Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Railroads – United States – Fiction'
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Besar, Agus. "The CSX line development plan (a guideline for conversion of rails to trails)." Virtual Press, 1992. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/845974.
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This creative project presents guidelines for Rail to Trail Conversion. A preliminary plan for conversion of the CSX running from Richmond County through Delaware County, and ending in Marion County, Indiana, is presented as a case study. The line, which connects several communities and several points of interest along the railroad right-of-way, has been requested for abandonment.To keep the line for interim public use, one of the possibilities is to convert the line to trail use. The trail corridor might create a good linkage between several adjacent places, because it provides various recreational zones along the former railroad right-ofway. There will be two different kinds of trail corridor-urban and rural trail. The distinction between the two will be one of use, urban trails will be used for daily activities and rural trails usually used primarily during weekends, holidays, and vacation time.The development of trail corridor will also encourage movement of people foreither cycling or walking. Campgrounds, wildlife watching stations, scenic overlook areas, trailheads, and outdoor fitness centers are the most common auxiliary components associated with trail development. Wherever the improvement passes through communities, the communities will benefit from the improvement of retailing activities. Each improvement requires certain criteria of location and land surface.Rail to trail conversion is a costly project. In order to make the project easier and economically feasible, the project should encourage more individuals, private organizations, and public agencies to get involved with the conservation. Local newspapers, broadcast on local radio and television, and interest group workshops are the most effective means of developing support. Time is critical in developing succesful rail to trail conversion. The project should be implemented as soon as the railroad has been abandoned, in order to prevent the tracks reverting to adjacent landowners.Department of Urban Planning
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Bruneau, Jonathan M. "Antitrust law enforcement within the U.S. airline industry : fact or fiction?" Thesis, McGill University, 1992. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=22505.
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The overriding theme of this thesis concerns the level of antitrust enforcement within the U.S. airline industry by the agencies entrusted with this task.After a brief Introduction, Chapter I will examine whether concentration within the U.S. airline industry is a natural phenomenon or an ordinary monopoly/oligopoly resulting from the behaviour of competitors. In concluding that a natural monopoly/oligopoly does not exist, Chapter II will analyse the policy being antitrust enforcement in the industry.
Chapter III will then use the implementation of S 408 of the Federal Aviation Act (FAA) by the Department of Transportation (DOT) as an example of such a policy. Finally, the remaining chapters are dedicated to an analysis of the CRS industry. By using this industry as an example, the writer will suggest that, by removing barriers to entry through aggressive use of S 411 of the FAA, the future may see new entrants enter the market. Emphasis will be placed on the attitude of the DOT in this regard.
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Vinje, Daniel Martin 1959. "The Effects of Deregulation on Rail Rates: A Study on Wheat, Barley, Corn, Oat, and Soybean." Thesis, North Dakota State University, 2006. https://hdl.handle.net/10365/29868.
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Although the original intent of this study was to do a pre-and post-deregulation assessment of rail rates per ton-mile, the results using post-deregulation data show a significant decrease in rail rates between 1981 and 2000. While accounting for changes in shipment characteristics, savings for wheat, barley, com, oat, and soybean shippers were 63.80%, 69.17%, 49.07%, 67.97%, and 59.36%, respectively. Rate savings over time for an average 1981 shipment were 45%, 55%, 38%, 45%, and 36% for wheat, barley, com, oat, and soybean shippers, respectively. Analysis regarding the effects of deregulation of rail rates on com, soybean, and wheat on a regional basis shows that rail rates not only differ across commodities, but also
among regions. In general, it was found that grain producers within regions that had higher levels of intermodal competition had lower rates than their counterparts with lower levels of intermodal competition. Distribution of benefits as a result of market-based pricing has varied among regions, and these variances are increasing over time.
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Ziemke, Dominik. "Comparison of high-speed rail systems for the United States." Thesis, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1853/37286.
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After decades of standstill in intercity passenger rail in the United States, the Obama administration recently started major initiatives to implement high-speed ground transportation projects that are expected to improve the nation's transportation system significantly, addressing most prevailing issues like congestion and energy prices while having positive effects on the economy.
This study evaluates and compares two high-speed ground transportation systems that have the potential to improve intercity passenger transportation in the United States significantly: the wheel-on-rail high-speed system and the high-speed maglev system. Both high-speed ground transportation systems were evaluated with respect to 58 characteristics organized into 7 categories associated with technology, environmental impacts, economic considerations, user-friendliness, operations, political factors, and safety. Based on the performance of each system in each of the 58 characteristics, benefit values were assigned. In order to weight the relative importance of the different characteristics, a survey was conducted with transportation departments and transportation professionals. The survey produced weighting factors scoring each of the 58 characteristics and the 7 categories. Applying a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) approach, the overall utility values for either system were calculated based on the benefit values from the systems comparison and the weighting factors from the survey.
It was shown that the high-speed maglev system is generally slightly superior over the wheel-on-rail high-speed system. Because the magnitude of the difference in the overall performance of both transportation systems is not very big, it is recommended that every project in the high-speed intercity passenger transportation market consider both HSGT systems equally.
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Davies, Richard Blaine Davies Richard Blaine. "Historical fiction makes American history come to life!" [Boise, Idaho : Boise State University, 2002. http://education.boisestate.edu/bdavies.
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Thesis (M.A.)--Boise State University, 2002.Web site. Master's project includes an explanatory text and CD-ROM entitled: Historical fiction : a web site supporting secondary U.S. history courses of study-Idaho Department of Education. Includes bibliographical references.
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Ge, Liang, and 葛亮. "A thematic study of the immigrants' fiction of Yan Geling." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2002. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B26652845.
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Yang, Kaibin, and 阳开斌. "Imperialist civilizing mission of Uncle Tom's Cabin and history of itsChinese rewriting." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2011. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B47250975.
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This thesis is a revisionist study of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a renowned American classic by Mrs. Stowe, and its Chinese translations. Thematically refreshing the novel as imperialist, I intend to therefore shed new lights in appreciating its century-long journey across China by studying two definitive rewritings of the original, heinu yutian lu （《黑奴吁天?》）from late Qing and heinu hen（《黑奴恨》）from the 1960s.
The thesis structurally contains four parts. Chapter 1 introduces the project generally. Chapter 2 studies the original text and chapter 3 and 4 the two Chinese translated texts respectively.
Re-reading of the original is crucial. Inspired by Edward Said’s efforts in connecting western culture and Imperialism, I established civilizing mission as core of the black narrative in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel widely celebrated as masterpiece of abolitionist literature.
My argument is based on textual analysis. I will argue that evangelization of Africa, rather than abolition of slavery, had been Stowe’s fundamental concern in building Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and it is exactly driven by this civilizing mission that she dictated the roles of the novel’s two leading black characters, Uncle Tom and George Harris. Tom, the Christian martyr, is to prove Africans’ capability of getting civilized; Harris, Stowe’s Christian patriot, is the pioneer of colonizing Africa into a new world of Christian and American civilization.
Reestablishing the original as such, I interpret the novel’s travel to 20th century China a
historical event: an Imperialist novel goes by an Imperialism-fighting country in an Imperialist age. Therefore forces a long-ignored question: how had Chinese translators responded? How the response developed?
This question can be best answered by looking into heinu yutian lu and heinu hen, two texts that represent respectively the beginning and the ending of Chinese critical treatment of the original in translating. And I will form my answer by analyzing the Chinese rewriting of the images of Uncle Tom and Harris, for they in the original are responsible for execution of the civilizing mission.
Translating under a crucial circumstance of imperial crisis, Lin Shu and Wei Yi, the producers of heinu yutian lu, aimed to promote the ideology of “ loving the country and preserving the race”（??保种）.While presenting the black sufferings as faithful even exaggerated as possible, they consistently infiltrated the novel’s Christianity. And it is this strategy of de-Christianization that undermined the original’s imperialist design. After the translation, both Tom and Harris adopted a new face. The former was still a noble Negro only based on Chinese virtues, and the latter kept well his patriotic passion, but not for Christian civilization, rather purely for Africa.
Intervention of the original’s civilizing mission climbed to a higher level as in the case of heinu hen, a drama adaptation by Ouyang yuqian in the radical 1960s. With Marxist class struggle being the guiding principle, Christian humanitarianism of the original was heavily criticized, and the black image reshaped dramatically. With Tom being portrayed as a slave that gradually woke up to his class consciousness, Harris was transformed into a revolutionary hero.published_or_final_version
Chinese
Master
Master of Philosophy
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Molin, Peter Castle. "Middling fiction Antebellum magazine story style, substance, and sensibility /." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2007. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3276693.
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Riccardelli, Charlie Frank. "The Hoboken War Bride: A Novel." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2018. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1248470/.
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The Hoboken War Bride is a work of historical fiction set in Hoboken, New Jersey during World War II. A young soldier named Daniel and an aspiring actress named Hildy marry days after meeting, though the marriage is doomed to fail. This young couple is not compatible. Daniel ships out to basic training the day after their hasty marriage, leaving Hildy behind with his family, the Anellos, who she quickly becomes attached to. Hildy is exposed to family in a way she had never lived with her own, embracing them even though she doubts she'll ever have a future with Daniel. When Daniel returns after the end of the war, the young couple try to make their marriage work, but it fails almost immediately. Both Hildy and Daniel struggle to pick themselves up after their divorce, finding themselves making choices they never thought they would when they were younger.
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Finch, Edward F. Holsinger M. Paul. "An hour or two using naval fiction in the United States history course /." Normal, Ill. Illinois State University, 1999. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ilstu/fullcit?p9960413.
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Thesis (D.A.)--Illinois State University, 1999.Title from title page screen, viewed July 26, 2006. Dissertation Committee: M. Paul Holsinger (chair), Lawrence W. McBride, John B. Freed, Steven E. Kagle. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 225-239) and abstract. Also available in print.
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Graham, Andrew Lindsay. "Federalism and fiction in the United States Constitution and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick." Thesis, Keele University, 1994. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.359159.
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Blanton, Paul 1968. "The distribution and impact of roads and railroads on the river landscapes of the coterminous United States." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/11186.
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xvi, 150 p. : ill. (some col.), maps (some col.) A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.Floodplain roads and railroads are common features in river landscapes, but their distribution and impacts have not been explicitly studied. This dissertation discusses the impacts of floodplain roads and railroads on channel and floodplain processes in river landscapes at the continental, regional, and local scales. At the continental scale, I documented the spatial patterns of roads and railroads in the floodplains of the continental United States and the regional variability of their potential impacts. Based on these results, I developed a conceptual model based on topography and the interaction of transportation and stream networks that suggests that the area of lateral disconnection caused by transportation infrastructure should be most extensive in mid-sized alluvial valleys in relatively rugged settings, such as those located in the western United States. I used pre-existing digital geologic, hydrologic, and transportation data with Geographic Information Systems software to map floodplain areas and lateral disconnection along the floodplains of two river systems in Washington State. I developed methods to quickly and inexpensively delineate potential or historic floodplain surfaces, to analyze lateral floodplain disconnection caused by different types of structure, and to rank floodplain reaches in terms of salmon habitat potential. Although all floodplains exhibited disconnection, the floodplain maps and habitat rankings helped identify opportunities for habitat preservation and restoration. At the local scale, I mapped and measured the impacts of lateral disconnection, showing that channel and riparian habitat was degraded in locations with floodplain transportation infrastructure confining the channel compared with similar nearby sites lacking such confinement. Railroad grades and road beds function as confining structures in the riparian zone, disrupting flood pulses and the exchange of water, sediment, and biota between channels and their floodplains and within the floodplain. Over longer time periods, these structures can also impede the natural meandering and migration of channels across their floodplains, disrupting the erosional and depositional processes that drive the high habitat and biological diversity characteristic of floodplains. My results show that human-caused disconnections need to be further incorporated into river science and management. This dissertation includes previously published and unpublished co-authored material.
Committee in charge: W. Andrew Marcus, Chairperson, Geography; Daniel Gavin, Member, Geography; Patricia McDowell, Member, Geography; Joshua Roering, Outside Member, Geological Sciences
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Roy, André 1963. "Une lecture politique de Star trek /." Thesis, McGill University, 1989. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=61800.
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Hami, Iman. "Alice Walker's womanist fiction : tensions and reconciliations." Thesis, University of Essex, 2016. http://repository.essex.ac.uk/16683/.
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A theory formulated by Alice Walker, womanism focuses on the unification of men and women with Nature and Earth. This thesis explores womanism with regards to its specific concerns with African American women’s rights, identities, and self-actualisation, and points towards its more overarching concerns with human relations and sexual freedom, as expressed in each of Walker’s seven novels. The seven novels discussed in the thesis are The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), Meridian (1976), The Color Purple (1982), The Temple of My Familiar (1989), Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), By the Light of My Father’s Smile (1998), and Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2004). Although Walker introduces the term “womanism” in 1983, this thesis traces the development of the concept across her canon of fictional works. By analysing the novels written in the 1970s, I establish how the term came to be coined, and, by seeing through themes and issues addressed early on and how they can be mapped through analysis of her later works, I demonstrate how womanism went on to be further developed and complexly wrought. This thesis thus examines how Alice Walker’s own theory of womanism is reflected through the oeuvre of her fictional works, and considers where tensions arise in her application of what is intended to be a universalist, humanist, project. For, in many of her novels, it is women’s sexuality and sexual power that are the focus, often at the cost of developing the potential of male characters’ equivalent attributes. However, as will be argued, it is in Walker’s later, less appreciated, works that womanism is more fully developed in its universal claims. The integration of spiritual themes and concepts into her narratives reduce or remove the tensions that arise in the reconciliation between woman and man, as well as between humanity and nature.
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West, Mark Peter. "Between times : 21st century American fiction and the long sixties." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2014. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5621/.
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This thesis examines conceptions of time and history in five American novels published between 1995 and 2012 which take as their subject matter events associated with the counterculture and New Left of the 1960s and 1970s. The thesis is organized around close readings of five novels. The first chapter focuses on Jennifer Egan’s The Invisible Circus (1995) and argues that it incorporates a number of problematic temporal experiences which have the effect of establishing a key tension of all the novels considered here: the concern with contextualizing and historicizing particular events and cultural atmospheres while remaining faithful to utopian ideas of radical change. Chapter two argues that Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document (2006) is oriented both structurally and thematically towards a future in which the relationship between the 1960s and 1990s will more clearly understandable. The third chapter examines the way Christopher Sorrentino’s Trance (2005) explores the multiplicitous nature of historical narratives, and how he distinguishes between those narratives and a conception of the bare events beneath them. The focus of chapter four is Lauren Groff’s Arcadia (2012) and examines how conceptions of the relationship between humans and nature influence theories of time, mythic histories and post-apocalyptic narratives. The final chapter on David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (2011) argues that the tension between continuation and change found in the conversion narrative is partly reconciled by a conception of time that allows the moment of radical utopian change (the moment of conversion) to be one of re-entrance into history. At stake throughout is the way these novels’ interpretation of particular events and larger cultural tendencies reveals and makes manifest various processes of historicization. I maintain a dual focus on the way these novels present historicization as something undertaken by individuals and societies and the ways in which these novels themselves not only engage in historicizations of the period but are in various ways self-conscious about doing so. If contemporary scholarship on the emergence of what has been called post-postmodern literature (Stephen J. Burn, Andrew Hoberek, Adam Kelly, Caren Irr) identifies a return to temporal concerns in recent fiction, the readings that comprise my thesis also make use of conceptions of time and history by Mark Currie, Jacques Derrida, Reinhold Niebuhr, Norman Mailer, Christopher Lasch, and Robert N. Bellah (among others) in order to ask: what are the particular material contours of the experiences of time and history manifested in these recent examples of the ‘sixties novel’?
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Thomas, Glen Joseph. "Plots and plotters : narrative, desire, and ideology in contemporary American historiographic metafiction /." [St. Lucia, Qld.], 2001. http://www.library.uq.edu.au/pdfserve.php?image=thesisabs/absthe16176.pdf.
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Case, Theresa Ann. "Free labor on the southwestern railroads the 1885-1886 Gould system strikes /." Access restricted to users with UT Austin EID Full text (PDF) from UMI/Dissertation Abstracts International, 2002. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/fullcit?p3077430.
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Stringam, Jean. "Canadian short adventure fiction in periodicals for adolescents, Canada, England, the United States, 1847-1914." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1998. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/tape15/PQDD_0007/NQ34842.pdf.
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Zevitz, Richard Gary, and Michael Braswell. "Long Road Home : The Trials and Tribulations of a Confederate Soldier." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2012. http://amzn.com/0828324654.
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A disgraced officer and an enlisted man forge an unlikely friendship through the desperate river battles waged along the Mississippi between Union forces and outnumbered Confederate defenders. Following their surrender, the two friends along with the other defeated Rebels are incarcerated in Northern prisoner of war camps where new challenges await them. Only one will survive. Based upon ten years of historical research, Long Road Home explores the trials and travails of George Spears and his friend, Eli Forrest.https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1004/thumbnail.jpg
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Robinson, Matthew Dean. "The Horse Latitudes." PDXScholar, 2015. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/2371.
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The Horse Latitudes is a collection of stories that documents one infantry squad's time in Baghdad, Iraq. The missions are long stretches of boredom, broken up by flashes of violence. The single sniper shot fired. An IED loosely buried in the roadside, waiting. A schoolyard of kids throwing fist-sized rocks at gun-trucks. The enemy is vast and changing. The downtime is a combination of homesickness, RPGs, and mortar fire. These men suffer through the war, heat, and each other.
These stories look into the fire-fights and their aftermath to get to soldiers' struggles within themselves: how to fight a faceless enemy, what it means to serve, how one soldiers, what makes a man, what makes a good man, what will it mean to die here, and what does it mean not to. This collection dismisses what we think we know about war -- violence, camaraderie, masculinity, enemy, victory -- in order to tell a harder, truer story.
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Wong, Yee-ling, and 黃綺玲. "Cyborgs, capitalism, hope: a study of Hong Kong and Hollywood science fiction films." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2013. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B50900146.
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Posthuman representations in selected Hollywood and Hong Kong science fiction films show new interconnections in “techno-globalization.” They also exhibit a waning relationship between the “center” and the “margin” of technoculture. This study discusses the relation of technology, humanity, affect, and aesthetics in selective science fiction films produced from 1984 to 2010. The science fiction features were made in the United States and in Hong Kong. They include: The Terminator (1984), Terminator2 (1991), Terminator Salvation (2009), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2002), I Love Maria (1988), Kung Fu Cyborg (2009) and Future X-Cops (2010). In particular, Kung Fu Cyborg merges the popular genre conventions of martial arts and technoculture, and manifests a different imagination at work wherein Hong Kong’s martial arts cinema stands in the place of a scientific-based Western technoculture absent in Hong Kong science fiction films. This study presents several key critical frames elaborated by scholars of science fiction who have assessed the recurrent themes and figures of science fiction films. The discussion of films identifies the resemblances, the differences, and the competitive dynamic between American science fiction films and Hong Kong action features. The absence of utopian or dystopian figures in posthuman filmic representations in Hong Kong cinema is considered an important difference from Western science fiction films. This thesis examines the figure of the cyborg and argues for the important place of emotions and the power to emote and hope as having a complex relationship to technology, humans and humanness. The compassionate cyborg has temporal and moral dimensions relating to belief and religion in this important genre. Thus, this thesis examines the backdrop for science fiction affect, which is one of oppression and crisis that speaks to the conditions of capitalism and modernity. The affective cyborgs make an important figure in the science fiction films that concern the crisis conditions, the appeal of technology, and the conventions of science fiction genre in commercial cinema.published_or_final_version
Comparative Literature
Master
Master of Philosophy
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Cooper, Valerie Y. "The crying of the blood : a collection of short stories." Virtual Press, 2006. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1337191.
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The Crying of the Blood is a collection of short stories with the two characters Mariah and Mary, born one hundred years apart, who deal with the challenges of life dealt them. Through descriptive language and the strong presence of place and setting, the author explores the under-girding strength of human nature in dealing with the external and internal pressures of the various forms of war and its aftermath. By examining the effects of the human condition through inherited and acquired traits passed to succeeding descendents of the characters, the author exposes the foibles of human nature. People live a specific way and repeat patterns of thinking and choosing without knowing why or stopping to consider the ensuing results of their actions. The collection of stories reveals the dark shadows of the Civil War that continue to shape the Southern culture and also the enduring strength and charm of the people and their traditions.This collection of stories is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a figment of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Resemblances to actual people, settings, and events are purely coincidental.Department of English
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Larrieux, Stephanie F. "Racing the future: Hollywood science fiction film narratives of race." View abstract/electronic edition; access limited to Brown University users, 2008. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3319100.
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Engren, Jimmy. "Railroading and labor migration : class and ethnicity in expanding capitalism in Northern Minnesota, the 1880s to the mid 1920s /." Växjö : Växjö University Press, 2007. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:vxu:diva-1636.
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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.
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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.
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Morris, Timothy R. ""Dollars Damn Me": Editorial Politics and Herman Melville's Periodical Fiction." VCU Scholars Compass, 2015. http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/3803.
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To illustrate Melville’s navigation of editorial politics in the periodical marketplace, this study analyzes two stories Melville published in Putnam’s in order to reconstruct the particular historical, editorial, social, and political contexts of these writings. The first text examined in this study is “Bartleby,” published in Putnam’s in November and December of 1853. This reading recovers overtures of sociability and indexes formal appropriations of established popular genres in order to develop an interpretive framework. Throughout this analysis, an examination of the narrator’s ideological bearings in relation to the unsystematic implementation of these ideologies in American public life sets forth a set of interrelated social and political contexts. Melville’s navigation of these contexts demonstrates specific compositional maneuverings in order to tend to the expectations of a popular readership but also to challenge ideological norms. Israel Potter, Herman Melville’s eighth book-length novel, serialized in Putnam’s from July of 1854 to March of 1855, is the focus of the second case study. This study tracks Melville’s engagements and disengagements with a variety of source materials and positions these compositional shifts amid contemporaneous political ideologies, populist histories, middle-class values, audience expectations, and editorial politics. This study will demonstrate that Melville set out to craft texts for a popular readership; however, Melville, struggling to recuperate his damaged credentials, seasoned by demoralizing business dealings, his ambitions attenuated by the realities of the literary marketplace, undertook the hard task of self-editing his works to satisfy his aspirations, circumvent editorial politics, and meet audience expectations.
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Stanley, Philip. "Legislating the Danville Connection, 1847-1862: Railroads and Regionalism versus Nationalism in the Confederate States of America." VCU Scholars Compass, 2014. http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/3510.
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This thesis examines the effect regionalism had upon North Carolina and Virginia during the 1847-1862 legislative battles over the Danville, Virginia, to Greensboro, North Carolina, railroad connection. The first chapter examines the rivalry between eastern and western North Carolina for internal improvement legislation, namely westerners’ wish to connect with Virginia and easterners’ desire to remain economically relevant. The second chapter investigates the Tidewater region of Virginia and its battle against the Southside to create a rail connection with North Carolina. The third chapter examines the legislation for the Danville Connection during the American Civil War in the Virginia, North Carolina, and Confederate legislatures. Through an examination of voting patterns and public opinion, this thesis finds that, despite Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s designation of the Danville connection as a military necessity, regionalism overcame Confederate nationalism during this instance.
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Tam, Pou U. "Machines in Faulkner's Mississippi garden." Thesis, University of Macau, 2009. http://umaclib3.umac.mo/record=b2554101.
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Chaplow, Lester Ian. "Tales of a Hollow Earth. Tracing the Legacy of John Cleves Symmesin Antarctic Exploration and Fiction." Thesis, University of Canterbury. Gateway Antarctica, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10092/5478.
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This thesis examines the hollow-earth theories of John Cleves Symmes and seeks to recognise and restore both his memory and his legacy. I outline Symmes’ theory that the Earth is hollow and habitable within, and accessible via holes at the North and South Poles, consider the impact of this theory on the commencement of the United States Antarctic Exploration program, and demonstrate its lasting legacy within the genre of Symmesian hollow-earth fiction.
Previous scholarship has been intermittent, disparate and oddly contextualised, often assigning both Symmes and his theory to the world of the “weird and wonderful.” In order to study Symmes’ legacy, I synthesise previous scholarship and show the continuing presence of his theory – at times unrecognised and unacknowledged – in fiction.
Commencing with a description of the series of publications in which Symmes publicised his idea, this thesis looks at his theory’s reception, with a discussion of several books and letters published in response to the theory – from contemporary times through to the current day. In determining the legacy of his theory, rather than the theory itself, I look at possible and probable sources for Symmes’ idea, and place it on the continuum of natural philosophy and science from the thirteenth century so as to set Symmes’ announcement in the perspective of its time. I then address Symmes’ influence on the United States Congress, which culminated in the United States Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842. Finally, I examine Symmes’ legacy in fiction, commencing with an extensive discussion of Symzonia, which some posit was authored by Symmes, and continuing through to the present.
I find that while Symmes’ theory, and the ensuing debate about a hollow earth, may have advanced the speed with which the United States commenced Antarctic exploration, with time this exploration would probably have happened anyway. His greatest legacy is through the establishment of a body of hollow-earth fiction based around the fictional hole which now bears his name; “Symmes’ Hole” lives on in literature to the current day.
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Bortoto, Pedro Mayer. "Imagens do trabalho: os ferroviários da Chicago and North Western Railway nas fotografias do Office of War Information, 1942-1943." Universidade de São Paulo, 2013. http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8138/tde-10042014-124620/.
Full textAbstract:
Com o objetivo de explorar outras formas de aproximar a história dos trabalhadores, essa dissertação tem por escopo analisar um conjunto de 724 fotografias acerca da rotina da Chicago and North Western Railway e entender as formas possíveis de um discurso fotográfico acerca do trabalho e dos trabalhadores das estradas de ferro. Essas fotografias foram produzidas pelo fotógrafo Jack Delano sob a direção de Roy Emerson Stryker que, à época, encontrava-se na direção da divisão de fotografia do Office of War Information. Mais precisamente, as imagens fazem parte da trajetória do que ficou mais conhecido como Historical Section do Farm Security Administration, um grupo de fotógrafos conhecidos por retratar a situação do mundo rural após a Grande Depressão. Por conta disso, como modo de se aproximar às fotografias para analisá-las, foi preciso realizar uma reflexão acerca de seus elementos constitutivos, a saber: a história dos ferroviários, da divisão de fotografia e o problema de encarar a fotografia como um documento histórico. Feito isso, caracterizam-se as fotografias como vestígio em que as trajetórias de fotógrafo e da divisão, premidos por pressões políticas internas à estrutura estatal estadunidense, e as dos ferroviários marcadas por várias tensões entre patrões e trabalhadores se cruzavam. Com isso em vista, partiu-se para uma análise por meio de banco de dados para compreender como esse discurso estava constituído nas imagens. A partir de uma análise quantitativa somada a uma aproximação detida das narrativas fotográficas presentes na coleção de fotografias, percebeu-se que ela se apoiou em um discurso de harmonia entre trabalhadores e companhia ferroviária em favor de uma visão de equilíbrio social e que se adequasse às expectativas liberais em relação ao esforço de guerra. Mesmo com imagens que poderiam trazer ruídos para essa visão, a força de certa mitografia que entendia o trabalho como fonte da ordem social apontava, de fato, para um discurso de dominação em que a lógica capitalista aparece imposta sobre os trabalhadores por meio do discurso fotográfico.Having as an objective to explore other ways to approach the workers history, this dissertation has as scope analyze a collection of 724 photographs on the routine of the Chicago and North Western Railway and understand the contents of a photographic discourse about railroad work and labor. These photographs were produced by photographer Jack Delano under direction of Roy Emerson Stryker, the head of the Office of War Informations Division of Photography. More precisely, the pictures are part of what is mostly known as the Farm Security Administrations Historical Section, group of photographers acknowledged for picturing the situation of the rural America after the effect of the Great Depression. For that matter, as means to establish an analytic procedure, it was necessary to reflect on the photographs constitutive elements, as: the history of railroad workers, the history of the division of photography and the question of understand photography as a historical record. As a result, the photographs were characterized as vestiges in which the trajectories of the photographer and the division, pressed by the politics inside the American state, and the trajectories of the railroad companies and workers, marked by various tensions, met. With this in view, it was established an analysis of the photographs through a database so it could be understood how the discourse was constituted in these pictures. From a quantitative analysis coupled with a detained approach to the photographic narratives found in the photographic collection, it was understood that the pictures relied on a discourse of harmony between workers and the railway in favor of a vision of social balance that suited the liberals expectations towards the war effort. Even though some images have the potency to challenge such view, the power of the mythography that understood labor as a source of social order pointed, in fact, to a discourse of domination in which the logic of capital was imposed on workers by means of photographic discourse.
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Lin, Yu-Fang. "The Cultural Construction of Taiwan in the Literatures of Taiwan, China, and the United States." Kent State University / OhioLINK, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent149178259135258.
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Thompson, Sidney 1965. "Bass Reeves: a History • a Novel • a Crusade, Volume 1: the Rise." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2015. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc804965/.
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This literary/historical novel details the life of African-American Deputy US Marshal Bass Reeves between the years 1838-1862 and 1883-1884. One plotline depicts Reeves’s youth as a slave, including his service as a body servant to a Confederate cavalry officer during the Civil War. Another plotline depicts him years later, after Emancipation, at the height of his deputy career, when he has become the most feared, most successful lawman in Indian Territory, the largest federal jurisdiction in American history and the most dangerous part of the Old West. A preface explores the uniqueness of this project’s historical relevance and literary positioning as a neo-slave narrative, and addresses a few liberties that I take with the historical record.
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Leeke, Jane. "A novel reading : literature and pedagogy in modern Middle East history courses in Canada and the United States." Thesis, McGill University, 2005. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=98549.
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The purpose of this study is to explore how the Arabic novel can and does challenge the conventional characterization of what constitutes constructive Middle East historiography. The thesis draws on a case study of undergraduate history course syllabi in order to highlight a number of crucial issues related to Arabic literature and the production of modern Middle East history. My analysis of the syllabi concludes that in general, Arabic novels in translation are part of a varied group of resources selected by a professor in order to complement the "official" histories provided by textbooks and government documents. The novel is deemed helpful because it often describes the "ordinary" or daily life of people. Also, the novel is presented as the contribution of an "indigenous voice" to the historical narrative.
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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.
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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.
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Olson, Ted. "Revelations: Poems." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2012. http://amzn.com/0984783687.
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Revelations: Poems, Appalachian poet Ted Olson’s second full-length poetry collection, contains eleven chapters of seven poems per chapter. Plying various forms and exhibiting a strong sense of musicality, these poems explore such themes as childhood, family, memory, love, nature, ritual, and visions both literal and spiritual. Olson’s poems provide surprising snapshots of a shared world that is all-too-often ignored or unexplored. In the words of literary critic James Owens, “We need Ted Olson. In his truest voice, he is a visionary poet, restlessly prying at the dim everyday with the shiny edge of intelligent illumination. His poems locate the connections and epiphanies, right there where they have always been, unseen until now and waiting for the right eye to find them, the right tongue to give them clarity and form.”https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1034/thumbnail.jpg
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McRae, Leanne. "Aliens, bodies and conspiracies: Regimes of truth in The X-files." Thesis, Edith Cowan University, Research Online, Perth, Western Australia, 1999. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses/1247.
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The X-Files is a television program that first screened on Australian television in 1993. This thesis will investigate the role of The X-Files as a cultural text. The X-Files is a significant program, and has contributed to a shift in the way in which television texts represent ideas about society, knowledge and truth. This thesis argues that The X-Files presents ‘knowledge’ in particular ways, and makes it possible to think about the relationship between the body, knowledge, and society in ways which have not previously been so visible.
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Duffy, Ryan. "Trouble along the Border: The Transformation of the U.S.-Mexican Border during the Nineteenth Century." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1374609923.
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Johnson, Don. "More Than Heavy Rain." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2014. http://amzn.com/1937875571.
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More Than Heavy Rain brings together poems of intense observation culled from a life lived mostly outside. Set mostly around the poet’s home along the Watauga River in northeast Tennessee, the poems also reach out to such distant locations as Montana, Alaska, and post-war Germany. Some of them reconstruct the poet’s childhood in rural West Virginia. Some examine his family history, the events and relatives who helped determine the way he views the world.https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1044/thumbnail.jpg
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Pearson, Lydia Marie. "The materiality of the female in Shirley Jackson's short fiction." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2008. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/3349.
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Shirley Jackson's fiction continues to be placed within the gothic horror genre because of its supernatural and horror images. I contend the major focus of her work is her critique of the social norms constructed for women by an archaic and inauthentic patriarchial system of rules and domestic expectation for women that result in madness for the resisting female.
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Douglas, Christopher Robins Dunfield. "Reciting America, repetition and the cultural self-sufficiency of the United States in the fiction of Russell Banks, Ralph Ellison, Maxine Hong Kingston, and T. Coraghessan Boyle." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1997. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp02/NQ27638.pdf.
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Graves, Jesse, Paul Ruffin, and William Wright. "Southern Poetry Anthology, VI: Tennessee." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2013. http://amzn.com/1937875458.
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The state of Tennessee is widely recognized as a home of great music, and its geographic regions are as distinct as Memphis blues, Nashville country, and Bristol old-time sounds. Tennessee’s literary heritage offers equal variety and quality, as home to the Fugitive Agrarian Poets, as well as a signature voice from the Black Arts Movement. Few states present such a multicultural panorama as does the Volunteer State. The poems in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume VI: Tennessee engage the storied histories, diverse cultures, and vibrant rural and urban landscapes of the region. Among the more than 120 poets represented are Pulitzer and Bollingen Prize-winner Charles Wright, Brittingham Award-winner Lynn Powell, and Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize-winners Rick Hilles and Arthur Smith. The book includes an introduction from renowned poet Jeff Daniel Marion, who in 1978 received the first literary fellowship from the Tennessee Arts Commission. Too, the book celebrates relatively young and gifted voices. This important anthology will stand for many years as the definitive poetic document for the state of Tennessee.https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1088/thumbnail.jpg
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Graves, Jesse. "Basin Ghosts." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2014. http://amzn.com/1937875539.
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Basin Ghosts is a collection of original poems by Jesse Graves, author of Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine. Many poems in Basin Ghosts address places and themes that resonated in Graves's first collection, which won the Weatherford Award, the Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award, and the Appalachian Writers' Association Book of the Year Award in Poetry. The poems in Basin Ghosts examine life in the rural South, changes that have occurred over generations in communities there, and the ways in which the past lives on through memory and attachment to the land.https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1056/thumbnail.jpg
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Endicott, David. "Spectacular fictions : the Cold War and the making of historical knowledge." Virtual Press, 1998. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1117103.
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The Cold War can be considered the final grand narrative of modernity because of its deterministic influence on the making of knowledge in twentieth-century America. Likewise, Cold War events and the power of their individual narratives and images (their petits recits) created the needed condition for the advent of the age of spectacle. The Cold War existed in this state of contradiction: the final grand narrative and the first postmodern spectacle. Examples of the literature of the Cold War period, what I have labelled the literature of spectacle, serve to both elucidate the social conditions of the age of spectacle and their relationship to our media society. Spectacular fictions also provide a means of examining the postmodern concept of historiographic fictionalization. Don DeLillo's Libra' presents a Lee Harvey Oswald who manipulates the traces of his life to blur the image that he knows must enter the historical record. The Richard Nixon of Robert Coover's The Public Burning evolves to an intense consciousness of the contradictions of historiography that is realized only after he is brutally molested by Uncle Sam for the entire nation to witness, a rape that both strips Nixon of any remaining masculinity and thrusts him forward into America's Cold War history as the dark shadow of his future presidency looms throughout the novel. In The Book of Daniel, E.L. Doctorow's Daniel Isaacson attempts to counteract historiography (and the narrative of his infamous parents, the Rosenbergesque Paul and Rochelle) by writing his own story, telling his history as he feels it relates to the American experience of the Cold War. Daniel's self-history differs from Oswald's selfnarratization because Oswald's text is intentionally fabricated, while Daniel realizes that his narrative is a fabrication of the nation's history. Likewise, the characterization of Nixon differs from that of Oswald, though both are inspired by their actual historical counterparts. While the Nixon of the 1970s greatly shapes the Nixon of the novel, the historical Lee Harvey Oswald remains an enigma of America's recent past, perpetually residing in the margins of unknowability. From this space of marginalization, DeLillo's Oswald emerges.Department of English
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Noboa, Ígor Carastan. "Filmes do fim do mundo: ficção científica e Guerra Fria (1951/1964)." Universidade de São Paulo, 2010. http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8138/tde-18102010-153611/.
Full textAbstract:
Esta dissertação tem como tema quatro filmes do gênero ficção científica, produzidos nos Estados Unidos da América no período do segundo pós-guerra, O Dia em que a Terra Parou (1951), Vampiros de Almas (1956), A Bolha (1958) e Limite de Segurança (1964). Nas sociedades contemporâneas, este gênero se torna relevante como objeto de interpretação do real, representando, interpretando e discutindo o seu contexto histórico e as relações humanas com o desconhecido, propondo formas de organização social e reflexões sobre a natureza da Ciência e Tecnologia. Por meio da leitura crítica dos filmes pode-se compreender o imaginário americano sobre questões referentes às relações internacionais da Guerra Fria e às ameaças internas à sociedade, sem deixar para trás a visão de que estes filmes atingiram diversas sociedades em diversas regiões do mundo e também tratam de questões universais.This dissertation presents four science fiction movies, produced in the United States of America in the second post war period, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), The Blob (1958), Fail-Safe (1964). In contemporary societies, this genre becomes relevant as an interpretation of the real, representing, interpreting, and discussing its historical context and the human relationships with the unknown, proposing ways of social organization and reflections about the nature of Science and Technology. By means of critical reading of the movies, the American imaginary regarding the international relations of the Cold War and the internal threats to society can be comprehended, without leaving behind the notion that these movies reach societies in different regions of the world and deal with universal questions.
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Graves, Jesse, Paul Ruffin, and William Wright. "Southern Poetry Anthology, VII: North Carolina." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2015. http://amzn.com/1937875873.
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Robert Morgan and Kathryn Stripling Byer, Al Maginnes and Cathy Smith Bowers, Thomas Rain Crowe and Michael McFee, as well as many new voices. . . Indeed, the variegation of the Tar Heel State's landscapes, as well as its rich history, is reflected through the myriad voices of its contemporary verse. As with other volumes of The Southern Poetry Anthology, this book--full of a wide gamut of poetic styles and approaches--will appeal to many readers, prove an excellent teaching resource for North Carolina students of literature, and serve as the definitive poetic document for North Carolina for many years. Conceived by Series Editor William Wright in 2003, The Southern Poetry Anthology is a projected twelve-to-sixteen volume project celebrating established and emerging poets of the American South, published by Texas Review Press. Inspired by single-volume anthologies such as Leon Stokesbury's The Made Thing, Gil Allen's A Ninety-Six Sampler, and Guy Owen and Mary C. Williams' Contemporary Southern Poetry: an Anthology, The Southern Poetry Anthology aspires to provide readers with a documentary-like survey of the best poetry being written in the American South at the present moment. Specifically, the editors' goals are twofold: first, to re-establish poetry of the South as a major presence in American literature, and second, to include a greater range of poets from the South to introduce a new poetic geography, a fresh corpus of what we understand to be "Southern Poetry."https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1019/thumbnail.jpg
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Abatan, Adetutu Abosede. "Cultural perspectives and adolescent concerns in Nigerian young adult novels." Diss., Virginia Tech, 1994. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/40308.
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Multicultural literature is a very important tool in today's classrooms because it enables teachers and students to learn about the practices, historical background for attitudes, norms and customs of other cultures and peoples.Ph. D.
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Workman, Jessica Crystal. "A laudable ambition fired her soul conduct fiction helps define republican womanhood, female communities, and women's education in the works of Judith Sargent Murray, Hannah Webster Foster, and Susanna Haswell Rowson." Master's thesis, University of Central Florida, 2011. http://digital.library.ucf.edu/cdm/ref/collection/ETD/id/4723.
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This study examines the major works of Judith Sargent Murray, Hannah Webster Foster, and Susanna Haswell Rowson, three major writers of the 1790s whose writing responds to the ideologies of the early American Republic. I suggest that Murray, Foster, and Rowson write conduct fiction which responds to the changing attitudes toward women and education after the American Revolution. Using fiction, these authors comment on the republican woman, the need for women's education, and the necessity for women to gather in communities for support. Despite the prevailing notion that reading too many novels would corrupt young women, Judith Sargent Murray's novella, The Story of Margaretta (1786), Hannah Webster Foster's novels, The Coquette (1797) and The Boarding School (1798), and Susanna Rowson's novels, Charlotte Temple (1794) and Reuben and Rachel; or, Tales of Old Times (1798), were some of the most popular books in the late eighteenth century. If these novels were not meant to be read by young women, who were the authors' primary audience, why were they so popular? This project situates these questions in the political environment the authors were writing in to show that a relationship exists between what women were reading and how authors of conduct fiction helped facilitate the changing roles of women in the early Republic.ID: 030646201; System requirements: World Wide Web browser and PDF reader.; Mode of access: World Wide Web.; Thesis (M.A.)--University of Central Florida, 2011.; Includes bibliographical references (p. 101-108).
M.A.
Masters
English
Arts and Humanities
English; Literary, Cultural and Textual Studies Track
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Chachere, Karen A. De Santis Christopher C. "Visually white, legally black miscegenation, the mulatoo, and passing in American literature and culture, 1865-1933 /." Normal, Ill. : Illinois State University, 2004. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ilstu/fullcit?p3128271.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 2004.Title from title page screen, viewed Jan. 10, 2005. Dissertation Committee: Christopher C. De Santis (chair), Ronald Strickland, Cynthia A. Huff, Alison Bailey. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 178-193) and abstract. Also available in print.
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Allen, Joseph J. "The retina blues : invisibility and cultural visibility." Virtual Press, 1995. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/941584.
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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
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Schembri, Peter Mark. "The use of genre by the Hollywood film industry to standardize and regulate the manufacture, content, and consumption of genre film commodities : the commercial success of recombinant science fiction films in the United States marketplace 1977-1989." Thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 1996. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/36383/1/36383_Schembri_1991.pdf.
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In 1977, Star Wars opened in the United States to become a multimillion dollar blockbuster. Star Wars heralded the arrival of the recombinant science fiction-fantasy film. By the end of the 1980s, recombinant science fiction-fantasy films were the top grossing Hollywood manufactured films of the decade, with E.T., The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) becoming the highest grossing film
in Hollywood's history. The use of genre by the Hollywood film industry during the 1980s ensured the continued popularity, and therefore financial success as measured by box-office receipts, of Hollywood recombinant science fiction films. This thesis argues that the Hollywood film industry during the 1980s, used genre as it operated through the Hollywood standard, to regulate and control the interrelationship between: the economic structures and practices of the Hollywood film industry;
the content of recombinant science fiction genre films and generic cycles as expressed in Hollywood manufactured film texts; and the consumption by American audiences of these texts. The Hollywood standard is essentially a standardized industrial process. The standardized production/manufacturing conventions of the 1980s Hollywood standard, informed the manufacture of
science fiction film commodities by studio executives and contracted creative personnel. The Hollywood standard also influenced the science fiction genre's product/content conventions and formulas. Although the science fiction genre was successfully recombined with the fantasy genre, each genre had its own content
conventions and formulas. The manufacture, promotion, distribution, and exhibition of Hollywood manufactured recombinant science fiction films entailed
relationships between a complex network of organizations. This thesis details four functions, each a stage of an industrial process operating in a consumer-orientated market economy. All four functions were present in the 1980s Hollywood film industry system: manufacture or creation; entrepreneurship and patronage; promotion and marketing; and consumption. These functions transformed
a science fiction film from a conception to a commercial
commodity. The Hollywood film industry used genre in an attempt to regulate and control each stage of the Hollywood film industry system. 1980s recombinant science fiction films, as commercial
commodities manufactured through an industrial process, were cultural
products subject to the supply and demand pressures of the American marketplace. The theoretical approach upon which this thesis is based is a synthesis of a number of social science perspectives. Each chapter of this thesis corresponds to a stage of the industrial process.
The basic process of communication model is combined with
semiotics in the performance model. The performance model acknowledges that the content of film texts are determined by studio executives and creative personnel who manufactured texts according to the Hollywood standard. During the 1980s, Hollywood film manufacturers were unable to predict, or predicted only to a limited extent, what manufactured genre film commodities would be successful in the marketplace. As a coping strategy, Hollywood film studios engaged in overproduction. Once the film commodity was selected for release in the American marketplace, it was subject to differential promotion, with greater financial resources being allocated to expensive science fiction films that were likely to be potential blockbusters. But every recombinant science fiction film was promoted. As a marketing strategy, genre recombinations could be used to develop a unique brand image for each manufactured film commodity so that it could be targeted at different segments of a mass market.
A mass audience of American consumers in the 1980s were aggregates of unique individuals and groups of active consumers, making informed and conscious decisions in the marketplace. When individuals paid to see a recombinant science fiction film, they expected to obtain meanings and pleasure from it. Consumers often used genre as an important strategy to gather initial information about a film prior to viewing, and genre was often
used as an strategy for evaluating the film after viewing. Using the concept of cultural forum, this thesis argues that Hollywood manufactured recombinant science fiction film texts 'commented' on ideological conflicts. Individuals and groups were capable of creating opposition readings, and could engage the Hollywood film industry at the level of personal actions; individuals were not being ideologically manipulated. It was upon consumer demand and expectations that the Hollywood film industry system during the 1980s was based. Since consumers in the 1980s were notoriously fickle in their selection of films, the Hollywood film industry used genre in an attempt to direct audience reception of film commodities in the marketplace.