Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2005. / Supervisor: William H. Goetzmann. Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Also available from UMI.

When her sister goes missing, Kattel Macé must fly to France to find her. While the police are cooperating, they have no leads to go off of forcing Kattel to start her own investigation. In her search, Kattel stumbles across evidence that implicates her own family members in her sisters mysterious disappearance.

published_or_final_version / Sociology / Master / Master of Philosophy

The primary objective of this M.A. thesis is to examine the portrayal of Switzerland and the role of the Swiss detective in the modern Swiss crime novel, with special focus on the works of three modern Swiss authors of different social status: Friedrich Glauser, Friedrich Durrenmatt and Hansjorg Schneider. While the crime novel is generally considered trivial entertainment for mass audiences within the realm of German literature, the case is somewhat different in Switzerland, a country with a small state mentality. The forthcoming analysis will demonstrate how these authors employ the crime novel as an educational device to convey a very important message to their fellow countrymen about the society in which they live. In their portrayal of Switzerland, the authors cover a wide range of circumstances relevant to their respective time periods, often dealing with controversial issues. Consequently, the Swiss detective plays a major role, as he must often solve difficult cases while faced with tremendous pressure from society. By focusing exclusively on Switzerland, this analysis will ultimately prove that the modern Swiss crime novel contains not only an entertainment aspect, but also important political, sociological and historical elements that distinguish the phenomenon from its international counterparts.

The Long Division is a novel that applies some conventions and tropes of the noir fiction genre to tell a story from the points of view of five individuals whose fates are interconnected through the narrative. Jodie Larkin is an Atlanta housecleaner who, fed up with her thankless job, hits the road with stolen cash, desperate to reconnect with the son she gave up for adoption. That son is Calvin Nowak, a teenager eager to escape an adoptive family that he feels can never understand him. He and Jodie embark on a runaway quest to discover the source of his pain. Their journey will take them to small town New York, where Calvin’s biological father, Sam Hartwick, is secretly tracking the shooter in a double murder case that will test his reputation and his faith in redemption. That killer is Wynn Johnston, a college student gifted and tortured, who clings to his bright academic prospects while hunted by vengeful criminals, police, and his own demons. He strikes up a desperate relationship with Erika Hartwick, Sam Harwick’s legitimate daughter, just as Sam’s illegitimate son Calvin and one-time lover Jodie arrive in town and instigate a climactic confrontation between all the perspective characters. The novel explores the value of family and how it can be tested by extreme circumstances, especially in paradoxical or ironic context where family is founded on, or broken apart by, characters flaws that threaten the stability of family itself. Likewise, it explores whether certain family relationships can or should be repaired, and the motives and morality of individuals when they support or subvert family dynamics.

The administration of initiation rites by an ecstatic specialist, now known to western scholarship by the general designation of ‘shaman’, has proven to be one of humanity’s oldest, most widespread, and continuous magico-religious traditions. At the heart of their initiatory rituals lay an ordeal – a metaphysical journey - almost ubiquitously brought on by the effects of a life-changing hallucinogenic drug experience. To guide their initiates, these shaman worked with a repertoire of locally acquired instruments, costumes, dances, and ecstasy-inducing substances. Among past Mediterranean cultures, Semitic and Indo-European, these sorts of initiation rites were vital to society’s spiritual well-being. It was, however, the mystery schools of antiquity – organizations founded upon conserving the secrets of plant-lore, astrology, theurgy and mystical philosophy – which satisfied the role of the shaman in Greco-Roman society. The rites they delivered to the common individual were a form of ritualized ecstasy and they provided an orderly context for religiously-oriented intoxication. In the eastern Mediterranean, these ecstatic cults were most often held in honour of a great mother goddess and her perennially dying-and-rising consort. The goddess’ religious dramas enacted in cultic ritual stressed the importance of fasting, drumming, trance-inducing music, self-mutilation, and a non-alcoholic ritual intoxication. Far and wide the dying consort worshiped by these cults was a god of vegetation, ecstasy, revelation, and salvation; by ingesting his body initiates underwent a profound mystical experience. From what limited information has survived from antiquity, it appears that the rites practiced in the eastern mystery cults were in essence traditional shamanic ordeals remodeled to suit the psychological needs of Mediterranean civilization’s marginalized people. This paper argues that the myths of this vegetable god, so-called ‘the Divine Bridegroom,’ particularly in manifestation of the Phrygian Attis and the Greek Dionysus, is deeply rooted in the life-cycle, cultivation, treatment, consumption of a tree-born hallucinogenic mushroom, Amanita muscaria. The use of this mushroom is alive and well today among Finno-Ugric shaman and this paper explores their practices as one branch of Eurasian shamanism running parallel to, albeit in a different time, the rites of the Phrygian goddess. Using extant literary and linguistic evidence, I compare the initiatory cults long-assimilated into post-agricultural Mediterranean civilization with the hallucinogen-wielding shaman of the Russian steppe, emphasizing them both as facets of a prehistoric and pan-human magico-religious archetype.

No description available.

Thesis (M.F.A.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2009. / Typescript. Accompanying DVD is titled "Director reel" and contains a trailer for the film.

Zugl.: Hannover, Univ., Diss., 2005

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.