This dissertation investigates contemporary narratives of homelessness in the United States after the McKinney Act of 1987, the first federal acknowledgement of homelessness and the proposed solution to it. Since 1987, narratives of homelessness usually do one of two things, and sometimes both. They identify and describe significant difference in the homeless (they are animals or other-worldly), or, a narrative will recommend a homeless person to the reading audience in order to show likeness or sameness. Both narrative strategies explore and speak back to current cultural readings of homelessness, and help to show how and why solutions to managing the problem of homelessness have failed. The issues presented in these narratives are pressing, and resound on local and global levels. In extreme cases, the homeless can be read as, and treated as, mere animals or human surplus. My project touches upon some of these ethical and practical questions regarding the homeless, and imagines a more complex ground from which to read literary figures of the homeless; it is no longer enough to speak in terms of "romanticized" and "realist" representations when sentiment, embodiment, species, and place are dynamic concerns.

Summary in English.|Incudes bibliographical references. / I explore the Vietnam War and the Border War of South Africa through the analysis of the oral histories of the soldiers who fought in these wars. Considering the scarcity of oral histories about the Border War, I conducted several personal interviews with Border War soldiers to add to the oral histories representing that conflict. In this dissertation, I frame the accounts of South African conscripts and Vietnam soldiers within the appropriate historical, social and ideological contexts of both wars. This comparison further focuses on the soldiers' perspective with relation to the physical and psychological conditions endemic to fighting guerilla wars, issues of race, class, ethnicity or regional affiliation in combat, as well as the return home from lost wars of intervention. My evaluation discovers significant common ground between the physical demands of warfare, the social and political environment, and most importantly, similar expressions of mental and emotional strain both during guerilla warfare and upon returning home. In conclusion, this is an endeavor to contribute to the breaking of the silence that has pervaded and enclosed the Border War by using, as a comparative point of departure, the vast experiences of Vietnam veterans who were more readily allowed the space to voice their accounts.

Bibliography: leaves 78-83. / This thesis primarily addresses the use of humour and the comic in four films about contemporary Native Americans, largely by Native Americans (Smoke Signals, Powwow Highway, Medicine River and Dead Man). Emphasis falls on the importance of these types of positive self-representations in counteracting the legacy of stereotyping and appropriation surrounding the image of the Native American, particularly the concept of the stoic, humourless, 'vanished American.' The nature of comedy as a genre rooted in survival and endurance is discussed, and its usefulness in depicting the situation of modem Native Americans is explored - highlighting the presence of comedy in traditional Native American culture that has influenced contemporary experience.

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