The narrative structure and formal style of the director Shinoda Masahiro's films reveal his ethical objective to encourage his viewer to engage with works of cinematic representation as the creative products of human agency that they are. Within his period films, Shinoda hopes to stimulate recognition of cinema's genealogical inheritance and reproduction of the absolutist propositions underlying traditional Japanese cultural forms. He posits that these have redirected essential human drives into masochistic self-effacement in tribute to a divine ideal imaged in the Imperial polity. By disrupting the illusion of cinematic realism which simply serves to reinforce Japanese culture's existent intertextual networks, Shinoda seeks to reground cultural expressions in their material and human origins. This acts as the first step to imagining a Japanese subject outside of the limited definitions posed by nostalgic absolutism and its reactionary antithesis in the equally self-destructive mode of global capitalism.

This thesis is devoted to the problem of exclusion that Roma population is subject of in Czech republic. This exclusion is studied through "helping professions" - professional intervening actors that help Roma to overcome the exclusion. Results used in this text come from two ethnographic research projects realized between 2008-2013. The text contains mixed approach, inductive ethnographic, stemming from my extensive research data and deductive or theory-driven. Methodologically the research belongs to the broad area of qualitative approach to social research, especially cognitive anthropological, psychoanalytical and that of individual psychology. First theoretical part, using mainly concepts of cognitive anthropology and distibutive theory of culture is focused on the theoretical question of the concept of culture and how it can be used for the "Roma culture" concept in relationship with the question of "majority". The second part consists mainly of a reinterpretation of the question of exclusion and Roma culture from the point of view of the concept of distantiation and expands it into Frantz Fanon inspired theory of confrontation. Third part is predominatly empirical and ethnograpical and consists of an inquiry into cognitive models of the help from exclusion as observed in helping professions....

This essay identifies a type of narrative dissonance in the depictions of working-class conditions within Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life and George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. In this thesis, the dissonance is argued in part to be the effect created when an author belonging to one social class attempts to portray a class separate from their own. According to Marxist views, class constructs are well-defined and exist in opposition to one another. As such, there is a distinction between describing circumstances while viewing from outside and portraying conditions from within a class consciousness one does not share. The contrast between these perspectives introduces a discordant element into the narrative which interferes with a reader’s immersion. Furthermore, instances of both intranarrational and extratextual unreliability exacerbate the peculiar sense of dissonance when those elements conflict with the experiences of the reader. Understanding and sympathizing with the experiences of the Other, while beneficial in many regards, should not be conflated with knowledge of their lived experience. In order to establish this distinction, a close reading of the books, highlighting examples, is utilized. Additionally, by way of further explanation, Althusser’s concept of “internal distantiation” is used to define conflicting class viewpoints as a contributing factor to the dissonance perceived.