Traversant à eux trois l’ensemble du XXe siècle, Vladimir Nabokov, Romain Gary et Philip Roth sont issus de mondes géographiques, culturels et théoriques différents. Pourtant, leur œuvre et leur conception de la fiction présentent bien des affinités : une sensibilité cosmopolite, une réflexion sur l'écriture de la mémoire, un goût prononcé pour la mystification, un rapport au langage qui dote la lettre d’un puissant pouvoir d’incarnation. Ces écrivains confient à leurs personnages une réflexion sur l'exil et l’acculturation, sur l’impossible coïncidence de soi à soi liée au multilinguisme, au cosmopolitisme ou à la judéité. Refusant les étiquettes identitaires, ils sont animés par une même ambition : celle de se créer eux-mêmes, de repenser l'identité patrimoniale en lui substituant une identité réflexive et dynamique. Mettant en jeu différentes formes de transgressions (filiales, génériques, ontologiques), la fiction devient ce lieu où l'écrivain fait son autoportrait sériel et où le biographique est incessamment construit et déconstruit. Le personnage romanesque se décline en autant de variantes de soi, parfois polémiques, qui permettent de faire émerger une vérité sur soi. Mais cette vérité ne peut se dire qu'entre les lignes, entre les langues et dans une écriture polyphonique. La langue elle-même devient la cachette où l'écrivain tente de redonner la parole aux disparus. / Vladimir Nabokov, Romain Gary and Philip Roth are three 20th century writers who have different geographical, cultural and theoretical backgrounds. However, their works and their conceptions of fiction share many similarities: a cosmopolite sensibility, a reflection on writing memory, a strong interest in mystification, and a specific relation to language that endows words with a strong power of incarnation. These writers have their characters voice their reflection on exile and acculturation, as well as on the impossibility of self-coincidence, in relation to their multilingualism or Jewish identity. Nabokov, Gary and Roth distrust identity labels, and therefore share the same ambition : to create their own self, to rethink patrimonial identity by replacing it with a reflexive, dynamic one. Because fiction operates different forms of transgression (filial, generic, ontological), fiction becomes a place for the writer to create a serial self-portrait, where biography is constantly constructed and deconstructed. The multi-faceted self finds its incarnation in conversely multiple characters, some of them being sometimes polemical, and it enables the surfacing of a truth on oneself. This truth can only be found “between the lines”, in-between languages and in the polyphony of writing. Language itself becomes a hiding-place where the writer tries to retrieve the voices of the departed.

During the period of military government in Argentina, Brazil (1964 –1982) and the present day communist Cuban regime, a machinery of cultural repression was established in these countries, these states had a systematic plan of cultural repression of any kind of opposition, dictatorships had an organized and sophisticated operating control over the press and all publications. The dissident writers examined in this dissertation developed strategies of resistance that depended largely on allegory to carry their messages against their respective oppressive regimes. By means of a detailed rhetorical analysis, our study examines the lookings of allegory and cultural resistance under the constraints of repression. Our corpus includes six novels written by dissident writers during the period studied in this dissertation. The fictional narratives selected in this study are divided into novels from Brazil, Argentina and Cuba. The Brazilian novels: of Jorge Amado Dona Flor e seus dois maridos (1966) and Érico Verissimo, Incidente en Antares (1971); two Argentine novels: Ricardo Piglia’s, Respiración artificial (1980) and Martin Khoan’s, Dos veces junio (2002); and by two Cubans: Jesús Díaz, Las iniciales de la tierra (1987) and Zoé Valdés, La nada cotidiana (1995). This dissertation demostrates that allegory and ghosts, as literary figures, can evolve and assume new functions of resisting oppressive governments through confronting, denouncing, identifying and conjuring national traumas as well as adapting themselves to the different political circumstances in which they are used.

This work describes the utilisation of the tape recorder as an instrument, the methods derived by musique concrète and the evolution of these practices. This leads on to its application that opened different creativity streams to many genres of music that we listen to today. This dissertation dives in the further to talk about to the album ‘My Life in the Bush of Ghosts’ by Brian Eno and David Byrne its cult status, revolutionary production and opens doors to discussing cultural appropriation and copyright infringement.

No description available.

The ubume is a ghost of Japanese folklore, once a living woman, who died during either pregnancy or childbirth. This thesis explores how the religious and secular developments of the ubume and related figures create a dichotomy of ideologies that both condemn and liberate women in their roles as mothers. Examples of literary and visual narratives of the ubume as well as the religious practices that were employed for maternity-related concerns are explored within their historical contexts in order to best understand what meaning they held for people at a given time and if that meaning has changed. These meanings and the actions taken to avoid becoming an ubume and to avoid interacting with one create a metanarrative that contributes to our understanding of the historical experience of women.

Thesis (M.A.)--Wichita State University, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Elliott School of Communication

The study of supernatural beliefs has been a major field in anthropology throughout its history. The study of paranormal experiences as such, however, has been largely left for folklorists to handle. This paper is an attempt to study the genesis, structure and interpretative schemes of narratives of paranormal experiences, specifically ghosts and hauntings, so that through the figure of the ghost (our perception of it, the ways in which we interact with it, how we read it and then talk about it) core experiences that turn non-believers into believers and believers into collectivities can become visible. Because experience is, for those who are said to have had paranormal encounters, what turns beliefs (or disbelief) into certainties, I have focused on theories that set experience and individual constructions of reality at the center of the actor-structure relation. My main purpose is to explore people’s narratives of alleged paranormal occurrences as they develop from individual experiences to cultural systems of legitimized meanings, in order to understand the processes that dynamically link micro and macro levels. I contend that a deeper understanding of all elements involved in the production of the personal-collective will further the development of better analytical tools to study the broad spectrum of cultural matter that escapes formal inquiry due to an old-yet-still-predominant divide between the objective and subjective, concrete and abstract, material and immaterial, public and private -dichotomies that lie at the very core of social and cultural theory. Through compelling analyses of ethnographic accounts on ghosts and the haunted I seek to reformulate the premises on which we understand this dilemma.

This thesis investigates the connection between the spiritualist movement and the literary ghost story, both of which came to prominence and mass popularity during the second half of the nineteenth century. While existing critical literature has viewed both phenomena as symptomatic of a wider Victorian fascination with the supernatural and the nature and possibility of an afterlife, little attention has been paid to the relationship between the two movements. By examining spiritualist literature alongside the work of both canonical and lesser-known writers, I attempt to address this area. My thesis argues for an understanding of the post-1850 ghost story as a dramatic representation of a new conception of the dead largely created by spiritualism, and reads the appearance, actions, behaviour and narratives of literary ghosts as an ongoing reflection and discussion of this idea.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Zürich, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [415]-424) and indexes.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Zürich, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [415]-424) and indexes.