In the three works—“Room with No View,” “Vessel,” and “Point to Something”—that the company presented at a performance in Glorya Kaufman Hall at UCLA on February 17, 2010, different strategies in movement language were deployed to engage both the dancers who do and those who do not use wheelchairs.

This dissertation deals with affect and its power to structure the current political landscape of migration, displacement and transnationalism into what I call a/effective landscapes. Borrowing the concept of affect from Gilles Deleuze and his followers such as Rosi Braidotti and Brian Massumi, who define affect as an impersonal pre-personal force, an immanent vitality and instrinsic to matter that is linked to the body's ability to experience affect and to affect, my premise is that affect affects emotionally (the protagonists of the work as well as the recipients of thereaders and viewers of artwork) and from which ensue political effects ensue.

Utilizing a comparative methodology, this dissertation explores the work of four German-speaking female transnational filmmakers and writers, all of whom contribute to and intervene in contemporary discourses on transnationalism, transnational subjectivity, concepts of space and time, the discourse on Heimat and monolingualism through their use of affect in writing and filming.

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Seen through a transnational, feminist lens, I try to identify affect in the works of Angelina Maccarone's Unveiled, Andrea taka's Das Fräulein, Herta Müller's Reisende auf einem Bein and Yoko Tawada's short story "Wolkenkarte," examining the political efficacy of their aesthetic of writing and filming affect. Unveiled in particular explores affect as a positive force, with the potential to overcome the various borders that have been created for the purpose of keeping out those regarded as aliens. Das Fräulein explores the affective state of three migrant women from the former Yugoslavia and their transversal becomings, which leads to a new definition for transnationalism beyond identification. "Wolkenkarte" and Reisende auf einem Bein are discussed as vibrant texts, which--inspired by the neutral aesthetics of Roland Barthes and the nomadic aesthetics of Rosi Braidotti--a/effectively engender modes of belonging that are not rooted in stable notions of monocultural and monolingual nation-state and Heimat/home.

Introduction

Methods

Results

Conclusions

Introduction

Methods

Results

Conclusions

In 1936, Walter Benjamin, fearful and frustrated with the traumatic residuals of the First World War and perhaps foreseeing a second one approaching, wrote an essay mourning what he perceived to be the loss of relevancy to storytelling in modern civilization. In this text entitled, "The Storyteller," Benjamin argued that the advent of modernization has alienated humanity from the histories and mythologies of their communities and has rendered the narrative and ultimately the storyteller, irrelevant to modern civilization. The storyteller, whose job was to pass on experience that allowed the community to deal with threatening "forces of nature" became irrelevant, because mankind was facing dangers it had never previous known and no amount of previous experience existed that properly equipped humanity to deal with the perils of modern warfare (102). Our stories no longer served their purpose of preparing us for any impending threat. Consequently, stories, which serve to define and interconnect communities, became ineffective because our modern technologies have distanced us from our traditions and, ultimately, from each other.

Through an examination into the art of mediating a story by considering not only Benjamin's definition of the storyteller, but equally his understanding of the story and its role in the community, it is this discussion's intent to illustrate that the role of the storyteller is still pertinent to modern culture. As Benjamin argued stories must evolve to meet the needs of the community, so must the manner in which the narrative is mediated. Technology, rather than alienating the community from its histories and mythologies, can through the medium of modern cinema fulfill this role of the bard in modern society. It will be illustrated that filmmakers can serve as modern bards that maintain ritual of keeping history alive through storytelling, counseling, advising and helping modern cultures to define themselves. This discussion will concentrate on the work of Carl Theodor Dreyer, Luc Besson, Terry Gilliam, Helma Sanders-Brahms, Christian Duguay, and Tim Burton. Each filmmaker addressed will respond to Benjamin's contention by illustrating the modern method of mediation by which history and mythology is accessed and kept a relevant force within our modern cultures.

Over three decades have passed since Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) was identified as the causative agent of AIDS. With committed distribution and use of antiretroviral therapy, the AIDS crisis ebbed to a point where it is no longer a major concern for a majority in first world countries. However, for the select regions in the world where the disease endures as a major public health concern, there remains considerable incentive to develop a safe, effective vaccine against HIV. The RV144 HIV vaccine clinical trial completed in 2009 has been the only study to show protection against HIV infection. However, the modest efficacy (31.2%, P=0.04) indicated that the vaccine design used in the trial would need to be improved for higher efficacy before widespread use. Since the results of the RV144 clinical trial, various lines of research have elucidated methods that could be explored to improve vaccine efficacy. Follow-up studies of the RV144 trial indicated that an antibody response against regions in the HIV envelope protein (gp120) variable domains (V1V2 and V3) inversely correlated to infection. The identification of broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs) against gp120 was a welcome discovery providing evidence that a human antibody response could effectively neutralize a vast majority of HIV strains. Perhaps most surprising was the observation that multiple families of bNAbs targeting regions in the V1V2 and V3 domains bound oligo-mannose N-linked glycans on gp120. This observation was particularly relevant, as the original gp120 immunogens of the RV144 trial displayed predominantly sialic acid-terminal N-linked glycans. The work in this dissertation describes three major lines of research that converge upon improving upon the efficacy of gp120 based HIV vaccines. First, the identification of a monoclonal antibody that binds a glycan-dependent antibody within the V1V2 domain suggests that antibodies to such epitopes can be raised by immunization with gp120 molecules, providing further support for the viability of a gp120 based vaccine design. Secondly, we show that the addition of key, conserved glycosylation sites to the A244 and MN rgp120 vaccine immunogens of the RV144 clinical trial, in conjunction with modification of the incorporated glycoform, results in new binding by multiple families of bNAbs previously thought not to bind monomeric gp120 proteins. We further built upon the development of glycan-optimized gp120 immunogens by showing that a CHO-derived cell line, in which the Mannosyl (Alpha-1,3-)-Glycoprotein Beta-1,2-N-Acetylglucosaminyltransferase had been inactivated, could be stably transfected to produce glycan-modified clade C rgp120 immunogen. The resulting immunogen would be more amenable for translation to large-scale production, thereby making relevant gp120 based immunogens more accessible for widespread investigation. Finally, we investigated the potential for glycosylated V1V2 and V3 based gp120 protein fragments to improve the magnitude of the antibody response to regions associated with protection in the RV144 trial. Cumulatively, these studies contribute both potential reagents for, as well as a deeper understanding of, a second-generation of gp120 based vaccines for use in clinical trials.

In my dissertation, "Refamiliarizing Empathy through the Aesthetics of James Joyce and Agustín Yáñez," I perform a comparative study of aesthetic portrayals of empathy primarily through two representative novels of Latin-American and European modernism: Yáñez's Al filo del agua (The Edge of the Storm) and a work that greatly inspired it, Joyce's Ulysses. In doing so, I advance a new interdisciplinary approach that incorporates aesthetics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, narratology, ethics, and the haptic in order to show how these two narratives, despite generally being more associated with modernist themes such as alienation, not only contain but construct empathy as well. In Al filo del agua I focus primarily on the character Father Reyes as a figure of empathy, while in Ulysses I namely analyze Bloom, particularly within the blind stripling scene. I also include an examination of the striking woodblock prints that accompany the original edition of Al filo del agua in order to demonstrate how this text features empathy not only textually, but also visually. I ultimately argue that empathy primarily makes an appearance in Al filo del agua through its more political form, prosocial action, while in Ulysses empathy occurs principally in the form of perspective taking via the perspicacious musings of Bloom.