Thesis (M. A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2005. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2005. / Supervisor: William H. Goetzmann. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--West Virginia University, 2001. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains iv, 241 p. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 235-241).

Vladimir Giorgio Scerbanenco naît à Kiev en 1911, s’installe en Italie à six mois et meurt à Milan en 1969. Auteur d’une centaine de romans, de plusieurs nouvelles et de nombreux articles, il pratique avec aisance tous les genres littéraires, véritable « machine à écrire » qui n’obtient qu’une gloire assez brève auprès du public et de la critique avec ses romans noirs de la fin des années soixante. Le protagoniste récurent y est alors Duca Lamberti, un jeune médecin expulsé de l’Ordre pour avoir pratiqué l’euthanasie qui devient une sorte de détective privé travaillant aux côtés de la police de Milan. Dans ces romans, pour la première fois en Italie, il ne s’agit pas seulement de résoudre une énigme, mais plutôt de représenter et comprendre la sphère des souffrances individuelles dans ses déterminations sociales plus larges, qui pèsent fatalement sur la possibilité d’expérimenter rationnellement la réalité. A la forme toujours égale des romans policiers, Scerbanenco ajoute des éléments référentiels nouveaux qui nous placent face au paradoxe continuel du couple dialectique « répétition/innovation ». En effet, c’est avec ces romans violents reposant sur ce personnage, Duca Lamberti, que la littérature de masse, grâce à l’accumulation hyperréaliste des éléments les plus évidents de la contemporanéité, commence à montrer la transformation rapide de la vie quotidienne italienne. / Vladimir Giorgio Scerbanenco was born in Kiev in 1911, but moved to Italy as a child and died in Milan in 1969. Author of more than a hundred novels, several short stories and numerous articles, he practiced all literary genres and reached a brief critic and public success only with his hard boiled novels from the late sixties, who see as a recurrent protagonist Duca Lamberti, a young doctor expelled from the Order for practicing euthanasia who becomes a sort of private detective, working with the Milan police. For the first time in Italy, these novels are not only about solving an enigma, but rather representing and understanding the sphere of individual suffering amid its wider social determinations, which inevitably compromise one’s opportunity to rationally experience reality. Scerbanenco added new referential elements to the formal identity of the detective novel that leave us facing the continuous repetition of the dialectic couple « repetition / innovation » paradox. Indeed, thanks to the hyper-realistic accumulation of the most evident elements of contemporaneity, it is with these novels, centered on the character of Duca Lamberti, that mass literature begins to reveal in a violent form the rapid transformation of the Italian daily life.

Over the last two centuries, mass-produced serial narratives, especially those created for women, have been vilified or ignored by literary and cultural critics. Serial narratives, which include continuing stories published in installments and independent tales that form part of an overarching plot, have been maligned for their content, for the material realities of their mass production, and most simply for their popularity. Serial texts aimed at female audiences have been subjected to further criticisms: they have been judged as being trivial or insipid in content and as lacking aesthetic merit or cultural weight. Despite these criticisms, serial narratives were exceedingly popular with audiences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and by the end of the twentieth century became the dominant mode of storytelling across nearly all media. Popularity, far from being a reason to disparage these works, suggests the enormous power serial narratives have to both reflect and shape the culture that produces and consumes them. This cultural agency has long been overlooked, and this study hopes to change that. Serial narratives, it will be argued, train readers and viewers in various ways to actively participate in the narrative and in parallel ways in real life, an outcome especially noteworthy for modern female audiences. Ongoing and repetitive, serial narratives invite long-term engagement that enables audiences to participate imaginatively in the story itself and to embody the attitudes and behaviors of the serial protagonists in their own lives. In addition, because they are published on a potentially infinite basis, serial narratives are a medium through which modern audiences come to understand themselves and the world they inhabit. This connection between the reading and viewing choices of the modern citizen and their lived experiences, what I call serial modernism, provides a way of understanding how serial texts enact this connection particularly in relation to the modern woman’s increasing sense of agency and her continually evolving identity. Several serial texts from different eras and in different media that powerfully engage with evolving expectations of American women over the last 150 years will crystallize this connection: Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women series (1868-1886) and her serialized novel Work (1873); two silent film serials, The Perils of Pauline (1914) and The Hazards of Helen (1914-1917); two teenage sleuth series, Carolyn Keene’s Nancy Drew (1930-2003) and Margaret Sutton’s Judy Bolton (1930-1967); and Sara Paretsky’s adult detective series V.I. Warshawski (1982-present).

Text in German / Classics and Modern European Languages / M.A. (German)

this diploma thesis compares and contrasts the works of two different classics of the detective genre. Not only does it describe two different literary characters and their detective methods, but it also explores how the fiction is influenced by the attitudes and experiences of the very authors, i.e. A.C.Doyle and G.K.Chesterton. Besides comparing different thematic features, attention is also given to literary method and style.

Using trauma theory, I analyze the disjointed narrative structure of gothic works from 1764-1853 as symptomatic of the traumatic experience. Gothic novels contain multiple structural anomalies, including gaps in experience that indicate psychological wounding, use of the supernatural to violate rational thought, and the inability of witnesses to testify to the traumatic event. These structural abnormalities are the result of trauma that characters within these texts then seek to prevent or repair via detection.

This thesis approaches the issue of the detective in the 21st century through the parodic novella form. The main body of the work is a piece of fiction about an amateur detective trying to find a solution to an imagined crime. This comes from my study of detective fiction, starting with Oedipus and ending with twentieth and twenty-first century examples, especially in the works of Thomas Pynchon and Chester Himes, where the detective loses power. The novella follows Whitney Sloat as he acts as detective in a world that can’t let go of the hardboiled traditions. He and the people around him struggle to connect with reality, pursuing a way of life that cannot exist outside of their world.

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