Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Literary Journalism Studies'

This thesis examines the relationship between Bessie Head's work as a journalist during the late 1950s and two of her novels: the first written just after she had left formal journalism and the second a decade later. I claim, in this thesis, that early journalistic writing by Head, which has been critically ignored, and even dismissed, not only merits critical attention but, furthermore, that knowledge this work will yield new insights into Head's fictional writing for which she is famous. Between 1959 and 1960, before she left South Africa, Bessie Head wrote two weekly columns for children and teenagers, some book reviews and had a role in the production of "True Romance" stories for Home Post, a tabloid supplement to the Sunday newspaper Golden City Post. Head was involved in the production of these romances for over a year and I provide an analysis of the "True Romance" stories published in Home Post. I maintain that these romances, like all texts in popular romance genre (which I discuss) constructs the feminine in very particular ways. I locate this analysis within wider, but related, discussion about the representation of women in both Golden City Post and Drum magazine as they were both considered to be the authoritative newspapers representing black South African life in the 1950s. Head's columns, I claim, especially the one for teenagers, present constructions of the feminine, as well as the masculine, which are significantly at odds with the dominant representations of the feminine, and masculine, in the media I have mentioned, during the late 1950s. A close reading of the representations of gender which Head set up in this column, together with the book reviews she wrote, will give us new insight into her fictional work, particularly The Cardinals which is an early work written and set during this period but only published posthumously in 1993. Reading this novel against the background of the journalistic work and world Head was engaged in just before she wrote it will enable us to read its complexities, specifically those regarding gender and romance. I claim that Head also gave us what is probably the earliest gender perspective, and critique, of 1950s black journalism - a period generally considered to be a vibrant one for black journalism and writing in South Africa. In The Cardinals, which fictionally recreates the black journalistic milieu of the late 1950s in South Africa, Head suggests that black women journalists (and writers) found themselves facing a very different situation from black male journalists. Finally I suggest that with romance structure and the role which gender plays in the novel. Although critics have persistently read this novel as an idealistic, and unrealistic, romance with a happy ending, I suggest, in this thesis, that one can read the novel, in the light of Head's earlier work, as being a radical subversion of the romance.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 87-92).
The introduction explicates the nature of narrative literary journalism and situates the four stories within this edifice. This body of work experiments with the classical form of narrative literary journalism. The Soul Searcher tells the story of the ethnomusicologist John Turest-Swartz who wants to promote the little known rural musician Louisa Steenkamp. It traces the development of an indigenous South African band over a period of one year. Thumeka in the Dunes is a career portrait in the context of urban nature conservation. The protagonist Thumeka Mdlazi is both part of the obstacle - the community threatening the nature reserve - and its solution, as a protector of the dunes. A Place to Live under the Rainbow deals with the repeated attacks against Somali refugees in South Africa portraying victims and perpetrators alike. On a meta-level, the story also reflects on the topic of xenophobia in a more discursive style. A Runner's Mind is a first-person creative non-fiction narrative. The core of the story is the motivation for ultra-marathon runner Randall Turner to keep running. This account is framed by my own personal reflections on running and non-running. All stories are anchored in a South African social setting and reflect people's struggles and small achievements in overcoming seemingly hopeless situations.

English
Ph.D.
Can journalism be avant-garde? This question arises from the body of work produced by the New Journalists, whose leading figures include Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and Norman Mailer. Today, this question is urgent for considerations of the journalist’s role within a political landscape increasingly hostile to the news media. Yet it is a question that has not been sufficiently explored in the field of literary study. Scholars of literary journalism have identified the features of an experimental journalism, traced its historical origins, and made claims about how to situate the New Journalism generically. While important, this scholarship overlooks the relationship between experimentation with conventional journalistic form and similar experimentations in other artistic fields. As a result, the stakes of the New Journalism’s experimentations with conventional reporting have not been sufficiently mined. In order to remedy this, I place the New Journalism within a broader history of avant-garde art. The agitation of mainstream journalistic practice undertaken by each of the writers above was spurred by a questioning of a foundational journalistic practice: objectivity. The New Journalists challenged the authority of fact and its capacity to represent the human condition. This challenge to objectivity drove an experimentation with journalistic form that produced a deeply innovative body of work; however, these innovations are not merely formal. They also call into question the epistemological assumptions that tether journalism to a phenomenal world assumed to be fully representable. Significantly, the challenges to objectivity posed by the New Journalists parallel the challenges to representation posed by avant-garde artists like Paul Cezanne and Karel Appel. My dissertation thus situates the challenges to journalistic form undertaken by the New Journalists within a broader history of artistic experimentation and demonstrates that the significance of these experimentations exceeds the fields in which they occur. These arguments provide a framework for understanding not only the formal innovations of avant-garde artists, but also the epistemological consequences, and ethical imperatives, inherent in these innovations. My understanding of avant-garde art is informed by the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard. Over the course of his career, Lyotard illuminated the philosophical dimensions of artistic innovation. For Lyotard, one of the hallmarks of avant-garde experimentation is its ability to confront and redress problems across a variety of discursive fields. That is, Lyotard values avant-garde experimentation because it responds to discourses beyond its own, and much of Lyotard’s writing about avant-garde art establishes connections between artistic innovation and broader issues of ethics, politics, and justice. Over the course of this dissertation, I demonstrate how the New Journalism participates in this tradition by asking questions about the role and responsibility of the reporter through the self-conscious development of an experimental journalistic aesthetic.
Temple University--Theses

Scholars have heretofore under-examined William Makepeace Thackeray's early critical essays despite their potential for illuminating Victorian manners and life. Further, these essays' treatments of aesthetics, class, society, history, and politics are all influenced by the pecuniary aspects of periodical journalism and frequently expose socio-economic attitudes and realities. This study explicates the circumstances, contents, and cultural implications of Thackeray's critical essays. Compensatory payments Thackeray received are reconciled with his bibliographic record, questions regarding Thackeray's interactions with periodicals such as Punch and Fraser's Magazine answered, and a database of the payment practices of early Victorian periodicals established. Thackeray's contributions to leading London newspapers, the Times and the Morning Chronicle, address history, travel, art, literature, religion, and international affairs. Based upon biblio-economic payment records, cross-references, and other information, Thackeray's previously skeletal newspaper bibliographic record is fleshed out with twenty-eight new attributions. With this new information in hand, Thackeray's views on colonial emigration and imperialism, international affairs, religion, medievalism, Ireland, the East, and English middle-class identity are clarified. Further, Thackeray wrote a series of social and political "London" letters for an Indian newspaper, the Calcutta Star. This dissertation establishes that Thackeray's letters were answered in print by "colonial" letters written by James Hume, editor of the Calcutta Star; their mutual correspondence thus constitutes a revealing cosmopolitan - colonial discourse. The particulars of Thackeray's Calcutta Star writings are established, insights into the personalities and viewpoints of both men provided, and societal aspects of their correspondence analyzed. In his many newspaper art exhibition reviews Thackeray popularized serious painting and shaped middle-class taste. The nature and timing of Thackeray's art essays are assessed, espoused values characterized and earlier analyses critiqued, and Thackeray's role introducing middle-class readers to contemporary Victorian art explored. Other Thackeray newspaper reviews addressed literature; indeed, Thackeray's grounding of literature in economic realities demonstrably carried over from his critical thesiss to his subsequent work as a novelist, creating a unity of theme, style, and subject between his early and late writings. Literary pathways originating in Thackeray's critical reviews are shown to offer new insights into Thackeray novels Catherine, Vanity Fair, Henry Esmond, and Pendennis.

Drawing on broader discussions that attempt to envision new ways of negotiating identity, nationalism and race in a post-colonial, post-apartheid South Africa, this thesis examines how whiteness is constructed and negotiated within the framework of literary-journalistic narratives. It is significant that so many established journalists have chosen a literary format, in which they use the structure, conventions, form and style of the novel, while clearly foregrounding their journalistic priorities, to re-imagine possibilities for narratives of identity and belonging for white South Africans. I argue that by working at the interstice of literature and journalism, writers are able to open new rhetorical spaces in which white South African identity can be interrogated.

This thesis examines the literary narratives of Rian Malan (My Traitor&rsquo
s Heart, 1991), Antjie Krog (Country of My Skull, 1998, and Begging to be Black, 2009), Kevin Bloom (Ways of Staying, 2009) and Jonny Steinberg (Midlands, 2002). These writers all seem to grapple with the recurring themes of &lsquo
history&rsquo
, &lsquo
narrative&rsquo
and &lsquo
identity&rsquo
, and in exploring the narratives of their personal and national history, they attempt to make sense of their current situation. The texts that this thesis examines exhibit an acute awareness of the necessity of bringing whiteness into conversation with &lsquo
other&rsquo
identities, and thus I explore both the ways in which that is attempted and the degree to which the texts succeed, in their respective projects. I also examine what literary genres offer these journalists in their engagement with issues of whiteness and white identity that conventional forms of journalism do not. These writers are challenging the conventions of genre &ndash
both literary and journalistic &ndash
during a period of social and political flux, and I argue that in attempting to limn new narrative forms, they are in fact outlining new possibilities for white identities and ways of belonging and speaking. However, a close reading of these literary-journalistic narratives reveals whiteness in post-apartheid South African to be a multifaceted and often contradictory construct and position. Despite the lingering privilege and structural advantage associated with whiteness, South African whiteness appears strongly characterised by a deep-seated anxiety that stems from a perpetual sense of &lsquo
un-belonging&rsquo
. However, while white skin remains a significant marker of identity, there does appear to be the possibility of moving beyond whiteness into positions of hybridity which offer interesting potential for &lsquo
becoming-other&rsquo
.

At the centre of this study lies the question if normative gender thinking affects the way poetry gets reviewed and how the reviews are written, this in relation to both the gender of the reviewer and the poet. The study crosses three academic fields; gender studies, poetry and journalism, and is based on the cultural studies theory of media affecting and even creating the world around it. The study is based on two types of analysis. One quantitative analysis based on the thematic criticism theory about detail studies that shows bigger patterns, this analysis focuses on how the poet and his/hers work are being treated in the reviews in areas such as how much space they´re given in the newspapers, how they are named by the reviewer and the tendency to quote the reviewed work.  And one qualitative analysis based on the new criticism method of close reading, that focuses on the reviewers way of writing and how that may be connected with theories of gender differences, this both connected to the gender of the reviewers and the poets. The material chosen for this study are all the reviews that were published in the same newspapers and that reviewed two specific poetry works by two specific poets chosen with great sensibility to age and career so that their difference in gender would be the most significant difference between them. The works were chosen based on year of publishing, they were supposed to be published as newly as possible and as close to each other in time as possible. The works I ended up with were Dimman av allt (2001) and Svart som silver (2008) by Bruno K. Öijer and Silverskåp (2000) and Nu försvinner vi eller ingår (2007) by Birgitta Lillpers. The results of this study show several differences in how poetry is being judged and how poetry reviews are being written are connected with the gender of the poets and the reviewer. Lillpers got 35% less space in the newspapers and Öijers poetry got quoted a lot more which confirms that female poetry often is considered as less important than the male poetry, and that men in general tends to be judged as more professional than woman. The male reviewers tended to express themselves with greater certainty than the female reviewers who held a more professional tone in their reviews and focused more on the technical aspects of the poetry. This confirms the theory of the male words are being looked upon as the truth but contradicts the theory of women writing more based on personal experience and of women being less skilled in language techniques. In conclusion, there are differences in how poetry gets reviewed and how the reviews are written that are connected to the genders of the poet and the reviewer but these differences are complex and does not show a clear normative way of thinking about gender

The Common Core State Standards and the National Council for the Social Studies (C3 Framework) have recently prompted renewed emphasis on literacy, particularly in history, therefore it is important to analyze and compare what exactly the teacher educators of leading journals are saying about historical literacy. This study examines the literacy messages for the history classroom in The Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy and Theory (JAAL) and Research in Social Education (TRSE) from 2010-2015. An emergent, qualitative content analysis was used to analyze data from these journals. Results from this study indicates definitions on historical literacy vary between journals, both journals focused on elements of historical literacy over the whole concept, and historical literacy is addressed differently for distinctive intended participants. Implications from this study concerning teacher educators and history teachers are examined and possibilities for further research are also discussed.

L’étude présentée dans cette thèse s’inscrit dans la problématique générale de la maîtrise de l’information et dans le prolongement de travaux antérieurs conduits à ce sujet en France et en Pologne. L’objectif est d’évaluer l’expérience, les connaissances et les compétences des doctorants français et polonais quant à leur usage des revues scientifiques offertes par les bibliothèques universitaires, et ce, afin de mettre en place un programme éducatif, dédié aux doctorants, basé sur les standards de la maîtrise de l’information et visant à développer leur usage des revues scientifiques
The purpose of the research described in this thesis was: to present the problem of information literacy (IL) from the perspective of the previous works in this domain, especially those conducted in France and in Poland; to evaluate the experience, knowledge, and skills of French and Polish doctoral students in the area of use of scientific journals offered by academic libraries; and to prepare and educational project for doctoral students, based on IL international standards and principally aimed at increasing the use of scientific journals

Thesis (MPhil) -- University of Stellenbosch, 2004.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The state of media literacy in South Africa was investigated on the basis of a case study. A survey was conducted among grade 10 learners in two Free State schools which are amongst the top achievers academically to determine if these learners possess the knowledge linked with media literacy. It was found that the majority of these learners do not. It is therefore imperative that the media industry promotes media literacy through assistance to teachers and independent training programmes aimed at learners.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: 'n Ondersoek na die stand van mediageletterdheid in Suid-Afrika is aan die hand van 'n gevallestudie gedoen. Die aan- of afwesigheid van kennis wat mediageletterdheid veronderstel, is met behulp van 'n vraelys onder gr. 10-leerders aan twee van die Vrystaat se voorste (akademiese) skole gemeet. Die navorser het bevind dat die meerderheid van dié leerders nie oor dié kennis beskik nie. Die bevindinge dui op die noodsaaklikheid van steun aan onderwysers vanuit die bedryf asook die aanbied van onafhanklike opleidingsprogramme deur mediamaatskappye

Bengt Lidforss (1868–1913) was professor of botany between 1910 and 1913. But after the turn of the century he also emerged as a charismatic leader within the Swedish working-class movement. He became one of its foremost publicists. In the social democratic newspaper Arbetet in Malmö he wrote about natural sciences but also about political, philosophical and literary issues. As a literary critic Lidforss was the keenest protector of the Scanian literary school, and his struggle for Ola Hansson and Vilhelm Ekelund has made its mark in Swedish literary history, as have his contributions in favour of Gustaf Fröding and August Strindberg, culminating in the polemic articles during the Strindberg Feud (1910–11). Skönhetsdyrkare och socialdemokrat. Studier i Bengt Lidforss litteraturkritiska gärning (Worshipper of Beauty And Social Democrat. Studies in Bengt Lidforss’ Achievement As A Literary Critic) emphasises the paradoxic combination of Lidforss’ fundamentally socialist views and a strong belief in art. To him art was not isolated from society but quite the contrary; a significant factor in the changing of society. The new socialistic human being should be ennobled by arts instead of emasculated by religion. With the help of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “field”, it is shown how Lidforss, by attacking leading middle-class newspapers and publicists, created for himself and Arbetet a constantly stronger position within the field of journalism. Within the field of literary criticism he attacked the middle-class critics, and thus participated in associating Strindberg and Fröding as well as the young Scanian writers with the working-class movement. Lidforss’ literary taste was seen as an alternative to middle-class taste and the worshipping of beauty thereby became fashionable among socialists. The fact that one finds sympathies not only for symbolism but also for decadent descriptions with Lidforss the socialist, has to do with the fact that the descriptions of the discomfort of the heroes revealed the disadvantages of the capitalist society. Nevertheless Lidforss’ issued warnings against programmatic pessimism, since he was of the opinion that literature should strengthen people in their struggle. When it came to the plight of the human being under capitalism he was a pessimist, but he believed the stronger in a future socialist society. The terms for the artists would be more tolerable in such a society, he prophesied. He admitted that revolutionary poetry could be useful but was of the opinion that the quality of art would lessen if it consciously served politics. The revolutionary poetry he praised in his reviews was poetry he found genuine and coming from the heart. He did not favour pronounced tendencies, but he liked to use poetry in a political context.
Bengt Lidforss (1868–1913) var botaniker, men också publicist och socialist. Skandalomsusad och färgstark har han porträtterats av ett stort antal skönlitterära författare, allt ifrån August Strindberg till Inger Alfvén. Hans mångsidiga medarbetarskap i Arbetet hjälpte tidningen fram till en uppmärksammad position. I denna bok skildras hans kamp för en ledande position också inom det litterära fältet. Lidforss var en skönhetsdyrkare av stora mått men samtidigt socialdemokrat. Detta ledde till att han stred på många kulturella arenor – inte bara mot kritiker, författare, och Svenska Akademien, utan också mot inflytelserika män inom kyrka och politik. Skönhetsdyrkare och socialdemokrat ger oss oväntade svar på vad dessa bataljer handlade om och vi får möta Lidforss samtida giganter som Fredrik Böök, Vilhelm Ekelund, Albert Engström, Verner von Heidenstam, Oscar Levertin, August Strindberg med flera.

This thesis discusses source criticism from a critical perspective which encompasses its challenges, demands and possibilities for teaching practice. The questions guiding the core of this research are the following:1) What differentiates people’s activities in the process of evaluating sources? 2) What characterizes an effective practice in critical evaluation of sources? 3) Which criteria, factors and strategies might be important to consider in order to have a successful source critical methodology that promotes the improvement of critical thinking when analysing information and news?The studied materials include data from one survey and 54 semi-structured interviews. The interviews, analysed by using a methodology based on Grounded Theory, led to the development of a concept, critical source criticism (CSC), which define a broad perspective for the analysis of sources, and a related theoretical model (the CSC-model) aimed to be used for didactical purposes. The outcomes from this research suggest that different forms and levels of knowledge in history and social studies (in theory and practice), have a critical impact on the way we interact with information. The results also suggest that the combinations of theories and methodologies, alongside an emphasis on pluralism and multiperspectivity, can turn source criticism into an effective practice to achieve several educational goals. Subsequently, these results, are considered in the development of the proposed model in this thesis. The CSC-model developed in this study could be suitable for the analysis of information such as news, in planning of source-critical based teaching and in source critical discussions. I argue that this methodological structure, can be applied to facilitate the development of critical thinking, as well as other skills and abilities essential for democratic participation. This thesis Includes summaries in Swedish and Spanish as appendices".

This thesis consists of an introduction and six of my books, published between 1985 and 1999, on aspects of the history of women in nineteenth-century Australia. The books are The Governesses: Letters from the Colonies 1862-1882 (1985); A Colonial Woman: The Life and Times of Mary Braidwood Mowle 1827-1857 (1986); Pen Portraits: Women Writers and Journalists in Nineteenth Century Australia (1988); Pioneer Writer: The Life of Louisa Atkinson, Novelist, Journalist, Naturalist (1990); Tasma: The Life of Jessie Couvreur (1994); and Rosa! Rosa! A Life of Rosa Praed, Novelist and Spiritualist (1999). At the time they were published each of these books either dealt with a new subject or presented a new approach to a subject. Collectively they represent a body of work that has expanded knowledge of women's lives and writing in nineteenth-century Australia. Although not consciously planned as a sequence at the outset, these books developed as a result of the influence on my thinking of the themes that emerged in Australian social and cultural historical writing during this period. The books also represent a development in my own work from the earlier more documentary-based books on letters and diaries to the interpretive challenge of biographical writing and the weaving of private lives with public achievements. These books make up a cohesive, cumulative body of work. Individually and as a whole, they make an original contribution to knowledge of the lives and achievements of women in nineteenth-century Australia. They received critical praise at the time of publication and have led to renewed interest and further research on the subjects they cover. My own knowledge and expertise has developed as a result of researching and writing them. The Governesses was not only the first full-length study of a particular group of letters but it also documented aspects of the lives of governesses in Australia, a little researched subject to that time. A Colonial Woman, based on a previously unpublished and virtually unknown diary, pointed to the importance of 'ordinary' lives in presenting an enriched view of the past. Pen Portraits documented the early history of women journalists in Australia, a previously neglected subject. Three of the women I included in Pen Portraits, Louisa Atkinson, Tasma and Rosa Praed, the first two of whom were pioneer women journalists as well as novelists, became the subjects of my full-length biographies. In my biographies of women writers, Pioneer Writer, Tasma, and Rosa! Rosa!, I recorded and interpreted the lives of these important writers placing them in the context of Australian cultural history as women who negotiated gender barriers and recorded this world in their fiction. My books on Louisa Atkinson and Tasma were the first full-length biographies of these significant but largely forgotten nineteenth-century women writers, while my biography of Rosa Praed was the first for more than fifty years. Each introduced original research that changed perceptions of the women's lives and consequently of attitudes to their creative work. Each provided information essential for further research on their historical significance and literary achievements. Each involved extensive research that led to informed interpretation allowing insightful surmises essential to quality biography.

The Internet, and Web 2.0 tools can empower audiences to actively participate in media creation. This allows the production of large quantities of content, both amateur and professional. Online memes, which are extensions of usually citizen-created viral content, are a recent and popular example of this. This thesis examines the participation of ordinary individuals in political culture online through humor creation. It focuses on citizen-made political humor memes as an example of engaged citizen discourse. The memes comprise of photographs of political figures altered either by captions or image editing software, and can be compared to more traditional mediums such as political cartoons, and 'green screens' used in filmmaking. Popular culture is often used as a 'common language' to communicate meanings in these texts. This thesis thus examines the relationship between political and popular culture. It also discusses the value of 'affinity spaces', which actively encourage users to participate in creating and sharing the humorous political texts. Some examples of the political humor memes include: the subversion of Vladimir Putin's power by poking fun at his masculine characteristics through acts similar to fanfiction, celebrating Barack Obama’s love of Star Wars, comparing a candid photograph of John McCain to fictional nonhuman creatures such as zombies using photomanipulation, and the wide variety of immediate responses to Osama bin Laden's death. This thesis argues that much of the idiosyncratic nature of the political humor memes comes from a motivation that lies in non-serious play, though they can potentially offer legitimate political criticism through the myths 'poached' from popular culture.

This study examines the mutually constitutive relationship between the print culture of the late nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire and the framework of social, cultural and political transformations in which that culture operated. This study crosses traditional disciplinary lines between literary studies and intellectual history by arguing for the modification of one of the central premises of modernization theory: the existence of an overtly masculine political public sphere standing in contrast to a supposedly nonpolitical feminine domestic and private sphere. By examining newspapers, magazines, journals, and novels, which reflected the emergence of communities of readers, I show that the print culture became central to the mediation and diffusion of themes in public discourse; and furthermore, I show that it diminished the separation between the public and private spheres as it penetrated into the domestic space and was used to insert issues from the private sphere into the public domain. Arguing that Ottoman intellectuals saw the novel as an instrument to disseminate their political, social, and cultural agendas, I examine Henüz On Yedi Yaşında (Only Seventeen Years Old; 1882) by Ahmet Mithat Efendi, focusing on how gender, ethnicity, and sexuality in early Turkish novels were imagined and represented. Based on my research in Ottoman and Turkish archives between 2004 and 2006, I show how women’s journals ensured the visibility of Ottoman women as writers in the public sphere. Women’s journals established a real intellectual community of women writers and readers who between them overtly introduced a feminist agenda into the public sphere. As part of my project of recovering the cultural work women's novels did within the political arena of nineteenth century Ottoman society, I also discuss the forgotten life and works Fatma Aliye Hanım, one of the first Ottoman woman novelists, analyzing two of her novels, Muhâdarât (1891-92) and Refet (1897). Finally, I explore the reasons why several Ottoman women writers were forgotten after the establishment of the Turkish Republic and why they are not included in the Turkish literary canon today.
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This thesis examines the discipline of English studies in South Africa through a review of articles published in 11 academic journals over the period 1958-2004. The aims are to gain a better understanding of the functions of peer-reviewed journals, to reveal the presence of rules governing discursive production, and to uncover the historical shifts in approach and choice of disciplinary objects. The Foucauldian typology of procedures determining discursive production, that is: exclusionary, internal and restrictive procedures, is applied to the discipline of English studies in order to elucidate the existence of such procedures in the discipline. Each journal is reviewed individually and comparatively. Static and chronological statistical analyses are undertaken on the articles in the 11 journals in order to provide empirical evidence to subvert the contention that the discipline is unruly and its choice of objects random. The cumulative results of this analysis are used to describe the major shifts primarily in ranges of disciplinary objects, but also in metadiscursive and thematic debates. Each of the journals is characterised in relation to what the overall analysis reveals about the mainstream developments. The two main findings are that, during the period under review, South African imaginative written artefacts have moved from a marginal position to the centre of focus of the discipline; and that the conception of what constitutes the `literary' has returned to a pre-Practical criticism definition, broadly inclusive of a variety of types of artefact including imaginative writing, such as autobiography, letters, journals and orature.
English Studies
D. Litt. et Phil. (English)

The thesis deals with interpretation Josef Hora´s (1891-1945) collection of works in context of literature of 1st half of 20th century. It is primarily focused on changes of Hora´s poetics in his poetical production. In addition the subject of interest is also author´s artistic and publicistic production. All these parts are related with his life and another literary production at that time. In the first chapter is Josef Hora´s biography devoted to influences on his works. The second chapter interprets author´s poetical production. His books of poetry are sorted in a chronological sequence for better understanding their mutual influences and the influences of period, when they were written. The third chapter refers to a trend of Hora´s proses in a chronological sequence as well and their interpetations. The fourth chapter specifies Hora´s Russian, South Slavic and German translations. The fifth chapter touches his publicistic production, particularly favourite themes and genres In the sixth chapter there is enumerated bibliography of Josef Hora and finally, all discovered facts are recapitulated and generalized in the summary.

In the early 1990s, a series of gruesome murders of young women in Ciudad Juárez, a city located in the U.S.-Mexico border, shook the political landscape of Mexico. A decade later, the strange and violent murders, known as the feminicides or feminicidios of Juárez, reached international infamy across hemispheres and continents. During this time, the city and the cases became the subjects of an extensive body of scholarship and of any imaginable artistic medium (narrative, poetry, theater, performance, music, and so on). Eventually, the complexity and overexposure of the cases and the sociopolitical conditions of Ciudad Juárez placed them at the center of a paradoxical debate: on one hand, the work of activists, feminists, and scholars of social sciences (like anthropologists and sociologists) studied the murders as a localized example of a larger phenomenon of mysoginistic violence; on the other, journalistic and media investigations of Juárez understood the murders as the products of specific agents (serial killers, murderers, drug cartels, amongst others) and the fractures within the Mexican Nation-State. And yet, despite the expansion and overlapping of these discourses, fictional representations of Juárez remained tangential to this intricate debate. Thus, this research explores the different ways in which writers, artists, and filmmakers deployed and negotiated existent perspectives on the feminicides within fictional environments. As a result of the vast amount of published work available on Ciudad Juárez, I narrowed the objects of my research through a transnational scope. The resulting sample of texts transverses borders (Mexico and the U.S.), continents (Latin America and Europe), genres (fiction and nonfiction), and mediums (literature and film). The first chapter explores the connections of Sergio González Rodríguez’s Huesos en el desierto and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 through the theoretical framework of the possible worlds of fiction. The second chapter moves to issues of representation, gender, and race through the analysis of two novels written by Chicana scholars: Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders and Stella Pope Duarte’s If I Die in Juárez. Finally, the third chapter focuses on film representations of Juárez and the feminicides in the form of Gregory Nava’s Bordertown and Carlos Carrera’s Backyard/El Traspatio.
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