Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Suspense fiction'

Suspense and surprise, as common and crucial elements of interest realised in literary fiction, are analysed closely in a sample of short stories, so as to develop a detailed explanation of how these forms of interest are created in literary texts, and to propose models for them. Creating suspense involves more conditions, necessary and optional, and more complication than surprise: the several optional conditions mainly serve to intensify the feeling of suspense the reader experiences. Surprise requires two necessary and sufficient conditions, with only a couple of optional conditions to maintain or ensure coherence in the text. The differences are considered attributable to a more fundamental difference between suspense and surprise as emotions. Suspense can be regarded as a progressive emotion, whereas surprise is a perfective emotion. As such, suspense as an interest is considered as a process-oriented interest, while surprise is an effect-oriented one. Suspense is mostly experienced while reading and has the reader involved with the story. Surprise drives the reader to reassess the story in the new light it throws on events and to look for some further message; this is often a main aim of the literary fiction which ends in surprise.

This thesis explores the genre of gothic literature by outlining the themes and common techniques that writers use. It discusses prominent writers in the genre, as well as critiques their techniques and compares them to my own. Two fiction pieces are accompanied with the critical introduction that fit the gothic literature genre.

In this dissertation, I present Dramatis, a computational human behavior model of suspense based on Gerrig and Bernardo's de nition of suspense. In this model, readers traverse a search space on behalf of the protagonist, searching for an escape from some oncoming negative outcome. As the quality or quantity of escapes available to the protagonist decreases, the level of suspense felt by the audience increases. The major components of Dramatis are a model of reader salience, used to determine what elements of the story are foregrounded in the reader's mind, and an algorithm for determining the escape plan that a reader would perceive to be the most likely to succeed for the protagonist. I evaluate my model by comparing its ratings of suspense to the self-reported suspense ratings of human readers. Additionally, I demonstrate that the components of the suspense model are sufficient to produce these human-comparable ratings.

Magister Artium - MA
In these novels suspense plays an important role, but elements that are usually found in literary works are also prominent in these narratives, for instance the fleshing out of characters' psyche and working with philosophical or current issues. In rhetorical terms these novels can be said to be suspense novels that make use of literary devices and themes. Novels by Deon Meyer fit into this category. In the Netherlands translations of his works are to be found among 'literaire thrillers' in bookshops. Therefore one of Meyer's novels was chosen for analysis. In this study the ways in which suspense is created in a narrative text is investigated. Proteus, a literary thriller, was chosen for its handling of characters and events in the transition in South Africa from an apartheid state to a democratic dispensation. This poses an intricate challenge for the writer. The reseach problem posed is this: How is literary suspense created in a narrative text? The creation of suspense in a narrative text has to do with literary communication. For this reason Roman Jakobson's well-known model for literary communication is at the basis of this research. Rene Appel's criteria for the creation of suspense in narrative texts, as it is explained in his work Spanning in verhalen: Over het schrijven van spannende boeken (2007), is also part of this study at its theoretical base. Various relevant sources have been included in this regard. In this formalistic study various elements pertaining to suspense in the narrative are part of the research in terms of isolating the ways in which suspense is produced in a narrative text in general and specifically in the case of Proteus. Also in this regard the novel's literarity is discussed.
South Africa

This mystery is set in the early 1980s and based on actual events. A high-school student unearths dark and deadly secrets of his Appalachian community. The explosive consequences forever mark his own life, his family's, and his town's.
https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1009/thumbnail.jpg

Suspense as represented in translated fiction is an under-researched field. To date, there appear to be no published studies of suspense in translated versions of detective fiction. This thesis aims to examine how suspense is re-created or re-presented in translation into Chinese, and whether and how the translation changes the sense of suspense. The investigation is based on an exploratory comparative textual study of three recent Chinese translations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, one of Sherlock Holmes’ most renowned cases. The thesis adopts Iwata’s (2008) model of suspense as the theoretical framework and modifies it to better identify the suspense as conveyed in the source text and the three translations. Van Leuven-Zwart’s (1989) transeme model is used to examine semantic shifts in the three Chinese translations to determine how suspense is re-created and affected in the target texts. The findings suggest that all three translators have shown inconsistency when tackling suspenseful conditions as various shifts are detected in each translation. The translators choose to make no shift or a certain degree of semantic shift each time, based on their own understanding and interpretation of the selected text, leading to divergent re-creation of suspense. The thesis identifies potential contributors to translation of suspense which may impact on future research and practice. The data presented here relate to Chinese translation, but may be applied to other language pairs.

L’objet de cette recherche est de revisiter la notion d’intrigue dans le Nouveau Roman après une campagne de dénigrement théorique menée par certains nouveaux romanciers. Une reconsidération qui s’inspire essentiellement des travaux de Paul Ricoeur sur « La Mise en intrigue » et qui se fonde principalement sur les études récentes de Raphaël Baroni sur « la tension narrative ». Dans la première partie il s’agit de remettre en perspective littéraire et critique cette notion en la confrontant au roman dit « traditionnel » et en parcourant les travaux nombreux des écrivains, critiques et théoriciens qui ont abordé cette question.La deuxième partie est concrètement une mise en chantier où sont éprouvées les idées de fiction, de passion, de suspense et de tension.Enfin la dernière partie est une sorte de reprise d’un modèle précis d’intrigue qui est celui du roman policier dans la perspective de mettre en évidence son aspect passionnant et passionnel
The object of this research is to revisit the notion of “intrigue” in the new novel after a campaign of theoretical belittlement led by certain new novelists. A reconsideration which is essentially inspired by Paul Ricoeur’s works on “ the stake in intrigue” and which is based mainly on the recent studies of Raphaël Baroni on the narrative tension.In the first part it is question of handling in literary and critical perspective this notion by confronting it with the so-called “traditional” novel and by examining the numerous works of the writers, the critics and the theorists who approached this question.The second part is concretely and deeply analysed where the ideas of fiction, passion, suspense and tension are studied. Finally the last part is a kind of resumption of precise model of “intrigue” which is the one of the detective novel in the perspective to bring to light its fascinating and passionate aspect

Thesis (M. A.(English Studies)) --University of Limpopo, 2019
This study explores a literary comparative examination of crime between Africa and Scandinavia, with special attention to Botswana and Norway. Smith’s and Nesbo’s selected novels are used as primary texts for analysis. The novels are, therefore, set in two different areas. These writers depict crime from the African and European perspectives. Chapter One deals with a brief introduction, and the aim and objectives of the study. It also expands on the theoretical background and provides definitions of terms that are used in this paper. Chapter Two presents views from various scholars on crime. This study is based on an Afro-Western approach of literary analysis. In other words, there are thoughts by both African and Western writers which assist in determining possible and noticeable similarities and differences, on the issue of crime. Chapter Three analyses crime from an African perspective while Chapter Four discusses crime from a Western point of view. Each of these chapters reflects on crime through character portrayal and depiction within its context. Chapter Five is a comparative analysis of both novels. The chapter identifies possible similarities and differences, mainly of the depiction of crime in different settings – Africa and Scandinavia, committed by blacks and whites. However, the structural and linguistic approaches of both the novels are also reviewed, assisting in discovering the life, in comparison, of the authors. The last chapter (Chapter Six), is a conclusion of the study and future suggestions. Basically, the study argues that blacks only should not be portrayed as perpetrators, but that whites too can be culprits. Again, there should be an equal of measurement on the weight and honour of the two races. Lastly, the moral is that without considering skin colour, financial and social backgrounds, justice must be served equally. Hence, whoever is caught in any form of wrongdoing, they must be given the appropriate punishment – regardless of race, colour, religious creed, gender, financial and social background. Key Words: Crime, Afro-Western, Marxism, suspense, detective, identity, puzzle, fix, accumulation, class, characterisation and setting

Cette thèse se propose de relire l’œuvre de J. D. Salinger à la lumière de l'usage que fait l'écrivain des motifs du détour et du suspens, tous deux caractérisés par un fonctionnement ambivalent. L'écriture de Salinger, fondamentalement introspective, prend par bien des aspects des allures de quête, à la fois identitaire et littéraire. L'exploration de l'identité qu'elle met en scène implique notamment un détour par l'altérité, auteur et personnages revêtant un certain nombre de masques, au risque parfois de refuser de s'en défaire ensuite. L'auteur se devine également derrière ses pratiques d'écriture, dont la dimension obsessionnelle révèle un profond désir de maîtrise de son travail, qui l'amène parfois à se perdre dans ses textes et s'apparente finalement davantage à une attitude de fuite qu'à la recherche d'un idéal littéraire. Dans l’œuvre salingerienne, le détour participe d'une réflexion sur les concepts de norme et de déviance, ainsi que sur le thème de l'errance. D'abord perçu comme néfaste, il apparaît à terme comme un moyen privilégié d'accéder à des révélations insoupçonnées. L’éloge de l'écart que l'on observe sur le plan thématique trouve un écho dans l'utilisation par les personnages-narrateurs de stratégies narratives louant les mérites du détour. La digression, le fragment, le renvoi aux marges du texte ainsi que l'intertextualité – autant d'outils interrogeant la distinction généralement établie entre le centre et la périphérie, entre l'accessoire et l'essentiel – révèlent toute leur efficacité lorsqu'ils sont employés pour aborder des sujets qui échappent aux cadres traditionnels. Le décentrement du texte passe également dans certains cas par un recours à la métatextualité qui permet notamment à l'écrivain de prolonger et de mettre en scène la réflexion qu'il mène sur son écriture. Les encarts métatextuels, parce qu'ils viennent interrompre temporairement la narration, peuvent aussi être considérés comme des manifestations du suspens dans le texte, suspens d'abord employé par Salinger pour interroger les notions de progression et de stase. Son œuvre présente simultanément une réflexion sur la résistance au passage du temps et la notion d'entre-deux, l'auteur affectionnant particulièrement la représentation de périodes liminales, à la fois lieux du mouvement et lieux hors du temps. Par ailleurs, l'écrivain s'attache par diverses stratégies narratives déployées dans ses textes à suspendre l’interprétation du sens, qui se révèle mouvant, différé, voire tout simplement retenu, lorsqu'il ne s'abîme pas dans l'absurde ou le non-sens. Ce faisant, Salinger interroge la validité de toute interprétation, plaidant pour une approche plus intuitive de l'art, et s'efforce du même geste de repousser indéfiniment l'achèvement de son œuvre, trahissant par là l'urgence éprouvée de mettre à distance l'angoisse mortifère qui l'obsède
The aim of this PhD research is to try to shed new light on J. D. Salinger's work by focusing on the writer's use of two inherently ambivalent motifs, namely detour and suspension. Salinger's writing, partly because of its introspective nature, often takes on the appearance of a quest, both personal and artistic. It stages the author's exploration of his own identity, which implies exploring otherness through the use of masks worn by both characters and writer, who sometimes refuse to later put them down. The study of Salinger's writing practices shows an obsessional dimension indicative of his powerful desire to control every aspect of his work, sometimes leading him to fully immerse himself in the world of fiction – an attitude in the end more evocative of evasion than of a search for literary perfection. In Salinger's work, the representation of detours is the starting point of a reflection on the concepts of norm and deviance, as well as on the theme of wandering. While it first appears as harmful, the detour motif eventually shows its potential for the revelation of unsuspected truths. Deviation is thus presented in a positive light, and its effectiveness as a writing strategy is repeatedly praised. Such stylistic devices as digression, fragmentation, or intertextuality are called upon to question the classical distinction between center and margins, between what is essential and what is incidental. Those devices are most effective when it comes to dealing with topics unfit for traditional approaches. The author’s will to decenter the text also involves the use of metatextuality, which serves the writer's exploration of his own writing and its staging for the reader's benefit. Metatextual passages, as they temporarily bring the narration to a halt, may also be seen as manifestations of suspension. In his work, Salinger first uses suspension to question the notions of progress and stasis. His texts invite the reader to engage in a reflection on the characters' resistance to the passing of time as well as the notion of in-betweenness. Indeed, the author has specialized in the depiction of those liminal periods in the lives of individuals, which are characterized by change and an out-of-time quality. Moreover, the writer makes use of different stylistic devices to suspend the reader’s access to the meaning of his stories. In most of them meaning remains unstable and unsure, whether elucidation is deferred or simply refused to the reader, who is also confronted to manifestations of the absurd or even utter nonsense. Salinger thus challenges the value of interpretation, pleading for a more intuitive approach to art, and makes sure he indefinitely postpones the completion of his own work, in the same way that his characters develop strategies to postpone their confrontation with death

In 1991 a group of orthodox Jews applied to the London Borough of Barnet for permission to erect small groups of structures resembling telephone poles, connected - at a height of about twenty feet - by fine nylon filament, at thirty nine locations in the borough. Overall, the number of such structures was to be about eighty. Given that such structures closely resemble common 'street furniture', it was argued by those supporting the proposal that these items would be virtually unseen among the tens of thousands of lamp posts, telephone poles, and the like already in the area. Yet, far from remaining a routine matter for Barnet's Planning Officers, the application became an issue of heated public controversy, engaging the attention of the national and international media. The nature of that opposition is the major focus of this thesis. The religious driving force which lay behind the application relates to the laws of the Jewish shabbat. In order to overcome specific restrictions arising from those laws, Jewish sages long ago devised legal 'solutions'. Among these solutions is one which requires the creation of the physical structures which were the subject of the planning application. In everyday usage the legal solution is referred to by the Hebrew word eruv. It might be argued that this faintly absurd controversy represented in symbolic form the basic dilemma of Jewish life in liberal societies in the late twentieth century. This thesis analyses the eruv conflict in terms of space and place, modernity and post-modernity, and contemporary identities and concludes that the eruv proposal was greeted with hostility because it was seen as a disordering of space which threatened identities within a context of the operation of 'banal nationalism'.

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.

Often hailed as “China’s Stephen King,” Chinese psychological suspense author Cai Jun occupies a position at the peak of the new wave of young authors flooding China’s popular literature market. In order to understand Cai’s popularity as an author, the impact his works and writing have on this market, and how he creates his particular brand of suspense fiction, it is both necessary to put his works into a larger context and analyze his writing. This thesis provides a brief overview of the recent literary scene in China, from the rise of internet literature and the comeback of genre fiction to the advent of mooks, the evolution of young adult literature, and the development of the author marketing industry, and also addresses the “pure vs. popular” controversy in China’s literary world, identifies how Cai fits into these trends, and determines who Cai is as a writer in terms of genre, story content, and literary reception through the translation and analysis of Cai’s short story “Kidnapped.”

The subject matter of my study is representations of Russia in Anglo-American and Russian spy novels, mysteries, and action thrillers of the 1990s. Especially suitable for representing the world split between good and evil, these genres played a prominent role in constructing the image of the other during the Cold War. Crime fiction then is an important source for grasping the changes in representing Russia after the Cold War. My hypothesis is that despite the changes in the political roles of Russia and the United States, the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union continued to have a significant impact on popular fiction about Russia in the 1990s. A comparative perspective on depictions of Russia in the 1990s is particularly suitable in regard to American and Russian popular cultures because during the Cold War, Soviet and American identities were formed in view of the other. A comparative approach to the study of Russian popular fiction is additionally justified by the role that the idea of the West had played in Russian cultural history starting from the early eighteenth century. Reflection on depictions of Russia in crime fiction by writers coming from the two formerly antagonistic cultures poses the problem of representation in its relationship to time, history, politics, popular culture, and genre. The methods used in this dissertation derive from the field of cultural studies, history, and structuralist poetics. A combination of structuralist readings and social theory allows me to uncover the ways in which popular detective genres changed in response to the sentiments of nostalgia and anxiety about repressed or lost identities, the sentiments that were typical of the 1990s. My study of Anglo-American and Russian spy novels, mysteries, and action thrillers contributes to our understanding of the ways American and Russian cultures invent and reinvent themselves after a significant historical rupture, how they mobilize the past for making sense of the present. Drawing on readings of literature and culture by such scholars as Mikhail Bakhtin, Tzvetan Todorov, Siegfried Kracauer, Andreas Huyssen, Fredric Jameson, and Svetlana Boym, I show that differences in Anglo-American and Russian representations of Russia are a result of cultural asymmetries and cultural chronotopes in the United States and in Russia. I argue that Russian and American crime fiction of the 1990s re-writes Russia in the light of cultural memory, nostalgia, and historical sensibilities after the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union. Memories of the Cold War and coming to terms with the end of the Cold War played a defining role in depicting Russia by Anglo-American detective authors of the 1990s; this role is clear from the genre changes in Anglo-American thrillers about Russia. Similarly, reconsideration of Russian history became an essential characteristic in the development of the new Russian detektiv.

Kwok Sze-Ki.
Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2003.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 131-138).
Abstracts in English and Chinese.
Abstract --- p.i
摘要 --- p.iii
Acknowledgements --- p.v
Introduction The Genre of Detective Thriller --- p.1
Chapter Chapter One --- The Figure in the Carpet: Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd --- p.33
Chapter Chapter Two --- """Thrillers are like life´ؤmore like life than you are"": Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear" --- p.68
Chapter Chapter Three --- "Cultural and Metaphysical Mysteries: Paul Bowles's ""The Eye"" and Jorge Luis Borges's ""The Garden of Forking Paths""" --- p.99
Concluding Remarks --- p.127
Bibliography --- p.131