Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Buildings in fiction'

The Former Lives of Buildings is a novel about thirty-one-year-old architect Adelle Corey. Adelle is a woman in denial. A nightmare figure called the Baron steals memories of her closest relationships and most poignant experiences. He hides the memories in Adelle's dreams, where he reconstructs them into buildings. The only way she can recover the memories is by cutting or tattooing these buildings into her skin. Adelle uses notebooks, mnemonic devices, and academic trivia to keep track of her daily routines. The novel takes place in contemporary times and opens in the burn unit of Bridgeport Hospital, Connecticut, where Adelle has been recovering for two months. She does not remember her stay prior to the opening day of the story, but she retains her memories from this day forward. Adelle's parents, her husband, and the mysterious woman Celesse St. Armand, who has been given charge over her care, refuse to allow Adelle to see her six-year-old son, Ben, until she can recover the missing days. Adelle suspects that something has happened to Ben. She seeks the help of Sam, her tattoo artist, to recover memories. The search uncovers painful truths about Adelle's childhood and marriage, ultimately forcing her to face that the Baron is a device she created to protect herself, not an outside force acting upon her. Adelle goes from a lonely, untrusting existence to a willingness to form deep friendships. She gains the capacity to face the whole truth instead of selecting only the comfortable parts. She does not find her son in any of the buildings. However, confronting the experiences hidden there gives her the strength to accept that she has passed her memory problems on to her son, who has not been able to remember his family since the fire. Although their marriage does not survive, Adelle and De learn to work together as parents.
M.F.A.
Masters
English
Arts and Humanities
Creative Writing

Appalachian writing brings a voice to the region that is often obstructed or excluded by popular culture throughout the United States. Crowded with stereotypes, many stories of Appalachian culture are misconstrued or never heard at all. This makes the work of modern Appalachian writers especially significant. Perhaps one of the best ways to reach a broader audience of people in this fast-paced digital time is through shorter writings, and in this thesis I will be presenting my process of writing modern flash fiction and poetry and of sharing the truths of working class, Appalachian people.

This dissertation is concerned with the gendered discourse of nation and home where women carry the symbolic duty of holders of a pure, uncontaminated culture passively confined to the domestic space. I consider two commonplace tropes, the woman-as-nation metaphor and the Victorian angel in the house, both of which convey a limited view of women's agency and her significance in simultaneously resisting and ratifying patriarchal visions of nation and gender. The novels in this study document various phases of nation building under periods of colonialism and postcolonialism, and each features the plight of women affected by the realities of sham democracies and political instability. My analysis rests on the claim that postcolonial authors continue the inquiries into the ironic and futile foundations on which nation and identity is built which define modernist despair. I assert the value in understanding how women respond to disillusionment across cultures in an attempt to recover the experience of women and her political consciousness, granting a relevance to the role women play in textual deliberations on political skepticism and political idealism often reserved for male actors.

This thesis examines how practices of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) serve to legitimise Uruguay's largest ever foreign investment, the US$2.5-billion pulp mill constructed by the Finnish-Chilean firm Montes del Plata. Unusually, this investment prompted little social conflict, which runs counter to the community tensions frequently associated with large-scale infrastructure investments in Latin America. To explore this, the thesis takes an agency-oriented approach to the study of corporate-community relations. It offers fresh insights for critical management scholars and anthropologists of corporations into the techniques of collusion and co-optation in large-scale foreign direct investment (FDI) projects. Based on participant observation with Montes del Plata's community relations managers and their community interlocutors, conducted over separate periods during and after the mill's construction, the thesis examines the legitimising impulse of corporate citizenship, both as concept and practice. I show how the company seeks to incorporate itself as a morally-infused entity through ongoing interactions between its representative agents and external actors. I argue that the form of CSR that emerges is neither moral nor responsible, but its command over social relations nonetheless makes it a potent force for corporate capitalism's expansion. The mill owner attempts to manage its social and political relations in such a way as to secure the proximity needed for legitimacy-building, while creating the requisite distance to reduce onerous moral obligations; a balance that I analyse using the concepts of detachment and depoliticisation. The thesis opens with a discussion of the politics of representation, demonstrating how the agents of Montes del Plata (the Corporation) shape the local political ecosystem through the recognition, or not, of its counterparties' claims to representativeness. Chapters 1 and 2 also explore the theory of personation, especially in the efforts by the Corporation's community managers to infuse the company with moral characteristics. Their struggles in doing so invite consideration of a pragmatic approach to legitimacy building through the calculated management of social relations. Chapters 3 and 4 further show how principles of detachment and depoliticisation frame the Corporation's approach to relationship management. Chapter 3 examines how participation and empowerment are utilised to depoliticise development goods and stage the Corporation's detachment from their delivery. Chapter 4 examines the detachment effects of the changes to the region's political economy sparked by the mill project, and how the mill owner depoliticises public expectations of job creation. The conclusion makes the case for a distinctive approach to FDI legitimation driven by detachment (and reattachment) and facilitated by depoliticisation, which I term 'detachable CSR'.

This thesis is a science fiction exploration of a future dystopian world where privacy becomes a dominant currency that is distributed according to social class and ranking mechanisms. It utilizes speculative world-building to study the unanticipated implications of technology on personal privacy, surveillance and social inequality on future societies. The project introduces The Mall, as a highly efficient and hyper-connected world, but also exposes its downfall as a society with heightened cultural and socio-political disparities. Inspired by past civilizations, the development of the modern nation-state as well as contemporary society, the design adapts, appropriates and reformulates existing cultures into new hybrid possibilities. This thesis project is presented as an illustrated coded tapestry that allows the viewer to explore and interact with various components of the narrative to speculate and critique an alternative future-world void of privacy.

L'essor du numérique et la multiplication des supports (smartphone, tablette tactile)ouvrent de nouvelles perspectives en matière d'écriture. Dans ce monde où textes, images et sons s'entrecroisent au fil des réseaux et au gré de l'interactivité, la fiction littéraire peut-elle trouver une voie qui lui permette de préserver sa richesse tout en bénéficiant des apports du numérique ? Comment l'auteur littéraire peut-il concevoir et agencer ses matériaux narratifs afin de toucher efficacement des lecteurs disposés à franchir le pas du numérique ? Quels sont les fondements d'une narration multimodale utilisant au mieux les potentiels du texte, de l'image et du son, dans toute leur complémentarité, pour servir une fiction littéraire destinée à un large public ? Ces questions sont abordées, tant du point de vue de l'auteur que de celui du lecteur, dans une approche transdisciplinaire à la fois théorique et expérimentale.

The subject of this dissertation is Swedish upper secondary pupils’ reception of novels read as part of their literature instruction. The main purpose is to study and compare the reading of female pupils with that of male pupils and to analyze to what extent attention is paid to their private reading experiences in the literary teaching. What strategies do the students use to interpret and discuss fiction? And what is the relationship between their private reading habits and the way fiction is studied at school? Consequently, the subject field of this qualitative study concerns not only teenagers’ private reading habits, but also gender related issues, school adjusted reading routines and didactic matters. Reading at school differs in many ways from the pupils’ private reading habits, but there are also differences regarding the students’ attitudes towards reading as such. There proved to be certain diversities between the reading habits of boys and girls. The boys read in general less than the girls, and many boys were interested in reading adventurous and exciting stories. The girls were more into reading realistic novels, and to them it was important that they could identify with the characters. Many pupils responded personally to their reading. Instead of reflecting on the meaning of a text and comparing it to other texts or phenomena of the surrounding world, their reception confined itself to categories like “boring” or “exciting”. Merely a few students included a more profound literary analysis in their responses. An important aim of literature instruction must be to broaden the pupils’ literary repertoires and to make them improve their reading skills. This study shows that to achieve these improvements the students must feel involved, which means that literature instruction must be adapted to the literary cultures of both boys and girls.

The mosaic novel - with its independent 'story-tiles' linking together to form a complete narrative - has the potential to act as a reflection on the periodic resurfacing of unconscious memories in the conscious lives of fictional characters. This project is an exploration of the mosaic text as a fictional analogue of involuntary memory. These concepts are investigated as they appear in traditional fairy tales and engaged with in this thesis's creative component, Sourdough and Other Stories (approximately 80,000 words), a mosaic novel comprising sixteen interconnected 'story-tiles'. Traditional fairy tales are non-reflective and conducive to forgetting (i.e. anti-memory); fairy tale characters are frequently portrayed as psychologically two-dimensional, in that there is no examination of the mental and emotional distress caused when children are stolen/ abandoned/ lost and when adults are exiled. Sourdough and Other Stories is a creative examination of, and attempted to remedy, this lack of psychological depth. This creative work is at once something more than a short story collection, and something that is not a traditional novel, but instead a culmination of two modes of writing. It employs the fairy tale form to explore James' 'thorns in the spirit' (1898, p.199) in fiction; the anxiety caused by separation from familial and community groups. The exegesis, A Story Told in Parts - Sourdough and Other Stories is a critical essay (approximately 20,000 words in length), a companion piece to the mosaic novel, which analyses how my research question proceeded from my creative work, and considers the theoretical underpinnings of the creative work and how it enacts the research question: 'Can a writer use the structural possibilities of the mosaic text to create a fictional work that is an analogue of an involuntary memory?' The cumulative effect of the creative and exegetical works should be that of a dialogue between the two components - each text informing the other and providing alternate but complementary lenses with which to view the research question.

Thesis (M. A.)--Florida State University, 2005.
Advisor: Mark Winegardner, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of English. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Sept. 15, 2005). Document formatted into pages; contains iv, 88 pages.

碩士
國立臺灣大學
社會學研究所
106
Based on an eight-month ethnographic study conducted on three construction sites in Beijing, this article aims to analyze how the family is embedded into the precarious employment relationship. I distinguish two types of labor demands in the building industry, namely “stability-oriented” and “flexibility-oriented”. And I found that three types of family relations cater to two labor demands respectively and further shape labor protection, money power, and work identity among women workers. I propose a circular process that details on how the family links the precarity and individual women workers. The circular process includes five parts, which I name as “Embeddedness”, “Selection”, “Gendered expectations”, “Identity”, and “Reproduction”. Through this circular process, I argue that women workers identify their labor as the contribution to the family and thus hardly recognize their precarious working conditions. This article provides a deeper understanding of the family in the making and the reproduction of the precarious employment relationships.

This thesis argues that Morituri by Yasmina Khadra and White Masks by Elias Khoury use the genre of the detective novel as a pretext for social and political critique of Algeria and Lebanon respectively. This thesis links the generic (crime fiction) and the conceptual (Political and Social Critique in Modern Arab World). While the detective novel is traditionally thought of as a non-academic, entertaining part of popular culture, the use of the genre to critique the failure of nation building after colonization elevates the genre and transforms it from mere entertainment to a more serious genre. Both novels are emblematic of a shift in the use of the detective and crime novel to address the political disarray in their respective states and the Arab world as a whole. As modern examples of detective novels in the modern Arab world, Morituri and White Masks transform the genre through their complex interweaving of aspects of the popular genre of detective fiction with the more serious political novel. The historical and political context of both countries at the time of the novels’ settings are an intrinsic part of understanding the crimes and the obfuscation of the perpetrator. In both of these novels, the technical and generic aspects are connected to the thematic, and the detective novel structure is not just there for suspense and entertainment. Instead, this structure points to the neocolonial system, benefitting the most powerful and the most affluent at the expense of the weak, poor, and disadvantaged.

En prenant comme point de départ l'interprétation de l'épopée homérique par Erich Auerbach, ce mémoire se consacre à la notion d'immersion fictionnelle, non sous son versant psychologique de phénomène contingent de la conscience imageante, mais sous son versant imaginaire, en tant que mythe sociétal d'immédiateté déterminant des stratégies esthétiques et médiatiques concrètes, que j'articule autour des poétiques contemporaines de construction de mondes (world building). L'enjeu est de saisir les répercussions esthétiques de ce fantasme d'une représentation qui occulterait à la fois sa médiateté et le réel-sensible, à une époque où la transfictionnalité et la transmédiaticité s'élèvent tranquillement comme modes narratifs dominants de notre culture occidentale contemporaine. Avec cette conviction que le terme d'immersion doit être replacé dans le cadre de ses effets, le premier chapitre s'affairera à démêler quelques difficultés théoriques que pose la notion en la problématisant sous l'égide des questions ontologiques de vérité et de la position phénoménologique de Sartre sur l'imaginaire. Tout en posant les outils théoriques nécessaires aux analyses subséquentes, le deuxième chapitre approfondit cette problématisation en empruntant aux théories modales des mondes possibles un cadre conceptuel opératoire, qui amènera, notamment grâce au concept formalisé de «~monde~», à concevoir la fiction comme un mouvement de distanciation. Appuyé par la lecture du roman tolkienien, le troisième chapitre tourne le fantasme d'immersion du côté d'une pulsion encyclopédique de complétude, concrétisée par des stratégies textuelles d'accumulation informationnelle et de virtualisation de données diégétiques laissées en suspens -- effets d'actualité que je qualifie d'extra-narratifs en les présentant en contraste des principes prescriptifs du \emph{muthos} aristotélicien formant une chaîne causale téléologique fondée sur une loi d'économie narrative. Le quatrième et dernier chapitre, articulé autour de la notion encore trop peu étudiée de canonicité, observe les poétiques de construction de mondes telles qu'elles se désamorcent elles-mêmes, dans le contexte des univers partagés, en engendrant des incohérences logiques donnant lieu à la tenue d'un discours auctorial-éditorial régissant les vérités fictionnelles comme moyen de maintenir l'immersivité de la représentation. L'analyse générique des comic-books de superhéros et une enquête sur la gestion éditoriale de l'univers de Star Wars permettront d'identifier les multiples modalités de délimitation de la frontière entre canon et apocryphe. En conclusion, je reviens brièvement sur la notion d'immersion, ainsi exemplifiée, en la resémiotisant comme une médiation compétitive de mise en présence de l'être.
Starting from Erich Auerbach's interpretation of the Homeric epic, this master's dissertation studies the notion of fictional immersion, not in its psychological aspect of a contingent phenomena of human consciousness, but rather in its collective imaginary sense, as a societal myth of immediacy generating concrete aesthetic and media strategies that I investigate from the standpoint of contemporary poetics of world building. The objective is to apprehend the aesthetic repercussions of this desire for a mediation that would conceal both the real and its own mediacy, in a time where transfictionality and transmedia storytelling are becoming more and more the dominant narrative modes of our contemporary western culture. Under the conviction that immersion must be looked at as a set of cultural strategies, the first chapter unravels some theorical difficulties bounded to the term by problematizing it towards ontological questions of truth and Sartre's phenomenological stance on the imaginary. While laying a necessary theorical toolset for subsequent analyses, the second chapter examines these problems by borrowing to possible worlds modal theories a set of working concepts, which will lead to the assumption that fiction is a movement of distanciation, notably with the aide of the formal concept of ``world''. Through a reading of the tolkienian novel, the third chapter directs the desire for immersion towards an encyclopedic impulsion for completeness, embodied by textual strategies such as informational proliferation and allusion to virtual diegetic data -- strategies leaving an impression of the actual that I describe as extra-narrative in contrast to Aristote's \emph{muthos} forming a teological causal chain based on a principle of an unitary narrative. The fourth and final chapter, articulated around the still too little studied notion of canonicity, observes poetics of world building as they neutralize themselves, particularly with shared universes, by generating logical inconsistencies giving birth to authorial and editorial discourses stating fictional truths as a way of maintaining the mediation's immersivity. The analysis of the superhero comics genre and an inquiry of the editorial management of the Star Wars universe will exemplify the multiple modalities of this delimitation between the canon and the apocryphal. As a conclusion, I briefly come back to the notion of immersion itself by redescribing it as a competitive mediation of presence.

Literary representation of character in South Africa is not just problematic but also complicated by racial dynamics, which easily lead to prejudiced portrayal by most writers. Mphahlele's reaction to White writing's "distortion" of the image of Blacks, in his critical texts resulted in his being labelled a protest writer. Concerning his creative writing, he admits that he initially couldn't portray the character of a white person roundedly due to limited acquaintance with him. What he only knows about him and therefore depicts in his early writings is the White stereotype. His acquaintance with the White world through varied interaction gives a leverage that improves his portrayal of the White character. Consequently his later works reflect objective representation of characters from different races. The study therefore concludes that he falls outside the bracket of protest writers, as his literary works prove to transcend the limitations of stereotypical character representation.
Afrikaans and Theory of Literature
M.A. (Theory of Literature)