VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Amateur Modernism: Literary Responses to Professional Society

Amateur Modernism argues that the rise of professional society during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century triggered efforts to revivify and renovate the ostensibly anachronistic concept of amateurism. This project investigates how four modernist writers—Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dashiell Hammett—all employed the concept of amateurism in their work to signal not a rejection of professionalism, but a struggle against the codified systems and habits of mind it tended to produce. As I demonstrate, many modernist texts position amateurism and professionalism in a productive tension, combining the amateur pursuit of wide-ranging knowledge, pleasurable work, and improvisational thought, with the financial independence and expertise afforded by professional training. Modernists were often ambivalent about the promises of professionalism and invoked amateur attitudes they believed could repair cultural fragmentation, democratize learning, and make working life more pleasurable. Chapter One argues that Ford, ambivalently caught between his German ancestry and his work writing wartime propaganda for the British government, appealed to amateurism as broad general knowledge transcending national borders, and enabling him to negotiate the tensions between the patriotism that was demanded of him and the cosmopolitanism he admired. Chapter Two considers amateurism as a spontaneous and rambling habit of mind as it focuses upon Woolf’s efforts to incorporate amateurism into higher education and the professions by encouraging women, who were becoming professionals for the first time, to maintain their capacity to think in non-hierarchical and unspecialized ways. Chapter Three understands amateurism as a bridging impulse as it focuses on Hurston’s attempt to make disciplinary cultural anthropology accessible to a popular audience. Chapter Four examines how Hammett, inspired by the pleasurable work of the gentleman-amateur, argued that lower-middle class workers like his detective characters might covertly derive wry pleasure by improvising between the cracks of professional bureaucracies. By emphasizing the malleability of amateurism and professionalism during the modernist period, this dissertation offers a critique of scholarship that reads contemporary, calcified oppositions between the professions and amateurism back onto modernist debates.

Keywords: Modernism
Professional Society
Virginia Woolf
Ford Madox Ford
Zora Neale Hurston
Dashiell Hammett
Amateur
Advisor: Cuddy-Keane, Melba
A Reconciliation of Logical Representations of Space: from Multidimensional Mereotopology to Geometry

Reasoning about spatial knowledge is an important aspect of computational intelligence. Humans easily switch between high-level and low-level spatial knowledge, while computers have traditionally relied only on low-level spatial information. Qualitative spatial representation and reasoning is concerned with devising high-level, qualitative, representations of certain aspects of space using small sets of intuitive spatial relations that lend themselves to efficient reasoning. Many such representations have been developed over the years, but their use in practical applications seems to be inhibited. One reason preventing more widespread adoption of qualitative spatial representations may be the gap between simple but inexpressive qualitative representations at one end and geometric or quantitative representations with the expressivity of Euclidean geometry at the other end. Another factor may be the lack of semantic integration between the various spatial representations ranging from qualitative to geometric ontologies. We will address both issues in this thesis with a focus on spatial ontologies that involve some kind of mereotopological relations such as contact and parthood. We design a family of spatial ontologies with varying restrictiveness and increasingly more expressive nonlogical languages, organized into hierarchies of ontologies of equal expressivity. As the most foundational spatial ontology we propose a multidimensional mereotopology based only on `containment' and `relative dimension' as undefined concepts. By adding either `boundary containment' or `betweenness' as new concepts, we further extend the expressivity without impairing the qualitative character. Tools from mathematical logic, such as interpretability and definability, are used to semantically integrate other spatial ontologies into our hierarchies. Moreover, we show how mereotopological theories, incidence geometries, and ordered incidence geometries are formally related to our theories. We thereby better understand differences in expressivity, restrictiveness, and ontological assumptions between a broad range of spatial ontologies. Throughout the thesis, we utilize automated theorem provers to assist with the verification of all ontologies by constructing nontrivial models and by proving key properties about the axiomatized relations and functions. Theorem provers are also utilized to obtain some of the integration results.

Keywords: ontology
automated reasoning
geometry
mereotopology
first-order logic
spatial information
semantic integration
theory interpretation
incidence
qualitative spatial reasoning
physical space
hole
void
dimension
boundary
ontology verification
multidimensional
definability
nonconservative
mereogeometry
RCC
Whitehead
mereology
betweenness
interpretation
spatial intelligence
knowledge integration
expressivity
Advisor: Grüninger, Michael
A Foucauldian Engagement with the “Problem of Ethics” in the Canadian HIV Community-based Research Movement

This dissertation examines the Canadian HIV community-based research (CBR) movement, with an attention to how research ethics is understood and practiced. HIV CBR brings together health researchers, clinicians, service providers, and people living with HIV (PHAs) to undertake collaborative research and evaluation. HIV CBR is characterized by inclusive and community-driven research processes, a commitment to partnership building, and the involvement of relevant stakeholders. However, HIV CBR practitioners claim the formal research ethics review process is unresponsive and alienating, and fails to address the ethical issues present in their work. For these reasons, research ethics review has been identified as a major barrier to HIV CBR. Towards examining these claims, interview data were collected from recipients of Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) HIV CBR operating grants from across Canada. The analysis offered here departs from the majority of the literature by using Michel Foucault’s approach to ethics. Foucault’s work considers the role of power, discourse, and how conceptions of morality emerge within particular systems of governance. This dissertation includes an introductory chapter, three core chapters written in a manuscript format and a concluding chapter. In Chapter 1, I situate my dissertation at the intersections of HIV CBR, empirical bioethics, and critical public health. Chapter 2 examines the confessional dimensions of interviewing participants about their ethical transgressions. Chapter 3 offers an analysis of the relationship between actors in the CBR movement, related funding programs, and the state. Chapter 4 examines the relationship between actors in the CBR movement and prescriptive research ethics. In Chapter 5, I conclude by exploring the implications for advancing greater critical reflexivity in HIV CBR. Overall, this dissertation theorizes the so called “problem of ethics” in HIV CBR and uses it as opportunity to ask different kinds of questions about community engagement in collaborative research.

Keywords: HIV
Foucault
Research Ethics
Canada
Community-based research
Advisor: Strike, Carol
Leone Orsini e il manoscritto “Italien 1535” della Bibliothèque nationale de France

This thesis consists of a study and an edition of a poetry collection, or canzoniere, compiled by the sixteenth-century Roman poet and prelate Leone Orsini (1512-1564). The canzoniere is composed of 198 poems. There are no printed editions of this canzoniere, and, even more remarkably, it survives in only a single vellum manuscript copy which is held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris and is catalogued “Italien 1535.” The absence of the author’s name as well as a title and a colophon might explain why the manuscript has been misidentified and in the library catalogue of the Bibliothèque nationale it is still incorrectly attributed to the Florentine Luigi Alamanni (1495-1556), one of Orsini’s colleagues in the “Accademia degli Infiammati” of Padua. Very little has been written about Leone Orsini’s canzoniere. In fact, there is only one published article that deals with the Paris manuscript, Francesco Flamini’s “Il canzoniere inedito di Leone Orsini” (1901). In it the author identifies, for the first time, Leone Orsini as the author of the canzoniere. This lack of attention to Orsini is surprising when we consider that he was a figure well worthy of finding a place among contemporary eminent poets and prelates such as Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), Giovanni Guidiccioni (1480-1541), and Giovanni Della Casa (1503-1556). The first part of this thesis analyses the manuscript in detail, reconstructs the story of its development, and includes illustrations of it. It then explores Orsini’s life and tackles the problem of the attribution of the manuscript. Based on a thorough analysis of the 198 poems, new evidence of Orsini’s authorship is offered. This is followed by the explanation of the purpose of the manuscript, a description of the structure and of the style of the canzoniere and of the characters cited in the poems. The second part of the thesis provides an annotated edition of the canzoniere based on the only extant codex. This thesis thus brings important new information to light on the contributions that Leone Orsini made to Italian culture and literature and, more generally, to Petrarchism in Europe in early modern period.

Keywords: Leone Orsini
manuscript
Advisor: Eisenbichler, K
Middle English Lyrics: Lyric Manuscripts 1200–1400 and Chaucer’s Lyric

This thesis endeavours to understand late medieval lyric poetry and song from two ostensibly separate contexts: insular manuscript witnesses of English lyric from 1200 to 1400; and the narrative effects of lyric in Geoffrey Chaucer’s longer poetry, including the Canterbury Tales, the Parliament of Fowls, and the Book of the Duchess. These two contexts yield new insights about the medieval lyric. First, an overview of the manuscripts of medieval lyric from 1200 to 1400 in England suggests that about half of anonymous lyrics in this period exist in multiple witnesses and are thus in some sense connected, providing us with the insight that lyric at this time was not so much fragmentary as embedded in rich networks of meaning. The first chapter of the thesis uses network mapping software to represent some of these networks, and discusses the relationships among lyrics that appear in Maidstone, Maidstone Museum MS A.13 and related manuscripts, such as Oxford, Jesus College MS 29, and Cambridge, Emmanuel College MS 27. Subsequent chapters of the thesis draw out connections between lyrics and narrative events in Chaucer’s poetry, showing in a very different sense that lyric as a literary form reaches outward from the speaker to the narrative world itself, inviting narrative events to take place. Such an insight is markedly different from views of the lyric which think of it as making nothing happen. Lyric is a force for change that drives narrative, and a force for change in Chaucer’s imaginary social worlds; Chaucer’s lyric and late medieval lyrics are embedded in networks of meaning, both in the narrative poetry in which they appear, and in the manuscripts in which they are copied.

Keywords: Medieval literature
Middle English
English literature
Geoffrey Chaucer
Canterbury Tales
codicology
manuscripts
lyric
song
Ovid
Boethius
music
poetry
Parliament of Fowls
Book of the Duchess
Troilus and Criseyde
Advisor: Gillespie, Alexandra
Addressing Obesity in Schizophrenia: An Ecological Approach

Individuals with schizophrenia are at high risk for obesity. Contemporary treatment approaches have concentrated on improving diet and physical activity behaviour. Guided by the Medical Research Council Framework, this thesis aimed to identify modifiable environmental factors that may influence the dietary and physical activity behaviours of clients at a psychiatric facility and examine the efficacy of intrapersonal and environmental components of a broad ecological intervention. Study one explored what environmental factors at the facility influence diet and physical activity. Participants identified that obesogenic elements involved aspects of the social and built environments and that both intrapersonal interventions and environmental changes are needed to improve physical activity and dietary behaviour. Based on the findings of the first study, study two examined the feasibility of exercise counseling amongst individuals with schizophrenia and its effect on increasing moderate and vigorous levels of physical activity (MVPA). Findings showed that exercise counseling is feasible. Accelerometer results showed that levels of MVPA decreased throughout the study, but levels of mediating psychological variables of physical activity increased. Study three examined the use of point-of-choice prompts to increase stair use at the hospital. Overall, no significant changes in stair use between the study phases were found, but male staff members increased their stair use throughout the study. Using multiple research methods, this thesis has made several contributions to the understanding of physical activity and dietary behaviours in individuals with schizophrenia. Novel solutions are needed to move beyond lifestyle interventions and address multiple individual and environmental factors that cause weight gain in this population.

Keywords: Physical activity
Obesity
Diet
Mental health
Advisor: Faulkner, Guy
Making Room: The Geography of Rooming House Regulation in Toronto

This dissertation addresses the contemporary moment of the uneven regulation of rooming houses using qualitative research methods including semi-structured interviews, participant observation and document analysis. The uneven regulation of rooming houses provides an opportunity to study the local administration of poverty, the fragmented legal landscape of municipal law, the suburbanization of poverty and the governance of a marginalized tenant population. This dissertation questions how municipal governments function administratively, how space—specifically suburban space—influences urban governance and how an imagined geography of a 1970s skid row permeates present-day debates concerning suburban rooming houses. The geography and regulation of rooming houses in Toronto is fragmented. This fragmented legal landscape provides an opportunity to study how the bureaucratic functions of the municipal government alter the state of affordable housing in the city. In 1974, Toronto implemented a rooming house licensing bylaw as a response to fatal fires and unsafe living conditions in rooming houses. Still, in 1989 the Rupert Hotel fire happened in a licensed downtown rooming house. This specific fire garnered considerable municipal attention to the ‘problem of rooming houses.’ When the City of Toronto amalgamated in 1998, the rooming house licensing bylaw remained within the jurisdiction of the former City of Toronto (the downtown) and rooming houses were prohibited in the former cities (the inner suburbs) of Scarborough and North York and licensed (in a limited capacity) in Etobicoke. As poverty continues to rise in Toronto’s inner suburbs, rooming houses are increasingly in demand. Meanwhile, the legal status of rooming houses continue to be precarious as they are perceived to be illegal in the suburbs and legal in the downtown. Overall, this dissertation documents the geography of municipal bylaws in the context of gentrification, urban renewal, increased poverty in the suburbs and the everyday role of law.

Keywords: urban governance
affordable housing
legal geography
licensing
suburbs
municipal law
Advisor: Ruddick, Sue
Conceptual Metaphor and U.S. Strategic Defense

This dissertation asks how it was possible for national missile defense (NMD) in the US to have been revived in the early 1980s and approved for deployment in 2002, despite the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, despite the end of the Cold War, and despite chronic concerns about NMD's feasibility, cost, and rationale. I argue that the survival, revival, and eventual deployment of strategic defense from 1983-2002 were facilitated by conceptual metaphors—the mental constructs that connected missile defense discourse to other meanings like SHIELD, VISION, JOURNEY, ROGUES, and PROLIFERATION. These metaphors worked in both a cognitive sense and a rhetorical sense. In cognitive terms, metaphors shaped the decision-making of policymakers, predisposing them to support NMD. On the rhetorical front, these same metaphors made it difficult for policymakers to offer socially acceptable arguments against missile defense. Thus, policymakers were ‘rhetorically coerced’ into expressing support for NMD.

Keywords: Metaphor
Missile Defense
Embodiment
Nuclear Strategy
Constructivism
Strategic Defense Initiative
Political rhetoric
Advisor: Homer-Dixon, Thomas
Sacred Ritual, Profane Space: The Roman House as Early Christian Meeting Place

This dissertation examines the nature of pre-Constantinian Christian meeting places, with a special focus on Roman domestic space as sacred or ritual space. Given the lack of material evidence for house churches, it has been largely assumed that these domestic spaces were not considered sacred by the Christians who met there, and were instead neutral places of meeting which could easily accommodate the nascent Christian communities’ ritual needs. In this study, I propose not only that these domestic spaces were considered sacred space by Christian communities, but that they were also complex ritual loci in their own right. Mapping what is known from early Christian texts onto the archaeological data for Roman domestic space here provides a new lens through which to examine the relationship between early Christians and their meeting space. Part of the negotiation of this space would likely have included the domestic cult. Despite the fact that the domestic cult operated in a polytheistic context, I assert that its practices did not necessarily cease in those places used for worship by the Christians. I also argue that continued practice of the domestic cult in Roman domestic spaces did not preclude the house-church Christians from understanding their rituals or their meeting places as sacred. Theories of sacred space and ritual practice are here engaged to demonstrate that the house-church Christians constructed temporarily sacred space through ritual enactment.

Keywords: Early Christianity
Roman Religion
Advisor: Kloppenborg, John S.
Abortion in Late-Renaissance Italy

What did abortion mean in late-Renaissance Italy? This dissertation investigates conceptions and practices of abortion in Italy from 1550-1650. It aims to historicize abortion by recovering and joining together, from a broad base of sources, as many contemporary representations and images, points of view and voices on this subject as possible. I argue that abortion was a contentious and ambiguous event that had several meanings and that generated many seemingly inconsistent responses from ordinary individuals and institutional authorities. Abortion was a complex physical and medical event that carried heavy moral load. It was discussed in numerous contexts and had bearings on a variety of socio-historical domains. Drawing on a variety of sources, (including archival materials, legal codes and civic proclamations, works of theology, jurisprudence and medicine, letters and trial documents), and interdisciplinary in its method (utilizing the methodologies of social and cultural history, gender studies, history of ideas, the law, medicine and the body, and microhistory), this dissertation offers the first focused analysis of conceptions of abortion in the early modern period by examining meanings and practices in relation to broader social, political, medical, and religious developments in Counter-Reformation Italy. While detecting and analysing changes in institutional responses towards the practice over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this dissertation argues that culturally pervasive discourses of ambiguity and uncertainty persisted and that this shaped the way abortion was processed at the situational level. Examining the multiple and contradictory ways in which abortion was represented in various discursive contexts, this study throws light on some of the broader social, sexual, and gender imbalances that bore directly on perceptions and experiences of the female body and that shaped the ways in which institutions and individuals processed abortions. Far from being black or white, early modern Italian attitudes and responses to abortion were always complex and multifaceted.

Keywords: Early Modern Italy
History of Abortion
History of the Body
Social and Cultural History
Advisor: Dacome, Lucia
"Artist Writings: Critical Essays, Reception, and Conditions of Production since the 60s"

This dissertation uncovers the history of what is today generally accepted in the art world, that artists are also artist-writers. I analyse a shift from writing by artists as an ostensible aberration to artist writing as practice. My structuring methodology is assessing artist writings and their conditions and reception in their moment of production and in their singularity. In Part 1, I argue that, while the Abstract-Expressionist artist-writers were negatively received, a number of AbEx-inflected conditions influenced and made manifest the valuing of artist writings. I demonstrate that Donald Judd conceived of writing as stemming from the same methods and responsibilities of the artist — following the guiding principle that art comes from art, from taking into account developments of the recent past — and as an essayistic means to argumentatively air his extra-art concerns; that writing for Dan Graham was an art world right of entry; and that Robert Smithson treated words as primary substances in a way that complicates meaning in his articles and in his objects and earthworks, in the process introducing a modernist truth to materials that gave the writing cachet while also serving as the basis for its domestication. In chronicling the reception of these artists’ written production at the time of its writing, I conclude that writing that could be related to artists’ visual practices is what resonated in the late 60s. In Part 2, I explore Frank Bowling’s public deliberation on the relationship of black experience to modernist painting in Arts Magazine; Art & Language’s supposition that an editorial might count as art — arguing that it always already came up for the count as secondary-primary artist writing; female artist-writers’ disclosure of their art and writing in new feminist-founded magazines; and critics’ recognition of artist writings as a critical space. I conclude by proposing that the profusion of and demand for artist writings were constituted by the poststructuralist death of the author along with a persistent meaning-limiting author-function. This study confirms that critical engagement with writing by artists is a challenge: to viewers/readers, to art writers, and to artist-writers during the nascent era of artist writing.

Keywords: artists' writings
Advisor: Cheetham, Mark A.