@phdthesis{Abbas2024, author = {Abbas, Eid Nagy Eid}, title = {Demotic Texts from Medinet Habu (Philological, Paleographical, and Cultural Study)}, doi = {10.25972/OPUS-35265}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-352653}, school = {Universit{\"a}t W{\"u}rzburg}, year = {2024}, abstract = {The current study presents a new a group of Demotic ostraca in the belongings of the Cairo Museum. A large part of this group stem from Medinet Habu in the western bank of modern Luxor in Upper Egypt and was discovered in the beginning of the thirties of the last century by the Chicago Oriental Institute (recently renamed as Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures 'ISAC'). A small portion of the collection under consideration come from other Upper Egyptian provenances including Gebelein, Edfu, Kom Ombo, and possibly elsewhere in Thebes. The main goal of the present dissertation is to decipher, translate, and provide a philological, paleographical, and cultural analysis of the group of texts in question. The results of this study are spread over two main parts, the first of which is dedicated to the main and largest part of the collection, i.e. ostraca from Medinet Habu, while the second is concerned with ostraca from other places. The first part comprises of five sections beginning with receipts of money and in-kind payments including some receipts for the payments of the different capitation charges in the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods, a few for land-related payments, as well as others related to different Ptolemaic monopolies or trades such as a receipt for the price of oil, one for the linen tax, in addition to a unique receipt for the rarely attested fish tax. The second section includes accounts and lists of different kinds be it monetary, in-kind, agriculture, or any other type of lists or accounts that record different everyday transactions. The following section presents a relatively different type of lists, namely lists of personal names. The fourth section incorporates a variety of texts of different concerns, e.g. texts of religious nature, letters, temples oaths, or other private documents. Unidentified texts occupy the fifth and final section of the first part. The second part of the study, which comprises texts that originate from different Upper Egyptian localities, includes three sections, i.e. receipts, accounts, and lists of names.}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{HennyKrahmer2023, author = {Henny-Krahmer, Ulrike}, title = {Genre Analysis and Corpus Design: Nineteenth Century Spanish-American Novels (1830-1910)}, doi = {10.25972/OPUS-31999}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-319992}, school = {Universit{\"a}t W{\"u}rzburg}, year = {2023}, abstract = {This work in the field of digital literary stylistics and computational literary studies is concerned with theoretical concerns of literary genre, with the design of a corpus of nineteenth-century Spanish-American novels, and with its empirical analysis in terms of subgenres of the novel. The digital text corpus consists of 256 Argentine, Cuban, and Mexican novels from the period between 1830 and 1910. It has been created with the goal to analyze thematic subgenres and literary currents that were represented in numerous novels in the nineteenth century by means of computational text categorization methods. The texts have been gathered from different sources, encoded in the standard of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), and enriched with detailed bibliographic and subgenre-related metadata, as well as with structural information. To categorize the texts, statistical classification and a family resemblance analysis relying on network analysis are used with the aim to examine how the subgenres, which are understood as communicative, conventional phenomena, can be captured on the stylistic, textual level of the novels that participate in them. The result is that both thematic subgenres and literary currents are textually coherent to degrees of 70-90 \%, depending on the individual subgenre constellation, meaning that the communicatively established subgenre classifications can be accurately captured to this extent in terms of textually defined classes. Besides the empirical focus, the dissertation also aims to relate literary theoretical genre concepts to the ones used in digital genre stylistics and computational literary studies as subfields of digital humanities. It is argued that literary text types, conventional literary genres, and textual literary genres should be distinguished on a theoretical level to improve the conceptualization of genre for digital text analysis.}, subject = {Gattungstheorie}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Zhang2023, author = {Zhang, Yanxiang}, title = {The Making of a Place: Topographical Literature on West Lake by Tian Rucheng (b. 1501) and Zhang Dai (b. 1597)}, doi = {10.25972/OPUS-32759}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-327590}, school = {Universit{\"a}t W{\"u}rzburg}, year = {2023}, abstract = {This dissertation explores the local gazetteers of West Lake that were compiled by literati of the Ming dynasty. In 1547, the first West Lake gazetteer was published by the local literatus of Hangzhou, Tian Rucheng 田汝成. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, accompanying the huge enthusiasm for West Lake and the flourishing of its tourism, the production of West Lake gazetteers reached its peak. This trend, however, was reduced by the turmoils in the last years of the Ming and the dynastic transition, a period when West Lake had also experienced destruction. Nevertheless, the practice was resumed in the first decades of the Qing dynasty by some literati who had survived the disasters. One prominent work of this period was compiled by the Ming loyalist and "remnant subject" Zhang Dai 張岱, who wrote an author's preface in 1671. This dissertation can be divided into two parts. The first part focuses on the editorial principles of compilers, e.g., which materials are included, how they are organized and presented. It explores various possible intentions of the compilers, such as scholarly and documentary, practical and oriented toward tour-guiding, didactic and educational, and personal and nostalgic ones. The second part focuses on some of the perceptions, attitudes, and values of literati focusing on West Lake. The discourses analyzed in this part include West Lake as a hybrid between metropolitan city and sheer wilderness, as a national symbol and object of nostalgia of the lost dynasty, and as a place of pleasure-seeking and indulgence. While a discourse often had a long tradition and historical development, the emphasis of the study is on the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, i.e., the late Ming.}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Awadallah2022, author = {Awadallah, Abdelhaleem Aly Ahmed}, title = {The Crew of the Sun Bark in the Amduat}, doi = {10.25972/OPUS-28711}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-287115}, school = {Universit{\"a}t W{\"u}rzburg}, year = {2022}, abstract = {The Amduat is one of the most important Netherworld Books which was recorded in various kinds of Ancient Egyptian sources since the beginning of the 18th dynasty, especially the walls of the royal tombs. The main theme of the Amduat is the journey of the sun god through the underworld where the solar bark and its crew is the central scene of the journey. The study focuses on finding the reasons of choosing the crew's members who manage the sun bark's journey in the Amduat. It also aims at illustrating the functions and responsibilities of each crew member. Following a historical approach, the study analyzes the Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts as the most important documents before the New Kingdom, and proceeding to the inscriptions and writings of the monuments which contain portrayals and inscriptions of the Amduat in the New Kingdom. Furthermore, it sheds some light on the solar cycle's main features and primary aspects, and tries to scrutinize the date, meaning, and symbolisms of the Amduat and its indications in the earlier sources.}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Ravasio2020, author = {Ravasio, Paola}, title = {Black Costa Rica. Pluricentrical Belonging in Afra-Costa Rican Poetry}, edition = {1. Auflage}, publisher = {W{\"u}rzburg University Press}, address = {W{\"u}rzburg}, isbn = {978-3-95826-140-2}, doi = {10.25972/WUP-978-3-95826-141-9}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-202981}, school = {W{\"u}rzburg University Press}, pages = {iii, 264}, year = {2020}, abstract = {Black Costa Rica: Pluricentrical Belonging in Afra-Costa Rican Poetry engages the lyric of Eulalia Bernard (Lim{\´o}n, Costa Rica *1935), Shirley Campbell (San Jos{\´e}, Costa Rica *1965), and Dlia McDonald (Col{\´o}n, Panam{\´a} *1965) by a historically backwards-looking perspective that explores a pluricentrical sense of belonging. This concept refers mainly to plural centers of cultural and historical identifications along a glocal sociohistorical continuum stretched across the multifold aspects of the nation~diaspora dynamic/s. The literary analysis traces the coming of age of the Afro-Costa Rican community in these women's poetry as a local manifestation of global phenomena concerning diaspora/s, the dialectics of race and nation, and processes of assimilation and of marginalization. The dissertation asks, fundamentally, how does their poetry reveal a historical imagination referring both to a national specificity while simultaneously expressing identification with socio-historical processes in the circum-Caribbean region? What are the poetic themes and which the lyrical forms that constitute a myriad of local and global aspects regarding the coming of age of the Afro-Costa Rican community? Departing from these premises, the dissertation tells a story of the past by addressing the ways in which the glocal is deployed through specific figures of speech. Based on the study of what I have termed a modernized-nature oxymoron in McDonald, a skin-history metonymy in Campbell, and code-switching in Bernard, spatial and racial configurations as well as linguistic identity are here addressed as features of a trifold historical imagination yielding pluricentrical belonging. The oxymoron tells of an outernational past (diasporic) while the metonymy declaims a supranational one (global); multilingualism instead points to an infranational historical imagination ('non'-Costa Rican). By way of a close reading, the dissertation tells the recent story of the country's past in the form of a three layered stor(y)ing of spatially-, meta-historically-, and multilingually-defined imaginings of Black Costa Rica.}, subject = {Lyrik}, language = {en} } @book{Glasgow2018, author = {Glasgow, Rupert}, title = {Minimal Selfhood and the Origins of Consciousness}, edition = {1. Auflage}, publisher = {W{\"u}rzburg University Press}, address = {W{\"u}rzburg}, isbn = {978-3-95826-078-8 (Print)}, doi = {10.25972/WUP-978-3-95826-079-5}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-157470}, publisher = {W{\"u}rzburg University Press}, pages = {260}, year = {2018}, abstract = {The aim of the book is to ground the logical origins of consciousness in what I have previously called the 'minimal self'. The idea is that elementary forms of consciousness are logically dependent not, as is commonly assumed, on ownership of an anatomical brain or nervous system, but on the intrinsic reflexivity that defines minimal selfhood. The book seeks to trace the logical pathway by which minimal selfhood gives rise to the possible appearance of consciousness. It is argued that in specific circumstances it thus makes sense to ascribe elementary consciousness to certain predatory single-celled organisms such as amoebae and dinoflagellates as well as to some of the simpler animals. Such an argument involves establishing exactly what those specific circumstances are and determining how elementary consciousness differs in nature and scope from its more complex manifestations.}, subject = {Selbst}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Glasgow2017, author = {Glasgow, Rupert}, title = {The Minimal Self}, publisher = {W{\"u}rzburg University Press}, address = {W{\"u}rzburg}, isbn = {978-3-95826-052-8 (print)}, doi = {10.25972/WUP-978-3-95826-053-5}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-145252}, school = {W{\"u}rzburg University Press}, pages = {392}, year = {2017}, abstract = {The aim of The Minimal Self is to undertake a conceptual analysis of the term 'self' and thereby establish the minimal conditions that must be met to ascribe selfhood to an entity. This conceptual analysis focuses on what is termed 'intrinsic reflexivity', which is taken as the defining feature of selfhood. Three underlying categories of intrinsic reflexivity are distinguished: self-maintenance, self-reproduction and self-containment. These three fundamental categories provide a framework within which it is possible to distinguish entities that can be designated 'selves' from entities that are merely 'self-like', thus establishing the logical preconditions for the 'emergence' of selfhood. By examining the fuzzy borderlines between selves and the merely self-like as manifest in phenomena such as dissipative systems, genetic material, viruses and bacteria, it becomes possible to ascertain a form of 'minimal selfhood', a mode of being shared by all selves qua selves. Free-living single-celled organisms such as protozoa are paradigmatic instances of minimal selfhood to the extent that they can be characterized in terms of the three intrinsically reflexive processes of self-maintenance, self-reproduction and self-containment. Minimal selfhood is also presupposed by more complex multicellular selves such as animals. Such an analysis is found to shed light on the origin of life and on the nature of organisms and biological individuals.}, subject = {Selbst}, language = {en} } @article{Middelhoff2017, author = {Middelhoff, Frederike}, title = {Literary autozoographies: contextualizing species life in german animal autobiography}, series = {Humanities}, volume = {6}, journal = {Humanities}, number = {2}, publisher = {MDPI}, issn = {2076-0787}, doi = {10.3390/h6020023}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-198052}, pages = {23}, year = {2017}, abstract = {What does it mean to take animal autobiography seriously and how can we account for the representation of life-narrating animals? The article investigates animal autobiographies as 'literary autozoographies', drawing attention to both the generic contexts and the epistemological premises of these texts. Adopting a double-bind approach stemming from autobiographical research as well as cultural animal studies, the article focuses on early nineteenth-century equine autozoographies from the German-speaking tradition. These texts are discussed exemplarily in relation to the parameters of fictional autobiographies, before they are contextualized with historical discourses regarding horses in natural history and so-called 'horse-science'. Due to the fact that the poetics and aesthetics of the genre are modeled on the templates of factual autobiographies, the article argues that literary autozoographies can be read as fictional autobiographies as well as meta-auto/biographical discourse undermining autobiographical conventions. Furthermore, it shows that literary autozoography and zoology share a common historical and ideological epistemology accounting for the representation of animals in both fields. Literary autozoographies thus participate in the negotiation and production of species-specific knowledge. Reading Life of the Mecklenburg Mare Amante (1804), Life of a Job Horse (1807) and Life of a Worn-Out Hack (1819) alongside equine-centric discourses around 1800, the article demonstrates in what ways these texts can be regarded as part of a regime of knowledge attributing emotions and cognitive capacities to horses, while simultaneously arguing for humane treatment on the basis of interspecies homologies.}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Masis2015, author = {Mas{\´i}s, Jethro}, title = {The Primacy of Phenomenology Over Cognitivism. Towards a Critique of the Computational Theory of Mind}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-136404}, school = {Universit{\"a}t W{\"u}rzburg}, year = {2015}, abstract = {This investigation deals with the history of the reception of phenomenological philosophy in cognitive science and how this reception has altered and continues to shape the traditional view of cognition inspired by the computer metaphor of mind. The claim will be espoused that cognitive science is not devoid of a philosophical perspective and cognitivism will be characterized precisely as the philosophy behind much work in cognitive science. In conclusion, the irreducibility of philosophical questioning to cognitive science will be defended and reasons will be given as to why it matters to mount such defense.}, subject = {Subjektive Theorie}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Schaub2012, author = {Schaub, Kerstin}, title = {As Written in the Flesh. The Human Body as Medium of Cultural Identity and Memory in Fiction from New Zealand}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-78336}, school = {Universit{\"a}t W{\"u}rzburg}, year = {2012}, abstract = {This dissertation focuses on selected novels written by contemporary indigenous authors from Aotearoa/New Zealand and examines the fictional imagination of the human body as a medium of cultural identity and memory. The novels discussed are Keri Hulme's »The Bone People« (1984), »Nights in the Gardens of Spain« (1995) and »The Uncle's Story« (2000) by Witi Ihimaera as well as James George's »Hummingbird« (2003). In order to further decolonisation processes and to come to terms with the colonial past and the complexity of present realities, the fictional works position the human body as an active entity in the negotiation of specific cultural epistemologies. This project explores the narrative translation of corporeality that is used to locate alternative concepts of identity and cultural memory. Taking into account indigenous perspectives, this thesis makes use of the current theoretical approaches presented by pragmatism and affect theory in order to analyse the investment of the novels in feeling and the reciprocal relationship between text and corporeality depicted by the narratives. On the one hand, the novels aim to undermine oppressive and marginalising categories by placing particular emphasis on »sensuous gaps« in the text. On the other hand, the narratives intend to construct alternative identities and evoke specific aspects of indigenous histories and knowledge by imagining the human body in terms of »sensuous inscription«. The novels portray individuals who act from a place in-between different cultures, and articulate a desire to dissolve polarities and emphasise individual and cultural transformation as a formative element in the creation of complex identities and new perspectives.}, subject = {Postkoloniale Literatur}, language = {en} }