemic area, geographical location may play a role in the risk of iron deficiency and infection among children. Iron home-fortification likely alters the spatial risk profile of malaria and non-malaria infection in this setting, though additional research is needed to confirm the direction of these relationships.