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Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wyoming, 2007. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on Oct. 21, 2008). An Interdisciplinary Master of Arts thesis in English, Education, and Environment and Natural Resources. Includes bibliographical references (p. 150-154).

Thesis (M.A.)--Montana State University--Bozeman, 2004. / Typescript. Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Greg Keeler. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 58-59).

The five stories in this collection are an exploration of realist fiction through a variety of narrative points of view and a diversity of characters. The stories explore issues of class, age, work and family, but in each piece, the characters struggle in their own way to discover a sense of belonging in their own lives. Central to each of these stories is a sense of place. All are set in the American west, most in rural California and the land and activities of place provide not only a specific landscape, but often a limitation, a narrative element against which the characters both resist and find their truest home.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2006. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Study of themes in the novels of Edward Abbey, Lan Cao, Toni Morrison, and Leslie Marmon Silko. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 233-238). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

In this study on literature and thought from the early 20th century, I examine techniques of organization – including rhetoric, poetics and citation – across the work of the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) and the Austrian writer Robert Musil (1880-1942). With particular attention to Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms and Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, this dissertation analyzes the prose strategies, by which the authors develop a poetics of orientation. Responding to shifts in the epistemological foundations of the empirical sciences, the authors reimagine genre and style as a way to direct the reader in the interpretive process. Although the inflection of this poetics of orientation differs in Cassirer’s cultural philosophy and Musil’s essays and narrative, they both follow dynamic moments in thought, the drama that unfolds as the interpersonal experience of making sense of the world. The displacement of substance by function in the sciences provides the shared ground against which the patterns of their prose emerge. In the first section, “Ernst Cassirer. Problemgeschichte: from genre to texture”, I engage Cassirer’s shift from a critique of reason to a critique of culture, in which language and myth are treated alongside theoretical knowledge as interfaces for knowing the world. His mode of thought develops in a mode of writing, modifying the philosophical genre Problemgeschichte, which developed in the 19th century and was the dominant mode of philosophy among Neo-Kantians at the turn of the 19th to 20th century. He extends the genre’s diction of direction, such as the ubiquitous terms Richtung and Weg, with a decidedly mathematical accent. This figural register reflects the epistemic shift from substance to function, which also typifies his characterization of problems as sites of discursive interference. Building on this discussion of the philosophical genre Problemgeschichte, I then analyze narrative aspects of Cassirer’s writing, such as focalization, in order to understand how his play of citation demonstrates functional thinking. In the second section, “Orientation: Robert Musil’s Reise vom Hundertsten ins Tausendste”, I follow Musil’s prose detours as an intentional gambit, connecting heterogeneous intellectual inquiry. Arguing that his prose innovation cannot be exhausted by a discussion of his essayistic style, I challenge standard accounts of the dissolution of narrative in Musil’s writing. The shift from substance to function as the epistemological foundation in the empirical sciences informs Musil’s displacement of narrative schema by narrative impulses, which preserves traces of traditional story telling as devices for helping the reader find their way in a textual space. Both Cassirer’s and Musil’s poetics of orientation demonstrate engagement with the tumultuous Interwar period, which counters anti-Enlightenment tendencies of intellectual inquiry, common in the German-language cultural production of the early 20th century. The authors’ prose strategies are the vehicle for an intellectual vision, which maintains the potential for an open future.

This thesis probes the materiality of a text by focusing on elliptical matters. In The Culture of Time and Space, Stephen Kern introduces the term "positive-negative space" to describe the primacy of empty space as a formal subject matter in sculptures of the early twentieth century. With some caveats and distinctions, the thesis argues that Kern's theory of positive-negative space is crucial for reading Faulkner's crytic and polyvalent production of space. Using a smorgasbord of approaches including psychoanalytic and reader-response criticism, feminist and critical race theories, post-structuralist and formalist notions of space, theories of the "hole" in fine arts sculpture, and the New Southern studies, my thesis reinvents the conception of positive-negative space, and asserts that positive-negative space as an artistic principle" is the modus operandi of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Sanctuary. / by Simone Maria Puleo. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2012. / Includes bibliography. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / System requirements: Adobe Reader.

Both Calixthe Beyala's Le petit prince de Belleville, published in France in 1992, and Cynthia Shearer's The Celestial Jukebox, published in the United States in 2005, explore similar questions regarding the place of immigrants in increasingly multicultural societies. Gilles Deleuze and Fâelix Guattari's concept of - smoothness and - striation illuminates the settings of these two texts, helping demonstrate that the Parisian neighborhood of Belleville presents a striated space dominated by State constraints, from which the residents yearn to break free, and the fictional town of Madagascar, Mississippi consists of relatively smooth space that allows for local improvisation and engenders insecurity. The stories of Loukoum and Boubacar illustrate how these two characters negotiate their respective spaces, with Loukoum creating a position thoroughly between striated majority French culture and the smoothness of his diasporic sphere and Boubacar functioning as a rhizomatic nomad, embarking on an autonomous journey of discovery. / by Karyn H. Anderson. / Signature page unsigned. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2009. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2009. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

This thesis offers an analysis of selected works by Virginia Woolf through the theoretical framework of technology of place. The term “technology”, meaning both a finished product and an ongoing production process, a mode of concealment and unconcealment in Martin Heidegger's sense, is used as part of this thesis's argument that place can be understood through constant negotiations of concrete place perceived through the senses, a concept based on the Heideggerian notion of “earth”, and abstract place perceived in the imagination, a concept based on the Heideggerian notion of “world”. The term “technology of place”, coined by Irvin C. Schick in The Erotic Margin: Sexuality and Spatiality in Alteritist Discourse (1999), is appropriated and re-interpreted as part of this thesis's adoption and adaptation of Woolf's notion of ideal biographical writing as an amalgamation of “granite” biographical facts and “rainbow” internal life. Woolf's granite and rainbow dichotomy is used as a foreground to this thesis's proposed theoretical framework, through which questions of space/place can be examined. My analysis of Flush (1933) demonstrates that place is a technology which can be taken at face value and, at the same time, appropriated to challenge the ideology of its construction. My analysis of Orlando (1928) demonstrates that Woolf's idea of utopia exemplifies the technological “coming together”, in Heidegger's term, of concrete social reality and abstract artistic fantasy. My analysis of The Years (1937) demonstrates that sense of place as well as sense of identity is ambivalent and constantly changing like the weather, reflecting place's Janus-faced function as both concealment and unconcealment. Lastly, my analysis of Woolf's selected essays and marginalia illustrates that writing can serve as a revolutionary “place-making” technology through which one can mentally “make room” for (re-)imagining the lives of “the obscure”, often placed in oblivion throughout the course of history.

Thesis (Ph. D) -- University of Western Sydney, Nepean, 1999. / "An enquiry into the relationship between place and space, and the writiing life, with reference to journals and poetry written by Diane Fahey, and to works by Eavan Boland, Annie Dillard, and May Sarton" -- p. ii. Thesis submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, School of Communication and Media Studies, University of Western Sydney, Nepean. Bibliography : p. 259-264.