Thesis (Ph.D.)--Brown University, 2005. / Vita. Thesis advisor: Nancy Armstrong. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 195-203). Also available online.

Thesis (M.A.) -- Central Connecticut State University, 2007. / Thesis advisor: Aimee Pozorski. "... in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 85-88). Also available via the World Wide Web.

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"Retro" is a novel which attempts to depict the psychological reality of the spiritually isolated individual characterized in traditional gothic novels, in this case the alienated individual in the contemporary American South. The novel follows the doctrine set down by Roland Barthes, Frank Kermode, and other postmodern critics, which holds that, as Kermode puts it, "all closure is in bad faith." Therefore, rather than offering resolution to the problems and events presented in the text, the novel attempts instead to illustrate the psychological effects its main character experiences when confronted with a world that offers only irresolution and uncertainty. The novel's strategy is to depart from conventional, realistic modes of narration and to adopt instead certain characteristics of satire, surrealism, and the type of grotesque often associated with the gothic novel.

During the 1960's a distinct change of emphasis took place in the manner in which East German novels reflected the relationship between individual and collective. Using three of the best known works of the period (E.Strittmatter's Ole Bienkopp, H.Kant's Die Aula and Christa Wolf's Nachdenken über Christa T.), this study attempts to describe the change and to consider its implications for the theory of socialist realism. Because each of the novels represents an individual author's contribution to a body of literature which must serve a collective function, his position vis-a-vis society is revealed not only in the social content of his work but also by the form in which it is presented. The central concern of this discussion is the way in which both the content and the form of East German socialist realist literature increasingly, in the course of the 1960's, reflect the potential contradictions and creative tensions inherent in the relationship between individuality and collectivism. Having in the initial, formative stages emphasized the unity of individual and collective aspirations, socialist realist literature began in the 1960's to move away from the programmatic, normative view of social relationships which had first evolved under foreign (Soviet Russian) conditions and become entrenched during the ideological confrontations of the 1950's. The work of Erwin Strittmatter, whose earlier writing typifies the perspectives and style of the 1950's, serves to introduce these changes. His novel Ole Bienkopp is generally recognized to be the first major work to deal principally with relationships within the GDR, rather than the broader issues of internal or external threats to the social structure. The major innovation of Ole Bienkopp is that its narrative interest derives from so-called "non-antagonistic conflicts." This clearly requires much more realistic differentiation of the individual characters than the simplistic, black-white confrontations of earlier works. Strittmatter's characterization is examined both from the point of view of its realism and also to assess the social perspective which it reflects. In contrast to Strittmatter's relatively conservative style and aggressive argumentation, Hermann Kant's Die Aula consistently introduces to East German prose many of the techniques of modern bourgeois novels, corresponding to its more reflective, questioning approach to life. Like Strittmatter and the third author, Christa Wolf, Kant undertakes a retrospective reassessment of the formative years of the GDR, when individual and collective attitudes towards the new society were first established. Although he hints at the importance of this undertaking for finding a satisfactory role for the individual in contemporary society, one of the great flaws of the novel is that he fails to follow this point through. However, many of the literary techniques which made Die Aula so popular and the social attitudes it revealed reappeared to much greater effect in Christa Wolf's Nachdenken über Christa T. Because of its subtle use of style and language and very "open" form and highly reflective, introspective approach to life in the GDR, this novel represents in many ways the apotheosis of the changes in both the content and the form of socialist prose in East Germany during the 1960's. The history of the reception of the novel alone suggests that Wolf had reached hitherto undefined boundaries of socialist realism. Bearing in mind the innovations of perspective and form introduced by Ole Bienkopp and Die Aula, the final chapter examines Wolf's concern that each individual – whether author or ordinary citizen – find fulfilment in the collective. / Arts, Faculty of / Central Eastern Northern European Studies, Department of / Graduate

My dissertation, Mimetic Sensations: Sensation Genres, Victorian Realism, and the Transmission of Feeling, focuses on the little explored subject of how Victorians imagined feeling to transfer both within fictional scenes of representation and between fictional scenes and the real bodies of the audience or readers consuming them. Turning to mid-nineteenth century criticism, Victorian theories of emotion and physiology (primarily by Alexander Bain), sensation genres across different media (novels and plays by Wilkie Collins, the sensation dramas of Boucicault), along with the “high” realism of George Eliot, I contend that sensation was envisioned as crucial to the transfer of fictional feeling into real feeling. Realism operates not only in how it converts the raw materials from real life into a fictional form of verisimilitude, but in how the fictional representation becomes reconverted into lived, embodied feelings in the real world through those who witness it.

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A thesis report submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of Master of Arts in Media Studies to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, 2019 / This study examines contemporary representation and imaginings of the black South African family structure in a popular reality television programme, Date My Family. Further categorised in the sub-genre of reality dating television, the programme is also a significant study of the ways in which reality television values intersect with discourses about family, romantic partnering and romantic love. These are the three main themes that have been identified in Date My Family, and are all fundamental and significant social practices that will be explored in a critical discussion of dynamics in black South African families. This study aims to outline the ways in which Date My Family displays contemporary understandings of black identity in relation to the family structure, as well as how the programme either imagines or renegotiates traditional conceptions of family, romantic partnering and romantic love. The study’s examination of its three main themes is informed by literature that serves an introductory and contextual function. Subsequently, I apply theories of identity, race and representation. Using discourse analysis to focus on the visual and verbal discourses, I show that the programme displays significant cultural relevance and a representation of the social circumstances in which it is produced. Date My Family portrays instances in which Western/ European traditions and conceptions of family, romantic partnering and romantic love have been continued in the African context, how some of these traditions and conceptions co-exist with those of Africa, and how these traditions and conceptions have been renegotiated. The structure of the black South African family seems to remain in its traditional form – the extended unit - and notions of female-headed households and an absence of fathers in the family remain topics of representation in the current, local context. / NG (2020)

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