Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Charles Johnson'

Belly Laughs: Body Humor in Contemporary American Literature and Film Scholars are more than happy to laugh at but seem somewhat reluctant to discuss body humor, which is perhaps the most neglected form of comedy in recent criticism. In this dissertation, I examine the ways in which contemporary American writers and filmmakers use body humor in their works, not only in moments of so-called "comic relief" but also as a valid way of exploring many of the same issues that postmodern artists typically interrogate in their more somber moments. The writers discussed in this project-Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Charles Johnson, and Woody Allen-were chosen for the divergent ways in which they present the body's comic predicament in psychological, metaphysical, and historical situations. The introduction explains the diverse traditions that these artists draw upon and considers how various theoretical approaches can affect our understanding of body humor. The first chapter examines Jewish-American novelist Philip Roth's use of absurd and grotesque body imagery as manifestations of his characters' moral dilemmas. The second chapter looks at how slapstick comedy informs a worldview dominated by paranioa and chaos in Thomas Pynchon's novels. Chapter Three looks at Woody Allen's early films, in which he parodies and revises the slapstick cinematic tradition of artists like Charlie Chaplin and The Marx Brothers. Chapter Four considers African-American writer and cartoonist Charles Johnson's depiction of the ways in which the body's desires and pitfalls complicate the quest for spiritual enlightenment.

This dissertation explores the significance of law and religion to the Scottish Revolution through the career of Archibald Johnston of Wariston. As a lawyer committed to the defense of Scottish Presbyterianism against the Anglicanism of Charles I, Wariston epitomized the legal and religious objectives of the Revolution. While his importance to the Revolution is marked in the historiography, Wariston has received little specialized study. This work draws on manuscript collections from Edinburgh University Library, the National Archives of Scotland and the National Library of Scotland to reconstruct his vision of the Scottish constitution. As the most intimate source of his religious life, his diary is explored in a social and political context to construct a composite view of his private piety and his public policy.<br>Wariston joined visceral opposition to innovations in religious worship imposed by Charles I. He rose in prominence because his legal expertise was indispensable to a Revolution predicated on a constitutional challenge of the authority of the Crown. The Revolution was a nationalist revolt against an alleged English imperialism. Wariston's religious experience in the Revolution revealed that the Church was the touchstone for a revival of national consciousness of Scottish laws, courts, customs and history. Wariston participated in the rediscovery and reinterpretation of Scottish law to undo decades of Anglicized Crown reform in Church and State.<br>When war began in 1639 Wariston became central to intelligence gathering and the forging of a loose alliance with English opponents of Charles I. This intelligence network informed Scottish propaganda to England and proved decisive in turning English popular opinion against the King. In 1640 Charles was forced to abandon war and enter into the negotiations which led to the London Treaty of 1641. Wariston pursued two main objectives---Scottish independence and permanent institutions of Anglo-Scottish cooperation---to ensure Scottish influence in English policy. While the latter initiatives were deferred in the Treaty, the Revolution achieved independence and the preservation of Scottish Presbyterianism. This study finds that ideas of religion and law in the Revolution were shaped by the overarching imperative of independence and a renewed Scottish nationalism.

Piracy has a big mysterious stamp. In the west, we have a clear picture of the 17th and 18th century pirates through stories about prostheses, planks, parrots and eyepatches. These stories come from one source, Captain Charles Johnson's legendary work that addresses a large number of pirates and their lives on the seven seas. This study investigates how modern historians relate critically to Captain Charles Johnson's work and how they interpret his stories about the fictional pirate utopia, Libertalia. What are their purposes and what have they been affected by? By applying a social-constructive theory, the purpose of course becomes evident by seeing what truths these historians created and carried on and how Charles Johnson's work was used in history. Through a social constructive study influenced by source criticism of the works of Marcus Rediker, David Cordingly and Philip Gosse, their interpretations have been perceived as very different. The different historians seem to have their own personal agendas and perceptions and have through their expertise created perceptions and stories that may characterize future generations' perception of the golden age of the piracy and, in particular, their image of Libertalia as a fair society without rulers.   The researchers' source-critical approach varies from seeing Johnson's work as narrative stories for future generations to the fact that Johnson primarily had a profit interest in the authorship. These ideas, however, are something that the historians themselves have concluded and thus become part of the social construction we call reality, in which we exist.

The dissertation investigates narrative strategies employed by the contemporary American novel to criticize and counteract the dynamics of domination. The study focuses primarily on Charles Johnson's Middle Passage (1990), Richard Powers's The Time of Our Singing (2003), and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead (1991). These three novels address problems of sociopolitical repression and racial discrimination arising from the preconditions and heritage of colonial rule and the enslavement of Native Americans and African-Americans. While Johnson, Powers, and Silko refer to concrete historical moments, the critique implicit in their novels does not primarily arise from narrated historical facts or fictional experience, but from the narrative configurations they construct, and in which they embed these facts and experiences. They juxtapose naturalized assumptions about fixed meanings of space, temporality, and ensuing notions of self prevailing in the narrated historical past to ever changing combinations of ethnic, cultural, and social belonging within shifting spatial and temporal parameters, until these assumptions become untenable. Their method of exposition is therefore basically dialogic, and the insights that these novels yield constitute a form of knowledge that becomes available precisely through the combination of dialogics and literary narrative. To the degree that previous assumptions still prevail, all three novels provide a critique of the foundations on which members of Western culture across racial and ethnic lines construct their sense of authority within dynamics of power today. Johnson, Powers, and Silko are associated with African American, mainstream American, and Native American literature, or, in the case of Silko, with the field of American women's writing, and yet, while belonging in these subfields of American studies, go beyond and indeed defy such institutional categories in the conceptual reach of their work. Their novels participate<br>La thèse examine les stratégies narratives employées par le roman américain contemporain en vue de critiquer et de contrecarrer la dynamique de la domination. L'étude se concentre principalement sur Middle Passage de Charles Johnson (1990), The Time of Our Singing (2003) de Richard Powers et Almanac of the Dead (1991) de Leslie Marmon Silko. Ces trois romans abordent les problèmes socio-politiques de répression et de discrimination raciale découlant des conditions préalables et de l'héritage de la domination coloniale et l'asservissement des Amérindiens et des Afro-Américains. Tandis que Johnson, Powers et Silko se rapportent à des moments historiques concrets, la critique implicite que l'on retrouve dans leurs oeuvres n'est pas principalement issue des faits historiques narrés ou des expériences fictives proposées, mais des configurations narratives qu'ils construisent, et dans lesquels ils intègrent ces faits et ces expériences. Ils juxtaposent des hypothèses établies touchant les significations convenues de la temporalité et de l'espace qui mènent des notions d'autonomie en vigueur dans le passé historique rapporté jusqu'à l'évolution constante des combinaisons de facteurs ethniques, culturels et sociaux appartenant au transfert des paramètres temporels et spatiaux, et ce, jusqu'à ce que ces hypothèses deviennent insoutenables. Leur méthode d'exposition est donc essentiellement dialogique et les propositions offertes par ces romans constituent une forme de connaissance qui devient disponible notamment à travers la combinaison de la dialogique et de la narration littéraire. Dans la mesure où les hypothèses antérieures continuent de prévaloir, les trois romans fournissent une critique des fondements sur lesquels les membres de la culture occidentale à travers les frontières raciales et ethniques construisent leur sens de l'autorité au sein de la dynamique du pouvoir exercé aujourd'hui. Johnson, Powers, et Silko sont associ

The decades after World War II were a time of growth and change for queer people across the country. Many chose to move to major metropolitan centers in order to pursue a life of openness and be part of queer communities. However, those people only account for part of the story of queer history. Other queer people chose to stay in small towns and create their own queer spaces for socializing and community building. The Gulf Coast of Florida is a place where queer people chose to create queer community where they lived through such actions as private house parties and opening bars. The unique place of the Gulf Coast as a tourist destination allowed queer people to build and join communication networks that furthered the growth of a sense of community leading ultimately to the founding of Bay AIDS Services and Information Coalition in 1989.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 2005.<br>Advisor: Joe M. Richardson, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of History. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Jan. 24, 2006). Document formatted into pages; contains viii, 164 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

Doctoral dissertation: Panoptical tropes and negotiations between art and politics in Charles Johnson's short fiction Abstract The dissertation traces the uneasy marriage between ideology and aesthetics in African American literature, and its reflections in Charles Johnson's short fiction. The historical introduction is an attempt to reevaluate the tradition of ideological self-policing in African American literature. Its central thesis resides in the claim that African American literature and its critical reception has still retained some of this ideological template, in a manner and degree that throws it out of sync with the mainstream trajectory of American literature. This lingering anachronism cannot be legitimately attributed to a single causative circumstance, yet one of the more obvious explanations for this residual trend is the living memory of overt discriminatory practices in many parts of the United States, which is why the centrifugal literary discourses of assimilationism and protest fiction are still very vibrant. This simple argument alone provides a sufficient basis for contextualizing and understanding the thesis that ideological writing still inadvertently manages to find its way into African American fictional pursuits. This is also underscored by the observable fact that even the...

This research is concerned with the complex and contested relationship between the sovereign prerogatives of states and the international imperative of defusing world conflicts. Due to its historical setting following World War Two, the national vs. international staking of claims was framed within the escalating imperial-nationalist confrontation and the impending “end of empire”, both of which were significantly influenced by the role Israel played in this saga. The research looks at the issue of “decolonization” and the anti-colonial struggle waged under the leadership of Egypt’s President Nasser. The Suez War is analyzed as the historical event that signaled the beginning of the final chapter in the domination of the European empires in the Middle East (sub-Saharan decolonization followed beginning in the early 1960s), and the emergence of the United States as the new major Western power in the Middle East. The Suez experience highlighted a stubborn contest between the defenders of the concept of “sovereign consent” and the advocates of “International intervention”. Both the deployment of the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) and its termination were surrounded by controversy and legal-political wrangling. The role of UNEF and UN peacekeeping operations in general framed the development of a new concept for an emerging international human rights law and crisis management. The UNEF experience, moreover, brought into sharp relief the need for a conflict resolution component for any peace operation. International conflict management, and human rights protection are both subject to an increasing interventionist international legal regime. Consequently, the traditional concept of “sovereignty” is facing increasing challenge. By its very nature, the subject matter of this multi-dimensional research involves historical, political and international legal aspects shaping the research’s content and conclusions. The research utilizes the experience and contributions of several key participants in this pioneering peacekeeping experience. In the last chapter, recommendations are made –based on all the elements covered in the research- to suggest contributions to the evolving UN ground rules for international crisis intervention and management.<br>Graduate<br>hilmyh@uvic.ca