This dissertation, as its title suggests, is a study of gender and identification. The main body of the thesis is s consideration of four novels (Clarissa, The Scarlet Letter, Portrait of a Lady, and Tess of the d'Urbervilles), all of which are centered around a heroine defined by her suffering. In the figure of the heroine/victim is conjoined the activity of the hero and the passivity of the victim. Such a conjunction raises perplexing problems. One of these is that the "heroism" or "greatness" of the heroine is measured by means other than her action, for as victim she can do or move very little. Her heroism is measured instead by the pity and sympathy she elicits from other and by the extent to which she moves them (us). What this means for reading is that we cannot study the character without studying the response she generates. A study of character becomes a study of response - of both the responses represented in the text (those of other characters) and of our own response as readers. I read each of these four novels as a type of "school of sympathy," as a place in which readers are instructed how to feel. Novels, in this view, are social agents doing social work. Their work, in this case, is the construction of subjectivity. Each novel constructs the reader's emotions toward the heroine as much as it constructs the heroine herself. Gender plays an important part in this construction. Following some recent film as well as literary theory, I discuss to what extent the reader's position in these novels is constructed as male, and then go on to consider what implications this has for identification with the female. Each novel presents us with a type of cross-gender identification in which our sympathy for the heroine appears to depend upon the imposition of clear and distinct gender boundaries, boundaries which are established only to be crossed. In my sixth and final chapter, I turn to the work of two twentieth-century female authors, Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter, to see in what ways they "talk back" to the tradition which has defined woman as other, to see in what ways, if any, they re-define the possibility of female heroism, and, finally, to consider the implications for the reader.

This dissertation, as its title suggests, is a study of gender and identification. The main body of the thesis is s consideration of four novels (Clarissa, The Scarlet Letter, Portrait of a Lady, and Tess of the d'Urbervilles), all of which are centered around a heroine defined by her suffering. In the figure of the heroine/victim is conjoined the activity of the hero and the passivity of the victim. Such a conjunction raises perplexing problems. One of these is that the "heroism" or "greatness" of the heroine is measured by means other than her action, for as victim she can do or move very little. Her heroism is measured instead by the pity and sympathy she elicits from other and by the extent to which she moves them (us). What this means for reading is that we cannot study the character without studying the response she generates. A study of character becomes a study of response - of both the responses represented in the text (those of other characters) and of our own response as readers. I read each of these four novels as a type of "school of sympathy," as a place in which readers are instructed how to feel. Novels, in this view, are social agents doing social work. Their work, in this case, is the construction of subjectivity. Each novel constructs the reader's emotions toward the heroine as much as it constructs the heroine herself. Gender plays an important part in this construction. Following some recent film as well as literary theory, I discuss to what extent the reader's position in these novels is constructed as male, and then go on to consider what implications this has for identification with the female. Each novel presents us with a type of cross-gender identification in which our sympathy for the heroine appears to depend upon the imposition of clear and distinct gender boundaries, boundaries which are established only to be crossed. In my sixth and final chapter, I turn to the work of two twentieth-century female authors, Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter, to see in what ways they "talk back" to the tradition which has defined woman as other, to see in what ways, if any, they re-define the possibility of female heroism, and, finally, to consider the implications for the reader. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Thesis (EdD)--Open University.

Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio University, June, 2010. / Title from PDF t.p. Release of full electronic text on OhioLINK has been delayed until July 1, 2013. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio University, June, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1998. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 335-406). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

This short story collection consists of twenty short fictions and a novella. A preface precedes the collection addressing issues of craft, pedagogy, and the post Program Era literary landscape, with particular attention paid to the need for empathy as an active guiding principle in the writing of fiction.

Text in English / This study offers a fine-grained analysis of James Cameron’s film, Avatar (2009), on several theoretical fronts to provide a view of the film from a cognitive cultural studies perspective. The insights gained from cognitive theory are used to situate the debate by indicating the value cognitive theories have in cultural criticism. The critical discourse analysis of Avatar that results is a vehicle for the central concern of this study, which is to understand the diverse, often contradictory, meaning-making exhibited by Avatar audiences. A focus on the construction of empathic responses to the film’s messages investigates the success of this polysemy. Ihe central propositions of the study are that meanings and interpretations of the experience of viewing Avatar are made discursively; they are situated in definable traditions, mores and values; and this meaning-making takes place in a cognitive framework which allows for the technical reproduction and reception of the experience while providing powerful, emerging and cognitively plausible narratives. In an attempt to situate the film’s commercial success and its plethora of awards, including an Oscar for best art direction, the analysis takes a critical view of Cameron’s use of cultural stereotypes and the framing of the exotic other, and considers the continuing development of these elements over the whole series and product line or, as Henry Jenkins (2007) defines it, “transmedia”. In drawing the theoretical boundaries of the methodologies used in this study and in arguing for their complementarities, the study contributes to a renewal of Raymond Williams’ (1961) mostly forgotten claim of the cross-disciplinary cognitive dimension of cultural studies and demonstrates an affirmation of this formulation as cognitive cultural studies. / Art History, Visual Arts and Musicology / M.A. (Art History)