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Musty, Emma. "A short history of lines." Thesis, Aberystwyth University, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/2160/c4aa2292-b43a-4d1f-bb59-b3cea766cb02.
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Moore, Marshall. "Inhospitable : a novel." Thesis, Aberystwyth University, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/2160/17c43877-5c4e-4d9b-b0aa-881667fbd5c0.
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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.
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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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Smit, Willem Jacobus. "Becoming the third generation: negotiating modern selves in Nigerian Bildungsromane of the 21st century." Thesis, Stellenbosch : University of Stellenbosch, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/2335.
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Thesis (MA (English))--University of Stellenbosch, 2009.ENGLISH ABTRACT: In recent years, original and exciting developments have been taking place in Nigerian literature. This new body of literature, collectively referred to as the ―third generation‖, has lately received international acclaim. In this emergent literature, the negotiation of a new, contemporary identity has become a central focus. At the same time, recent Nigerian literary texts are articulating responses to various developments in the Nigerian nation: Nigeria‘s current political and socio-economic situation, diverse forms of cultural hybridisation, as well as an increasing trans-national consciousness, to mention only a few. Three 21st-century novels – Chimamanda Nogzi Adichie‘s Purple Hibiscus (2004), Sefi Atta‘s Everything Good Will Come (2004) and Chris Abani‘s GraceLand (2005) – reveal how new avenues of identity-negotiation and formation are being explored in various contemporary Nigerian situations. This study tracks the ways in which the Bildungsroman, the novel of self-development, serves as a vehicle through which this new identity is articulated. Concurrently, this study also grapples with the ways in which the articulation and negotiation of this new identity reshapes the conventions of the classical Bildungsroman genre, thereby establishing a unique and contemporary Nigerian Bildungsroman for the 21st century. The identity that is being negotiated by the third generation is multi-layered and inclusive, as opposed to the exclusive and unitary identities which are observable in Nigerian novels of the previous two generations. Such inclusivity, as well as the hybrid environments in which this identity is being negotiated, results in a form of ―identity layering‖. Thus, the individual comes into being at the point of intersection, overlap and collision of various modes of self-making. Such ―layering‖ allows the individual, albeit not without challenge, to perform a self-styled identity, which does not necessarily conform to the dictates of society. At the same time, the identity is negotiated by means of an engagement, in the form of intertextual dialoguing, with Nigeria‘s preceding literary generations. The most prominent arenas in which this new identity is negotiated include silenced domestic spaces, religo-cultural traditions, constructs of gender and nation, as well as in multicultural and hybrid communities. The investigation conducted in this thesis will, consequently, also focus on such areas of Nigerian life, as they are portrayed in the focal texts. Various theories of literary analysis (some of which specifically focus on Nigeria), Bildungsroman theory, theories of allegory, (imaginative) nation formation, feminism, gender and performativity, as well as theories of cultural identity and cultural exchanges, will form the critical and theoretical framework within which this investigation will be executed. Chapter One explores how Purple Hibiscus‘s protagonist, Kambili Achike, negotiates her gender identity and voice in order to constitute herself as an independent, self-authoring individual. Chapter Two, which focuses on Everything Good Will Come, investigates the dialectic relationship between Enitan Taiwo‘s national and personal identity, which inevitably leads to her quest to reconceive her gender identity, since national identity, as she finds out, is always an engendered construct. In its analysis of GraceLand, Chapter Three turns to the difficulties that Elvis Oke faces when he attempts to negotiate an alternative masculine identity within a rigid patriarchal system and between the cracks of a fraudulent African modernity.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: In die afgelope paar jaar was daar opwindende, oorspronklike ontwikkelinge in Nigeriese literatuur. Hierdie nuwe literatuurkorpus, wat gesamentlik bekend staan as die ―derde generasie, het onlangs internasionale erkenning ontvang. In hierdie opkomende literatuur, kry die soeke na 'n nuwe, kontemporêre identiteit ‘n sentrale fokus. Terselfdertyd reageer onlangse Nigeriese literêre werke met verskeie ontwikkelinge in die Negeriese nasie: Nigerië se huidige politieke en sosio-ekonomiese situasie, diverse vorme van kultuurverbastering asook 'n toenemende trans-nasionale bewustheid, om maar ‘n paar te noem. Drie 21ste eeuse romans – Chimamanda Nogzi Adichie se Purple Hibiscus (2004), Sefi Atta se Everything Good Will Come (2004) en Chris Abani se GraceLand (2005) – onthul hoe nuwe kanale van identiteidsonderhandeling en –vorming in verskeie kontemporêre Nigeriese situasies ondersoek word. Hierdie studie ondersoek die maniere waarop die Bildungsroman, die roman van selfontwikkeling, as ‗n medium dien waardeur hierdie nuwe identiteit geartikuleer word. Terselfdertyd sal hierdie studie ook worstel met die maniere waarin die artikulasie en soeke na hierdie nuwe identiteit die konvensies van die klassieke Bildungsroman genre hervorm, en daardeur 'n unieke en kontemporêre Nigeriese Bildungsroman vir die 21ste eeu vestig. Die identiteit wat ontwikkel deur die derde generasie is veelvlakkig en inklusief en staan teenoor die eksklusiewe, eenvormige identiteite wat in Nigeriese romans van die vorige twee generasies opgemerk word. Hierdie inklusiwiteit, sowel as die hibriede omgewings waarin hierdie identeite ontwikkel word, lei tot die vorming van identiteitslae. Die individu kom dus tot stand by die kruising, oorvleueling en botsing van verskillende metodes van selfvorming. Hierdie vorming van lae laat die individu toe, alhoewel nie sonder uitdagings nie, om 'n selfgevormde identiteit te hê wat nie noodwndig aan die eise van die gemeenskap voldoen nie. Terselfdertyd word hierdie identiteit onderhandel deur ‗n skakeling met Nigerië se voorafgaande literêre generasies in die vorm van intertekstuele dialoog. Die mees prominente omgewings waar hierdie nuwe identiteit onderhandel word, sluit stilgemaakte huishoudelike spasies, religieus-kulturele tradisies, konstrukte van gender en nasie, sowel as multi-kulturele en hibriede gemeenskappe in. Die ondersoek wat in hierdie tesis uitgevoer sal word, sal daarom ook fokus op hierdie areas van Nigeriese lewe, soos deur die fokale tekste voorgestel. Verskeie teorieë van literêre analise (sommige wat spesifiek op Nigerië fokus), Bildungsromanteorie, teorieë van allegorie, (denkbeeldige) nasievorming, feminisme, gender en performatiwiteit, sowel as teorieë van kultuuridentiteit en -uitruiling, vorm die kritiese en teoretiese raamwerk waarbinne hierdie ondersoek uitgevoer sal word. Hoofstuk een ondersoek hoe Purple Hibiscus se protagonist, Kambili Achike, haar genderidentiteit onderhandel en uitdrukking gee om haarself as onafhanklike, self-skeppende individu te vorm. Hoofstuk twee, wat fokus op Everything Good Will Come, ondersoek die dialektiese verhouding tussen Enitan Taiwo se nasionale en persoonlike identiteit, wat onvermydelik lei tot die herbedenking van haar genderidentiteit, aangesien nasionale identiteit, soos sy uitvind, altyd 'n gekweekte konstruk is. In sy analise van GraceLand, draai Hoofstuk drie om die moeilikhede wat Elvis Oke in die gesig staar wanneer hy probeer om ‘n alternatiewe manlike identiteit te onderhandel in 'n rigiede patriargale sisteem tussen krake van 'n bedrieglike Afrika-moderniteit.
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Williams, Colby D. "Reading 9/11 in 21st Century Apocalyptic Horror Films." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2011. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_theses/116.
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The tragedy and aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks are reflected in American apocalyptic horror films that have been produced since 2001. Because the attacks have occurred only within the past ten years, not much research has been conducted on the effects the attacks have had on the narrative and technological aspects of apocalyptic horror. A survey of American apocalyptic horror will include a brief synopsis of the films, commentary on dominant visual allusions to the 9/11 attacks, and discussion of how the attacks have thematically influenced the genre. The resulting study shows that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, have shaped American apocalyptic horror cinema as shown through imagery, characters, and thematic focus of the genre.
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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.
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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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Nyambi, Oliver. "Nation in crisis : alternative literary representations of Zimbabwe Post-2000." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/85652.
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Thesis (PhD)-- Stellenbosch University, 2013.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The last decade in Zimbabwe was characterised by an unprecedented economic and political crisis. As the crisis threatened to destabilise the political status quo, it prompted in governmental circles the perceived 'need‘ for political containment. The ensuing attempts to regulate the expressive sphere, censor alternative historiographies of the crisis and promote monolithic and self-serving perceptions of the crisis presented a real danger of the distortion of information about the situation. Representing the crisis therefore occupies a contested and discursive space in debates about the Zimbabwean crisis. It is important to explore the nature of cultural interventions in the urgent process of re-inscribing the crisis and extending what is known about Zimbabwe‘s so-called 'lost decade‘. The study analyses literary responses to state-imposed restrictions on information about the state of Zimbabwean society during the post-2000 economic and political crisis which reached the public sphere, with particular reference to creative literature by Zimbabwean authors published during the period 2000 to 2010. The primary concern of this thesis is to examine the efficacy of post-2000 Zimbabwean literature as constituting a significant archive of the present and also as sites for the articulation of dissenting views – alternative perspectives assessing, questioning and challenging the state‘s grand narrative of the crisis. Like most African literatures, Zimbabwean literature relates (directly and indirectly) to definite historical forces and processes underpinning the social, cultural and political production of space. The study mainly invokes Maria Pia Lara‘s theory about the ―moral texture‖ and disclosive nature of narratives by marginalised groups in order to explore the various ways through which such narratives revise hegemonically distorted representations of themselves and construct more inclusive discourses about the crisis. A key finding in this study is that through particular modes of representation, most of the literary works put a spotlight on some of the major talking points in the political and socio-economic debate about the post-2000 Zimbabwean crisis, while at the same time extending the contours of the debate beyond what is agreeable to the powerful. This potential in literary works to deconstruct and transform dominant elitist narratives of the crisis and offering instead, alternative and more representative narratives of the excluded groups‘ experiences, is made possible by their affective appeal. This affective dimension stems from the intimate and experiential nature of the narratives of these affected groups. However, another important finding in this study has been the advent of a distinct canon of hegemonic texts which covertly (and sometimes overtly) legitimate the state narrative of the crisis. The thesis ends with a suggestion that future scholarly enquiries look set to focus more closely on the contribution of creative literature to discourses on democratisation in contemporary Zimbabwe.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Die afgelope dekade in Zimbabwe is gekenmerk deur ‗n ongekende ekonomiese en politiese krisis. Terwyl die krisis gedreig het om die politieke status quo omver te werp, het dit die ‗noodsaak‘ van politieke insluiting aangedui. Die daaropvolgende pogings om die ruimte vir openbaarmaking te reguleer, alternatiewe optekenings van gebeure te sensureer en ook om monolitiese, self-bevredigende waarnemings van die krisis te bevorder, het 'n wesenlike gevaar van distorsie van inligting i.v.m. die krisis meegebring. Voorstellings van die krisis vind sigself dus in 'n gekontesteerde en diskursiewe ruimte in debatte aangaande die Zimbabwiese krisis. Dit is gevolglik belangrik om die aard van kulturele intervensies in die dringende proses om die krisis te hervertolk te ondersoek asook om kennis van Zimbabwe se sogenaamde 'verlore dekade‘ uit te brei. Die studie analiseer literêre reaksies op staats-geïniseerde inkortings van inligting aangaande die sosiale toestand in Zimbabwe gedurende die post-2000 ekonomiese en politiese krisis wat sulke informasie uit die openbare sfeer weerhou het, met spesifieke verwysing na skeppende literatuur deur Zimbabwiese skrywers wat tussen 2000 en 2010 gepubliseer is. Die belangrikste doelwit van hierdie tesis is om die doeltreffendheid van post-2000 Zimbabwiese letterkunde as konstituering van 'n alternatiewe Zimbabwiese 'argief van die huidige‘ en ook as ruimte vir die artikulering van teenstemme – alternatiewe perspektiewe wat die staat se 'groot narratief‘ aangaande die krisis bevraagteken – te ondersoek. Soos met die meeste ander Afrika-letterkundes is daar in hierdie literatuur 'n verband (direk en/of indirek) met herkenbare historiese kragte en prosesse wat die sosiale, kulturele en politiese ruimtes tot stand bring. Die studie maak in die ondersoek veral gebruik van Maria Pia Lara se teorie aangaande die 'morele tekstuur‘ en openbaringsvermoë van narratiewe aangaande gemarginaliseerde groepe ten einde die verskillende maniere waarop sulke narratiewe hegemoniese distorsies in 'offisiële‘ voorstellings van hulself 'oorskryf‘ om meer inklusiewe diskoerse van die krisis daar te stel, na te vors. 'n Kernbevinding van die studie is dat, d.m.v. van spesifieke tipe voorstellings, die meeste van die letterkundige werke wat hier ondersoek word, 'n soeklig plaas op verskeie van die belangrikste kwessies in die politieke en sosio-ekonomiese debatte oor die Zimbabwiese krisis, terwyl dit terselfdertyd die kontoere van die debat uitbrei verby die grense van wat vir die maghebbers gemaklik is. Die potensieel van letterkundige werke om oorheersende, elitistiese narratiewe oor die krisis te dekonstrueer en te omvorm, word moontlik gemaak deur hul affektiewe potensiaal. Hierdie affektiewe dimensie word ontketen deur die intieme en ervaringsgewortelde geaardheid van die narratiewe van die geaffekteerde groepe. Nietemin is 'n ander belangrike bevinding van hierdie studie dat daar 'n onderskeibare kanon van hegemoniese tekste bestaan wat op verskuilde (en soms ook openlike) maniere die staatsnarratief anngaande die krisis legitimeer. Die tesis sluit af met die voorstel dat toekomstige vakkundige studies meer spesifiek sou kon fokus op die bydrae van kreatiewe skryfwerk tot die demokratisering van kontemporêre Zimbabwe.
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Saul, Roshi. "Homesick." Thesis, Swansea University, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.678519.
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Lee, Jason Eng Hun. "'All is not Well in the world' : critical cosmopolitanism in twenty-first century fiction." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10722/197089.
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This thesis considers how contemporary American and British novels at the turn of the century attempt to conceptualize global human, political, economic and ecological risks through different levels of global connectedness. Taking a theoretical approach, the thesis offers up the notion of critical cosmopolitanism as a form of literary critique that might help to connect the field of literature to current sociological debates about globalization and cosmopolitanism. Critical cosmopolitanism is summarized here as follows: a predisposition towards cosmopolitan ideals but also a self-reflexive awareness of its perceived ideological and narrative shortcomings; a desire to conceive of a planetary self-conscious by maneuvering across and between spatial containers like the nation-state; an attempt to map disjunctive flows of global capital onto various narrative ‘worlds’; a type of narrative reflexivity that is transferred onto the reader.
The thesis comprises of two parts. Part 1 considers how the war on terror discourse problematizes novelists’ attempts to imagine planetary connectedness, and their struggles to imbue their readers with a self-reflexivity as an act of critical cosmopolitanism. Chapter 1 discusses the representational challenges that 9/11 presents to the novelist in terms of historicity, and outlines some of the prevailing metanarratives/counternarratives that are projected by them. Chapter 2 considers how alterity is used to critique or negotiate representations of the terrorist persona in novels by Don DeLillo, John Updike and Mohsin Hamid. Pointing to flaws in their narrative forms, these novelists enable their reader to transcend certain ideological boundaries which are denied to their own protagonists. Chapter 3 considers the interrelationship between terror and the spectacle in novels by Don DeLillo, Jonathan Safran Foer and Ian McEwan, looking at how 9/11’s images are able to project itself across the world but still reduce viewers’ capacity for imagining global connectedness.
Part 2 explores how novelists use a range of postmodern strategies to represent the various connections/dislocations made possible by global capital and how it problematize perceptions of human relationships across the world. Global capital is presented as a fluid dynamic that enables greater connectivity across the globe, but it also poses difficulties in one’s ability to realize a genuine cosmopolitanism against the all-incorporating power of the market. Chapter 4 deals with a variety of attempts in novels by William Gibson and Don DeLillo to cognitively map the relations of capital and consumer culture, and to make these complex global systems more intelligible to the reader. Chapter 5 discusses novels by David Mitchell and Rana Dasgupta that experiment with heterotopic, multi-layered narrative platforms to represent interconnecting but geographically separate ‘worlds’, and their ability to project cosmopolitan ideals across these textual horizons of space and time.published_or_final_version
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Moudouma, Moudouma Sydoine. "Re-visiting history, re-negotiating identity in two black British fictions of the 21st Century: Caryl Phillips’s A distant shore (2003) and Buchi Emecheta’s The new tribe (2000)." Thesis, Stellenbosch : University of Stellenbosch, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/2120.
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Thesis (MA (English Literature))--University of Stellenbosch, 2009.Notions of home, belonging, and identity haunt the creative minds of fiction writers belonging to and imagining the African diaspora. Detailing the ways in which two diasporic authors “re-visit history” and “re-negotiate identity”, this thesis grapples with the complexity of these notions and explores the boundaries of displacement and the search for new home-spaces. Finally, it engages with the ways in which both authors produce “new tribes” beyond the bounds of national or racial imaginaries. Following the “introduction”, the second chapter titled “River Crossing” offers a reading of Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore, which features a black African man fleeing his home-country in search of asylum in England. Here, I explore Phillips’s representation of the “postcolonial passage” to the north, and of the “shock of arrival” in England. I then analyse the ways in which the novel enacts a process of “messing with national identity”. While retracing the history of post-Windrush migration to England in order to engage contemporary immigration, A Distant Shore, I argue, also re-visits the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In the final section, I discuss “the economy of asylum” as I explore the fates of the novel’s two central characters: the African asylum-seeker and the outcast white English woman. My reading aims to advance two points made by the novel. Firstly, that individuals are not contained by the nations and cultures they belong to; rather, they are owned by the circumstances that determine the conditions of their displacement. Phillips strives to tell us that individuals remain the sites at which exclusionary discourses and theories about race, belonging and identity are re-elaborated. Secondly, I argue that no matter the effort exerted in trying to forget traumatic pasts in order to re-negotiate identity elsewhere, individuals remain prisoners of the chronotopes they have inhabited at the various stages of their passages. The third chapter focuses on Buchi Emecheta’s The New Tribe. Titled “Returning Home?”, it explores the implications of Emecheta’s reversal of the trajectory of displacement from diasporic locations to Africa. The New Tribe allows for the possibility of re-imagining the Middle Passage and re-figuring the controversial notion of the return to roots. In the novel, a young black British man embarks on a journey to Africa in search of a mythic lost kingdom. While not enabling him to return to roots, this journey eventually encourages him to come to terms with his diasporic identity. Continuing to grapple with notions of “home”, now through the trope of family and by engaging the “rhetoric of return”, I explore how Emecheta re-visits the past in order to produce new identities in the present. Emecheta’s writing reveals in particular the gendered consequences of the “rhetoric of return”. Narratives of return to Africa, the novel suggests, revisit colonial fantasies and foster patriarchal gender bias. The text juxtaposes such metaphors against the lived experience of black women in order to demythologise the return to Africa and to redirect diasporic subjects to the diasporic locations that constitute genuine sites for re-negotiating identity.
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Martinez, Diane L. "Developing Global Communication Skills for Technical Communicators in the 21st Century: Researching the Language of Collaboration and Cooperation in the Bologna Process." DigitalCommons@USU, 2012. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/etd/1331.
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Professional communication programs must be aware of the complexities and nuances of contemporary global communication and adapt their instruction to reflect these realities. Thus, there is a need for research efforts in global communication that provide insight into this type of communication.
This dissertation is a study of the language of collaboration and cooperation in professional and global contexts. Using Burke’s theories of identification and terministic screens, cooperation theory, activity theory, and a brief historical perspective on the European Union, I conducted a rhetorical analysis of Bologna Process documentation to study how this large and diverse membership is evolving and moving toward identification. Specifically, I explored the answers to three questions: How were the common goals of the Bologna Process rhetorically developed in the ministerial communiqués? In what ways was the goal of democracy or equal representation demonstrated in the documentation? How did members negotiate between self-interest and the best interests of the group?
In professional communication where specificity and clarity often dominate conversations regarding effective writing, the Bologna Process demonstrates the opposite. Vague terminology is one of the most noticeable rhetorical aspects of the ministerial communiqués. Preliminary readings may deem such documents as political documents intended to deceive readers or mask accountability, but further analysis into the rhetorical situation of the Bologna membership indicate vague terminology can be seen as a way of giving members ownership of the Process and investing in the welfare of the group.
Further analysis also indicates that vague terminology and document hierarchy can create a democratic environment by encouraging social connections. Because working groups must continually reinterpret the language in the ministerial communiqués, the abstract and ambiguous terms in the communiqués invites participation from all members to debate and discuss the language from a standpoint of self-interest as well as the group’s interest.
Effective collaboration and cooperation may not always be the result of clear directives as is often taught in professional communication courses. Instead, the Bologna Process documentation demonstrates that vague terminology may be a rather effective strategy for diplomacy and for encouraging democracy, especially with diverse multinational group members.
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Njovane, Thandokazi. ""The wings of whipped butterflies" : trauma, silence and representation of the suffering child in selected contemporary African short fiction." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004214.
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This dissertation, which examines the literary representation of childhood trauma, is held together by three threads of inquiry. Firstly, I examine the stylistic devices through which three contemporary African writers – NoViolet Bulawayo, Uwem Akpan, and Mia Couto – engage with the subject of childhood trauma in five of their short stories: “Hitting Budapest”; “My Parents’ Bedroom” and “Fattening for Gabon”; and “The Day Mabata-bata Exploded” and “The Bird-Dreaming Baobab,” respectively. In each of these narratives, the use of ingén(u)s in the form of child narrators and/or focalisers instantiates a degree of structural irony, premised on the cognitive discrepancy between the protagonists’ perceptions and those of the implied reader. This structural irony then serves to underscore the reality that, though in a general sense the precise nature of traumatic experience cannot be directly communicated in language, this is exacerbated in the case of children, because children’s physical and psychological frameworks are underdeveloped. Consequently, children’s exposure to trauma and atrocity results in disruptions of both personal and communal notions of safety and security which are even more severe than those experienced by adults. Secondly, I analyse the political, cultural and economic factors which give rise to the traumatic incidents depicted in the stories, and the child characters’ interpretations and responses to these exigencies. Notions of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, identity and community, victimhood and survival, agency and disempowerment are discussed here in relation to the context of postcolonial Africa and the contemporary realities of chronic poverty, genocide, child-trafficking, the aftermath of civil war, and the legacies of colonialism and racism. Thirdly, this dissertation inspects the areas of congruence and divergence between trauma theory, literary scholarship on trauma narratives, and literary attempts to represent atrocity and trauma despite what is widely held to be the inadequacy of language – and therefore representation – to this task. There are certain differences between the three authors’ depictions of children’s experiences of trauma, despite the fact that the texts all grapple with the aporetic nature of trauma and the paradox of representing the unrepresentable. To this end, they utilise various strategies – temporal disjunctions and fragmentations, silences and lacunae, elements of the fantastical and surreal, magical realism, and instances of abjection and dissociation – to gesture towards the inexpressible, or that which is incommensurable with language. I argue that, ultimately, it is the endings of these stories which suggest the unrepresentable nature of trauma. Traumatic experience poses a challenge to representational conventions and, in its resistance, encourages a realisation that new ways of writing and speaking about trauma in the African continent, particularly with regards to children, are needed.Adobe Acrobat 9.54 Paper Capture Plug-in
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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.
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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).
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Haines, Katherine Jane. "Literary networks and the making of 21st century African literature in English : Kwani Trust, Farafina, Cassava Republic Press and the production of cultural memory." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2017. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/67649/.
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Mbao, Wamuwi. "Imagined pasts, suspended presents South African literature in the contemporary moment." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002244.
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Scholarship on Post-Apartheid South African literature has engaged in various ways with the politics of identity, but its dominant mode has been to understand the literature through an anxious rupture-continuation paradigm in which the Apartheid past manifests itself in the present. However, in the contemporary moment, there are writers whose texts attempt to forge new paths in their depictions of identities both individual and collective. These texts are useful in contemplating how South Africans experience belonging and dislocation in various contexts. In this thesis, I consider a range of contemporary South African texts via the figure of lifewriting. My analysis demonstrates that, while many texts in the contemporary moment have displayed new and more complex registers of perception concerning the issue of ‘race’, there is a need for more expansive and fluid conceptions of crafting identity, as regards the politics of space and how this intersects with issues of belonging and identity. That is, much South African literature still continues along familiar trajectories of meaning, ones which are not well-equipped to understand issues that bedevil the country at this particular historical moment, which are grounded in the political compromises that came to pass during the ‘time of transition’. These issues include the recent spate of xenophobia attacks, which have yet to be comprehensively and critically analysed in the critical domain, despite the work of theorists such as David Coplan. Such events indicate the need for more layered and intricate understandings of how our national identity is structured: Who may belong? Who is excluded? In what situations? This thesis engages with these questions in order to determine how systems of power are constructed, reified, mediated, reproduced and/or resisted in the country’s literature. To do this, I perform an attentive reading of the mosaic image of South African culture that emerges through a selection of contemporary works of literature. The texts I have selected are notable for the ways in which they engage with the epistemic protocol of coming to know the Other and the self through the lens of the Apartheid past. That engagement may take the form of a reassertion, reclamation, displacement, or complication of selfhood. Given that South African identities are overinscribed in paradigms in which the Apartheid past is primary, what potentials and limits are presently encountered when writing of the self/selves is attempted? My study goes beyond simply asserting that not all groups have equal access to representation. Rather, I demonstrate that the linear shaping of the South African culture of letters imposes certain restrictions on who may work within it. Here, the politics of publishing and the increasing focus on urban spaces, such that other spaces become marginalized in ways that reflect the proclivities of the reading public, are subjected to close scrutiny. Overall, my thesis aims to promote a rethinking of South African culture, and how that culture is represented in, and defined through, our literature.
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Peters, Maria Verena [Verfasser]. "Crossover literature and age in crisis at the turn of the 21st century : Harry Potter’s kidults and the Twilight moms / Maria Verena Peters." Siegen : Universitätsbibliothek der Universität Siegen, 2018. http://d-nb.info/1161942939/34.
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Mbao, Wamuwi. "Unavowable communities : mapping representational excess in South African literary culture, 2001-2011." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/80124.
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Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2013.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis takes as its subject matter a small field of activity in South African fiction in English, a field which I provisionally title the post-transitional moment. It brings together several works of literature that were published between 2004 and 2011. In so doing, it recognises that there can be no delineation of the field except in the most tenuous of senses: as Michael Chapman asserts, such “phases of chronology are ordering conveniences rather than neatly separable entities” (South African Literature 2). In attempting to take a reading of this field, I draw on discussions of the innumerable post-transitional flows and trajectories of meaning advanced by critical scholars such as Ashraf Jamal, Sarah Nuttall, Louise Bethlehem and others. In this thesis, I trace the “enigmatic and acategorical” (Jamal, “Bullet Through the Church” 11) dimension of this field through several works by South African authors. These works are at once singular and communal in their expression: they are singular in the sense that they are unique literary events1; they are communal because they share a particular force in their writing, a force that resists thematic bestowing. The schism between these conflicting/contiguous poles forms the basis of this thesis. I examine the works of a diverse selection of South African authors, finding in them a common, if discontinuous, seam in their treatment of excess, by which I mean the irreducible surplus that always demarcates the limits of representation. I find that these works each engage a movement towards the aporetic moment opened up by their characters’ experience of the traumatic. To be sure, these particular works of literature are notable for their exploration of ideas of alterity, loss and the capacity for survival in the routines of ‘South African’ lives. I use literature as the primary site of navigation for this enquiry because, as the scholars cited above have observed, literature is often a generator of meanings and a space where complex ideas about identity are explored and played out through the medium of the everyday. I recognise here that in the post-transitional moment, literature’s affective capacity in the world of action is limited – in Simon Critchley’s terms, it is ‘almost nothing.’ My thesis seizes this almost as the site of exploration. Taking as its starting point the existential question ‘have we learnt to imagine ourselves in other ways?’ I propose a number of positions from which these post-transitional works of literature might be read. The first chapter attempts to give account of the theoretical problem that attends to the reading of that which exceeds language’s capacity to invest with meaning. I use works by Diane Awerbuck, Annelie Botes, Shaun Johnson and Kgebetli Moele to inform my argument. In the next chapter, I explicate the problem of excess via a reading of Mark Behr’s Kings of the Water (2009). I then trace the aporetic nature of Otherness as it occurs in J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime (2009), paying particular attention to the ways in which that novel performs a refusal of meaning. Finally, I read Ishtiyaq Shukri’s The Silent Minaret (2005) as a work that posits the failure of alterity as a launching point for future ethical action. The burden of this thesis, as I see it, lies in the apophastic nature of its subject matter. In embarking upon an exploration of the incommensurable, my argument is for an ethics of reading that seeks to explicate the ways in which literature works by thinking through its affective capacity the better to affirm its performative dimensions.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Die onderwerp van hierdie proefskrif behels ‘n klein veld in Engelse Suid-Afrikaanse fiksie wat ek voorlopig met die term “post-oorgangsmoment” sal aandui. Dit bring verskeie letterkundige werke byeen wat tussen 2004 en 2011 gepubliseer is. Hierdie kunsmatige afbakening hou rekening met Michael Chapman se stelling dat “phrases of chronology are ordering conveniences rather than neatly separable entities” (South African Writing 2). In ‘n poging om hierdie aangeduide veld te lees, put ek heelwat uit besprekings wat tans gevoer word oor die ontelbare betekenistrajekte van die post-oorgangsmoment deur kritici soos Meg Samuelson, Leon de Kock, Ashraf Jamal, Sarah Nuttall, Louise Bethlehem en andere. In hierdie proefskrif skets ek die “enigmatic and acategorical” (Jamall, “Bullet” 11) aspekte van die aangeduide veld soos dit uiting vind in verskeie werke van Suid-Afrkaanse outeurs. Hierdie werke is terselfdertyd alleenstaande en gemeenskaplik in hul uitdrukking: hulle is alleenstaande omdat hulle unieke literêre gebeurtenisse verteenwoordig en gemeenskaplik omdat hulle ‘n spesifieke impuls deel, ‘n impuls wat tematiese kategorisering teenstaan. Die kloof tussen hierdie opponderende/naburige pole vorm die grondslag van hierdie proefskrif. Ek ondersoek die werk van ‘n diverse seleksie Suid-Afrikaanse outeurs en vind ‘n gemene, dog diskontinue, soom in die manier waarop hulle oorskot hanteer, dit wil sê, die onreduseerbare surplus wat alle representasie begrens. Ek vind dat hierdie werke elkeen ‘n weg na die aporetiese moment oopskryf deur die karakters se ervarings van trauma. Hierdie letterkundige werke word ook gekenmerk deur hulle verkenning van idees soos alteriteit, verlies en die oorlewingskapasiteit in die roetines van ‘Suid-Afrikaanse’ lewens. Ek gebruik literêre werke as die primêre navorsingsveld vir hierdie ondersoek aangesien die letterkunde dikwels as ‘n genereerder van betekenis dien en as ‘n ruimte funksioneer waar komplekse idees rondom identiteit deur die medium van die alledaagse verken kan word. Ek is bewus dat die letterkunde ‘n beperkte affektiewe kapasiteit in die wêreld van handeling in die post-oorgangsmoment besit – dit is bykans niks, soos Simon Critchley dit stel. My proefskrif betrek hierdie bykans as brandpunt vir die ondersoek. Ek stel verskeie posisies voor vanwaar hierdie post-oorgang literêre werke gelees kan word deur die beantwoording van die eksistensiële vraag of ons geleer het om onsself op ander maniere te verbeel as uitgangspunt te gebruik. Die eerste hoofstuk poog om die teoretiese probleem te omskryf wat ontstaan as ‘n mens probeer om die oorskot van taal se betekenisgewende vermoë te lees. In die daaropvolgende hoofstuk belig ek die probleem van oorskot deur Mark Behr se Kings of the Water (2009) te lees. Daarna skets ek die aporetiese aard van Andersheid soos dit in JM Coetzee se Summertime (2009) voorkom, deur spesifiek ook aandag te skenk aan die maniere waarop die roman ‘n weiering van betekenis aanbied. Laastens lees ek Ishtiyaq Shukri se The Silent Minaret (2005) as ‘n werk wat die mislukking van alteriteit as ‘n beginpunt gebruik om toekomstige etiese handelings te rig. Die hooftema van hierdie proefskrif lê myns insiens in die apofastiese aard van die onderwerpsmateriaal. Deur ‘n ondersoek na die onmeetbare te onderneem, staan ek ook ‘n bevrydings-etiek van lees voor wat poog om die manier waarop literêre tekste werk te verhelder deur die affektiewe vermoë van literêre tekste te bedink.
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Hopper, Keith. "Imagining otherwise : Neil Jordan's counter-narratives." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.669873.
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Lombard, Erica. "The profits of the past : nostalgic white writing of post-apartheid South Africa." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:bb2c9ae1-e551-4931-9a44-3197fdc6e010.
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Drawing on relevant theory from memory studies, literary criticism, sociology, reception studies and book history, this thesis examines the prevalence of nostalgia in white South African writing of the post-apartheid period. It identifies the numerous and remarkably conventional texts by white authors that proliferated in this time which might be described as nostalgic, arguing that these constitute a key genre of post-apartheid South African literature. In seeking to offer an explanation for why these nostalgic forms predominated in this period, this study takes into consideration the full "communications circuit" of a book i.e. the life-cycle of a book from production to consumption. Consequently, it employs an interdisciplinary framework to examine nostalgic literature from the perspectives of both the producers and consumers of texts. It is argued, ultimately, that post-apartheid nostalgic writing was particularly involved in the protection of certain formulations and structures of whiteness at individual, collective and institutional levels. The argument unfolds in three phases, each of which explores the value of nostalgia and nostalgic white writing in a different but related sphere: namely, literature, memory, and the market. The first phase of the argument provides a literary critical reading of the generic hallmarks of these novels, considering a range of representative texts, including works by Mark Behr, André Brink, Justin Cartwright, J. M. Coetzee, Lisa Fugard, Christopher Hope, Jo-Anne Richards, and Rachel Zadok. The second examines the allure of nostalgia and nostalgic books for the writers and readers of this literature, drawing on sociological studies of post-apartheid white South African identity and reader-response theory to analyse a selection of online and print reviews by readers. In the third phase, the thesis utilises a book historical approach to investigate the influence of various literary markets and the publishing industry, both local and global, in shaping the nostalgia trend.
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Flett, Edward Charles. "Virtual frontiers and the technological state : contemporary American narratives in a global context." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:608353cc-62d8-496c-b8df-d79de028f03e.
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This thesis analyses a series of threshold states located within contemporary culture. It investigates the effects of technology on spatial relations and human conditions in recent centuries, with a specific interest in the rise of virtual phenomena and the ongoing process of virtualisation. Key to the discussion is measuring the extent to which America and its narratives have influenced the virtual layer attached to contemporary global technological culture. Prevalent within this framework is the idea of the frontier as an idealised outpost, a lingering threshold state that is scrutinised in terms of its metaphoric power and socio-historical relevance. The research examines the points of interaction between the frontier, the virtual, and recent technology, as well as the areas in which technology has been produced, distributed, and consumed, as a means of building on ‘virtual frontiers’ and the ‘technological state’ as original critical concepts. Chapter one, from a socio-cultural and historical perspective, develops the idea of California as the location where the frontier spirit dispersed, transferring to an extent from land to body. Rich in posthuman ambience, the state functions as a hub from which to negotiate the position of the body in relation to the frontier: to look at the body as a frontier in itself, its virtualisation, and the now perennial dialectic between the positive and negative effects of technology on human/non-human interactivity. From the ashes of the 1960s, pockets of urban youth living in America’s inner cities gave birth to a subculture that is now globally recognised as Hip Hop. Despite Hip Hop always being a potent reflective surface, chapter two assesses its development and continuing capacity as a virtual and technological form of expression. In the decades between Malcolm X’s assassination and the election of President Obama, how has Hip Hop changed as a virtual arena and mode of resistance, as it has simultaneously been incorporated into the American mainstream? Indeed, as a cultural object and virtual space with the potential to carry evocative messages across thresholds, did Hip Hop even survive this transition? And what were the ramifications of its transformation? The third chapter examines the shadows emanating from the terrorist attacks on the US in 2001. The narratives from 9/11 are considered while investigating a diverse selection of transnational texts that touch on the subject, including works from Don DeLillo, Amy Waldman, Martin Amis, and Frédéric Beigbeder. Also considered is the day’s social and historical significance, and its power as a virtual event. More specifically, the impact on time, perception, and narrative structure is observed, each element appearing in the shadows that stretch out from the decades before and beyond the events of that clear blue September morning. Through characters in recent fiction by William Gibson and Hari Kunzru, the final chapter scans American consumption and the representations projected out from its brands and advertising. Within technological states now transmitted globally, the chapter reflects on the consequences of consumer culture as we venture further into the virtual and its realities, drawn through what Jean Baudrillard calls an irreconcilable conflict between ‘total integration’ and the ‘dual form’.
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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.
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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.
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Glover, Jayne Ashleigh. ""A complex and delicate web" : a comparative study of selected speculative novels by Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing and Marge Piercy." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002241.
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This thesis examines selected speculative novels by Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing and Marge Piercy. It argues that a specifiable ecological ethic can be traced in their work – an ethic which is explored by them through the tensions between utopian and dystopian discourses. The first part of the thesis begins by theorising the concept of an ecological ethic of respect for the Other through current ecological philosophies, such as those developed by Val Plumwood. Thereafter, it contextualises the novels within the broader field of science fiction, and speculative fiction in particular, arguing that the shift from a critical utopian to a critical dystopian style evinces their changing treatment of this ecological ethic within their work. The remainder of the thesis is divided into two parts, each providing close readings of chosen novels in the light of this argument. Part Two provides a reading of Le Guin’s early Hainish novels, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Word for World is Forest and The Dispossessed, followed by an examination of Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, Lessing’s The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five, and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The third, and final, part of the thesis consists of individual chapters analysing the later speculative novels of each author. Piercy’s He, She and It, Le Guin’s The Telling, and Atwood’s Oryx and Crake are all scrutinised, as are Lessing’s two recent ‘Ifrik’ novels. This thesis shows, then, that speculative fiction is able to realise through fiction many of the ideals of ecological thinkers. Furthermore, the increasing dystopianism of these novels reflects the greater urgency with which the problem of Othering needs to be addressed in the light of the present global ecological crisis.
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Flynn, Warren. "Fragments of the moon (novel) ; and." University of Western Australia. School of Social and Cultural Studies, 2008. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2008.0073.
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Fragments of the Moon is a novel set mostly in South Korea, examining relationships between people, interpersonal spaces, architectural spaces and landscape through a cross-cultural context. Matt, a graduate architect from Perth, Australia, finds himself increasingly vulnerable to cultural confusion as he adjusts to life away from his home and friends. Having initially assumed that Seoul's western facade echoes its social dynamic, Matt increasingly discovers that the Confucianism which underpins much of contemporary Korean society makes all relationships far more complex than his assumptions had allowed. Together with a Canadian student who is seeking to find the essence of a different Korea through her investigation of Buddhism, and through meeting diverse Korean characters, readers will discover several of the many facets of contemporary Korean culture. Readers will be encouraged to test the slippery surfaces on which familiar and unfamiliar attitudes to bodies, landscape and created spaces rest. 'Body, Space, Ideas of Home: Cross-cultural Perspectives' (thesis) The thesis examines the interaction of body space, architectural space, landscape, and emotional states in contemporary literary fiction from several cultural perspectives. Bodies, landscapes, and architectural spaces are shown to be devices through which contemporary authors with different cultural backgrounds have expressed character and explored ideas, especially thematic concerns related to cultural or cross-cultural confusion or understanding. Notions of 'feeling at home' and 'being alien' are investigated through the work of authors who either have a cross-cultural heritage (e.g. Jhumpa Lahiri a Bengali/American), or who write about a culture which is not their own (e.g. Dianne Highbridge, an Australian writing about Japan). Several chosen authors explore the relationships between the spiritual and the physical, the metaphysical and the corporeal. These elements are particularly highlighted when examining the narratives of Tim Winton (The Riders, 1994) and Simone Lazaroo (The World Waiting To Be Made, 1994); and two of Japan's most popular writers, Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood, 2000) and Banana Yoshimoto (Lizard, 1995). For some writers, this exploration of spaces forms the focal point of their work; for others, it is an important facet of their narrative world, which helps to ground their writing for contemporary readers whose own backgrounds must also influence their understandings.
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Albertson, Jennifer. "In two minds (novel) ; and A singular voice (dissertation)." University of Western Australia. English and Cultural Studies Discipline Group, 2008. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2008.0105.
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Temperton, Barbara. "The Lighthouse keeper's wife, and other stories (novel) ; and Ceremony for ground : narrative, landscape, myth (dissertation)." University of Western Australia. English, Communication and Cultural Studies Discipline Group, 2007. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2008.0005.
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The focus of this project is on poetry, narrative, landscape and myth, and the palimpsest and/or hybridisation created when these four areas overlay each other. Our local communities' engagement with myth-making activity provides a golden opportunity for contemporary poets to continue the practice long established by our forebears of utilising folklore and legendary material as sources for poetry. Keeping in mind the words of M. H. Abrams who said
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O'Brien, Lauren Leigh. "Self, family and society in Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter, Rachel Zadok's Gem Squash Tokoloshe, and Doris Lessings's The Grass is Singing." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1006771.
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This dissertation examines Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter, Rachel Zadok’s Gem Squash Tokoloshe, and Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing. It focuses on the development of each of the protagonists’ identities in three realms: the individual, the familial and the societal. Additionally, it is concerned with the specific socio-political contexts in which the novels are set. It employs psychoanalytic and historical materialist frameworks in order to engage with the disparate areas of identity with which it is concerned. The introduction establishes the analytical perspective of the dissertation and explores the network of theoretical frames on which the dissertation relies. Additionally, it contextualises each of the novels, within their historical contexts, as well as in relation to the theory. The first chapter examines Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter. It focuses on the protagonist’s assertion of an identity independent of her father’s role as a political activist, and her eventual acceptance of the universal difficulty in negotiating a life which is both private and political. The second chapter, on Rachel Zadok’s Gem Squash Tokoloshe, examines the relationship between the protagonist’s traumatic experiences as a child and her inability to assert an identity as an adult. The similarities between the protagonist’s attempts to address her traumas and thereby create herself anew and South Africa’s employment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a means to acknowledge and engage with its traumatic history is of import. The third chapter which deals with Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing traces the life of its protagonist, whose identifications remain childish as a result of having witnessed her parents’ difficult relationship. Her understanding of the world is informed by a rigid, binary understanding, which is ultimately disrupted by her relationship with a black employee. She is incapable of readjusting her frame of reference, however, and ultimately goes mad. I conclude that, while my focus has been on personal, familial and social identifications, the standard terms in which identity is examined, namely, race, class, and gender, are present in each of the three tiers of identity with which I have been concerned.
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Wyrill, Beth Alexandra. "The interface of history and fiction in Russel Brownlee’s Garden of the plagues, Ingrid Winterbach’s To hell With Cronjé, and Etienne van Heerden’s The long silence of Mario Salviati." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1015517.
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Both historiographical and literary practices have undergone revision in recent years in attempting to address the inheritance of nineteenth-century realism. Since the object of realist stylistics, employed in both the writing of fiction and history, is to render authorship authoritative or even invisible, the ideological import of these narratives is often such that the constructedness of the historical record and its absences are veiled. In developments beginning in the 1980s with the advent of ‘New Historicism’ and with the emergence of postmodern literary techniques, the interface of literature and history became of seminal importance, since both were now credited as being products of narrative and discourse, and hence, to varying degrees, of the literary imagination. This movement intersects interestingly with developments in postcolonial studies, since it is the voices of the marginalized and disempowered colonized peoples that are routinely co-opted and excised from nineteenth-century realist histories. These concerns are now being fully explored in the literature of the contemporary post-transitional South African moment, since authors in this country seemingly now feel freed up to look back to histories that precede the immediate traumas of apartheid. The concern, in relation to apartheid developments but also on a broader universal scale, is this: if history is viewed as perpetual emergences of modernities, then one of the great absences in the record is the historical determinants of any given epistemology. The attempt to recreate such an epistemological genealogy is thus simultaneously postcolonial, historiographical, and literary. Russel Brownlee’s Garden of the Plagues (2005), Ingrid Winterbach’s To Hell with Cronjé (2010), and Etienne van Heerden’s The Long Silence of Mario Salviati (2002) attempt to bridge this gap in the recorded sensibilities of any historical moment by representing a ‘lived experience’ of the past, and in the process imaginatively recreating the cultural, historical and psychological locations of the proponents of an emerging modernity. This study concerns itself with the ways in which these authors address the influence of realist historiography through the use of literary innovations that allow for the departure from realist stylistics. Most commonly, all three authors draw on forms of magic realism, but multiple refigurings and recombinations of notions of temporality, narrative, and characterization likewise work to defamiliarize the once stable discourse of history.
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Bones, Gail Nelson. "The six pillars of character in 21st century Newbery Award Books." Lynchburg, Va. : Liberty University, 2010. http://digitalcommons.liberty.edu.
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Hadgraft, Nicholas. "English fifteenth century book structures." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 1998. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1349380/.
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In discussing fifteenth century book structures the thesis describes those collections from which it's survey (of over three hundred bindings) was drawn. It explores the physical archaeology of the book, and considers the context of book production in the late medieval period. The technical skills of the bookbinder are considered in detail, as are the tools, materials and technologies used. The demise of the wooden boarded medieval book is compared with the great age of Romanesque bookbinding. In focusing on the collections held by Cambridge libraries, it was inevitable that there should be a strong concentration on the work of bookbinders from that city, but those from Oxford and London are well represented. The work of a number of provincial binders is also given attention. Many of the books studied were undergoing conservation work whilst being surveyed, and this has provided much information which would otherwise have never been revealed. In particular it was possible to make a detailed study of sewing techniques, and of the changing materials used in the making of sewings. Utilising a microcomputer with a powerful spreadsheet programme, the survey of three hundred books explores all aspects of English fifteenth century binding in wooden boards. Each book was catalogued in terms of nearly three hundred questions in computerised format, and the results were turned into graphs for percentage interpretation. In addition every book was recorded on a detailed survey form, supported by photographs, drawings and diagrams to provide as full a set of details as possible. The results were scrutinised to consider the impact of the growing use of paper and of the invention of printing with movable type. The cultural, social and economic demands of the medieval age are brought together as aspects which influenced the development of the book structure. The way in which books were made and used is considered in depth. The impact of mainstream historical developments in politics, religion and education are also factors which played a vital role in the history of the book during this period. The codex (in original condition) is a "time capsule", to quote Christopher Clarkson, and this research seeks to explore book production in one of the most vital centuries of its history.
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Zhou, Bo. "Socioeconomic Achievements of Asian Americans in the 21st Century." Thesis, State University of New York at Albany, 2018. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10930764.
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This dissertation research is a comprehensive study of Asian Americans' socioeconomic achievements. It aims to measure changes of Asian Americans' socioeconomic achievements between 2005 and 2015, to examine the glass ceiling facing Asian Americans, and to evaluate the impacts of the Great Recession and concentration on occupational attainments of Asian Americans.
Using American Community Survey data, I attempt to answer the following questions. First, how did the patterns of Asian Americans' socioeconomic achievements changed over a decade between 2005 and 2015? Second, how thick and persistent is the glass ceiling faced by Asian immigrants and U.S.-born Asians? Third, did Asian Americans benefit from geographical and industrial concentration? Fourth, what was the impacts of the Great Recession on Asian Americans?
The potential contributions of this study are as follows. First and foremost, it provides substantiate empirical findings on glass ceiling facing Asian Americans. Moreover, it clarifies the effects of industrial and geographical concentration on each of the major Asian American groups. It examines how glass ceiling facing Asian Americans being strengthened during the Great Recession. In addition to the theoretical contributions, it also improves research methods through applying synthetic cohort analysis on the study of glass ceiling.
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Rehan, Naveed. "Rationalism and D. H. Lawrence : a 21st century perspective." Thesis, Montana State University, 2004. http://etd.lib.montana.edu/etd/2004/rehan/RehanN04.pdf.
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Since the time of the Greek philosopher Plato, Western intellectuals have relied on logos or \"the word\" to make philosophical propositions about the world humans find themselves in. Logos or \"the word\" has generally been privileged over mythos or pathos, denoting emotion and feeling. This privileging has sometimes been challenged by intellectuals within the Western tradition. D. H. Lawrence was the most vocal and passionate writer to do so in modern times. This text traces the development of rationalism in the Western tradition and Lawrence\'s resistance to it. It also examines modern theoretical developments and notes their convergence with Lawrence\'s ideas. It concludes by claiming that the postmodern intellectual climate in the West tends towards a critique of rationalism, much like Lawrence.
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Bohlmann, Markus P. J. "Moving Rhizomatically: Deleuze's Child in 21st Century American Literature and Film." Thèse, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/23140.
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My dissertation critiques Western culture’s vertical command of “growing up” to adult completion (rational, heterosexual, married, wealthy, professionally successful) as a reductionist itinerary of human movement leading to subjective sedimentations. Rather, my project proposes ways of “moving rhizomatically” by which it advances a notion of a machinic identity that moves continuously, contingently, and waywardly along less vertical, less excruciating and more horizontal, life-affirmative trails. To this end, my thesis proposes a “rhizomatic semiosis” as extrapolated from the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to put forward a notion of language and, by implication, subjectivity, as dynamic and metamorphic. Rather than trying to figure out who the child is or what it experiences consciously, my project wishes to embrace an elusiveness at the heart of subjectivity to argue for continued identity creation beyond the apparently confining parameters of adulthood. This dissertation, then, is about the need to re-examine our ways of growing beyond the lines of teleological progression. By turning to Deleuze’s child, an intangible one that “makes desperate attempts to carry out a performance that the psychoanalyst totally misconstrues” (A Thousand Plateaus 13), I wish to shift focus away from the hierarchical, binary, and ideal model of “growing up” and toward a notion of movement that makes way for plural identities in their becoming. This endeavour reveals itself in particular in the work of John Wray, Todd Field, Peter Cameron, Sara Prichard, Michael Cunningham, and Cormac McCarthy, whose work has received little or no attention at all—a lacuna in research that exists perhaps due to these artists’ innovative approach to a minor literature that promotes the notion of a machinic self and questions the dominant modes of Western culture’s literature for, around, and of children.
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Chang, Kwai-yan. "Will the English language become the single world language in the 21st century?" Click to view the E-thesis via HKUTO, 2001. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/B42575709.
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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.
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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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Maltby, Deborah K. Phegley Jennifer. "Reading "Hodge" nineteenth-century English rural workers /." Diss., UMK access, 2007.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Dept. of English and Dept. of History. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2007."A dissertation in English and history." Advisor: Jennifer Phegley. Typescript. Vita. Title from "catalog record" of the print edition Description based on contents viewed Nov. 13, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 299-321). Online version of the print edition.
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Dedman, Stephen. "Techronomicon (novel) ; and The weapon shop : the relationship between American science fiction and the US military (dissertation)." University of Western Australia. School of Social and Cultural Studies, 2008. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2008.0093.
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Techronomicon Techronomicon is a science fiction novel that examines far-future military actions from several different perspectives. Human beings have colonized several planets with help from the enigmatic and more technologically advanced Zhir, who gave spaceships and habitable worlds to those they deemed suitable and their descendants. The Joint Expeditionary Force is the military arm of the Universal Faith, called in when conflicts arise that the Faith decides are beyond the local government and militia and require their intervention. Leneveldt and Roader are JEF officers assigned to Operation Techronomicon, investigating what seems to be a Zhir-built defence shield around the planet Lassana. Another JEF company sent to Kalaabhavan after the murder of the planets Confessor-General loses its CO to a land-mine, and Lieutenant Hellerman reluctantly accepts command. Chevalier, a civilian pilot, takes refugees fleeing military-run detention camps on Ararat to a biological research station on otherwise uninhabited Lila. The biologists on Lila discover a symbiote that enables humans to photosynthesize, which comes to the attention of Operation Techronomicon and the JEF's Weapons Research Division. Leneveldt and Roeder, frustrated by the lack of progress on Lassana, are sent to Lila to detain the biologists, who flee into the swamps. Hellerman's efforts to restore peace on Kalaabhavan are frustrated by the Confessors, and his company finds itself besieged by insurgents. The novel explores individuals' motives for choosing or rejecting violence and/or military service; the lessons they learn about themselves and their enemies; and the possible results of attempts to forcibly suppress ideas.
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West, Mark Peter. "Between times : 21st century American fiction and the long sixties." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2014. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5621/.
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This thesis examines conceptions of time and history in five American novels published between 1995 and 2012 which take as their subject matter events associated with the counterculture and New Left of the 1960s and 1970s. The thesis is organized around close readings of five novels. The first chapter focuses on Jennifer Egan’s The Invisible Circus (1995) and argues that it incorporates a number of problematic temporal experiences which have the effect of establishing a key tension of all the novels considered here: the concern with contextualizing and historicizing particular events and cultural atmospheres while remaining faithful to utopian ideas of radical change. Chapter two argues that Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document (2006) is oriented both structurally and thematically towards a future in which the relationship between the 1960s and 1990s will more clearly understandable. The third chapter examines the way Christopher Sorrentino’s Trance (2005) explores the multiplicitous nature of historical narratives, and how he distinguishes between those narratives and a conception of the bare events beneath them. The focus of chapter four is Lauren Groff’s Arcadia (2012) and examines how conceptions of the relationship between humans and nature influence theories of time, mythic histories and post-apocalyptic narratives. The final chapter on David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (2011) argues that the tension between continuation and change found in the conversion narrative is partly reconciled by a conception of time that allows the moment of radical utopian change (the moment of conversion) to be one of re-entrance into history. At stake throughout is the way these novels’ interpretation of particular events and larger cultural tendencies reveals and makes manifest various processes of historicization. I maintain a dual focus on the way these novels present historicization as something undertaken by individuals and societies and the ways in which these novels themselves not only engage in historicizations of the period but are in various ways self-conscious about doing so. If contemporary scholarship on the emergence of what has been called post-postmodern literature (Stephen J. Burn, Andrew Hoberek, Adam Kelly, Caren Irr) identifies a return to temporal concerns in recent fiction, the readings that comprise my thesis also make use of conceptions of time and history by Mark Currie, Jacques Derrida, Reinhold Niebuhr, Norman Mailer, Christopher Lasch, and Robert N. Bellah (among others) in order to ask: what are the particular material contours of the experiences of time and history manifested in these recent examples of the ‘sixties novel’?
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Wragg, Stefany J. "Vernacular literature in eighth- and ninth-century Mercia." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2017. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:32fa907f-158e-4dd6-ab1b-05c7689b6e79.
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This dissertation reads a group of Old English prose and verse texts that linguistic evidence suggests probably originated in Mercia, within the context of eighth- and ninth-century Mercian cultural and political history. This approach complements and supplements existing scholarship, offering evidence that the theory that a culture of vernacular translation and composition thrived in Mercia has fruitful explanatory powers. It articulates a theoretical narrative of the early period of Old English literature, and identifies two major trends that can be linked to the political and material culture of Mercia in the eighth and ninth centuries. The first is the proliferation of vernacular hagiography, both in prose and verse. In the first chapter, I offer an overview of Anglo-Saxon texts connected with the cult of Guthlac, a saint closely connected to the Mercian dynasty in the eighth and ninth centuries. This chapter offers an interpretation of Felix's Vita sancti Guthlaci as an iteration of Mercian identity, and highlights the way in which Guthlac A asserts and emphasizes the saintâs Mercian identity. I then propose a revival of the cult of Guthlac linked to a crisis in the Mercian succession in the ninth century, to which the possibly Cynewulfian account of Guthlac's death in Guthlac B, the Old English prose translation of Felix's life, and the entries in the Old English Martyrology, may be connected. In Chapter 2, I offer a reading of the hagiographical poetry of Cynewulf, namely Juliana and Elene, in light of the remarkably â and arguably uniquely â powerful position of women in Mercia from the reign of Offa onwards. The early cult of Juliana appears to have a Mercian bias, and the empowered female saints in Cynewulf's works may also be connected to evidence for female literacy in the Tiberius-group manuscripts, all of which originate in eighth- and ninth-century Southumbria. In Chapter 3, I read the Old English translation of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica, a major though until recently little-studied prose work, in relation to other texts with a literal style of translation and a hagiographical focus, and its apparent interest in Mercian conciliar culture. I also propose that the style of illumination of the earliest extant copies of the Old English Historia ecclesiastica may be influenced by Mercian, Tiberius style. The second major trend which the material and literary culture of Mercia manifests in this period is an early Orientalism, imitating and appropriating Eastern models as signs of power and sophistication. Sculptures such as those at Breedon-on-the-Hill, Leicestershire, in which Mary is modelled on Byzantine sculpture, or the dinar of Caliph al-Mansur (773-4), reminted as coinage for Offa, demonstrate a deep engagement with Oriental culture prevalent in Mercia during this period. Several decorative elements in the eighth- and ninth-century Tiberius group manuscripts, which have stylistic affinities and are often associated with Mercia, also have Oriental origins. This same phenomenon is traceable in the literary record. For example, Cynewulf's works engage in various ways with different regions of the Orient, including the Mediterranean, Africa, Rome, Jerusalem and India. The Old English Martyrology combines Insular and continental saints with Eastern saints. The Oriental character of two of the prose texts of BL Cotton Vitellius A. xv., The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle and The Wonders of the East, both usually considered Mercian on linguistic grounds, has been long noted. Together with its manuscript neighbours, Wonders and Beowulf, I consider the Letter's interest in the wider world, as well as its theorization of kingship, by which it might be considered a speculum regum. This thesis reads these texts in the light of various forms of evidence for Mercian literary culture, including linguistic characteristics and preexisting scholarship. In so doing, it fleshes out a theoretical narrative of vernacular literature prior to the late ninth-century Alfredian renaissance.
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Hall, Shane. "War by Other Means: Environmental Violence in the 21st Century." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/22688.
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This dissertation studies the intersections of militarism, climate change, and environmental justice in U.S. literature and popular culture since the end of the Cold War. The project identifies different mechanisms enacting environmental military violence through discursive analysis of literary and cultural texts, and considers the ideas, values, and beliefs that support environmental military violence. In each chapter I trace a different dynamic of environmental violence structured through the logics of U.S. counterinsurgency theory by examining what I call “narrative political ecologies”—cultural texts that center concerns of ecology and broadly defined political economy. Chapter I establishes the stakes and questions of the dissertation. The next two chapters investigate the dynamics of environmental violence depicted within narrative political ecologies. Chapter II investigates how eruptive interpersonal violence secures more insidious, hidden forms of slow environmental violence in Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier. Chapter III considers the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands and the environmental military violence responsible for the deaths of undocumented migrants by examining Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway and the Electronic Disturbance Theater’s Transborder Immigrant Tool. Chapter IV turns to potential f wars and conflicts that may be caused by climate change as they have been depicted in speculative fiction. In novels depicting climate migrants, such as Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (2014), I show that even politically progressive, intersectional approaches to environmental endangerment naturalize conflict and occlude dialogic solutions to environmental change. The final chapter traces how the environmental refugee has become a paradigmatic figure in climate change discourse, particularly the aspects of this discourse where issues of national security are articulated. At the center of these texts is the figure of the migrant and narratives of migrations, and I argue that the figure of the environmental migrant offers a privileged vantage on the constitutive forces of the Anthropocene. The dissertation identifies the specific literary and rhetorical techniques that authors use to contest environmental militarization and expand the U.S. public’s capacity to creatively and compassionately reason around increased flows of environmental migrants— issues of vital importance for humane climate change adaptation.
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Kugler, Emily Meri Nitta. "Representations of race and romance in eighteenth-century English novels." Diss., Connect to a 24 p. preview or request complete full text in PDF format. Access restricted to UC campuses, 2007. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ucsd/fullcit?p3258372.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2007.Title from first page of PDF file (viewed May 29, 2007). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 264-272).
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Kirlew, Shauna Morgan. "21st-Century Neo-Anticolonial Literature and the Struggle for a New Global Order." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2012. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_diss/93.
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21st-century Neo-anticolonial Literature and the Struggle for a New Global Order explores the twenty-first-century fiction of five writers and investigates the ways in which their works engage the legacy and evolution of empire, and, in particular, the expansion of global capitalism to the detriment of already-subjugated communities. Taking up a recent call by Postcolonial scholars seeking to address the contemporary challenges of the postcolonial condition, this project traces out three distinct forms of engagement that function as a resistance in the texts. The dissertation introduces these concepts via a mode of analysis I have called Neo-anticolonialism, a counter-hegemonic approach which, I argue, is unique to the twenty-first century but rooted in the anticolonial work of Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon. Building on a foundation laid by those activist scholars, this project argues that Neo-anticolonialism necessitates the bridging of discourse and activism; thus, the dissertation delineates the utility of Neo-anticolonialism in both literary scholarship and practical application. Through a close analysis of the fiction of the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jamaican Michelle Cliff, Amitav Ghosh, a South Asian writer, African American writer Edward P. Jones, and Black British writer Caryl Phillips, the project offers a Neo-anticolonial reading of several twenty-first-century texts. In doing so, I explain the depiction of these instances of resistance as Neo-anticolonial Refractions, literary devices which function as prisms that cast images thus exposing the perpetuation of inequality in the twenty-first century and its direct link to the past epoch. Moreover, each chapter, through an explication of the refractions, reveals how resistance occurs in the face of the brutal reality of oppression and how this cadre of writers engages with the history of empire as well as with its contemporary permutations.
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Robinson, Sarah E. "The Other Sherlock Holmes| Postcolonialism in Victorian Holmes and 21st Century Sherlock." Thesis, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, 2018. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10808581.
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This thesis examines Sherlock Holmes texts (1886–1927) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and their recreations in the television series Sherlock (2010) and Elementary (2012) through a postcolonial lens. Through an in-depth textual analysis of Doyle’s mysteries, my thesis will show that his stories were intended to be propaganda discouraging the British Empire from becoming tainted, ill, and dirty through immersing themselves in the “Orient” or the East. The ideal Imperial body, gender roles, and national landscape are feminized, covered in darkness, and infected when in contact for too long with the “Other” people of the East and their cultures. Sherlock Holmes cleanses society of the darkness, becoming a hero for the Empire and an example of the perfect British man created out of logic and British law. And yet, Sherlock Holmes’ very identity relies on the existence of the Other and the mystery he or she creates. The detective’s obsession with solving mysteries, drug addiction, depression, and the art of deduction demonstrate that, without the Other, Holmes has no identity. As the body politic, Holmes craves more mystery to unravel, examine, and know. Without it, he feels useless and dissatisfied with life. The satisfaction with pinpointing every detail, in order to solve a mystery continues today in all media versions. Bringing Sherlock Holmes to life for television and updating him to appeal to today's culture only make sense. Though society has the insight offered by postcolonial theory, evidence of an imperial mindset is still present in the most popular reproductions of Sherlock Holmes Sherlock and Elementary.
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Memed, Orhan. "Seventeenth-century English keyboard music - Benjamin Cosyn." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1991. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.315899.
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Rice, Andrea. "Rebooting Brecht: Reimagining Epic Theatre for the 21st Century." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1555688903742283.
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Svedberg, Katarina. "A Deeply Satisfying Lie? : Authorship, Performance, and Recognition in 21st Century American Novels." Thesis, Stockholms universitet, Engelska institutionen, 2017. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-144469.
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There has been a considerable amount of research done on questions of authorship over the past century or so, and the interest in the subject is still going strong today. This essay takes as its point of departure two seminal poststructuralist essays on authorship—Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author,” and Michel Foucault’s “What is an Author?”—as these texts have had a significant impact on the discourse. It examines how scholars like Seán Burke and Jane Gallop have explained this anti-authorial tendency and extended the connection between authors and death, and how their findings relate to a performative conception of authorship. The study will take as its central critical approach the study of authorship as cultural performance as formulated by Ingo Berensmeyer, Gert Buelens, and Marysa Demoor, and Sonja Longolius. It will utilize this approach to analyze four contemporary American novels—James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003), Paul Auster’s Travels in the Scriptorium (2006), Ron Currie Jr.’s Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles (2013), and J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst’s S. (2013)—and the different ways in which these novels problematize notions of authorial self-invention. The focus of the analysis will be on the author-reader relationship, moments of recognition, and developments in writing technology. These issues have been selected for their connection to current conceptions of the creation of author personae, which can in turn be viewed as reflecting performance as it takes place in daily life and therefore give indications as to the cultural climate in which the novels were produced. Ultimately, the aim is to have illustrated how these novels present the reader with textually traced author personae that are highly aware of their own performances. In addition, it is suggested that authors are dependent on their readers to recognize these personae for them to become felicitously legitimized.
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Yamada, Hiroshi. "Developing 21st century skills in language teaching: A focus on English education in Japan." Doctoral thesis, Kyoto University, 2021. http://hdl.handle.net/2433/263736.
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京都大学新制・課程博士
博士(人間・環境学)
甲第23275号
人博第990号
京都大学大学院人間・環境学研究科共生人間学専攻
(主査)准教授 金丸 敏幸, 教授 桂山 康司, 准教授 笹尾 洋介, 教授 田地野 彰
学位規則第4条第1項該当
Doctor of Human and Environmental Studies
Kyoto University
DGAM
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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.
Full textAbstract:
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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Ben-Nasr, Leila. "The Narrative Space of Childhood in 21st Century Anglophone Arab Literature in the Diaspora." The Ohio State University, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1546475958114273.
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