VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Le maschere della scrittura. Appunti linguistici sulla narrativa di Tommaso Landolfi.

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.

Keywords: Italian
Landolfi
Language
Prose
Style
Advisor: Somigli, Luca
The Tailors, Drapers, and Mercers of London and the London Commissary and Husting Court Wills, 1374-1485

Scholarly interest in the intimate lives of individuals in late medieval England has been particularly strong over the past thirty years. This interest can be linked to heightened scrutiny of wills and the nature and extent of their utility as access points into testators' lives, their most intimate relationships, and their varied desires and concerns, particularly in the context of the family and the household. Some scholars have argued that wills present a limited view of testators in a specific moment, rather than encompassing the entirety of the individuals' legacies. The heavily formulaic nature of the wills enrolled in late medieval English courts have also been considered characteristics that hamper the ability of the documents to reveal testators' individual personalities and concerns. Others, however, have noted that testators' adherence to formulaic structure in wills in fact constitutes a community founded on participation in shared traditions, and that the conventions of will-making still allowed testators a certain degree of flexibility to assert their own desires and address their individual concerns. This thesis presents evidence from wills enrolled from 1374 to 1485 in London's Husting and Commissary Courts. I argue that the conventions and guidelines concerning format, structure, and content of wills in late medieval London indeed were the primary forces in shaping them, but the same guidelines also allowed some room for testators to acknowledge and affirm close relationships and to look after their own spiritual welfare. The thesis demonstrates that testators could and often did negotiate the wills' structural and legal conventions in singular ways, most often to assert and maintain the supervision of their wives' circumstances as widows, and also to enact and confirm their own piety as a measure of ensuring their memory in the larger community and their spiritual welfare following their death.

Advisor: Gervers, Michael
Attention and Distraction in Middle English Literature

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

Keywords: attention
Augustine
Chaucer
distraction
Julian of Norwich
Middle English
Advisor: Gillespie, Alexandra
Disrupted Ugi Reaction: Synthesis of Cyclic Peptides and Peptidomimetics

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.

Keywords: Chemical biology
Cyclic peptide
Macrocycle
Multicomponent reaction
Peptide
Peptidomimetic
Advisor: Yudin, Andrei K
Enactive Democracy

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.

Keywords: Democratic theory
Indigenous politics
Advisor: Williams, Melissa S
A Medieval New World: Nation-making in Early Canadian Literature, 1789-1870

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.

Keywords: Adaptation
Canadian nationalism
Medievalism
Multiculturalism
Transnationalism
Advisor: Murray, Heather
Laser Spectroscopy of Mass-selected Protein Ions: Biological Fluorescence in the Gas Phase

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.

Keywords: Fluorescence Spectroscopy
Gas-phase
Laser Spectroscopy
Mass Spectrometry
Protein Structure
Advisor: Jockusch, Rebecca A
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

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.

Keywords: Bayesian
children
geostatistics
infection
iron deficiency
Advisor: Cole, Donald C
Zlotkin, Stanley H
Implications of Sexual Risk Assessment for HIV Intervention Planning: The Utility of the Expanded AIDS Risk Reduction MODEL among Young Ghanaian Women

ID: 10997Background Study Objective(s): Increasing HIV/AIDS knowledge alone does not stem the spread of HIV among young Ghanaian women. Rather, the solution lies in enhancing the individual's appreciation of her own risk and self-efficacy for reducing risky behaviours (Sallar, 2001). The current dissertation aims to understand the factors related to HIV/AIDS sexual risk behaviour among young Ghanaian women. In an expansion of the AIDS Risk Reduction Model (ARRM; Catania, 1990), psychological (sexual assertiveness and self-esteem), interpersonal (resiliency), and cultural variables (spirituality, cultural mistrust, gender roles, childhood sexual abuse, social health, and Africentrism) were identified to assist in the prediction of stage-specific variables at each stage (i.e., Labeling, Commitment, and Enactment) of the ARRM. Sexual risk behaviour was further examined in relationship to diverse demographic variables. Methods: Using quantitative exploratory survey and convenience sampling methods, two hundred (N=200) female participants were recruited at three institutions in Accra, Ghana. Results: Labeling: Labeling was positively related to Peer Norm. However, Labeling was negatively related HIV/AIDS Risk Knowledge and Susceptibility to HIV. Further, there was a positive relationship between Labeling and HIV Testing (at the Commitment Stage). The overall regression for the expanded predictors model on Labeling was not statistically significant. Education and age accounted for the bulk of the explained variance at this stage. Commitment: HIV testing intention was negatively related to age and marital status. However, it was positively related to education. Overall, neither the ARRM nor the expanded ARRM variables predicted Commitment. However, there was a positive relationship between Self- esteem and Commitment. Enactment: Condom Use Self-efficacy was positively related to age. Education was positively related to Enactment. For the expanded predictors, Perception of Sexual Enjoyment, Sexual Communication, Spirituality and Self-Esteem were negatively related to Enactment. There was also a positive relationship between Sexual Assertiveness and Enactment. Conclusion: Together, findings validated the Expanded ARRM as a fairly reliable model that helped in the coherent understanding of psychosocial and cultural issues that increase sexual vulnerability in young Ghanaian women. Overall, this study contributes to efforts to promote the use of culturally appropriate strategies in HIV prevention in Ghana.

Keywords: ARRM
Culture
Ghana
HIV
Psychology
Women
Advisor: Schneider, Margaret
Wane, Njoki
Development and Testing of the Canadian Physiotherapy Assessment of Clinical Performance

Clinical education is a core component of the Canadian university physiotherapy (PT) entry-to-practice curricula. Assessment of students during clinical experiences is a critical element of the clinical education courses. A standardised tool to measure PT students' clinical performance in relation to the level of competence expected for an entry-level physiotherapist that is specific to the Canadian context does not exist. The main objective of this thesis was to develop and explore the psychometric properties of the Canadian Physiotherapy Assessment of Clinical Performance (ACP). The ACP is to be used by PT students and their clinical instructors to describe the PT students' clinical performance behaviours as observed in the clinical education setting relative to what might be expected of a physiotherapist in Canada. The first study of this thesis refined the items that would compose the new measure, identified the items that would have a comment box and also gained consensus on the rating scale anchors through Delphi methodology. The second and third studies provided evidence for the substantive nature (face and content validity) of the ACP. Interviews were conducted in the second study with stakeholders including clinical instructors, recent graduates and individuals with expertise in measurement and /or clinical education. The third study entailed broad consultation with physiotherapists who had clinical education experience via a national online survey. The fourth study piloted the ACP in 10 PT university education programs across Canada from March to December 2013. The analyses performed in this study provided evidence to support our scoring and generalization inferences and, in addition, also provided evidence for the structure and external relationships (construct validity) of the ACP. The ACP was also found to be a practical measure. Cronbach's alpha coefficients for each role ranged from 0.94-0.99; scores at final internship points were higher than at midpoint; senior students performed better than junior students; students who performed well/poorly on the ACP also perform well/poorly on the current measure. The ACP can be used with confidence to assess the clinical performance behaviours of entry-level physiotherapy students in the clinical education setting.

Keywords: Clinical Education
Educational Assessment
Internship and Residency
Physical Therapy Specialty
Students
Advisor: Beaton, Dorcas E