Tesi sul tema "Latin fiction – 21st century"
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1
Guzman-Medrano, Gael. "Post-Revolutionary Post-Modernism: Central American Detective Fiction by the Turn of the 21st Century". FIU Digital Commons, 2013. http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/917.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
Contemporary Central American fiction has become a vital project of revision of the tragic events and the social conditions in the recent history of the countries from which they emerge. The literary projects of Sergio Ramirez (Nicaragua), Dante Liano (Guatemala), Horacio Castellanos Moya (El Salvador), and Ramon Fonseca Mora (Panama), are representative of the latest trends in Central American narrative. These trends conform to a new literary paradigm that consists of an amalgam of styles and discourses, which combine the testimonial, the historical, and the political with the mystery and suspense of noir thrillers. Contemporary Central American noir narrative depicts the persistent war against social injustice, violence, criminal activities, as well as the new technological advances and economic challenges of the post-war neo-liberal order that still prevails throughout the region.
Drawing on postmodernism theory proposed by Ihab Hassan, Linda Hutcheon and Brian MacHale, I argued that the new Central American literary paradigm exemplified by Sergio Ramirez’s El cielo llora por mí, Dante Liano’s El hombre de Montserrat, Horacio Castellanos Moya’s El arma en el hombre and La diabla en el espejo, and Ramon Fonseca Mora’s El desenterrador, are highly structured novels that display the characteristic marks of postmodern cultural expression through their ambivalence, which results from the coexistence of multiple styles and conflicting ideologies and narrative trends. The novels analyzed in this dissertation make use of a noir sensitivity in which corruption, decay and disillusionment are at their core to portray the events that shaped the modern history of the countries from which they emerge. The revolutionary armed struggle, the state of terror imposed by military regimes and the fight against drug trafficking and organized crime, are among the major themes of these contemporary works of fiction, which I have categorized as perfect examples of the post-revolutionary post-modernism Central American detective fiction at the turn of the 21st century.
2
Popper, Rafael. "21st century foresight". Thesis, University of Manchester, 2011. http://www.manchester.ac.uk/escholar/uk-ac-man-scw:151961.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
21st Century Foresight offers a comprehensive study of ‘foresight’ as an instrument of policy. It covers the development of foresight methodology, the design of foresight activities and their evaluation. The thesis is based on eleven publications collectively making significant contributions to knowledge about global foresight practices and applications in different domains (i.e. research areas and socio-economic sectors). New conceptual frameworks developed include the Foresight Diamond, the SMART Futures Jigsaw and the Methods Combination Matrix (MCM), which can be used as tools for futures research, practical work in the design and management of forward-looking activities and knowledge transfer on foresight. The thesis shows both generalised and specific contributions to knowledge. The former is best demonstrated with the development of a “fully-fledged evaluation” framework with twenty criteria, the identification of critical factors influencing the selection of foresight methods (e.g. geo-R&D context) and the use of network analysis techniques in foresight. The latter is prominent throughout the thesis with examples including the results of particular evaluations and the profiles of foresight practices in Europe and Latin America. A prevailing theme is the use of mapping and benchmarking approaches to evaluate foresight practices and reveal a more detailed understanding of the impacts of foresight in science, technology and innovation systems. The theoretical contributions (e.g. using exploratory research and catastrophe theory) are complemented with a set of practical instruments providing methodological basis and guidelines for increasing the efficiency and outcome of foresight and horizon scanning activities. Overall, the thesis demonstrates original contributions to five distinct yet interconnected areas of knowledge: foresight methodology; foresight practices in Europe and the world; foresight in Latin America; foresight evaluation; and the evaluation of national technology foresight programmes. The various approaches used to frame the morphology of foresight – supported with evidence, comparisons and evaluations – are the main contributions to knowledge.
3
Coto-Rivel, Sergio. "Le roman centre-américain contemporain : fictions de l'intime et nouvelles subjectivités". Thesis, Bordeaux 3, 2014. http://www.theses.fr/2014BOR30031/document.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
L’Amérique centrale s’est trouvée au centre de l’attention médiatique pendant les années 80 à cause de l’embrasement produit par les conflits armés et du fait de l’intérêt pour les témoignages liés aux revendications politiques. Le temps est venu de s’interroger aujourd’hui sur les voies empruntées par la littérature centre-américaine une vingtaine d’années après la signature des traités de paix. Cette question se trouve à l’origine de la présente étude : nous essayons de comprendre de quelle manière le roman contemporain s’intéresse à la construction des nouvelles subjectivités, quelles sont les nouvelles modalités de représentation propres à la fiction. La littérature centre-américaine contemporaine se présente de manière générale comme un domaine d’une grande diversité ; nous pouvons y lire une remise en question des contradictions, des luttes sociales et des discours dominants des sociétés de l’Isthme. Ces questionnements sont, à notre avis, reliés au texte littéraire du fait de la position privilégiée accordée à la subjectivité. Celle-ci a différentes manières de définir l’individu contemporain afin de renvoyer au lecteur toute une série d’énoncés tantôt intimistes, tantôt politiques et transgresseurs, qui montrent une crise dans la représentation des identités aussi bien personnelles que nationales. Jusqu’à quel point pouvons-nous considérer que la littérature centre-américaine contemporaine présente un renouvellement concernant les positions des sujets représentés dans les romans ? De quelle manière ces changements interagissent-ils dans une région conflictuelle, une région qui peine encore à définir sa propre identité ? Nous nous efforçons dans la thèse d’approfondir l’analyse des positions subjectives et des procédés littéraires ainsi que la démarche philosophique permettant la construction de nouveaux sujets-personnages dans un corpus constitué de romans publiés entre 1998 et 2009 par les écrivains suivants : Horacio Castellanos Moya, José Ricardo Chaves, Maurice Echeverría, Jacinta Escudos, Mauricio Orellana Suárez, Milagros Palma, Roberto Quesada et Uriel Quesada. Nous nous intéressons de manière particulière aux procédés narratifs mettant en rapport l’intimité et la subjectivité, avec la représentation des espaces corporels dessinés dans les romans, ainsi que les espaces géographiques et les lieux de la violence. Ces éléments vont dévoiler de nouveaux engagements et de nouveaux discours à un moment qui paraît dominé par la subjectivitéCentral America attracted greatly the media attention during the 1980s because of the armed conflicts and the increasing interest in testimonies linked to the political vindications. Now is the time to question the paths taken by Central American literature twenty years after the peace agreements were signed in the region. This question is found at the beginning of the present study on which we try to comprehend in what way the contemporary novel is interested in the construction of new subjectivities and in new means of representation specific to fiction. Contemporary Central American literature presents itself generally as a space of great diversity. We can read in it an important questioning of the contradictions, of the social struggles, and of the dominant discourses of isthmian societies. These questionings are, in our opinion, articulated on the literary text thanks to the privileged position given to subjectivity. It uses different ways to define the contemporary subject with the purpose of confronting the reader to a series of statements, intimist as well as political and transgressive, which express a crisis on the representation of national and personal identities. How far can we consider that contemporary Central American literature shows an important displacement related to the positions of the subjects represented in the novels? In what way said displacements interact in a conflictive region, a region which still has difficulties to define its own identity? On this thesis we make an effort to delve in the analysis of the subjective positions and in the literary and philosophical strategies which allow the construction of new subject-characters, in a corpus constituted of novels published between 1998 and 2009 by the following writers: Horacio Castellanos Moya, José Ricardo Chaves, Maurice Echeverría, Jacinta Escudos, Mauricio Orellana Suárez, Milagros Palma, Roberto Quesada, and Uriel Quesada. We are particularly interested in the narrative processes which relate intimacy and subjectivity with the representation of corporal spaces in the novels, as well as the geographical spaces and violence spaces. These elements will demonstrate new commitments and new discourses in a time that seems dominated by subjectivity
4
Allen, Claire. "Beyond postmodernism : London fiction at the millenium". Thesis, University of Northampton, 2010. http://nectar.northampton.ac.uk/8845/.
Testo completo
5
Leiva, Diego. "Latin American Engagement Strategies towards China in the 21st Century". Thesis, Griffith University, 2020. http://hdl.handle.net/10072/398090.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
Despite a common regional pattern of economic engagement between Latin America and China, consisting of exports of Latin American natural and energy resources and imports of Chinese manufactures, significant variations can be identified between the engagement strategies of Latin American states towards China between 2001 and 2016. To date, no major research efforts have been made to demonstrate and explain these variations by scholars of international relations (IR). This thesis aims to fill this gap building on the literature that explores the economic exchanges between China and the region. The research question that guides this thesis is: Why have Latin American countries developed significantly different engagement strategies for managing their relations with China between 2001 and 2016? To explain the varied strategies, I propose and test a neoclassical realist model, labelled “National Power and Perception” model, which incorporates two Independent Variables: a) Latin American countries’ position in the regional structure of power (systemic variable); and b) Latin American presidents’ perceptions of the US-led liberal order (domestic intervening variable). I develop a small-N comparative study with four cases, one typical case for each proposed type of engagement strategy (Mexico under Vicente Fox, Brazil under Lula da Silva, Chile under Ricardo Lagos, and Venezuela under Hugo Chávez). The findings suggest that the general hypothesis and the four specific hypotheses are confirmed. The interplay of both IVs explains the significant variation in the four types of Latin American engagement strategies towards China analysed in this thesis.Thesis (PhD Doctorate)
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
School of Govt & Int Relations
Griffith Business School
Full Text
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Akhtar, Jaleel. "Dismemberment in the fiction of Toni Morrison". Thesis, University of Sussex, 2015. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/53849/.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
Dismemberment in the Fiction of Toni Morrison investigates the motif of dismemberment in Morrison's fiction from multiple perspectives—historical, psychological and cultural. My first chapter on A Mercy focusses on the aspect of historical dismemberment in the context of colonialism and slavery. I look at the forced separation of African Americans from their families and motherland in terms of originary experiences of racism and dismemberment. This entailed fragmentation for African Americans who struggled to develop strategies of survival in the New World. My second chapter on Jazz focuses on the impact of transgenerationally transmitted trauma. I argue that experiences of dismemberment – such as feelings of amputation and phantom limbs – arise not from physical amputation but from traumatic experiences and the unconscious of preceding generations as the result of trasgenerational hauntings. I borrow from the psychoanalytic insights of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok in my explanation of phantom limbs in Jazz. The third section of my project looks at how social order is brought about in the fictive community of Sula through the scapegoating mechanism. I define the scapegoating principle in Sula in terms of cultural dismemberment because of the ways the community members symbolically cut a pariah figure, like Sula, off by performing symbolic acts of violence. The characterization of Sula emphasizes the psychological need for a scapegoat figure who can give an outlet to the defensive tendencies of the community following discrimination. My final chapter focusses on Morrison's most recent novel Home, which is about homecoming. In this novel, Morrison continues with her project of imagining a space of domestic and social comfort which is physically and psychically safe in the broad sense of a homeland for African Americans. Home offers a place of salvation from social, historical and psychic fragmentation or the traumas of racism which result in experiences of disruption, amputation and dismemberment.
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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/.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
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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Raulerson, Joshua Thomas. "Singularities: technoculture, transhumanism, and science fiction in the 21st Century". Diss., University of Iowa, 2010. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/2968.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
A spectre is haunting contemporary technoculture: the spectre of Singularity. Ten years into a century thus far characterized chiefly by the catastrophic failure of global economic and political systems, deepening ecological anxieties, and slow-motion social crisis, the only sector of our collective cultural myth of Progress still vibrantly intact is the technological - a project which, in vivid contrast to the systemic failure that seemingly prevails at nearly every other level, continues to charge forward at breakneck speed. Since the late twentieth century, prompted by the all-but-exponential growth of machine intelligence and global information networks, and by the still largely obscure but increasingly profound-seeming implications of emerging nanotechnology, futurists and fabulists alike have postulated an imminent historical threshold whereupon the nature of human existence will be radically and irrevocably transformed in a sudden explosion of technological development. This moment of transcendence, it is supposed, is at most only a few years off; indeed, some say, it may have already begun. The "Singularity" - a term coined in 1986 by the mathematician and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, and subsequently adopted throughout technocultural discourse - is at present the primary site of interpenetration between technoscientific and science-fictional figurations of the future, an area in which the longstanding binary distinctions between science and SF, and between present and future, are rapidly dissolving. As much as the Singularity thesis implies a total reorganization of society and of the self - which posthumanist cultural studies and cyborg theory have already begun mapping - it also poses a daunting existential challenge to the enterprise of SF itself, to the extent that the Singularity imposes what Vinge has described as "an opaque wall across the future," an impenetrable cognitive obstacle beyond which the extrapolative imagination cannot glimpse. For a genre long defined by its efforts to assert, through the narrative technique of extrapolation, a meaningful continuity between present and future, the Singularity presents a thorny problem indeed, demanding both a reevaluation of SF's conception of and orientation toward the future, and a new narrative model capable of grappling with the alien and often paradoxical complexity of the postsingular.
This study is an inquiry into the properties and problematics of Singularity across fictional and nonfictional discourses, and as such it operates on two levels. Reading Singularitarian literature against a broadly articulated context of fringe-science and transhumanist movements, consumer culture, political and economic theory, and related areas of contemporary cyber- and technoculture, I examine how the metaphor of Singularity structures and signifies the aspirations and anxieties of late-twentieth and early twenty-first century technocivilization. As a project of literary criticism specifically, the study works to identify and theorize a grouping of texts that is emerging from cyberpunk and postcyberpunk tendencies in contemporary SF, organized around the premises of Singularity and the posthuman, and classifiable primarily in terms of an attempt to mount a response to the formal and conceptual problems Vinge has identified. Primary readings are drawn from a wide-ranging selection of twentieth- and twenty-first-century technocultural fiction, with emphasis on SF works by Charles Stross, Cory Doctorow, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker, and William Gibson.
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Ya, Li. "La muerte en literatura contemporánea mexicana en comparación con el pensamiento oriental". Doctoral thesis, Universitat de Barcelona, 2021. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/671143.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
Esta tesis doctoral aspira a analizar la muerte en la narrativa mexicana contemporánea con un especial enfoque en el estudio paralelo de los pensamientos mexicanos y orientales; más específicamente, los chinos. Con el objetivo de desentrañar la esencia de la muerte presentada en las narrativas, haremos, primero, algunas observaciones sobre la función de los mitos de la muerte y el paisaje en las comunidades indígenas y las antiguas comunidades chinas. Mediante la exploración del acervo cultural del pasado y el seguimiento del desarrollo histórico de la perspectiva de la muerte en las dos culturales, procuramos comprender cierta conducta histórica del pueblo y la naturaleza de las costumbres y del espíritu público. Partiendo de esta base, estudiaremos las variadas connotaciones de la muerte y sus coloridos aspectos sensoriales en el panorama literaria, poniendo especial atención en escritores contemporáneos como Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, Fernando del Paso y algunos vanguardistas chinos. Con la lectura paralela de las novelas mexicanas y chinas en la elaboración del tema de la muerte, intentamos describir las similitudes y destacar sus peculiaridades; de este modo nos adentraremos en la conformación de sus identidades étnicas y nacionales, daremos coherencia al legado tradicional del país, reflexionaremos sobre cómo las ideas de la muerte cimbran dicho edificio y dibujaremos de manera más o menos fidedigna el rostro que caracteriza esta era y que supone la entrada al futuro.This doctoral thesis aims to analyze death in contemporary Mexican narratives with a special focus on the parallel study of Mexican and oriental thoughts; more specifically, the Chinese thoughts. In order to unravel the essence of death presented in the narratives, first, we will make observations on the role of the myths of death and the landscape of indigenous and ancient Chinese communities. By exploring the cultural heritage of the past and monitoring the historical development of the perspective of death in the two cultures, we seek to clarify certain historical behaviors of the people and the nature of customs and public spirit. From this basis, we will study the various connotations of death and its colorful sensory aspects in the literary scene, with particular reference to contemporary writers such as Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, Fernando del Paso and some Chinese avant-garde writers. Through the parallel study of the Mexican and Chinese novels about their elaboration of the theme of death, we try to describe the similarities and highlight their peculiarities; in this way we will delve into the conformation of their ethnic and national identities, give coherence to the traditional legacy of the country, reflect on how the ideas of death shape its building and draw more or less faithfully the face that can characterize this era and represent the entrance to the future.
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Crotty, Tammy J. "Left of mainstream : genre fiction and its ability to transcend formula". Virtual Press, 2005. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1313073.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
This collection of short stories studies the elements of genre fiction and applies them to literary fiction. Science fiction, fantasy, and horror have specific manners in which they speak to an audience. By using these elements, for example the desensitization of the current generation of readers to most horrors, an author can demonstrate the core of the human relationship to pain, faith, or hope. Though some genre fiction seems to fit certain formulas, there are also horror or science fiction stories which do not fit a conventional mold. This collection sets forth to break away from genre fiction conventions. Also, this project utilizes the genre of magical realism, which is the medium between genre fiction and literary fiction, by using fantastic events within a mundane setting to emphasize the author's ideas. By bridging the gap between genres, magical realism reveals how interrelated the elements of all genres are. In this study stories use magical and horrifying events while maintaining an intention beyond the formulaic thrill. Therefore, genre fiction can have a place amongst literature.Department of English
11
Halliday, Sophie. "Representations of gender and subjectivity in 21st century American science fiction television". Thesis, University of East Anglia, 2014. https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/51483/.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
This thesis interrogates representations of gender and subjectivity within 21st century American science fiction television. It recognises a recent convergence of generic concerns, the shifting contexts of television, and the cultural context of 21st century America. Identifying a recent shift in how American science fiction television of this era has engaged with issues of gender and subjectivity, I offer an exploration of this trend via four key texts: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (FOX, 2008-2009), Fringe (FOX, 2008-2013), Battlestar Galactica (SyFy, 2004-2009) and Caprica (SyFy, 2009-2010). The importance of this thesis lies in its exploration of new representational strategies in contemporary science fiction television in relation to the female body, and its consideration of the wider socio-cultural concerns of America in the 21st century. Previous attempts have been made to examine the socio-political import of certain series this thesis interrogates. I intervene in these debates by offering a much more focused interrogation of gender and subjectivity in 21st century science fiction television, via the framework of acclaimed and newly emerging series. Utilising a methodological approach that involves detailed textual analysis informed by social and cultural theory, I situate my case study series within the socio-cultural context of 21st century America. As such, this thesis covers a broad range of current representations that speak to how constructions of gender and subjectivity within a contemporary US cultural context are currently being worked through. Foregrounding an engagement with a particularly fraught period of American history via the female body, I argue that the protagonists my case study series present offer a positive intervention in previous estimations of how the female body has been utilised in film and television. As such, this thesis considers the implications of this particular context upon how these protagonists are represented by these newly emerging series.
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Hayes, Jacqueline. "Fighting for Protections| Challenging the 21st Century Sweatshop in New York State". Thesis, State University of New York at Albany, 2017. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10682549.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
This dissertation examines how neoliberalism and immigration enforcement between 1980 and 2010 changed the nature of ‘sweated’ work in the U.S. This dissertation focuses on the particular case of Latino undocumented workers in New York State and the organizations fighting to win them protections. In order to answer my research questions, I conducted 30 semi-structured interviews over the course of 2 years (2013–2015), examined immigration enforcement data, and analyzed U.S. immigration and welfare policies between 1980 and the present. Research interviews made clear that both the lack of social and legal protections alongside the threat of immigration enforcement have a definitive impact on working conditions in low-wage sectors. Staff and volunteers from worker justice centers and immigration rights organizations also emphasized the fact that some of the old protections that were hard fought and won by prior generations of labor activists are ill-suited to address the needs of low-wage, non-citizen workers who face a number of new challenges. By focusing on undocumented Latino workers and worker centers in New York State this dissertation shifts the conceptual lens from a particular ‘worksite’ to the forces—historical, legal, and social—which make sweating possible once an individual enters a workplace. This dissertation contends that the specters of wagelessness and deportation collaborate to ensure the flexibility of undocumented labor and that these are the distinctive features of the contemporary U.S. sweatshop.
13
Smith, Olga. "Between reality and fiction : the art of French photography since the 1970s". Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.610275.
Testo completo
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Royters, Nathan Miller. "Ghosts Amid the Gears: Neoliberal Subjectivity in 21st Century Chinese and American Fiction". Thesis, The University of Sydney, 2022. https://hdl.handle.net/2123/28053.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
This thesis investigates patterns of contemporary Chinese and American fiction reflecting and refracting neoliberal subjectivity. This essay adopts David Foster Wallace’s disapproving motif of ‘gears’ as an organising metaphor for neoliberal reductions of subjectivity, forcing eruption of potentialities as literal and figurative ‘ghosts’ seeking escape from diegetic worlds. The Cartesian dichotomy (ghosts/gears), derived from British philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s notion of the “ghost in the machine,” is balanced in strangely consistent yet contrasting ways by all characters who synthesise entrepreneurialism with spirituality, communalism, ecology, and ethnicity. American Wallace’s The Pale King reveals a gentle, spiritual rebellion against neoliberal hegemony wherein characters protest the existential paucity of bureaucratic labour, instead seeking monastic, hedonistic transcendence. In Paul Beatty’s The Sellout impoverished African-Americans are estranged from racially-striated, capitalist ‘machinery,’ pioneering liminal neo-economic spaces and rejuvenating industry through a radical return to ‘magical’ ethno-subjectivity. The Chinese novels display both cosmopolitan and rural capitalism, sounding alarmist timbres in tracing work’s transnational, technological, ecological and eschatological dangers. In Chen Qiufan’s The Waste Tide, capitalist overdeterminations augment worker flesh and selfhood, disrupting feng shui and precipitating cataclysm. Likewise, Yan Lianke’s The Day the Sun Died shows mercantilism as antagonistic to spiritual-temporal ontologies. The comparative study reveals American admonitions of neoliberalism as parochial, compared with panoramic, macrocosmic concerns in Chinese fictive violence, cognisant of globalisation. Despite continental distance, all texts imagine spectral, subjective potentiality in pneumatic tension with neoliberal demands. These trans-Pacific, bi-national texts resist economic totalitarianism, imagining alternative ontologies.
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Bakker, Barbara. "Arabic dystopias in the 21st century : A study on 21st century Arabic dystopian fiction through the analysis of four works of Arabic dystopian narrative". Thesis, Högskolan Dalarna, Arabiska, 2018. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:du-27968.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
Dystopian fiction as intended in the Western literary tradition is a 20 th century phenomenon on the Arabic literary scene. This relatively new genre has been experiencing an uplift since the beginning of the 21st century and many works that have been defined dystopias have been published and translated into English in the last 10 – 15 years. In order to find out their main features, Claeys’s categorization of literary dystopias is applied and a thematic analysis is carried out on four Arabic dystopian works of narrative, written by authors from different parts of the Arabic world. The analysis shows that 21st century Arabic dystopias are political dystopias, with totalitarianism as their main variation. Rather than on society, their focus is on the individual, and more specifically on personal freedom. The totalitarian constraints are mainly caused by religious fundamentalism and bureaucratic procedures. Surveillance and control over population are implemented by means of religious precepts and bureaucratic constructions, together with, in some instances, control over language and technological devices. Political totalitarianism regardless of a specific political ideology is identified as main theme. The thesis suggests that a Western-based classification framework is only partially suitable for Arabic dystopian fiction of the 21st century and that further research, including but not limited to a specific classification theory for Arabic dystopian fiction, is necessary to properly investigate this new literary trend in Arabic literature.
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McMillan, Rebecca J. "Building “21st Century Sewer Socialism”: Sanitation and Venezuela’s Technical Water Committees". Thèse, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/26255.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
This thesis assesses the potential of Venezuela’s technical water committees (mesas técnicas de agua, MTAs) to address governance and logistical challenges for improving sanitation in the barrios (low income settlements) of Caracas. The MTAs are a radical experiment in urban planning whereby beneficiary communities map their own water and sanitation needs and help to plan infrastructure development, which is financed by the state. In addition to improving services, the MTAs aim to promote “popular” or “citizen power” as part of a broader political transformation, the Bolivarian Process (1999-present). Based on Hickey and Mohan’s (2005) four criteria for “transformative participation,” the paper argues that the MTAs have opened spaces for citizen empowerment and improved services in the barrios; however, participation at the local scale cannot resolve many of the challenges for improving sanitation such as institutional overlap and the financing gap, especially given that sanitation is the least profitable form of service provision in terms of economic and political payoffs.
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Bakker, Barbara. "Arabic dystopias in the 21st century : A study on 21st century Arabic dystopian fictionthrough the analysis of four works of Arabic dystopian narrative". Thesis, Högskolan Dalarna, Arabiska, 2018. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:du-28495.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
Dystopian fiction as intended in the Western literary tradition is a 20 th century phenomenon on the Arabic literary scene. This relatively new genre has been experiencing an uplift since the beginning of the 21 st century and many works that have been defined dystopias have been published and translated into English in the last 10 – 15 years. In order to find out their main features, Claeys’s categorization of literary dystopias is applied and a thematic analysis is carried out on four Arabic dystopian works of narrative, written by authors from different parts of the Arabic world. The analysis shows that 21 st century Arabic dystopias are political dystopias, with totalitarianism as their main variation. Rather than on society, their focus is on the individual, and more specifically on personal freedom. The totalitarian constraints are mainly caused by religious fundamentalism and bureaucratic procedures. Surveillance and control over population are implemented by means of religious precepts and bureaucratic constructions, together with, in some instances, control over language and technological devices. Political totalitarianism regardless of a specific political ideology is identified as main theme. The thesis suggests that a Western-based classification framework is only partially suitable for Arabic dystopian fiction of the 21 st century and that further research, including but not limited to a specific classification theory for Arabic dystopian fiction, is necessary to properly investigate this new literary trend in Arabic literature.
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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.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
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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Gill, Josephine Ceri. "Race, genetics and British fiction since the Human Genome Project". Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.610822.
Testo completo
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Majola, Fundile Lawrence. "Good-Gooder-Goodest". Thesis, Rhodes University, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1015657.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
My stories are set in the townships, and move with the vigorous rhythms and jagged structures of township life. Some of them are written in English and others in isiXhosa. Some of the dialogue is township slang, a mixture of languages; and pure isiXhosa. The stories follow no particular pattern and are arranged according to any form of chronology, and different voices, at times as a man/boy and in others as a girl. The characters are not related each story perfectly stands for itself. Some of the stories hark back to the days of apartheid and are seen through the eyes of a child confused by the humiliations of his elders.Amabali am asekelwe ezilokishini yaye ahambelana neemeko ezimaxongo zokuphila zasezilokishini apho yaye amanye asukela kwixesha lengcinezelo yesizwe esimnyama. Imiba echatshazelwa kula mabali iquka intlupheko, intiyo kwakunye nokuphilisana koluntu ezilokishini, phantsi kwezo meko. Amabali la ndizame ukuwenza alandele indlela yokubalisa yhenkwenkwana enguSkhumba, ethi ibone iqwalasele iimeko zokuphila zabantu bohlanga lwayo. Ingqokelela esisiqendu sokuqala yona ibhalwe ze yangeniswa ngesiNgesi.
This thesis is presented in two parts: English and isiXhosa.
21
Graham, Felicia Christine. "Extracting the Truth| How Coexisting with the Black Gold Reshapes Lives and Livelihoods in 21st Century Colombia". Thesis, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2015. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=1603377.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
There have been many pitfalls resultant from our current civilization’s dependence on oil and gas, though none has been more ignored than the impacts of hydrocarbon production on our fellow human beings. This thesis has three primary aims: (1) to make clear the theoretical frameworks that have led these human impacts to be ignored, including Resource Curse Theory, and to propose Political Ecology as a new framework for understanding the challenges that resource extraction levies on individuals and communities; (2) to detail, document, and highlight the widespread, complex, and generative impacts that resource extraction itself produces in order to begin seeking real solutions; and (3) to bring to the fore the struggles of the Colombian people in relation to hydrocarbon production and resource extraction. As shall be seen, Colombia is a unique though entirely ignored case study of rapidly expanding hydrocarbon production. While thought to be a ‘success’ in the eyes of many, this thesis shows the true nature of oil and gas production by focusing in on the deep structural changes that the southern community of Puerto Gaitan has endured since the arrival of Canadian oil company Pacific Rubiales, and explaining how these deeper problems are reproduced in other extractive areas across Latin America and the world.
22
Rave, Maria Eugenia B. "Magical Realism and Latin America". Fogler Library, University of Maine, 2003. http://www.library.umaine.edu/theses/pdf/RaveMEB2003.pdf.
Testo completo
23
Dougherty, Mary Ann. "Betrayal : Short Stories". PDXScholar, 2015. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/2233.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
This collection of short stories, titled Betrayal, is my thesis project to meet the requirements for a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing/Fiction. In each story, of course, there is betrayal, of sister, daughter, wife, husband or lover. The settings of the stories are various, the Midwest, the Great Lakes, the Allegheny Mountains and Louisiana bayou country. Northeastern Ohio and Lake Erie, especially, have informed description and metaphor in the stories, and their atmosphere is influenced by Gothic literature.
24
Carvalho, Alyssa May. "The novel as cultural and historical archive: an examination of Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat (2006)". Thesis, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10948/1224.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
This research engages with a contemporary theoretical debate in the literary field, namely the ability of fictional texts to contribute to archival records. Contemporary research in archival discourse suggests that there are many intersections between fiction and the archive. Using Hamilton and others’ seminal text Refiguring the Archive (2002) and Pasco’s “Literature as Historical Archive” (2004) as point of departure, this dissertation offers an analysis of the South African English translation of Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat (2004, translated 2006). In both form and function, the novel is viewed as a simulation of an archive. In Agaat, Van Niekerk has compiled a fictional archive of two indigenous South African cultures through her portrayal of the two main characters: Afrikaner culture during apartheid as embedded in the focalization of Milla de Wet and remnants of Khoi and/or San culture as emerge from the fictionalised subjectivity of her coloured housekeeper-nurse, Agaat. Through a conceptual and theoretical exploration of archival discourse, I argue that literary texts, such as Van Niekerk’s novel, have the potential to refigure (or creatively redefine) the archive and to enhance its scope and relevance, especially as South Africa undergoes transformation.
25
Zaharchenko, Tanya. "Where the currents meet : frontiers of memory in the post-Soviet fiction of East Ukraine". Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.708117.
Testo completo
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Mahlangu, Songeziwe. "Penumbra". Thesis, Rhodes University, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1015207.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
After failing his Post Graduate Diploma in Accounting Mangaliso Zolo takes an office job at a large insurance company in Cape Town. Anonymous and overlooked in a vast bureaucracy but with a pay check promising happiness and security, he slides into a series of personal crises that test his grip on what he believes in. When at his lowest ebb he leaves his job, grabs his bible and hits the streets his world closes in on him and he is eventually confined to a psychiatric hospital. Penumbra is a novel that explores the liminal area between faith and avarice, sanity and madness, modernity and tradition, friendship and enmity. It is set in contemporary South Africa, a society defined by alienation and excess.
27
Musavengana, Shelter K. "Before before & after after". Thesis, Rhodes University, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1017775.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
The stories in this collection explore the fantastical, the power of memory, and the human capacity to love. Moving between the surreal, the absurd, the allegorical, and the metafictional, they elaborate on life's ordinary madness and the mysteries of the spirit. By challenging the either/or boundaries of the binary of realism and fantasy, the stories provoke the reader to engage actively with the text. Influenced by experimental US author Stacey Levine, the mid‐century British novelist Barbara Comyns, and the adventurous Chinese writer Can Xue, in most cases, they create a playful, experimental world that exists at a slight angle to the world as we know it.
28
Masters, Benjamin Scott. "The ethics of excess : style and morality in British fiction since the 1960s". Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.648740.
Testo completo
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Shishkin, Timur. "Marginalized Characters in Contemporary American Short Fiction". PDXScholar, 2011. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/297.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
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.
30
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.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
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.
31
Amrhein, Saundra Marie. "Cuba's Chords of Change: Music, Race, Class & Motherhood at the turn of the 21st Century". Scholar Commons, 2013. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/4277.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
This thesis is an ethnography and biographical study that examines the impact of the immense socioeconomic changes underway in Cuba at the turn of the 21st century and the flexible identity categories through which individuals navigate a social crisis.
The biography and ethnography in this thesis are centered on the life of Violeta Aldama, an aging revolutionary and Afro-Cuban mother who struggles to make ends meet while fighting to steer her son, Brian, through a classical music education and into a music career. Amid growing racial inequalities when many Afro-Cubans are locked out of the most lucrative jobs in the new tourism sector and less likely to have family abroad sending remittances, the booming dance music industry offers the greatest promise for advancement and wealth than possibly any other profession. With the retraction of the state in a growing market economy, Violeta must scramble to build new networks of support while also coming to terms with the idea that the system she fought for all of her life will no longer be able to sustain her son.
This study argues that individuals navigate through social crises through identity categories that are both socially constructed and subjectively fluid. In the process, they rely on these identity categories to build new contacts for support while also finding in them meaning and agency. I frame this thesis around three broad identity categories - race, class and national identity. The study also shows how Violeta in turn experienced these categories - as well as motherhood and her revolutionary roles - and the ways that she used them to build networks of support.
The thesis is guided by the theory on lo informal developed by scholar Damián Fernández: the split in individuals between ideals and passionate beliefs versus life on the black market to help loved ones survive.
The study's methodology draws from feminist ethnography, examining not only Violeta's position in society as an Afro-Cuban woman and aging revolutionary, but also my relationship with her and her son as a white, middle-class American researcher during a time when relationships with foreigners became a crucial means of social advancement.
This research bridges academic areas of study regarding Cuba's growing racial inequalities and the rising economic power of the music industry. It also contributes to the academic canon on social movements by highlighting roles of individuals - not just the state or opposition alliances - as social actors.
32
Kuit, Henali. "Dear space dad and other stories". Thesis, Rhodes University, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1017774.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
My stories are set around the themes of family, animals and outer space -- which leads to other themes like religion, loneliness, romance, eating animals, growing up and longing for the past. Most of the stories have non-linear structures. Some use gradual shiftings of narrator voice; in others the narrative is flat, lacking plot. I favour repetition over plot-based climaxes to create coherency and narrative flow. I also favour free indirect discourse over dialogue or description as a means to characterize.
33
Cartwright, Robert Oliver. "Third crime unlucky". Thesis, Rhodes University, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1015729.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
This is a contemporary mystery novel set in the Eastern Cape. A town’s airstrip, situated between the golf club and the military base, acts as host to the local flying club and an active skydiving school. An amateur investigator uses unorthodox methods and the help of friends to find the cause of aeroplane fires and sabotage. His investigations lead him via geological research and insurance reports into contact with members of the aviation, property development and military fields.
34
Soria, Luján Daniel. "21st Century illiberal democracies in Latin America and the Inter-American Democratic Charter: Two models of democracy in the region?" Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2015. http://repositorio.pucp.edu.pe/index/handle/123456789/115347.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
The Inter-American Democratic Charter (IDC) was adopted in 2001 by member states of the Organization of American States (OAS) as a renewed instrument for the defense of democracy, not only against traditional coup d´etat but also to face serious violations to horizontal accountability. The second assumption took into consideration, as a precedent, the political situation in Peru during Alberto Fujimori's administration (1995-2000), defined as a competitive authoritarian regime by Political Science and Constitutional Law scholars. However, during the last decade to the presentwe find in Latin America several countries with governments where the principle of checks and balances has been eroded as a result of measures adopted by their respective executive branch. This situation suggests the following concerns: The liberal democratic model of the IDC is in crisis? This model has been overcame by illiberal governments that privileges economic and social rights and restraints civil and political rights? Or both models a recondemned to coexist in the region?La Carta Democrática Interamericana (CDI) fue adoptada en el año 2001 por los Estados miembros de la Organización de Estados Americanos (OEA) como un instrumento renovado para la defensa de la democracia, no sólo contra el golpe de Estado tradicional, sino también para hacer frente a las graves violaciones de la responsabilidad horizontal. El segundo supuesto consideró, como precedente, la situación política en el Perú durante el gobierno de Alberto Fujimori (1995-2000), el cual fue definido por los académicos de Ciencias Políticas y Derecho Constitucional como un régimen autoritario competitivo. Sin embargo, durante la última década hasta la actualidad hemos hallado en América Latina varios países con gobiernos en donde el principio de equilibrio de poderes ha erosionado como resultado de las medidas adoptadas por sus respectivas ramas ejecutivas. Esta situación sugiere las siguientes preocupaciones: ¿El modelo democrático liberal de la CDI se encuentra en crisis? ¿Este modelo ha sido vencido por los gobiernos liberales lo cuales privilegian a los derechos económicos y sociales y restringen los derechos civiles y políticos? ¿O ambos modelos están condenados a coexistir en la región?
35
Duggan, Lucy. "Reading the city : Prague in Czech and Czech-German narrative fiction since 1989". Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:3827cf9c-fa91-4fb5-aa7e-8942de885729.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
In the course of its history, Prague has been the site of many significant cultural confrontations and conversations. From the medieval chronicle of Cosmas to the work of contemporary writers, the city has taken shape in literature as a multivalent space where identities are constructed and questioned. The evolution of Prague's literary significance has taken place in an intercultural context: both Czech-speaking and German-speaking writers have engaged with the city and its past, and their texts have interacted with each other. The city has played a central part in many collective narratives in which myth, history and literature intertwine. Looking at contemporary prose fiction written in both Czech and German, this thesis explores continuities and contrasts in the literary roles played by Prague. It analyses two German-speaking emigrant authors, Libuše Moníková (1945-1998) and Jan Faktor (1951- ), viewing them alongside three Czech writers, Jáchym Topol (1962- ), Daniela Hodrová (1946- ), and Michal Ajvaz (1949- ). Through close readings of eight texts, the thesis approaches the imagined city from four angles. It discusses how contemporary authors portray the search for meaning in the city by imagining Prague as two contrasting realms (the 'real' city and the 'other' city), how the discontinuities of the city are reflected by the fragmentation of the authorial stance, how these authors assemble new Prague myths from the vestiges of older topoi, and how they confront the contradictory urges to uphold the boundaries of the city and to transgress them. In post-1989 Prague, authors explore the unstable spaces between continuity and discontinuity, constructing an authorial ethos in these areas of tension.
36
Holgate, Ben. "Porous borders : the amorphous nature of magical realist fiction in Asia and Australasia". Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:32abdfeb-baa7-40ee-b721-89b66bc74043.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
This thesis aims to broaden the scope of magical realism by examining contemporary fiction in Asia and Australasia, regions which have been largely neglected in critical discussion of the narrative mode. My research seeks to modify and expand our collective conception of magical realism through key texts that challenge not only how we read the narrative mode, but also our expectations of it. My analysis involves a dual intervention in the fields of postcolonial studies and world literature. I supplement existing scholarship of magical realism with new paradigms of critical thought, such as epistemology, mythopoeia, ecocriticism, intertextuality and discourse on human rights. Each of the key authors - Indigenous Australian Alexis Wright, New Zealand Maoris Keri Hulme and Witi Ihimaera, Indian-born cosmopolitans Amitav Ghosh and Salman Rushdie, and Chinese Nobel laureate Mo Yan - subjects the narrative mode to differing intellectual, socio-cultural and historical frameworks, and in the process reinvents magical realism to serve their own artistic purposes. The authors' key texts demonstrate the need to recalibrate theory on magical realism in contexts such as Alexis Wright's depiction of ongoing colonisation of Australia's first inhabitants in a supposedly postcolonial country, and Mo Yan's critique of post-communist China. I argue that magical realism has porous borders, not only geographically and culturally, but also in the sense that the narrative mode frequently spills over into other, different generic kinds such that the distinctions between them are often blurred. In addition, magical realism's constant state of transformation makes it particularly difficult to define. Therefore, I propose a minimalist definition of the narrative mode and a flexible approach. However, underlying cultural elements and individual artistic expression in a text may sometimes limit magical realism's utility as a tool for literary analysis. Finally, I explore the notion of a genealogy of magical realism based on polygenesis, emerging in different cultures at different times.
37
Rawlins, Isabel Bethan. "Counting planes". Thesis, Rhodes University, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1001816.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
This collection of prose-poems and flash fiction, together with a few short stories, shows how romantic relationships colour our perspectives on the world. The collection has echoes throughout of speakers' voices, theme, imagery and tone. There is a narrative logic too, but working on a subtle level of echo and resonance
38
Welstead, Adam. "Dystopia and the divided kingdom : twenty-first century British dystopian fiction and the politics of dissensus". Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/17104.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
This doctoral thesis examines the ways in which contemporary writers have adopted the critical dystopian mode in order to radically deconstruct the socio-political conditions that preclude equality, inclusion and collective political appearance in twenty-first century Britain. The thesis performs theoretically-informed close readings of contemporary novels from authors J.G. Ballard, Maggie Gee, Sarah Hall and Rupert Thomson in its analysis, and argues that the speculative visions of Kingdom Come (2006), The Flood (2004), The Carhullan Army (2007) and Divided Kingdom (2005) are engaged with a wave of contemporary dystopian writing in which the destructive and divisive forms of consensus that are to be found within Britain's contemporary socio-political moment are identified and challenged. The thesis proposes that, in their politically-engaged extrapolations, contemporary British writers are engaged with specifically dystopian expressions of dissensus. Reflecting key theoretical and political nuances found in Jacques Rancière's concept of 'dissensus', I argue that the novels illustrate dissensual interventions within the imagined political space of British societies in which inequalities, oppressions and exclusions are endemic - often proceeding to present modest, 'minor' utopian arguments for more equal, heterogeneous and democratic possibilities in the process. Contributing new, theoretically-inflected analysis of key speculative fictions from twenty-first century British writers, and locating their critiques within the literary, socio-political and theoretical contexts they are meaningfully engaged with, the thesis ultimately argues that in interrogating and reimagining the socio-political spaces of twenty-first century Britain, contemporary writers of dystopian fiction demonstrate literature working in its most dissensual, political and transformative mode.
39
Kingston, Matthew Patrick. "(Re)inventing the Novel: Examining the Use of Text and Image in the Twenty-First Century Novel". Fogler Library, University of Maine, 2008. http://www.library.umaine.edu/theses/pdf/KingstonMP2008.pdf.
Testo completo
40
Morgan, Jane Mary Kathleen. "Like Katherine". Thesis, Rhodes University, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1001814.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
Vicky, a thirty something English radio journalist, has moved to Cape Town to try and work out what it is that's missing from her life and to fill the gap. At first she thinks she's found what she's looking for, but a series of unsettling events makes her realise she has simply brought her problems with her. She goes back to England, ostensibly for work, where she is contacted by her stepbrother, Mark. They hardly know each other but he has a reason for wanting to find her. They meet and, for both of them, their encounters change the way they see themselves and their relationships. Vicky comes to understand more about her past and her family and, for the first time, to find a connection with her emotional life
41
Molino, Nicolene Chloe. "Dog wars : a Victorian steampunk adventure". Thesis, Rhodes University, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1001815.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
We're in an alternate universe, circa Dickensian London. Leofric Lieven, a local crime lord, is about to find the past catching up on him. The Romany Carnival has come to town, and a gypsy woman, his former lover and partner in crime, demands from him a favour which will redress his betrayal of years before: he must secure a stolen object and return it to her. But things go horribly wrong when local delivery boy Cards Bennish is kidnapped by Leofric’s competitor before he can deliver the goods that will cover Leofric's debt to the gypsy. In this world, humans can shape shift into animals, entirely or only partially, dog fighting is the favourite pastime for high stakes betting, and power belongs to the highest bidder. The gypsy’s final bet, for the highest stakes yet, will seal the fates of a number of people, for better or worse
42
Guerra, Noriega Alex Alí. "Climate-related disaster risk in mountain areas : the Guatemalan highlands at the start of the 21st Century". Thesis, University of Oxford, 2010. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:3d6941f4-da2e-42c6-85cd-890af8797c58.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
Mountains are hazardous places. Framed in political ecology and disaster theory in geography, this research set out to answer the overarching question of how the risk of climate-related disasters has changed in mountain areas of Guatemala at the start of the century. It involved four main related activities that examined key elements of disaster risk: 1) the trigger, assessing extreme rainfall trends based on daily records; 2) the hazards, through an evaluation of the relevance of land use and cover (LUC) to slope failure; 3) elements of social vulnerability, looking at its geography and trend at the turn of the century, and also exploring the role of globalisation in specific communities; and 4) an assessment and mapping of disaster risk in two sites, including an estimation of exposure levels to hazards. Methods range from statistical analysis of quantitative data (rainfall, landslide, and vulnerability chapters), GIS-based modelling (risk mapping), and qualitative analysis including interviews. The main findings state that: increasing annual and extreme rainfall has contributed to higher disaster risk only in a few areas; LUC change from forest to annual crops has increased risk in a few locations but it has not done so in most of the volcanic highlands either because there has been only minor LUC change or because LUC does not seem to have an effect on slope failure in certain types of geology. Disaster risk has decreased overall because vulnerability has become lower in the vast majority of mountain areas but risk may be higher as a result of increased exposure to hazards either in mountain communities or in marginal areas of the capital and surrounding municipios. The analysis of risk helped identify four mountain zones where risk is very likely to have increased. Further research questions are mostly related to studying the evolution of climate-related disaster risk in those areas.
43
Денісова, Дар'я Данилівна, e Daria Danylivna Denisova. "Weird Fiction у сучасному літературному процесі англомовних країн". Видавничий дім «Гельветика», 2016. http://repository.sspu.sumy.ua/handle/123456789/3484.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
У розвідці здійснено порівняння основних риси англомовної літератури ХХІ століття та визначальних характеристик Weird Fiction. Зазначено місце Weird Fiction у сучасному літературному процесі.The research presents a comparative analysis of contemporary trends in Anglophone 21-st-century literature and the tradition of Weird Fiction and defines the place of Weird Fiction in contemporary literary process.
44
Madingwane, June. "Kaffirmeid and other stories". Thesis, Rhodes University, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1015659.
Testo completo
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Sparks, Catriona Margaret Mullineaux. "Capitalocene Dreams: Dark Tales of Near Futures & The 21st Century Catastrophe: Hyper-capitalism and Severe Climate Change in Science Fiction". Thesis, Curtin University, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/70516.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
This thesis investigates the research question: What is the role of speculative fiction in a climate changed world? The short story collection: Capitalocene Dreams: Dark Tales of Near Futures explores life on the fringes of disintegrating Australian enclaves during the dying days of neoliberal excess. The exegesis: The 21st Century Catastrophe: Hyper-capitalism and Severe Climate Change in Science Fiction, contrasts ecocatastrophe science fiction of the sixties and seventies with contemporary climate or Anthropocene fiction.
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Maharaj, Keshav. "Rehab is for quitters". Thesis, Rhodes University, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1011901.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
My collection has the common theme of addiction: addictive personalities strung across the pages. Not only the usual addictions such as the daily-ritualized beer or joint, but also the pain of addiction to anti-social habits, pathologies, forbidden love, etc. I try to capture the behavior and life that surrounds addictions too: relationships, rehab, criminal behavior, all sorts of abuse, etc. Some of the stories are heavy-handed, slapping the reader in the face, some are subtler. Some are told with lightness and humor, some with gravity.
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Woudstra, Ruth. "Touching Brýnstone". Thesis, Rhodes University, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1015032.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
Touching Brýnstone is the story of Beth, a young journalist who is troubled by misfortunes in her family and work circumstances. In a Pretoria library she is seduced by a book that consoles her and progressively becomes a fetish object. It sparks a journey to Japan, where she arrives to teach English. She is intent on meeting the author, whom she confounds with protagonist and book. This Bildungsroman is an exploration of the complex relationship between inner and outer self, and the struggle towards wholeness. Beth must find a way out of the obsession so that she can return to South Africa with an enriched insight into her shadow self.
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Reed, Graham Conan. "The talisman". Thesis, Rhodes University, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1001817.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
The Talisman is an adventure story set in a future where much of today's cultural memory and technology has been lost. Following a hunting accident, a young man named Forest survives a life-threatening wound and embarks on a quest for knowledge. Rising sea levels, bands of marauders, wild animals and the perils of survival in the broken world are not the only problems facing the survivors. The nature of the collapse of the society, what triggered it and its subsequent unfolding, bequeaths an existential quandary upon them that only Forest, and a rare text as old as the earth itself, can unravel
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Carstens, Johannes Petrus (Delphi). "Uncovering the apocalypse : narratives of collapse and transformation in the 21st century Fin de Siècle". Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/85700.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
Thesis (PhD)-- Stellenbosch University, 2013.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This dissertation examines the idea of apocalypse through the lens of science fiction (sf) written during the current fin de siècle period. I have dated this epoch, known as the information era, as starting in 1980 with the advent of personal computing and ending in approximately 2020 when the functional limits of silicon-based digital manufacturing and production are expected to be reached. By surveying the field of contemporary sf, I identify certain trends and subgenres that relate to particular aspects of apocalyptic thought, namely, conceptions of the ‘terror of history,’ the sublimity of accelerated techno-scientific advance, the ‘affective turn’ in media-culture and posthuman philosophy. My principal method of inquiry into how the apocalypse is imagined or ‘figured’ in sf is the concept of hyperstition – a neologism (combining the words ‘hyper’ and ‘superstition’) coined by the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU). Hyperstition describes an aesthetic response whereby cultural fictions – principally, ideas relating to apocalypse – are imagined as transmuting into material realities. I begin by scrutinizing two posthumanist works of theory-fiction (theory written in the mode of sf) by the CCRU and 0rphan Drift which anticipate immanent human extinction and imagine the inception of a new evolutionary cycle of machine-augmented evolution This sensibility is premised on the sociallydestabilising cycles of exponential growth that characterise information-era technological developments, particularly in the digital industries, as well as the accelerated human impact on the natural environment. Central to my argument is the romantic materialist philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari and their concepts of accelerationism, schizoanalysis and Bodies without Organs (BwO’s). Their ontology is constructed around the idea that exponential rates of development necessitate a new aesthetic paradigm that ventures beyond philosophies of human access. The narrative of apocalypse, approached from this perspective, can be interpreted in catastrophic or anastrophic terms; either as a permanent ending or as the beginning of something radically new. Using hyperstition, I also investigate the sf of Russell Hoban, Michael Swanwick, Brian Stableford, Charles Stross, Dan Simmons, M. John Harrison and Paul McAuley to see not only how these authors interpret the concept of cultural acceleration, but also to identify common threads. Countering the catastrophic ‘death of affect’ postulated by theorists such as Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio with the anastrophic rejoinder of cyberdelic information-era countercultures, I conclude by investigating the new ‘affective turn’ in contemporary media theory. The works of theoretical fiction and sf that I investigate are informed, as I demonstrate, by the Situationist techniques of psychogeography, dérive and detournement, as well as by the literary tropes of 18th and 19th century fin de siècle Gothic and dark Romantic fiction.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie proefskrif ondersoek die idee van apokalips deur die oogpunt van wetenskap fiksie (wf) soos geskryf gedurende die huidige ‘fin de siècle’ tydperk. Ek dateer hierdie epog, bekend as die inligtings-era, as die tydperk wat in 1980 begin met die koms van persoonlike rekenaars en nagenoeg eindig in 2020, wanneer die funksionele limiete van silikon gebaseerde digitale vervaardiging en produksie na verwagting bereik sal word. Deur die veld van kontemporêre wf in oënskou te neem, identifiseer ek sekere neigings en sub-genres wat vergelyk met sekere kenmerke van apokaliptiese denke, naamlik: begrippe soos die ‘verskrikking van geskiedenis’, die verhewendheid van versnelde tegno-wetenskaplike vooruitgang, die ‘emosionele omkeer’ in media-kultuur en post-humanistiese filosofie. My primêre metode van ondersoek van hoe die apokalips voorgestel of ‘beskryf’ kan word in wf, is die begrip van hiper-bygelowigheid - ‘n neologisme (samevoeging van die woorde ‘hiper’ en ‘bygeloof’) soos geskep deur die Kubernetiese Kultuur Navorsings-Eenheid (KKNE) en Nick Land, medestigter van die KKNE. Hiper-bygelowigheid beskryf die proses waarvolgens kulturele versinsels - hoofsaaklik opvattings met betrekking tot apokalips – in materiële realiteite omgeskakel kan word. Ek ondersoek ek twee post-humanistiese werke van teorie-fiksie (teorie geskryf volgens die wf metode) deur KKNE en 0rphan Drift, wat inherente menslike uitwissing verwag en die ontstaan van ‘n nuwe evolusionêre siklus van masjien-toename voorstel. Hierdie proses is gebaseer op die sosiaal-destabiliserende siklus van eksponensiële groei wat kenmerkend is van die inligtings-era se tegnologiese ontwikkelinge, veral in die digitale industrie, sowel as versnelde menslike impak op die natuurlike omgewing. Die kern van my beredenering is die goties-materialisties-teoriese standpunt soos deur Land ingeneem, sowel as die romanties-materialistiese filosofie van Deleuze en Guattari. Hierdie gevalle van neo-materialistiese (of objek-georiënteerde) filosofië word toegelig deur ‘n apokalipties-teoretiese basis bekend as akseleerasionisme. Hierdie uitgangspunt is ontwikkel rondom die idee dat die eksponensiële tempo van ontwikkeling ‘n klimaks sal bereik in ‘n evolusionêre ‘wipplank punt’ en dat ‘n nuwe estetiese paradigma nodig is wat dit bokant die filosofie van menslike vermoë kan waag sodat daar oor hierdie waarskynlikheid geteoretiseer kan word. Die beskrywing van apokalips, soos vanuit hierdie oogpunt beskou, kan vertolk word in beide katastrofiese of anastrofiese terme of as ‘n permanente einde of as die begin van iets wat radikaal nuut sal wees. Deur gebruik te maak van die hiperbygelowigheidsteorie, wat ‘n onderafdeling is van akseleerasionisme, ondersoek ek WF van Russell Hoban, Michael Swanwick, Brian Stableford, Charles Stross, Dan Simmons, M. John Harrison and Paul McAuley ten einde vas te stel hoe hierdie skrywers die konsep van kulturele akseleerasie interpreteer, maar ook om gemeenskaplike leidrade te identifiseer. Met teenargumentering ten opsigte van die katastrofiese ‘dood van affek’ gepostuleer deur teoretici soos Jean Baudrillard en Paul Virillio met die anastrofiese samevoeging van kuberdeliese inligtings-era-kontra-kulture, ondersoek ek die nuwe ‘gemoedsomkeer’ in kontemporêre mediateorie. Die werke van teoretiese fiksie, sowel as baie van die ander gevalle van wf wat ek ondersoek en soos deur my gedemonstreer, word toegelig deur Situasienistiese tegnieke van psigo-geografie, dérive en detournement, sowel as deur die literêre menigtes van die 19de eeu ‘fin de siècle’ donker Romantiese en Gotiese fiksie.
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Fetile, Khanyisa. "An analysis of the representation of sexual abuse in selected post-apartheid novels". Thesis, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10948/3822.
Testo completoAbstract (sommario):
This study examines the way in which three South African novelists, K. Sello Duiker, Phaswane Mpe and Sindiwe Magona portray the sexual abuse of men and women in the post-apartheid era. The novels under discussion are: Thirteen Cents (2000) and The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001) by K.Sello Duiker, Beauty’s Gift (2008) by Sindiwe Magona and Phaswane Mpe`s Welcome to Our Hillbrow. It will also look at the characters and the events to show that sexual abuse can be physical, traumatic and emotional, and that it affects both males and females, reinforcing in a sense Pucherova`s assertion that “both men and women are oppressed by a patriarchal heterosexist society” (2009:937).