Joe Sacco and Chester Brown are two artists who emerged out of a vibrant tradition of autobiographical comics in the eighties and nineties. This paper argues that Sacco's Palestine and Brown's Louis Riel announce a new way of writing the self rejuvenating the autobiographical genre in comic books which has been lamented for having become overused and excessively solipsistic. Sacco's flamboyant expressionism opposes Brown's aesthetic of silence. Brown's silence is configured so that it is not an absence of speech, but a suppression of it in which attention is continually being drawn to the unspoken. A close analysis of Sacco and Brown's comics reveals the different ways in which their complementary aesthetics construct different subject positions for the reader. Sacco simulates a sense of being there and uses his subjectivity as a vehicle for drawing a reader in, while Brown's Louis Riel collapses these distinctions between absence and presence such that there is no point of entry into the work with which a reader can sustain illusory bonds of identification.

A recurrent premise of post-war criticism is that World War II marked the end of the American working class novel. This thesis challenges this assumption and argues that the working class novel redeveloped throughout the 1940s and 1950s in response to major social, political, economic and cultural changes in the United States. A prime justification for the obituary on the working class novel was that after 1945 the United States no longer had class divisions. However, as the first two chapters of this study point out, such a view was promulgated by influential literary critics and social scientists who, as former Marxists, were keen to distance themselves from class politics. Insisting that the working class novel was hamstrung by a dogmatic Marxist politics and a fealty to social realism, these critics argued that the genre's relevance depended on the outdated politics and conditions of the 1930s. As such they were able to use literary criticism as a means of justifying their own ambiguous politics and deflecting any close scrutiny of their accommodation with the post-war liberal consensus. In a close examination of four writers in the subsequent chapters it is shown that, in fact, working class writers were extremely successful in adapting to post-war conditions. Harvey Swados, in his novel On the Line (1957) and in his journalism, provides crucial insights into the effects of the transition from a Fordist to a post-industrial society on the identity of the industrial worker. In The Dollmaker (1954) Harriette Arnow dramatises an important migration from the rural South to Detroit during World War II which exposes the ways in which American capitalism was able to diffuse a national working class identity. Chester Himes' novel If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), and his experiences as an African American writer in the 1940s, highlight the intersections between race (and racism) and class in the United States. Hubert Selby, in Last Exit to Brooklyn (1957), undermines the hegemonic ideology of post-war consumerism by drawing attention to the poverty and violence in an urban working class community. All these writers share a common concern with continuing, and re-developing, the dynamic and heterogeneous tradition of American working class cultural production.

There is no abstract available for this dissertation.

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 2006. Graduate Programme in Interdisciplinary Studies. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 159-167). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?index=4&did=1240690011&SrchMode=1&sid=7&Fmt=2&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1194986884&clientId=5220

Thesis (M. Div.)--Emmanuel School of Religion, Johnson City, Tennessee, 1996. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 86-89).

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

The career path of African American novelist Chester Himes is often characterised as a u-turn. Himes grew to recognition in the 1940s as a writer of the Popular Front, and a pioneer of the era's black 'protest' fiction. However, after falling out of domestic favour in the early 1950s, Himes emigrated to Paris, where he would go on to publish eight Harlem-set detective novels (1957-1969) for Gallimard's La Série Noire. Himes's 'black' noir fiction brought him critical and commercial success amongst a white European readership, and would later gain a cult status amongst an African American readership in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Himes's post-'protest' career has been variously characterised as a commercialist 'selling out'; an embracing of black 'folk' populism; and an encounter with Black Atlantic modernism. This thesis analyses the Harlem Cycle novels in relation to Himes's career, and wider debates regarding postwar African American literature and race relations.Fundamentally, I argue that a move into commercial formula fiction did not curtail Himes's critical interest in issues of power, exploitation, and racial inequality. Rather, it refocused his literary 'protest' to representational politics itself, and popular culture's ability to inscribe racial identity, resistance and exploitation. On the one hand, Himes's Harlem fiction meets a formulaic and commercial demand for images of 'pathological' black urban criminality. However, Himes, operating 'behind enemy lines', uses the texts to dramatise this very dynamic. Himes's pulp novels depict a heightened Harlem that is thematically 'pulped' by a logic of capitalist exploitation, and a fetishistic dominant of racial difference. In doing so, Himes's formula fiction makes visible certain anti-progressive shifts in the analysis and representation of postwar race relations. My methodology mirrors the multiple operations of the texts, placing Himes's detective fiction in relation to a diverse and interdisciplinary range of sources: literary, historical, and theoretical. Using archival material, I look in detail at Himes's public image and contemporary reception as a Série Noire writer, his professional correspondence with French and U.S. literary agents, and his private thoughts and later reflections regarding his career. This methodology attempts to get to grips with a literary triangulation between Himes's progressive authorial intentions, the demands placed upon him as a Série Noire writer, and the wider ideological shifts of the postwar era. By exploring these different historical, geographical and literary contexts, this thesis offers a wide-reaching analysis of how cultural and racial meanings are produced and negotiated within a commodity form.

Context: Increased physical activity participation and fitness are cardioprotective. The EUROACTION trial demonstrated that a preventive cardiology programme significantly increased self-reported physical activity participation (Wood et al., 2008). Objective: The EUROACTION Physical Activity and Fitness (EPAF) Study aimed to objectively evaluate the effectiveness of the EUROACTION physical activity and exercise intervention at increasing physical activity participation and fitness in people with coronary artery disease (COR) and those at high risk of developing cardiovascular disease (HRI) compared to standard care. Study design: A nested study within a paired cluster randomised controlled trial in eight European countries. Methodology: 12 pairs of centres (12 hospitals and 12 general practices) were randomised to receive the EUROACTION programme (INT) or be monitored for usual care (UC). In the INT hospitals, COR patients participated in a 16-week supervised exercise programme and a home-based activity intervention, delivered by a physiotherapist. In INT general practice nurses were trained to deliver personalised physical activity advice to HRI. Outcome measures: Objective physical activity participation was measured by mean number of steps per day (Yamax Digiwalker SW200 pedometer). Fitness was determined by the Incremental Shuttle Walk Test (ISWT) [hospital centres] and Chester Step Test (CST) [general practice centres]). Results: The mean number of steps in COR patients at 1–year was significantly higher in INT (+2310 steps, 95% CI +1226 to +3394 steps; P=0.003). The difference in cardiorespiratory fitness (ISWT) exceeded the minimal clinically important difference but was not statistically significant (+54 metres [95% CI - 102.8 to +211.0 metres]; P=0.42). In general practice centres, whilst no significant differences were found at 1 year in mean steps per day (+982 steps, 95% CI -569 to +2533 steps) and cardiorespiratory fitness (CST) at 1-year (+0.93 minutes, 95% CI -0.62 to +2.48 minutes), there was a difference in the change over time in fitness in favour of the INT (+0.94 mins [95% CI +0.23 to +1.66 mins]; P=0.02). Marked heterogeneity impacted on statistical power. All differences observed represented clinically important differences. Conclusion: The EPAF-Study has demonstrated that the EUROACTION programme was effective at increasing physical activity participation but objective measures indicate to a lesser degree than the self-reported physical activity outcomes previously published. Clinically important differences in objectively measured physical activity participation and cardiorespiratory fitness suggest further research, which is sufficiently powered, is warranted.

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