<p> In 1895, French sociologist Gustave Le Bon proclaimed the era of crowds upon us, in his influential work, <i>The Crowd</i>. Le Bon's work was translated into English a year later, inspiring a number of similar works by American sociologists, and almost single-handedly creating the discipline of crowd psychology. Interest in the new masses was not limited to sociologists, however. Due to advances in transportation and communication technologies, and the rise of the city, the problem of &ldquo;man in the mass&rdquo; came to pervade the atmosphere of America, at the turn of the twentieth-century. </p><p> Thus, American writers also wrestled with the difficulty of representing this catch-all entity &ldquo;the crowd,&rdquo; often speculating about what the psychology of the crowd might mean for the future of democracy. But, whereas early crowd theory was overwhelmingly conservative in its depiction of the crowd mind as a site of primitive impulses, irrational emotions, and affective contagion, authors like Frank Norris and Sherwood Anderson, though largely ceding to this description, saw in the crowd the possibility for an entirely new social consistency. </p><p> Contrary to sociological prescriptives designed to brace the individual against the imminent threat of crowd contagion, however, Norris and Anderson identify what contemporary theorist Roberto Esposito terms the &ldquo;immunity regime&rdquo; as the true difficulty to overcome. For Esposito, the biopolitically engendered immunitary <i>dispositif</i> protects modern individuals from &ldquo;a risky contiguity with the other, relieving them of every obligation toward the other and enclosing them once again in the shell of their own subjectivity&rdquo; (<i>Terms</i> 49). It is this hard shell of subjectivity that Norris and Anderson attempt to break down in their works. </p><p> In this way, the two authors represent a small segment of a genealogical thread in American fiction&mdash;one stretching from Whitman, to Steinbeck, and beyond--that takes a gambit on what Badiou calls the &ldquo;communist hypothesis.&rdquo; Perhaps most importantly, though, the texts of Norris and Anderson demonstrate, either deliberately or otherwise, that such a gambit must preclude any recourse to substantialist notions of innate gregariousness, primitive sympathy, or herd instinct. Thus, while refusing to endorse the immunitarian paradigm as the final word on being-together, Norris and Anderson demonstrate how we must work and think <i>through</i> immunity to arrive at an adequate concept of collective life in the modern era. </p><p> While other studies of the crowd or the masses often ask what the multitude <i> stands for</i>, in a metonymical or metaphorical register, this one asks how it is formed, how it functions, and what it could mean for the possibility of collective life in modernity. Similarly, whereas other studies often judge a particular representation of the crowd against a preformed model of what constitutes the properly political, the following study attempts to unearth the crowd's immanent possibilities to potentially change those very models. </p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-11, Section: A, page: 4701. Adviser: Gary Xu. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 219-231) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of English, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 20, 2009). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-10, Section: A, page: 3962. Adviser: Patrick Brantlinger.

This dissertation describes and examines the fictional representations of friendship between middle-class boys at all-male public boarding schools during the nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries in England. In the texts under consideration, romantic friendships embody educational, social, and spiritual ideals; readings of sermons, letters, memoirs, and book illustrations contextualize these ideals and suggest that they mirror a broader ideological framework in the culture. Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857) and F. W. Farrar's Eric (1858), which consolidate the tropes of the schoolboy narrative, self-consciously reflect the philosophical and educational standards of Thomas Arnold, Headmaster at Rugby School from 1828 to 1842. For Arnold, highly emotional friendships, based on Christian values, helped to develop piety and to reflect, in earthly terms, the spiritual brotherhood that all "men" share with God. Friendships in Charles Dickens's fiction also conform to many of these narrative and ideological constructs. Nicholas Nickleby (1838-9) represents the comforts of compassionate friendship, while David Copperfield (1849-50) illustrates the torturous complexity of the schoolboy romance. In Our Mutual Friend (1864-5), Dickens alludes parenthetically to Mortimer and Eugene's school days in order to evoke the history and depth of their adult friendship. Edwardian fiction presents a revised discourse on schoolboy friendship, with expressions of affection breaking through a strenuous emotional reserve. In E. M. Forster's A Room With a View (1908), the schoolboy Freddy Honeychurch invites George Emerson to share an uninhibited bond (the "Sacred Lake" bathing scene) that both contrasts with the atomized heterosexual relations in the novel and presages their eventual brotherhood (when George marries Freddy's sister Lucy). The animals in Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908) inhabit a homosocial society modelled on Grahame's fantasy of the public school. E. F. Benson's David Blaize (1916) dignifies friendship between boys in spite of the political, intellectual, and aesthetic breakdown of male identity and relations that resulted from the oppressive traumas over masculinity indicative of the fin-de-siecle.

Orientador: Sílvia Maria Azevedo / Banca: Luiz Roberto Velloso Cairo / Banca: André Luis Gomes / Banca: Edvaldo Bergamo / Banca: Arnaldo Franco Junior / Resumo: O objetivo desta tese é analisar os romances brasileiros Olho de Rei (2005), de Edgard Telles Ribeiro, e Leite Derramado (2010), de Chico Buarque, observando mais de perto os modos de representação do narrador que rememora, e a ocorrência do processo da metamemória no discurso do narrador. Assim, os narradores de tais romances não apenas relatam suas reminiscências como também refletem sobre o próprio ato de rememorar. Além disso, busca-se demonstrar que, na literatura brasileira, a ocorrência de um narrador metamemorialístico já se dá desde o século XIX. Dessa forma, é feito inicialmente um panorama de vários romances brasileiros em que se observa tal recorrência, desde Lucíola (1862), de José de Alencar, ao Livro das Horas, (2012) de Nélida Piñon. Além de se observar os modos de construção de tais enunciados sobre a reminiscência, esse trabalho busca verificar como os mesmos se detêm em temas como a relação entre reminiscência e linguagem; reminiscência, tempo e imaginação; memória involuntária; memória coletiva, entre outros. Há um diálogo com a crítica sobre tais temas e com os dois romances analisados / Abstract: The objective of this thesis is to analyze the Brazilian novels Olho de rei (2005), by Edgard Telles Ribeiro, and Leite derramado (2010), by Chico Buarque, observing more closely the modes of representation that the narrator remembers, and the occurrence of the process of metamemory in the discourse of the narrator. Thereby, the narrators of such novels not only report their reminiscences as well as reflect on the act of remembering. In addition, it seeks to demonstrate that, in Brazilian literature, the occurrence of a narrator gives metamemorialistic already since the nineteenth century. Thus, there is initially an overview of various Brazilian novels where there is such a recurrence, since Lucíola (1862), by José de Alencar, until Livro das horas (2012), of Nelida Piñon. Besides observing the ways of building such statements about reminiscence, this work aims to verify how they hold up on topics such as the relationship between reminiscence and language; reminiscence, time and imagination; involuntary memory, collective memory, among others. There is a dialogue with the criticism on these issues and the two novels analyzed / Doutor

This thesis examines how the sociopolitical contexts of the mid-twentieth century influenced readers’ interpretations of Mark Twain’s novel “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye,” two controversial novels that were subjected to censorship activity. In particular, this thesis will focus on the reception of both of these novels during the 1950s and 1960s, a period marked by two major events: The Civil Rights Movement and the youth counterculture phenomenon. In this study, the reception of “Huckleberry Finn” will be analyzed in the context of the civil rights movement, using news articles published in the 1950s and 1960s to illustrate how the different interpretations of readers prompted school board directors to ban the book from junior high and high school reading lists.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 282-291).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2003. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 223-244). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Cornell University, 2006. / (UMI)AAI3227284. Adviser: Biodun Jeyifo. Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-07, Section: A, page: 2587.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2008. / Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 288-303).