This thesis is divided into two chapters, the first being an examination of conspiracy and paranoia in Libra, while the second focuses on the relationship between art and terror in Mao II, “In the Ruins of the Future,” Falling Man, and Point Omega. The study traces how DeLillo’s works have evolved over the years, focusing on the creation of counternarratives. Readers are given a glimpse of American culture and shown the power of narrative, ultimately shedding light on the future of our collective consciousness.

Univ., Diss.--Göttingen, 2002.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Texas at El Paso, 2009. / Title from title screen. Vita. CD-ROM. Includes bibliographical references. Also available online.

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Doctor Legum - LLD / This contribution looks at the relevance of conspiracy in international criminal law. It establishes that conspiracy was introduced into international criminal law for purposes of prevention and to combat the collective nature of participation in commission of international crimes. Its use as a tool of accountability has, however, been affected by conflicting conceptual perceptions of conspiracy from common law and civil law countries. This conflict is displayed in the decisions on conspiracy by the international criminal tribunals, and finally culminates into the exclusion of punishment of conspiracy in the Rome Statute. It is questionable whether this latest development on the law of conspiracy was a prudent decision. While the function of conspiracy as a mode of liability is satisfactorily covered by the modes of participation in the Rome Statute, its function as a purely inchoate crime used to punish incomplete crimes is missing. This study creates a case for inclusion in the Rome Statute, punishment of conspiracies involving international crimes that do not extend beyond the conceptual stage, to reinforce the Statute’s purpose of prevention. This conspiracy should reflect the characteristics of conspiracy acceptable under both common law and civil law systems. This means excluding the far reaching and often problematic characteristics exemplified in the common law conspiracy.

Verschwörungstheorien haben Hochkonjunktur. Jedoch gibt es kaum wissenschaftliche Literatur, die sich mit diesem Phänomen beschäftigen, vor allem nicht auf dem Gebiet der politischen Bildung. Diese Staatsexamensarbeit soll eine Annäherung an Verschwörungstheorien sein und beschäftigt sich insbesondere mit den Erfahrungen von Politiklehrer/innen mit Konspirationen.

En analysant trois romans des écrivains américains, l'auteur de cette thèse examine courantes attitudes envers la notion de paranoïa et théorie de conspiration. L'auteur envisage comment cela permet de constituer une manière de dépasser le type de pouvoir centrée sur la capacité d’agir compris comme exclusivement humaine, ou plus spécifiquement, de deprivilégier la position humain dominante ce qui ouvre la possibilité pour les approches posthumaines de causalité d'émerger. Le première étape est d'établir au début que les deux conceptions (paranoïa et conspiration) provoquent la peur intrinsèque des origines de cause et de pouvoir d’agir. La croyance que ce n'est pas moi-même qui est responsable de mes propres actions, ou que c'est quelqu'un d'autre qui décide et provoque les évènements et mes actions implique le problème et l’inquiétude sur l’origine d’un action. / On the basis of a detailed and thorough study of three novels of American writers,the author of the present thesis questions the current attitudes towards paranoia andconspiracy theory and claims that challenging these, constitutes a way of going beyondhuman-centered types of agency ; or more specifically, of de-privileging human agency andallowing for post-humanist approaches of causality to emerge. The first step is to state thatboth concepts bring about the inherent fear about the origin of cause and agency. The beliefthat it is not myself who is responsible for my own actions, or that there is someone else whois pulling the strings, necessarily involves the problem of agency.

No description available.

"Fabricated Preservation" aims to push the boundaries with traditional theses, creating a multi-layered experience that blends fact and fiction through a performance that centers around environmental storytelling in virtual reality. The experience questions the balance of theatrical elements in traditional storytelling which forefront text and human characters over architecture, props, and environment, and critically examines how an environment can play a crucial role in a narrative. The narrative itself focuses on one question: if a genealogy company had access to past environments via time travel, what new information could we learn about our ancestors?  The normal perceptions of a "game" are challenged, introducing real world elements to trick the audience and subtly influence how they navigate a virtual space. A complex fictional character is introduced through the performance and developed through the environment, with the hopes that the audience will gain some emotion toward them: either connecting with the character as if they were a close friend, or feeling unsettled that they observed the character's realistic personal space. This voyeuristic theme weaves its way through each layer of the storytelling, poking at the audience's morals with the hopes that they will question the experience around them.  Above all, the main goal of Fabricated Preservation is to challenge the audience to mentally engage with the virtual experience, by paying attention to the details of their environment and constructing their own version of a narrative from those details. / Master of Fine Arts / Fabricated Preservation examines how an environment can play a crucial role in a narrative. An environmental story was created that centers around a fictional character, influenced by a close friend's life. Virtual reality was used to allow the audience to immerse themselves more within a virtual bedroom environment, using virtual props to convey the personality of the character. A fictional genealogy company called The Fifth Turning was also created to convey that environmental story through a different perspective to the audience. There are two main stories that go hand in hand with this experience: the primary story is the life of a college girl in the 1990s. The secondary story is of the fictional company, the Fifth Turning, which uses time travel technology to access the bedroom environment of the college girl to obtain more personalized genealogy information.

This thesis explores the representation of conspiracy in the literature of the July Monarchy (1830-1848) and its engagement with conspiracy thinking, with particular reference to the work of Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) and George Sand (1804-1876). In providing the first sustained scholarly exploration of conspiracy and cultural production in nineteenth-century France, it situates the novel within wider discourses on European political history in the years leading up to the upheaval of 1848. Through close readings of Balzac and Sand's common investment in conspiracist modes of explanation, this study makes the case for a new generic category, the novel of conspiracy, around which literary poetics, historical imagination and political fantasy come to coalesce. Chapter one proposes a re-evaluation of the dialectic between models of surface and depth reading in Balzac's Une ténébreuse affaire (1841), arguing that the conspiratorial landscape of this proto-detective novel belies Balzac's fraught relationship to the severed referentiality of his narrative. As illustration of a Balzacian poetics of conspiracy, Une ténébreuse affaire, it is suggested, points forward in literary history towards the Flaubertian aesthetic of platitude. Chapter two looks to the political criticisms Jacques Rancière makes of Sand's patrician benevolence to inform its reading of Le Compagnon du Tour de France (1840), which depicts workers' secret societies and the underground networks of Restoration liberalism. Accusations of misguided idealism, this thesis shows, align Rancière's critique and the literary-critical narrative informing Sand's twentieth-century aesthetic devaluation with the reproach that she herself levels at the Carbonarist conspirators of her novel. Chapter three, finally, turns to the alternative origin myth of 1789 that Sand elaborates in Consuelo-La Comtesse de Rudolstadt (1842-44). Her engagement with the founding text of the conspiracist tradition of explanation, it argues, provides the cornerstone for the interrogation of the tensions of a pre-Revolutionary Europe torn between Enlightenment and Illuminism. Framing the Balzacian and Sandian novel as emblematic of a wider discourse on the conspiratorial origins of 1789 has a two-fold advantage. On an immediate level, it nuances received critical ideas on these authors' relationships to history and literary genre (a realist Balzac incapable of looking back further than the Restoration whose demise he so lamented; an idealist Sand too caught up in a utopian future to envisage the historical past). In doing so, this study seeks to problematize the narrative of oppositionality behind the Balzac-Sand binary in terms of which the literary history of nineteenth-century France is habitually couched. Yet, more significantly, it also gestures towards the importance of the conspiratorial as a prism through which to approach the porosity of the very categories of 'literature' and 'history' in the nineteenth-century French context.