6 research outputs found
Emotion and psychopathology : bridging affective and clinical science/ Edit.: Jonathan Rottenberg; Sheri L. Johson
No full textviii, 336 hal.; 25 cm
Emotion and psychopathology : bridging affective and clinical science/ Edit.: Jonathan Rottenberg; Sheri L. Johson
No full textviii, 336 hal.; 25 cm
Theatre of Testimony: An investigation in devising Asylum
Get PDFThe use of testimonies in performance is enjoying increased artistic and critical popularity on contemporary world stages and has a long and rich tradition on South African stages. Both internationally and locally, emerging and established playwrights working on migration and refugee issues are seeking to incorporate the testimony of asylum seekers into their work. This necessitates a need to critically reflect on the influences that shape and structure the staging of testimonies. This study argues that increased migration and the mounting number arrivals of asylum seekers on South African shores, has motivated at times violent interaction between host communities and the new arrivals. These incidents have inspired a distinct trend of testimonial performances around the concept of asylum. This dissertation uses Narrative analysis to read examples of contemporary theatre of testimony plays that examine this phenomenon. The study examines how playwright positioning informs the structuring of asylum testimonies on stage in addition to contextualising the ethical and moral complexities the playwright's positionality places on their practice. Through three case studies, the study interrogates how playwright positioning informs notions of authorship, authenticity, truth, theatricality and ethics. The study further investigates the challenges speaking for 'self' and speaking for the 'other' place on testimonial playwrights
Movement Literacy: Creating a Healing Encounter in Physical Education
No full textModern Physical Education (PE) administered systemic models of teaching crafts. It
atrophied the play element in human nature, and shaped a single-lens attitude to the
treatment of bodies. Framing minds, it veiled the conditions of learning processes and
thus “instituted” the sovereignty of subjective concerns. It created many unexplained
“gaps” between abstract concerns and pragmatic issues.
Following language’s poststructural analysis, PE’s professional communication
practices were exposed to alternative methodological refocusing from conforming to
move to personalise the agent’s experience in moving to learn.
In the wake of poststructuralism came Whitehead’s Physical Literacy (PL) which I adopt
as “leitmotif” to reform PE’s teacher preparation and schooling practices. PL addresses
children up to 14 years. For older pupils, PL’s language needs to constitute versions of
human purposes voiced by the introduction of a new development called “Movement
Literacy” (ML). ML acknowledges that language and movement are very different forms
of “self-expression”. By itself however, self-expression is inadequate when it comes to
learning how to learn. Critical dialogue needs to be brought in to facilitate meaningful
innovation in the PE world. By employing the philosophies of phenomenology and
hermeneutics I make a case that expression in languaging movement [subjecting the
agent’s account to hermeneutic treatment] is expression for others, and in exchange
with others the expression is redefined, and changes the way one sees and talks about
movement and about oneself.
In its reflective practice, reverentially, ML will also unpack pedagogy’s hidden protocol,
hoping to reclaim PE’s authentic purpose. It connects secular matters with sacred
implications by reconciling the polemic differences between “techne” [purpose] and
“phronesis ” [prudence]. With limited reference to Eastern “selflessness” ML advances
teaching, through pedagogy and andragogy as a life-time mission. Not providing
answers, the thesis offers a manifesto attempting to facilitate new questions such as:
how can language and movement communicate? and how can movement educators
“minister” to their learner’s sense of well-being
The Persistence of Minimalism
Get PDFThe following work develops a new and general theory of minimalism – one addressing both its transhistorical and interdisciplinary dimensions, and capable of accounting for existing minimalism of every epoch and in every medium, while suitably open to embrace minimalist work yet to be created. To offer such a theory it is necessary not only to revisit the histories of minimalist practice and criticism, but also to consider its radical philosophical ground and implications. Hence its principal thesis – that minimalism exemplifies the persistence and facticity of the Real – grapples at once with the ontological heart of minimalist theory, and its practical instantiation through canonical as well as rarely considered examples. Divided into three parts, the first part addresses minimalism as the manifestation of particular aesthetic properties in relation to critical and theoretical trends. Since it becomes apparent that no single descriptive or theoretical account adequately frames minimalism, the discussion turns to the possibility of discovering a philosophical ground equally radical to the minimalist objects it addresses. The Real – an indifferent field of forces from which contingent entities are subtracted from within an irreversible temporal passage – offers precisely this radical continuum. Minimalism, by exposing the continuity between radical poiesis and an essentially quantitative understanding of Being, clarifies the indifferent persistence of the Real in every existential situation. Penetrating to the heart of this proposition, parts two and three respectively address minimalism in terms of its quantitative logic of Being – every exemplary subtraction from which is instantiated a type of existential calculation – and its exemplary aesthetic manifestation in terms of an existential transumption – a constructive poietic displacement by which minimalism renders itself maximally intelligible in terms of its objecthood and persistence. The work concludes with a typology which reorients and confirms the substance of the preceding argumentation
The uses of silence : a twentieth-century preoccupation in the light of fictional examples, 1900-1950
Get PDFA striking feature of twentieth-century Western cultural history was a
preoccupation with silence. This thesis is a survey of the phenomenon across a
broad range of literary and theoretical discourses actively engaged in the period
in exploring and exploiting silence's expressive and philosophical potential. Its
focus, and unifying principle, is the dynamic resourcefulness of the motif-the
diversity of its uses and significations. The meaning of silence shifts according to
its context and the discourse deploying it. By analysing an array of novels and
theoretical formulations-by writers as diverse as James, Chopin, Conrad, H. D.,
Forster, Lawrence, Faulkner, and Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Blanchot, Hassan,
Macherey, Irigaray, Spivak, Derrida-the mobility of silence as a construct is
exposed.
Silence is identified in the fiction of the period 1900-1950, and its
implications are assessed in the light of the various ways in which its uses were
understood and interpreted by twentieth-century theorists. Theory provides a
heuristic device for the comprehension of the fiction selected for scrutiny whilst
further highlighting the extent of the past century's dedication to the motif.
Fiction and theory are regarded as two different manifestations of a fascination
with silence: fiction dramatizes a commitment to the motif which comes to be
formally registered in theoretical discourse as the century progresses.
After an introductory chapter outlining the expanse of the phenomenon to
be studied, the thesis is divided into two parts illustrating the discrete
implications attaching to the motif: 'Social Silences' and 'Ontological Silences'.
The project questions whether the multiplicity of silence's usage may work to
depotentiate its signifying power; in particular, whether its role in abstract
'ontological' formulations diminishes its force for emancipatory 'social'
discourses. In conclusion, by means of the synchronic organization of the thesis,
silence's import is shown to lie in its resourcefulness rather than in any intrinsic
characteristic it might be thought to possess
