Thesis (Ph. D.)--New York University, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 199-208).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Los Angeles, 1982. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 195-202).

M.A. / This dissertation conducts a semiotic analysis of the transposition of The French Lieutenant's Woman from novel to film. Special attention is paid to the concept of narrative point of view. The study is introduced by a chapter outlining the theoretical approach followed in this dissertation, after which a careful analysis of The French Lieutenant's Woman as written narrative and as film is attempted. The success of this adaptation is illustrated by showing how Karl Reisz uses the same principles of subversion, violation and manipulation which give Fowles's narrative style its distinctive character. It is also shown that an adaptation can be successful as long as the particular characteristics of the specific medium are taken into account.

Border Crossings and Multicultural Whiteness analyzes the interplay of cinema and nation in audience responses to vampire films. Since audiences accept nationality, race, and ethnicity as “natural” terms for social differentiation, I examine them in tandem with an exaggerated term for social differentiation that calls attention to its ideological constructivity: vampire. Vampire-film narratives involve border crossings, posing; questions about immigration, cultural assimilation, and foreign intervention that produce notions of nation, race, and ethnicity. I question why audiences devalue vampire films, particularly ones challenging the “transparency” of eurocentrism, multiculturalism, and whiteness, to suggest that inequalities within film narratives reflect industrial inequalities with global film circulation. Vampire-hunters assassinate in foreign rulers, yet vampires are forbidden to immigrate; Hollywood dominates foreign markets, yet foreign films are often denied entry into US markets. I propose the concept of multicultural whiteness, linking problematic discourses of inclusion and exclusion, to suggest an internalization of Hollywood narrative conventions, cinematic styles, and production values as an expression of US nationalism. Audiences evaluate vampire films according to criteria of performing whiteness while constructing “America” as an a historical “nation of immigrants.” Chapters 1 and 2 investigate ethnocentrism and nationalism imbedded in vampirism against alternative primordialist and constructivist theories of nation, relating them to the evaluative criteria within vampire-film canons. Chapter 3 analyzes ambiguous representations of nationality for international audiences in Hammer Films (UK) productions since the late 1950s. Chapter 4 suggests that dubbing, reediting, and peripheral exhibition venues reduce parodies of eurocentrism in Mexican, Filipino, Japanese, and South Asian films to depoliticized touristic spectacle during 1960s–1970s. Chapter 5 examines “vampires of color” in post-1975 Hollywood as sites for debates and negotiation over miscegenation and assimilation. Chapter 6 explores multiculturalism's deflation of tensions between Chinese transnationalism (one China) and Hong Kong's hybrid identity (Chinese-British) in 1980s Hong Kong films. Chapters 7 and 8 question the purported de-centering of multinational financing in art and blockbuster films and interrogate the unequal benefits of globalization I conclude by discussing fan fiction, video distribution and reception via the Internet, contending that copyright law is selectively enforced according to national hierarchies within the global marketplace.

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An examination of fictional feature films produced in the United States between the mid-1950s to the end of the 1990s. The author argues that youth films comprise a genre of late twentieth-century American cinema, and that they reconstitute significant narrative and thematic characteristics of the novelistic Bildungsroman and its modern literary variants, the childhood initiation tale and the coming-of-age or the rites-of-passage story. The genre of modern youth films includes not only teen entertainments but also social problem films and more personal, quasi-autobiographical works by modern directors. Overall, youth films commonly dramatize situations and events that bear upon the child's initiation into new domains of psychosocial experience and the adolescent's and postadolescent's encounters with the pleasures and perils of modern life, thereby taking up the leitmotif of identity formation that is typically associated with twentieth-century literary fiction, autobiography and stage drama. A further argument is that the genre of youth films reflects the culturally and aesthetically eclectic character of contemporary American cinema. As a mass medium the American cinema promotes the cultural fantasies of a commercialistic society; but as an art form it shares with modern fiction and drama a capacity for social criticism, irony, and self-reflexivity. The study explores these dual faces of contemporary cinema by analyzing it's representations of American youth as symbols of generational and social change. Three significant phases in the history of youth films are discussed: Its cultural origins in youth melodramas of the 1950s; the ideologically revisionist films of the American Film Renaissance made between 1967 and 1977; the expanding range of subjects and themes in the genre during the period of the American Independent Film Movement from 1987 through 2000. Special emphasis is given to the theme of memory in youth films; the genre's multi-ethnic subjects and perspectives; and the impact of modern film aesthetics on film genre theory.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2009. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 345-355).

Thesis (Ph. D. in English)--Vanderbilt University, Aug. 2008. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.). / Written for the Dept. of German Studies. Title from title page of PDF (viewed 2008/03/12). Includes bibliographical references.