Prior studies have shown that the information and cultural product flow is dominantly one direction from large/wealthy markets to smaller markets. Extending this position through the underlying research, it is expected that the audiences in the United States, one of the largest cultural product exporters, may have shaped certain perceptions on the scarcity of Korean films in their domestic film market. By studying the users in an internet film discussion community, this research aims to provide useful ideas about how American audiences perceive Korean films. This qualitative case study conducted a content analysis of the actual postings by the participants on the Internet Movie Database (http://www.imdb.com) as they discuss the Korean movie "OldBoy." Then, in-depth interviews with volunteered users were performed.Foreign films, such as Asian films like OldBoy, seem to especially satisfy their needs of alternatives due to these films' scarcity in U.S. market. In other words,participating in community discussion is a means of finding new foreign films, and watching new foreign films works as a way of contributing to their film viewing communities. Also, contributing the community enhances their perceived prestige as film enthusiasts. The investigator started this research from the assumption that the scarcity of Korean films made U.S. audiences ethnocentric. However, study observed that the scarcity of Korean films and the foreignness of this film is treated as one of the most attractive aspects to this subset of viewers. This study has shown that by contributing to and participating in message board discussions, the viewers built a film viewing community in the IMDb website. The discussions with others in the film viewing community helped them build and enhance their prestige as serious film-goers as they built an interpretive community. Tracking the posts and respondents' answers, the investigator could predict that they are building exchange networks in their foreign film viewing community, and this process may influence to their future foreign film viewing.

There is a current wave of interest in pornography as a vehicle for queer, feminist and lesbian activism. Examples include Dirty Diaries: Twelve Shorts of Feminist Porn (Engberg, Sweden, 2009), the Pornfilmfestival Berlin (2006-) and the members-only Club LASH in Stockholm (1995-). Based on ethnographic fieldwork designed around these cases, the purpose of the thesis is to account for, historicize and understand this transnational film culture and its politics and ethics. The fieldwork consists of interviews, questionnaires and participant observation, including participation as one of the filmmakers in Dirty Diaries. The thesis studies queer, feminist and lesbian pornography as an interpretive community. Meanings produced in this interpretive community are discussed as involving embodied spectatorial processes, different practices of participation in the film culture and their location in specific situations and contexts of production, distribution and reception. The thesis highlights a collective political fantasy about a safe space for sexual empowerment as the defining feature of this interpretive community. The figure of safe space is central in the fieldwork material, as well as throughout the film culture’s political and aesthetic legacies, which include second wave feminist insistence on sexual consciousness-raising, as well as the heated debates referred to as the Sex Wars. The political and aesthetic heterogeneity of the film culture is discussed in terms of a tension between affirmation and critique (de Lauretis, 1985). It is argued that the film culture functions both as an intimate public (Berlant, 2008) and as a counter public (Warner, 2002). Analyzing research subjects’ accounts in terms of embodied spectatorship (Sobchack, 2004, Williams, 2008), the thesis examines how queer, feminist and lesbian pornography shapes the embodied subjectivities of participants in this interpretive community and potentially forms part of processes of sexual empowerment.

The aim of the theses is to describe meanings, which female readers of the slash subgenre derive from it, and interpretive strategies they use to create those meanings. Slash is a type of literature that conceives or develops the same-sex romantic and sexual relationships of male characters from original media art. The subject of work study is the public of this type of literature, which is composed primarily of women. The work is based on the perspective of interpretivism and uses the concept of interpretative communities. According to this concept, meanings are being negotiated within a group of readers sharing interpretative strategies. In this work, I view slashers as an interpretive community and therefore assume that the readers' strategies and meanings will show some similarities. The technique of semi-structured interviews is used to achieve the goals of the theses. The interviews took place with nine female slashers. Data collected in this way were analyzed by the method of grounded theory.

Selected South African high school students’ perceptions of stereotypes in William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” are the center of attention in an attempt to establish or refute the existence of a uniform interpretation in the interpretive community. The textual reader responses were collected by using a questionnaire. The results show that the respondents use stereotypes to understand encounters with literary texts and as tools to connect the content of the text with their own experiences. The stereotypes also provide a framework for the readers to position themselves with or against the text and the depicted characters. Consequently, the female respondents are more inclined to distance themselves from sexist values than the male readers. Next to all the readers condemn racist values and racist language detectable in the text. Overall, the readers distance themselves from negative values and identify themselves with positive values. The results show that readers use a variety of stereotypes as aids to interpret the characters, events, values and structure of society in “A Rose for Emily”.

Le travail porte sur la lecture de Madame Bovary de Flaubert. Menacée d’être proscrite en 1857, elle devient ensuite progressivement prescrite par les programmes de littérature au lycée et à l’université en France et dans les pays anglo-américains. La chercheuse explore le processus de « classicisation » du roman et l’histoire de la réception de son personnage principal par trois communautés interprétatives : les journalistes et critiques contemporain·e·s de Flaubert, les critiques universitaires français et anglo-américain·e·s des années 1960-1980 et des lycéen·ne·s français·e·s en 2016. Le travail interroge donc la constitution des interprétations dominantes ainsi que la dynamique des phénomènes d’identifications au cœur de ces différentes lectures en relation avec l’esthétique de l’auteur. Des problématiques de légitimation structurent en effet ces discours lectoraux et révèlent dans les valeurs qu’ils convoquent la « valence différentielle des sexes », universelle selon Françoise Héritier, qui fait d’une lecture masculine la référence de toute lecture légitime du roman en invalidant des attitudes lectorales perçues comme féminines. Cette situation a pour conséquence un encadrement pédagogique spécifique des interprétations lectorales dans le cadre scolaire dont la thèse interroge les présupposés et les effets sur les lecteurs et lectrices contemporain·e·s.Diverses méthodologies ont été utilisées pour mener la recherche. Les articles de journaux et les textes judiciaires publiés lors du procès de Madame Bovary ont été analysés. Un corpus de travaux structuralistes et post-structuralistes, des théories de la réception et féministes a également été examiné. La chercheuse a par ailleurs eu recours aux techniques de l’explication de texte pour comprendre l’esthétique de Flaubert et la confronter aux réactions des divers lecter·rice·s. Enfin, la chercheuse a mené une enquête de terrain basée sur un questionnaire, des journaux de lecture et des entretiens avec une classe de lycéen·ne·s français. / This work carries on reading Madame Bovary by Flaubert. Although reading the novel threatened to be prohibited when it was first published in 1857, it progressively became mandatory in French studies in French high schools and at French universities and Anglo-American universities. The thesis explores the « classicisation » process of the novel as well as the reception of its principal character by three interpretive communities: journalists and critics who were Flaubert’s contemporaries, French and Anglo-American academics between the sixties and eighties, and high school French students in 2016. The work thus examines the making of dominant interpretations and the dynamics of identifications at play in relation with the aesthetics of the author. Readers discourses are indeed shaped by self-legitimation purposes and by the universal « differential valency of genders » that Françoise Héritier conceptualized. Masculine reading is thought to be the template of « good » readings of the novel, while all readers’ demeanours perceived as « feminine » are invalidated. This situation results in a specific framing of pedagogical expectations, expectations of which the thesis intents to decipher the assumptions and effects on French high-school readers.To do so, the researcher used a variety of methodologies. She analyzed articles published in newspapers when the book was first published as well as the judiciary speeches and texts written during the trial of Madame Bovary. She also analyzed academic papers and structuralist, post-structuralist, reader-response and feminist theories. She used literary close reading to understand the aesthetics of Flaubert and confront his writing to the reactions of his readers. Finally, she gathered and analyzed empirical data through a survey, reading diaries and interviews with a class of French high school students.This thesis therefore belongs to the field of cultural studies, in the sense that it uses various academic approaches to understand a cultural object and its effects on its readers and because it tries to shift the epistemological viewpoint from which a classic such as Madame Bovary as been examined in Western culture.

The goals of the present dissertation are twofold: 1) to bring back into the literary thought the notion of "world view", which has been largely discredited due to its abusage in the context of official Marxism during the socialist era, and 2) to affirm the usefulness of the notion of "world view" in the literary practice. The thesis is structured so as to meet the goals: the first chapter presents several probes of the usage of the phrase "world view" and definition discussions related to it. In this framework, the "scientific world view" from the socialist era is then confronted with a range of other definitions of the notion, such as F. X. Šalda's "view of life and world". In the second chapter, I present my approach to this notion, aimed at serving the purposes of current literary research. Firstly, I distinguish the notion of "world view" from the notions of "mentality" and "ideology", and secondly, following the research of The Worldviews Group (Brussels) I propose my own definition of world view. Since the Group does not deal with actual interpretations of literary texts, I make use for the intended purpose of an updated and slightly modified concept of Terry Eagleton, originally published within the monograph Criticism and Ideology (1976). What is essential is foremost to differ between a)...