published_or_final_version / English / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

This master's thesis in creative work is divided in two parts: a compilation of novels and a critical study. The creative work is entitled "Les lits clos". It is a compilation of nine novels imprint with black humor. This creative work tends to demonstrate that daily routine is a source of black humor and that reality is nothing but the perception that everyone makes of it. / "Les lits clos" will be preceded by a critical study which intends to explain what is black humor by following Andre Breton, founder of that term. First of all we will discuss of Jacques Vache who, in his correspondence with Andre Breton, was interested to what he called "Umour". Then we will see how Breton, using Freud's theory, has refined objective humor created by Hegel. Black humor is at first a search for freedom, moreover the desire to overcome death. Black humor is nourished by the imagination to recover the origin of image. The black humorist lies between the subjective and the objective and tends to stay in balance within each other. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of South Carolina, 1976. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Liberty University, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1977. / Typescript. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [189]-193).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 1975. / Typescript. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 279-293).

No description available.

Thesis (M.A.)--Florida State University, 2003. / Advisor: Mark Winegardner, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Feb. 25, 2004). Includes bibliographical references.

Set up as a visual investigation, the research explores how the addition of paint and graphite materials onto the surface of found and discarded photographs, creates a visual and conceptual disjuncture by punctuating and altering the temporal frame of the photograph. The research is positioned in relation to Susan Sontag’s description in On Photography (1977) as to how the photograph can at once “transfix” and “anesthetize” the subject matter, which through the passage of time serves to create an “aesthetic distance,” and Roland Barthes’ observation in Camera Lucida (1980) that the photograph is “platitudinous.” The tendency to project nostalgic sentiment onto the found vernacular photograph is explored, drawing on Susan Stewart’s notion of the authentic object in On Longing (1984), which, it is argued, when expressed in the form of the found photographic object, becomes an emblem of loss, further exaggerating the sense of distance and impenetrability. Working specifically with the found photograph prompts a questioning of previous critical commentaries concerning painting over photographs, as in Gerhard Richter’s ‘Overpaintings,’ where Joannes Meinhardt (2009) suggests that the addition of paint intensifies the essential “speechlessness” of the photograph. This research extends these discourses and contributes a counter critical position, supported and articulated through an original body of work. It proposes that the applied paint on the surface of the found photograph punctures the essential “speechlessness” and unknowability magnified within this subset of photography. The very physical materiality and difference offered by the paint medium ruptures the perception of distance and mediates the tendency towards nostalgic interpretations, bringing a level of stability and certainty in the face of the uncertain, fluctuating meaning and temporal plane of the found photograph.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1996. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [214]-226).