Bibliography: p. 133-137. / The modern genre of fantasy romance is a relatively recent development in popular literature, and one which is gaining increasing popularity. In its contemporary form, fantasy romance has developed from earlier fantasy and romance forms, and a generic base which includes romance, comedy and pastoral can be identified. Conventional fantasy romance is concerned with the defense of a magical land, characterised in terms of beauty, health and balance, from some destructive threat. This concern with the health of the land reflects modern ecological consciousness and awareness of potential environmental destruction. Ecological awareness can be traced through critical analysis of various works of fantasy romance. J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, as the text which marked the beginning of the modern fantasy romance form, shows the potential for ecological awareness in the genre, although Tolkien's cultural context of post-war England in some ways inhibits ecological consciousness in the narrative. The development of a more modern ecological consciousness is studied through investigation of the Riddlemaster trilogy of Patricia A. McKillip, which shows a more abstracted sense of environmental destruction expressed through a concern with power and identity. Stephen Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant provides a narrative awareness of generic convention which could be construed as postmodern. Derrida's deconstruction of the notion of genre allows an interesting insight into Donaldson's processes of generic mixing, although the narrative's success is ultimately compromised by Donaldson's lack of authorial control. Sheri S. Tepper's True Game series displays a highly contemporary conflation of ecological concerns with those of feminism, as the destructive impulses of largely male competitiveness are contrasted to an organic and intuitive female response to the land. Orson Scott Card's Alvin Maker series, in its depiction of an alternative settler America, integrates ecological concerns with those of racial harmony, while his construction of a messianic hero recalls Card's own Mormon background. Finally, some attention is given to fantasy romance as a potentially escapist genre rather than one which inspires actual ecological awareness, and links are made with popular elements in the ecological movement itself. The thesis concludes by proposing the relevance of fantasy romance's magical land as a regenerative ideal of health and beauty in an increasingly ugly and ecologically deteriorating modern environment.

This thesis examines the relationship between Bessie Head's work as a journalist during the late 1950s and two of her novels: the first written just after she had left formal journalism and the second a decade later. I claim, in this thesis, that early journalistic writing by Head, which has been critically ignored, and even dismissed, not only merits critical attention but, furthermore, that knowledge this work will yield new insights into Head's fictional writing for which she is famous. Between 1959 and 1960, before she left South Africa, Bessie Head wrote two weekly columns for children and teenagers, some book reviews and had a role in the production of "True Romance" stories for Home Post, a tabloid supplement to the Sunday newspaper Golden City Post. Head was involved in the production of these romances for over a year and I provide an analysis of the "True Romance" stories published in Home Post. I maintain that these romances, like all texts in popular romance genre (which I discuss) constructs the feminine in very particular ways. I locate this analysis within wider, but related, discussion about the representation of women in both Golden City Post and Drum magazine as they were both considered to be the authoritative newspapers representing black South African life in the 1950s. Head's columns, I claim, especially the one for teenagers, present constructions of the feminine, as well as the masculine, which are significantly at odds with the dominant representations of the feminine, and masculine, in the media I have mentioned, during the late 1950s. A close reading of the representations of gender which Head set up in this column, together with the book reviews she wrote, will give us new insight into her fictional work, particularly The Cardinals which is an early work written and set during this period but only published posthumously in 1993. Reading this novel against the background of the journalistic work and world Head was engaged in just before she wrote it will enable us to read its complexities, specifically those regarding gender and romance. I claim that Head also gave us what is probably the earliest gender perspective, and critique, of 1950s black journalism - a period generally considered to be a vibrant one for black journalism and writing in South Africa. In The Cardinals, which fictionally recreates the black journalistic milieu of the late 1950s in South Africa, Head suggests that black women journalists (and writers) found themselves facing a very different situation from black male journalists. Finally I suggest that with romance structure and the role which gender plays in the novel. Although critics have persistently read this novel as an idealistic, and unrealistic, romance with a happy ending, I suggest, in this thesis, that one can read the novel, in the light of Head's earlier work, as being a radical subversion of the romance.

This study is concerned with the development of a field of film theory around the place of the female spectator. Chapter 1 presents an historical overview of some trends in the development of film theory, with emphasis on the emergence of a paradigm in which theories of semiotics, ideology and psychoanalysis intersect. It critically assesses the establishment of a dominant theory founded in the notion of film as art, proposing certain parallels between this and contemporary Leavisite literary theory, and notes auteurism as the point of departure from this into the consideration of film as popular culture. It then traces the impact of the critiques by Barthes and Foucault of authorial intentionality, Althusser's theory of ideology and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory in the shift to a body of film theory centrally concerned with the notion of film as text. The feminist intervention is located at the meeting point of this theory with the concerns of the emergent women's movement, and is traced in its development from the "image of" criticism of Rosen and Haskell to Claire Johnston's and Laura Mulvey's seminal work on women and representation. Chapter 2 focuses on some of the theoretical considerations of the image and the gaze, extends these into the theory of cinema as an apparatus, and outlines feminist critiques of apparatus theory. Accounts of representation and the image are drawn from Bill Nichols, John Berger, and Peter Wollen's summary of C.S. Peirce. In the shift of theoretical interest to the process of viewing film, Munsterberg's account of the psychology of vision is noted. The psychoanalytic construction of visual meaning is traced through Lacan's elaboration of the mirror phase to its significance for cinema in the centrality of desire and the gaze. The consequent development of a model of cinema as an apparatus by Baudry and Metz is followed. The feminist criticism of the androcentricity of this model is traced, both through its outright rejection, and through specific critiques by Teresa de Lauretis, Jacqueline Rose, Kaja Silverman, Mary Ann Doane and Constance Penley. Chapter 3 follows three theorists in their attempts to account for female spectatorship: Laura Mulvey's theory of oscillation, Teresa de Lauretis's double identification and Mary Ann Doane's accounts both of textual strategies of specularization in the "woman's film" and the masquerade are considered. Chapter 4 presents an analysis of the text Klute in order to apply some of the theoretical implications, particularly around questions of female subjectivity and spectatorship. It situates Klute within its historical context, in relation to the cinema industry and the emergent women's movement, and within the terms suggested by its generic structuration. The Conclusion provides a summary of my intention to provide an overview of this difficult and fertile field of debate. An Appendix provides a script of Klute.

This thesis grapples with the curious relationship of the metaphors of detection and reading. Detective fiction is often seen as an enactment of reading, while the literary critic is often described in terms of detection, investigation and interrogation. The Introductory section discusses the implications that such a self-reflexive and reflecting involvement has for narrative, the self, logic and the very institution of academic literary criticism itself. The notion of a detective genre, and genre-criticism in general, is put into question by analysing the legal and coercive nature of a literary concept that styles itself as objective, scientific and historical. The power of the critic to construct genre is likened to the legal capacity of the detective and a polemical call is made to re-examine the academy's resulting claims of authority. An analysis of the crime of incest in two films, Roman Polanski's Chinatown and Jack Nicholeson's The Two Jakes, is used to further problematise the notion of the law. Claude Levi-Strauss' work on kinship structures helps to point to the aporetic and contradictory position that incest can be seen to occupy in the formation of human society. Criminal anthropology provides an interesting frame for this discussion. Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 is used to explore the fundamental uncertainty in which the detective/reader necessarily finds herself. Sigmund Freud's concept of the uncanny is introduced to account for the interpreter's state of unease in the face of ambiguity. Finally, a literary essay, Jacques Derrida's "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences", is read rather as a form of detective story than as a factual analysis, whether this experiment is successful will be up to the reader. The overriding claim of this thesis is that there is no such thing as perception.

This dissertation outlines the political and social organization of the Icelandic Commonwealth, and analyses the characters of Gunnlaug in Gunnlaugs saga; of Brodd-Helgi, Geitir, Bjami and Thorkel in Vápnfirŏinga saga and of Snorri in Eyrbyggja saga.

Bibliography: p.181-191. / The subject of this essay is Structuralism, and the point of view, that of a student of literature. And this much the title conveys. However, there are points which need to be made by way of a preface in order to clarify what this essay attempts and what it does not. First, there is the problem faced by any writer on Structuralism - definition of his subject. This problem has been sufficiently talked about in the text, along with how a recognition of it generated the essay's form, and no more need be said on this matter here. But, second, it must be stressed that, though this is an essay in criticism of a style of thought, it has no pretensions to being an essay in philosophy. Rather than progressing by way of a rigorous analysis of a set of concepts, its motivating spirit is more justly characterized as that of a critical review. The hope is to illuminate and, as well, to suggest points of weakness which, I believe, deserve the probing for soundness which rigorous analysis provides. However, though this is itself not an essay in philosophy, I have attempted to treat the abstractions I deal with, and the argument-forms I deal with them in, with respect. The same might be said of my treatment of ideas belonging to the other disciplines - mathematics and linguistics - in which I could not be considered a specialist.

The genre of the romance has a long and complex history, encompassing a diversity of literary forms. In this dissertation, I focus on the sub-genre of the domestic romance and on the ways in which this form has represented the problematics of gender as they are constructed within the home and family under patriarchy. I examine the notion of the dichotomy between public and private worlds and the demarcation of these zones as gendered, as domains of masculine and feminine activity respectively. This opposition is a consequence of the development of the middle-class family unit in England attendant on the emergence of capitalism from the late sixteenth century onwards, which resulted in a gendered division of labour. The domestic romance bears the traces of these historical processes as it negotiates the position of women as wives and mothers in domestic worlds ordered by patriarchy. I trace these mediations through three texts. Wuthering Heights, I argue, enacts a bold disruption of the organisation of the unregulated libidinal energy of its protagonists Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. The restoration of domestic harmony at the text's closure is an uneasy one. The Thorn Birds is situated within the mass literary culture peculiar to the twentieth century. Working from within the limitations and formulae of the contemporary romantic 'bestseller', the text offers multiple examples of female discontent and of acts of rebellion by women against the structures and practices constraining their lives, but these rebellions are circumscribed and contained by the text's endorsement of the figure of the 'proper woman - the dutiful wife and mother - as the realisation of femininity. Possession relocates the romance within the framework of academic theoretical discourse, addressing questions of the patriarchal construction of the feminine informed by the new conceptual and narrative categories of postmodernism. The novel ultimately affirms the romantic recoding of history in its own closure, positing its endless narrative possibilities. In the final analysis, I situate the romance as offering manifold narrative possibilities to women in very different historical dispensations. Bibliography: pages 91-94.

This paper will examine moments in literature where the narratives of baseball as American myth and those involving African Americans converge, moments where authors confront (either consciously or not) the implications of both narratives within the same shared space. It is at these moments of convergence that the mythic language surrounding the game and its interaction with African Americans are thrown into dramatic relief. A myth, says Roland Barthes in his Mythologies, is a kind of "metalanguage," a narrative which refers to and talks about another narrative; it is at least twice removed from any referent which exists in reality. "What is invested in the concept," writes Barthes, "is less reality than a certain knowledge of reality." Examining this space will reveal how myths operate and continue to affect an understanding of personal and national identities, especially since this space involves the intersection of the emblematic discourse of baseball with a black presence that appears to question the very tenets of established national memory.

Summary in English. / Bibliography: pages 148-152. / This study seeks to understand the visual dynamics of contemporary science fiction cities in film by exploring a number of diverse architectural and cinematic influences. The argument is initiated through a consideration of utopianism and science fiction, before moving onto specific architectural analysis focused on utopian plans from the modernist period, and the growth of New York during the 1920s. Through a brief reading of German Expressionist Cinema in Chapter 3, the spatial and architectural groundwork is laid for the analysis of several films in Chapters 4-6: Disclosure, Blade Runner, Selen, The Devil's Advocate, 12 Monkeys and The Fifth Element. (While not all the films would be considered as science fiction, those non-science fiction films offer provocative readings of the city as a whole). Within the discussion of these films, the paradigmatic nature of New York and Los Angeles is also analyzed. The author finds that the central thesis holds, though discussion of other contemporary films not dealt with here could produce an alternative interpretation. Specifically, the work of Edward Soja and Michel Foucault provide fruitful lines of examination through an engagement with the spatiality of postmodernism, though postmodernism is not analyzed in itself. The dissertation aims to have current application, in terms of the recent release of some of the films, but is also written with the aim of future expansion, stressing the design aspect of contemporary film.

Includes bibliography. / I have taken my notion of 'Post-Environmentalism' from John Young's book of the same name which seemed to me to provide an eclectic and essentially deconstructive approach to the debate surrounding 'the environmentalist crisis'. As the term suggests, the debate is one subject to essentialist thinking which constitutes it as simple and singular. In particular I am interested in the ways in which that logic is one of specularity, forwarded by a scientific privileging of ocular epistemology. I therefore use the strategy of 'Post-Environmentalism' in so far as it provides a way of making use of the historical and political importance of all the discourses involved, in particular Deep-Ecology and Ecofeminism, without privileging one over another. However, I also point out ways in which this mapping project is subject to the same specular logic. In so far as Surfacing is a postmodernist text which constantly relativizes the discourses of, in particular but not exclusively, ecofeminism and science, it functions like 'Post-Environmentalism' to deconstruct the specific problems of each. In particular I look at the way in which the narrator uses metaphor to deconstruct rational masculinist thought and create the possibility of an empowering subject position for women, nature and fiction as a marginalized genre.