Thesis (M.A. in communication)--Washington State University, December 2009. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on Feb. 12, 2010). "Edward R. Murrow College of Communication." Includes bibliographical references (p. 107-115).

Thesis (M.A.)--Carleton University, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 119-123). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (M.A.) - Carleton University, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 113-120). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (M.A.)--Carleton University, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 120-129). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 53-56).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 53-56). Also available in print.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 294-302).

Psychobiographers study the lives of extraordinary, prominent, and enigmatic individuals. Psychobiographical research advances our insight into the uniqueness and complexity of the human personality and therefore makes a substantial contribution towards one of the major objectives of the field of psychology. Purposive sampling was employed to select Charlize Theron as the subject of this psychobiographical study. As the only South African who has won an Oscar, Theron is an exceptional individual who demonstrates tenacity and a will to succeed despite significant traumatic events in her childhood. The case study data was organised and analysed according to the general analytic approach developed by Huberman and Miles (2002) and one of Alexander’s (1990) strategies, namely questioning the data. Erikson’s psychosocial theory (1950, 1963, 1995) was selected to guide this study because it recognises the impact of socio-cultural influences on developmental processes and provides a comprehensive, staged framework for studying Theron’s personality development. This study contributes to the development of psychobiographical research in South Africa.

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Sociology / Master / Master of Philosophy

This thesis examines an intermittent uncanniness that emerges in cultural responses to new image technologies, most recently in some impressions of the digital actor. The history of image technologies is punctuated by moments of fleeting strangeness: from Maxim Gorky's reading of the cinematographic image in terms of 'cursed grey shadows', to recent renderings of the computer-generated cast of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within as silicon-skinned mannequins. It is not merely the image's unfamiliar and new aesthetics that render it uncanny. Rather, the image is received within a cultural framework where its perceived strangeness speaks allegorically of what it means to be human at that historical moment. In various ways Walter Benjamin, Anson Rabinbach and N. Katherine Hayles have claimed that the notion and the experience of 'being human' is continuously transformed through processes related to different stages of modernity including rational thought, industrialisation, urbanisation, media and technology. In elaborating this argument, each of the four chapters is organized around the elucidation of a particular motif: 'dummy', 'siren', 'doppelg??nger' and 'resurrection'. These motifs circulate through discourses on different categories of digital actor, from those conceived without physical referents to those that are created as digital likenesses of living or dead celebrities. These cultural responses suggest that even while writers on the digital actor are speculating about the future, they are engaging with ideas about life, death and identity that are very old and very ambivalent.