The suburb of Belleville is situated on the north-eastern outskirts of inner Paris. Its particular blend of social strata, race and architecture has made it a site of interest for historians, writers and artists since the Middle Ages. Thanks in part to the phenomenal success of Daniel Pennac’s six tome Malaussène series, published towards the end of the 20th century and situated in Belleville, the site has continued to enjoy a privileged status among the historical and cultural precincts of Paris. The representation of Belleville in the written and spoken word has a long history, part of which has been told, although in somewhat piecemeal fashion to date. Existing research may be divided into 3 categories, corresponding to the disciplines of history, sociology and literature. Historical studies are extensive and tend to support the suburb’s reputation as a site of revolution and social unrest. The sociological studies focus on immigration to the suburb and on the consequences of its physical transformation over the last half of the 20th century. The overall image presented by sociologists is one of a cosmopolitan suburb whose inhabitants manage to co-exist peacefully despite the multicultural mix; Belleville’s reputation as a melting pot success story sits at odds with that of its image as a centre of rebellion. Literature-based research conducted into the suburb is more sketchy; Belleville’s association with the noir genre and its inherent illicit elements also contrasts with the previous observations. If the existing studies present various pictures of historical and contemporary Belleville, they do not, however, give a comprehensive image of the suburb, nor do they provide an analysis of the role of Belleville in the noir genre, with particular reference to the Malaussène series. I have thus undertaken a multidisciplinary study of the suburb, with the objective of establishing links between the history, sociology and the literature of Belleville, of gaining an understanding of the function of Belleville as a setting for detective fiction and of offering a new explanation of the success of Pennac’s Malaussène series, by relating it to his representation of Belleville. The three focus areas of my research are its history from the Middle Ages until the end of the 20th century, its diverse representations in literature and popular culture, and its connection to a particular literary genre: the noir. The originality of my project lies in the method created to categorise existing research. Belleville rouge presents a view of the site as historically antiauthoritarian in its attempts to promote social justice. Belleville rose incorporates those studies which emphasise the suburb to varying degrees as a utopia, a model of social harmony or a centre of joyful festivities. Belleville noir focuses on the choice of the suburb as backdrop for the noir genre in literature and film; a hub of transgression and criminal activity, the antithesis of the positive space presented in the second category. The first part of my research project looks at the history of Belleville, the changing nature of its borders, which differ greatly from the administrative division according to author and historian, and the creation of a collective Belleville identity. Part two examines the representations of Belleville in literature and popular culture from the Middle Ages until the year 2000, and furthermore attempts to determine to what extent these cultural representations correspond to the suburb’s history. The third section deals with the role of Belleville in noir film and literature. If a single image corresponding to the décor of the neo-polar genre begins to emerge from the representations of Belleville by the film directors and various authors whose texts make up our corpus, this image differs greatly from the nostalgic one offered by Daniel Pennac; his representation of the suburb is hence treated separately. It is this strong sense of attachment to, and identification with, Belleville that is underlined by Pennac in his Malaussène series. Setting himself apart from his néo-polar contemporaries, Pennac draws heavily on all of the three faces of Belleville: the rouge, the rose and the noir. His refusal to adhere strictly to the néo-polar genre and his corresponding tendency to borrow from other genres such as the fairy tale, has resulted in a fusion of the real and the mythological which has engendered in his series a streak of optimism not found in the works of his contemporaries. Pennac draws on the history and traditions of the suburb to thus present an original view of contemporary Belleville as a peace-loving, cohesive community. If we accept that the cultural memory of a site is dictated in part by its inhabitants, and hence is in constant evolution, outlasting its physical appearance, Pennac’s role of guardian of the cultural memory of Belleville may extend to that of the cultural memory of the French nation. / Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2009

Thesis (Ph.D.)--McMaster University, 2003. / Advisor: Daniel Coleman. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 338-351). Also available via World Wide Web.

Thesis (M. Soc. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis -- Departmental honors in Women's Studies. / Bibliography: ℓ. 84-87.

Thesis (M.Soc.Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available in print.

This study investigates the popular pleasures produced by readers of men's magazines, focusing primarily on the publication, Men's Health, which represents a new type of magazine catering for men. Using qualitative research methods such as textual analysis and reception analysis, the study explores the pleasures produced by both men and women from the consumption of such texts. The theoretical perspective of cultural studies informs this project, an approach that focuses on the generation and circulation of meanings in society. Focusing on the notion of the active audience and Hall's encoding/decoding model, this study examines readers' interpretations of the Men's Health text, focusing on the moment of consumption in the circuit of culture. Reception theory proposes the existence of "clustered readings" produced by interpretive communities that are socially rather than individually constructed. As a critical ethnography, the study interrogates these meanings with particular reference to questions of gender relations and power in society. Access to different discourses is structured by the social position of readers within relations of power and this study takes gender as a structuring principle. Therefore, this study also explores the particular discursive practices through which masculine and feminine imagery is produced by the Men's Health text and by its readers. The research findings support the more limited notion of the active audience espoused by theorists such as Hall (1980) offering further evidence to suggest that readers produce readings other than those preferred by the text and that therein lies the pleasure of the text for male and female readers. The research concludes that the popularity of Men's Health derives from the capacity of its readers to make multiple meanings of the text.

xi, 284 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / My dissertation delves into the recent articulation of popular nationalism in Mainland China, with particular emphasis on the changes that globalization and transnationalism have brought about to the representation of the Chinese nation in sentimental terms. Complementing the rich existing literature of Chinese nationalism that focuses mainly on the pre-1949 period, my study explores the less-treaded contemporary era characterized by the new historical condition of postsocialism, which features a residual of the socialist past as well as its reinvention under new overwhelming trends of globalization. Postsocialism and its consequences-the deepening of a neoliberalist economic refonn, the state-intellectual promotion of cultural economy, the emergence of a dominant consumer culture, etc.-have produced new issues existing scholarship on Chinese nationalism has yet to address. One such issue is how the paradoxical entity of the "nation" in time and space has been fragmented by the accretion of diversified voices from a wide spectrum of Chinese society. In postsocialist China, the agents imagining the nation include not only regulars like the state and intellectuals, but also new players like mass-media elites and netizens (wangmin). I argue that these voices of different social forces that break up the hegemony of the state in representing the nation-the result of which being not that the state is excluded from this enterprise but that it now tells only part of the story-become expressed as modes of national sentiments (minzu qinggan) when the nation is imagined under the historical condition of postsocialism. My study then explores in detail the fashioning and refashioning of contemporary Chinese subjectivity, as it relates through the joining of national sentiments to the literal and figurative body of the nation and the social power structure, by analyzing these specific voices in a broad range of popular texts from TV, film, and the Internet. The detailed examination includes four chapters dealing with specific modes of national sentiments articulated by the intellectuals, the state, the mass-media elites, and the netizens, respectively. / Committee in charge: Tze-lan Sang, Co-Chairperson, East Asian Languages & Literature; David Leiwei Li, Co-Chairperson, English; Maram Epstein, Member, East Asian Languages & Literature; Bryna Goodman, Outside Member, History

This dissertation focuses on the production and development of a conspicuous, widespread culture phenomenon in contemporary Japan, which is characterized by numerous young, mediapromoted personalities, or pop-idols, who are groomed for public consumption. The research, based on eighteen months of in-depth fieldwork in the Japanese entertainment industry, aims to contribute to the understanding of the allegorical role played by pop-idols in the creation of youth culture. Pop-idols are analyzed as personified symbols that function as vehicles of cultural production. The principal issues suggested in this research include: the criteria of popidol production; the ways in which pop-idols are produced; the perceptions of pop-idol performances by producers, performers, and consumers; the ways in which idol personalities are differentiated from each other; the ways in which pop-idol performances are distinguished from other styles or genres; and the social, cultural, political, economic, and historical roots as well as consequences of pop-idols' popularity. These issues are explored through the examination of female pop-idols. The single, most important function of pop-idols is to represent young people's fashions, customs, and lifestyles. To this end, the pop-idol industry generates a variety of styles that can provide the young audience with pathways toward appropriate adulthood. They do this within their power structure as well as their commercial interest to capitalize on adolescence - which in Japan is considered the period in which individuals are expected to explore themselves in the adult social world. The stylized promotion, practiced differently by promotion agencies that strive to merchandise pop-idol images and win public recognition, constitutes a field of symbolic contestation. The stage is thus set for an investigation of the strategies, techniques, and processes of adolescent identity formation as reified in the construction of idol personalities. This dissertation offers a contextualized account of dialogue that occurs between capitalism, particular rhetoric of self-making, and the lifestyle of consumers, mediated by pop-idols and their manufacturing agencies that function together as the cultural apparatus. The analysis developed in this dissertation hopes to provide theoretical and methodological contributions to the study of celebrities in other social, cultural, and historical settings. / Arts, Faculty of / Sociology, Department of / Graduate

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<p>Intensively industrialized animal agriculture, or factory farming, poses many challenges for our notions of “life” and how it should be treated. Factory farming’s mass instrumentalization and exploitation of animals potentially unsettles both our most basic notions regarding the justice of sacrificing certain lives in order to improve other lives, and our decisions about which lives belong to each category. This thesis examines the factory farm as a site that relies upon and produces particular lessons about life. The first chapter explores factory farming’s insistence that economically useful features of animals can be endlessly manipulated and optimized, summarily rendering disposable all other aspects of their lives. Recent work on “neoliberal” economic ideology identifies the emergence of similar conclusions about <em>human</em> life under neoliberalism, yet animal life remains largely un-theorized in this context. Meanwhile, the field of critical animal studies is generating a rich body of work theorizing our exclusion of animals from full ethical and political consideration, but has yet to grapple with how the factory farm brings to bear its own economizing logic that intensifies the “othering” of animal life. The resulting pedagogy of life reverberates throughout the range of cultural responses to factory farming. Chapter Two discusses factory farm designer Temple Grandin’s work in order to illustrate how attempts to situate the site within ostensibly non-economic narratives of life such as ecology, comparative epistemology, and spirituality reveal ways that those narratives can become complicit with the factory farm’s neoliberal pedagogy. Chapter Three examines current representations of vegetarian identity, demonstrating that even resistant responses can reinscribe the factory farm’s sacrificial economy. The thesis concludes that alternative futures for critical resistance to the factory farm depend upon a more thorough apprehension of its conceptual reach, and concerted pedagogical and ethical work through and beyond its framing of both human and animal life.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)