Tesis sobre el tema "Science fiction, American – History and criticism"
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1
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Fogelholm, Jens. "Lost in Space : Sökandet efter mening hos människan i Titan A.E". Thesis, Uppsala universitet, Teologiska institutionen, 2018. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-339480.
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This thesis deals with the depiction of meaningfulness and meaning-making, as seen in human characters in the 2000 animated science fiction film Titan A.E. (directed by Don Bluth). The analysis aims to show how Titan A.E. portrays a collective humanity in their search for a meaningful existence, given the outer space setting of its story. Evil is also brought up, in the context of how it creates meaning within the main narrative of the story. The emotions expressed by the story's characters are treated as if they were real. Meaningfulness and meaning-making get exemplified in both dialogue and visual components seen in the film. In addition to this, some reflection is made on the promotional trailers of Titan A.E. and how their displayed contents differ from the finished product. In parallel to the main analysis, there is a wider discussion made about the relationship between films and their real-world process of production, especially regarding whether theological reflection and the film industry can intersect or not.
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Shishkin, Timur. "Marginalized Characters in Contemporary American Short Fiction". PDXScholar, 2011. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/297.
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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.
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Zheng, Baoxuan y 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.
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Franco, Jefferson Luiz. "Ensinando o futuro: visões da ficção científica sobre o ato de lecionar". Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná, 2017. http://repositorio.utfpr.edu.br/jspui/handle/1/2821.
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Esta pesquisa apresenta uma abordagem teórico-analítica da questão da representação da docência em textos de ficção científica de três autores norteamericanos do século XX: Isaac Asimov, autor do conto Como se divertiam, de 1951; Lloyd Biggle Jr, que escreveu Maneira doida de lecionar em 1966 e Connie Willis, cuja narrativa analisada tem o título Muito barulho por nada e data de 1990. Discutir as relações potencialmente passíveis de serem estabelecidas entre o imaginário retratado nessas obras e a visão neoliberal contemporânea do ato de ensinar como objeto de automatização e normatização estrita pode certificar o fato de que tais representações idealizadas tornaram-se, em grande medida, paradigmas advindos das práticas do capitalismo avançado (as quais têm como modelo primário a nação estadunidense) capazes de influenciar a forma como são entendidas, representadas e planejadas as relações entre a figura docente e as tecnologias em nosso país. Portanto, como objetivo primário, elencamos a tentativa de compreender como é realizada a construção discursiva da representação do trabalhador da educação (e das tecnologias imaginárias que cercam essa representação), inserindo-a nas dimensões culturais do imaginário norte-americano a fim de discutir sobre seus reflexos contemporâneos e seu conteúdo determinístico. Para isso, metodologicamente empregamos a recensão e análise bibliográfica de artigos científicos e textos literários nacionais e estrangeiros (que incluíram, mas não se limitaram, às obras designadas como objetos) e, entre as conclusões levantadas, apontamos a constatação de que a relação do corpus com a indústria cultural não permite um afastamento radical das teorias educacionais tradicionalistas familiares aos leitores que constituem o público-alvo dos autores, além de destacarmos vieses marcados pelo determinismo nos textos, embora seja, em alguns casos, apenas insinuado ou surja em contraste com produções posteriores do escritor. Como apontamento final, entretanto, é possível enxergar o conteúdo último dos textos do corpus como prioritariamente humanista: Asimov retrata o desejo de um ensino comunitário em lugar do isolamento do discente em nome da eficiência; Biggle Jr. discute, de forma subjacente, a desvalorização da figura do docente ante uma técnica voltada para a maximização de resultados econômicos e, por fim, Willis coloca em pauta as possibilidades e perigos de tentar se banir ideologias do ambiente escolar, dentro de um molde supostamente democrático que acaba servindo à aniquilação das possibilidades de aprendizado.This research presents a theoretical-analytical approach to the question of representation of teaching in science fiction texts of American authors of the 20th century: Isaac Asimov, author of The fun they had! (1951); Lloyd Biggle Jr, who wrote And madly teach at 1966 and Connie Willis, whose analyzed narrative is called Ado and dates back to 1990. Discuss the relationships potentially liable to be established between the imaginary depicted in these works and the contemporary neoliberal vision of the act of teaching as the object of automation and strict standardization can certify the fact that such idealized representations have become, to a large extent, paradigms from the practices of advanced capitalism (which have as their primary model the American nation) capable of influencing how relationships between teachers and technologies in our country are understood, represented and planned. Therefore, as a primary objective, we attempt to understand how the discursive construction of the representation of the education worker (and the imaginary technologies surrounding this representation) is carried out, inserting it into the cultural dimensions of the North American imaginary in order to discuss its contemporary reflections and its deterministic content. In order to do this, we methodologically used the review and bibliographical analysis of scientific articles and national and foreign literary texts (which included, but were not limited to, works designated as objects), and, among the conclusions drawn, we pointed out that the relationship of the corpus with the cultural industry does not allow a radical departure from traditionalist educational theories familiar to the readers who constitute the target audience of the authors, in addition to highlighting perspectives marked by determinism in the texts, although in some cases, it is just insinuated or emerged in contrast to subsequent productions of the writer. As a final point, however, it is possible to see the ultimate content of the texts of the corpus as having a humanistic priority: Asimov portrays the desire for a communal education in place of the isolation of the student in the name of efficiency; Biggle Jr. discusses, in a subtle way, the devaluation of the teacher's figure before a technique focused at the maximization of economic results and, finally, Willis points out the possibilities and dangers of trying to ban all the ideology of the school environment, following a supposedly democratic mold that ends up serving the annihilation of the possibilities of learning.
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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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Beaulé, Sophie. "L'institution de la science-fiction française, 1977-1983". Thesis, McGill University, 1985. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=65469.
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Strecker, Geralyn. "Reading prostitution in American fiction, 1893-1917". Virtual Press, 2001. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1213148.
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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
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King, Edward Carlos Richard. "Mapping the control society : science fiction tropes and digital technologies in contemporary Argentine and Brazilian narrative". Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.610135.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Leperlier, Henry. "Canadian science fiction, a reluctant genre". Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape9/PQDD_0033/NQ61856.pdf.
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Jordan, Linda. "German science-fiction magazines of Hugo Gernsback, 1926-1935". Thesis, McGill University, 1986. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=65493.
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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.
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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
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Jorgensen, Darren J. "Science fiction and the sublime". University of Western Australia. English, Communication and Cultural Studies Discipline Group, 2005. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2005.0116.
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[Truncated abstract] This thesis makes three assertions. The first is that the sublime is a principal pleasure of science fiction. The second is that the conditions for the emergence of both the sublime and science fiction lie in the modern developments of technology, mass economy and imperialism. Maritime and optical technologies; the imagination that accompanied imperialism; and the influence of capitalism furnished the cognition by which the pleasures of both science fiction and the sublime came into being. The third claim is that a historical conception of the sublime, one that changes according to the different circumstances in which it appears, offers privileged insights onto changes within the genre. To make such extensive claims it has been necessary to make a cognitive map of the development of both the sublime and science fiction. This map reaches from the Ancient Romans, Lucian and Longinus; to Thomas More, Jonathan Swift, Johannes Kepler, Voltaire and Immanuel Kant; to Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. This thesis then examines how the features of these fictions mutate in the twentieth-century fiction of A.E. van Vogt, Clifford Simak, Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, Ivan Yefremov, the Strugatsky brothers, J.G. Ballard, Pamela Zoline, Ursula Le Guin, Vonda McIntyre, Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Stephen Baxter, William Gibson, Ken MacLeod and Stanislaw Lem. These writers are considered in their own specific periods, and in their national contexts, as they create pleasures that are contingent upon changes to their own worlds. In representing these changes, their fictions defamiliarise the anxieties of the reading subject. They transcend the contradictions of their times with a sublime that betrays its own conditions of transcendence. The deployment of the sublime in these texts offers a moment of critical possibility, as it betrays the fantasies born of a subject's relation to their world
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Hagan, Justice M. "Desert Enlightenment: Prophets and Prophecy in American Science Fiction". University of Dayton / OhioLINK, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=dayton1366729757.
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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.
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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.
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Blatchford, Mathew. "The old New Wave : a study of the 'New Wave' in British science fiction during the 1960s and early 1970s, with special reference to the works of Brian W. Aldiss, J.G. Ballard, Harry Harrison and Michael Moorcock". Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 1989. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/22150.
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Bibliography: pages 174-184.This thesis examines the 'New Wave' in British science fiction in the 1960s and early 1970s. The use of the terms 'science fiction' and 'New Wave' in the thesis are defined through a use of elements of the ideological theories of Louis Althusser. The New Wave is seen as a change in the ideological framework of the science fiction establishment. For oonvenience, the progress of the New Wave is divided into three stages, each covered by a chapter. Works by the four most prominent writers in the movement are discussed.
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Hall, Karen Peta. "Discovering the lost race story : writing science fiction, writing temporality". University of Western Australia. English and Cultural Studies Discipline Group, 2008. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2008.0216.
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Genres are constituted, implicitly and explicitly, through their construction of the past. Genres continually reconstitute themselves, as authors, producers and, most importantly, readers situate texts in relation to one another; each text implies a reader who will locate the text on a spectrum of previously developed generic characteristics. Though science fiction appears to be a genre concerned with the future, I argue that the persistent presence of lost race stories where the contemporary world and groups of people thought to exist only in the past intersect in science fiction demonstrates that the past is crucial in the operation of the genre. By tracing the origins and evolution of the lost race story from late nineteenth-century novels through the early twentieth-century American pulp science fiction magazines to novel-length narratives, and narrative series, at the end of the twentieth century, this thesis shows how the consistent presence, and varied uses, of lost race stories in science fiction complicates previous critical narratives of the history and definitions of science fiction.
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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/.
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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.
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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.
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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/.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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James, Sarah J. "Not without my body : feminist science fiction and embodied futures". Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/14613.
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This study explores the interaction between feminist science fiction and feminist theory, focusing on the body and embodiment. Specifically, it aims to demonstrate that feminist science fiction novels of the 1990s offer an excellent platform for exploring the critical theories of the body put forward by Judith Butler in particular, and other feminist/queer theorists in general. The thesis opens with a brief history of science fiction's depiction of the body and feminist science fiction's subversions and rewritings of this, as well as an overview of Judith Butler's theories relating to the body and embodiment. It then considers a wide range of feminist science fiction novels from the 1990s, focusing on four key areas; bodies materialised outside patriarchal systems in women-only or women-ruled worlds, alien bodies, cyborg bodies and bodies in cyberspace. An in-depth analysis of the selected texts reveals that they have important contributions to make to the consideration of bodies as they develop and expand the issues raised by theorists such as Butler, Elisabeth Grosz, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva.
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Kwan, Wing-ki Koren y 關詠琪. "Experiments in subjectivity: a study of postmodern science fiction". Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2005. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B3681250X.
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Zajac, Ronald J. (Ronald John). "The Dystopian city in British and US science fiction, 1960-1975 : urban chronotopes as models of historical closure". Thesis, McGill University, 1992. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=61046.
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In much dystopian SF, the city models a society which represses the protagonist's sense of historical time, replacing it with a sense of "private" time affecting isolated individuals. This phenomenon appears in dystopian SF novels of 1960-75--including Thomas M. Disch's 334, John Brunner's The Jagged Orbit, Philip K. Dick's Martian Time-Slip, J. G. Ballard's High-Rise, and Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren--as well as some precursors--including Wells, Zamyatin's We, Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. In these novels the cities also reveal in their chronotopic arrangement the degree to which revolutionary forces can oppose the dystopian order. While the earlier dystopias see revolution crushed by despotic state power, those of 1960-75 see it thwarted by the dehumanizing effects of capitalism. The period from 1960-75 ends in resignation to an existence in which individual action can no longer effect political change, at best tempered by irony (Disch, Delany).
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McFarlane, Anna M. "A gestalt approach to the science fiction novels of William Gibson". Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/6263.
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Gestalt psychologists Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler argue that human perception relies on a form, or gestalt, into which perceptions are assimilated. Gestalt theory has been applied to the visual arts by Rudolf Arnheim and to literature by Wolfgang Iser. My original contribution to knowledge is to use gestalt theory to perform literary criticism, an approach that highlights the importance of perception in William Gibson's novels and the impact of this emphasis on posthumanism and science fiction studies. Science fiction addresses the problem of difference and the relationship between self and other. Gestalt literary criticism takes perception as the interface between the self and the other, the human and the inhuman. Gibson's work is of particular interest as his early novels are representative of 1980s cyberpunk while his later novels push the boundaries of science fiction through their contemporary settings. By engaging with Gibson the thesis makes its contribution to contemporary science fiction criticism explicit. In Gibson's Sprawl trilogy autopoiesis defines life and consciousness, elevating the importance of perception (Chapter I). The Bridge trilogy uses the metaphor of chaos theory to examine dialectic tensions, such as the tension between space and cyberspace (Chapter II). Faulty pattern recognition is a key theme in Gibson's post-9/11 work as gestalt perception allows and limits knowledge (Chapter III). Chapter IV explains how the gestalt in psychoanalysis creates a fragmented subject in Spook Country (2007). Finally, the gestalt appears as a parallax view, a view that oscillates between the world we experience and the world as represented in the text (Chapter V). I conclude that gestalt literary criticism offers an exciting new reading of Gibson's work that recognises its engagement with visual culture and cyberpunk as a whole.
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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/.
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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.
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Winward, P. "Politics and postmodernism in the fiction of Russell Banks, Don DeLillo and Robert Stone : an enquiry into the attempt to write a radical fiction in the era of late capitalism". Phd thesis, Department of English, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/12322.
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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.
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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
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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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Slaughter, Carolyn Overton. "Language as disclosure in five modernist American works". Diss., The University of Arizona, 1987. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/184311.
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"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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Munoz, Cabrera Patricia. "Journeying: narratives of female empowerment in Gayl Jones's and Toni Morrison's ficton". Doctoral thesis, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/210259.
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This dissertation discusses Gayl Jones’s and Toni Morrison’s characterisation of black women’s journeying towards empowered subjectivity and agency. Through comparative analysis of eight fictional works, I explore the writers’ idea of female freedom and emancipation, the structures of power affecting the transition from oppressed towards liberated subject positions, and the literary techniques through which the authors facilitate these seminal trajectories.
My research addresses a corpus comprised of three novels and one book-long poem by Gayl Jones, as well as four novels by Toni Morrison. These two writers emerge in the US literary scene during the 1970s, one of the decades of the second black women’s renaissance (1970s, 1980s). This period witnessed unprecedented developments in US black literature and feminist theorising. In the domain of African American letters, it witnessed the emergence of a host of black women writers such as Gayl Jones and Toni Morrison. This period also marks a turning point in the reconfiguration of African American literature, as several unknown or misplaced literary works by pioneering black women writers were discovered, shifting the chronology of African American literature.
Moreover, the second black women's renaissance marks a paradigmatic development in black feminist theorising on womanhood and subjectivity. Many black feminist scholars and activists challenged what they perceived to be the homogenising female subject conceptualised by US white middle-class feminism and the androcentricity of the subject proclaimed by the Black Aesthetic Movement. They claimed that, in focusing solely on gender and patriarchal oppression, white feminism had overlooked the salience of the race/class nexus, while focus by the Black Aesthetic Movement on racism had overlooked the salience of gender and heterosexual discrimination.
In this dissertation, I discuss the works of Gayl Jones and Toni Morrison in the context of seminal debates on the nature of the female subject and the racial and gender politics affecting the construction of empowered subjectivities in black women's fiction.
Through the metaphor of journeying towards female empowerment, I show how Gayl Jones and Toni Morrison engage in imaginative returns to the past in an attempt to relocate black women as literary subjects of primary importance. I also show how, in the works selected for discussion, a complex idea of modern female subjectivities emerges from the writers' re-examination of the oppressive material and psychological circumstances under which pioneering black women lived, the common practice of sexual exploitation with which they had to contend, and the struggle to assert the dignity of their womanhood beyond the parameters of the white-defined “ideological discourse of true womanhood” (Carby, 1987: 25).
Doctorat en philosophie et lettres, Orientation langue et littérature
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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/.
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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
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McGinney, William Lawrence. "The Sounds of the Dystopian Future: Music for Science Fiction Films of the New Hollywood Era, 1966-1976". Thesis, connect to online resource, 2009. http://digital.library.unt.edu/permalink/meta-dc-9839.
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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/.
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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.
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Wright, Edward. "The American mythic network :a comparative exploration into mythological and ideological perspectives on American culture and the operation of literature within it". Thesis, The University of Sydney, 1999. https://hdl.handle.net/2123/27759.
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Steenkamp, Elzette Lorna. "Identity, belonging and ecological crisis in South African speculative fiction". Thesis, Rhodes University, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002262.
Texto completoResumen
This study examines a range of South African speculative novels which situate their narratives in futuristic or ‘alternative’ milieus, exploring how these narratives not only address identity formation in a deeply divided and rapidly changing society, but also the ways in which human beings place themselves in relation to Nature and form notions of ‘ecological’ belonging. It offers close readings of these speculative narratives in order to investigate the ways in which they evince concerns which are rooted in the natural, social and political landscapes which inform them. Specific attention is paid to the texts’ treatment of the intertwined issues of identity, belonging and ecological crisis. This dissertation draws on the fields of Ecocriticism, Postcolonial Studies and Science Fiction Studies, and assumes a culturally specific approach to primary texts while investigating possible cross-cultural commonalities between Afrikaans and English speculative narratives, as well as the cross-fertilisation of global SF/speculative features. It is suggested that South African speculative fiction presents a socio-historically situated, rhizomatic approach to ecology – one that is attuned to the tension between humanistic- and ecological concerns.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Cortes, Caballero Jose Arturo. "Mexico en la obra de Gustavo Sainz". Diss., The University of Arizona, 1994. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/186801.
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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.