abstract: During the first half of the last decade, there was a heated debate regarding what type of critical approach best suits the study of video games. Those who argued for approaches traditionally associated with narrative studies were primarily interested in video games as a new frontier for storytelling. The opposition claimed that video games are not systems for storytelling, and that applying literature and film theories to video games dismisses the interactive nature of video games as games. The argument was bitter, but ended abruptly with no clear results or consensus. Yet are narratology and ludology, the two proposed critical theories, so disparate that the use of one means the exclusion of the other? This paper suggests the possibility that narratology and ludology share more in common than critics have thus far realized. Both games and story share themes of conflict, and in focalizing on the antagonist of single-player video games it becomes possible to trace the development of conflict and how it functions in the video game medium. In analyzing antagonists and the conflict they embody, it becomes apparent that narratology and ludology are not so incompatible in their methodologies and assumptions. Finally, because video games themselves are a multifaceted medium, it is only appropriate that critics use multiple theoretical approaches in their analysis to broaden critical knowledge of how the medium functions. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. English 2012

Over the course of theatre's history, villains had stereotypical traits: revenge, greed, and power. Contemporary villains, though, evoke more empathy and sympathy from audiences than classic villains. In an effort to understand the roots of villainous behavior in contemporary characters, this thesis surveys a few notable classic villains to help compare the classic to the contemporary. While holding on to qualities of the classic stereotypes, contemporary playwrights create frequent moments of sympathy and empathy for villains who appeal to audiences' desires to connect, justify, and understand the reasons for their villainies. This thesis investigates despicable yet empathetic villains in three plays: Tony Kushner's Angels in America, Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane, and Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman's Assassins. An analysis of the playwrights' manipulation of characters and traits, as well as audience expectations, provides a theory on the new villain type and the lessons that can be learned.

This qualitative thesis examines levels of pessimism as they relate to modern and postmodern horror cinema. Beyond assumed differences in levels of pessimism between the two genres, the study also examines implicit and explicit moralization of these categories. Specifically, the study questions if postmodern horror cinema's characteristic increase in pessimism is simply a change in the genre's convention, yet a change that is irrespective of either genre's capabilities to moralize. First, the study singularly examines the conventions of each genre as it relates to levels of pessimism. Second, the study discusses works that bridge the two genres. And third, the study speculates on the future of pessimism in postmodern horror cinema, specifically examining the genre's increased reliance on a combination of narrative and documentary techniques. In addition, this study uses content analysis as its methodological framework, whereby representative works of horror cinema (the data) are subjected to in-depth personal reading and textual analysis given the levels of pessimism between the two genres (the coding) via text immersion. Nonetheless, this study should be viewed more as a guided and informed exploration of certain characteristics regarding the genres and less of a defense since the data will not be quantified.

Mötet mellan människor är något som kan vara spännande och få en att upptäcka något nytt i livet, likaså i film. Dessa möten mellan karaktärer gör att handlingen drivs framåt och skapar ett spännande interagerande mellan karaktärer. I detta kandidatarbete har vi valt att fokusera på mötet mellan hjälten och skurken, oftast två starka och viktiga karaktärer inom film. Karaktärsrollerna är hämtade från Voglers The writer’s Journey (1997). För att få en bredare bild av hur rollerna kan se ut i film har vi valt att analysera två olika filmer i olika genre, filmerna vi valt är Die Hard (1988) och Alien (1979). Vi har tagit hjälp av analysmodellen som presenteras i From Antz to Titanic - A students guide to film analysis (2000) och format modellen till vårt passande. En av delarna i analysen fokuserar på hur de tekniska aspekterna i scener kan hjälpa till att föra berättelsen vidare. Grundat i undersökningen har en kompletterande gestaltning i form av en film skapats där vi har använt oss av karaktärsrollerna som vi analyserat. / Meetings between people can be exciting and make you discover something new, also in movies. Meetings between the characters drives the plot forward, and create exciting interaction between the characters. We have chosen to focus on meetings between the hero and the villain, two strong and important character roles in the film. The character roles are taken from Vogler, The Writer's Journey (1997). To get a broader picture of how roles may appear in film, we have chosen to analyze two different films in different genres, the films we have chosen are Die Hard (1988) and Alien (1979). We have used the analytical model presented in From Antz to Titanic - A student's guide to film analysis (2000) and formed the model to our fitting. One of the parts of the analysis focuses on the technical aspects of the scenes that can help move the story forward. Based on our survey of character roles and meetings between them, we have created a movie to portray this.

Oliver Twist is a novel loved by many, read by more. It is a classic novel by Charles Dickens, portraying the life and hardships of a young boy named Oliver Twist, who was born in a work house. Oliver is bright and righteous, the exact opposite of his brother Edward “Monks” Leeford. This essay will follow Oliver and Monks and analyse their characters in the light of the literary hero and the literary villain and in doing so see how Dickens use the characters as literary tools to convey his view of a dark, uncaring Victorian society as well as his hopes for a brighter future. Their strong characteristics make way for a fascinating story, a story that do not only tell us about Oliver’s bravery and Monks’ egoism, but one that do also prove that they are characters created by Dickens to show both the Victorian society that he lived in as well as the society that it could become.

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / This work aims to understand the consolidation of the villain as a stereotypical character, representative of questions related to conception of social, cultural and historical values, according to a collective imagination. For tihs, it seeks to support the comparative analysis of two works in which we can see the configuration of this character one, linked to a theater type, very popular, the melodrama, and other linked to Brazilian dramaturgy in the nineteenth century. This approach favors the observation of relevant aspects about the development of theater in Brazil, at a time when there was an accentuated movement towards the establishment of a national culture. In this context, there was a conflict between the aim of producing works of literary quality, according to foreign standards (mostly European) and scenic exercise. However, in this period, there was a predominance of representations of popular forms, like the melodrama, acclaimed by general public. Its success stimulated influence of its features in writing of the national works, encouraged the exploration of aspects like the utilization of villains characters and the relationship between written text and elements of the scenic spectacle, approaching theatre and literature with the composition of spectacular texts, based on the use of rubrics. Therefore, in this study, we present a show that this happened in practice and suggest its income in the characterization of the Brazilian literature. / Este trabalho almeja compreender a consolidação do vilão como uma personagem estereotipada, representante de questões relacionadas à concepção de valores sociais, culturais e históricos, de acordo com um imaginário coletivo. Para tanto, busca-se apoio na análise comparativa de duas obras em que se pode observar a configuração dessa personagem uma delas, representante de um tipo teatral de forte apelo popular, o melodrama, e a outra, vinculada à dramaturgia brasileira produzida no século XIX. Tal abordagem favorece a observação de aspectos relevantes acerca do desenvolvimento do teatro no Brasil, numa época em que se verifica um movimento acentuado em prol do estabelecimento de uma cultura nacional. Nesse contexto, destaca-se um conflito entre o intuito de produzir obras de qualidade literária, de acordo com padrões estrangeiros (europeus, sobretudo) e o exercício cênico, em que se nota a predominância de representações de formas populares, como o melodrama, aclamado pelo grande público. Seu sucesso perante a plateia estimulou a influência de características de sua estrutura dramática sobre a escrita de obras nacionais, favorecendo a exploração de personagens-tipo (dentre elas, o vilão) e a relação do texto escrito com elementos próprios do espetáculo cênico, aproximando encenação teatral e literatura a partir da composição de peças que consagraram o uso sistemático de rubricas. Assim sendo, neste estudo, apresentamos uma mostra de que isso se deu na prática e sugerimos seu rendimento na caracterização da literatura dramática brasileira.

This thesis deals with the villains' depiction in the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies. By examining the first 20 movies of the series, I try to find out how are the villains depicted in the MCU movies and what are their motivations. This is achieved through combination of studying relevant literature that deals with the topic, qualitative content analysis of the movies and narrative analysis, which is based on the monomyth structure of Joseph Campbell and its reinterpretation for movies and television by Christopher Vogler. In this thesis I first shortly describe the history of superhero movie as a whole and the specifics of the shared Marvel Cinematic Universe. In the theoretical part I describe Campbell's and Vogler's narrative structure. Then I describe the methodology, which I then use to describe the findings and their interpretations. In this part I examine the villains' motivations, which are divided into several categories, and examine their story arcs through the prism of the Hero's journey structure. Here it is shown that the villains in the MCU movies are depicted in an overwhelmingly Manichean way. In the discussion, I describe possible issues with my research and suggest potential directions of further research. In the conclusion, I then summarize the findings of both the theoretical...

On championing the villain, there is a naive quality that must be maintained even though the actor has rehearsed his tragic ending several times. There is a subtle difference between to charm and to seduce. The need for fame, glory, power, money, or other objects of affection drives antagonists so blindly that they ve no hope of regaining a consciousness about their actions. If and when they do become aware, they infrequently feel remorse. I captured the essence of the villain by exposing these lightless characters to the sun. On Monday, April 9th and Tuesday, April 17th, 2007, on the Gillespie stage in Daytona Beach, Florida, I performed a thirty-minute, one-act cabaret entitled The Dark Side of the Tune. By selecting pieces from the musical theatre genre to define and demonstrate the qualities of the stock character, the villain, I created a one-man show; a musical play, including an inciting incident, rising conflict, climax, and denouement, with only a few moments of my own dialogue to help handle the unique transitions for my own particular story. By analyzing the arc of major historical villains and comparing them to some of the current dark characters, I will discuss the progression of the villain s role within a production and the change from the clearly defined villain to modern misfits who are frequently far less scheming or obvious. My research includes analysis of the dark references within each piece s originating production, and how it has been integrated into the script for The Dark Side of the Tune and a breakdown of my cabaret s script (Appendix A). I explore actors tools, specifically voice, movement, and characterization, and their use in creating villainous characters. I also discuss similarities in story progression for the deviant s beginning, middle, and final positions within the plot structure of a production.

<p>The literature on J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter is prolific. People have written on various topics dealing with issues such as translation, etymology and diverse areas concerning the language. In this essay, I examine whether linguistic features such as reporting verbs, adverbs of manner and adjectives contribute to the depiction of heroic and villainous characters. Before conducting this research, my assumptions were that there would be a great difference in the value of the words depending on the character they were associated with. I wanted to see if the heroic characters used verbs and adverbs with positive connotations, and the villainous characters verbs and adverbs with negative connotations. I also wanted to know if the adjectives describing the characters could, in themselves, clearly indicate whether a character was a hero or a villain.</p><p>The results of my research suggested that the choice of particular verbs and adverbs contributed only indirectly to the depiction of the characters. Without context, it was not possible to know if the character was a hero or a villain simply by identifying the verbs and adverbs used to describe their speech. By contrast, the choice of particular adjectives did appear to indicate more clearly whether a character was hero or villain. Finally, the results of my research indicated that context, rather than the use of particular linguistic features was often the most important factor in contributing to the portrayal of characters in the novel.</p>

Made available in DSpace on 2016-03-15T19:46:27Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Ana Claudia Dale Vedove Goto.pdf: 4797508 bytes, checksum: da32dc89ddc9fa6c4e189e9b41aad4ec (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-08-14 / This study has as its theme the build of the hero and the villain in a political discourse, most especially in the discourse of Fernando Collor de Mello, based mainly on the semiotic theory of French line and the methodology developed by Algirdas J. Greimas and in Brazil by Diana Luz Pessoa de Barros and José Luiz Fiorin. The purposes are to examine the narrative and discursive strategies applied as persuasion mechanisms in a political discourse; among these strategies, show the resources used in the creation of the figure of the hero; check the intertextual and interdiscursive relations present in the text, which builds the ideological and socio-historical context of the discourses; to examine the role of the setting of the hero in a political discourse; and checking how Collor set up himself as a hero and how the media supported to create the hero picture taken by the political, until to the achievement of the presidency of the country, and the villain picture when he begun to be investigated by the crimes of corruption. The material analyzed consists of Fernando Collor discourse as president in 1990 and as a senator in 2007, beside of this and two magazine where the politician was masthead, and some records of the main printed communication press of the time. With the linguisticdiscursive analysis, it was possible to draw the line of the hero powerful as opposed to the hero suffered , used as persuasion techniques in political discourse. / Este trabalho tem como tema a construção do herói e do vilão no discurso político, mais especialmente no discurso de Fernando Collor de Mello, com base, principalmente, na teoria semiótica de linha francesa e a metodologia desenvolvidas por Algirdas J. Greimas e, no Brasil, por Diana Luz Pessoa de Barros e José Luiz Fiorin. Os objetivos são: examinar as estratégias narrativas e discursivas utilizadas como mecanismos de persuasão no discurso político; entre essas estratégias, mostrar os recursos utilizados na construção da figura do herói; verificar as relações intertextuais e interdiscursivas presentes nos textos e que constroem o contexto sóciohistórico e ideológico dos discursos; examinar o papel da construção do herói no discurso político; e verificar como Collor se construiu como herói e como a mídia contribuiu para criar a imagem de herói adotada pelo político até chegar à presidência, e de vilão, quando passou a ser investigado por crime de corrupção. O material analisado é constituído dos discursos deposse de Fernando Collor como presidente da República, em 1990, e como senador, em 2007, além de duas capas da revista Veja, em que o político foi destaque, e de alguns registros dos principais meios de comunicação impressa da época. Com a análise linguístico-discursiva, foi possível traçar o percurso do herói poderoso em oposição.