Thesis (M.A.)--Boise State University, 2002. / Web site. Master's project includes an explanatory text and CD-ROM entitled: Historical fiction : a web site supporting secondary U.S. history courses of study-Idaho Department of Education. Includes bibliographical references.

This report offers analysis of two contemporary zombie apocalypse novels that imagine the future for the United States. By considering how Max Brooks’ World War Z and Colson Whitehead’s Zone One participate in critical conversations regarding postmodernity, this report reveals that these authors use the zombie apocalypse narrative to express concerns about social and cultural pathologies, as well as possibilities for utopian reform in the twenty-first century. By imagining the zombie horde as the radical other, the novels engage in discussions regarding racial and class inequalities in contemporary America. Ultimately, my analysis of these two texts reveals a disturbing tendency to imagine the zombie apocalypse as the solution to America’s persistent social and political dilemmas. / text

Exploring the products of diverse cinematic modes of production—including Hollywood as well as art and experimental contexts—and their surrounding production and reception discourses, this dissertation reveals the ways in which science-fiction (sf) provided a pervasive influence in the film culture of the United States, Western Europe, and Japan throughout the sixties. In this era, three sf plot-types—disaster, dystopia, and exploration—were mobilized as cultural frames for analyzing contemporary social and technological change, frequently evoking socially critical and/or progressive horizons of interpretation. As such, sixties sf cinema provides an antithesis to the flights of fancy and conservative parables that often epitomized the genre in the fifties. In this era, therefore, Disaster stories called into question nuclear proliferation rather than warning against some intruding alien force. Likewise, Dystopia could be found in Western bourgeois praxis as well as in communist totalitarianism. Exploration, rather than merely promising a hegemonic vision of outer space to be achieved through flag-planting galactic imperialism, could represent the hope for new conceptual and social norms. / text

This thesis is a revisionist study of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a renowned American classic by Mrs. Stowe, and its Chinese translations. Thematically refreshing the novel as imperialist, I intend to therefore shed new lights in appreciating its century-long journey across China by studying two definitive rewritings of the original, heinu yutian lu （《黑奴吁天?》）from late Qing and heinu hen（《黑奴恨》）from the 1960s. The thesis structurally contains four parts. Chapter 1 introduces the project generally. Chapter 2 studies the original text and chapter 3 and 4 the two Chinese translated texts respectively. Re-reading of the original is crucial. Inspired by Edward Said’s efforts in connecting western culture and Imperialism, I established civilizing mission as core of the black narrative in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel widely celebrated as masterpiece of abolitionist literature. My argument is based on textual analysis. I will argue that evangelization of Africa, rather than abolition of slavery, had been Stowe’s fundamental concern in building Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and it is exactly driven by this civilizing mission that she dictated the roles of the novel’s two leading black characters, Uncle Tom and George Harris. Tom, the Christian martyr, is to prove Africans’ capability of getting civilized; Harris, Stowe’s Christian patriot, is the pioneer of colonizing Africa into a new world of Christian and American civilization. Reestablishing the original as such, I interpret the novel’s travel to 20th century China a historical event: an Imperialist novel goes by an Imperialism-fighting country in an Imperialist age. Therefore forces a long-ignored question: how had Chinese translators responded? How the response developed? This question can be best answered by looking into heinu yutian lu and heinu hen, two texts that represent respectively the beginning and the ending of Chinese critical treatment of the original in translating. And I will form my answer by analyzing the Chinese rewriting of the images of Uncle Tom and Harris, for they in the original are responsible for execution of the civilizing mission. Translating under a crucial circumstance of imperial crisis, Lin Shu and Wei Yi, the producers of heinu yutian lu, aimed to promote the ideology of “ loving the country and preserving the race”（??保种）.While presenting the black sufferings as faithful even exaggerated as possible, they consistently infiltrated the novel’s Christianity. And it is this strategy of de-Christianization that undermined the original’s imperialist design. After the translation, both Tom and Harris adopted a new face. The former was still a noble Negro only based on Chinese virtues, and the latter kept well his patriotic passion, but not for Christian civilization, rather purely for Africa. Intervention of the original’s civilizing mission climbed to a higher level as in the case of heinu hen, a drama adaptation by Ouyang yuqian in the radical 1960s. With Marxist class struggle being the guiding principle, Christian humanitarianism of the original was heavily criticized, and the black image reshaped dramatically. With Tom being portrayed as a slave that gradually woke up to his class consciousness, Harris was transformed into a revolutionary hero. / published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Philosophy

Caryl Phillips, best known as a novelist, is a versatile writer who has also written for theater, radio, television and film. His experience in writing screenplays has made a considerable impact on the texture, style, technique and structure of his novels, which display either explicitly or implicitly many visual and formal features that resemble the narrative strategies of cinema. This study explores the many ways in which the cinematic art has influenced Phillips’s writing, focusing specifically on his four major novels: The Final Passage, The Nature of Blood, Dancing in the Dark, and In the Falling Snow. The chapters of this dissertation demonstrate that Phillips’s sustained interest and work in the area of cinema have profoundly shaped his novelistic craft, which is visibly manifested in the form, style and even themes of his fiction. He has used techniques analogous to film substantially in his novels for the purpose of formal experimentation, demonstrating a filmic sensibility that contributes considerably to his uniqueness in theme, characterization and form, enriches the meaning of his texts, and enhances his writing in a great many ways. Thus a reading of his novels in relation to the language and grammar of cinema will lead to a deeper understanding of his fictional art. This thesis uses cinema as an analytical framework to demonstrate the filmic quality of Phillips’s fiction. Chapter One discusses the dynamic exchanges, interactions, and cross-influences between the novel and film, thus establishing a theoretical context for a cinematic reading of Phillips’s major novels. Chapter Two investigates Phillips’s visual imagination by analyzing how literary equivalents of various camera shots such as long shots, medium shots, close-ups, pan shots, dolly shots, tilt shots, and freeze frames are produced by his use of language. It shows that Phillips visualizes his scenes as if through a camera lens, with medium shots, as a mode of characterization, predominating in his novels and sequences of shots displaying a recurring rhythm created by a continuous switching between the long, medium and short camera-to-object distances. Chapter Three, focusing on the editing processes, examines Phillips’s adaptive use of the different types of montages: quick sequences of brief shots, metaphorical montages, repetitive montages, jump cuts, parallel montages and flashback montages. This chapter demonstrates that the construction of literary montages in Phillip’s works has contributed to the author’s visual, rhythmic and concise language style and the predominance of different montage types in the four novels results in their distinct structural features. Chapter Four studies Phillips’s use of the cinematic devices of lighting, color and sound to illustrate that the three elements are a significant and expressive part of the author’s themes and narrative techniques. The reading of Phillips’s novels in the light of cinematic aesthetics will uncover some of the unexplored aspects of his fictional style, draw attention to those formal patterns that are associated with his literary translation of filmic devices, place him in the tradition of literary modernism, and ensure a fuller appreciation of his artistic achievement. / published_or_final_version / English / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

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This thesis represents a new 'tool' for a special hermeneutic of Mircea Eliade's writings. Its function is to analyse his fiction with the help of his academic studies, and it attempts to prove the influence of the latter upon the former. Although theoretical studies on this subject have been published, no real endeavour to prove this influence has been done. In a way, this thesis is a response to an academic need. On the other hand, the entire oeuvre of Eliade constitutes not only a vast field of research in itself, but an 'opener' of original paths and theories. This leads to the need to bring into play new terms (e.g. 'personal hierophanies', 'chronophanies', 'diastimophanies' etc.), new concepts (e.g. the quadrifold structure of the labyrinth: psychological, philosophical, metaphysical and mythical), theories (e.g. on the evolution of the symbolic language, on the linear or circular structure of the labyrinth) and parallels (e.g. between the myths of Orpheus and Dionysus; between the works of Nae lonescu and Mircea Eliade). During the whole thesis, our main aim was to preserve a balance between the scholarly writings of Eliade and his fiction. This accounts for ou'f' undertaking to keep critical references to the minimum. It is QU r hope that the present thesis proves that the dichotomy of the Eliadean oeuvre is only an apparent one, and his academic works put their imprint on his literary creations

This thesis examines Lewis Grassic Gibbon/James Leslie Mitchell's promotion of the transformative power of the feminine and its offshoot of freer sexuality as a basis for new relationships among individuals, their societies and the world. As a result of Gibbon's revaluation of gender values, the feminine becomes identified as innate human "good," largely subsumed under, and set in opposition to, the evil perpetrated by the masculine historical process. Distinct from actual women, the feminine can be reclaimed by men too, affecting Gibbon's representations of both sexes. The feminine emerges as revolutionary - and not a conservative form of symbolism limiting women's subjectivity - in that it prepares the ground for a return to society and fuels both men and women with the power to challenge society's (masculine) values and institutions. A world-view structured around a gender dichotomy is nothing new. An overview of Gibbon's literary contemporaries, however, reveals that his prioritising of gender and sexual issues is unusual for a Scots male writer of the 1920sl1930s, although it does align him with female, feminist writers of his period (ch. I). Gibbon's early writing reconsiders stereotypes and archetypes of women/femininity but does not advance a practical programme for change (eh. 2). The influence ofDiffusionism, pronounced after 1930, manifests itself by portrayals of the male's re-connection to his "pre-civilisation" self through the feminine, allowing men and women together to renounce evils such as religion and masculine versions of history (eh. 3). Chapter 4 analyses various models that interact with factors such as race and sexual orientation to transcend gender disunity, although Gibbon's vision is occasionally marred by scepticism and blind-spots. His later work reveals a developing conviction that the individual- male or female - may have to lead the battle against evil, aiding transmission of the idea of "good." This, however, may lead to an overwriting of essential feminine values as is seen by the ending of A Scots Quair (chs. 5 & 6). In an analysis giving equal weight to most of his fiction, the thesis concludes that Gibbon's first step to solving civilization's malaise is a movement beyond polarities that make genders and sexes antagonistic, a ''third way," creating a rebirth of the individual and society when people re-awaken to the divinity in self and other and reconnect to the feminine. This movement, however, runs the risk of staying conjectural since actual measures for social change prove harder for Gibbon to delineate.

published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Arts

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