Texte remanié de: Th. Ph. D.--Pretoria--University of South Africa, 1995. Titre de soutenance : A critical appraisal of Fay Weldon's fiction. / Bibliogr. p. 177-190. Index.

Down Among the Women (1972), Female Friends (1974), and Remember Me (1976), three of Fay Weldon’s early novels, share similar themes, narrative voices, and stylistic elements. Although the novels explore different aspects of women’s lives, the similarities call for a study of Weldon’s early techniques and contribution to twentieth-century literature. I study Weldon’s early works to reveal her belief that feminism evolved through small, individual changes rather than general societal upheaval. I center my study on motherhood and wifehood in Down Among the Women, friendship in Female Friends, and motherhood in Remember Me. In each novel, women make changes in these specific areas of their lives, and through these changes, Weldon rewrites traditional women as newly defined feminists. My readings of each novel support my contention that although the women are not reformed in every facet of their lives, Weldon defines them as feminists because they have actively redefined at least one firmly rooted feminine role to benefit themselves.

Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2006. / Timothy Renick, committee chair; Kathryn McClymond, Jonathan Herman, committee members. Electronic text (p. 54 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Apr. 30, 2007; title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references (p. 51-54).

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In this study of several novels each by Barbara Pym, Fay Weldon, and Margaret Atwood, I focus on two areas: the ways in which female protagonists break out of their victimization by individuals, by institutions, and by cultural tradition, and the ways in which each author uses a structural pattern in her novels to propel her characters to solve their dilemmas to the best of their abilities and according to each woman's personality and strengths.

It is undeniable that literature reflects much about the society that produces it. The give-and-take relationship between a society and its literature is especially interesting when medieval texts are considered. Because most medieval plots and characters are variants of existing stories, the ways that the portrayals change has the potential to reveal much about the differences between medieval societies separated by distance and time. Changes to the treatment of these recurring characters and their stories can reveal how the attitudes of medieval society changed over time. Perceptions of magic and attitudes toward its female practitioners, both real and fictional, changed drastically throughout the Middle Ages among clergy members and the ruling class. Historically, as attitudes toward women became more negative, they were increasingly prohibited from receiving a formal education and from gaining or maintaining positions traditionally associated with feminine magical power, such as healer, midwife, or wise woman. As the power of the Church grew and attitudes changed throughout the Middle Ages, women’s power in almost all areas of life experienced a proportional decrease. Using a combination of historical and literary sources, this paper will explore whether this decrease in power is evident in literary portrayals of magical female characters in medieval literature. Specifically, it will examine the agency and potency, or the intrinsic motivation and effectiveness within the story, respectively, of female characters within medieval narratives, comparing the characters to their earlier iterations. This research will offer a unique perspective on the roles of magical women in medieval literature.

Contemporary British novelist Fay Weldon negotiates the postmodern "culture industry" as the self-conscious heir to a traditon of women writers dating back to the Middle Ages. Like her predecessors, Weldon defensively and offensively negotiates ideological constructions of womanhood, including injunctions to chastity, modesty, and silence; prohibitions against formal education for women; disdain for the literary production and commercial success of women writers; and the application of double standards in the critical reception of their works. Modernizing the strategies traditionally deployed by women writers, Weldon engages with the advertising industry and the mass-oriented literature of radio and television, using them to construct a career and a public identity for herself while advancing an alternative history of women in the twentieth and early twenty-first century. She exploits the distinctions between high culture, popular culture and mass culture in order to provoke critical reflection; partly for this reason, her work deliberately resists academic criticism. The novels Praxis, Puffball, The Cloning of Joanna May, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, and The Bulgari Connection explore the phenomenon Walter Benjamin described as the nullification of "aura" in the age of mechanical reproduction; they interrogate the connections between several kinds of reproduction associated with human gestation, women's bodies and social identities, and language and literature. Weldon's interrogative fictions experiment with the novel form, and their reception has been mixed, often splitting along gender lines. Feminists have not always embraced Weldon because she questions everything. Because her prolific output is ongoing, Weldon's achievement as Woman of Letters cannot yet be fully assessed.

For the past two centuries deaf people in the United States have faced more or less intense skepticism about their marriages to each other, largely due to fears of inherited deafness. Theses fears, while always present, have waxed and waned over time, becoming most prominent during the eugenics era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At Gallaudet University, they were repeatedly expressed by the faculty and administration in a variety of forms and contexts, and echoed by many its students. This dissertation demonstrates the significant influence of these ideas at Gallaudet University on the wider deaf community over the last century; it traces how skepticism toward deaf marriage was framed in terms of hereditarian and, for a time, eugenic ideals; and it explored other more subtle but similarly effective attempts to influence marriage decisions by deaf people. The idea that deaf people should not marry one another was embraced by faculty in Gallaudet’s early decades, diffused from administration to faculty, from faculty to students (deaf undergraduates as well as hearing students studying deaf education), and ultimately carried to other deaf educational institutions via the alumni. While student responses to these ideas were fluid, their adoption by early administration and faculty had a profound and lasting impact. One result was that, during much of the early twentieth century, deaf people were less likely to marry, and when married less likely to have children.

The residential designs of Fay Jones embody the ideals of organic architecture in the highest degree. Working in the tradition of Frank Lloyd Wright, Jones produced a wide range of houses that represent an intensely personal endeavor. Although the chapels and public pavilions designed by Jones are his most famous works, the meticulous construction detailing and elaborate material joints in Jones' houses reward long-term residents, who discover new details and new compositions of light and shadow for years after moving into their homes. The careful working and reworking of details contribute to a unifying generative idea that enforces the part-to-whole relationship of organic building, but it is also an outpouring of Jones' belief that caring is an “imperative moral issue.” It is difficult to occupy a Jones building or study the work without getting swept up in Jones' notion that “[one] must idealize, even romanticize, what [one] is doing.” Through a consideration of clients' relationships with Fay Jones and the spaces they occupy, this study reflects on Jones' hope that “perhaps the inhabitants can be more comfortably and more meaningfully integrated into the natural forces of life.” Jones' thoughts about architecture, recorded in his journals and lecture notes, reinforce the accounts of key, residential clients who benefited from Jones' earnestness about building and living. The carefully arranged joint details of Jones' designs form a physical representation of the close relationships of Jones, his clients, and the craftsmen who built the work. / text

The Michael Fay conflict in 1994 provided an opportunity to use Singapore as a subject for mass communication research.Three prominent U.S. newspapers, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, were chosen for content analysis of their coverage of Singaporean news eight months before, six months during and eight months after the Fay trial proceedings. The amount of news space devoted to Singaporean news ray the three newspapers during the three periods was also studied.The objective of the study was to determine if the coverage of Singaporean news by U.S. newspapers changed as a result of the Fay case.Results of the study showed that U.S. newspapers provided a negative coverage of Singaporean news as a result of the Fay controversy. In terms of news space alloted to Singaporean news, the New York Times remained fairly constant throughout the three periods. The Los Angeles Times first decreased its coverage during the trial proceedings, but expanded its coverage after the case ended. Conversely, the Chicago Tribune increased its coverage of Singaporean news during the case, but its coverage dwindled with the conclusion of the case. / Department of Journalism