Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Delaware, 2006. / Principal faculty advisor: J. A. Leo Lemay, Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 1982. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 240-243).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 1982. / Vita. Bibliography: leaves 240-243.

Thesis (doctoral)--University of Liverpool, 1988. / BLDSC reference no.: DX89326.

Robert Dick is best known as a leading proponent of contemporary music and extended techniques for the flute; however, his teaching is informative on a broader level that encompasses technical and musical aspects of traditional playing as well as contemporary practices. This dissertation is intended to serve as a resource for flutists, providing a detailed documentation of his approach to playing and teaching the flute. Dick’s highly integrated pedagogy—informed by his traditional training, revolutionary work in documenting and codifying extended techniques on the flute, and his equal personal involvement in performance, composition, and improvisation—provides a strong basis and clear trajectory, musically as well as technically, to his students. The primary research material for this document is the author’s personal collection of detailed notes from her studies with Dick. Additionally, as no pedagogy exists in a vacuum, a number of sources including historical treatises and more recent published documentations of flutists’ pedagogies provide context and support. Such publications are of current and continuing educational value; considering Dick’s contributions to the development of flute playing and his integrated approach to teaching the flute, a document that accurately and thoroughly addresses his pedagogy is a logical addition to this literature.

Conventional literary representations of disability reflect and re-inscribe the fraudulent assumption that individuals with impairments are mysterious 'others,' subhuman betrayers of the divinely-sanctioned corporeal norm. When such normative 'myths' are internalized by a social body, the culturally-determined 'disabled' minority is subjected to various forms of oppression and degradation, stigmatizing efforts designed to strip the 'deviants' of agency and dignity. The object ofthis study is to isolate and, subsequently, demythologize the presuppositions ordering such conventional disability myths. This 'demythologizing' effort is patterned, in large part, on the theoretical tenets espoused by Roland Barthes in his influential text Mythologies. Barthes's text, in its emphasis on destabilizing culturally-fixed 'truths,' provides the theoretical framework necessary for gauging the socio-political load of disability myth. In an effort to illumine, moreover, the presence and workings of disability myth in nineteenth and twentieth century Western consciousness, I examine the specific portraits of disability that appear in Herman Melville'sMoby-Dick; Melville's canonized text lends itself particularly well to this type of investigation as its characters -Ahab and Pip, in particular - are representative of the spectrum of negative disability imagery. This critical exercise, in its emphasis on displacing and, thus, de-naturalizing mythic representations of 'normal' and 'abnormal' corporeality, resembles and reinforces the efforts of the Disability Movement and its attempts to restore power and dignity to the unjustly disenfranchised 'disabled' minority. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

En 1974, le fameux écrivain de science-fiction Philip K. Dick (1928-1982), une figure centrale de la littérature d'anticipation des États-Unis d’Amérique, vécut une expérience à forte saveur mystique qu'il interpréta comme une conversion religieuse traditionnelle à la lumière des écrits gnostiques de la bibliothèque copte de Nag Hammadi. Poisson d’Or, que l’on retrouve dans le premier tome du tryptique métaphysique romanesque de d’Or. notamment grâce aux travaux pionniers d’André Billette traitant de la conversion religieuse comme récit et du professeur Kenneth Ring envisageant le récit de contact extraterrestre comme une voie alternative de transformation psycho-spirituelle. Nous démontrerons ainsi que la récit de la conversion gnostique de Philip K. Dick possède à la fois les caractéristiques du récit de conversion religieuse traditionnelle et du récit de contact extraterrestre.

This thesis considers Herman Melville's Moby-Dick as a textual strategy of possible, alternative models of reading, as well as a text in itself. I approach the text as a drama of interpretations and argue that the individual consciousnesses of different interpreters represent different interpretive strategies, and that these differences suggest distinct structures of community. This approach becomes more focussed in the discussion of Ahab and Ishmael as representatives of two contrasting interpretive possibilities, of "reading" the text as a "pasteboard mask" which conceals a stable identity and single "truth," versus "reading" the text of the "defaced" and hence indeterminate surface of changing "meanings." Each strategy implies a different way of conceiving "space" as the "place" where community is formed, and though critics frequently perceive the ending of Moby-Dick as a paradoxical conflict between these two visionary quests, I suggest that Ishmael's survival presents a possible resolution, where Moby Dick becomes the narrative of filling space with many narratives to create the text Moby-Dick.

This essay is a comparative anlysis of ”Paycheck”, ”The Minority Report” and ”Adjustment Team” by Philip K. Dick and their film adaptations, Paycheck,  Minority Report and The Adjustment Bureau. I am primarily interested in the political message of the original stories and how it is affected in the process of transmediation into film. The political message is clearly reflected in the way the protagonists’ free will relates to the bigger system of power. This relationship can either problematize the protagonist’s struggle, forcing him to sacrifice something, or simplify the political dimension by letting him overcome every single obstacle. The extent of the political message is enhanced by its allegorical meaning, especially when related to the contemporary reality. Therefore, I will investigate how the texts and films can be read allegorically and what impact the process of adaptation has on the allegories. I will use Fredric Jameson’s approach to allegory that treats it as a method of interpretation and a tool of mediation and understanding the diversity of human experience. I argue that the allegorical element functions rather independently of the literal political message. When some allegorical interpretations are lost, new ones, connected to the sociocultural context of the adaptation are created. All three adaptations reduce the scope of the political message found in the original texts, opting for less reflective entertainment or even action cinema. Nevertheless, on the allegorical level, they offer new interpretations that echo their updated sociocultural conditions. Keywords: Philip K. Dick; Political Message; Allegory; Adaptation

Thesis (M.A.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Graduate Studies in the College of Religious Instruction. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 98-101).