Amy Tan¡¦s The Joy Luck Club and Cristina Garcia¡¦s Dreaming in Cuban propose the matrilineal narrative of woman suffering and spiritual growth. Multiple narrators tell personal stories about the past events to cope with their current concerns and coming difficulties. Their storytelling functions as a way of making sense of experiences and fashioning identity. The first chapter explores how the narrative activity enables the del Pino and Joy Luck women to construct a preferred version of personal experiences. They not only tell stories to create idealized self-images but also live their lives to justify the images. Though they portray themselves as capable women in personal stories, they often appear vulnerable and mentally unstable in reality. Such contradiction results from the traumatic events the women leave untold, and they resist telling partly because of their madness and partly because of their repudiation of the events. The second chapter will examine their traumatic experiences to understand how their emotional problems determine the representation of their personal narratives. Due to the early traumatic experiences, the women develop maladaptive schemas to cope with their negative emotions. The schemas, however, undermine their interpersonal relationships and prevent them from fulfilling the basic needs. While wrestling with their emotional problems, they unwittingly transplant schemas into the next generation. The third chapter examines how certain crucial moments in their lives enlighten the women to have awareness of their schemas at the core of their suffering. The death of the family members and serious mother-daughter disagreements provide the opportunity for the women to move beyond the limited way they used to perceive themselves and others. With an open and positive attitude, they relate the traumatic experiences to understand how their early suffering contributes to their present difficulties and outgrow what has troubled them before.

The subject of the thesis is a comparative analysis of sign production and the interpretation of the film and painting of oneiric or horror genre focused on Vall Lewton's films and their similarity to the painting in creating an atmosphere of uneasiness and fear. Although these works are based on a sign structure, which is an important key to their interpretation, they are not independent of the different interpretations they allow. On the contrary, it seems that the work's intention is to encourage the viewer to complete the art by projecting his own fear into it. This approach is based on Umberto Eco's and Jan Mukařovský's theory of the interpretation, both of which emphasizing the reader's role in understanding the principle of functioning of the work of art. The concepts of the model author and model reader in Eco's theory and the term semantic gesture within Mukařovský's work are sharing numerous similarities.