Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Communities – Fiction'

At present, it can be difficult for teachers to teach writing effectively in the formal classroom due to large class sizes and unreasonable standardized testing criteria. As a result, many students are unable to learn how to communicate well in writing. Teachers will need to look outside the traditional methods of writing instruction to find ways to teach writing strategies effectively and efficiently. Informal learning occurs frequently in online spaces. Online communities, such as fan fiction websites, offer an opportunity for experts and novices to work in the same digital space where one can learn from each other through interactions within the community.

This dissertation analyzes the discourse among participants in an online fan fiction website, fanfiction.mugglenet.com, in order to find evidence of writing support and effective writing instruction. Participants in the community contribute to the success of writers as they comment on stories and in the forums. Members of the community interact with one another in three different ways: through comments on stories as they are being updated, through comments in the Beta Forums, and through private interactions between beta readers and authors. Comment feeds and threads from the Beta Forums were coded for evidence of writing support and elements of effective writing instruction. Findings of the study centered on motivation and support for writers as they continue to update their stories.

The study creates theoretical constructs to contribute to existing research on educational technology and writing instruction. Based on the evidence of this study, informal learning in the community can be harnessed to teach writing to novice writers. Technology and new media prove to be a useful tool for educators who are looking to for new ways to teach writing. This grounded theory research plans to provide teachers in the classroom with more effective tools. Online fan fiction communities offer students a chance to interact with other writers about stories they have written. Learning from the community has potential to provide motivation for students to write more often and frequently. Informal learning through the community has the potential to give educators a tool to teach vital writing skills.

BACK TO BLUEFIELD is a collection of ten short stories set in the fictional small town of Bluefield, Ohio. Like “Dance of the Happy Shades” by Alice Munro, BACK TO BLUEFIELD highlights patriarchal limitations women often face in rural communities. In “This Little Light of Mine,” a teenage girl attempts to escape the sexual abuse inflicted on her by her father, while in “Praise Camp,” a youth pastor counsels a teenager to repress homosexual feelings, yet cannot bury her own unrequited love for her female best friend. In the spirit of Hemingway’s “The End of Something,” each story contain a high, clear note of grief. In “Lottie’s Winter,” a widow pushes away a new chance at love because of her lasting grief over her husband’s death. Disoriented by profound loss, and limited by Bluefield’s cultural expectations and economic struggles, each character confronts staggering gaps between their realities and their desires.

This essay presents aspects of fan fiction conducive to language learning, and therefore relevant to teachers of English in upper-secondary schools in Sweden. Students may lack motivation to engage in creative writing assignments in formal learning settings. However, young people engage in fan fiction-writing, and by doing so, develop their language and literacy skills. Drawing upon aspects of fan fiction-writing and participation in fan fiction communities, such as, imitation, interaction, and literary discussions, teachers could find inspiration in these activities to use in their teaching.

English
Ph.D.
As a writer popularly known for his fervent self-interrogations and encyclopedic second novel Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace’s most apparent significance in US literary history lies in his explicit response to his postmodern predecessors, such as John Barth and Thomas Pynchon. In his now infamous essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction,” Wallace argued that postmodern authors had over-invested in the literary tools of irony and self-reference to such a degree that they became complicit in the erosion of the same communal principles that broadcast television attacks in its bid for increasing consumer dependency and profit. In search of a way beyond this complicity, Wallace called for a brand of “anti-rebels” who would discard irony for earnest principles and teach us how to resist the temptations of the United States’ consumer culture. This call was heard by literary critics. “E Unibus Pluram” is the center for arguments over Wallace’s fiction, as critics discuss whether that essay expresses the literary project Wallace actually pursued and to what extent it should guide our reading practices. One problem this dissertation identifies in these discussions is an overemphasis on specific devices like irony that Wallace analyzes in “E Unibus Pluram.” Though important for understanding his argument, this overemphasis comes at the expense of our seeing the deeper problem that Wallace identifies in “E Unibus Pluram,” which is the atomization of US culture that is fueled by our addiction to pleasure-based commodities like television. The loss of focus on this central problem has led to confusion in readings of Wallace that fail to see the abiding concerns that he carried from his first work to his last. This dissertation seeks to remedy this problem by reading Wallace’s mature fiction as a developing struggle against the atomization of US culture. In this struggle, Wallace launched a series of increasingly complex narrative strategies for promoting a communal way of life to his readers. This dissertation reads several of these strategies to reveal two developments in Wallace’s thought: his diagnosis of the problems facing US culture as created by an unmitigated individualism and his understanding of the best way to respond to individualism by emphasizing the great importance of social institutions. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that Wallace pictured fictional communities throughout his career as a means of critiquing the atomized space of the contemporary United States. He built these communities to help readers see that there are different ways to occupy the world than those promoted by consumer capitalism, but he also structured his narratives to teach readers how to see and think in the ways he thought necessary for realizing such alternatives.
Temple University--Theses

Speculative fiction is a genre that is gaining urgency in the contemporary Canadian literary scene as authors and readers become increasingly concerned with what it means to live in a nation implicated in globalization. This genre is useful because with it, authors can extrapolate from the present to explore what some of the long-term effects of globalization might be. This thesis specifically considers the long-term effects of globalization on communities, a theme that speculative fictions return to frequently. The selected speculative fictions engage with current theory on globalization and community in their explorations of how globalization might affect the types of communities that can be enacted. This thesis argues that these texts demonstrate how Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s notion of “cooperative autonomy” can be uniquely cultivated in the conditions of globalization – despite the fact that those conditions are characterized by the fragmentation of traditional forms of community (Empire 392).

The category of young adult (YA) fiction encompasses a wide range of genres; but despite this generic diversity, it has so far failed to represent the full range of communities that make up contemporary British society. Discussions are ongoing between professionals in the publishing industry and campaigning individuals and organisations who are aiming to redress this imbalance. Writers making new work are in a position to help effect a change, but acknowledging and responding to the call for inclusion can be far from straightforward, with questions being raised such as: ‘how far can a writer stray from their own lived experience?’ and ‘how can a writer avoid tokenism or cultural appropriation when writing for inclusion?’ This thesis consists of a new YA contemporary novel, Sea Change, and an accompanying critical essay, which reflects on the challenges I encountered while aiming to write for inclusion. Set in the Scottish Highlands, Sea Change is a contemporary YA crime novel, in which the world of the sixteen-year-old protagonist, Alex, is thrown into turmoil when he discovers a dead body next to his fishing boat. The decisions Alex makes following this discovery set in motion the plot of the story. The narrative, as it unfolds, facilitates the exploration of themes frequently associated with adolescence, such as friendship, risk-taking and the maturation into an adult identity, along with themes specifically linked to Alex’s status as a member of marginalised communities because of his sexuality and social class, such as prejudice, acute stress brought on by economic pressure, and low self-esteem. This thesis, then, reviews the opinions and recommendations being expressed by campaigners for greater diversity, and exposes the uncertainties and challenges a writer faces when aiming to write for inclusion.

In the wake of the guilty verdict of George Floyd’s murderer, police officer Derek Chauvin, there is hope for change in the pattern of police brutality against black people in the United States. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas was published three years prior to George Floyd’s death, in 2017, and is a realistic fictional novel in the young adult genre that has gained attention for its relevant contribution in the debate of racism and police violence, as the fictional victim Khalil Harris, an unarmed black teenager, does not receive the same justice as George Floyd. In this essay, reader response to The Hate U Give is analysed in order to examine how it affects the opinions and worldview of the reader during and after the read. A close reading and analysis of pivotal scenes was carried out using affective stylistics, in order to interpret what the text does to the reader word-by-word, and subsequently the reader’s creation of meaning was examined and discussed. The reader’s response was then analysed with Stanley Fish’s theoretical framework of interpretive communities, groups with shared social norms and worldviews, which dictate how individuals create meaning in the first place. The analysis suggests that readers of The Hate U Give, while starting out in different, albeit to a certain extent similar, interpretive communities, will gradually align themselves with the interpretive community of Black Lives Matter through shared ideas and opinions and the increased understanding they develop when they read the novel.

The aim of this study is to examine knowledge processes in online spaces. It focuses on threeparticular cases: the Bonfireside Chat podcast, the community around the computer game Europa Universalis 4, and the Supernatural fandom. By applying the frameworks of Wenger’s (1998) communities of practice and Hall’s (1980) modes of reading, it examines how these spaces and their communities engage with their respective media artifacts. It concludes thatthese processes display high levels of complexity and literacy, and that a deeper understanding of such processes is useful in developing future educational efforts, online as well as offline.

This study seeks to excavate a certain line of irony running through the war fiction of Ernest Hemingway, Evelyn Waugh, and Joseph Heller. Bookended by brief engagements with Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895) and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), the study of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929), Waugh’s Put Out More Flags (1942) and Sword of Honour trilogy (1965), and Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) seeks to map out the emergence of a kind of irony that is best understood to function as a mode of apprehension. As the publication dates of these novels would suggest, my concern relates predominantly to the literature produced after the First and Second World Wars; all three men saw war firsthand, and in this way theirs is also a kind of experiential irony. At the same time as the work traces the emergence of this mode of irony, it also argues that a concurrent decline in the existence of sympathetic communities formed around shared experiences (what Linda Hutcheon calls “discursive communities”) took place – a decline which served to unsettle the successful transmission of irony. The fate of the individual in wartime at times appears to be closely bound to their participation in a series of these communities, and protagonists like Jake Barnes, Frederic Henry, Basil Seal, Guy Crouchback, and John Yossarian each demonstrate a different level of cohesion with the social group – with differing results. Woven through the analysis is a consideration of the inheritance of this line of irony, with an unexpected outcome being the emergence of the curious kinship of Hemingway and Waugh. Ultimately this project will contribute to the vastly dynamic area of irony studies. With its specific focus on the use of irony in war fiction born out of the two great global conflicts of the twentieth century, this thesis offers an exploratory reading of a historically contingent mode of irony that is used to such devastating effect in the novels listed above, and that underwrites the fraught and fractured character of ironic discourse in a postmodern world.

Magister Artium - MA
In these novels suspense plays an important role, but elements that are usually found in literary works are also prominent in these narratives, for instance the fleshing out of characters' psyche and working with philosophical or current issues. In rhetorical terms these novels can be said to be suspense novels that make use of literary devices and themes. Novels by Deon Meyer fit into this category. In the Netherlands translations of his works are to be found among 'literaire thrillers' in bookshops. Therefore one of Meyer's novels was chosen for analysis. In this study the ways in which suspense is created in a narrative text is investigated. Proteus, a literary thriller, was chosen for its handling of characters and events in the transition in South Africa from an apartheid state to a democratic dispensation. This poses an intricate challenge for the writer. The reseach problem posed is this: How is literary suspense created in a narrative text? The creation of suspense in a narrative text has to do with literary communication. For this reason Roman Jakobson's well-known model for literary communication is at the basis of this research. Rene Appel's criteria for the creation of suspense in narrative texts, as it is explained in his work Spanning in verhalen: Over het schrijven van spannende boeken (2007), is also part of this study at its theoretical base. Various relevant sources have been included in this regard. In this formalistic study various elements pertaining to suspense in the narrative are part of the research in terms of isolating the ways in which suspense is produced in a narrative text in general and specifically in the case of Proteus. Also in this regard the novel's literarity is discussed.
South Africa

This study investigates the contribution of Romanian and German academic and literary communities to the formation of readerships for Margaret Atwood’s dystopian fiction and examines various conceptualisations of the Canadian writer as a literary celebrity in Romania and Germany by taking into account the response to and institutionalisation of the writer’s literary dystopias in the two countries both before and after the fall of communism in 1989. It aims to demonstrate that publishing, translation and cultural policies complicate the cultural reception of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian fiction in Eastern European countries and re-evaluates critical representations of Eastern European readerships and publishing contexts as invisible within the global literary field. By investigating the strategies which publishers, editors and translators employed in the dissemination and institutionalisation of Atwood’s work in Romania and Germany, this thesis examines paradigm shifts both in translation, publishing and marketing strategies and conceptualisations of literary celebrity as shaped by cultural state policies. To this end, the first chapter highlights representations of literary markets and readerships in the Atwood archive, and analyses how the Atwood literary archive values celebrity and translation. The second chapter charts the first translation projects which were carried out in both East Germany and communist Romania and points out how forms of censorship have impacted upon the production, dissemination and circulation of her work in translation. The third chapter draws upon interviews with Romanian academics and examines teaching and reading practices employed within a post-communist context. Finally, the study suggests how further examinations of the response to both Canadian and dystopian fiction within Eastern European contexts might proceed.

The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between author, text and user-generated modifications in the context of the computer game Civilization 4. These relationships are studied in part by analyzing how the game mechanics have been modified, and in part through analyzing the communication taking place between players of Civilization 4 in the CivFanatics online forums. The study concludes that fans as creators are increasingly leaning on each other and their self-produced accumulated body of knowledge in the generation of new and further changes to the narrative universe, and that the original creators of the game have all but faded from view. This suggests that fan creativity is not situated against or directed at particular authors (original or otherwise), but a community effort quite independent from original intent.

This study examines the major works of Judith Sargent Murray, Hannah Webster Foster, and Susanna Haswell Rowson, three major writers of the 1790s whose writing responds to the ideologies of the early American Republic. I suggest that Murray, Foster, and Rowson write conduct fiction which responds to the changing attitudes toward women and education after the American Revolution. Using fiction, these authors comment on the republican woman, the need for women's education, and the necessity for women to gather in communities for support. Despite the prevailing notion that reading too many novels would corrupt young women, Judith Sargent Murray's novella, The Story of Margaretta (1786), Hannah Webster Foster's novels, The Coquette (1797) and The Boarding School (1798), and Susanna Rowson's novels, Charlotte Temple (1794) and Reuben and Rachel; or, Tales of Old Times (1798), were some of the most popular books in the late eighteenth century. If these novels were not meant to be read by young women, who were the authors' primary audience, why were they so popular? This project situates these questions in the political environment the authors were writing in to show that a relationship exists between what women were reading and how authors of conduct fiction helped facilitate the changing roles of women in the early Republic.
ID: 030646201; System requirements: World Wide Web browser and PDF reader.; Mode of access: World Wide Web.; Thesis (M.A.)--University of Central Florida, 2011.; Includes bibliographical references (p. 101-108).
M.A.
Masters
English
Arts and Humanities
English; Literary, Cultural and Textual Studies Track

In this thesis, depending on Benedict Anderson’s Studies of nationalism in his book The Imagined Communities, I will prove that in her historical fiction for children, Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands, the Palestinian writer Sonia Nimr is reviving and reforming Arab national identity. Anderson identifies the nation as a group imagined by its members; the people who perceive and identify themselves as equal members in this group. For the people to imagine their nation, Anderson states three tools: the map as a representation of the geographical space, the census as a representation of population identity categories that live in a particular land, and the museum as the representation of historical and the legal continuity of certain ethnicities in a certain geographical space. The three tools are thoroughly abstracted and used in Nimr’s book as we follow the footsteps of Nimr’s heroine in her travels, we see her drawing Arab historical map, when Palestine was a canton in the great Arab State. The social fabric Nimr weaves by the characters in her book reflects the real and the reformed census of Arab ethnicities and their social classes with the highlighting of the essential role of Arabic women in society. The narrated society of Nimr’s work reforms nation’s census which accords with the extended pan Arab geography of Arab nation. The nation imagining requirements are completed by visiting the history and wandering in the historical Arabic cantons and cities which materialize Nimr’s trail to perpetuate those important places in her textual museum, which she builds in her addressed work to children to answer their question about who we are and how we are the most eligible ethnicities to live on this land. Nimr does not promote a certain political agenda nor casts a holy cover on the past; by contrast, she teaches Arab children past lessons to revive and reform their modern Arab national identity as a remedy for the catastrophic national present.

This thesis ‘opens up’ an exploration of the relationship between identity and achievement in reading, taking as its focus a case study of 16 – 19 year olds studying at Black Country further education colleges. As a group Black Country young people are often characterised through quantitative measurement, league tables and inspection reports, as underachieving in ‘schooled’ literacy. Drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives from Bourdieu, Bernstein and Foucault this project seeks to explore, problematize and challenge these representations offering a more dynamic account of young people’s engagement with textual experience that is grounded in young people’s own accounts of their experience of their out of school literacies. At the same I offer a critically reflexive account of the process of researching and representing research and attempt to achieve homology between the theoretical perspectives I put to use in my analysis and the practices of writing a PhD. I aim to present a reflexive piece of work that explores the situatedness of the PhD, and its authoring, as product and process.

In a golden era for comic based media, this paper uses the hypothetical emergence of superheroes to analyze the assumptions and predictions of three international relations theories: realism, liberalism, and constructivism. Comics consistently reflect the real world, paralleling events and concepts discussed in foreign affairs dialogues. The thought experiment, and the comic genre itself, provides a vehicle for thinking broadly about the political and social ramifications of successful or failed problem solving, state interaction, and scientific advances.

More than 2.6 million troops have deployed in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Still, surveys reveal that more than half feel “disconnected” from their civilian counterparts, and this feeling persists despite ongoing efforts, in the academy and elsewhere, to help returning veterans overcome physical and mental wounds, seek an education, and find meaningful ways to contribute to society after taking off the uniform. This dissertation argues that Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans struggle with reassimilation because they lack healthy, complete models of veteran identity to draw upon in their postwar lives, a problem they’re working through collectively in literature and artwork. The war veteran—returning home transformed by the harsh realities of military training and service, having seen humanity at its extremes, and interacting with a society apathetic toward his or her experiences—should engage in the act of storytelling. This act of sharing experiences and crafting-self subverts stereotypes. Storytelling, whether in a book read by millions, or in a single conversation with a close family member, should instruct civilians on the topic of human resiliency; it should instruct veterans on the topic of homecoming. But typically, veterans do not tell stories. Civilians create barriers to storytelling in the form of hollow platitudes—“thank you for your service” or “I can never understand what you’ve been through”—disconnected from the meaning of wartime service itself. The dissonance between veteran and civilian only becomes more complicated when one considers the implicit demands and expectations attached to patriotism. These often well-intentioned gestures and government programs fail to convey a message of appreciation because they refuse to convey a message of acceptance; the exceptional treatment of veterans by larger society implies also that they are insufficient, broken, or incomplete. So, many veterans chose conformity and silence, adopting one of two identities available to them: the forever pitied “Wounded Warrior” or the superficially praised “Hero.” These identities are not complete. They’re not even identities as much as they are collections of rumors, misrepresentations, and expectations of conformity. Once an individual veteran begins unconsciously performing the “Wounded Warrior” or “Hero” character, the number of potential outcomes available in that individual’s life is severely diminished. Society reinforces a feeling among veterans that they are “different.” This shared experience has resulted in commiseration, camaraderie, and also the proliferation of veterans’ creative communities. As storytellers, the members of these communities are restoring meaning to veteran-civilian discourse by privileging the nuanced experiences of the individual over stereotypes and emotionless rhetoric. They are instructing on the topics of war and homecoming, producing fictional and nonfictional representations of the veteran capable of competing with stereotypes, capable of reassimilation. The Introduction establishes the existence of veteran culture, deconstructs notions of there being a single or binary set of veteran identities, and critiques the social and cultural rhetoric used to maintain symbolic boundaries between veterans and civilians. It begins by establishing an approach rooted in interdisciplinary literary theory, taking veteran identity as its topic of consideration and the American unconscious as the text it seeks to examine, asking readers to suspend belief in patriotic rhetoric long enough to critically examine veteran identity as an apparatus used to sell war to each generation of new recruits. Patriotism, beyond the well-meaning gestures and entitlements afforded to veterans, also results in feelings of “difference,” in the veteran feeling apart from larger society. The inescapability of veteran “difference” is a trait which sets it apart from other cultures, and it is one bolstered by inaccurate and, at times, offensive portrayals of veterans in mass media and Hollywood films such as The Manchurian Candidate (1962), First Blood (1982), or Taxi Driver (1976). To understand this inescapability the chapter engages with theories of race, discussing the Korean War veteran in Home (2012) and other works by Toni Morrison to directly and indirectly explore descriptions of “difference” by African Americans and “others” not in positions of power. From there, the chapter traces veteran identity back to the Italian renaissance, arguing that modern notions of veteran identity are founded upon fears of returning veterans causing chaos and disorder. At the same time, writers such as Sebastian Junger, who are intimately familiar with veteran culture, repeatedly emphasize the camaraderie and “tribal” bonds found among members of the military, and instead of creating symbolic categories in which veterans might exist exceptionally as “Heroes,” or pitied as “Wounded Warriors,” the chapter argues that the altruistic nature which leads recruits to war, their capabilities as leaders and educators, and the need of larger society for examples of human resiliency are more appropriate starting points for establishing veteran identity. The Introduction is followed by an independent “Example” section, a brief examination of a student veteran named “Bingo,” one who demonstrates an ability to challenge, even employ veteran stereotypes to maintain his right to self-definition. Bingo’s story, as told in a “spotlight” article meant to attract student veterans to a college campus, portrays the veteran as a “Wounded Warrior” who overcomes mental illness and the scars of war through education, emerging as an exceptional example—a “Hero”—that other student veterans can model by enrolling at the school. Bingo’s story sets the stage for close examinations of the “Hero” and the “Wounded Warrior” in the first and second chapters. Chapter One deconstructs notions of heroism, primarily the belief that all veterans are “Heroes.” The chapter examines military training and indoctrination, Medal of Honor award citations, and film examples such as All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Heroes for Sale (1933), Sergeant York (1941), and Top Gun (1986) to distinguish between actual feats of heroism and “Heroes” as they are presented in patriotic rhetoric. The chapter provides the Medal of Honor citations attached to awards presented to Donald Cook, Dakota Meyer, and Kyle Carpenter, examining the postwar lives of Meyer and Carpenter, identifying attempts by media and government officials to appropriate heroism—to steal the right to self-definition possessed by these men. Among these Medal of Honor recipients one finds two types of heroism: Sacrificing Heroes give something of themselves to protect others; Attacking Heroes make a difference during battle offensively. Enduring Heroes, the third type of heroism discussed in the chapter, are a new construct. Colloquially, and for all intents and purposes, an Enduring Hero is simply a veteran who enjoys praise and few questions. Importantly, veterans enjoy the “Hero Treatment” in exchange for silence and conforming to larger narratives which obfuscate past wars and pave the way for new ones. This chapter engages with theorists of gender—such as Jack Judith Halberstam, whose Female Masculinities (1998) anticipates the agency increasingly available to women through military service; like Leo Braudy, whose From Chivalry to Terrorism (2003) traces the historical relationship between war and gender before commenting on the evolution of military masculinity—to discuss the relationship between heroism and agency, begging a question: What do veterans have to lose from the perpetuation of stereotypes? This question frames a detailed examination of William A. Wellman’s film, Heroes for Sale (1933), in the chapter’s final section. This story of stolen valor and the Great Depression depicts the homecoming of a WWI veteran separated from his heroism. The example, when combined with a deeper understanding of the intersection between veteran identity and gender, illustrates not only the impact of stolen valor in the life of a legitimate hero, but it also comments on the destructive nature of appropriation, revealing the ways in which a veteran stereotypes rob service men and women of the right to draw upon memories of military service which complete with those stereotypes. The military “Hero” occupies a moral high ground, but most conceptions of military “Heroes” are socially constructed advertisements for war. Real heroes are much rarer. And, as the Medal of Honor recipients discussed in the chapter reveal, they, too, struggle with lifelong disabilities as well as constant attempts by society to appropriate their narratives. Chapter Two traces the evolution of the modern “Wounded Warrior” from depictions of cowardice in Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895), to the denigration of World War I veterans afflicted with Shell Shock, to Kevin Powers’s Iraq War novel, The Yellow Birds (2012). As with “Heroes,” “Wounded Warriors” perform a stereotype in place of an authentic, individualized identity, and the chapter uses Walt Kowalski, the protagonist of Clint Eastwood’s film, Gran Torino (2008), as its major example. The chapter discusses “therapeutic culture,” Judith Butler’s work on identity-formation, and Eva Illouz’s examination of a culture obsessed with trauma to comment on veteran performances of victimhood. Butler’s attempts to conceive of new identities absent the influence of systems of definition rooted in the state, in particular, reveal power in the opposite of silence, begging another question: What do civilians have to gain from the perpetuation of veteran stereotypes? Largely, the chapter finds, the “Wounded Warrior” persists in the minds of civilians who fear the veteran’s capacity for violence. A broken, damaged veteran is less of a threat. The story of the “Wounded Warrior” is not one of sacrifice. The “Wounded Warrior” exists after sacrifice, beyond any measure of “honor” achieved in uniform. “Wounded Warriors” are not expected to find a cure because the wound itself is an apparatus of the state that is commodified and injected into the currency of emotional capitalism. This chapter argues that military service and a damaged psyche need not always occur together. Following the second chapter, a close examination of “The Bear That Stands,” a short story by Suzanne S. Rancourt which confronts the author’s sexual assault while serving in the Marines, offers an alternative to both the “Hero” and the “Wounded Warrior” stereotypes. Rancourt, a veteran “Storyteller,” gives testimony of that crime, intervening in social conceptions of veteran identity to include a female perspective. As with the example of Bingo, the author demonstrates an innate ability to recognize and challenge the stereotypes discussed in the first and second chapters. This “Example” sets the stage for a more detailed examination of “Veteran Storytellers” and their communities in the final chapter. Chapter Three looks for examples of veteran “difference,” patriotism, the “Wounded Warrior,” and the “Hero” in nonfiction, fiction, and artwork emerging from the creative arts community, Military Experience and the Arts, an organization which provides workshops, writing consultation, and publishing venues to veterans and their families. The chapter examines veteran “difference” in a short story by Bradley Johnson, “My Life as a Soldier in the ‘War on Terror.’” In “Cold Day in Bridgewater,” a work of short fiction by Jerad W. Alexander, a veteran must confront the inescapability of that difference as well as expectations of conformity from his bigoted, civilian bartender. The final section analyzes artwork by Tif Holmes and Giuseppe Pellicano, which deal with the problems of military sexual assault and the effects of war on the family, respectively. Together, Johnson, Alexander, Holmes, and Pellicano demonstrate skills in recognizing stereotypes, crafting postwar identities, and producing alternative representations of veteran identity which other veterans can then draw upon in their own homecomings. Presently, no unified theory of veteran identity exists. This dissertation begins that discussion, treating individual performances of veteran identity, existing historical, sociological, and psychological scholarship about veterans, and cultural representations of the wars they fight as equal parts of a single text. Further, it invites future considerations of veteran identity which build upon, challenge, or refute its claims. Conversations about veteran identity are the opposite of silence; they force awareness of war’s uncomfortable truths and homecoming’s eventual triumphs. Complicating veteran identity subverts conformity; it provides a steady stream of traits, qualities, and motivations that veterans use to craft postwar selves. The serious considerations of war and homecoming presented in this text will be useful for Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans attempting to piece together postwar identities; they will be useful to scholars hoping to facilitate homecoming for future generations of war veterans. Finally, the Afterword to the dissertation proposes a program for reassimilation capable of harnessing the veteran’s symbolic and moral authority in such a way that self-definition and homecoming might become two parts of a single act.

In 2008, J.K. Rowling and her publishers instigated a lawsuit against one of her biggest fans. The Warner Bros. et al V. RDR Books et al lawsuit successfully enjoined the publication of a secondary work which would have competed directly with author J.K. Rowling’s future project, a Harry Potter encyclopaedia. This incident is utilized in this thesis as an example of a larger issue. That issue is whether a society founded on an industrial economic framework of property rights should continue to strengthen a culture of corporate creative monopolies, and whether it is prudent to re-examine notions of ownership and creativity to incorporate emergent methods of information dissemination. This thesis seeks to document modern fan practices while simultaneously identifying many of the reasons why they are under threat. This thesis will incorporate recent theory on user-generated media content and attempt to relate them to the activities of fan communities. It examines the deconstruction of notions of authorship and property in these communities in order to facilitate fans’ non-market knowledge economy. There are two very important questions which drive this research; what are the legal and social concerns surrounding intellectual property and moral authority in the process of fan creativity and publishing? How do online fan communities negotiate their enthusiasm for popular media under the threat of legal prosecution? With the aforementioned lawsuit as a case study, this thesis will address the changing roles and relationships between producer and consumer. It will argue that fan creativity is deserving of greater legal protection and acknowledges that there is an important distinction between ‘derivative’ and ‘secondary’ works.
Thesis (M.A.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2011

This thesis considers how the digital medium and social networks affect the short story. I argue that digital short fiction has shown changes, such as signs of becoming more modular or briefer than its print counterparts, and that it has also reflected a shift to the personal or semi-autobiographical story. Digital short fiction has also been used increasingly to market a publisher’s or author’s name or non-digital works. I begin contextualizing this shift in Chapter 1 by analyzing different approaches to the study of the short story, including an overview of generic and historical scholarship, and I conclude with a working definition of the short story. In Chapter 2, I analyze early digital short fiction along with the themes of contemporary fiction in general that have been affected by digital media, social networks, and other changes. I also consider digital short fiction in the context of its publication media, postmodernism, and changes in communication in general. In Chapter 3, I verify these considerations with responses to questionnaires sent to writers of short fiction both on the Web and off. By studying these writers’ conceptions of the short story, preferred publication media, and writing habits, I build on the working definitions of the short story from Chapters 1 and 2. In Chapter 4, I consider the effects on the short story and conclude that we can update print-based conceptions of the short story to include born-digital short fiction and accommodate the contemporary shift in general to modularity, open source, social networks, and the focus on the self. Rather than establishing a concrete definition of what short fiction is at this time, I conclude that a better approach is to replace pre-defined categories with an acknowledgement that the short story is perhaps shifting closer to pre-print storytelling roots, although within the confines of current limitations such as copyright and the attention span of contemporary readers. Although we cannot fully quantify these changes at this time, I argue that they impact the short story and require scholars to consider its paratexts and publication media differently than in pre-Web years.

碩士
國立臺灣大學
圖書資訊學研究所
107
Since the first online fiction came out in 1998, the Internet Literature Industry in China has evolved from a small and immature industry to one that has full-copyright operation model which not only vertically integrates the upstream and downstream industry chains, but also derives copyrights such as films and TV series, animations, games, etc. Therefore, online fictions have become an important driving force for the development of the cultural and entertainment industry, and attracted countless readers at home and abroad; in addition, many researchers from different disciplines also put effort into exploring diverse issues around them. This study first reviews the definition, characteristics and the course of development of online fictions, and then introduces the commercialized website settings and how they influence the behaviors of writers and readers. Previous studies indicated that the relationship between writers and readers has changed owing to the proprietary nature of digital platforms. The readers provide emotional and financial incentives for writers to produce online fictions by subscribing, voting, commenting and sending money. Besides, the collective reading culture, shared language and norms, daily interaction and identification, derivative creation culture are important factors in maintaining the community. The research is motivated by the desire to investigate the phenomenon. Taking the current largest online literary website "Qidian" as a research field, a total of 50 fictions were sampled, 25 from the main Qidian site, the other 25 from Qidian female site. Drawing on qualitative participation observation, quantitative activity analysis and social network analysis, this paper systematically collects, analyzes and visualizes the interactive pattern of the Qidian fan communities. Here the paper establishes the network of “post and reply” to examine the communications patterns of Qidian interaction networks, allowing us to simultaneously investigate the global and local structure of the networks. This paper finds that most posts in Qidian fan communities have few replies and the length of the replies are short; however, a few numbers of the members have a large number of replies, and the degree distribution is found to follow a power law. The forum features dynamic sorting and “pinned post”, which led to the “building culture” in Qidian fan communities. The network density is low, the average path length is short, and the average clustering coefficient is high, which indicates that the networks of the Qidian communities are “small-world” and there are few members serve as hubs to facilitate the information flows within the communities. With the indicators such as “in-degree”, “betweenness centrality” and “PageRank” to measure the importance of the member, the results show that the writers, moderators and the “meng zhu”(盟主) are important members; however, ordinary members can also become crucial as long as they keep interacting and make a buzz. This paper contributes to the online fiction community studies by providing empirical evidence which show how commercialized website settings influence the structure of networks, how these settings affect the content of the posts, and how the fandom culture impacts the dynamics of the community.

This thesis consists of two parts. Both parts navigate the experience of displacement, in both realist and metaphorical modes, of a number of Sudanese expatriates to Australia. The first part, a fictional account in the form of a novella, employs different points of view to explore a range of diasporic encounters undergone by diverse Sudanese migrants and refugees prior to and during resettlement in Australia. Taking the events of the author’s life as its focus, the second part delves into narratives of personal, inner displacement that have deep roots in the history of Sudan and the question of a common national identity. The exegesis also examines the dynamics of his dualistic relationship with the Sudanese communities in Australia while sharing many of the same challenges and crises. His perspective, which can be understood in different ways as being partly inside and partly outside in relation to those communities and the wider Australian community, provides a position from which to view a series of Otherings and exclusions that challenge and displace identity while also contributing to the ‘forming’ of it. The novella, centred on a café in an inner suburb of Melbourne, portrays different responses, narrated in the protagonists own voices, to a conflict that erupts from a simple remark to which a renowned retired Sudanese football (soccer) player takes offence. Their responses, revealed to the narrator in private, allow the reader to listen to the diversity of personal histories and views that are able to exist and collide within larger national and postcolonial histories, the signs of which act in unexpected ways.

This study (re)presents the intergenerational experiences of gay men in Australian schools, communities and families across a fifty-year period. A snowball sample of six participants, ranging in age from fifteen to sixty-five, participated in life history interviews that focussed on eliciting narratives of (re)membered school experiences connected to the social and cultural discourses of (homo)sexuality. This study contributes to the scholarship of sexuality in Australian contexts. A particular gaze is directed on how schooling, family and community norms form and storm subjectivity and identity in childhood and adolescence. This research is framed by the national debate regarding lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ)+ rights in Australia that erupted over the implementation of the Safe Schools Coalition program across Australian states. The ensuing moral panic incited by conservative groups, and the public scrutiny surrounding the proposed support mechanisms and inclusivity for LGBTIQ+ adolescents and their peers, inspired my resolve to undertake this research. Drawing on a sociocultural framework to look at the intersections around sexuality, in conjunction with the embodied knowledge of Othering, I saw the importance of a discursive examination of experiential encounters with institutionalised heteronormativity in Australian schools, family dynamics and community settings. The lived experiences of same-sex-attracted informants is an under-explored area within the scholarship of sexuality in Australian schools. This study elucidated firsthand experiences of what it has meant, and means, to be gay in Australian schools communities and families over a fifty-year period. The conclusions of the study indicate that all participants, regardless of age, have encountered overt (homo)phobia, and describe how heteronormativity has limited and negatively impacted on their ability to contribute and participate in school, in their families and in community settings. This investigation is presented in the form of a creative product and an exegesis. In each of the components there is an understanding of how deviations from binary constructions of gender and sexuality are articulated. This study adds to the plethora of work and rethinking which needs to be done in Australian schools, families and communities to support LGBTIQ+ individuals.