Shortly after returning to Moscow in 1936, Prokofiev composed his first Soviet opera, Semyon Kotko (Opus 81). The libretto was taken from Valentin Kataev's novel I am a Son of the Working People, a tale of revolution and war in a small Ukrainian village and one that adheres to the tenets of Socialist Realism. Kataev encouraged Prokofiev to set this text in a highly conservative song style. Prokofiev was also influenced in the project by Vsevolod Meyerhold, an innovative artist who advocated using continuous declamation as a means of achieving "dramatic truth" in music. / This essay examines the extent to which Semyon Kotko can be considered a conformist opera. Part One is a survey of Socialist Realism and its manifestation in Soviet literature and music during the 1930's; Parts Two and Three examine the text and music of Semyon Kotko as representative of the doctrine. Consideration is given throughout the study to the opposing influences of Kataev and Meyerhold on Prokofiev, and to the political events surrounding the opera's composition.

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This thesis consists in a comparison between the novels of Julien Gracq and the magical realism. More precisely, our research's main concern is about the forms of strangeness developed throughout the works of the author. We wish to demonstrate how elements of the texts---space, time, metafiction and intertextuality---generate the appropriate atmosphere for the emergence of magic. We think that, whether or not the representation includes magic, it maintains itself on the edge of the fantastic, partly because the images constantly suggest its imminence. Our intention is thus to prove that the feeling of strangeness that emerges from Gracq's fiction is a latent or embryonic form of magical realism.

This dissertation offers the first comprehensive examination of realism in English-Canadian fiction of the early twentieth century. It argues for the existence of a "modern-realist" movement that is Canada's unique and unacknowledged contribution to the collection of international movements that makes up literary modernism. This argument involves a detailed analysis of the aesthetics, aims, preoccupations, and techniques of the modern realists, a reexamination of the oeuvres of the movement's most prominent writers, and a critical reevaluation of the "modernity" of Canada's three most significant realist sub-genres—prairie realism, urban realism, and social realism. This study also provides a literary-historical overview of the movement as a whole, which begins with the inauguration of the Canadian Bookman in 1919, and concludes with the emergence of a contemporary Canadian fiction in the 1950s. The conclusions arrived at in this work are based upon a reading of dozens of novels and works of short fiction, many of them unpublished and/or critically neglected and forgotten. The findings in this study are also based on original research into archival materials from seven institutions across Canada.

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This thesis sets out to examine social realism in Alex La Guma's longer fiction by using Georg Lukacs's Marxist theory as a point of departure. Tracing the development in La Guma's novels in terms of a shift from critical realism to gestures towards socialist realism I argue that this shift is informed by Lenin's "spontaneity/consciousness dialectic" in terms of which workers begin by engaging in spontaneous actions before they are ultimately guided by a developed political consciousness. I am quite aware that linking La Guma's work to socialist realism might raise some eyebrows in some circles but I am nonetheless quite emphatic about the fact that socialist realism in La Guma's fiction is not in any way tantamount to the Stalin-Zhdanovite version of what Lukacs calls "illustrative literature". Rejecting Lukacs's conception that socialist realism is a prerogative of writers in the socialist countries, I argue that gestures towards socialist realism made in La Guma's last novels are rooted in South African social reality. One of the claims being made in this study is that La Guma's novels render visible his attempt to create a South African proletarian literature. For this reason I make a case for Russian precedents of La Guma's writing by attempting to identify some intertextual connection between La Guma's novels and Gorky's work. Where realism is concerned I argue that although La Guma seems to draw extensively on Maxim Gorky in redefining his aesthetics of realism, Lukacs's theory of realism is useful in contextualising his fiction. The first chapter is largely biographical, examining La Guma's father's influence in shaping his political ideology and his literary tastes. Chapter two focuses on La Guma's aesthetics of realism. In chapter three I examine La Guma's journalism as having provided him with the subjects of his fiction and argue that there is a carry-over in terms of La Guma's style from journalism to fiction. Accordingly, I provide evidence of this carry-over in the next chapter on A Walk in the Night in which I argue that while La Guma's style is naturalist the novel is critical realist in perspective. Chapter five contextualizes the shift from And A Threefold Cord, to The Stone • Country as providing evidence of La Guma's use of "the spontaneity/consciousness dialectic". In chapter six I read In the Fog of the Seasons' End in relation to Gorky's Mother as its intertext in terms of its gestures towards socialist realism as seen for example in its "positive heroes", Beukes and Tekwane. There are further elements of socialist realism in Time of the Butcherbird which are nevertheless brought into question by some ideological contradictions within the text this is the central thrust of my argument in chapter seven. I conclude this study with a brief discussion of La Guma's craftsmanship. / Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1998.

This study aims to explain the Stuxnet-attack against Iran in 2009-2010 by using the IR-theory of structural realism. By doing so the theory also faces the challenge of the impact of the information revolution on security and international relations. The structural realism that is at hand is that of Kenneth Waltz and his Theory of International Politics from 1979.The study reaches the conclusion that Waltzs focus on the structure of the international system and the distribution of capabilities applies well to the case of Stuxnet as a cyber attack. The creators of the sophisticated Stuxnet, USA and Israel, also indicates that when it comes to this certain aspect of the information revolution and IR, states seem to still be the main actor. Finally the character of one of the major features of the Stuxnet-attack; the internet, is shown to have an anarchic structure that fits well as an extension of the realist view of the international system.

This Master's thesis examines the status of myth and symbol in postmodern religious discourse, and proposes a new way of understanding representation in religion. The first chapter deals with the sense of symbol as it emerged out of literary and philosophical romanticism, and explores several divergent interpretations of the meaning of the symbol according to modernist and structuralist criticism. The second chapter, after analysing the function of myth and history in religious understanding, connects the romantic symbol to a contemporary hermeneutics based on the aesthetic and epistemological tenets of magic realism. It is my contention in this thesis that magic realism, in its conflation (and deconstruction) of the ideologically charged dichotomy of myth and reality, provides a hermeneutical tool with which to critique demythologization; and that, in its dual aspect as heir to both romanticism and realism, magic realism may be a more fertile source than either neo-romanticism or post-structuralism for a truly postmodern religious criticism.

Since literary magical realism exploded out of Latin America and into international critical attention in the mid twentieth century, the limbs of its narrative genealogy continue to be sketched in both lower and higher than the branch bearing the immense impact of el boom. Perhaps the most often cited figure from magical realism’s pre-Latin American and pre-literary phase is Franz Roh, who deployed the term in 1925 to describe the German painting movement Magischer realismus, as critics such as Irene Guenther, Kenneth Reeds, Wendy Faris, and Lois Parkinson Zamora have shown. After having migrated transatlantically, magical realism mutated formally in the process whereby it came to be embodied in Latin American literature. Following the boom of the 1950s and 60s magical realism began to be recognized as a global phenomenon. Literary magical realism has now been written by authors from innumerable countries of origin and thus is not the sole property of Latin Americans, as Alejo Carpentier might have us believe. Erik Camayd-Freixas, who himself contends for the delimitation of a distinct Latin American magical realism, still concedes that the mode is “today’s most compelling world fiction” (583). In addition to Carpentier, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Gabriel García Márquez, and Isabel Allende, among other significant Latin American magical realists, key contributions to the mode’s corpus have since been recognized in the works of Jack Hodgins, Louise Erdrich, Robert Kroetsch, and Toni Morrison. Beyond the American continents, Wenchin Ouyang points out: “[Magical realism] is in Arabic, Chinese, English, German, Italian, Japanese, Persian, Portuguese, Spanish, Tibetan, and Turkish, to name but a few languages”. One recent example of magical realism is Salman Rushdie’s novel, The Enchantress of Florence (2008), analyzed in this study. Considering this novel in conjunction with the landmark 1949 publication of Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World (El reino de este mundo), including its famous prologue, these two magical realist texts represent a significant development in magical realist authorship among East and West Indies. Furthermore, they form two temporal poles between which there is a nearly sixty-year time span, a figure that does not include texts preceding the Latin American boom.

This thesis examines the literary representations of feminist and nationalist struggles in the Middle East particularly in Lebanon and Palestine. It aims to explore the simultaneous articulation of these two pivotal concerns in contemporary Arabic literature written by Arab women, from the 1960s to the present. One of the primary goals of this thesis is to explore how contemporary feminist literature reflects the effects of national crises in the Middle East on women’s status. To this end, this thesis reads closely a number of the novels of two contemporary Arab women writers: Ghādah al‐Sammān and Sah|ar Khalīfah whose work engages in this literary interrelationship of nationalist and feminist struggles in Lebanon and Palestine, respectively. Through the close analyses of these authors’ novels, this thesis explores how, in their response to the political turmoil in the Middle East, contemporary Arab women writers render reality in creative forms: al‐Sammān cries for freedom by exploiting literary existentialism to reflect the human struggle against the backdrop of the Lebanese civil war, while Khalīfah employs critical realism in her portrayal of the human pain during the Palestinian‐Israeli conflict. This thesis argues that both writers challenge long‐established literary traditions by advancing these themes in new artistic styles: literary existentialism and realism, and, therefore, considers this a manifestation of the avant‐gardism of both writers for they move the writings of Levantine women to a higher level by adding these literary forms to the repertoire of contemporary Arab women’s literature. The contribution of this thesis lies in its investigation of the innovative literary styles of these two authors and their place in the writings of contemporary Arab women. Thus, this thesis aims to remedy the neglect of the writings of these authors by presenting close analyses of some of the works of al‐Sammān and Khalīfah with a view to understanding their use of literary existentialism and critical realism.