Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2003. Graduate Programme in Language, Culture and Teaching. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 205-220). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNQ99164

In chapter 1, I ponder the role of authorship and whether or not an original text can truly exist. Specifically, the claim that Borges has that a copy can be superior to an original. From this, brings me to chapter 2 with the movie Man of la Mancha. In this movie, I highlight some of the pros and cons of a copy. The windmill scene is a negative emanation of the Quixote, while the interaction between people and the presence of women is something the movie truly displays well. In the third chapter, I look at Lost in la Mancha because it demonstrates a failed attempt to translate the Quixote. In essence, anything that tries to represent this truly great text will fail; however, it's failure can paradoxically be thought of as a success because it's an homage to the Quixote. As far as the Ezra Pound material, I thought it extremely pertinent to look at his experience on a metro because he attempts to describe a vision that he had through poetry. He notes that it is very difficult to encapsulate his entire experience because the primary form of art (his vision) is being described through a secondary form (words). Thus, when you translate a form of art through a medium it loses some of its value. This is what happens with the Quixote; its primary form (words) is being displayed through a secondary form (film), and it inevitably loses something in the translation. The final chapter/conclusion is a more in-depth investigation of this investigation primary form of art (writing). This uses the character of Gines as a concrete example of a formal and stylistic quality that is unique to literature. Namely, the physical ranging of words on a page in both a spatial and literary sense. When you extract those lines from a novel you implicitly remove some of the dialectic between Cervantes' work and the genres he's invoking, just by taking it out of the form of literature. The surroundings of text establish the meaning of the novel. The conclusion is my final chance to argue why the Quixote is so special and untranslatable. I touch on the qualities that keep it forever live and present in us today. Through the Quixote's proclivity for renaming the real world (established societal beliefs/values, etc.) in his own vein, Cervantes allows for the Quixote to reappropriate the world around him, making it uniquely his. In so doing, Cervantes creates a character who is able, not only to write his own self-history, but to control the way that said self-history will be written by others. By blurring the lines between narrator and narration and history and fiction, Cervantes creates a work that is endlessly present, where words becoming living page, and actions occur as they are said.

The essay presents the scholarly controversy over the correct attribution of the works by “Shakespeare”. The main alternative author is Edward de Vere, 17th earl of Oxford. 16th century conventions allowed noblemen to write poetry or drama only for private circulation. To appear in print, such works had to be anonymous or under pseudonym. Overtly writing for public theatre, a profitable business, would have been a degrading conduct. Oxford’s contemporary fame as an author is little matched by known works. Great gaps in relevant sources indicate that documents concerning not only his person and authorship but also the life of Shakspere from Stratford, the alleged author, have been deliberately eliminated in order to transfer the authorship, for which the political authority of the Elizabethan and Jacobean autocratic society had motive and resources enough. A restored identity would imply radical redating of plays and poems.                       To what extent literature is autobiographical, or was in that age, and whether restoring a lost identity from written works is legitimate at all, are basic issues of the debate, always implying tradition without real proof versus circumstantial evidence. As such arguments are incompatible, both sides have incessantly missed their targets. The historical conditions for the sequence of events that created the fiction, and its main steps, are related. Oxford will be in focus, since most old and new evidence for making a case has reference to him. The views of the two parties on different points are presented by continual quoting from representative recent works by Shakespeare scholars, where the often scornful tone of the debate still echoes. It is claimed that the urge for concrete results will make the opinion veer to the side that proves productive and eventually can create a new coherent picture, but better communication between the parties’ scholars is called for. / Literary Degree Project

<p>Most of the existing plagiarism detection systems compare a text to a database of other texts. These external approaches, however, are vulnerable because texts not contained in the database cannot be detected as source texts. This paper examines an internal plagiarism detection method that uses style markers from authorship attribution studies in order to find stylistic changes in a text. These changes might pinpoint plagiarized passages. Additionally, a new style marker called specific words is introduced. A pre-study tests if the style markers can fingerprint an author s style and if they are constant with sample size. It is shown that vocabulary richness measures do not fulfil these prerequisites. The other style markers - simple ratio measures, readability scores, frequency lists, and entropy measures - have these characteristics and are, together with the new specific words measure, used in a main study with an unsupervised approach for detecting stylistic changes in plagiarized texts at sentence and paragraph levels. It is shown that at these small levels the style markers generally cannot detect plagiarized sections because of intra-authorial stylistic variations (i.e. noise), and that at bigger levels the results are strongly a ected by the sliding window approach. The specific words measure, however, can pinpoint single sentences written by another author.</p>

Project (M.F.A.) - Simon Fraser University, 2004. / Theses (School for Contemporary Arts) / Simon Fraser University. Also issued in digital format and available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Carolina at Wilmington, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references ([65]-66).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 227-238). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Under the tensions of nationalization and globalization, mainland Chinese cinema has undergone tremendous changes in terms of industrial transformations, diversification of film language, style and genre, revenues, etc. in the new century. This is epitomized in a new surge of commercial entertainment cinema. This dissertation examines Lu Chuan and his films among this surge and as a representative of the new development of Chinese popular cinema. The study reveals a new political regime and a new popular imagination in China with its greater integration into the international system of global capitalism in in the first decade of the twenty-first century. I apply Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the field of cultural production to explore structural transformations in the field of Chinese cinema, and trace these changes to the shaping forces in the larger fields of Chinese power and economy. This structural examination is related to the agency of individuals as cultural entrepreneurs maneuvering their way within the state system through alliance of power, capital and talent, and forming their own voices and a public space. Theories of popular cultural studies help me analyze Lu Chuan’s films as a site where different international and domestic social, political, and cultural forces contend and negotiate with each other. I also draw upon theories of film studies to illustrate Lu Chuan’s application of international film language and styles including classical Hollywood cinema and the art film in rendering Chinese socialist stories in the age of globalization. Instead of treating Lu Chuan as an auteur or artistic creator, I look into his authorship as a site of different discourses and a technique of the self, which helps him distinguish his films from others and establish his position in the field. Trauma studies provide a useful tool in discussing Chinese cinematic representations of the national trauma, the Nanjing Massacre, during different historical periods, and Chinese nation’s continuing effort in grappling with this trauma. This textual analysis is to illustrate the newest development in Chinese cinema. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the historical transformation of Chinese society and to identify the forces that shaped Chinese cinema, which took form in a new alliance amongst power, capital, and art, and contributed to a post-socialist popular imagination in China in the first decade of the new century. / text

This dissertation argues that Robert De Niro's performances in the 1970s mark him as pivotal a figure in the history of American film acting as Stella Adler, Elia Kazan, and Marlon Brando. De Niro's transformations into Vito Corleone, Travis Bickle, and Jake La Motta take the Method to the extreme, permanently changing our understanding of screen performance while revealing the relationships among authorship, agency, and acting. Utilizing rare artifacts from De Niro's recently donated materials to the Harry Ransom Center, I provide hitherto unseen evidence of his meticulous research, his conversations with directors, and his extreme bodily transformations that I argue constitute a truly unique iteration of the Method. Though certainly a student of Adler, De Niro's efforts to reshape productions around his characterizations and exercise his growing power to do whatever it takes - including rewriting dialogue to reflect vernacular speech, improvising scenes for spontaneity, and finding his own costumes – demonstrate a particular commitment to artistic truth, historical accuracy, and verisimilitude that mark him as inimitable within the diverse world of Method theorists, pedagogues, and practitioners. There is nothing, I argue, that appears in a De Niro film that has not been deliberated, discussed, or fought for by the actor, and I consider here how his filmography – including pivotal '70s films such as MEAN STREETS, TAXI DRIVER, THE DEER HUNTER, and RAGING BULL – speaks to a Method performance that extends beyond the screen and behind the scenes. Demystifying De Niro's "Method" therefore allows us to revisit key cinematic contributions to 1970s US film culture and significantly deepens our understanding of actor agency by troubling dominant historical narratives of production and confounding assumptions about on-set hierarchies. / text

Motivation: When I set out to write a novel about Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, I wanted the focus to be on her, not the Bard. However, as I developed the idea, I realised that his character was an essential component of the narrative. So how should I set about ‘inventing’ such an iconic character? In addition, how relevant were earlier versions – biographical and fictional – to this project? Though I found a wealth of material about Shakespeare and his plays, I discovered there is a substantial sub-genre of Shakespeare invention. As a writer new to historical fiction, this felt a little like putting Jesus Christ into a story – and it turned out that some writers have given Shakespeare a distinctly Messianic character. Methods: In order to invent my own version of Shakespeare, I needed to assimilate what had gone before. The line between fact and fiction was blurred, but I clarified what was known and what unknown, and established what was myth. I then researched fourteen fictional versions of Shakespeare, starting with Kenilworth (Sir Walter Scott, Constable & Co, 1821) and ending with Shakespeare’s Memory (Jorge Luis Borges, Penguin, 2001). Results: My discovery was that the invention of history is a complex imaginative and intellectual process, but each writer solves a succession of challenges in their own way. Identifying these challenges helped me to create a new Shakespeare, and to clarify my own reasons for writing this particular novel. Conclusions: Far from being a form which is nostalgic, escapist or conservative, historical fiction is continually re-inventing itself in the light of the events and ideas which are contemporary to the writer. The continuing evolution and re-acquisition of the character of William Shakespeare is an illustration of its perennial significance.