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It has become something of a truism to contend that David Foster Wallace was concerned with irony; both its challenge to ethical conviction and the ability of the author to enact sincere communication in the millennial United States. However, this privileging of sincerity within Wallace Studies has resulted in neglect being shown to the first half of Polonius’ famous dialectic – ‘to thine own self be true’ – precluding analysis of Wallace that focuses on his relationship with authenticity. Similarly, critics have often sought to argue for Wallace’s panhuman universalism, to the detriment of the overtly nationalistic strain in his writing. This thesis aims to address these underrepresented areas within Wallace scholarship, arguing that his writing is fundamentally engaged with a debate over what it means to be ‘real American’. The phrase is taken from a 1996 interview with Salon.com’s Laura Miller, during which Wallace averred that his intention when writing Infinite Jest was to capture ‘something real American, about what it’s like to live in America around the millenium’ (Conversations with David Foster Wallace 59). This comment is central to an understanding of Wallace’s oeuvre, as it introduces his historical specificity and his pragmatic desire to explore ‘what it’s like to live’, whilst also alluding to his constant negotiation with epistemological and ontological questions over the ‘real’, all framed within an expressly nationalistic paradigm. The word ‘real’ is used in this sense both as an adverb to connote something that is authentically or intrinsically ‘American’, whilst it also serves as an intensifier – to denote something that is very American – implying a hierarchy of things that can be more ‘American’ than others. With regards to his immediate historical context, this entrenches Wallace firmly within the Culture Wars of the 1990s, and yet it also gestures further back in history, situating him within a fundamentally American literary tradition: the American Jeremiad. Wallace’s challenge was to attempt to engage with ideas of the real and the really American, despite the challenges to authenticity (and indeed the idea of a nation) that resulted from the permeation of myriad contemporary discourses into the national psyche, including advertising jargon, postmodern/poststructural ‘theory’, the language of psychotherapy, the discourse of political correctness, and the partisan rhetoric of politicians. The first two chapters will focus on Wallace's engagement with ostensible challenges to the 'authentic' subject, and the difficulty of authentically representing the self. Chapter one will focus on 'Octet' and Wallace's uneasy place within the so-called 'New Sincerity' paradigm, highlighting Wallace’s attempt to counter the discourse of ‘postmodern irony’ with an ‘other-directed’ sincerity, and yet exposing his conservative project of self-preservation. Chapter two will examine Wallace's often fraught relationship with psychotherapy; in particular the way that psychotherapeutic discourse has infiltrated American culture, precluding the singularity and authentic representation of individual experience. Chapter three will continue this exploration of the widespread adoption of specialist discourses, although this time focusing on the abstractions of postmodern/poststructural theory, and Wallace’s attempt to find ‘real American’ replacement cultural symbols that could be applied to both individuals and the nation as a collective. Chapter four will be concerned with Wallace's search for an efficacious philosophical model that is suitably 'American'; whilst also capable of incorporating the singularity of individual experience within a national collectivity. Finally, chapter five will focus on Wallace's more explicit engagement with politics, tracing the development of his political ideas. In doing so a picture of Wallace will emerge that highlights some of his contradictions; contradictions that he himself was aware of and drew attention to, as well as contradictions that run to the very heart of 'the idea of America'.

This dissertation is a historical-cultural analysis of the popular enthusiasm for an artifact known as the Kensington Rune Stone (KRS). The verifiable history of the KRS begins in 1898, when a Swedish American immigrant unearthed a large stone from a western Minnesota farm field. On the stone was an inscription written in a runic alphabet telling the story of a party of Scandinavian explorers that had traversed the area in the fourteenth century. Most scholars have declared the stone to be a hoax, yet this has not deterred its ardent defenders from using it to generate cultural capital for several social groups in western Minnesota. Over time, the KRS has emerged as a sacred civic totem representing the region and proclaiming it as founded by Christian Norsemen. KRS enthusiasm developed as a sect of American civil religion that both affirms and challenges the central orthodoxies underlying the myths about the origin of the United States. The mythic narrative constructed around the KRS has been embraced by many Minnesotans for its legitimating power to justify the white settlement of the state. The theoretical orientation of this dissertation relies on several scholars of religion, including Emile Durkheim, Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Pierre Bourdieu, and Thomas A. Tweed. / Religion

At least eight soapstone carvings of birds furnished a shrine, Great Zimbabwe, in the 19th century. This large stonewalled settlement, once a political and urban centre, had been much reduced for four centuries, although the shrine continued to operate as local traditions dictated. The Zimbabwe Birds were handed down from a past that has only been partially illuminated by archaeological inquiry and ethnography, as has the site as such. This thesis publishes the first detailed catalogue of the Birds and attempts to reconstruct their provenance at the site based on the earliest written accounts. A modern history of the Birds unfolds when the European settlers removed them from the site in dubious transactions, claiming them as rewards of imperial conquest. As the most treasured objects from Great Zimbabwe, the fate of the Birds has been intertwined with that of the site in a matrix of contested meanings and ownership. This thesis explores how the meanings of cultural objects have a tendency to shift and to be ephemeral, demonstrating the ability of those in power to appropriate and determine such meanings. In turn, this has a bearing on ownership claims, and gives rise to an “authorized heritage discourse” syndrome.   The forced migrations of the Zimbabwe Birds within the African continent and to Europe and their subsequent return to their homeland decades later are characterised by melodramatic episodes of manoeuvring by traders, politicians and theologians, and of the return of stolen property cloaked as an amicable barter deal, or a return extolled as an act of generosity. International doctrines that urge the return of cultural property are influenced by Western hegemonic ideologies. Natural justice is perverted, as stolen property acquires a (superior) significance in its new context, which merits the extinction of the original provenance. This leaves “generosity” and goodwill as the promises of the future, holding the fate of one Zimbabwe Bird still kept in exile in South Africa.

Присутствие в рекламе этнических символов, образов и элементов показывает, насколько широко этничность используется с прагматической точки зрения. В данной работе был проведён сравнительный анализ использования этнических элементов в бразильской и российской рекламе и определены наиболее эффективные приёмы использования этнических элементов в локальной и международной рекламе. Была разработана методика исследования этнических элементов в рекламе, и при ее помощи была изучена реклама FIFA по продвижению страны-организатора чемпионата мира по футболу на предмет использования этнических элементов, проанализировано отношение международной аудитории к такой рекламе и даны рекомендации по применению этнических элементов в рекламе. / The presence of ethnic symbols, images and elements in advertising shows how much ethnicity is used from a pragmatic point of view. In this paper was conducted a comparative analysis of the use of ethnic elements in Brazilian and Russian advertising and the most effective methods of using ethnic elements in local and international advertising were determined. Through developing the methodology of researching ethnic elements in advertising the FIFA advertisement on promoting the host country of the World Cup was studied for the use of ethnic elements. We analyzed the attitude of the international audience to such advertising and gave recommendations on the use of ethnic elements in advertising.

Mulberry and Peach is a novel written in the 1970s by a Chinese American writer named Nie Hualing (1925- ). It contains overlapping letters and diaries with flashbacks and flashforwards in first-person narration. Taohong is the new identity after Sangqing’s schizophrenia in the USA in 1969-1970. The book starts with Taohong’s letter, which introduces the main female character Sangqing´s life stories, told through her diaries between 1945-the 1970s in four places of her diasporic lives from mainland China to Taiwan, then the USA. The aim of this thesis is to explore the title of the book, the prologue and the epilogue, Sangqing’s first Dairy on Qutang Gorge (1945), and the four letters from Taohong, using the close reading method and combining the theories and concepts of characterization and symbolism, impressionistic, female aesthetic, intertextuality in literature and the cultural symbols for a deep and detailed text reading analysis.