Journeys to the Edge of the Egg is a collection of short fictions related by the theme of initiation into new life. While the ages of the protagonists vary from early childhood to middle-age, they are all on journeys which take them to the beginning of real life--the Egg of the title--a new relationship with reality. / Many of the characters are addicts of some kind, either addicted to alcohol, or to a way of loving, or to a relationship with art, or to the perverse thrill crime; and many of the stories describe the process of breaking free of these patterns of obsession, or failing to. But mostly the characters succeed--they do come through. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-03, Section: A, page: 0798. / Major Professor: Jerome H. Stern. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1992.

Princess of Oranges is a collection of ten stories set in 1970s Orlando, Florida. The stories render a world where adult dysfunction forces children to choose from a menu of the perilous and the precarious. The juvenilizing adults seem able only to live love as illness, triumph as a lie, self-awareness as self-destruction. The stories are about how the ill-equipped take on dilemmas of care and love. / The collection is thematically centered around the consciousness of Fay Kinney. At her youngest, Fay is nine, at her oldest, sixteen. Four stories trace her sexual and emotional initiations into the adult world via adolescent female modes of reconciling identity. Two stories show Fay simultaneously saving and destroying her brother as he assembles his escapes. / Four stories examine how women's relationships come of age as mothers and daughters and friends revise the ways see themselves and the way they tell their stories. In conflict with their husbands, friends, and each other, the girlfriends in "Winter Heat," the stepmother in "Lost Lake," the grandmother in "Greenie," and the mother and daughter in the title story struggle towards new, transcendent senses of self and place. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-03, Section: A, page: 0798. / Major Professor: Jerome Stern. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1992.

This study focuses on the Christ archetype as manifested in the works of two twentieth century French authors: Albert Camus and Antoine de Saint-Exupery. The Christ archetype is treated as a primordial image that transcends time, history, and religion. / As representatives of the crisis of the bourgeoisie in the first half of this century both writers repudiate traditional religious convictions. The existentialist philosophy of the absurd propagates the belief that God is irrelevant, or indifferent to the life of man. Modern man, feeling abandoned and alienated is forced to develop a new consciousness of self, one that recognizes a new yet problematic freedom that places full responsibility on the individual. In the absence of a saving deity man must find a terrestrial savior. In spite of divergent and at times opposing philosophies, the archetypal approach nonetheless demonstrates that Camus and Saint-Exupery share common ground in the belief that man's certain and final mortality notwithstanding, man must become his own Christ. Both writers exhibit an appreciation for the christian virtues of charity, fraternity and sacrifice. The human savior, acknowledging the futility of his task, must persevere, for through his actions he revolts against a senseless human condition. / Herein lies man's greatness and the basis for the Christ archetype. Through his indefatigable efforts man transcends his condition while remaining firmly entrenched in his human but courageous struggle for life. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 52-08, Section: A, page: 2943. / Major Professor: Victor Carrabino. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1991.

Between 1975 and 1994, William F. Buckley, Jr., wrote ten innovative spy novels on the continuing adventures of the series hero, CIA agent Blackford Oakes. Set in the 1950s through the mid-1990s, the series may be read allegorically as a Christian-conservative pilgrim's progress through the Cold War. For Buckley invites the reader to interpret this all-American hero as a Western knight, who struggles for the survival of individualist, humane values in a Holy War against totalitarian barbarians and who personifies in particular the American natural law consensus, as described by John Courtney Murray, S. J. Throughout all ten novels, Blackford Oakes carries this humanistic burden on behalf of his Christian individualist author: to bear reluctant witness to the ineffable crimes against humanity of this century. / The reader-critic may reconstruct Buckley's didactic intent for the novels, and the lay reader's constructions, with a theory of interpreters' accord. This law-and-humanities approach redefines the text as an instrument of record for three indispensable parties: the composer, the reader, and the critic. In the case of Buckley's novels, the author as the composer, the reader, and the critic interpret or reinterpret in turn the conventions of the spy thriller, especially its heroic conventions. Both Buckley and his readers thus may call on Blackford's character as a mutual "agent" of self-interpretation or co-interpretation, respectively. As a self-described "performing writer," Buckley takes delight in manipulating this interpretive sequence. Finally, by renegotiating the terms of the postwar thriller, Buckley has succeeded in coining his own didactic subgenre, the allegorical thriller. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-05, Section: A, page: 1771. / Major Professor: Fred L. Standley. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1995.

Since its initial appearance in 1852, Empedocles on Etna has continued to spark controversy. Now frequently celebrated as Matthew Arnold's most significant poem, Empedocles and its author are recognized as central to the development of the modern literary tradition. This study presents a socio-historical analysis of Empedocles and interpretations of it as an illustration of the process of literary-critical transformation. The primary methodological model is provided by Jerome McGann's The Beauty of Inflections: Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (1985). As Coleridge did for his Ancient Mariner, Arnold has also "underwritten" the entire interpretive tradition of Empedocles largely through the 1853 "Preface." The study begins with an examination of the original context of Empedocles. The Chapter 1 overview includes information that has been gathered by various critics from the poem's initial publication to the present regarding Arnold, his poem, and his critics during the period immediately preceding the first publication of Empedocles through the response to its 1867 republication. In addition to providing background information pertinent to the poem, Chapter 1 distinguishes between information available to Arnold's contemporaries and later information as it began to circulate in the reading communities. Chapters 2 through 4 categorize twentieth-century studies of Arnold and Empedocles. Chapter 2 examines the critical perception of Arnold's brand of Classicism as well as his ancient sources. Chapter 3 focuses on studies which stress Arnold's and his poem's complex relationship to Romanticism. Post Romanticism, Arnold, and Empedocles are addressed in chapter 4. The final chapter offers a reinterpretation of Empedocles. The study thus reveals the transformations inherent in not only the critical understanding of a particular work and its author, but also in the conception and practice of criticism as well. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-04, Section: A, page: 1369. / Major Professor: Fred L. Standley. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1995.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 32-09, Section: A, page: 5242. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1971.

Arriving as indentured laborers during the latter half of the 19th century, the East Indian diaspora in the French Caribbean occupies a marginal space in literary and critical writings emerging from this region. This diaspora, the majority of whom were recruited from Indian settlements under French possession at the time, constituted a cheap source of labor replacement for the plantation owners during the post-slavery epoch. Contracted to work for a minimum period of five years, these laborers, unlike African slaves, had the right to repatriate at the end of their service. For those who decided to stay in the already socio-economically and racially hierarchized French Caribbean society, it meant that they were then positioned de facto at the lowest echelon of the pyramid. The Indo-French Caribbeans’ historical and social marginalization coupled with their ethnic minority status – to date persons of East Indian descent account for approximately 15% and 3% of the Guadeloupean and Martinican populations respectively – bled into their non-recognition in literary and critical writings. Admittedly, canonical cultural identity paradigms shaping French Caribbean discourse – such as Négritude and Antillanité, which focus predominantly on the African diaspora or even Créolité, which, though paying more attention to “minority” cultures, subsumes cultural difference into a homogenous creole identity – results in the sidelining of the Indo-French-Caribbeans’ cultural and physical presence. In my dissertation, Locating Indianité: Representations of the East Indian diaspora in selected novels by Moutoussamy, Condé, Confiant, and Minatchy-Bogat, I analyze literary depictions of Indo-French-Caribbeans in five novels by both well known (Maryse Condé and Raphaël Confiant) and lesser-known (Ernest Moutoussamy and Arlette Minatchy-Bogat) authors. I specifically examine the writers’ treatment of the East Indian diaspora’s exilic experience, its cultural identity formation and interaction with the surrounding cultural diversity characteristic of the French Caribbean to call into question and revise existing cultural identity models. I, therefore, examine the following questions in my dissertation: How does the East Indian diaspora in the French Caribbean add to or destabilize prevailing identity paradigms and processes such as Créolité and créolisation? How do authors imagine the East Indian diasporic identity in the French Caribbean novel? What role does space play in constructing and/or situating the East Indian identity in the French Caribbean novel? How do authors of non-East Indian origin represent this community in their fiction? How do their representations remodel cultural identity paradigms to render them inclusive of Indianness? Where do their representations position the East Indian identity in the broader cultural identity framework of Créolité and créolisation at work in the French Caribbean? How do characters of mixed East Indian descent, specifically mixed race female characters, figure in this literature? How does the mixed race identity challenge exclusivist identity constructs based on race and color? The theoretical framework for this dissertation draws on Francophone and postcolonial scholarship and pays particular attention to studies on identity construction, exile, diaspora as well as hybridity. The dissertation will, additionally, consider race theory, spatial theory, feminist theory, and affect theory in order to place East Indian identity in relation to the already existing body of literary and critical works on identity construction in the French Caribbean. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester 2017. / July 18, 2017. / East Indian diaspora, French Caribbean literature, Indianité, kala pani narratives, postcolonial studies / Includes bibliographical references. / Martin Munro, Professor Directing Dissertation; Pat W. Williams, University Representative; Aimée M. Boutin, Committee Member; Jeannine Murray-Román, Committee Member; Corbin McKenzie Treacy, Committee Member.

Immersive Fictions: Modern Narrative, New Media, Mixed Reality presents an approach to narrative fiction that responds to the expanded role of virtual environments in contemporary life. Despite the growing number of daily activities mediated by digital technologies, the virtual is still widely characterized as the opposite of the real. The pervasiveness of this perspective is demonstrated in the frequent use of immersion metaphors to describe virtual environments. I argue that this practice perpetuates an ontological binary that obscures the ways in which the virtual enters and participates in a wired culture. Immersive Fictions reimagines the relationship between media and its users in this context in order to trace the circuits of interaction running across the supposed boundary between the virtual and real. Because the expectation that media-generated environments be "immersive" proceeds from the long tradition of describing a reader's experience of being "lost in a book," this dissertation takes the form of a comparative study of videogames and print literature and relies on an interdisciplinary approach combining new media studies and literary criticism. I demonstrate how print works such as Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves and videogames such as Ubisoft's Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Silicon Knight's Eternal Darkness, CyberConnect2's .hack//Infection position their audience not as vicarious visitors to non-actual worlds, but as book readers or game players. Their embodied engagement then becomes itself a site of the fiction as the conflicts animating these narratives are shown to be active in the material task and cultural significance of reading and play. As a result, I argue for a new understanding of "realism," exemplified by Infinity Ward's Modern Warfare series and Danny Ledonne's Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, which addresses the virtualities of fiction, not in terms of their representational or even immersive capacities, but with regard to how they situate their audience in the context of the social, political, and ethical forces bearing on their interactions with the virtual.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of English, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-04, Section: A, page: 1339. Adviser: Paul John Eakin. "Title from dissertation home page (viewed March 22, 2007)."

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Lehigh University, 2009. / Adviser: Elizabeth Fifer.