This paper examines the prevalence of sexual violence in American media with particular focus on attitudes of sexual violence as a contribution to rape culture. Included is a content analysis of the prevalence of sexually violent lyrics in popular rap music, and a literature review of articles and studies on the effects of sexually violent media. The media discussed in the literature review includes films, television, and pornography. The relationship between the presence of sexually violent media and its impact on public opinion on sexual assault and rape proclivity are analyzed. The literature reviewed includes studies on differences in response to sexually violent media based on gender. Also included are explanation and summary of a study utilizing the excitation transfer theory and the social learning theory as they apply to the understanding of the perpetuation of rape myth acceptance based in the viewing of sexually violent media. These studies utilize the rape myth acceptance scale, the acceptance of interpersonal violence scale, and the adversarial sexual beliefs scale, among other scales of measurement to assess rape myth acceptance and rape proclivity. The high prevalence of sexual assault in the United States calls for an analysis of the acceptance of beliefs that perpetuate sexual assault and the media which support and increase the presence of these beliefs.

In both his fiction and non-fiction, Lewis comments on myth, its characteristics and strengths, and its relation to Christian doctrine. His use of myth to examine and to illustrate Christian ideas is most important in the space trilogy, the Narnia series of children's books, and Till We Have Faces. These books are the primary sources for this thesis, and they will be examined in chronological order.

Thèse numérisée par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Joseph Campbell tells us that if you look closely at all cultures you find the story of “The Hero's Journey”, the vehicle for my thesis project, a devised theatre piece titled A Thousand Faces: Everyday Heroes. Though the subject of A Thousand Faces is the exploration of “The Hero's Journey” the foundation of the work is the application of the pedagogical principles of Ritual Poetic Drama Within the African Continuum (RPDWAC) as outlined in the practices of my mentor Dr. Tawnya Pettiford-Wates, Assistant Professor of Performance at Virginia Commonwealth University Theatre (VCU). I apply RPDWAC pedagogical principles to Archetypes for the Actor/Singer (AFAS), a training methodology developed by Frankie Armstrong and another of my mentors, Professor of Voice and Speech and Head of Performance at VCU Theatre, Janet B. Rodgers. This paper outlines the process and performance of a class that combined these methodologies.

This written thesis accompanies a sixteen-minute documentary video, Harbor, in which the filmmaker explores her relationship with her father who has suffered a stroke. Detailed accounts of the pre-production, production and post-production of the video allow the reader to understand the challenging and rewarding process of making an autobiographical documentary. Theoretical issues are also discussed, including the validity, criticisms, artistic nature and ethical concerns of autobiographical filmmaking. The filmmaker stresses the universality of her story, and how, despite the film's very personal nature, it is applicable for anyone who has dealt with the illness and/or disability of a parent.

Master's thesis Don Juan as the character in French literature from 1850 until 1950 is dedicated to the research on the change of Don Juan's character in the selected works of this period. Author concentrated on the sources of inspiration and on contribution of individual authors in relation to previous works with Don Juan's theme. In his work he uses mainly the comparative method. He divides works into three groups. In the first group, there are the works whose authors found inspiration for Don Juan's character above all in the works of Molière and Tirso de Molina. In the second part, there are works that follow the romantic concept by Prosper Mérimée. In the third part, there are atypical works, in which does not prevail any of the previous models. Author concentrates on new elements with which Don Juan's myth was enriched.

Master's thesis presents comparison of motifs and images of fantastic appearance and terror in the novel Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley and its film and theatre adaptations, and studies their changes. It deals not only with theoretical problems of fantastic appearance, terror (horror) and adaptation, but especially the Frankenstein myth and its influence on creating these images in given texts. Thesis describes the development of fantastic and horrific images from the literary text towards visual and performance media. The thesis studies the transformation of these images within three film adaptations made by directors J. Searlse Dawley (1910), James Whale (1931) and Kenneth Branagh (1994), and one play written by Nick Dear and directed by Danny Boyle (2011). Key words: Frankenstein, Frankenstein myth, fantastic appearance, fantastic, terror, horror, adaptation

Pour être confortable la classification littéraire ne parvient pas toujours à rendre compte de la complexité des productions humaines et de leur réception. C’est d’autant plus vrai à une époque de grands changements, politiques, économiques, sociaux et culturels, comme le XVIIIe siècle européen. Tributaire d’une terminologie limitatrice, l’histoire littéraire a contribué à enclore les Lumières dans une cadre resserré, qui soulignait de manière dyadique les différences entre auteurs chrétiens et philosophes, raison et sensibilité. C’est dans le dépassement de ce débat que s’inscrit notre réflexion sur la symbolique de la possession à l’époque des Lumières. Cette étude est consacrée à l’analyse d’un corpus de textes qui, estimés à la lumière d’une problématique anthropologique, prennent une teinte autre que moralisatrice, fantastique, picaresque ou dramatique. Ces genres sont diffusés par les œuvres de Guevara, Lesage, Cazotte, Beckford, Goethe, Lewis, Chamisso et Potocki au fil de détours narratifs et temporels porteurs d’une modernité littéraire. L’interdépendance des enjeux esthétiques, narratifs et psychologiques marque résolument l’ancrage sociologique de la fabula dans la cité. Ces nouvelles, romans et drame assurent la naissance d’un genre d’investigation sociologique et psychologique, encore non conceptualisé à l’époque de leur parution, d’une contemporanéité manifeste avec la société en pleine mutation qui constitue son substrat et son horizon d’attente. Distincte du mythe de Satan et du Romantisme à venir, la symbolique de la possession est un regard sur l’avènement de la reconnaissance, encore confuse à l’époque des Lumières, de l’individualité irréductible / Convenient though it may be, literary classification sometimes fails to account for the complexity of human productions and of their reception. This is all the more so at an age of sweeping political, economic, social and cultural changes such as the European eighteenth century. Literary history, dependent as it is on restrictive terminology, has contributed to enclose the Age of the Enlightenment within a narrow framework which dyadically underscored the difference between Christian authors and philosophers, between sense and sensibility. The present reflexion on the symbolics of possession at the turn of the Enlightenment aims to transcend such a debate. The study is dedicated to the analysis of a corpus of texts which, seen from an anthropological perspective, take on a dimension other than moralistic, fantastic, picaresque or dramatic. Those genres were circulated by the works of Guevara, Lesage, Cazotte, Beckford, Goethe, Lewis, Chamisso and Potocki, by narrative and temporal means laden with literary modernity. The interdependence of aesthetic, narrative and psychological stakes resolutely shows how anchored within the body politic the fabula is. Those short stories, novels and dramas paved the way for a genre of sociological and psychological investigation – a genre not yet conceptualized when those works came out – in obvious keeping with the thoroughly changing society which is both its background and its horizon of expectations. The symbolics of possession, to be distinguished from the myth of Satan and the oncoming Romanticism, is an outlook on the advent of the acknowledgement – still confused at the turn of the Enlightenment – of irreducible individuality

In my thesis I focused on the matter of the relationship of Americans during the decades after World War II to their own identity, as well as to the myths of the West or consumer society. I wanted to compare these aspects on plays by Sam Shepard and David Mamet, two playwrights concerned with similar issues in 1960s and 1970s. In the theoretical part of the thesis I concentrated on the development of the American theater off Broadway. I described three significant theater groups of the era and the differences in their approach. I based the comparison of the plays on Richard Schechner's performance theory and J. L. Austin's theory of the so-called "performatives." Later I discussed the matters of rituals and myths in the postmodern society where I based my theory especially on Victor Turner's and Marie Maclean's work. The two main chapters are dealing with comparing two plays by each author with regard to the way Shepard and Mamet work with rituals and modern myths. Those are considered commonplace, insufficient, almost misleading in a modern society, and the plays' characters thus cannot cope with the society. They end up being on its outer edge and do not seem to be able to find the way back. As a result of the comparison of the plays based on the theoretical part I concluded that even though from the...