Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Pastoral fiction, American History and criticism'
To see the other types of publications on this topic, follow the link: Pastoral fiction, American History and criticism.
Create a spot-on reference in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and other styles
Consult the top 50 dissertations / theses for your research on the topic 'Pastoral fiction, American History and criticism.'
Next to every source in the list of references, there is an 'Add to bibliography' button. Press on it, and we will generate automatically the bibliographic reference to the chosen work in the citation style you need: APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago, Vancouver, etc.
You can also download the full text of the academic publication as pdf and read online its abstract whenever available in the metadata.
Browse dissertations / theses on a wide variety of disciplines and organise your bibliography correctly.
1
Shishkin, Timur. "Marginalized Characters in Contemporary American Short Fiction." PDXScholar, 2011. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/297.
Full textAbstract:
The focus of the present research work is the contemporary American short stories that bring up issues of compulsory norm and the conflict between marginalized characters and their environment. This research was based on those short stories that seemed to represent the idea of being "different" in the most complex and multilayered way, and its goal was to unfold new aspects of the conflict between "normal" and "abnormal"/"different". Variations of norm as well as diversity within the marginalized raise a number of questions about the reasons for their inability to coexist peacefully. The close reading and the analysis of the selected stories show that all the conflicts in them, in one way or another, repeat similar patterns and lead to the same root of the problem of misunderstanding, which is fear. To be more precise, all the cases of hate towards "different" characters can be explained by the hater's explicit or implicit fear of death in its various forms: inability to procreate one's own kind, cultural or personal self-identity loss, actual life threat in the form of a reminder of possible physical harm and death. Most often it would be the case where shame and fear of death overlap in a very complex way. In general, the cases of characters' otherness fall into three major groups. The nature of the alienation for each of these groups is described and analyzed in three separate chapters. Prejudice and stereotypes are playing a great role in formation of fears and insecurities which need to be dismantled in order to make peaceful coexistence possible. This work concludes with pointing out the crucial role of taking an approach of representation of various perspectives and diversification of voices in creative writing, academia and media in the context of multicultural society.
2
Proietti, Salvatore. "The cyborg, cyberspace, and North American science fiction." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1998. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape11/PQDD_0021/NQ44558.pdf.
Full text
3
Zheng, Baoxuan, and 鄭寶璇. "The theme of alienation in modern Chinese and Anglo-American fiction." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1985. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31206803.
Full text
4
Jenkins, Jennifer Lei. "Failed mothers and fallen houses: Gothic domesticity in nineteenth-century American fiction." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1993. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/186122.
Full textAbstract:
This study examines the relation between gender and genre in four novels that chart the development of American domestic life from the Colonial to the Gilded Age. In these novels, the presence in the house of women--mothers, daughters, sisters, servants, slaves--often threatens the fathers' dynastic ambitions and subverts the formal intentions of the narrative. These women represent familiar but strange forces of the uncanny which lurk beneath the apparently placid surface of domestic narrative. In "house" novels by Hawthorne, Stowe, Alcott, and James, interactions of the uncanny feminine with dynastic concerns threaten not only the novel's social message of destiny and dynasty, but the traditional form of the novel itself. In The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne constructs a narrative in which patrician fathers and domestic daughters struggle for control of the House and its story. Slavery disrupts domestic life in Uncle Tom's Cabin, inverting and thereby perverting traditional notions of home and family and producing monstrous mothers and failed households. Alcott details the abuses and dangers of reified gender roles in family life, while depicting a young woman's attempt to reconstruct domesticity as a female community in Work. Finally, James displaces domestic concerns entirely from The Other House, portraying instead the violent nature of feminine desire unrestrained by tradition, community, or family. Story and telling work at cross-purposes in these novels, creating a tension between Romantic structures and realistic narrative strategies. These authors depart from the tropes of their times, using gothic devices to reveal monstrous mothers, uncanny children, and failed or fallen houses within the apparently conservative domestic novel. Such gothic devices transcend literary historians' distinctions of romance and sentimental fiction as respectively male and female stories and reveal the fundamentally subversive nature of domestic fiction. For these writers, the uncanny presence of the feminine produces a counternarrative of gender, class, and race, redefines the cultural boundaries of home and family, and exposes the fictive nature of social constructions of gender and domesticity.
5
Strecker, Geralyn. "Reading prostitution in American fiction, 1893-1917." Virtual Press, 2001. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1213148.
Full textAbstract:
Many American novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries discuss prostitution. Some works like Reginald Wright Kauffman's The House of Bondage, (1910) exaggerate the threat of "white slavery," but others like David Graham Phillips's Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (1917) more honestly depict the harsh conditions which caused many women to prostitute themselves for survival. Contemporary critical interpretations of novels addressed in this dissertation began before major shifts in women's roles in the workplace, before trends towards family planning, before women could respectably live on their own, and especially before women won the right to vote. Yet, a century of progress later, this vestigal criticism still influences our study of these texts.Relying on primary source materials such as prostitute autobiographies and vice commission reports, I compare fictional representations of prostitution to historical data, focusing on the prostitute's voice and her position in society. I examine actual prostitutes' life stories to dispel the misconception that prostitution was always a lower-class business. My chapters are ordered in regards to the prominence of the prostitute characters' voices: in Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) the heroine seldom speaks for herself; in two Socialist novels--Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) and Estelle Baker's The Rose Door (1911)--prostitutes debate low wages, political corruption, and organized vice; and in Phillips's Susan Lenox, the title character is almost always allowed to speak for herself, and readers can see what she is thinking as well as doing. As my chapters progress, I demonstrate how the fictions become more like the prostitutes' own autobiographies, with self-reliant women telling their stories without shame or remorse. My conclusion, "Revamping `Fallen Women' Pedagogy for Teaching American Literature," suggests how social history and textual scholarship of specific "fallen women" novels should affect our teaching of these texts.Department of English
6
Kocela, Christopher. "Fetishism as historical practice in postmodern American fiction." Thesis, McGill University, 2002. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=38213.
Full textAbstract:
This study contends that postmodern American fiction dramatizes an important shift of philosophical perspective on the fetish in keeping with recent theories of fetishism as a cultural practice. This shift is defined by the refusal to accept the traditional Western condemnation of the fetishist as primitive or perverse, and by the effort to affirm more productive uses for fetishism as a theoretical concept spanning the disciplines of psychoanalysis, Marxian social theory, and anthropology. Analyzing the depiction of fetishistic practices in selected contemporary American novels, the dissertation utilizes fetish theory in order to clarify the unique textual and historiographic features of postmodernist fiction. It also emphasizes the way in which conventional ideas about history and teleology are necessarily challenged by an affirmative orientation toward the fetish. Part One of the dissertation, comprising the first two chapters, traces the lineage of Western thinking about fetishism from Hegel, Marx, and Freud to Derrida, Baudrillard, and Jameson, among others. Recognizing that traditional theories attribute the symbolic power of the fetish to its mystification of historical origins, Part One posits that poststructuralist and postmodernist contributions to the subject enable, but do not develop, an alternative concept of fetishism as a practice with constructive historical potential. Part Two of the study seeks to develop this historical potential with reference to prominent descriptive models of postmodernist fiction, and through close readings of five contemporary American authors: Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, Robert Coover, John Hawkes, and Don DeLillo. The four chapters of Part Two each examine the fictional representation of fetishism within a different theoretical framework, focusing on, respectively: temporality and objectivity in postmodern fiction theory; the interrelation between psychoanalytic theory and female fetishism in novels by Pynchon and Acker
7
Shea, Maureen Elizabeth. "Latin American women writers and the growing potential of political consciousness." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1987. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/184310.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation provides a feminist reading of the works of Latin American women writers since the decade of the sixties to the present who focus on the particular historical moment of their times from a political perspective. A systematic study of the narrative figure in novels by Dora Alonso, Elena Poniatowska, Claribel Alegria and Darwin Flakoll, and Isabel Allende, reveals an awareness of the undercurrents of oppression existent in their societies based on racial and class stereotypes with a growing understanding of oppression based on sex. From the perspective of the female narrator in Tierra Inerme by the Cuban writer Dora Alonso, the Cuban social structure before 1959 is condemned for its inequality on the basis of class, race, and sex. However, the perspective of the narrator reveals that she has not entirely escaped the prejudices that permeate her society concerning women. Hasta no verte Jesus mio, by the Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska concentrates on the testimony of Jesusa Palancares who condemns the structural inequality existent in Mexican society. Although Palancares' perspective reveals an awareness of the unequal treatment of women, because of her underprivileged status she concentrates on oppression based on class. In Cenizas de Izalco by Darwin Flakoll from the United States and the Salvadoran Claribel Alegria, the 1931 massacre of the peasants in El Salvador is condemned. However, through the contrasting perspectives of the male and female narrators, oppression on the basis of sex is most emphasized. La casa de los espiritus by the Chilean Isabel Allende depicts brutal class, racial and sexual oppression in Chile from the 1920's to 1973. It is in this novel that sexual oppression is portrayed most vividly, again through the contrasting perspectives of the male and female narrators. Although a growing awareness of sexual oppression emerges in the novels studied becoming most emphatic in this decade through an awakening feminist consciousness, the perspective of the narrators emphasize to varying degrees the importance of solidarity among women to combat injustice of every form to achieve a more equitable existence for all oppressed people.
8
MacLeod, Alexander. "Between a rock and a soft place : postmodern-regionalism in Canadian and American fiction." Thesis, McGill University, 2003. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=19527.
Full textAbstract:
This study calls for a re-evaluation of contemporary regionalist literary theory. It argues that traditional models of the discourse have been too heavily influenced by nineteenth century realist aesthetics and political ideologies. Because most scholars continue to interpret regionalist texts according to a resolutely empirical reading of geography, literary regionalism has fallen out of touch with the new kinds of "unrealistic," generic landscapes that now dominate North American culture in the postindustrial era. Drawing heavily on recent work by postmodern geographers such as Edward Soja, David Harvey, Michael Dear and Derek Gregory, this project updates regionalist theory by "re-placing" the artificially stabilized reading of geography that dominated the nineteenth century with a more self-consciously spatialized reading of what Soja calls our contemporary "real-and-imagined" places. By grafting together traditional regionalism and postmodern spatial theory we improve on both contributing discourses. In a "postmodern-regionalist" literary criticism, traditional regionalism sheds its reputation for theoretical naivete, while the elusive abstractions of postmodern theory gain a real-world referent, and a specific geographical index. When we "read postmodernism regionally" - - when we aggressively interrogate where this kind of fiction comes from and the places it represents - - we realize that the canons of postmodern fiction in Canada and the United States have been influenced by two very different spatial epistemologies. Rather than being "determined" by their real geographies, Canadian and American postmodernism have been more directly influenced by two different readings of geography. Works by Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, and Don DeLillo demonstrate that American postmodernism often interprets social space according to what Henri Lefebvre calls the idealistic "the illusion of transparency," while texts by Canadian postmodernists such as Robert Kroetsch, Wayne Johnston and Guy Vanderhaeghe tend to fall under Lefebvre's more materialistic "illusion of opacity." The ambiguous figure of Douglas Coupland - - a Canadian writer most critics treat as an American - - puts the spatial conventions of postmodernism in both countries in sharp relief. In an American postmodernism, dominated by generic suburban settings, regions will almost always be seen as imaginary projections, while in a Canadian postmodernism, dominated by the Prairies, regions will almost always retain some sense of their material reality.
9
Stewart, Robert Earl. "The catastrophe of entertainment : televisuality and post-postmodern American fiction." Thesis, McGill University, 1999. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=30220.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis examines the effects of television and entertainment culture on American fiction. Focusing primarily on the novels of Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace, with a secondary focus on the films of American film director David Lynch, the thesis proposes that post-postmodern fiction, fiction in which the familiarizing trends of postmodern fiction are reversed, is a response to the powerful influence of television and other forms of electronic media on American culture.
10
Johnson, Alfred B. "Net work : social networks, disruptive agency, and innovation in Howells, Fitzgerald, Heller, Pynchon, and Gibson." Virtual Press, 2006. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1343471.
Full textAbstract:
This study uses concepts from network science to analyze the agency of outsider characters who cause change or disruption without necessarily securing economic or political power for themselves. Network science as theorized by thinkers like Duncan Watts (Six Degrees, 2003) and Albert-Laszlo Barabasi (Linked, 2002) explains social networks in terms of social structures: clusters of people, bridges between them, pathways through them. Michel Foucault (The Archaeology of Knowledge, 1971) suggests that new notions must enter public or personal awareness on "surfaces of emergence"—institutions like families and social groups. Michel de Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Life, 1974) looks at inventive ways that users repurpose products, both industrial and cultural, and so become "secondary producers." To analyze the influential-outsider agency of the fictional characters featured in this study, I theorize the clusters, bridges, and pathways of network science as surfaces of emergence on which "secondary productions" can appear and then spread through a social network.The introductory chapter explores and explains the general application of network science to literary criticism. In subsequent chapters, I use a networks-based approach to examine the agency of William Dean Howells's Tom Corey (The Rise of Silas Lapham, 1884), F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby (The Great Gatsby, 1925), Joseph Heller's Milo Minderbinder (Catch-22, 1961), Thomas Pynchon's Pierce Inverarity (The Crying of Lot 49, 1965), and William Gibson's Cayce Pollard (Pattern Recognition, 2003). These characters do unusual things with and from the subject positions in which they find themselves, and—whether or not they are or remain marginalized characters in their social systems—they are innovative and influential in ways that other characters do not understand or anticipate. All five novels depict the diffusion of innovative ideas and practices as a process of unplanned, non-coercive social negotiation, where innovation can originate with any person or group of people in the social network and is dependent on the complex interaction of liminal notions and mainstream thinking. The networking approach to these novels clarifies the ways that their authors have imagined social networks to function and the particular interactions they have imagined to lead to change or disruption.Department of English
11
Traves, Julie. "Writing himself and others : Philip Roth and the autobiographical tradition in Jewish-American fiction." Thesis, McGill University, 1996. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=26763.
Full textAbstract:
Philip Roth's parody of autobiography in the Zuckerman series is part of a larger debate concerning the problems of Jewish art. As Roth manipulates personal and personified autobiography, he both underlines and undermines Jewish traditions of reading and writing. To be sure, Zuckerman's struggle for artistic identity articulates a long-standing Jewish concern with the tensions of collective representation. It is from a culture consistently threatened by alienation and extermination that Roth finds his terms of reference. Zuckerman and his creator are subject to a whole discourse of Jewish textuality: to Jewish notions about the relationship between the individual and the group; between fact and fiction and between aesthetics and morality.However, the Zuckerman books are at once part of a continuum of Jewish culture and a unique response to the pressures of contemporary American Judaism. Through his humorous manipulations of autobiographical fiction, Roth finally counter-turns the very compasses by which he has oriented himself. He offers a potent commentary on the fatuity of Jewish "facts" and on the fictitious nature of the collectivized Jewish voice. For Roth, it is not only the Jew's experience, but his/her imagination, his/her individual frame of understanding, that determines ethnic identity. In the end, Roth challenges the cohesion of the Jewish cultural text. He places himself in a house of mirrors, where life and art, self and group, Jewish reverence and Jewish rebellion, endlessly reflect off one another.
12
Kwong, Tsz Ching. "The archived future : North American apocalyptic fiction and the ambiguous construction of the present." HKBU Institutional Repository, 2013. http://repository.hkbu.edu.hk/etd_ra/1514.
Full text
13
Kisawadkorn, Kriengsak. "American Grotesque from Nineteenth Century to Modernism: the Latter's Acceptance of the Exceptional." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1994. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278030/.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation explores a history of the grotesque and its meaning in art and literature along with those of its related term, the arabesque, since their co-existence, specifically in literature, is later treated by a well-known nineteenth-century American writer in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque- Theories or views of the grotesque (used in literature), both in Europe and America, belong to twelve theorists of different eras, ranging from the sixteenth century to the present period, especially Modernism (approximately from 1910 to 1945)--Rabelais, Hegel, Scott, Wright, Hugo, Symonds, Ruskin, Santayana, Kayser, Bakhtin, (William Van) O'Connor, and Spiegel. My study examines the grotesque in American literature, as treated by both nineteenth-century writers--Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, and, significantly, by modernist writers--Anderson, West, and Steinbeck in Northern (or non-Southern) literature; Faulkner, McCullers, and (Flannery) O'Connor in Southern literature. I survey several novels and short stories of these American writers for their grotesqueries in characterization and episodes. The grotesque, as treated by these earlier American writers is often despised, feared, or mistrusted by other characters, but is the opposite in modernist fiction.
14
Wright, Charlotte M. "Plain and Ugly Janes: the Rise of the Ugly Woman in Contemporary American Fiction." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1994. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278032/.
Full textAbstract:
Women characters in American literature of the nineteenth century form an overwhelmingly lovely group, but a search through some of the overlooked works reveals a thin but discernible thread of plain, even homely, heroines. Most of these fall into the stereotypical "old maid" category, and, like their real-life counterparts, these "undesirable" women are considered failures, even if they have money or satisfying careers, because they do not have boyfriends, husbands, or children. During the twentieth century, the old maid figure develops into someone not just homely, but downright ugly; in addition, the number of these characters increases, especially in the latter half of the century. In many works written since the 1960s, the woman's ugliness is such an intrinsic part of the story that it could not take place if she were beautiful. In subtle ways, these "ugly woman" stories begin to question the overwhelming value placed on beauty, to question the narrow definition of beauty in American society as a whole, and to suggest that the price for such a "blessing" might indeed be too high. Rather than settling for being a mere "heroine"—which still carries feminine connotations of passive behavior and second-class status—the ugly woman's increase in power over her own life and the lives of others, allows her to achieve a status more in keeping with the more "masculine" and active role of hero.
15
Polley, Jason S. "Acts of justice : risk and representation in contemporary American fiction." Thesis, McGill University, 2006. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=102824.
Full textAbstract:
Spectacles of justice preoccupy contemporary American culture. Legal culture---including the Watergate trials, the Lewinsky scandal, and OJ Simpson's trial for alleged murder---assumes a central place in the American imaginary. Configurations of the law are not limited to media reportage and televised docudramas. Nor are arbitrations confined to law faculties and the spaces of formal courts. Working through depictions of due process in different ways and in different zones, contemporary American writers point up the prevalence of legality in everyday life. Whether on college campuses, in TV studios and suburban homes, or at theatres and racetracks, justice mediates interpersonal relations. Personal narratives proliferate as modes of self-justification. Everyone has a right to represent her side of a story. As interpretations of reality, however, none of these stories can claim absolute justness. No one has a monopoly on the law or victimhood.This dissertation inspects how Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo, and Jane Smiley present the inconsistencies of the law. These American novelists emplot global escapes into their work as a means to inform notions of liberty and jurisprudence. For these writers, freedom requires the recognition of contradictory---and unanticipated---narratives. "Justice Theory" emerges where media, gambling, performance, and suburban studies intersect with ethics, globalism, and narratology. In Franzen's novel The Corrections and essay collection How to Be Alone, self-validation requires the appreciation of the stories of others. In DeLillo's later works, particularly the plays The Day Room and Valparaiso, justice materializes in terms of isolation and the will to alter personal stories. For Smiley, as construed in her long novels The Greenlanders and Horse Heaven, dynamic responsive actions attend risky, unpredictable encounters in competitive milieus like the racetrack. These authors reveal that executions of justice and the perpetration of injustice involve varied consequences. The law is not only about punishment and recompense. Rather, legality directs the consequences of its applications toward the ideal of justice, which evolves alongside the subjects that it serves and the stories that they relate.
16
Ravi, Vidya. "From virgin land to hinterland : place and dwelling in American fiction, 1951-1995." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2013. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.648366.
Full text
17
Hise, Patricia Jean Fielder. "Carson McCullers Beyond Southern Boundaries: Diagnosing "An American Malady"." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1998. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc935671/.
Full textAbstract:
The loneliness theme of Carson McCullers' fiction falls into three divisions or levels. And because of her focus on the individual, her general theme of loneliness as it results from human isolation is universal. She develops her "broad principal theme" through an examination of human characteristics common to all human beings. In expressing her concept of isolation as a human condition, however, she presents loneliness as she believes it exists in her own culture, and, for this reason, her works present a loneliness that results from American cultural attitudes and is tempered by a Southern sense of nostalgia. After first establishing an understanding of McCullers' basic theme through an analysis of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, this study analyzes the nature of the Southern tradition and its influence on the criticism of her fiction with particular focus on the problems of determining to what degree her Southern settings inhibit the interpretation of her works beyond a regional perspective. A comparison of thematic elements, events, and characterization in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter to nonfiction critical discussions of American culture in The Image by Daniel Boorstin and The Pursuit of Loneliness by Philip Slater shows that the social context and the theme of isolation in the novel reflect a condition of life that is American, not distinctively Southern. The final portion of this study continues the analysis of McCullers' basic theme in Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Member of the Wedding, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, and Clock Without Hands, comparing elements of these later works to The Image and The Pursuit of Loneliness in order to demonstrate the particularly American loneliness of her characters and the value of her works to the tradition of American novel.
18
Lee, Jason Eng Hun. "'All is not Well in the world' : critical cosmopolitanism in twenty-first century fiction." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10722/197089.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis considers how contemporary American and British novels at the turn of the century attempt to conceptualize global human, political, economic and ecological risks through different levels of global connectedness. Taking a theoretical approach, the thesis offers up the notion of critical cosmopolitanism as a form of literary critique that might help to connect the field of literature to current sociological debates about globalization and cosmopolitanism. Critical cosmopolitanism is summarized here as follows: a predisposition towards cosmopolitan ideals but also a self-reflexive awareness of its perceived ideological and narrative shortcomings; a desire to conceive of a planetary self-conscious by maneuvering across and between spatial containers like the nation-state; an attempt to map disjunctive flows of global capital onto various narrative ‘worlds’; a type of narrative reflexivity that is transferred onto the reader.
The thesis comprises of two parts. Part 1 considers how the war on terror discourse problematizes novelists’ attempts to imagine planetary connectedness, and their struggles to imbue their readers with a self-reflexivity as an act of critical cosmopolitanism. Chapter 1 discusses the representational challenges that 9/11 presents to the novelist in terms of historicity, and outlines some of the prevailing metanarratives/counternarratives that are projected by them. Chapter 2 considers how alterity is used to critique or negotiate representations of the terrorist persona in novels by Don DeLillo, John Updike and Mohsin Hamid. Pointing to flaws in their narrative forms, these novelists enable their reader to transcend certain ideological boundaries which are denied to their own protagonists. Chapter 3 considers the interrelationship between terror and the spectacle in novels by Don DeLillo, Jonathan Safran Foer and Ian McEwan, looking at how 9/11’s images are able to project itself across the world but still reduce viewers’ capacity for imagining global connectedness.
Part 2 explores how novelists use a range of postmodern strategies to represent the various connections/dislocations made possible by global capital and how it problematize perceptions of human relationships across the world. Global capital is presented as a fluid dynamic that enables greater connectivity across the globe, but it also poses difficulties in one’s ability to realize a genuine cosmopolitanism against the all-incorporating power of the market. Chapter 4 deals with a variety of attempts in novels by William Gibson and Don DeLillo to cognitively map the relations of capital and consumer culture, and to make these complex global systems more intelligible to the reader. Chapter 5 discusses novels by David Mitchell and Rana Dasgupta that experiment with heterotopic, multi-layered narrative platforms to represent interconnecting but geographically separate ‘worlds’, and their ability to project cosmopolitan ideals across these textual horizons of space and time.published_or_final_version
English
Doctoral
Doctor of Philosophy
19
Boettcher, Anna Margarete. "Through Women's Eyes: Contemporary Women's Fiction about the Old West." PDXScholar, 1995. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/4966.
Full textAbstract:
The myth of the West is still very much alive in contemporary America. Lately, there has been a resurgence of new Western movies, TV series, and fiction. Until recently the West has been the exclusive domain of the quintessential masculine man. Women characters have featured only in the margins of the Western hero's tale. Contemporary Western fiction by women, however, offers new perspectives. Women's writing about the Old and New West introduces strong female protagonists and gives voice to characters that are muted or ignored by traditional Western literature and history. Western scholarship has largely been polarized by two approaches. First, the myth and symbol school of Turner, Smith, and followers celebrated American exceptionalism and rugged male individualism on the Western frontier. Second, the reaction against these theories draws attention to the West's legacy of racism, sexism and violence. The purpose of the present study is to collapse these theoretical fences and open a dialogue between conflicting theoretical positions and contemporay Western fiction. Molly Gloss's 1989 The Jump-Off Creek and Karen Joy Fowler's 1991 Sarah Canary selfcritically re-write the Old West. This study has attempted to explore the following questions: How can one re-write history in the context of a postmodern culture? How can "woman," the quintessential "Other" escape a modernist history (and thus avoid charges of essentialism) when she has not been in this history to begin with? In this study I analyze how these two contemporary feminist authors, Molly Gloss, and Karen Joy Fowler, face the dual challenge of writing themselves into a history that has traditionally excluded them, while at the same time deconstructing this very historical concept of the West. Fowler's and Gloss's use of diverse narrative strategies to upset a monolithic concept of history-- emphasizing the importance of multiple stories of the Old West-- is discussed in detail.
20
Slaughter, Carolyn Overton. "Language as disclosure in five modernist American works." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1987. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/184311.
Full textAbstract:
"Language as Disclosure in Five Modernist American Works" comprises a series of Heideggerian readings of James's The Turn of the Screw, Williams's In the American Grain, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon, and Barth's Lost in the Funhouse. Each text is taken as a single and separate performance of poetic language. The readings do not interpret or explain the texts but attempt to follow them in a thinking, to map what shows up and in what relations. The attempt is to get past the roadblock of "ambiguity" that characterizes modernist texts, not by deciding the undecidable but by exploring it. The dissertation explores the nature or function of language. In James literality works to indicate, to evoke, to found and maintain as well as to violate or subvert a human order. Language borders and opposes the abyss in the story, and it is at this border and in this conflict that reality originates. Williams too revises the notion of origin as he proposes a new "method" of "composition" whereby a poet in the act of asserting and proving himself sets forth not only his own potency but that of his ground, his locality, his period and his time. In the Faulkner story representative language has become disconnected from life, is irrelevant, ineffectual, dysfunctional. However, in spite of its explicit indictment of words, the work discloses a new ontology, a new standard of value, and an originary function for words. In the Hemingway story language or the work of art (the bullfight, here) is the site, the occasion, and the agency in and by which "facts," things that actually happen, rise into appearance upon the horizon of death. In these modernist works we find the function of language to be, in some sense, disclosure. With the Barth story we pass into a milder postmodern atmosphere, but we find the same antagonists, language and not-language. Ostensibly language is impotent; thematically the rational paradigm is overwhelmed by objectivity. I claim, however, that language diminished and exposed is still working by modernist standards to provoke into view the potentiality that representative language cannot express.
21
Chan, Suet Ni. "In the periphery of the margin: white masculinity in contemporary American fiction /Chan Suet Ni." HKBU Institutional Repository, 2017. https://repository.hkbu.edu.hk/etd_oa/351.
Full textAbstract:
My thesis discusses male identity in contemporary culture in relation to work by Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk. Such work reflects the problems, anxieties, and dilemmas of the masculine subject in American culture. The characters in my six selected texts, namely, Ellis' Less Than Zero, American Psycho, and Glamorama, and Palahniuk's Fight Club, Survivor, and Choke, symbolize a generation with no discernible future. Each male protagonist finds himself in a place of no time and no meaning because image and illusion have supplanted essence. These characters combat culture-prevalent emptiness in the sense that each ironically re-asserts his so-called individuality against the dogmas of the establishment. Each, furthermore, is aware that his existence is not subject to a higher order or preset goal: traditional morality thereby has no meaning. My selected texts feature masculine subjects struggling with their own contingencies once stripped of given privileges (gender, class, race, and otherwise). To examine the notion of masculinity, I emphasize the role of power relations in gender construction. Bret Easton Ellis characterizes a world of appearance defined by particular styles. Chuck Palahniuk's males are empty--they do not have any definitive meaning. Judith Butler challenges the proposition of a fixed identity, or an essential permanent masculinity or femininity as structured and reified by social norms. Therefore, we should not view masculinity as a cohesive and homogeneous category. Following Foucault, I examine the relationship between masculine subjects and social practices. At stake here, is how the performative articulation of proper masculinity disempowers and imprisons the masculine subject in a material form over which he has no control. The body becomes the object of desire and thus the vehicle/preserve of the sense of powerlessness that the masculine subject experiences daily within a hegemonic culture. Power is exercised through a dominant presence. This presence structures as a binary classification serving to underscore differences and ensure particular privileged social positioning. The proposition of a fixed identity, or an essential permanent masculinity or femininity, is structured and reified by social norms. Masculinity as a cohesive and homogeneous category is historically represented as an unstable center from which all other identities are defined.
22
Young, Erin S. "Corporate heroines and utopian individualism: A study of the romance novel in global capitalism." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/11460.
Full textAbstract:
x, 195 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.This dissertation explores two subgenres of popular romance fiction that emerge in the 1990s: "corporate" and "paranormal" romance. While the formulaic conventions of popular romance have typically centralized the gendered tension between hero and heroine, this project reveals that "corporate" and "paranormal" romances negotiate a new primary conflict, the tension between work and home in the era of global capitalism. Transformations in political economy also occur at the level of personal and emotional life, which constitute the central problem that contemporary romances attempt to resolve. Drawing from sociological studies of globalization and intimacy, feminist criticism, and queer theory, I argue that these subgenres mark the transition from what David Harvey calls Fordist capitalism to flexible or global capitalism as the primary social condition negotiated in the popular romance. My analysis demonstrates that corporate and paranormal romance novels reflect changing ideals about intimacy in a globalized world that is increasingly influenced, socially and culturally, by the values and philosophies that dominate the marketplace. Each of these subgenres offers a distinct formal resolution to the cultural and social effects of a flexible capitalist economy. The "corporate" romances of Jayne Ann Krentz, Nora Roberts, Elizabeth Lowell, and Katherine Stone feature heroines who constantly navigate the dual and intersecting arenas of work and home in an effort to locate a balance that leads to success and happiness in both realms. In contrast, the "paranormal" romances of Laurell K. Hamilton, Charlaine Harris, Kelley Armstrong, and Carrie Vaughn dissolve the tension between home and work, or the private and the public, by affirming the heroine's open and endless pursuit of pleasure, adventure, and self-fulfillment. Such new forms of romantic fantasy at once reveal the tension in globalization and the domination of corporate and masculinist values that the novels hope to overcome.
Committee in charge: David Leiwei Li, Chair; Mary Elene Wood; Cynthia H. Tolentino; Jiannbin L. Shiao
23
Dobozy, Tamas. "Towards a definition of dirty realism." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2000. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp02/NQ56533.pdf.
Full text
24
Jerez, Marco Antonio. "Formacion de la expresion fronteriza del septentrion novohispano: Siglos XVI-principios del XVIII." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1991. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/185686.
Full textAbstract:
The idea of the North, codified since the Old Testament as an empty space, also appears with this distinctive feature in the context of the northern border of New Spain. This notion of an empty space to the North presents a negative/positive signification that is homologous to the pair North/South. The process studied here involves the inversion that occurs on the northern border of New Spain. The study begins with the negative codification of the North expressed in the voyages of the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, and follows its transmutation into its opposite in the optimistic hyperbole of Eusebio Francisco Kino. The processes of inversion in the systems of the fictionalization of the border territory to the north of New Spain are analyzed between these two extremes. The analysis begins with the naming of the first islands discovered by Columbus, where the analogical transportation of an East-West hierarchal system appears. Later in New Spain Hernan Cortes' foundation of Segura de la Frontera delimits a border zone to the south that carries the negative connotation of his failed journey to Honduras. There follows a process of inversion toward the North that is made concrete in the significant "California", the name given to an island of fabulous riches in Las Sergas de Esplandian. When the cortesian expression is later inverted in Cabeza de Vaca's Naufragios, the expression precipitates into a wholly fictitious character. This course continues later in Fr. Marcos de Niza with his journey to Cibola. Then in Gaspar de Villagra there is a movement from the profane to the sacred. Ultimately in Kino we find a utilitarian concept that annuls the previous mythical codes, thus determining a restructuring of the word. Within the tempo-spacial framework established in this dissertation, the process that appears in the texts is shown systematically, fulfilling the objective of this work, i.e., the study of the formation of the system of expression of the northern border from the sixteenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth.
25
Russell, Noel Ray. "Authorial Subversion of the First-Person Narrator in Twentieth-Century American Fiction." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1988. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc501035/.
Full textAbstract:
American writers of narrative fiction frequently manipulate the words of their narrators in order to convey a significance of which the author and the reader are aware but the narrator is not. By causing the narrator to reveal information unwittingly, the author develops covert themes that are antithetical to those espoused by the narrator. Particularly subject to such subversion is the first-person narrator whose "I" is not to be interpreted as the voice of the author. This study examines how and why the first-person narrator is subverted in four works of twentieth-century American fiction: J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to , and Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus
26
Erickson, Stacy M. "Animals-as-Trope in the Selected Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1999. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2227/.
Full textAbstract:
In this dissertation, I show how 20th century African-American women writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison utilize animals-as-trope in order to illustrate the writers' humanity and literary vision. In the texts that I have selected, I have found that animals-as-trope functions in two important ways: the first function of animal as trope is a pragmatic one, which serves to express the humanity of African Americans; and the second function of animal tropes in African-American women's fiction is relational and expresses these writers' "ethic of caring" that stems from their folk and womanist world view. Found primarily in slave narratives and in domestic fiction of the 19th and early 20th centuries, pragmatic animal metaphors and/or similes provide direct analogies between the treatment of African-Americans and animals. Here, these writers often engage in rhetoric that challenges pro-slavery apologists, who attempted to disprove the humanity of African-Americans by portraying them as animals fit to be enslaved. Animals, therefore, become the metaphor of both the abolitionist and the slavery apologist for all that is not human. The second function of animals-as-trope in the fiction of African-American women writers goes beyond the pragmatic goal of proving African-Americans's common humanity, even though one could argue that this goal is still present in contemporary African-American fiction. Animals-as-trope also functions to express the African-American woman writer's understanding that 1) all oppressions stem from the same source; 2) that the division between nature/culture is a false onethat a universal connection exists between all living creatures; and 3) that an ethic of caring, or relational epistemology, can be extended to include non-human animals. Twentieth-century African-American writers such as Hurston, Walker, and Morrison participate in what anthropologists term, "neototemism," which is the contemporary view that humankind is part of nature, or a vision that Morrison would most likely attribute to the "folk." This perspective places their celebration of the continuous relations between humans and animals within a spiritual, indeed, tribal, cosmological construction. What makes these particular writers primarily different from their literary mothers, however, is a stronger sense that they are reclaiming the past, both an African and African-American history. What I hope to contribute with this dissertation is a new perspective of African-American women writers' literary tradition via their usage of animals as an expression of their "ethic of caring" and their awareness that all oppression stems from a single source.
27
Chew, Laureen. "Chinese American images in selected children's fiction for kindergarten through sixth grade." Scholarly Commons, 1986. https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/uop_etds/2131.
Full textAbstract:
The purpose of this study is to investigate Chinese American images in selected children's fiction to determine whether or not data support the position of the Council on Interracial Books for Children, that the works of fiction studied tend to stereotype Chinese Americans.
After reading the selected fifteen works of fiction, a criterion checklist was devised by the investigator to examine the behavior and lifestyle of Chinese Americans depicted in a variety of circumstances. validity of the criterion checklist was established by a panel of experts in the area of Chinese American studies. Inter-rater reliability was determined by two readers who utilized the criterion checklist to analyze the content of one lower elementary grade and one upper elementary grade work of fiction. Finally, the criterion checklist was used to analyze the fifteen works of fiction and draw conclusions related to the purpose of this study.
The findings in this study do support the conclusions of the Council on Interracial Books for Children that this group of fiction portrays Chinese Americans in a one dimensional, stereotypic manner. In the checklist items related to environment, food, utensils, physical attributes, cultural celebrations, occupations, and recreation, Chinese Americans were portrayed as adhering to Chinese-specific characteristics. However, in cross-cultural and behavioral items, Chinese Americans were portrayed as desiring Western-specific characteristics. This tendency was especially prevalent in upper elementary grade fiction. A more integrative or multi-dimensional view of Chinese Americans appreciating, and able to function well in, both cultural contexts is disconcertingly absent.
Based on the findings of this study, the following recommendations are made:
1. That teachers, librarians, and other school personnel who use this collection of books, supplement them with materials containing contemporary and realistic information about Chinese Americans.
2. That future writers of children's fiction dealing with Chinese Americans portray them in a multidimensional manner.
3. That curriculum writers of textbooks use a similar criterion checklist to offset the one-dimensionality of Chinese American images in existing children's literature.
4. That future writers of children's fiction on Chinese Americans utilize a criterion checklist such as the one in this study to assist them in developing multi-dimensional characters.
28
Cleveland, William. ""Why is Everyone So Interested in Texts?": The Shifting Role of the Reader in the Genre of Hard-boiled Fiction." Fogler Library, University of Maine, 2007. http://www.library.umaine.edu/theses/pdf/ClevelandW2007.pdf.
Full text
29
Potts, Henry M. "Native American values and traditions and the novel : ambivalence shall speak the story." Thesis, McGill University, 1996. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=26754.
Full textAbstract:
The commitment to community shared by Native American authors such as N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, and Louise Erdrich is partially evinced by each author's readiness to inscribe in novel form the values and traditions of the tribal community or communities with which he/she is closely associated. Many students of the novel will attest to its pliant, sometimes transmutable nature; nevertheless, as this study attempts to make clear, there are some reasons why Native American authors should reconsider using the novel as a means to express their tribal communities' values and traditions. Unambivalent prescriptions, however, seem more suited to the requirements of law or medicine; and so this study also examines some of the reasons why Native American authors should continue to embrace this relatively "new" art form persistently termed the novel.
30
Cortes, Caballero Jose Arturo. "Mexico en la obra de Gustavo Sainz." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1994. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/186801.
Full textAbstract:
Esta tesis esta estructurada mediante el uso de las tecnicas narrativas, y la evocacion de la historia y la literatura mexicanas en la obra literaria de Gustavo Sainz. La Introduccion constituye el primer capitulo y presenta el marco teorico utilizado: filosofia para un fin de epoca de Villoro, cultura nacional, mito y literatura, y novela y sociedad. La Introduccion se subdivide en: (1) Entrevista con Sainz; (2) Biografia; (3) Gazapo y la literatura de la Onda; (4) Contexto social, economico y politico de Mexico de la obra de Sainz. El Segundo capitulo estudia el Mexico-Tenochtitlan en Fantasmas aztecas: el nahuatl, lenguaje neobarroco, tiempo, espacio, y contexto historico real: instituciones y ritos. El tercer capitulo examina el Virreinato de la Nueva Espana en el Retablo de inmoderaciones y heresiarcas: la cultura indigena, la flora y la fauna, el arte barroco, las razas, la encomienda y la iglesia y los intelectuales: la Ilustracion. El cuarto capitulo trata acerca del Mexico moderno de la decada de los sesenta, el cual se refleja en El Muchacho en llamas y en A la salud de la serpiente: genero autobiografico: escritor, generacion, epoca, y el lenguaje de la Onda. El quinto capitulo analiza y evalua, literariamente, la masacre del 2 de octubre y el Movimiento Estudiantil de 1968, en Compadre lobo y en A la salud de la serpiente.
31
Davies, Christopher. "'Carrying the fire' : Cormac McCarthy's moral philosophy." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002260.
Full textAbstract:
In this thesis, I argue that the question of ethics, despite claims to the contrary, is a central concern in Cormac McCarthy’s fiction. My principal contention, in this regard, is that an approach that is not reliant on conventional systems of meaning is needed if one is to engage effectively with the moral value of this writer’s oeuvre. In devising such an approach, I draw heavily on the ‘immoralist’ writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. The first chapter of the study contends that good and evil, terms central to conventional morality, do not occupy easily definable positions in McCarthy’s work. In the second chapter, the emphasis falls on the way in which language and myth’s mediation of reality informs choice. The final chapter focuses on the post-apocalyptic setting of The Road, in which normative systems of value are completely absent. It argues that, despite this absence, McCarthy presents a compassionate ethic that is able to find purchase in the harsh world depicted in the novel. Finally, then, this study argues that McCarthy’s latest novel, The Road, requires a reconsideration of the critical claim that his work is nihilistic and that it negates moral value.
32
Chan, Suet Ni. "Women at crossroads : a study of women's search for identity in twentieth century Chinese-American fiction." HKBU Institutional Repository, 2009. https://repository.hkbu.edu.hk/etd_ra/1095.
Full text
33
Birge, Amy Anastasia. ""Mislike Me not for My Complexion": Shakespearean Intertextuality in the Works of Nineteenth-Century African-American Women." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1996. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278175/.
Full textAbstract:
Caliban, the ultimate figure of linguistic and racial indeterminacy in The Tempest, became for African-American writers a symbol of colonial fears of rebellion against oppression and southern fears of black male sexual aggression. My dissertation thus explores what I call the "Calibanic Quadrangle" in essays and novels by Anna Julia Cooper, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. The figure of Caliban allows these authors to inflect the sentimental structure of the novel, to elevate Calibanic utterance to what Cooper calls "crude grandeur and exalted poesy," and to reveal the undercurrent of anxiety in nineteenth-century American attempts to draw rigid racial boundaries. The Calibanic Quadrangle enables this thorough critique because it allows the black woman writer to depict the oppression of the "Other," southern fears of black sexuality, the division between early black and white women's issues, and the enduring innocence of the progressive, educated, black female hero ~ all within the legitimized boundaries of the Shakespearean text, which provides literary authority to the minority writer. I call the resulting Shakespearean intertextuality a Quadrangle because in each of these African-American works a Caliban figure, a black man or "tragic mulatto" who was once "petted" and educated, struggles within a hostile environment of slavery and racism ruled by the Prospero figure, the wielder of "white magic," who controls reproduction, fears miscegenation, and enforces racial hierarchy. The Miranda figure, associated with the womb and threatened by the specter of miscegenation, advocates slavery and perpetuates the hostile structure. The Ariel figure, graceful and ephemeral, usually the "tragic mulatta" and a slave, desires her freedom and complements the Caliban figure. Each novel signals the presence of the paradigm by naming at least one character from The Tempest (Caliban in Cooper's A Voice from the South; "Mirandy" in Harper's Iola Leroy; Prospero in Hopkins's Contending Forces; and Ariel in Hopkins's Hagar's Daughter).
34
Duplat, Alfredo. "Hacia una genealogía de la transculturación narrativa de Ángel Rama." Diss., University of Iowa, 2013. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/2484.
Full textAbstract:
Esta disertación conecta la teoría de la transculturación narrativa de Ángel Rama con la tradición intelectual latinoamericana que aportó sus características más distintivas. Las teorías de Rama fueron influidas por dos tradiciones latinoamericanas. Una es de carácter político y tiene su origen en la Reforma de Córdoba de 1918. La otra, de carácter epistemológico y se remonta a la década de 1930, cuando comienza el culturalismo en Latinoamérica. Mi investigación se ocupa de un grupo de intelectuales uruguayos que trabajaron en torno al semanario Marcha [1939-1974]: Carlos Quijano [1900-1984], Julio Castro [1908 -desaparecido en 1977] y Arturo Ardao [1912-2003]. También me ocupo de dos intelectuales brasileños, Antonio Cândido [1918] y Darcy Ribeiro [1922-1997], quienes continuaron con la tradición culturalista que inauguraron en Latinoamérica autores como Gilberto Freyre [1900-1987] y Fernando Ortiz [1881-1969]. Recuperar las redes intelectuales que acompañaron el proceso de articulación de la transculturación narrativa nos permite comprender mejor las tesis de Rama por dos razones. Primero, porque enmarca esta teoría dentro de algunos de los debates políticos y culturales más importantes de la Guerra Fría. Y segundo, porque se aproxima a la manera como Rama comprendió la historia latinoamericana y su coyuntura política y socio-cultural durante las décadas de 1960 y 1970.
El objetivo de la teoría de la transculturación narrativa es describir el proceso por el cual las manifestaciones literarias latinoamericanas pasan de la dependencia a la autonomía cultural. Como el proceso descrito se despliega dentro de la estructura social, para comprenderlo es necesario analizar la interacción entre las obras literarias y la sociedad que las rodea, de esta forma las ciencias sociales --antropología, sociología, economía-- son instrumentos de análisis indispensables para comprender una obra o tradición literaria. Este marco general de análisis es descrito por Rama como el culturalismo.
En el caso de Rama, una lectura desde los estudios literarios puede dar por sentado que el culturalismo fue tan sólo un método de análisis alternativo al estructuralismo francés. Aunque esta perspectiva sea en parte correcta, no es del todo precisa. El culturalismo al que se refiere Rama es el mismo que practicaron los cientistas sociales en Latinoamérica desde la década de 1930. Recuperar la historicidad de la transculturación narrativa no solo nos permite comprender la genealogía de esta teoría sino recuperar y hacer visibles algunas tradiciones intelectuales contra-hegemónicas que desarticuló la Guerra Fría en Latinoamérica.
35
Truter, Victoria Zea. "Dreamscape and death : an analysis of three contemporary novels and a film." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1012976.
Full textAbstract:
With its focus on the relationship between dreamscape and death, this study examines the possibility of indirectly experiencing – through writing and dreaming – that which cannot be directly experienced, namely death. In considering this possibility, the thesis engages at length with Maurice Blanchot's argument that death, being irrevocably absent and therefore unknowable, is not open to presentation or representation. After explicating certain of this thinker's theories on the ambiguous nature of literary and oneiric representation, and on the forfeiture of subjective agency that occurs in the moments of writing and dreaming, the study turns to an examination of the manner in which such issues are dealt with in selected dreamscapes. With reference to David Malouf's An Imaginary Life, Alan Warner's These Demented Lands, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and Richard Linklater's Waking Life, the thesis explores the literary and cinematic representation of human attempts to define, resist, or control death through dreaming and writing about it. Ultimately, the study concludes that such attempts are necessarily inconclusive, and that it is only ever possible to represent death as a (mis)representation.
36
Tait, Lisa Olsen. "Mormon Culture Meets Popular Fiction: Susa Young Gates and the Cultural Work of Home Literature." Diss., CLICK HERE for online access, 1998. http://patriot.lib.byu.edu/u?/MTNZ,25499.
Full text
37
Vázquez-Medina, Olivia. "Cuerpo presente : imaginería corporal, representación histórica y textura narrativa en Yo el Supremo (1974), Noticias del Imperio (1987) y el General en su Laberinto (1989)." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2009. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.670014.
Full text
38
Bigna, Daniel Humanities & Social Sciences Australian Defence Force Academy UNSW. "Life on the margins : the autobiographical fiction of Charles Bukowski." Awarded by:University of New South Wales - Australian Defence Force Academy. School of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2005. http://handle.unsw.edu.au/1959.4/38717.
Full textAbstract:
Charles Bukowski devoted his writing career to turning his own life into poetry and prose. In poems and stories about his experiences as one of the working poor in post war America, and in those depicting his experiences as a writer of the American underground, Bukowski represents himself as both a literary and social outsider. Bukowski expresses an alternative literary aesthetic through his fictional persona, Henry Chinaski, who struggles to overcome his suffering in a world he finds absurd, and who embarks on a quest for freedom in his youth to which he remains committed all his life. This thesis examines Charles Bukowski's autobiographical fiction with a specific emphasis on five novels and one collection of short stories. In the novels, Post Office (1970), Factotum (1975), Women (1978), Ham on Rye (1982) and Hollywood (1989), and in a number of short stories in the collection Hot Water Music (1983), Bukowski explores different periods of Chinaski???s life with a dark humour, revealing links between Chinaski???s struggle with the absurd and those aspects comprising Bukowski???s alternative aesthetic. The thesis focuses on such aspects of Bukowski???s art as the uncommercial nature of his publishing history, his strong emphasis on literary simplicity, the appearance of the grotesque and Bukowski???s obsession with nonconformity, drinking and sex. These aspects illuminate the distinctive nature of Bukowski???s art and its purpose, which is the transformation of an ordinary life into literature. This thesis argues that Bukowski illuminates possibilities that exist for individuals to create an identity for themselves through aesthetic self-expression. The thesis traces the development of Chinaski's non-conformist personality from Ham on Rye, based on Bukowski's youth in Los Angeles during the Depression, to Hollywood, Bukowski's ironic portrayal of Chinaski's brush with the commercial film industry. Through meeting the many challenges he faced throughout his life with defiance, honesty and an irreverent sense of humour, Bukowski invites readers to identify with his alternative world view. The thesis argues this particular aspect of his writing constitutes his most valuable contribution to twentieth century American fiction.
39
Mackinnon, Jeremy E. "Speaking the unspeakable : war trauma in six contemporary novels." Title page, contents and abstract only, 2001. http://web4.library.adelaide.edu.au/theses/09PH/09phm15821.pdf.
Full textAbstract:
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 246-258) Presents readings of six novels which depict something of the nature of war trauma. Collectively, the novels suggest that the attempt to narrativise war trauma is inherently problematic. Traces the disjunctions between narrative and war trauma which ensure that war trauma remains an elusive and private phenomonen; the gulf between private experience and public discourse haunts each of the novels.
40
Trainin, Sarah Jean. "The rise of mass culture theory and its effect on golden age detective fiction." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2002. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/2255.
Full text
41
Dedman, Stephen. "Techronomicon (novel) ; and The weapon shop : the relationship between American science fiction and the US military (dissertation)." University of Western Australia. School of Social and Cultural Studies, 2008. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2008.0093.
Full textAbstract:
Techronomicon Techronomicon is a science fiction novel that examines far-future military actions from several different perspectives. Human beings have colonized several planets with help from the enigmatic and more technologically advanced Zhir, who gave spaceships and habitable worlds to those they deemed suitable and their descendants. The Joint Expeditionary Force is the military arm of the Universal Faith, called in when conflicts arise that the Faith decides are beyond the local government and militia and require their intervention. Leneveldt and Roader are JEF officers assigned to Operation Techronomicon, investigating what seems to be a Zhir-built defence shield around the planet Lassana. Another JEF company sent to Kalaabhavan after the murder of the planets Confessor-General loses its CO to a land-mine, and Lieutenant Hellerman reluctantly accepts command. Chevalier, a civilian pilot, takes refugees fleeing military-run detention camps on Ararat to a biological research station on otherwise uninhabited Lila. The biologists on Lila discover a symbiote that enables humans to photosynthesize, which comes to the attention of Operation Techronomicon and the JEF's Weapons Research Division. Leneveldt and Roeder, frustrated by the lack of progress on Lassana, are sent to Lila to detain the biologists, who flee into the swamps. Hellerman's efforts to restore peace on Kalaabhavan are frustrated by the Confessors, and his company finds itself besieged by insurgents. The novel explores individuals' motives for choosing or rejecting violence and/or military service; the lessons they learn about themselves and their enemies; and the possible results of attempts to forcibly suppress ideas.
42
Reavis, E. "Adolescent Female Identity Development and Its Portrayal in Select Contemporary Young Adult Fiction." Thesis, School of Information and Library Science, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/1901/116.
Full textAbstract:
This study describes a content analysis of six contemporary young adult fiction novels. Adolescence is a time of great change, particularly for girls. It is during this time that female adolescents develop their voice and identity. As literature reflects the reader’s world, it also affects in part how female adolescents perceive their identity. Latent content analysis was used to code eight variables to determine if select contemporary young adult fiction novels appropriately describe the development of identity among adolescent females. All of the novels included in the study provided sufficient evidence of accurate portrayal of female adolescent identity development, by having examples of at least four out of eight variables, with most having examples of seven out of eight variables.
43
Abramowitz, Rachel I. "Donald Barthelme and 'Not-Knowing', 1964-1987." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c183d6a9-86f9-4337-b6c5-4efdc6dc0731.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis argues that Barthelme's major 1985 essay "Not-Knowing" contains within its title Barthelme's central artistic idea, and that not-knowing informs both the subject of his fiction and his philosophy of art. This study will be the first critical treatment of Barthelme that positions his work from beginning to end in terms of the dimensions of not-knowing that came out of his own reading in psychology, art theory, philosophy, religion, and education, offering coherent readings of content and suggesting the ways in which content relates to form. The Introduction explores the origins of Barthelme's ideas of not-knowing, paying special attention to the influence of Mallarmé, Joyce, and Beckett on Barthelme's first characterisations of not-knowing, creativity, and reception. The first chapter gives an in-depth reading of Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964), Barthelme's first collection of stories. Though Barthelme had not yet begun to formally theorise his ideas of not-knowing, they were already latent in Come Back, Dr. Caligari's characterisation of psychological experience, specifically in relation to anxiety, boredom, and interpretation. The second chapter looks at the ways in which Harold Rosenbergâs theories of the visual arts, and especially collage, which Barthelme encountered while co-editing Location magazine with Rosenberg in the early 1960s, address form and not-knowing, and how Barthelme treats these issues in Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968), City Life (1970), The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine (1971), Sadness (1972), Guilty Pleasures (1974), and Amateurs (1976). The third chapter shows how Barthelme's university studies in 19th century philosophy, especially Kierkegaard in The Concept of Irony (1841) and Kierkegaard's treatment of Schlegel in that treatise, inform his concern with irony, both in theory and practice, in City Life (1970), Great Days (1979), and Overnight to Many Distant Cities (1983). Chapter Four argues that Kierkegaard's theories of education and religion in Either/Or (1843) and The Present Age (1846), as well as the contemporary incarnation of Dewey's ideas of progressive education, both had a profound influence on Barthelme's ideas about the way a society is educated into knowingness, the artist's aspiration toward not-knowing, and the validity of religion in the postmodern world. The conclusion to the thesis reexamines the Introduction's argument about literary influence through a brief reading of The Dead Father (1975). Barthelme is recognised as one of the most important American postmodernist writers, and yet there has been relatively little critical treatment of his oeuvre. The major books that address Barthelme's work, which include Jerome Klinkowitz's Literary Disruptions: The Making of a Post-Contemporary American Fiction (1975) and Donald Barthelme: An Exhibition (1991), as well as Alan Wilde's Horizons of Assent (1981) and Stanley Trachtenberg's Understanding Donald Barthelme (1990), belong to a two-decade span of classifying writers such as Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, and John Barth using a limited set of ideas about postmodernism that were interesting as theory at the time, but did little to explore the actual literary, philosophical, and aesthetic content and contexts of these writers' works (with the possible exception of Pynchon). This thesis aims to rescue Barthelme from now-hackneyed ways of talking about postmodernism, which include lumping various aesthetic techniques under the rubric of "metafiction," claiming that the era's sole interest is in surface at the expense of depth, and that the dependence upon clichés is a deliberate expression of artistic exhaustion.
44
Sipley, Tristan Hardy 1980. "Second nature: Literature, capital and the built environment, 1848--1938." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/10911.
Full textAbstract:
x, 255 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.This dissertation examines transatlantic, and especially American, literary responses to urban and industrial change from the 1840s through the 1930s. It combines cultural materialist theory with environmental history in order to investigate the interrelationship of literature, economy, and biophysical systems. In lieu of a traditional ecocritical focus on wilderness preservation and the accompanying literary mode of nature writing, I bring attention to reforms of the "built environment" and to the related category of social problem fiction, including narratives of documentary realism, urban naturalism, and politically-oriented utopianism. The novels and short stories of Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Rebecca Harding Davis, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Upton Sinclair, and Mike Gold offer an alternative history of environmental writing, one that foregrounds the interaction between nature and labor. Through a strategy of "literal reading" I connect the representation of particular environments in the work of these authors to the historical situation of actual spaces, including the western Massachusetts forest of Melville's "Tartarus of Maids," the Virginia factory town of Davis's Iron Mills, the Midwestern hinterland of Sinclair's The Jungle, and the New York City ghetto of Gold's Jews without Money. Even as these texts foreground the class basis of environmental hazard, they simultaneously display an ambivalence toward the physical world, wavering between pastoral celebrations and gothic vilifications of nature, and condemning ecological destruction even as they naturalize the very socio-economic forces responsible for such calamity. Following Raymond Williams, I argue that these contradictory treatments of nature have a basis in the historical relationship between capitalist society and the material world. Fiction struggles to contain or resolve its implication in the very culture that destroys the land base it celebrates. Thus, the formal fissures and the anxious eruptions of nature in fiction relate dialectically to the contradictory position of the ecosystem itself within the regime of industrial capital. However, for all of this ambivalence, transatlantic social reform fiction of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century provides a model for an environmentally-oriented critical realist aesthetic, an aesthetic that retains suspicion toward representational transparency, and yet simultaneously asserts the didactic, ethical, and political functions of literature.
Committee in charge: William Rossi, Chairperson, English; Henry Wonham, Member, English; Enrique Lima, Member, English; Louise Westling, Member, English; John Foster, Outside Member, Sociology
45
Lam, Chou I. "A descriptive study of how culture-specific terms are glossed in a Chinese translation of Angels and Demons." Thesis, University of Macau, 2012. http://umaclib3.umac.mo/record=b2586620.
Full text
46
Reis, Ashley E. "With the Earth in Mind: Ecological Grief in the Contemporary American Novel." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2016. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc849760/.
Full textAbstract:
"With the Earth in Mind" responds to some of the most cutting-edge research in the field of ecocriticism, which centers on ecological loss and the grief that ensues. Ecocritics argue that ecological objects of loss abound--for instance, species are disappearing and landscapes are becoming increasingly compromised--and yet, such loss is often deemed "ungrievable." While humans regularly grieve human losses, we understand very little about how to genuinely grieve the loss of nonhuman being, natural environments, and ecological processes. My dissertation calls attention to our society's tendency to participate in superficial nature-nostalgia, rather than active and engaged environmental mourning, and ultimately activism. Herein, I investigate how an array of postwar and contemporary American novels represent a complex relationship between environmental degradation and mental illness. Literature, I suggest, is crucial to investigations of this problem because it can reveal the human consequences of ecological loss in a way that is unavailable to political, philosophical, scientific, and even psychological discourse.
47
De, Craim Alexandre. "L'unité narrative de L'Astrée: structures architextuelle, textuelle et thématique." Doctoral thesis, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/209749.
Full textAbstract:
L’Astrée d’Honoré d’Urfé marqua à divers titres le roman de la première moitié du XVIIe siècle. Non seulement cette œuvre ouvrait la voie aux vastes fictions héroïques de Gomberville ou de Scudéry, mais elle apparaissait également comme un modèle de composition parvenant à unir, au sein d’un unique roman, une matière hétéroclite. La complexité de L’Astrée est donc tout autant thématique que structurelle :les traditions pastorale et chevaleresque s’entremêlent et le récit principal est sans cesse interrompu par des narrations secondes prises en charge par les personnages mêmes de la diégèse. Cependant, le récit n’en forme pas moins un ensemble unifié ;d’ailleurs, il fut d’emblée reçu comme un roman et non comme un recueil de nouvelles. C’est pourquoi, nous avons désiré étudier le « système » que l’auteur met en place afin d’unifier l’œuvre aussi bien au niveau de la forme qu’au niveau du contenu. Pour y parvenir, nous avons établi une description complète des structures narratives de L’Astrée via une observation narratologique qui s’attache tantôt à rechercher dans différentes traditions littéraires les éléments de structure faisant sens dans le roman d’Urfé, tantôt à cartographier la mécanique narrative qui régit la progression des nombreux fils du récit. Ensuite, d’un point de vue davantage thématique, nous avons souhaité mettre au jour divers mécanismes – dont les variations sur le thème de la perte et du regret – qui assurent au roman une unité quant à sa matière foisonnante. Par ces analyses, nous espérons éclairer le fonctionnement d’un roman-clé de l’histoire, qui posa les premiers jalons de la modernité romanesque.Doctorat en Langues et lettres
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished
48
Allen, Joseph J. "The retina blues : invisibility and cultural visibility." Virtual Press, 1995. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/941584.
Full textAbstract:
My text formulates a theory of postmodern invisibility while examining the condition of cultural invisibility. As I track strategies of position and space in contemporary American literature and music, I propose a tactic for attaining cultural visibility that draws from Jean Baudrillard's notion of the-more-visible-than-the-visible, postmodern aesthetics and the cultural metaphor of the optics of the vision system.In our technoculture, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and his narrator's choice of an invisible identity, though wonderfully evocative, is no longer a viable solution to the dilemma of cultural invisibility. Later contemporary American fiction, especially Don DeLillo's White Noise, offers a strategy that oscillates between invisibility and visibility and is ineffective in curing cultural invisibility. My project centers on Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and her representation of a storytelling ceremony that can cure the problem of cultural invisibility. Silko proposes a narrative mode capable of representing and accomplishing cultural work by reversing the flow of culture. Nathaniel Mackey's jazz-inspired fiction, Dibot Baghostus's Run (1993), expands Silko's magical blueprint by employing a culturally dense, hyper-visible narrative mode.Like Silko and Mackey, cultural theorist Trinh Minh-ha, anthropologist Michael Taussig, and sociologist Stephen Pfohl employ the more-visible-than-the-visible composition strategy of collage. Their writings, as well as the aesthetic of hiphop, serve as a model for my text because in collage, there is room for disorientation, noise, local elements, plurality, recomposition, hyper-visibility, and the sampling of crosscultural artifacts and debris. Experiencing a montage can shock sensory perceptions into novel paradigms of representation and, as Silko and Mackey hope, bring about a meaningful cultural visibility.For Minh-ha, Silko, and Mackey, stories and other cultural artifacts circulate freely like gifts. The pleasure is in transmitting, circulating, and retransmitting the story: the pleasure of making the story more-than-visible. Then the story functions, as Minh-ha states, "as a cure and a protection [that] is at once musical, historical, poetical, ethical, educational, magical." While my text strives to represent several of these elements, my theory of postmodern invisibility reflects and transmits a narrative mode that is capable of curing the problem of cultural invisibility.Department of English
49
Davies, Ben. "Exceptional intercourse : sex, time and space in contemporary novels by male British and American writers." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/2582.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis provides a theory of exceptional sex through close readings of contemporary novels by male British and American writers. I take as my overriding methodological approach Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the state of exception, which is a juridico-political state in which the law has been suspended and the difference between rule and transgression is indistinguishable. Within this state, the spatiotemporal markers inside and outside also become indeterminable, making it impossible to tell whether one is inside or outside time and space. Using this framework, I work through narratives of sexual interaction – On Chesil Beach, Gertrude and Claudius, Sabbath’s Theater, and The Act of Love – to conceptualise categories of sexual exceptionality. My study is not a survey, and the texts have been chosen as they focus on different sexual behaviours, thereby opening up a variety of sexual exceptionalities. I concentrate on male writers and narratives of heterosexual sex as most work on sex, time and space is comprised of feminist readings of literature by women and queer work on gay, lesbian or trans writers and narratives. However, in the Coda I expand my argument by turning to Emma Donoghue’s Room, which, as the protagonist has been trapped for the first five years of his life, provides a tabula rasa’s perspective of exceptionality. Through my analysis of exceptionality, I provide spatiotemporal readings of the hymen, incest, adultery, sexual listening and the arranged affair. I also conceptualise textual exceptionalities – the incestuous prequel, auricular reading and the positionality of the narrator, the reader and literary characters. Exceptional sex challenges the assumption in recent queer theory that to be out of time is ‘queer’ and to be in time is ‘straight’. Furthermore, exceptionality complicates the concepts of perversion and transgression as the norm and its transgression become indistinct in the state of exception. In contrast, exceptionality offers a new, more determinate way to analyse narratives of sex.
50
Long, Kim Martin. "The American Eve: Gender, Tragedy, and the American Dream." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1993. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc277633/.
Full textAbstract:
America has adopted as its own the Eden myth, which has provided the mythology of the American dream. This New Garden of America, consequently, has been a masculine garden because of its dependence on the myth of the Fall. Implied in the American dream is the idea of a garden without Eve, or at least without Eve's sin, traditionally associated with sexuality. Our canonical literature has reflected these attitudes of devaluing feminine power or making it a negative force: The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, and The Sound and the Fury. To recreate the Garden myth, Americans have had to reimagine Eve as the idealized virgin, earth mother and life-giver, or as Adam's loyal helpmeet, the silent figurehead. But Eve resists her new roles: Hester Prynne embellishes her scarlet letter and does not leave Boston; the feminine forces in Moby-Dick defeat the monomaniacal masculinity of Ahab; Miss Watson, the Widow Douglas, and Aunt Sally's threat of civilization chase Huck off to the territory despite the beckoning of the feminine river; Daisy retreats unscathed into her "white palace" after Gatsby's death; and Caddy tours Europe on the arm of a Nazi officer long after Quentin's suicide, Benjy's betrayal, and Jason's condemnation. Each of these male writers--Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner--deals with the American dream differently; however, in each case the dream fails because Eve will not go away, refusing to be the Other, the scapegoat, or the muse to man's dreams. These works all deal in some way with the notion of the masculine American dream of perfection in the Garden at the expense of a fully realized feminine presence. This failure of the American dream accounts for the decidedly tragic tone of these culturally significant American novels.