Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Mosses in literature'

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s collection of short stories, Mosses from an Old Manse, serves as his contribution to the philosophical discussions on Transcendentalism in Concord, MA in the early 1840s. While Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and the other individuals involved in the Transcendental club often seem to readily accept the positions presented in Emerson’s work, it is never so simple for Hawthorne. Repeatedly, Hawthorne’s stories demonstrate his difficulty in trying to identify his own opinion on the subject. Though Hawthorne seems to want to believe in the optimistic potential of the spiritual and intellectual ideal presented in Emersonian Transcendentalism, he consistently dwells on the evil and blackness that may be contained in the human heart. The collection of short stories written while Hawthorne lived in Concord and surrounded himself with those dominant literary figures represents the clearest articulation of his ambivalent position on Transcendentalism.

The aim of this study is to present the poet Moses Rosenkranz from the Bukovina and to examine how Heidegger's phrase Sprache als Heimat applied to the life and works of this particular poet and his environment. The first section looks at Rosenkranz's biography within the context of the Bukovina, where many people grew up speaking German, Ruthenian, Romanian, Yiddish and Polish. This placed the authors from the region in a particularly favourable context for having first-hand knowledge of the way language could or could not become an ersatz home for them in everyday life once their own homes had been lost. The second part of the thesis investigates the way loss affected Rosenkranz's writing and the conditions Heidegger saw as necessary for an encounter with Dasein. This revealed some of the details of Heidegger's understanding of the words `existence', `language' and `Heimat' which could not correspond to Rosenkranz's relationship to language or belonging. The third part of the thesis considers ways in which a sense of belonging could be recreated in writing. Rosenkranz's relationship with words and the material realities it involved were analysed by using his autobiography, his poems and the letters he wrote to his first wife Anna Ruebner-Rosenkranz. Paul Celan, as the most significant poet from the Bukovina, is often cited as a means of comparing the two writers and in order to convey a fuller picture of the literary area. Comparing Heidegger's thoughts on language and home with the way Rosenkranz and other Bukovina poets understood the two concepts provided new material for an interpretation of Sprache als Heimat in terms of the relationship between writer and reader. This revealed that the understanding of language in the works of the Bukovina authors was actually closer to the conclusions on language reached by the philosopher Levinas than to those of Heidegger. Levinas shows how the relationship to the other, to whom language is addressed, can become the real reason for writing and the point where language and belonging meet.

ABSTRACT Lucy Brandão s poetry, produced among the 70s, 80s and 90s of the 20th century, is characterized as a happening of the modern Alagoana Literature, by its expansionist, emancipative, renewable and democratic movement, in Néstor Garcia Canclini s sense (2003). Her poetry is borne on a negative and dissonant lyricism that has been already studied by Hugo Friedrich (1978). She performed her urban repentes and produced hybrid objects of art by mixing several languages and using a dense relation with ethics and aesthetics of existence, rare in her time. By the way, she joined the big refusal called counterculture in the occidental world, in a vanguard behaviour with the forefront of the post-60 maceioense artists that nourished themselves with the utopian reserves from the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Her voice registers, in the urban maceioense country, a singular aesthetic happening that promoted a transcultural trance in the traditional and the beat generation up-todating.
A poesia de Lucy Brandão, produzida entre as décadas de 70, 80 e 90, caracteriza-se como evento da modernidade alagoana, por seu movimento expansionista, emancipador, renovador e democratizador, na acepção de Néstor Garcia Canclini (2003). Portadora de uma negatividade lírica dissonante, já estudada por Hugo Friedrich (1978), fazendo uso de várias linguagens, Lucy Brandão performatizava seus repentes urbanos e produzia outros objetos artísticos híbridos em uma relação visceral com uma ética e estética da existência, rara em seu tempo. Nessa perspectiva, torna-se adepta da grande recusa que foi o movimento da contracultura no mundo ocidental, em uma atitude de vanguarda, integrando uma frente de artistas maceioenses pós-60 que se nutriu de reservas utópicas advindas do século XIX e início do século XX. Sua voz registra, no espaço urbano maceioense, um acontecimento estético singular que coloca em transe transculturador a atualização da tradição e da ruptura.

Submitted by Automa??o e Estat?stica (sst@bczm.ufrn.br) on 2016-01-05T17:54:42Z No. of bitstreams: 1 AnaShirleyDeVasconcelosOliveiraEvangelista_TESE.pdf: 1924532 bytes, checksum: 9ca6b7638941cd717c690a555412d0f5 (MD5)
Approved for entry into archive by Arlan Eloi Leite Silva (eloihistoriador@yahoo.com.br) on 2016-01-08T21:41:51Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 AnaShirleyDeVasconcelosOliveiraEvangelista_TESE.pdf: 1924532 bytes, checksum: 9ca6b7638941cd717c690a555412d0f5 (MD5)
Made available in DSpace on 2016-01-08T21:41:51Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 AnaShirleyDeVasconcelosOliveiraEvangelista_TESE.pdf: 1924532 bytes, checksum: 9ca6b7638941cd717c690a555412d0f5 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-11-12
Este estudo tem por objetivo compreender as constru??es identit?rias de Mossor?, nos enunciados da literatura de cordel. Tendo como fio condutor o epis?dio da resist?ncia citadina ao bando de Lampi?o no dia treze de junho de mil novecentos e vinte e sete, a nossa empiria constituiu-se dos enunciados presentes em nove cord?is, produzidos entre o espa?o-tempo de 1927 e 2007, ano em que a cidade comemorou oitenta anos do epis?dio. Ciente de que o tema extrapolou os limites dos meios comunicacionais da ?poca e passou a integrar o cotidiano dos mossoroenses, produzindo na mem?ria coletiva a imagem de uma cidade da resist?ncia em nomes de ruas, nomes de empresas, nas r?dios com a ?FM resist?ncia?, nos discursos pol?ticos, na sede da prefeitura cujo nome ? ?Pal?cio da Resist?ncia?, a quest?o central que orienta nossa investiga??o congrega a discuss?o em torno das rela??es dial?gicas travadas nos enunciados sobre o tema em tela. Nesse vi?s, a pesquisa elegeu como categorias de an?lise o conceito de vozes sociais e cronotopia, considerando que as diferentes identidades s?o produzidas em fun??o dos posicionamentos tomados pelos sujeitos, bem como, pelos contextos de produ??o. Inscrita na ?rea da Lingu?stica Aplicada (LA) e na linha de pesquisa Linguagem e pr?ticas sociais, a pesquisa articula as teoriza??es provindas da ?rea dos Estudos Culturais (sobretudo no que se refere ? identidade) com os referenciais te?ricos do C?rculo bakhtiniano (no tocante a concep??o s?cio-hist?rica da linguagem e em seu car?ter dial?gico). Os resultados indicam que, apesar de haver uma mov?ncia axiol?gica em torno das representa??es de Mossor? e do epis?dio de vinte e sete, os enunciados dos cord?is convergem para o discurso hegem?nico, corroborando com o perfil identit?rio da resist?ncia veiculado ao longo de oito d?cadas
This study has as objective to investigate the identity constructions of Mossor?, at the statements of the string literature. Having as thread the episode of resistance of the city against the group of Lampi?o at June the thirteenth of nineteen twenty seven, our study built itself at the statements present in nine strings, produced between the space-time of 1927 and 2007, year that Mossor? celebrated eighty years of the episode. Aware that the theme extrapolated the limits of the means of communication of the time and it became part of the everyday of the people from Mossor?, producing at the collective memory the image of a resistance city at the street?s names, at companies? names, at radios? names with the ?FM Resistance?, at the discourses of the politicians, at the city hall which name is ?Palace of the Resistance?, the central question that guides our investigation congregates the discussion around the dialogical relations done at the statements about the theme in vogue. This bias, the research elected as categories of analysis the concept of social voices and chronology, considering that the different identities are produced according to placements made by the subjects, as well as, by the context of production. Admitted at the area of Applied Linguistics (AL) and its line language and pratic of social the research articulates the theorizations provided from the area of Cultural Studies (especially regarding identity) with the theoretical framework of the bakhitinian Circle (regarding the social-historical conception of language and in its dialogical character). The results indicate that even existing an axiological movement around the representations of Mossor? and of the episode of 1927, the statements of the strings converge to a hegemonic discourse, corroborating with the identity profile of resistance transported over eighty decades

While much has been written on the Yiddish poet Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, there is a paucity of critical material which deals with the issue of persona in his poetry. This is unfortunate since the use of persona takes centre stage in Halpern's oeuvre. This work will discuss the issue of persona in Halpern's poems, and will focus specifically on one of Halpern's personae: "Moyshe-Leyb." I will begin with an overview of the relevant literary criticism on Halpern, and a discussion of the major themes found in his poetry. Furthermore, I will discuss Halpern's connection to literary modernism, and this movement's paradigm of persona. Finally, I will examine Halpern's possible motivations for choosing a persona with his own name, and the themes and issues found in these poems.

My essay is about the latter period of Anne Charlotte Leffler’s authorship. In Part I of my essay, I describe her path from the 1880s, where she described femininity as a shortcoming, as writes Ingeborg Nordin-Hennel, towards the 1890s and towards describing femininity as a possibility. This development took place on two levels – on an outer level, where all the woman writers in the late 1880s were influenced and where they were pushed out by the male writers, and on an inner level with Leffler herself.

Her late literary works depict new and more independent types of women, and eroticism is given a more prominent position. In Part II, I study Tre komedier (Three Comedies) which was published in 1891 and which includes the plays Den kärleken (Love is Strange), Familjelycka (Family Happiness), and Moster Malvina (Aunt Malvina). In my opinion, they are early expressions of the New Woman fiction. For my analysis, I use the criteria of genre for the New Woman fiction that is defined by Ebba Witt-Brattström. New Woman fiction is a lost link between the literature of social protest of the 1880s and female modernism. That characterizes, among other things, a new type of woman, who is intellectually and sexually aware. The plot is often contradictory and open-ended which allows scope for interpretation. The protagonist usually has a girlfriend or another woman, whom she can use as a mirror, and there is a new women’s “sistership” emerging, and the urban setting is yet another characteristic. The protagonist often stays at a boarding house or is out on a journey. The new male character is a weakling as opposed to the bourgeois masculinity. These features are distinct in Tre komedier. However, I have discovered a few more criteria.

I also discuss how Leffler, in the comedic form, delivers a pronounced criticism of society. In Tre komedier, the bourgeois matrimony, the bourgeois family, and the treatment of unmarried women are focused upon and criticized. The three plays differ very much from one another in the dramatic forms. Lynn R Wilkinson considers that they are among the first modernistic comedies, and they point forward to authors such as Wilde, Shaw, and Chekhov.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-28T14:16:29Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Ivy.pdf: 855811 bytes, checksum: 6f07144d1f7bf9389a83793b74d4ea3e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2005-05-11
Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior
The concept of soul, implied in The Treatise about the Immortality of the Soul written by Rabi Mosseh Rephael d Aguilar, is a by-product of the specific social and historical conditions that surrounded the Jewish community in Holland, by the time of the Renaissance in the 1600. It is also the result of the arguments among the natural philosophers of the time about the old and the modern . By combining natural philosophy and religion, added to the magic character provided by the Cabala and hermetic writings, the efforts of the renaissance magician can be seen clearly, as his attempts to blend different views, and finding the unity underlying the differences. The net of relations among Aristotelian, Platonic and neo-Platonic schools, as well as the magic that perpetuated the Renaissance through the hermetic writings, sets the tone to the Treatise, and explains much of the rationale used by Rabi Mosseh Rephael d Aguilar in proving the immortality of the soul
A concepção de alma implícita no Tratado sobre a Imortalidade da Alma, de autoria do Rabino Mosseh Rephael d Aguilar, é resultado de condições específicas do entorno histórico-social da comunidade judaica na Holanda renascentista, nos Seiscentos. Também é fruto do debate sobre o antigo e moderno entre os filósofos naturais do período. A combinação da filosofia natural com a religião natural, adicionada ao caráter mágico advindo dos textos herméticos e da Cabala, evidenciam o esforço do mago renascentista em conciliar distinções, acolhendo a unidade subjacente às diferenças. As redes de relações entre aristotelismo, platonismo e neoplatonismo, bem como a magia que impregnou a Renascença através dos textos herméticos, dá o tom ao Tratado e explica muitos dos argumentos usados pelo Rabino Mosseh Rephael d Aguilar para provar a imortalidade da alma

O objetivo deste trabalho é analisar a personagem Moisés, numa vertente comparatista, com base nas informações fornecidas pelo filme Os Dez Mandamentos, na versão de 1956, dirigido pelo produtor e diretor Cecil B. DeMille, alicerçado nos textos bíblicos e na historiografia, considerando a sua vida desde o seu nascimento à libertação dos filhos de Israel da escravidão do Egito. Pretendemos ainda, tratar das questões tais como: a transposição e adaptação dos textos bíblicos para a Planificação, découpage (Jorge, 2011:86), com destaque sobre a relação entre a arte literária e a cinematográfica, os conceitos teóricos dos textos bíblicos e do filme, salientando os Dez Mandamentos bíblicos, e a presença do dialogismo, da intertextualidade e da releitura no contexto da narrativa bíblica e fílmica. Finalmente, o presente estudo busca analisar o filme Os Dez Mandamentos, 1956, de Cecil B. DeMille; ABSTRAT: The objective set for this work is to analyze the character Moses, in a comparative way, based on the informations provided by the 1956 version of the The Ten Commandments movie, directed by the producer and director Cecil B. DeMille, by the biblical texts and by the historiography, considering his life from his birth to the liberation of the children of Israel from Egyptian bondage. It is also the purpose for this paper to deal with issues such as the transposition and adaptation from the biblical texts to the shooting-script, découpage (Jorge, 2011:86) highlighting the link between literary and filmic art, the theoretical concepts of the biblical texts and the movie focusing on the biblical Ten Commandments, and the presence of dialogism, intertextuality and rereading in the context of the biblical and filmic narrative. In conclusion, this research aims to analyze The Ten Commandments film 1956 production from Cecil B. DeMille.

Thesis (M.A.)--Indiana University, 2010.
Title from screen (viewed on July 19, 2010). Department of English, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Advisor(s): Robert Rebein, Jonathan Eller, William Touponce. Includes vitae. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 84-86).

The objective of this thesis is to examine how the bereavement of a mother tongue in various ways affects a person and how literature discusses this experience. How does literature reflect it and is it possible to identify any specific and recurring themes? Are there any similarities between the experience of migration and the experience of colonialism? What purpose does writing serve in this and how to describe the impact of language? Hopefully this thesis will contribute to a better understanding of the situation for newly arrived people and for persons living in Sweden with Swedish as a second language. The thesis has a postcolonial perspective as the focus is fiction dealing with a relocation from east to west. Earlier research and writings that has inspired is in particular the works by the two postcolonial theorists Franz Fanon and Sara Ahmed. The main source material for the study is literary works, e.g. the works of Jila Mossaed, Theodor Kallifatides, Athena Farrokhzad, Burcu Sahin and Yoko Tawada. The thesis is intentionally written in the form of an essay, suggesting the power of language and storytelling. The main objective of the thesis is to describe, rather than to arrive at a conclusion. One main focus is the author’s personal relation to the subject and to the Philippines and its colonial past. The literary works addressed in this study suggests that literature dealing with migration and language bereavement mainly focuses on a discussion about the relation between the native tongue and the new language, the relation between the metaphysical body and the new geographical location, about feelings of speechlessness and alienation that becomes physical. All these concurrent themes can be used as tools to define an experience that in many aspects is inconceivable. The thesis also identifies similarities between colonialism and migration, as both raise the question of inherit right to a place and a lifelong search for a place to call home. In this effort, writing is important and may function as an emancipatory lever to create new places.

The colonists living in the new United States after the American War for Independence were faced with the problem of forming new identities once they could no longer recognize themselves, collectively or individually, as subjects of Great Britain. After the French Revolution American politicians began to weed out the more radical political elements of the newly formed United States, particularly by painting one of the revolution’s biggest defenders, Thomas Paine, as unworthy of the attention he received during the American War for Independence, and fear ran throughout the states that an anarchic revolution like the French Revolution could bring the downfall of the nation. State, local, and regional organizations sprang up to fight Jacobinism, the legendary secret group of murderers and anarchists that fought against the French government. This distressing situation gave rise to new literature that sought to describe the “real” origins and background of Jacobinism in the War in Heaven and in Eden, and a new movement against Jacobinism was established. Fears about the organization of secret societies did not wane in the decades after the French Revolution, but worsened in the last half of the 1820s when a Freemason, William Morgan, disappeared under mysterious circumstances in connection to an exposé of Masonry he had written. Most Americans assumed that Freemasons had abducted and murdered Morgan in order to keep their oaths and rites secret. One influential early American who was influenced by this socio-historical was Joseph Smith, Jr., the founding prophet of Mormonism. Smith interpreted the Eden narrative in light of the movement against secret societies, and literary motifs common to anti-Jacobin literature during the period provided language and interpretive strategies for understanding the Eden narrative that would influence how Smith produced his new scripture. Only a few months after the publication of the Book of Mormon Smith edited the version of Eden found there into the text of the Bible itself and made the biblical narrative conform to the version found in the Book of Mormon through his own revisions and additions.

Abstract How to Believe in Nothing: Moses Mendelssohn’s Subjectivity and the Empty Core of Tradition Yuval Kremnitzer The purpose of this study is twofold. Firstly, it aims to illuminate key aspects of the work of Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), the ‘Father of Jewish Enlightenment,’ in particular, his well-known, and universally rejected, theory of Judaism. Secondly, it brings Mendelssohn’s ideas and insights to bear on the problem of Nihilism, a problem in the development of which Mendelssohn is usually considered to have played a merely incidental role. It is argued that these two domains, seemingly worlds apart, are mutually illuminating. Moses Mendelssohn enters our history books in two separate contexts, which seem to have nothing in common. In the context of ‘Jewish Studies,’ Mendelssohn is best known for his idiosyncratic view of Judaism as a religion devoid of any principles of belief, and for his confidence in its compatibility with reason – positions developed in his Jerusalem: Or, On Religious Power and Judaism (1783). In the history of philosophy, Mendelssohn is known as the last representative of the dogmatic Leibniz-Wolff School, rendered obsolete by Kant’s critical, transcendental turn. In this broader context, Mendelssohn is also widely recognized to have played a role, if only contingently, in the emergence of the term Nihilism at a decisive moment in the historical development of the problem, namely, the so-called pantheism controversy, in the context of which he published his last work of philosophy, Morning Hours: Lectures on God’s existence (1785). And yet he has never been taken as belonging to the development of the problem in its essence. This dissertation aims to show that Moses Mendelssohn’s work offers a decisive intervention in the problem of Nihilism, arguably the fundamental problem of Modernity, an intervention that has great value for contemporary debates of the problem. Following and expanding on Kant’s intervention in the controversy, which I show to have been deeply engaged with Mendelssohn, makes it possible to bring to light Mendelssohn’s unrecognized contribution. In response to Kant’s groundbreaking critical philosophy, which seeks to account for the conditions of possible experience, Mendelssohn develops a theory of the experience of possibility. Implicit in this theory is a profound reformulation of the problem of Nihilism, as a crisis in the experience of possibility. Mendelssohn’s unique post-Kantian philosophical position regarding subjectivity, nature and the divine absolute is given more concrete articulation in being related and traced back to his political theology and his reflections on Judaism. In this way, the two separate lines in Mendelssohn’s reception – as the father of Jewish enlightenment and as an incidental facilitator, or vanishing mediator, in the consequential pantheism controversy – coalesce, and illuminate each other.

This research report is concerned with translation in which culture plays a major role, and examines the issues involved in translating for a specific audience – in this case Arabic-speaking Moslem children in Egypt. Translation is firstly discussed in a broader context, demonstrating that translation needs to be understood either as “rewriting” or “cultural textualisation” (Snell-Hornby, 1997:123). Secondly, the translation of children’s literature is discussed as a type of translation operating through an encounter with both culture and linguistics. Overlaps between language and culture are located and the importance of contextual adaptation is emphasised in relation to solutions proposed for addressing the cultural problems raised in the translation of Peter Slingsby’s The Joining for Egyptian children. In conclusion, suggestions are made concerning translation as adaptation in the form of possible guidelines for future translators of children’s literature into Arabic.

My thesis explores the formation of the subject in the novels of Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, and Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day. I attach the concept of property in terms of how male protagonists are obsessed with materialistic ownership and with the subordination of women who, as properties, consolidate their manhood. The three novelists despite their racial, gendered, and literary differences share the view that identity and truth are mere social and cultural constructs. I incorporate the work of Judith Butler and other poststructuralist figures, who see identity as a matter of performance rather than a natural entity. My thesis explores the theme of freedom, which I attached to the ways characters use their bodies either to confine or to emancipate themselves from the restricting world of race, class, and gender. The three novelists deconstruct any system of belief that promulgates the objectivity of truth in historical documents. History in the three novels, as with the protagonists, perception of identity, remains a social construct laden with distortions to serve particular political or ideological agendas. My thesis gives voice to African American female characters who are associated with love and racial and gender resistance. They become the reservoirs of the African American legacy in terms of their association with the oral and intuitionist mode of knowing, which subverts the male characters’ obsession with property and with the mainstream empiricist world. In this dissertation, I use the concept of hybridity as a literary and theoretical devise that African-American writers employ. In effect, I embark on the postcolonial studies of Henry Louise Gates, Paul Gilroy, W. E. B Du Bois, James Clifford, and Arjun Appadurai in order to reflect upon the fluidity of Morrison’s and Naylor’s works. I show how these two novelists subvert Faulkner’s essentialist perception of truth, and of racial and gendered identity. They associate the myth of the Flying African with the notion of hybridity by making their male protagonists criss-cross Northern and Southern regions. I refer to Mae Gwendolyn Henderson’s article on “Speaking in Tongues” in my analysis of how Naylor subverts the patriarchal text of both Faulkner and Morrison in embarking on a more feminine version of the flying African, which she relates to an ex-slave, Sapphira Wade, a volatile female character who resists fixed claim over her story and identity. In dealing with the concept of hybridity, I show that Naylor rewrites both authors’ South by making Willow Springs a more fluid space, an assumption that unsettles the scores of critics who associate the island with authenticity and exclusive rootedness.
Ma thèse est une étude comparative entre William Faulkner, Toni Morrison et Gloria Naylor. Elle me permet d’explorer comment les protagonistes males construisent leur identités en se référant à la possession matérialiste et en se basant sur la subordination de la femme, qui est une autre forme de possession, afin de consolider leur masculinité. Dans leurs textes respectifs, Go Down, Moses, Song of Solomon, et Mama Day, les trois auteurs, malgré leur différences culturelles et même littéraires, partagent l’idée que l’identité, l’histoire, et la vérité ne sont que des construits culturels et sociales. On se basant sur la théorie de Judith Butler et d’autres théoriciens poststructuralistes et contemporains, ma thèse reflète qu’il n’y a pas d’identité « naturelle » ou de réalité objective. La perception identitaire n’est qu’une illusion imaginaire et idéologique ou le sujet ne fait que répéter et performer le discours de son environnent. Faulkner, Morrison, et Naylor basent leurs oeuvres sur le thème de la liberté. Ils explorent comment, à partir de leurs corps, leurs caractères se conforment ou bien se détachent de l’idéologie qui confine leurs identités sexuelles, raciales et sociales. En critiquant, non seulement l’identité’ mais aussi l’histoire, ma thèse montre que les trois écrivains détruisent la perception que la vérité est objective surtout dans les documents historiques. Ainsi, la vérité devient qu’une forme de distorsion qui consolide une certaine idéologie. Ma thèse montre que les trois auteurs mettent en valeur la voix de la femme Afro-Américaine. Elle joue le rôle d’une médiatrice pour les protagonistes males. Elle rejette le discours matérialiste et sexiste. Cette voix féminine représente le thème de l’amour et la survie de sa communauté noire et la résistance raciale. La femme Afro-Américaine préserve la culture Africaine à travers son attachement à la tradition orale et à la connaissance intuitive. En se basant sur la tendance subversive de l’art et de la littérature postcoloniale qui est promulguée par les théories de Henry Louise Gates, Paul Gilroy, W. E. B Du Bois, James Clifford et Arjun Appadurai, je montre qu’à travers Toni Morrison et Gloria Naylor, le texte de Faulkner reste logocentrique et essentialiste dans sa vision hiérarchique de l’identité raciale et sexuelle. Morrison et Naylor se référant au mythe de l’Africain volant afin de justifier qu’il n’y a pas d’identité fixe et stable, donnant ainsi la voix a une identité hybride et fluide. En se basant sur l’article, « Parler en Langues » de Mae Gwendolyn Henderson, ma thèse explore comment en réécrivant d’autres textes, Gloria Naylor déconstruit non seulement Faulkner, mais aussi le sexisme qui demeure résident dans le texte de Toni Morrison. L’histoire de Willow Springs se base sur le mythe féminin d’une ex esclave Sapphira Wade, qui en étant volatile, son histoire et son identité résistent toute forme de catégorisations. En étudiant l’hybridité’ dans la culture Afro-Américaine, ma thèse montre que le Sud qui est décrit dans l’oeuvre de Mama Day est plus hybride que celui de Faulkner et Morrison.

Niagara is a work of magical realism, incorporating elements of historical and experimental fiction. The novel is inhabited by the problematic moguls and politicians who shaped American settlement, the burgeoning subculture of freight train hoppers that post their travels on the internet, and an author turned ghost who can no longer remember his past work.

The central idea of this study is an examination of the transformation of the image of the poet in different generations. My thesis problem is that the poet is dynamic, reflecting both the self-image and reception of society at different times. I collected data from many different sources- the primary sources were memoirs, poetry, short stories, novels and original documents from the Canadian Jewish Congress Archives and by speaking with historians about A.M. Klein, Irving Layton and Leonard Cohen. The secondary sources used were scholarly books about the poets articles from the Canadian Jewish press and documentaries. I used literary analysis for the poetry and I took a social-historical approach in the examination of the poets' relationship to the community and biography. The social historical approach and the literary approach were both used in this study to analyze the succession of Canadian Jewish poets. As an original contribution to the field, this study categorizes the three poets in a succession: Klein is the Jewish poet, Layton is the Canadian Jewish poet and Cohen is the spiritual guru, all reflecting the changing situation for Canadian Jews. I examine the first generation poet in this succession of gifted Canadian Jewish poets, A.M. Klein, the second generation, Irving Layton and the third generation poet, Leonard Cohen. Specifically, I argue that the roles and the reception to these poets have changed in the Jewish press as a result of changing times. As the years progress and the situation for worldwide Jewry becomes more stable with greater tolerance in a multicultural society, the poet moves away from the identification as a Jewish poet. In Klein's generation he is labeled as a Jewish poet. Layton fights the label of a Jewish poet and through controversy and celebrity he is recognized as a Canadian Jewish poet. Leonard Cohen re-defines the category of a Canadian Jewish poet in favor of a spiritual guru. This study provides an overview of the times and the issues that each poet faced in their generation. The first part of each chapter is devoted to a brief biography and an exploration of the way the Jewish community responded to the poets in terms of roles that they wanted them to undertake and the own reception to the poets in the local Jewish press. It is interesting that each poet served a different function in different generations as a response to the needs of the community. The second section of each chapter is an examination of the poets' self-image as depicted in their writing. All of the poets viewed themselves in the same manner, as spokesmen, controversial figures and as modern poets similar to ancient biblical figures. This section includes the ways the poets viewed their relationship with the community and their relationship to Judaism as a way of shaping their self-perception.

Traditional medicine, unlike western medicine, is not merely concerned with physical illness, but it is used for various purposes. For instance: It can be used for lkuthwala' (the process whereby a person consults a traditional doctor for the medicine that will make a person very rich). The practice of 'ukuthwala' has numerous disavantages, especially because of the price that is paid in return of the wealth accumulated. The price is usually a human sacrifice, depending on what version of Ukuthwala' a person has opted for. Traditional medicine can also be used for witchcraft (ukuthakatha),for protection against evil spirits (ukuqinisa) , for making someone love you, for job opportunities, and for inspiration of the army. It can be either used for good or evil purposes. The dissertation looks at both versions by strongly drawing examples from Zulu novels. Other issues raised in this study is the importance of religion and cosmology, culture, magic, as well as spiritual healing, in association with traditional medicine. The Africans believe in the spirit world. They believed that for people to communicate with 'Mvelinqangi ' (God) there should be 'amadlozi' (the ancestors), who should intercede with God on their behalf. Usually, they call a sangoma' (medium) or 'inyanga' (medicine-man) to perform the religious ritual, or he would just instruct the elder person in the family how to carry out the procedure of communicating with the ancestors (Canonici, 1996). Traditional medicine has its own professional ethics. These ethics are also discussed in the research.
Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2000.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)
By start of the 1920s, the United States had seen nearly forty years of vast accumulations of wealth by a small group of people, substantial financial speculation and a mass change in the economic base from agricultural to industrial. All of this ended in 1929 in a crushing depression that spread not only across the country, but also around the world. Hard-Boiled detective fiction first reached the reading public early in the decade initially as adventure stories, but quickly became a way for authors to express the stresses these changes were causing on people and society. The detective is the center of the story with the task of reestablishing a certain degree of order or redemption. An important character hallmark of this genre is that he is seldom able to do this, or that the cost is so high a terrible burden remains. His decisions and judgments in this attempt are formed by his relationship with the people or community around him. The goal of this thesis is to look at the issues raised in the context of how the detective relates to a person or community in the story. For analysis, six books were chosen arranged from least level of personal relationship by the detective to the most intimate. The books are Red Harvest, by Dashiell Hammett, The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler, The Galton Case, by Ross MacDonald, Cotton Comes to Harlem, by Chester Himes, Devil in a Blue Dress, by Walter Mosley, and I, the Jury, by Mickey Spillane. In the study of these books, a wide range of topics are presented including political ideologies, corruption, racial discrimination and family strife. Each book provided a wealth of views on these and other subjects that are as relevant today as when they were written.

The research in this thesis attempts to select texts from the African American Spirituals and the Bible that are appropriate for secondary language arts instruction, specifically for grades 9-12. The paper first gives an overview of legal justifications and educational reasons for teaching religious literature in public schools. Then, relevant educational standards are discussed, and, using the standards as an initial guide, I identify common themes within the Spirituals and Bible, which, from my analysis of various literatures, are slavery, chosenness, and coded language. Next, I describe my systematic effort to choose texts from the Spirituals and the Bible. To help accomplish this, I draw primarily from two tomes: Go Down Moses: Celebrating the African-American Spiritual and Biblical Literacy: The Essential Bible Stories Everyone Needs to Know. After I describe the research process of selecting texts, I form judgments about which biblical passages and African American Spirituals are particularly worthy of study, along with their applicable and mutual themes.