Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Fictional turn'

Depuis son premier roman Ghostwritten en 1999, jusqu'à sa plus récente parution (Utopia Avenue en 2020), l'auteur britannique contemporain David Mitchell tente de bâtir un univers de fiction unique et interconnecté qui ne cesse de s'accroitre à chaque publication. Cette volonté de continuité s'observe également dans la cohérence de ses thématiques, parmi lesquelles figure en bonne place la question de la communication et des langues. Ce leitmotiv récurrent nous a poussé à nous interroger sur la place qu'occupe la notion de traduction dans son œuvre globale. Cette thèse se propose d'étudier trois facettes de l'écrivain en rapport avec la traduction : l'auteur mettant en scène la traduction dans sa fiction, l'auteur traduisant, et l'auteur traduit. Chacun de ces trois grands axes met en lumière le caractère unique de l'artiste quant à l'acte de traduire. Ses romans ressuscitent ainsi les interprètes historiques de la tradition japonaise qu'étaient les Oranda tsūji au XVIIème siècle, présentent des immortels polyglottes ou des traducteurs amateurs, autant de figures rarement explorées dans le domaine du fictional turn of the translator. La propre expérience de traducteur professionnel de David Mitchell (aidé par son épouse Keiko Yoshida) est tout aussi particulière, par son choix de faire partager au monde sa version anglaise de The Reason I Jump, témoignage sous forme livresque d'un jeune adolescent autiste non-verbal nommé Naoki Higashida. La genèse complexe de l'œuvre originale ainsi que la motivation expliquée par un amour filial en font un objet d'étude fascinant, autant dans le domaine de l'éthique que de la neurologie. Sera également explorée dans cette partie une autre traduction moins connue de David Mitchell mais néanmoins originale : sa participation au projet collaboratif international Multiples, un jeu grandeur nature de traduction-relais. La dernière partie de cette thèse se penchera sur la manière dont Manuel Berri, traducteur quasi-attitré de David Mitchell depuis le début de sa carrière, a su relever les défis de sa prose qui s'avère retorse. Nous analyserons comment le traducteur a réussi à surmonter ces obstacles que sont les références culturelles implicites, les néologismes ou l'oralité de l'anglais non-standard, qu'il ait recours à la note de traducteur (dont nous essayons de prouver la légitimité), ou bien plus souvent grâce à sa créativité pour transmettre en langue française toute la versatilité de notre auteur. Cette thèse se termine par un entretien exclusif avec David Mitchell en personne, où ce dernier se livre sur sa vision de la traduction et nous confie ses futurs projets en relation avec cette dernière, preuve d'une obsession qui n'a pas fini de hanter sa production littéraire
From his first novel Ghostwritten in 1999 to his most recent (Utopia Avenue in 2020), contemporary British author David Mitchell has tried to build a unique and interconnected world of fiction which keeps growing with each new publication. This desire for continuity can also be seen in the coherence of his themes, among which the question of communication and languages stands prominently. This recurring leitmotif prompted us to examine the notion of translation throughout his work. This thesis will examine three aspects of the writer in relation to translation: the translator characters in his fiction, his experience as a translator, and the translation of his works. Each of these parts highlights the uniqueness of this artist in regards to translation. His novels resurrect the historical interpreters of the Japanese tradition, the Oranda tsujis of the 17th century, and showcase such figures as polyglot immortals and amateur translators, new archetypes which have not or rarely been explored in the field of the fictional turn of the translator. David Mitchell's own experience as a professional translator is just as special, in his choice to share with the world (and with the help of his wife Keiko Yoshida) an English version of The Reason I Jump, the memoir of a young non-verbal autistic teenager called Naoki Higashida. The complex genesis of the original work, as well as the motivations - namely filial love - behind his translation, make it a fascinating object of study, as much in the field of ethics as neurology. This section will also explore another of David Mitchell's lesser-known but nonetheless original translations: his participation in the collaborative project Multiples, an international exercise in relay translation. The final part of this PhD thesis will explore the ways in which Manuel Berri — David Mitchell's unofficial assigned translator since the start of his career — has risen to the challenge of his surprisingly tricky prose. We will analyse how he managed to overcome such obstacles as implicit cultural references, neologisms and the orality of non-standard English, whether by using translator's notes (which we are trying to legitimise) or, more often, by using his creativity to convey all the versatility of our author in the French language. This thesis will conclude with an exclusive interview of David Mitchell himself, in which he offers us his views on translation and reveal some of his future translation-related projects, proving once again how much this obsession keeps haunting his literary output

Includes bibliographical references.
Whereas commentary on autobiography in Coetzee tends to focus on the dynamics of secular confession and the idea of self-writing as 'autre-biography,' this thesis, taking the experience of emigration and literary celebrity as thematic pivots, argues that the protagonists of Coetzee's later fiction (Youth through Summertime) occasion a form of authorial self-disclosure that is not an end in itself but, with a nominal anchorage on Coetzee himself, a means of localising questions about literary genre, political complicity, the relation between author and character, the intersection of personal and collective history, and the social responsibility of the acclaimed writer. It is argued that the slippage of focus from the authorial personas in these fictions to the questions and critical voices they provoke nonetheless conspires to reaffirm the authority of the name and literary oeuvre' Coetzee. 'The thesis begins by examining the link in Youth between the protagonist's crisis of ethnic and literary identity and Coetzee's narrative strategy of subjective displacement (Chapter 1). It is shown that the refractive zone of questions in that fiction constitutes the self-qualifying reflex that becomes increasingly pronounced in the authorial surrogates and fictions that follow. Coetzee's representation of the acclaimed writer as a doubting, fallible, unheroic figure becomes in the case of Elizabeth Costello a rejection of the idea of the writer as a spokesperson for a group or cause and instead an opening for the pressures and responsibilities of living among others to be embodied and negotiated (Chapter 2). It is argued that Coetzee's Nobel Lecture provides a further example of this reserve about the reach of the writer's authority in the public realm: the deferral of authority in this text highlights by indirection an inconsistency in the Swedish Academy's invitation to Coetzee to speak for his work on the occasion of an award that celebrates its universal interpretability, its resistance to authorial meta-interpretation (Chapter 3). It is shown that in Slow Man, where the familiar metafictional interplay between the one who writes and the one who is written is framed on an emigrant history that is implicitly Coetzee's, the characters' contest of interpretation over photographs highlights the instability of the historical record - a point that holds for the text of Coetzee's personal history (Chapter 4). Emphasis on the nominal alignment of the author Coetzee and his authorial surrogate in Diary of a Bad Year governs a consideration of how the author's name- his proper name and reputation - focuses the condition of complicity with others as a reader and citizen; the question of whether the character JC speaks for Coetzee is revealed to be secondary to what it means to be held accountable for actions committed in the name of a group to which one belongs or set of interests to which one subscribes (Chapter 5). The thesis tracks the qualified textualisation of Coetzee 's authorial personas and history to Summertime, where' John Coetzee' is written out of an entanglement of acts of emigration and recollection in voices inflected with other histories than his own (Chapter 6).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2006.
Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 204-210). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

This thesis is based primarily on work published in academic refereed journals between 1994 and 2003. Taken as a whole, the thesis explores and enacts an evolving methodology for curriculum inquiry which foregrounds the generativity of fiction in reading, writing and representing curriculum problems and issues. This methodology is informed by the narrative and textual 'turns' in the humanities and social sciences - especially poststructuralist and deconstructive approaches to literary and cultural criticism - and is performed as a series of narrative experiments and 'intertextual turns'. Narrative theory suggests that we can think of all discourse as taking the form of a story, and poststructuralist theorising invites us to think of all discourse as taking the form of a text; this thesis argues that intertextual and deconstructive readings of the stories and texts that constitute curriculum work can produce new meanings and understandings. The thesis places particular emphasis on the uses of fiction and fictional modes of representation in curriculum inquiry and suggests that our purposes might sometimes be better served by (re)presenting the texts we produce as deliberate fictions rather than as 'factual' stories. The thesis also demonstrates that some modes and genres of fiction can help us to move our research efforts beyond 'reflection' (an optical metaphor for displacing an image) by producing texts that 'diffract' the normative storylines of curriculum inquiry (diffraction is an optical metaphor for transformation). The thesis begins with an introduction that situates (autobiographically and historically) the narrative experiments and intertextual turns performed in the thesis as both advancements in, and transgressions of, deliberative and critical reconceptualist curriculum theorising. Several of the chapters that follow examine textual continuities and discontinuities between the various objects and methods of curriculum inquiry and particular fictional genres (such as crime stories and science fiction) and/or particular fictional works (including Bram Stoker's Dracula, J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, and Ursula Le Guin's The Telling). Other chapters demonstrate how intertextual and deconstructive reading strategies can inform inquiries focused on specific subject matters (with particular reference to environmental education) and illuminate contemporary issues and debates in curriculum (especially the internationalisation and globalisation of curriculum work). The thesis concludes with suggestions for further refinement of methodologies that privilege narrative and fiction in curriculum inquiry.

My dissertation examines white masculine anxieties compelled by death and violence in Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991), Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996), and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997). A close reading of the four novels in tandem reveals important dynamics of a subgenre of American masculinist fiction in a period of rapid technological change. The novels represent the travails of white male protagonists whose "occupational spheres," comprising jobs, domestic spaces and recreational pursuits, are meant to protect them from undesirable threats and the dread of death. I argue that these protagonists, who are immersed in their respective occupational spheres, do not comprehend the complex violence in which their occupations implicate them, nor do they appreciate the impossibility of insulating their “interior” simulated habitats from the supposedly toxic “outside” worlds that surround them. In the first chapter, I analyze Don DeLillo’s White Noise, which I claim inaugurates the subgenre of American fiction to which all four novels belong, and I conclude that the protagonist, Jack Gladney, is caught up in a cycle of "re-mediation." His efforts to remedy his ills are only remediated into a medial milieu that further undermines his agency. In the second chapter, I examine American Psycho and track Patrick Bateman’s occupational sphere, which manifests the classed, raced, and sexualized systemic violence of Wall Street finance. The third chapter on Fight Club explores the anonymous narrator’s violent occupation as an actuarial risk analyst for a major automotive manufacturer. The last chapter, on American Pastoral, analyzes the insidious violence of the protagonist Seymour Levov’s occupation as a glove-manufacturing entrepreneur and seeming-apogee of the Jewish American dream of white assimilation. This dissertation project is partly an intervention in DeLillo, Easton Ellis, Palahniuk, and Roth criticism, much of which is still atavistically stuck in a pre-digital moment. By and large, the existing criticism, I contend, does not pay enough attention to the densely-mediated environments inhabited by the novels’ protagonists. My engagement with these novels draws upon rhetorical analysis, genre theory, psychoanalysis, critical race theory, gender studies, and new media studies.
Arts, Faculty of
Graduate

Contemporary Central American fiction has become a vital project of revision of the tragic events and the social conditions in the recent history of the countries from which they emerge. The literary projects of Sergio Ramirez (Nicaragua), Dante Liano (Guatemala), Horacio Castellanos Moya (El Salvador), and Ramon Fonseca Mora (Panama), are representative of the latest trends in Central American narrative. These trends conform to a new literary paradigm that consists of an amalgam of styles and discourses, which combine the testimonial, the historical, and the political with the mystery and suspense of noir thrillers. Contemporary Central American noir narrative depicts the persistent war against social injustice, violence, criminal activities, as well as the new technological advances and economic challenges of the post-war neo-liberal order that still prevails throughout the region. Drawing on postmodernism theory proposed by Ihab Hassan, Linda Hutcheon and Brian MacHale, I argued that the new Central American literary paradigm exemplified by Sergio Ramirez’s El cielo llora por mí, Dante Liano’s El hombre de Montserrat, Horacio Castellanos Moya’s El arma en el hombre and La diabla en el espejo, and Ramon Fonseca Mora’s El desenterrador, are highly structured novels that display the characteristic marks of postmodern cultural expression through their ambivalence, which results from the coexistence of multiple styles and conflicting ideologies and narrative trends. The novels analyzed in this dissertation make use of a noir sensitivity in which corruption, decay and disillusionment are at their core to portray the events that shaped the modern history of the countries from which they emerge. The revolutionary armed struggle, the state of terror imposed by military regimes and the fight against drug trafficking and organized crime, are among the major themes of these contemporary works of fiction, which I have categorized as perfect examples of the post-revolutionary post-modernism Central American detective fiction at the turn of the 21st century.

L'elaborato presenterà un'analisi di due romanzi dell'autore Patrick McGrath, Asylum e Trauma. La tesi si focalizzerà sulle tematiche gotiche care al romanziere, prima tra tutte la centralità nel suo lavoro della psichiatria, e la minuziosa attenzione ai processi mentali dei suoi personaggi, trattati in modo pressoché clinico. L'elaborato approfondirà il modo in cui queste tematiche si inseriscono nel genere gotico in cui McGrath è spesso inserito, e tratterà altri temi cari all'autore come la trasgressione, il rapporto tra scrittura, arte e follia, i ruoli di genere e l'importanza degli spazi fisici nell'economia dei romanzi.

The Victorian governess occupied a difficult position in Victorian society. Straddling the line between genteel and working-class femininity, the governess did not fit neatly into the rigid categories of gender and class according to which Victorian society organized itself. This troubling liminality caused the governess to become implicitly associated with another disturbing domestic presence caught between worlds: the Victorian literary ghost. Using Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw as a touchstone for each chapter, this thesis examines how the spectral mirrors the governess’s own spectrality – that is, her own discursive construction as a psychosocially unsettling force within the Victorian domestic sphere.

The aim of the thesis is to explore depictions of sexuality in popular science fiction film and television through a focus on storytelling, narrative, characters and genre. The thesis analyses science fiction as a film and television genre with a focus on the conventions, interpretations, and definitions of genre as part of larger contexts. Central to the argumentation is films and television series, from Star Wars and Star Trek, to Firefly and Torchwood. The approach allows a consideration of how the storytelling conventions of science fiction are, and have been, affected by its contexts. Through a consideration of a historical de-emphasis on narrative complexity and character formation in science fiction, the thesis displays and analyses a salient tendency towards juvenile and heteronormative narratives. This tendency is represented by a concept that I call the Star’verses, through which this dominant idea of science fiction as a juvenile, techno-centred, masculine, and heteronormative genre became firmly established. This generic cluster has remained a dominant influence on science fiction film and television since the 1980s. However, as argued, a major discursive shift took place in science fiction at the turn of the millennium. This adult turn in science fiction film, and television in particular, is attributed to contextual changes, but also to the influence of television dramaturgy. It explains why science fiction in the 21st century is not as unfamiliar with depictions of sexuality as its predecessors were. This turn does not signal a total abandonment of what the Star’verses represent; it instead contributes to a change to this dominant idea of the generic identity of science fiction. While sexuality has been disassociated from much science fiction, it is also argued that the science fiction narrative has extensive queer potential. Generic conventions, such as aliens and time travel, invite both queer readings and queer storytelling; the latter however is seldom used, especially in science fiction film. A majority of the examples of science fiction narrative that use this queer potential can be found in television. In cinema, however, this progression is remarkably slow. Therefore, the thesis analyses whether the storytelling techniques of Hollywood cinema, to which science fiction film owes much of its dramaturgy, could be considered heteronormative. A comparison is made to television dramaturgy in order to display the possibilities for the serialised, character-focused science fiction narrative. Ultimately, the thesis investigate the possibility for subversive storytelling and whether a normative use of dramaturgy needs to be overthrown in order to tell a subversive story.

Cette thèse de doctorat est un projet de «recherche à travers la création», qui a pour objectif d'explorer et d'éclairer le processus d'écriture d'un scénario pilote de série télévisée de science-fiction, qui traite du sujet moralement chargé de l'amélioration humaine.La science-fiction est un genre très important dans le monde en évolution rapide, avec sa technologie en constante évolution. Les romans de science-fiction, les films et les séries télévisées jouent un rôle majeur dans la création d'un discours social, moral et culturel sur la façon dont nous, en tant qu'humanité, pouvons et devons faire face aux technologies actuelles et futures et diriger notre évolution. L'amélioration humaine est l'une des technologies majeures dont l'évolution potentielle pourrait bouleverser et transformer la société et l'humanité de manière significative en offrant à l'humanité la possibilité de transcender la sélection naturelle et de contrôler son évolution.L'écrivain de science-fiction occupe une position unique dans laquelle il doit médier la science, la technologie et leurs possibilités psychologiques, morales et sociales sous forme d'histoire et de théâtre. Une fois réalisé avec tant de succès, le travail de l'écrivain de science-fiction peut offrir une valeur ajoutée en contribuant au discours social.La recherche de cette position unique, entre science, pertinence sociale et narration, est au cœur de ce travail. Son objectif est d'articuler des idées et des conceptualisations pour les considérations, les actions et les décisions créatives nécessaires pour accomplir ce type de défi.Pour ce faire, j'ai écrit deux scénarios de pilotes de télévision de science-fiction, une version antérieure et une version ultérieure. En parallèle, j'ai étudié le sujet de la valorisation humaine tant du point de vue scientifique que philosophique et social, ainsi que de la théorie et de la pratique de l'écriture de science-fiction, en mettant l'accent sur les récits traitant du développement humain et de la science-fiction actuelle. Séries télévisées. L'étude de l'amélioration humaine et de la science-fiction a contribué à la progression de l'écriture, du scénario initial au dernier, ce que j'estime plus satisfaisant pour atteindre les deux objectifs. une bonne représentation des enjeux sociaux et moraux de la valorisation humaine et de la réalisation du potentiel dramatique du sujet.Cette thèse comprend les scénarios et autres supports créatifs, précédés d'un essai critique qui décrit l'étude du perfectionnement humain et de la science-fiction, et analyse l'évolution du processus d'écriture menant au scénario final.Les enseignements tirés de la recherche soulignent l'importance de la compréhension de l'écrivain de science-fiction de la technologie sur laquelle il écrit (ou du «novum» - le créateur de différence technologique / scientifique); créer une prémisse d'histoire qui dérive de la technologie; explorer les différents aspects moraux, psychologiques et sociaux de la technologie choisie et les traduire en conflits d'histoire et en motivations de caractère; et prendre des décisions du monde de l'histoire qui répondent le mieux aux questions thématiques que l'auteur veut transmettre
This PhD dissertation is a “research-through-creation” project, which set out to explore and gain insights from the process of writing a science fiction TV series pilot screenplay, that deals with the morally charged subject of human enhancement.Science fiction is a very important genre in today's rapidly changing world, with its continuously advancing technology. Science fiction novels, movies and TV series play a major role in creating a social, moral and cultural discourse about how we, as humanity, can and should deal with current and future technologies and lead the way we evolve. Human enhancement is one of the major technologies which' potential evolvement could disrupt and change society and humanity in a significant way by offering humankind the possibility to transcend natural selection and control how it will develop. The science fiction writer is in a unique position in which he/she needs to mediate science, technology and their psychological, moral and social possibilities in the form of story and drama. When done so successfully, the science fiction writer's work can offer value by contributing to the social discourse. Researching this unique position, between science, social relevance and storytelling, is at the heart of this work. Its objective is to articulate insights and conceptualizations for the considerations, actions and creative decisions required to accomplish this kind of a challenge.To do so I have written two science fiction TV pilot screenplays, an earlier version and a later version. In parallel, I have studied the subject of human enhancement both for its scientific aspect and its philosophical and social aspect, and also studied about the theory and practice of science fiction writing, with an emphasis on stories that deal with human enhancement and current science fiction TV series. The two lines of work inter-related and complement each other.The study of human enhancement and science fiction took part in the progression of the writing from the initial screenplay to the final one, which is considered by me to be more satisfactory in achieving both a good representation of the social and moral issues of human enhancement, and in fulfilling the dramatic potential of the subject.This dissertation includes the screenplays and other creative materials, preceded by a critical essay which describes the study of human enhancement and science fiction, and analyzes the development of the writing process leading up to the final screenplay. The insights gained from the research highlight the importance of the science fiction writer's understanding of the technology he writes about (or the “novum” – the technological/scientific difference-maker); creating a story premise which as a derivative of the technology; exploring the different moral, psychological and social aspects of the chosen technology and translating those to story conflicts and character motivations; and making story-world decisions that best serve the thematic issues the writer wants to convey

An examination of postcolonial writings from the Caribbean disrupts the notion that postcolonial discourse is locked in a mode of constant reply to the colonizer and keeps the colonial powers at the center. Many Caribbean writers focus their discourse primarily on the ways their own communities internalize received ideas, and use them as the basis of social organization and interpersonal relationships. This study examines the use of Caribbean orature as the narrative strategy in selected Anglophone Caribbean fiction. I use a performance studies-centered approach to read prose fiction by Merle Collins, Earl Lovelace and Olive Senior that exemplifies the "inward turn" of Caribbean postcolonial criticism. I argue that these writers use specific oral forms to critique and challenge their communities, while affirming their local resources. In The Colour of Forgetting Merle Collins interrogates her community's rejection of its indigenous stories, in favor of a Euro-centric written history that privileges the outsiders' perspectives. Colour performs and presents an inclusive history, inspired formally and substantially by Grenadian oral tradition. I enter the conversation about Earl Lovelace's well-known nationalist discourse and validation of Caribbean orature by reading the gender ideologies that his choice of narrative strategy and treatment of female characters trouble. My central argument is that this writer's works reflect the lived experience of gender relationships in the Caribbean, rather than the dominant culture's colonially-derived patriarchal structure. My reading of Olive Senior's stories explores her use of gossip and other oral forms associated primarily with women to highlight how differences in race that informed life in colonial and early postcolonial Jamaica remain a central part of life in contemporary Jamaican society. I conclude that, in writing texts that straddle European literary traditions and Caribbean orature, these writers demonstrate the inevitable merging of and tensions among cultures and knowledge systems that characterize life in colonial/modern societies. However, more importantly, reading their fictions in the ways I have read them directs attention to the "inward turn" of postcolonial criticism that is sometimes elided in postcolonial discussions.

This thesis examines the inward turn of the contemporary Chinese novel: a tendency in fictional narrative to move from representing social reality and political events from an "objective" point of view to exploring personal experience, especially the interior world of human beings, from a subjective point of view. I take three novels published in the early 1990s as examples: Yu Hua's Crying in the Fine Rain(1991), Ge Fei's On the Margins (1992), and Wang Anyi's Fact and Fiction: One Way to Create a World (1993). I demonstrate a new narrative mode emerging, with thematic innovations and formal changes, against the background of the collapse of Communist collectivist ideology and the "master narrative" of socialist realism. In these three works, first-person autobiographical narrators are employed to explore personal experience and private life, a space once repressed and forbidden in modern Chinese literature. Reflections on growing-up, personal memory of the past and the imaginative search for identity can thus be read allegorically as a Chinese Bildungsroman of the awakening consciousness of Self. This new narrative not only emphasizes the importance of inner territory, but also ushers in a subjective writing which has greatly altered the appearance and conception of the Chinese novel. Chronological line is broken up into a psychological temporal order; plot and event become obscured within mental scenes; and omniscient didactic voices are replaced by self-conscious, reflective minds. Such individualistic, modernist narratives challenge the former collective, socially-oriented "realist epics" produced since 1930s, providing an alternative form and function for the modern Chinese novel.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
The creative component to this thesis is a form of life writing which straddles both memoir and literary documentary. The writer-researcher interviews the subject for her or his unusual life-experience, and audio-tapes the discussion as resource material for a creative nonfiction docu-memoir. In a work of this type, the memoir is primarily not that of the writer, but that of the subject. The documentary component can take the form of photographs, and also factual elements which the subject mentions in relation to their experience, and which gives a documentary-type effect to their narrative. My docu-memoir records the stories of seven subjects, five of whom are Forgotten Australians, of whom I am one. These people are of mainly Anglo-Celtic heritage, and were in care as children in Australia in the mid-part of the twentieth century. Two of the subjects are not Forgotten Australians, but one tells what it is like to be the long-lost sibling of a Forgotten Australian, and the other tells what it was like to have been a child in an orphanage in England so that, in my work, I can show that Australian orphanages were not greatly different to those in England, and the experience of being an incarcerated child was much the same regardless of geographical distance. The inclusion of all these people’s stories is intended to give a concise picture of the experience of being a Forgotten Australian: what it is like to be a “forgotten” and abused child, what it means as an adult to be a care-leaver, how their experiences have affected their lives and those of others around them, and how the experience and the effects of that are much the same no matter whether they were in care as children in England or in Australia. This is a story which has not been previously told from inside the group, in a literary work. In the exegesis, I study what docu-memoir is, and how to write a creative nonfiction work and tailor it to my topic. As models for my own docu-memoir I chose the works of Tony Parker, and especially *Lighthouse*, Sheila Stewart’s three docu-memoirs, *Country Kate*, *Lifting the Latch: A Life on the Land*, and *Ramlin Rose: The Boatwoman’s Story*, and Helen Garner’s *Joe Cinque’s Consolation*. From Parker and Stewart I learnt how to structure a docu-memoir of the type in which I am most interested, and various techniques that I could use when recreating the memories of others: such as, how to make the subjects in the work appear as real people, how to dwell on the metaphorical and philosophical in the words of people, and use the transcript material in a way that lets the subjects talk for themselves. From Garner I learnt how one might include oneself in the work as a point of reference for added credibility, and ways in which to enhance my work of nonfiction with creative elements like braiding the narratives with stories suggested by the subject matter, but which take the reader outside the interview situation, and use rhetoric to draw the reader into the literary landscape. From these writers I also learnt ways in which to maintain a code of ethics for a nonfiction writer when crafting a creative work of docu-memoir.

This thesis is a literary analysis of American settlement fiction, using a spatially-informed cultural historicist approach. The settlement movement in the U.S. was both a Progressive Era reform movement and a precursor to modern-day social welfare systems. As such, it has typically been viewed in either laudatory or censorious terms –- as an innovative force for social good, or as a negative source of social control. Drawing on Edward Soja’s concept of Thirdspace as a uniquely generative and semiotically rich cultural site, and focusing on Hull House as an example of Thirdspace, I argue that the settlement movement was in fact an extraordinarily multivalent phenomenon. Hull House (and the many settlement houses modeled after it) instantiated issues of gender, class, and race in complex ways that both reflected and refracted larger patterns in American culture. Moreover, these same patterns are evident in fiction that incorporates the spaces of the settlement house and the figure of the settlement worker. Contextualized readings of five novels (Elia Wilkinson Peattie’s The Precipice, Clara Laughlin’s Just Folks, Hervey White’s Differences, Sherwood Anderson’s Marching Men, and W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Quest of the Silver Fleece) provide evidence of the value of further recovering this dramatically understudied area of settlement discourse.

碩士
國立臺南藝術大學
動畫藝術與影像美學研究所
105
Metropolis by Fritz Lang on 1927, opened a prophetical genre of science fiction films, describing the industrial development of the future social phenomenon. The image not only presents a high degree of future architectural features and extreme differences in the field space, but also contains the contemporary exposure of social criticism: the bourgeoisie exploitation, the relationship of the working class and the machinery, the living field division and differences, the bourgeois surveillance and controlling of the working class, the blurred boundary between the human and the robot, and the confusions of the ideological state. Metropolis to develop science fiction films critique genre form, and development of science fiction films impact deeply. It is not only about the development of science and technology after Industrial Revolution, but also more to describe for the social system, the function of the film image and the boundaries of different bodies. Therefore, the first in thethesis, to arrange the history of science fiction films, from Metropolis to the present , and sort out the various body forms in science fiction films. In order to sum up the demonstration that Metropolis is the earliest emphasis on the different bodies of the instrumentalized description of the film to establish its importance and subsequent effects. Metropolis as the starting point, puts forward three body instrumentalization phenomena, such as body of manipulation, surveillance and prosthesis. Subsequently, the text of the three themes of the analysis, how the human body to become the manipulation of capitalism under the apparatus in science fiction films, and the relationship of manipulation between the body and the machine. Through the manipulation of the body, emphasizing the behavior of surveillance, a desire that through the camera image to surveillance people's behavior and activities to manipulate, evolved into a function of surveillance by mobile body, become a mobile camera, and multiple surveillance images. Finally, when the eyes of surveillant becomes a surveillance camera, the body's action follows the will of the surveillant, and instructions of the surveillant to observe the body, mobil body, image recording, and body extension of the prosthesis concept.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009.
Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-06, Section: A, page: . Adviser: Robert Dale Parker. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 179-186) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

This doctoral dissertation discusses the issue of religiosity in the context of American-Jewish literature, emphasizing the significance of Judaism as an indispensable element in the formation of American Jewish female identity. The dissertation consists of three chapters. Chapter 1 is devoted to a discussion of the emigration of Jewish women from Central and Eastern Europe to America in the first half of the twentieth century, the situation of women in the particular branches of contemporary American Judaism, and the influence of feminism on the current status of women in Judaism. Chapter 2 provides an overview of the chronological and thematic developments in American Jewish women’s writing in the United States in the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Chapter 3 contains a critical comprehensive analysis of selected fiction by contemporary American Jewish women writers, representatives of the third generation, whose works were published between 1980-2005. The narratives selected for the analysis in Chapter 3 have been examined not only from the socio-cultural perspective related to the Judaic religion and the place of women in the changing world, but also in terms of the form and style chosen by their authors.
Przygotowana rozprawa doktorska podejmuje problem religijności w kontekście literatury amerykańsko-żydowskiej, nakreślając znaczenie judaizmu jako niezbędnego elementu w kształtowaniu się amerykańsko-żydowskiej tożsamości kobiet. Praca składa się z trzech rozdziałów. Rozdział pierwszy poświęcony został emigracji kobiet żydowskich wywodzących się na ogół z Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej do Ameryki, pozycji kobiet w judaizmie oraz wpływowi feminizmu żydowskiego na kształt współczesnych odłamów judaizmu. W drugim rozdziale pracy dokonano przeglądu kobiecej literatury amerykańsko-żydowskiej na przestrzeni XX i początku XXI wieku. Trzeci rozdział, stanowiący część empiryczną rozprawy, zawiera krytyczną interpretację wybranych dzieł literackich pochodzących z okresu 1980-2005 autorstwa współczesnych pisarek amerykańsko-żydowskich reprezentujących trzecie pokolenie. Utwory te przeanalizowano zarówno z perspektywy społeczno-kulturowej, związanej bezpośrednio z religią judaistyczną i miejscem kobiet w zmieniającym się świecie, jak i pod kątem formy i stylu preferowanych przez ich autorki.
Uniwersytet w Białymstoku. Wydział Filologiczny

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)
This thesis applies the ontological turn to the war fiction of veteran authors, Kurt Vonnegut and Tim O’Brien. It argues that some veteran authors desire to communicate truth through fiction. Choosing to communicate truth through fiction hints at a new perspective on reality and existence that may not be readily accepted or understood by those who lack combat experience. The non-veteran understanding of war can be more informed by entertaining the idea that a multiplicity of realities exists. Affirming the combat veteran reality—the post-war ontology—and acknowledging the non-veteran reality—rooted in what I label “pre-war” or “civilian” ontology—helps enhance the reader’s understanding of what veteran authors attempt to communicate through fiction. This approach reframes the dialogic interaction between the reader and the perspectives presented in veteran author’s fiction through an emphasis on “radical alterity” to the point that telling and reading such stories represent distinct ontological journeys. Both Kurt Vonnegut and Tim O’Brien provide intriguing perspectives on reality through their fiction, particularly in the way their characters perceive and express morality, guilt, time, mortality, and even existence. Vonnegut and O’Brien’s war experiences inform these perspectives. This does not imply that the authors hold an identical perspective on the world or that combat experience yields an ontological understanding of the world common to every veteran. It simply asserts that applying the ontological turn to these writings, and the writings of other combat veterans, reveals that those who experience combat first-hand often walk away from those experiences with a changed ontological perspective.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
This dissertation argues that the literary anthropology of Wolfgang Iser allows us to resituate literary studies in response to the challenges of the “cultural turn” and the decline of literary studies. These include questions about what defines a literary text, and whether literature should be bracketed off from the remainder of culture. Iser’s definition for literature focuses upon the materiality of culture, by defining the text in language rather than as a concrete object, and as a unique medium we use to meet a basic need. Iser argues that the “open ended” nature of literature reflects the dynamic human, and favours a definition of the human that points towards the performative quality of representation, in terms of the metaphor of “plasticity”. However, he gives no account of the emergence of this vertical dimension in language. As a corrective measure, an argument is presented for the adoption of the originary hypothesis articulated by Eric Gans to underpin his generative anthropology. Here we follow Richard van Oort, who, in pursuing the argument for an anthropological perspective on the project of cultural interpretation conducted in the humanities, suggests the necessity for a grounding interpretation of our common origin in language. This originary hypothesis indicates that culture, language, and thereby, the human are coterminous. They each begin in a single scene, and a minimal fiction can be offered to describe this scene and provide a basic structure we can discover in each subsequent scene of human culture. The final phase of this dissertation examines the proposition that Iser’s anthropology exhibits a generative perspective on literature. The outcome suggests that the supplement of an originary hypothesis brings stability to his work in articulating categories such as fictionalizing, the imaginary, play, staging, and emergence, which undergird an important new way to approach literary studies.