Umberto Eco’s novels are complex texts that work, that can be read and thus interpreted on several levels, including but not limited to the literary, semiotic, linguistic, philosophic, and historical. Notwithstanding the postmodern ideology of the irrelevance of the author (in terms of identity and intentionality) to a text’s interpretation, Eco’s novels offer another level of reading and interpreting that includes the author’s own personal reading experiences. In this way, the author arguably becomes an integral part of the text and is directly involved in the interpretive process. This dissertation is a reconsideration of the figure of the postmodern author whose authority in a text’s interpretation has been challenged by theories of structuralism, post-structuralism, and intertextuality. It undertakes this rethinking by considering the role of the author as reader--and thus as writer in the process of rereading and rewriting. This study also investigates the postmodern theory of intertextuality (i.e., the notion that all texts are [re]iterations of other texts) from the point of view of the author’s own reading experiences (since inevitably, consciously or unconsciously, what the author reads becomes an intertext). Thus, through a combination of the author’s own reading and writing experiences, presented and perceived intertextually and intratextually throughout the text itself, and a series of fictionalized versions of personal experiences, not only is the reader able to gain insight into the author’s motives, intentions and personality, but the author is also able to retain or regain some of the authority over the text he or she creates.

Umberto Eco’s novels are complex texts that work, that can be read and thus interpreted on several levels, including but not limited to the literary, semiotic, linguistic, philosophic, and historical. Notwithstanding the postmodern ideology of the irrelevance of the author (in terms of identity and intentionality) to a text’s interpretation, Eco’s novels offer another level of reading and interpreting that includes the author’s own personal reading experiences. In this way, the author arguably becomes an integral part of the text and is directly involved in the interpretive process. This dissertation is a reconsideration of the figure of the postmodern author whose authority in a text’s interpretation has been challenged by theories of structuralism, post-structuralism, and intertextuality. It undertakes this rethinking by considering the role of the author as reader--and thus as writer in the process of rereading and rewriting. This study also investigates the postmodern theory of intertextuality (i.e., the notion that all texts are [re]iterations of other texts) from the point of view of the author’s own reading experiences (since inevitably, consciously or unconsciously, what the author reads becomes an intertext). Thus, through a combination of the author’s own reading and writing experiences, presented and perceived intertextually and intratextually throughout the text itself, and a series of fictionalized versions of personal experiences, not only is the reader able to gain insight into the author’s motives, intentions and personality, but the author is also able to retain or regain some of the authority over the text he or she creates.

“The Disposable Camera” theorizes the relationship between the cinematic image and energy resources. Framed by the emergent carbon-neutral cinema, the recent UCLA report on the film industry’s environmental footprint, as well as common perceptions about digital sustainability, “The Disposable Camera” posits that cinema has always been aware of its connection to the environment, the realm from which it sources its power, raw materials and, often enough, subject matter. But because the natural environment is so inextricably embedded within film’s basic means of production, distribution and reception, its effects remain as overlooked as they are complex. “The Disposable Camera” argues that cinematic history and theory can and indeed ought to be reappraised against the emerging ascendancy of environmental politics, all films; as such, all cinema could logically be included within the analytical parameters of this project. Primary focus, however, is given to documentary cinema, as well as notable experimental and narrative films. Selected texts do not overtly represent an environmental issue; rather, they reflexively engage with and theorize themselves as films, thus addressing the technological, industrial, and resource-derived essence of the moving image. Of import here are films that reveal how specific formal or aesthetic choices evidence and critique the ideology attached to resource consumption and/ or abuse. While it composes a distinctly environmental trajectory of the cinematic image, this project likewise historicizes and critiques these same stages and also challenges the utopian and/ or apocalyptical tendencies challenging eco-politics. Additionally, “The Disposable Camera” is committed to mapping out the shift from a distinctly tangible celluloid-based cinematic infrastructure to the ostensibly immaterial form of digital filmmaking. Indeed, the tension that now pits cinema’s material past against its immaterial future corresponds with the decline of natural reality on the one hand and the rise of cyber realities on the other, a parallel condition that fully evidences the increasingly palpable overlap between environmental and cinematic politics.

“The Disposable Camera” theorizes the relationship between the cinematic image and energy resources. Framed by the emergent carbon-neutral cinema, the recent UCLA report on the film industry’s environmental footprint, as well as common perceptions about digital sustainability, “The Disposable Camera” posits that cinema has always been aware of its connection to the environment, the realm from which it sources its power, raw materials and, often enough, subject matter. But because the natural environment is so inextricably embedded within film’s basic means of production, distribution and reception, its effects remain as overlooked as they are complex. “The Disposable Camera” argues that cinematic history and theory can and indeed ought to be reappraised against the emerging ascendancy of environmental politics, all films; as such, all cinema could logically be included within the analytical parameters of this project. Primary focus, however, is given to documentary cinema, as well as notable experimental and narrative films. Selected texts do not overtly represent an environmental issue; rather, they reflexively engage with and theorize themselves as films, thus addressing the technological, industrial, and resource-derived essence of the moving image. Of import here are films that reveal how specific formal or aesthetic choices evidence and critique the ideology attached to resource consumption and/ or abuse. While it composes a distinctly environmental trajectory of the cinematic image, this project likewise historicizes and critiques these same stages and also challenges the utopian and/ or apocalyptical tendencies challenging eco-politics. Additionally, “The Disposable Camera” is committed to mapping out the shift from a distinctly tangible celluloid-based cinematic infrastructure to the ostensibly immaterial form of digital filmmaking. Indeed, the tension that now pits cinema’s material past against its immaterial future corresponds with the decline of natural reality on the one hand and the rise of cyber realities on the other, a parallel condition that fully evidences the increasingly palpable overlap between environmental and cinematic politics.

This dissertation examines the varying roles of lawyers and judges in Canada, the United States, England, France and Germany in a selection of “fictional legal narratives”: novels, movies, television shows and plays that explore legal themes. The study focuses on contemporary works after 1960, and explores the North American fascination with lawyers that saturates the major levels of culture, from the popular (including television shows, movies and novels) to the academic. Fictional images of lawyers and judges not only reflect but arguably also influence our attitudes toward the legal system, and offer a concrete way of conceptualizing abstract legal concepts. However, the vast differences between the Anglo-American adversarial legal system and the continental European inquisitorial legal system spawn very different fictional portraits of lawyers and judges. The differences between fictional legal narratives produced by each country, even those with similarly structured legal systems, are also striking. Chapter One begins by outlining a number of factors that contribute to the proliferation of fictional legal narratives in some countries, and their relative scarcity in other countries. Next, Chapter Two traces the wide range of lawyer images in American fictional legal narratives, which both glamourize and demonize the figure of the lawyer. Turning to anthropomorphizations of law in the United Kingdom, Chapter Three examines the British tendency to perpetuate the idea that, if correctly executed, the fundamental principles of British law would lead to a just and harmonious society. Chapter Four then explores the “anxiety of influence” reflected in Canadian images of law, which are more “soft-boiled” than the fictional legal figures of other countries. Moving to French fictional legal narratives, Chapter Five contemplates the predominance of the juge d’instruction figure and the prevalence of the investigatory mode. The dissertation then discusses the relative scarcity of fictional legal narratives in Germany, and the cynicism in existing German stories about law in Chapter Six. The study concludes by considering the future directions of the law and culture movement, as well as both the challenges and rewards of this interdisciplinary work.

This thesis’ task is to reinterpret Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy of the will, hermeneutics, and study of metaphor from a perspective that speaks to what his early work conceptualized as a poetics of freedom. Poetics, for Ricoeur, becomes a mode of expression capable of representing and illuminating what he considers the essential paradox of our human condition: a will that is both free and bound, “set free as freedom and responsible in its very deliverance.” A poetics of freedom, Ricoeur conceptualized in the beginning of his career, would be a mediation through which we perceive a tensional reconciliation of our conflicted natures, “a linguistic register suitable for speaking of liberated freedom and liberated man in his existential concreteness and totality.” Ricoeur, however, never developed the poetics of freedom beyond its original conceptualization. Through an interpretive analysis of Ricoeur's work, I reorient his later works on metaphor and hermeneutics towards the concerns that dominated the philosophy of the will and the existential philosophy to which it belongs. This study of Ricoeur’s philosophy of being occurs in discourse with a poetic text, Dante’s Commedia. The Commedia, I argue, is a text whose poetry explicitly and implicitly discloses the importance of hermeneutics and poetics in the arrival at self-understanding. The correlations that arise between its aesthetic discourse and Ricoeur’s contemporary perspective illuminate what I consider to be at the core of the philosophy of being: a primordial tension of selfhood conceptualized in terms of the dialectical relations that arise between freedom and nature, between objectivity and subjectivity, and between perspective and meaning; or in Dante’s terms, between my life and la nostra vita (our life).

This dissertation explores various characteristics that define the monstrous and the heroic — both on their own and in conjunction with each other — in three representative texts of the Middle Ages, the Old English 'Beowulf' (manuscript c.1000), the Persian epic, 'The Shahnameh' (c.1010) and Gottfried von Strassburg’s Middle-High German poem, 'Tristan' (c.1210), as it delves into the cataclysmic aftermath of their corporeal confrontation. At the core of this study of three linguistically and geographically different, yet thematically contiguous texts, lies the significance of corporeality in terms of its articulation of the heroic self and identification of the monstrous other. Far from being diametrically opposed, the heroic and monstrous bodies bear enough resemblance to justify René Girard’s use of the phrase ‘monstrous doubles’ in reference to the host of similarities they manifest in the course of their confrontations. However, as shall be demonstrated, heroic and monstrous bodies need not be engaged in a single battle to manifest signs of similitude. Particular properties, such as ‘gigantism’, could be read as tokens of heroism and monstrosity, depending on the context. In 'Beowulf', for example, both Beowulf and Grendel stand out on account of their massive bulk, yet the former is marked as heroic; the latter, as monstrous. Significantly, the hero’s monstrosity not only endows him with an advantage over his fellow-humans, but also facilitates his mastery of monstrous bodies. The conquest of monstrous bodies overlaps with other paradigms of power including mastery over land and women. Gigantomachia and dragon-slaying tend to be coterminous with territorial claims. It is no coincidence that colonized lands are marked by their so-called ‘monstrous’ inhabitants, for as such, their conquest is rendered as both an act of heroism and a means of purification. Indeed, the purging of lands is a primordial priority of the heroic mission. Paradoxically, however, the hero has to be stained by elements of monstrosity in the first place to succeed at monstrous confrontations and goes on to acquire even more monstrous characteristics in a process which leads to ‘sublation’, the incorporation of a concept by a subsequent one in a way that leads to the formation of a new concept manifesting features of both. A third zone of possibilities comes to the fore in the midst of the entanglement of heroic and monstrous bodies. The clash between the heroic and the monstrous bodies could be read as a fusion, a marriage, which gives birth to a third party, in this case, a ‘Third Space’, a zone of discursivity and hybridity arising from the confrontation of an ‘I’ and a ‘Thou’. Significantly, the ‘Third Space’, in being unstable and fluid, is both susceptible to and a harbinger of change. In light of the fluidity of this space, the dismemberment and incorporation of bodies marking monstrous encounters take on added significance. One of the primary consequences of monstrous conflicts is ‘incorporation’, a freighted term, as shall be argued in the final chapter. While ‘incorporation’ can take place at a simple corporeal level, including the acts of cannibalism interspersed in 'Beowulf' and 'The Shahnameh', it can also constitute a mental challenge, a fusion of two different horizons of understanding. After all, in being both 'mixta' and 'mira', monsters not only serve as obstacles to the heroic body, but also to the intellectual mind. Although reflective of the mutability of times and the incertitude of man’s life during what has come to be known as the monstrous Middle Ages, monsters continue to charm us with their composite and enigmatic essence up to this day.

This dissertation examines the varying roles of lawyers and judges in Canada, the United States, England, France and Germany in a selection of “fictional legal narratives”: novels, movies, television shows and plays that explore legal themes. The study focuses on contemporary works after 1960, and explores the North American fascination with lawyers that saturates the major levels of culture, from the popular (including television shows, movies and novels) to the academic. Fictional images of lawyers and judges not only reflect but arguably also influence our attitudes toward the legal system, and offer a concrete way of conceptualizing abstract legal concepts. However, the vast differences between the Anglo-American adversarial legal system and the continental European inquisitorial legal system spawn very different fictional portraits of lawyers and judges. The differences between fictional legal narratives produced by each country, even those with similarly structured legal systems, are also striking. Chapter One begins by outlining a number of factors that contribute to the proliferation of fictional legal narratives in some countries, and their relative scarcity in other countries. Next, Chapter Two traces the wide range of lawyer images in American fictional legal narratives, which both glamourize and demonize the figure of the lawyer. Turning to anthropomorphizations of law in the United Kingdom, Chapter Three examines the British tendency to perpetuate the idea that, if correctly executed, the fundamental principles of British law would lead to a just and harmonious society. Chapter Four then explores the “anxiety of influence” reflected in Canadian images of law, which are more “soft-boiled” than the fictional legal figures of other countries. Moving to French fictional legal narratives, Chapter Five contemplates the predominance of the juge d’instruction figure and the prevalence of the investigatory mode. The dissertation then discusses the relative scarcity of fictional legal narratives in Germany, and the cynicism in existing German stories about law in Chapter Six. The study concludes by considering the future directions of the law and culture movement, as well as both the challenges and rewards of this interdisciplinary work.

This thesis’ task is to reinterpret Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy of the will, hermeneutics, and study of metaphor from a perspective that speaks to what his early work conceptualized as a poetics of freedom. Poetics, for Ricoeur, becomes a mode of expression capable of representing and illuminating what he considers the essential paradox of our human condition: a will that is both free and bound, “set free as freedom and responsible in its very deliverance.” A poetics of freedom, Ricoeur conceptualized in the beginning of his career, would be a mediation through which we perceive a tensional reconciliation of our conflicted natures, “a linguistic register suitable for speaking of liberated freedom and liberated man in his existential concreteness and totality.” Ricoeur, however, never developed the poetics of freedom beyond its original conceptualization. Through an interpretive analysis of Ricoeur's work, I reorient his later works on metaphor and hermeneutics towards the concerns that dominated the philosophy of the will and the existential philosophy to which it belongs. This study of Ricoeur’s philosophy of being occurs in discourse with a poetic text, Dante’s Commedia. The Commedia, I argue, is a text whose poetry explicitly and implicitly discloses the importance of hermeneutics and poetics in the arrival at self-understanding. The correlations that arise between its aesthetic discourse and Ricoeur’s contemporary perspective illuminate what I consider to be at the core of the philosophy of being: a primordial tension of selfhood conceptualized in terms of the dialectical relations that arise between freedom and nature, between objectivity and subjectivity, and between perspective and meaning; or in Dante’s terms, between my life and la nostra vita (our life).

This dissertation explores various characteristics that define the monstrous and the heroic — both on their own and in conjunction with each other — in three representative texts of the Middle Ages, the Old English 'Beowulf' (manuscript c.1000), the Persian epic, 'The Shahnameh' (c.1010) and Gottfried von Strassburg’s Middle-High German poem, 'Tristan' (c.1210), as it delves into the cataclysmic aftermath of their corporeal confrontation. At the core of this study of three linguistically and geographically different, yet thematically contiguous texts, lies the significance of corporeality in terms of its articulation of the heroic self and identification of the monstrous other. Far from being diametrically opposed, the heroic and monstrous bodies bear enough resemblance to justify René Girard’s use of the phrase ‘monstrous doubles’ in reference to the host of similarities they manifest in the course of their confrontations. However, as shall be demonstrated, heroic and monstrous bodies need not be engaged in a single battle to manifest signs of similitude. Particular properties, such as ‘gigantism’, could be read as tokens of heroism and monstrosity, depending on the context. In 'Beowulf', for example, both Beowulf and Grendel stand out on account of their massive bulk, yet the former is marked as heroic; the latter, as monstrous. Significantly, the hero’s monstrosity not only endows him with an advantage over his fellow-humans, but also facilitates his mastery of monstrous bodies. The conquest of monstrous bodies overlaps with other paradigms of power including mastery over land and women. Gigantomachia and dragon-slaying tend to be coterminous with territorial claims. It is no coincidence that colonized lands are marked by their so-called ‘monstrous’ inhabitants, for as such, their conquest is rendered as both an act of heroism and a means of purification. Indeed, the purging of lands is a primordial priority of the heroic mission. Paradoxically, however, the hero has to be stained by elements of monstrosity in the first place to succeed at monstrous confrontations and goes on to acquire even more monstrous characteristics in a process which leads to ‘sublation’, the incorporation of a concept by a subsequent one in a way that leads to the formation of a new concept manifesting features of both. A third zone of possibilities comes to the fore in the midst of the entanglement of heroic and monstrous bodies. The clash between the heroic and the monstrous bodies could be read as a fusion, a marriage, which gives birth to a third party, in this case, a ‘Third Space’, a zone of discursivity and hybridity arising from the confrontation of an ‘I’ and a ‘Thou’. Significantly, the ‘Third Space’, in being unstable and fluid, is both susceptible to and a harbinger of change. In light of the fluidity of this space, the dismemberment and incorporation of bodies marking monstrous encounters take on added significance. One of the primary consequences of monstrous conflicts is ‘incorporation’, a freighted term, as shall be argued in the final chapter. While ‘incorporation’ can take place at a simple corporeal level, including the acts of cannibalism interspersed in 'Beowulf' and 'The Shahnameh', it can also constitute a mental challenge, a fusion of two different horizons of understanding. After all, in being both 'mixta' and 'mira', monsters not only serve as obstacles to the heroic body, but also to the intellectual mind. Although reflective of the mutability of times and the incertitude of man’s life during what has come to be known as the monstrous Middle Ages, monsters continue to charm us with their composite and enigmatic essence up to this day.