Thesis (Ph. D.)--Lehigh University, 2001. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 247-257).

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität, Mainz, 2002.

The phenomenon of the farm attack has engendered an angry debate in South Africa today. Controversially, the South African media has paid great attention to violence against white farmers amidst a seemingly endless flood of violence against black farm workers. The now commonplace tales of farm attacks incite racial tension and provoke paranoia, leading one to question why they are repeated at all. Recent works by South African authors have engaged this question, including Jonny Steinberg's Midlands (2002), J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999), and Breyten Breytenbach's Dog Heart (1998). Critics have accused these works of perpetuating racism with their grim depictions of black-on-white violence but have failed to recognize the manner in which these authors contextualize the violence. I argue that each work registers the farm attack as a land claim, made in an era of failed land reform. Furthermore, these works reflexively explore the pragmatics of circulating the stories.

Yeats's depiction of political violence is examined through a reading of the political poetry centred on "Easter 1916," "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen," and "Meditations in Time of Civil War," each of these bearing a title emphasizing the poem's historicality, each representing one of the violent epochs in modern Ireland. By studying the dramatized narrative persona utilized by Yeats--a persona constituting the ideological and societal contexts of the poem, and effecting, through the choice of perspective, the selection of historical materials--the particular contents of Yeats's history-making are brought into focus. Yeats was both a romantic poet uneasy with the political component of verse, and an Irish nationalist for whom these events were essential ingredients of his life's work. In these poems we find the collision of Yeats's own conflicting ideals about poetry, politics, and history; a collision which produces a complex portrayal of Irish political violence.

This dissertation examines the complex and multi-faceted ways in which contemporary minority women's fictions may be thought of, both generically and individually, as practices of bearing witness to silence---practices of giving testimony to the presence of lives, experiences, events and historical realities which, otherwise, have been absented from the critical terrain of North American literary studies. For the most pact, the texts included in this study all tell tales of various, and often extreme, forms of sexual, racial, gender, colonial, national and cultural violence. Through readings of select works by Toni Morrison, Shani Mootoo, Arundhati Roy, Louise Erdrich, M. K. Indira, Mahasweta Devi and Leslie Feinberg, I argue for the ways in which these fictions may be understood as situated within the bounds of a genre---a genre that attempts to provide an account of what we might call "the half not told." I examine these fictions, both generically and specifically, as texts which have the ability to make several important critical interventions in the field of literary studies. Firstly, these texts have the potential to negotiate the impasse that feminist and postcolonial literary scholarship finds itself in around debates about the relationship between theory, activism and experience---as well as in debates about the relationship between violence, beauty, culture, subjectivity and desire. Secondly, the fictions under study help to challenge our very definitions of witnessing. Witnessing, in these works, is not simply a matter of "speaking out" against violence, but rather the issue of making space for the affective and emotive dimensions of various kinds of silences and silencings. Finally, in attempting to chart more precise vocabularies with which to assume readings of these narratives, my thesis also helps to think about the ways in which reading, writing and storytelling may, themselves, be seen as profoundly ethical undertakings that seek to give evidence

"Invasive cultures: American culture in Bret Easton Ellis’ American psycho” proposes that Ellis' small body of fictional works can be read as active critiques of American culture, detailing the ways in which this culture informs the current condition of American society in recent times. The larger intent of this thesis is to delineate and examine the relays between American culture, the forces of capitalism that underlie them, and their significant bearing on the social behaviour, personal expression and psychology of Ellis’ characters, who often directly assimilate and embody its characteristics, whether physically or mentally. Ellis presents his characters as deeply informed by their contact with the cultural realm. / Ellis' preoccupations with popular and consumer cultures, with the increasingly invasive mass media, and with a visually oriented society obsessed with surfaces, are all examined in the light of how these cultures are radically entangled with the consciousness and behaviour of his characters. In Ellis' fiction, the banal and the sensational are lucrative fixtures of a culture that functions as a commercial industry, driven by profit like any other, that exploits the desires and expectations of its consumers. Moreover, these common representations and modes of expression are presented as contagious, seeping into personal modes of self-expression. Just as Ellis instances how culture rigorously shapes the body and lifestyle, he also demonstrates through the stylized consciousness of his characters the media's powerful influence on their subjectivity and behaviour. This thesis focuses on American psycho (1991) but also discusses Ellis' other novels Less than zero (1984), The rules of attraction (1987), and The informers (1994).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 354-379).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Carolina Wilmington, 2008. / Vita. Title from PDF title page (viewed September 22, 2008) Includes bibliographical references ( p. 38-40)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 300-320).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2004. / Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages; contains x, 219 p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 204-219).