Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 1994. / Submitted to the Dept. of English. Adviser: Elizabeth Ammons. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [198]-209). Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;

Thesis (M.A.)--Texas State University--San Marcos, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 74-79). Also available on microfilm.

Thesis (M.A.)--Montana State University--Bozeman, 2007. / Typescript. Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Linda Karell. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 90-94).

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Analyzing Chesnutt's fiction from the angle of the West African trickster tradition explains the varying interpretations of his texts and his authorial intentions. The discussion also illustrates the influence that audience and editorial concerns may have had on African-American authors at the turn of the century.

Mythology is a consistent part of the high school English language arts school curriculum dating back well beyond the last forty years. High school English teachers‘ beliefs about mythology, student engagement, and educational policy demonstrate the rationale and dynamic of this longevity. This study explores the development and elements of myth, asserting the importance of approaching myth through critical cultural studies generally, and in high school English arts classrooms specifically. Drawing upon a variety of cultural sources (i.e. sacred narrative, children‘s television, cable news television, literature, movies, music, and the internet); theorists (from Levi-Strauss‘s structuralism through the post-structuralism of Barthes, Anzuldua, and Maya Derrin); and methodologies (content analysis of murals, news excerpts, teacher footage on video literary analysis, and autoethnography) this study presents a critical cultural studies exploration of myth and myth studies. After deconstructing and applying Levi-Strauss‘ notion of Bricolage to a wide variety of contexts, I conclude that myth is based in all sorts of individual and collective human movement. And this movement gives rise to myth which can be characterized as political, spiritual inter-textual, performative and hybrid. I further conclude that a critical cultural studies approach to myth attends to student engagement, anticipates 21st century learning frameworks, and offers possible consideration of interfaith education in schools.

This qualitative study comparing three separate English-language versions of a single Dakota cultural myth "Iktomi" presents a novel systematic approach for analyzing Native American folk tales to understand how stories function as tools of transmission of cultural information and knowledge. The method involved coding character traits according to type with regard to representation, ability, or attribute to ascertain patterns among the codes and elucidate character roles and relationships, reorganizing the coded traits into paired polarized correspondences to clarify relationships among traits, and assessing pronoun use and documenter effect pointing to gender-specific character activity. Findings revealed an encoded framework illuminating how the tale is used to represent progressive stages in the Dakota vision quest. Analysis using simple word counts of character traits produced emergent patterns disclosing a male-specific focus on character activities with additional evidence delineating a framework for the vision quest traditionally regarded tribally as a male rite of passage.

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There has, in the last quarter of a century, been an increased interest in the /Xam narratives that form the major part of the nineteenth century archive of materials collected by Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek in Cape Town from /Xam informants. This has resulted in a proliferation of writing about the Bleek and Lloyd collection and its contents. The critical examination of some of this body of writing forms part of the project of this thesis. The other aim of the thesis is to provide a close reading of certain of the /Xam texts themselves. This thesis is based on the view that the first of these projects has only been attempted in a cursory and indirect fashion and that the second, namely the close reading of/Xam texts, has not yet been undertaken on a scale that parallels the range and complexity of the materials or which exhausts the interpretative possibilities they offer. This thesis aims to fill some of these gaps in the literature without claiming that a comprehensive or definitive study is possible in so wide and rich a field. Postmodern and postcolonial theory has emphasised the discursive and ideological nature of the language of both hermeneutics and literature. In my consideration of the /Xam texts and the writing that has been produced in relation to them, I attempt to consistently foreground the historicity and textuality of my own practice and the practices of the materials with which I am working. In this regard I question, especially, two assumptions about the /Xam narratives: that they are primarily aetiological and that their chief character, /Kaggen, the Mantis, is a trickster. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2006.

The dissertation focuses on the impact of authority and grotesque in the U.S. literature of the 1960s. The key theoretical approaches used for the analysis were: Bakhtinian theory concerning popular carnival culture and Vizenor's theory concerning tricksters, Deleuzian notion of repetition and schizoanalysis and the theory of Foucault concerning power and anti- authority struggles. The main task of the analysis was to trace the common and differentiating features which were demonstrated in the novels in the form of anti-authority struggles and forms of madness, which is viewed as a deliberating force. The authors were chosen for their challenging attitudes toward the forms of power exercised over the American society and for the usage of the grotesque as a tool to convey a subversive message. The analysed authors were John Kennedy Toole and his A Confederacy of Dunces, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and his Slaughterhouse 5 and Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.