The thesis foregrounds the distinctive contribution Dirk Bogarde made to contemporary writing in a second career that developed in parallel to his screen commitments. It dispels the notion that Bogarde followed a familiar path as an actor who wrote books. Instead it establishes his reputation as an innovative writer whose formal technique was substantially influenced by the textual systems of cinema and the cross-fertilisation from acting to writing. In examining the formative factors that steered Bogarde towards authorship, the thesis addresses the role of performance as a generative factor in the evolution of the novels, establishing a discursive link with Bakhtinian dialogism, and specifically, transgredience as a formal imperative. Secondly, it affords a critical insight into why the major concerns with staging and performativity preoccupy his writing career. The thesis claims that Bogarde was an empirically dialogical writer whose use of camera-eye narration fostered the proliferation of competing discourses across the fiction. This formal dynamic is centred on the relationship between stages and dialogism, which incorporates the work of Erving Goffinan as a complementary critique to Bakhtinian theory with its emphasis on self-presentation. The concern with socially-constructed behaviour leads the thesis to address the associated issues of stereotyping and 'otherness', which in terms of body politics is articulated by the mono logic drive to confine the sexual 'other' to a fixed representation. Bogarde's ability to draw on cinematic and performance techniques identifies an area of expertise unavailable to most other writers. This is an unusual repository of skills to bring to writing which is why the thesis makes the claim for his singular achievement as a contemporary author. There are fruitful points of intersection to be explored in this respect with the work of Christopher Isherwood, whom Bogarde read and admired, as a basis for further research. It is hoped that the thesis will play its part in opening up new possibilities for Bogarde's writing to be re-visited by future critics.

Damn Near Perfect is the first section of the second draft of a novel. It is a romance and a coming-of-age story, about an conservatively raised young man, Reese McEwan. On a Mardi Gras visit to Louisiana, Reese falls in love with Noel Guillory, a bisexual poet finishing her last year at Louisiana State University. Reese also dreams of becoming a woodworker, and wants to serve as an apprentice at his family's furniture workshop; his parents oppose this wish and his relationship with Noel. From an affluent, Protestant background, Reese is a senior at Hampden-Sydney College, one of the last all male colleges in the U.S. He has been raised to take for granted his culture's very traditional, conservative values, and at the opening of the book has met with nothing to dispute these ideas. During the course of the novel, Reese abandons his education and traditional lifestyle. Because of his fascination with Noel and how she lives her life, he tries to become a part of her world, to his and her cost, and possibly to their benefit. Most of the novel is set in Baton Rouge, where Noel is finishing school at LSU, and where Reese goes to pursue her. The year is 1992. This first section is one hundred and four pages long, and covers the time from the beginning of Reese's visit to Louisiana, to when he goes back to school in Virginia. The second section, of about fifty pages or less, will cover his time back at college; until he decides to abandon his pursuit of a college degree and move to Baton Rouge permanently, in order to be with Noel and pursue a new career in woodworking. The final section, about one hundred pages in length, will cover Reese's attempts to build a relationship with Noel, and his frustrations with her much more liberal view of what a dating relationship should be.Damn Near Perfect explores how we decide who we will to grow up to be; what kind of relationship we want, what kind of person makes us happy, and what kind of person, in turn, we can make happy. It is about staking our claims to fulfillment - in love, work, and family, and about what our claims sometimes cost us.

A young man growing up in an alternate-history America becomes embroiled in revolution.

What Spins Away is a novel about a man named Caleb who, in the process, of searching for a brother who has been missing for ten years, discovers that his inability to commit to a job or his primary relationships is both the result of his history with that older missing brother, and his own misconceptions about the meaning of that history. On a formal level, the novel explores the ability of traditional narrative structures to carry postmodern themes. The theme, in this case, is the struggle for a stable identity when there is no stable community against which or in relationship to an identity might be defined.

This thesis analyse life and work of the leading figure of italian literature in the twentieth century Elsa Morante. Important elements of her work are defined on the basis of analyses of all her novels. The introduction part shows her personal life and comlete work, which includes also poetry, short stories and fairy tales. Four chapters analysing her four novels are following. The author debuts in 1948 when she published novel Menzogna e sortilegio. Second book L'isola di Artura followed nearly ten years later in 1957. This novel won critical acclaim and favour of readers. Next book La Storia was a bestseller with more then 600 000 sold copies. Critic's opinions differ widely, up to now this novel is receiving opposing reviewes. Morante concluded her writing with the last very pessimistic novel Aracoeli. Author wrote just four novels, in every one of them she used the same methodes and themes. Typical components of her writing style are the subject of the last chapter. key words: Elsa Morante, Menzogna e sortilegio, L'isola di Arturo, La Storia, Aracoeli, author's style

Le but de notre thèse est de fournir un panorama littéraire méditerranéen en abordant les oeuvres des écrivains qui vivent la migration et l’interculturalité. Dans la première partie de notre étude nous explorons le concept d’appartenance à ’espace méditerranéen à partir d’un point de vue philosophique. À l’aide des penseurs des XIXe et XXe siècles, nous mettons en avant d’abord la spécificité de la Méditerranée « matrice de civilisations », puis la littérature méditerranéenne migrante. Nous évoquons également l’état actuel des échanges entre pays méditerranéens sur le plan culturel ainsi que géopolitique et social avec une attention particulière aux phénomènes liés à la migration clandestine qui se traduit, au large de nos côtes, par d’innombrables massacres. Notre étude sur les oeuvres de Pasolini et de De Luca, précurseurs dans l’observation de ces mouvements migratoires, illustre de façon significative nos propos. Dans la deuxième partie de notre thèse, nous nous appuyons sur deux modèles de littératures de la migration : francophone et italophone. Dans l’univers francophone nous traitons de la naissance de la littérature migrante maghrébine suite à la colonisation puis à la décolonisation française. Nous analysons la naissance du roman au Maghreb, qui coïncide avec le besoin de raconter l’invasion, l’influence de la langue française et la migration. À propos de l’Italie littéraire de la migration nous voyons qu’elle est liée à la migration en provenance des pays de l’Est européen – comme l’Albanie – mais concerne tout particulièrement des auteurs migrants en provenance du Maghreb. Ces deux exemples de littérature migrante témoignent de la transformation de l’Italie, à l’origine pays d’émigration, en un pays d’accueil. La troisième partie de notre étude se concentre essentiellement sur l’exemple italien. Nous évoquons d’abord l’apparition d’oeuvres créées par les fils des migrants, puis nous rendons compte de la perception de l’image du migrant, à travers l’oeuvre d’écrivains sensibles à la question de la migration. Nous terminons par l’étude de l’oeuvre de Carmine Abate, pour signifier l’apparition d’une génération d’écrivains migrants engagés, qui donne, selon nous, une vision concrète du phénomène récent de la migration auquel est confrontée l’Italie. En définitive, notre itinéraire de recherche entend présenter un état actuel de l’espace méditerranéen, à travers, notamment, une unité de mesure : l’écriture migrante. / The purpose of our thesis is to supply a Mediterranean and literary overview with the writers who experience migration and interculturality. In the first part of our study, we will explore the concept of belonging to the Mediterranean area using a philosophical point of view. With the help of the 19th and 20th centuries’ thinkers, we will first define the Mediterranean area as a “matrix of the civilization” and then, the Mediterranean and migrant literature. We also deal with the actual state of the Mediterranean cultural, geopolitical and social exchanges that perpetuate between the countries of the area; which must be considered in terms of clandestine migration and several conflicts. A study on Pasolini and De Luca, as pioneers writers and experts of the migratory movement, highlights the said concept. In the second part of the thesis, we will take a look at two examples of the migrant literature: a French one and an Italian one. In the French universe we will deal with the birth of a North African migrant literature after the French colonization and decolonization. We explore the arrival of the North African writing, a phenomenon that collides with the need of talking about the invasion, the francophone countries and the migration. The Italian migrant literature is linked with the migration from East Europe – like Albania – and above all, North Africa. These examples testify to the transformation of Italy from emigration country to host country. The third part of the thesis focuses on the Italian example. We will talk about the appearance of a migrant literature by writers who are the sons of migrants; then, we will explore how the migrant is seen thanks to writers aware of the migration phenomenon. We will end our study with Carmine Abate’s work, to point out the arrival of a generation full of committed migrant writers and their visions of the question. To sum up, our study’s path tries to show the actual state of the Mediterranean area with a special measurement unit: the migrant literature.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Chemistry / Sundeep Rayat / Sundeep Rayat / This dissertation focused on the synthesis of 1-(2-ethynylphenyl)-4-phenyl tetrazole-5-thione derivatives 1 and evaluating their potential as a new class of photoactivated DNA cleaving prodrugs. We hypothesized that light activation of 1 would cause the decomposition of the tetrazolethione ring system to enyne-carbodiimide 2 with simultaneous loss of dinitrogen and sulfur via 1,3-triplet biradicals 1′, which would be spontaneously followed by Schmittel cyclization to indoloquinolines 3 via benzofulvene type biradicals 2′. The biradicals 1′ and 2′ would have the potential to cause DNA cleavage by abstracting hydrogens from its sugar phosphate backbone, analogous to the mechanism of action of naturally occurring enediyne antitumor antibiotics. Note that our proposed prodrugs contained a 1,4-diaryl tetrazolethione functionality and a direct synthetic route for their construction was lacking in the literature despite their wide spread applications. Therefore, our initial efforts were directed towards developing a general strategy to obtain these ring systems. We employed a highly versatile and efficient copper mediated N-arylation to first obtain a series of 1,4-diaryl tetrazol-5-ones which were thionated with Lawesson’s reagent to afford the corresponding 1,4-diaryl tetrazole-5-thiones in moderate yields. Specifically, the synthesis of 1 involved Sonogashira coupling of the obtained 1-(2-bromophenyl)-4-phenyl-1H-tetrazole-5(4H)-thione with the appropriate ethynyl compounds (Chapter 2). Since the tetrazole ring is an important structural component in many biologically and medicinally relevant compounds, we were interested in evaluating the anticancer activity of these compounds in the absence of photochemical activation. The moderate IC50 values against leukemia and breast cancer cell lines showed that the anticancer activity of these compounds prior to photoirradiation was minimal (Chapter 3). Independent studies have shown that the photodecomposition of tetrazolethiones gives carbodiimides via biradicals, and photocyclization of enyne-carbodiimide forms indoloquinoline also via biradicals. However, it was not known whether these two photoreactions could happen sequentially in one pot with one light source from a substrate like 1, generating biradicals 1′ and 2′ which could later be employed for DNA photocleavage as hypothesized. Therefere, we photolysed 1 in acetonitrile, and our results show clean formation of a mixture of enyne-carbodiimides and indoloquinolines via biradicals 1′ and 2′ (Chapter 4). Finally, we investigated DNA photocleavage by 1 at 350 nm and our results showed significant DNA cleavage in concentrations as low as 100 μM (Chapter 5).

Master of Arts / Department of English / Daniel A. Hoyt / In this project, the opening chapters of a novel, a fifty-foot man falls to the ground in Athens, Ohio. He is pronounced dead at the scene. What begins as a bizarre happening in a small college town soon spirals into an event with global repercussions. The federal government puts together a team of four scientists: Peter, a biologist; Jonathon, an archaeologist; Alexa, a forensic scientist; and Carly, a geneticist. As politicians, the media, and religious figures latch on to the giant man, the scientists try to determine if the body is real. Meanwhile, a religious cult develops in Athens. The cult believes the body is the Judeo-Christian God because it resembles images of God in popular and classic works of art. The giant man came from up in the clouds, has a white, billowing beard, and is old. Cult members tie bandanas around their eyes because they believe humans are not meant to look upon the body of God. The novel is told from a third-person omniscient point of view and shows the far-reaching consequences of such a fantastic event in our contemporary world. The novel delves into the mind of the Pope, a mortician, a lawyer, clergymen, students at Ohio University, the mayor of Athens, and a four-year-old boy, among many others. These characters try to come to terms with what it means to have the unreal and the impossible happen in their ordinary lives.

A novel about a man injured while working on an oilrig in the Gulf of Mexico, set primarily in Louisiana, Nevada, and California. While recovering from his injury, the protagonist is contacted by his dead brother’s daughter—a person whom he did not know existed—and he journeys to San Francisco in search of her.

A novel by JS Harlow. Mattock Corwin, a young man living in the vampire ruled kingdom of Gehenna, discovers that he is a mage and must escape the land of his birth before the rulers of his land destroy him as a potential threat to their power.