VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Staging Canlit: Reinterpreting the Canadian Literary in English-language Stage Adaptations of Canadian Fiction and Poetry from 1975-2011
Keywords: adaptation
Canadian fiction
Canadian poetry
Canadian theatre history
theatrical adaptations
Margaret Atwood
Michael Ondaatje
John Richardson
literariness in stage adaptations
literary adaptations

This dissertation examines theatrical adaptations of Canadian fiction and poetry performed on Canadian stages between 1975 and 2011. Treating the phenomenon of Canadian literary stage adaptations as a response to specifically Canadian environments of production and reception, this study considers how contextual pressures – whether the result of broad national, economic, and aesthetic trends, or unique material factors – have shaped adapters’ and audiences’ “horizons of expectations” in ways that promote the prioritization of particular visions of “Canadian literariness.” Through the use of three primary case studies comprising five theatrical adaptations, I identify several formal preoccupations that emerge in theatrical adaptation as the result of the Canadian theatre’s engagement with the perceived “literariness” of Canadian literature. In my first case study, I read the 1978 NDWT touring production of James Reaney’s adaptation of John Richardson’s novel Wacousta; Or, The Prophecy as a response to the concerns of thematic criticism, cultural nationalism, and related narratives of cultural maturation prevalent in the period. I then turn to the Canadian Opera Company’s 2004 adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and the 2007 National Arts Centre and Royal Shakespeare Company co-production of The Penelopiad. I argue that in the unique case of Margaret Atwood, as a result of the author’s literary celebrity and cultural iconicity, the success of stage adaptations based on Atwood’s novels is linked to adaptive strategies that prioritize the creation of a literary surrogate for the author on stage. Then, using Necessary Angel’s 1989 adaptation of Coming Through Slaughter and their 2011 adaptation of Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje, I consider how Ondaatje’s experimentalism has contributed to adapters’ decisions to mine the transmedial and experiential possibilities that “poeticity” offers the theatre. Finally, synthesizing the points of connection that emerge from my case studies and the broader body of Canadian literary stage adaptations, I propose features that frame a range of contemporary adaptive practices, including the priority given by adapters and audiences to Canadian stories (or narrative content), Canadian storytellers (narrators, and the process of narration), and Canadian storytelling (in the form of metatheatrical, intermedial, and interdisciplinary approaches).
Modernism, Age, and the Growth of the Subject
Keywords: Modernist Literature
Aging

“Modernism, Age, and the Growth of the Subject” examines discourses of aging in modernist literature, charting metaphors of age in which cultural norms, genres, and somehow even subjectivity itself have become older. Despite the common association of modernist writing with youth and rebellion, most of the best-known modernist characters are middle-aged people: the protagonists of Woolf’s later novels, beginning with Mrs. Dalloway, are almost all aging women, and Joyce was only able to write Ulysses by shifting his focus from the soaring ambitions of the young Stephen Dedalus to the thoughtful and bumbling figure of the middle-aged Leopold Bloom. Henry James provocatively described the “new” age by claiming “the novel is older now, and so are the young.” Examining texts by Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Winifred Holtby, Samuel Butler, Sigmund Freud, and T. S. Eliot, I show how modernists re-imagine processes of maturation and growth at the levels of individual, history, and species, understanding a state of maturity as a metonymy for the age of their own age. Older modernist characters are often better able to navigate the vicissitudes of twentieth-century life than their younger counterparts because they have more distance from the ideological norms which they imbibed in their youth. The mature modernist consciousness is marked by the ability to critically sift and re-inherit the personal and historical past, and often by an increased openness to the forces of the unconscious mind. Critiquing Victorian models of maturity for their buttressing of authoritative, conventionally “adult” social positions, and the corresponding emphasis on the potential of youth to achieve great things, modernist maturity runs against the cultural grain, suggesting that only those conventionally understood as failures and outsiders can be genuinely mature. Modernist maturity dwells in the state of what Giorgio Agamben calls “impotentiality,” as these authors delineate a communitarian “ethics of maturity” by associating their adult characters not with fulfilled individual potential, but with new possibilities for inter-personal connection and ethical action that emerge only when the individual has forsaken investment in his or her personal future.
Using Value of Information Methods to Determine Optimal Designs for Research in Diagnostic Tests and Multi-stage Randomized Clinical Trials
Keywords: Value of Information
Statistical Methods

Value of Information (VOI) methods are based on Bayesian decision theory and provide decision makers with a methodological framework to explicitly consider the uncertainty surrounding decision making and to evaluate the need for further research. VOI methods can be used to determine the optimal sample sizes for new research studies that maximize the expected net gain (ENG), i:e. the di erence between the expected value of information provided by the trial and the expected cost of doing it. The purpose of this thesis is to develop new methodologies in VOI research for clinical trials and diagnostic research studies. The rst project is to determine the optimal sample size for multi-stage randomized clinical trials from an industry perspective using VOI methods. A model is proposed for the expected total pro t that includes consideration of per-patient pro t, disease incidence,time horizon, trial duration, market share, and the relationship between the trial results and probability of regulatory approval. The proposed method includes multistage adaptive designs with a speci c solution for two-stage design. With an example, it is demonstrated that signi cant increases in ENG can be achieved by using multi-stage designs and a smaller expected total sample size and less cost will be required. The second project is the development of VOI methods for diagnostic research. Suppose the new research study is proposed to improve the estimation of sensitivity and speci city. The optimal sample sizes for new studies can be determined at the highest ENG considering both independent and correlated sensitivity and speci city. The methods include evaluating a single diagnostic test as well as comparing two diagnostic tests. Normal approximation methods are proposed for di erent scenario. The examples and numerical simulation demonstrate that the normal approximation methods are a good tool for sample size calculation to maximize the ENG for the new research study. VOI methods are relatively new. The methods developed in this thesis will contribute to statistical tools for decision making and help health planners to better evaluate the need for more research studies and determine the optimal sample sizes associated with them.
Binding too Much Rather than too Little: Age Differences in Attentional Control and the Implications for Associative Memory
Keywords: attention
inhibition
associative memory
aging
binding

This thesis investigated whether older adults’ reduced attentional control leads to hyper-binding or the obligatory formation of overly broad associations between events occurring in close temporal and spatial contiguity. Study 1 explored whether older, but not younger, adults form associations between co-occurring targets and distractors. Studies 2 and 3 explored whether this hyper-binding effect extends to sequential co-occurrences. Study 1 examined whether older adults’ lessened inhibitory control leads them to inadvertently form associations between co-occurring targets and distractors. Participants first performed a 1-back task on pictures overlapped with irrelevant words and were later given a paired-associates memory task that surreptitiously included preserved and disrupted pairs from the 1-back task. Older adults showed a memory advantage for preserved pairs and a disadvantage for disrupted pairs, while younger adults performed similarly across pair type, suggesting that older adults alone encode irrelevant co-occurrences in the environment. Study 2 examined whether older adults also encode sequential co-occurrences that are entirely contained within distracting information, regularities that younger adults manage to ignore. Participants viewed a series of red and green objects and performed a 1-back task on one of the colours. Both age groups showed similar learning of statistical regularities contained within the attended stream. However, only older adults showed learning of regularities contained within the unattended stream. Finally, Study 3 examined whether older adults form associations across successive pairs within a paired-associate learning task. Participants learned a list of word pairs and then received an associative recognition task in which rearranged pairs had originally occurred either close together or far apart in the study list. Unlike younger adults, older adults made more false alarms to near repairings than to far repairings, suggesting that older adults alone had inadvertently formed associations across successive pairs at study.
Bicultural Stress and Disordered Eating in Arab-Canadian Women: Clarifying the Roles of Acculturation, Ethnic Identity, Acculturative Distress and Cultural Value Conflicts
Keywords: Eating Disorders
Arabs
Arab-Canadian
Disordered Eating
Acculturation
Ethnic Identity
Acculturative Stress
Bicultural Stress

In this study, relationships between disordered eating and body shape challenges in relation to three culturally related variables of acculturation, ethnic identity, and bicultural stress and conflict were examined in a sample of 196 Arab-Canadian women. A series of correlational analyses and hierarchical regressions were performed. Results showed that bicultural stress and conflict predicted a significant amount of variability in disordered eating and body shape concerns, including internalization of the thinness ideal, over and above both ethnic identity and acculturation. Furthermore, significant three way-interactions revealed that bicultural stress and conflict moderated the relationships among Arab-Orientation and Anglo-Orientation as predictors of disordered eating symptoms. Bicultural stress and conflict also moderated the relationships among ethnic identity and acculturation as predictors of eating disorder symptoms. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
A Regulatory Loop between β-Catenin and Extra-cellular Matrix Components during the Proliferative Phase of Cutaneous Wound Healing
Keywords: wound repair
beta-catenin
extracellular matrix
fibroblast

β-Catenin is an important modulator of the cutaneous wound phenotype, where it is activated in dermal fibroblasts during the proliferative stage of repair. Despite its importance as a mediator of the healing process, the factors that regulate β-catenin during wound repair are not well understood, nor are the identities of its target genes. One possibility is the involvement of the extracellular matrix (ECM) as both a target and a regulator of β-Catenin activity. I investigated the existence of a regulatory loop between β-Catenin and the ECM in dermal fibroblasts during cutaneous wound repair. Fibroblasts cultured on various ECM components showed increased levels of β-Catenin activation, and this was found to occur through an integrin mediated, glycogen synthase kinase 3β dependent pathway. In vivo, wounds from mice that lack the EDA-fibronectin variant exhibited decreased β-Catenin signaling, fewer dermal fibroblasts, and decreased wound strength. These properties were rescued by genetic or pharmacologic activation of β-Catenin, using an EDA-fibronectin deficient mouse model that also expresses a conditionally stabilized form of β-Catenin, or the drug, Lithium Chloride. This suggests both, that ECM components regulate β-Catenin activity in dermal fibroblasts during healing, and that β-Catenin is an important modulator of cell behaviour and the resulting properties of the wound. Since fibronectin is a known transcriptional target of β-Catenin, it also suggests a regulatory loop between these two molecules. To investigate the existence of other ECM targets of β-Catenin during wound repair, we undertook a microarray analysis in wounds from conditional β-Catenin knockdown and stabilized mice. We found several ECM associated candidates that have not previously been identified as β-Catenin targets, and verified their direction of expression by real-time PCR. Together, this work suggests that β -catenin and ECM components interact in a regulatory loop to modulate fibroblast behaviour in the physiological context of wound repair.
Reform in the Time of Stalin: Nikita Khrushchev and the Fate of the Russian Peasantry
Keywords: Nikita Khrushchev
late-Stalinism
Joseph Stalin
collective farms
high modernism
James Scott
Arkhangelsk

“Reform in the Time of Stalin: Nikita Khrushchev and the Fate of the Russian Peasantry” Doctor of Philosophy 2012 Auri C. Berg Graduate Department of History University of Toronto “Reform in the Time of Stalin” is an exploration of a little-known, but highly significant chapter from the last years of the Stalin era. Between 1949 and 1951, Nikita Khrushchev attempted to carry out a radical reform of collective farms, an event that served as a turning point in the history of rural Russia and could be justifiably labeled “the second collectivization.” Through the prism of James Scott's concept of “high modernism,” this study examines the issue of reform under Stalin, demonstrating the political, economic, and social context in which the top leadership struggled to reform what had become an unworkable agricultural system. The dissertation draws on sources from party and state archives in Moscow, Kiev and Arkhangelsk, as well as central and regional newspapers and unpublished memoirs. To lay the background, the dissertation first explores the failed attempt by the Soviet Union to replace the traditional Russian commune with larger, rationally organized farms during the course of collectivization in the early 1930s. The subsequent two chapters are focused on the origins of the reform campaign: first in post-war Ukraine, where Nikita Khrushchev had considerable independence; and subsequently in Moscow, where high-level political rivalries and institutional competition undermined his efforts. Chapter four explores the local dimensions of the campaign through a case study from the province of Arkhangelsk. The final chapter turns to the relationship between center and periphery during the final chaotic months of the campaign. This study of late Stalin-era reform contributes to several recent debates in the historiography. First, it provides a new assessment of an increasingly controversial period in Nikita Khrushchev’s career. Second, it challenges the conventional view of a totalitarian society marked by conformity and fear by demonstrating that there was significant pressure throughout the country for reform during Stalin’s last years. What the prism of high modernism reveals is that advocates for change were limited by their own conviction that science and technology could solve social problems.
America Eats: Taste and Race in the New Deal Sensory Economy
Keywords: Food
Taste
Race
Gender
New Deal
America Eats

Recent developments in sensory history highlight the rewards of a sensory approach to the topic of racial formation in twentieth century U.S. Yet, few explicitly focus on the sense of taste. This dissertation looks at sensory interaction over food as a site for the making of the interwar American racial landscape. The narrative focuses on the cornerstone period of the late 1930s-early 1940s and considers, through the notion of sensory economy, the extent to which the senses are part of modern circuits of economic and cultural exchanges. The argument builds on the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) archive, especially the America Eats project; The FWP was one of the art programs of the New Deal Works Progress Administration (WPA) and an important part of the liberal state cultural apparatus. Considering the sense of taste as a cultural and economic currency circulating throughout the American social fabric as well as through the FWP archive allows highlighting taste as a medium for the negotiation of raced, gendered, ethnic, and regional identities in the interwar period. I examine how the FWP’s nostalgic and patriotic endeavour to record a national cuisine in the midst of the Great Depression contributed to the production and archiving of a prescriptive sensory and culinary knowledge about what was American food and who American eaters were. This dissertation documents how sensory interaction participated to the policing of the colour line but also to the creation of new tastes and, ultimately, to the birth of a commodified culinary plurality. The narrative also highlights how the encroachment of the food industries on American taste and the coming of World War II led to the upholding of conservative gender roles and stereotyped racial imagery. Finally, this dissertation examines the notion of region in the U.S. and looks at how the search for regional cuisines led FWP workers to use raced tastes as signals of regional authenticity. Overall, I suggest that a combined analysis of taste and race not only further our historical understanding of twentieth century American food culture but also enhances our comprehension of the role of the senses in race making.
Biography and Autobiography at the Hogarth Press
Keywords: Book History
Modernism
Biography
Autobiography
Publishing History
Virginia Woolf

The subject of this thesis is the biographies and autobiographies published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press between 1917 and 1946. I combine several areas of scholarly inquiry – biography and autobiography studies, modernist studies, book history, and the history of reading – in order to examine the intersections between literary and textual constructions of genre and the role of categorization in the book trade. My central argument is that diversity, as both the policy and the product of the Hogarth Press, allowed a multitude of voices, methodologies, perspectives, and subjects to co-exist at one publishing house and produced a body of works that goes far beyond the small circle of Bloomsbury with which it is usually associated. The variety of the Hogarth Press’s publications meant that its approach to genre was one of hybridity, oscillation, and ambivalence, but one that nevertheless found ways to position complicated works in the category-oriented world of the book trade. Drawing from unpublished archival materials in order to uncover relationships between authors, readers, publishers, booksellers, literary agents, book clubs, and critics, I argue that the Hogarth Press’s practices in publishing biographies and autobiographies informed the Woolfs’ writings about the importance and role of the genres in the context of literary modernism. Using material from the Hogarth Press Business Archive housed at the University of Reading, I offer detailed studies of the Press’s translations from the Russian of three biographies of Tolstoy and Sophia Tolstoy’s autobiography; two biography series of the 1930s; Henry Green and Christopher Isherwood’s fictionalized autobiographies; and Virginia Woolf’s own biographical experiments, Orlando, Flush, and Roger Fry. My analysis of these particular groups of works is underpinned by a reading of the Press’s whole list of publications between 1917 and 1946, a quantitative and qualitative analysis of which I offer in the opening chapter of the thesis. The 522 copies of Hogarth Press books and pamphlets I read are housed in the Virginia Woolf Collection at the E. J. Pratt Library at Victoria University in the University of Toronto.
A Theory of Scientific Change
Keywords: Scientific Change
Method
Theory

At any moment of history, there are theories that the scientific community of the time accepts as the best available descriptions of reality. In addition, there are methods which the scientific community of the time employs in theory assessment. This set of all accepted theories and all employed methods constitute the scientific mosaic of the time. The mosaic is in a process of constant change – both accepted theories and employed methods change through time. The main question of this dissertation is: are there any laws governing the process of transitions from one accepted theory to another and from one employed method to another? I.e. can there be a general theory of scientific change? Contrary to the widespread opinion, I argue that scientific change is a law-governed process and that there can be a general descriptive theory of scientific change (TSC). In the first part of the dissertation, I clarify the scope of TSC by defining it as a descriptive theory that reveals the actual mechanism of transitions in the mosaic, regardless of its scale, time period or field of inquiry. Then, I scrutinize and reject a number of traditional arguments against the possibility of TSC. In the second part, I construct an actual theory of scientific change. First, I postulate four axioms – four laws of scientific change. From these laws, I deduce a number of theorems concerning different aspects of scientific change. All axioms and theorems are illustrated by examples from the actual history of science. By proposing this TSC, I oppose the common wisdom of the so-called disunity of science thesis. I argue against the particularist approach which holds that the history of science can only be studied in a piecemeal fashion. On the contrary, I show that a general descriptive theory of scientific change can and does exist.