Thesis (Ph. D.)--Flinders University of South Australia, 2000. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on July 9, 2005). Includes bibliographical references (p. 307-379).

Made available in DSpace on 2015-08-20T17:10:03Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2015-03-17. Added 1 bitstream(s) on 2015-08-20T17:25:57Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 000841155.pdf: 1220968 bytes, checksum: 94a3b7cbcbdfe790ec1a15a6f90c11f5 (MD5) / Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) / Nesta pesquisa abordamos aspectos do feminismo pelo viés da crítica feminista anglo-americana em duas obras ficcionais publicadas no final dos anos sessenta e início da década de setenta: La Femme Rompue (1967), de Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), e A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970), da escritora irlandesa Iris Murdoch (1919-1999). Primeiramente, estabelecemos um diálogo entre o pensamento filosófico de Beauvoir e o de Murdoch. Posteriormente, estabelecemos uma relação entre a crítica literária feminista e o pensamento beauvoiriano e murdochiano no que tange a questão do papel da mulher como leitora e escritora de textos literários. Dessa forma, examinamos o papel do leitor(a) como instância fundamental no processo de desconstrução do caráter discriminatório das ideologias de gênero e demonstramos que, assim como Virginia Woolf, Beauvoir e Murdoch defendem o conceito de androginia na literatura. Finalmente, analisamos os diferentes recursos estéticos que Beauvoir e Murdoch utilizam na caracterização de suas personagens femininas, uma vez que La Femme Rompue apresenta as características de um romance moderno, enquanto A Fairly Honourable Defeat possui traços de um romance realista / The aim of this research is to address some aspects of feminism from a feminist Anglo-American critical stance in two fictional works that have been published in the late sixties and early seventies: La Femme Rompue (1967) by Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) and A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970) by the Irish writer Iris Murdoch (1919-1999). First, we establish a dialogue between the philosophical thought of Beauvoir and Murdoch. Then, we firm a relationship between feminist literary criticism and Beauvoir's and Murdoch's thoughts regarding the issue of women's role as a reader and as a writer of literary texts. Thus, we explore the role of the reader as a key instance in the process of deconstruction of the discriminatory nature of gender ideologies and we demonstrate that, just as Virginia Woolf, Beauvoir and Murdoch defended the concept of androgyny in literature. Finally, we analyze the different aesthetic features that Beauvoir and Murdoch use in the characterization of female characters, since La Femme Rompue presents the characteristics of a modern novel while A Fairly Honourable Defeat has some traces of a realist novel

This thesis explores the figure of the trickster in the works of Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Taylor, Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark. By looking at these writers’ treatment of elusive, illusive and allusive characters, the thesis argues that they each incorporated what can be read as “trickster” figures in their fiction as a means of addressing anxieties about art, society and the self. The trickster is a character-type found in narratives from a multitude of cultures and eras, and is typically characterised by his subversive presence, his boundary-crossing and his role as a healer of predicament. While the trickster is often perceived as a universal phenomenon arising from a collective unconscious, this thesis instead focusses on writers’ intentional inclusion of trickster characters in literature as a way of thinking through specific problems. Bowen, it will be shown, interpolated tricksy characters drawn from myth and fairy-tale into her fiction in order to expose a perceived rift between art and academia; Taylor used the trickster to think about the construction of identity in post-war Britain; Murdoch took models from Shakespeare to create tricksters that helped her explore the ethics of writing fiction; and Spark’s tricksters allowed her to conceptualise truth and lies, and good and evil. Concentrating on four mid-century writers whose works have been seen to vary in genre and style, this thesis demonstrates that a trickster paradigm emerged in mid-twentieth-century British fiction – a period not previously associated with the trickster. Influenced by converging strands of trickery and allusion in art through the early decades of the twentieth century, notable mid-century British writers used outsider characters to probe social and artistic shifts in a landscape fractured by war and to reach for a sense of healing. By identifying such characters as trickster figures, this thesis sheds new light on patterns of subversion, healing and character in mid-century fiction. It explores the particular affinity the trickster had with women’s writing, and illustrates how the trickster was important to twentieth-century concerns surrounding metafiction and the role of the reader.

La tesi indaga la specificità dell’approccio narrativo all’etica tramite l’analisi e il confronto delle proposte teoriche di A. MacIntyre, I. Murdoch, Ch. Taylor, P. Ricoeur e D. Carr, individuate come imprescindibili per le elaborazioni successive sul tema dell’etica narrativa, sia in ambito strettamente filosofico, sia nel più vasto scenario delle humanities. L’indagine descrittiva è finalizzata a una caratterizzazione quanto più possibile puntuale del profilo teorico dell’etica narrativa in quanto figura speculativa e alla messa a fuoco del suo apporto specifico alla riflessione etica. La duplice focalizzazione, storica e critica, della ricerca si riflette nelle modalità di interrogazione delle fonti. Nel caso di Alasdair MacIntyre e Iris Murdoch (ai quali sono dedicati rispettivamente il capitolo I e II) viene sviluppato un percorso selettivo di analisi testuale che, soffermandosi sui luoghi salienti della produzione di ciascun autore, evidenzia il ruolo della narrazione come paradigma per comprendere la prassi morale e formulare una teoria che ne rispetti la specificità. Al vaglio teoretico, piuttosto che all’analisi ricostruttiva, è invece più direttamente finalizzato il capitolo ‘sinottico’ dedicato a Taylor, Ricoeur e Carr (capitolo III). Prendendo spunto dalla tavola rotonda che li ha visti protagonisti nel 1983, all’indomani della pubblicazione del primo volume di Tempo e racconto di Ricoeur, il capitolo sviluppa infatti un esame dell’opera dei tre autori che punta a chiarire l’apporto specifico della componente fenomenologica, di quella critico-trascendentale e di quella ermeneutica alla loro riflessione sul nesso tra etica e narrazione. Le Considerazioni conclusive recuperano le osservazioni di carattere teoretico-valutativo raccolte al termine di ciascuno dei capitoli monografici e le indicazioni di carattere fondativo emerse all’interno del capitolo sinottico, pervenendo a un’ipotesi di definizione dell’etica narrativa, della sua fondazione antropologica e della specifica idea del bene che essa veicola. / The thesis deals with the narrative approach to ethics, whose peculiarity is analyzed with reference to the works of A. MacIntyre, I. Murdoch, Ch. Taylor, P. Ricoeur and D. Carr; their theories, in fact, are recognized as the starting points for the subsequent elaborations about narrative ethics, in philosophy as well as in the larger field of the humanities. The analyses of the works and the comparisons among the authors aim at an exact characterization of the speculative profile of narrative ethics and are directed to specify its contribution to ethics. This double focus, historical and theoretical, of the thesis is reflected in the way the sources are examined. As concerns A. MacIntyre and I. Murdoch (confronted respectively in chapter I and chapter II), a selective textual analysis is put forward, whose purpose is to point out the role of narrative as a paradigm both to comprehend the moral conduct and to formulate a theory able to do justice to its peculiarity. To theoretical confrontation more than to historical reconstruction is devoted the ‘synoptical’ chapter concerning Taylor, Ricoeur, and Carr (chapter III). Taking as a starting point the round table of 1983, when they met soon after Time and Narrative I by Ricoeur was published, the chapter works out a comparative analysis of the works of the authors in order to clarify the contribution of the phenomenological, Kantian and hermeneutical legacy to their justification of the link between narrative and ethics. The “Final remarks” collect the critical considerations introduced at the end of the first two chapters and the hints about the possible foundations of narrative ethics drawn in chapter III, coming to a hypothesis about the definition of the narrative approach to ethics, its anthropological foundation and the idea of the Good it points to.

This thesis provides a biographical case study of the crisis faced by News of the World, after revelations of unethical journalistic practices within the newspaper. A scandal that rapidly moved up the organizational hierarchy and spread globally, affecting stakeholders amongst all its networks from local British communities to its parent company News Corporation and its main owners, the Murdoch family. Corporate social responsibility and stakeholder management is presented as a key factor in order to uphold and obtain the society’s permission to operate. The study shows the importance of being a good corporate citizen, not solely as goodwill but in order to gain a parachute that can moderate the fall when facing a crisis.

No description available.

No description available.

As political debate over the overexploitation of fish stocks rages on, UBC’s Fisheries Centre is targeting the responsible management of aquatic ecosystems from multiple perspectives.

In this thesis I address the research question: 'How has the Internet delivered pluralism by promoting structural diversity and/or content diversity in Australia's newspaper industry?' Structural diversity is defined here as diversity in newspaper ownership and content diversity as the diversity of views published by individual newspapers. Central to the thesis is the notion of pluralism, the belief that the news media should provide a range of views and opinions, contradictory as well as complementary, to allow informed citizens to effectively take part in the democratic process. The newspaper industry in this country, however, is controlled by a powerful press oligopoly across a range of markets, a situation believed to greatly limit pluralism. A review of newspaper ownership and circulation from 1986 to 2002 shows that, as at 2002, four newspaper owners are the sole occupants of Australia's national and capital city newspaper market. Seven owners are predominant in Australia's regional daily newspaper market, although just three owners controlled 69 per cent of the market's circulation in 2002. Two owners controlled 69 per cent of Australia's suburban newspaper market in 2002. Similar trends were seen in the country's Saturday newspaper and Sunday newspaper markets. In all markets except the regional daily newspaper market, News Limited is the dominant newspaper owner. Australian Provincial News and Media is the dominant owner in the regional daily newspaper market with a 27 per cent share of circulation in 2002. Australia's concentrated newspaper ownership structure has led to a number of formal inquiries into diversity in the industry since 1980. In this thesis I review two of these inquiries, the 1991-92 House of Representatives Select Committee on the Print Media (the Print Media Inquiry) and the 2000 Productivity Commission Inquiry into Broadcasting, to determine (among other things) the nature of and the relationship between structural and content diversity as they apply to Australia's newspapers. (By virtue of major media groups' involvement in the Productivity Commission's inquiry - particularly News Limited, Publishing and Broadcasting Limited and, to a lesser extent, Rural Press - this inquiry, although broadcast-oriented, considered Australia's newspaper industry at length.) This review shows both inquiries were clear on how they saw this relationship - structural diversity is necessary for content diversity. However, the Print Media Inquiry suggested it was almost impossible to guarantee structural diversity in the nation's newspaper industry. The Productivity Commission, meanwhile, said that while it accepted content diversity was not inconsistent with media ownership concentration, it was more likely to be achieved where there was diverse ownership. With the relationship between structural and content diversity in mind, and the Print Media Inquiry's and the Productivity Commission's beliefs that new entrants in the newspaper industry were unlikely in the short term, I examine the suggestion that the Internet has the potential to increase structural diversity in Australia's newspaper industry by allowing new players to efficiently enter the industry via the World Wide Web. The extent to which this might occur is determined by a study of 18 Australian newspaper websites with one argument being that if established newspapers find the transition online relatively easy, then independent online-only news sites might be similarly established. Mings and White's four online news business models - a subscription model, advertising model, e commerce-based transactional model and partnership-based model - are used as a framework to examine the study's results. The study shows Australia's experience mirrors international experience in terms of the growth of newspapers online and in terms of their lack of profitability. It shows that 28 per cent of the newspapers surveyed maintained their circulation while offering free online news content, while a further 33 per cent registered circulation increases. Advertising revenue increased for seven of the nine newspaper websites containing advertising, suggesting that, for some Australian newspapers at least, gaining online advertising (as opposed to gaining overall profitability) has proved successful. And while the survey shows little evidence of Australian newspapers using the transactional model in any real sense, it does show that Australian newspapers are forming local online partnerships with other media and non-media businesses to facilitate their online activities. The study's key finding is that of the 18 newspapers surveyed, just two websites were profitable. This finding is consistent with literature that highlights a lack of commercially viable independent online news ventures both in Australia and internationally. While considerable hopes were held that the Internet would introduce more structural diversity into Australia's newspaper industry, I argue that the Internet's commercial imperatives, as they apply to newspapers, have to a large extent precluded it from adding structural diversity in the industry. In these circumstances, it may be that the only viable way of increasing content diversity in the nation's newspaper industry is to increase the availability of diverse information sources to journalists. I propose that one way to do this is via the Internet. The extent to which this is occurring is determined by a survey of Australian journalists' Internet use, the survey results showing that 97.4 per cent of the journalists who responded now use the Internet regularly, including 97.5 per cent of newspaper journalists. But most journalists who responded use the Internet as a preliminary research tool and as a way to check facts rather than as a means of accessing diverse news sources. The respondents' top five Internet uses, for example, are to e-mail work colleagues, to undertake preliminary research, to access media releases from websites, to verify facts and to search other news organisations' websites. They access major news organisation websites most frequently, followed by government websites, university/research institution websites and corporate/company websites. The least frequently accessed websites are those that could conceivably provide the alternate views demanded by pluralism: online news and current affairs discussion groups and websites set up by private individuals. The survey shows the types of websites Australian journalists most frequently access are linked to the credibility they give to information contained on those websites. Major news organisation websites are seen as providing the most credible information, followed by university/research institution websites and government websites. Websites perceived as providing the least credible information were those that host online news and current affairs discussion groups and websites set up by private individuals. The survey also shows Australian journalists have not embraced online reader interaction to any extent, lessening the likelihood that readers will be able to provide journalists with more diverse news sources. Less than 20 per cent of journalists interact with readers via the Internet and less than 10 per cent use this interaction to create or follow up news stories. The survey does provide results that support source diversity, however. It shows that almost a third of Australian journalists have obtained additional news sources via the Internet. The Internet has also allowed more than 40 per cent of journalists to access individuals or groups that they would not otherwise have accessed. The survey also shows that journalists who have had experience working in the online media environment consistently use the Internet more productively, in terms of diversity, than other journalists. It is these journalists that interact online with readers more, that participate in online discussion groups more and that appear more willing to seek online information from non-traditional sources such as independent news websites and the websites of private individuals or groups. Journalists with online media experience also represent the group that has most sought training in online journalism and online media practice and that most believes the Internet will play an increasingly important role for journalists and news consumers in the future. At present, the survey suggests, journalists with this online media experience comprise just 19 per cent of Australian journalists. But as the number of journalists with online media experience increases in the workforce, these journalists' greater acceptance of the Internet may then assist in greater source diversity leading to greater content diversity in Australia's news media. The studies of newspaper websites and journalists' Internet use suggest and support differing diversity models. In this thesis I propose two models for diversity, the first drawn from views espoused by the Print Media Inquiry and the Productivity Commission's Inquiry into Broadcasting. This model (below) sees a one-to-one correspondence between structural and content diversity and assumes that to increase the diversity of views available to the public, the number of media outlets must similarly be increased. The argument that the Internet can provide media pluralism by permitting new players to enter the media market relatively easily, an argument tested by my study of Australian newspaper websites, is commensurate with this model. The second model is based on my inquiries into journalists' Internet use and proposes a method of increasing content diversity within a fixed media ownership structure. This model (below) acknowledges that journalists produce content mostly via traditional news sources, but proposes this content can be increased and/or changed, with an emphasis on more diverse information, via non-traditional news sources obtained via the Internet. The success of this model, however, is predicated on journalists' acceptance of online information as a viable news source. The implication for journalism is that established journalistic norms and practices, which can limit online-supported content diversity, need to be overcome. Overall, the results of my inquiries suggest the answer to the research question is that the Internet has so far delivered little in terms of structural and content diversity in Australia's newspaper industry. However, the Internet's potential to do so remains, particularly if independent online-based media ventures find ways to become commercially viable and if journalists adopt the technology as a means of finding more diverse news sources.

No description available.