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The Uglier Animals is a collection of short stories exploring themes of change, impermanence and bodily transformation through a speculative lens. The characters in these stories struggle with the friction between place and desire. The body becomes a place on its own, to be trapped in or freed by. Humans and animals alike navigate the challenges of being, existing in relation to others and the space between us. Their bodies are burdens and tools, prisons and possibilities, and they morph accordingly, flesh inscribed with trauma and yearning. A bear fears going into hibernation. Unable to get an abortion, a young girl begins to absorb anyone who touches her pregnant belly. After a friend survives being beheaded by the farmer they worship, a rooster reckons with the tangled web between faith, love, and violence. In modern Brazil, a chicken coop, or under the sea, characters grapple with abandonment and longing. Bodies shrink and grow, cling to life and return from death, are opened up and torn apart. The stories swim in the gaps between emotional connections, characters wrestling with our reasons to leave, our reasons to stay, and everything we must carry along the way.

Patrick Chamoiseau is arguably the most prominent cultural personality from the French island of Martinique. His reputation is due to the worldwide success of his novels, especially Texaco, winner of the Prix Goncourt-award in 1992, but also to the fact that he is the leading theorist of the Créolité, an ideological movement whose aim is to preserve the character of Creole identity and culture against the threat of assimilation. Chamoiseau’s importance in an ideological context tends to overshadow his literary qualities, his novels being often seen as illustrations of his political ideas.Although Chamoiseau’s ideological views aren’t totally absent from his literary work, his novels strike the reader as extremely complex constructions, containing far more than a subversive aspect. An aspect that has been neglected by the critics is for example the supernatural. Probably because of the geographic vicinity to South America, Chamoiseau’s use of the supernatural has been, rather hastily, considered as typical of magical realism or marvellous realism. This dissertation aims at showing that the fantastic, as defined by Tzvetan Todorov (1970), is better suited to describe this aspect of Chamoiseau’s novels, especially Biblique des derniers gestes (2002).Our main objective is, however, not to decide whether the novel belongs to the fantastic as a genre, but to examine the reasons why it is used. A close analysis shows that it is often in relation to the past of Martinique that the supernatural appears. Thanks to the theory of the fantastic, we find three possible explanations of this fact. Firstly, the supernatural is juxtaposed to the real in order to reveal its limits and its “constructedness”. Martinican past thus appears as a French construction. Secondly, the fantastic can be used to reveal the absence of genuine Martinican history. Finally, the fantastic can be a reminder of a terrible event from the past. In conclusion it can be said that Chamoiseau uses the fantastic in order to write the history of an event that he sees as the origin of Martinique: slavery. By doing this he contributes to the fantastic as well, by showing that it is not necessarily gratuitous and by providing a good example of original and innovative use.

This study explores controlling images as essential to the representation of black women’s lives within the media, especially the comic book character, Storm from the X-Men series. The researcher uses content analysis to examine the graphic images, text and dialogue of the comic books chosen for this study. Furthermore, the researcher juxtaposes Storm to the main controlling images that Patricia Hill Collins discusses in her seminal work, Black Feminist Thought, but also to expand this discussion to include the stereotype of the Magical Negro.

This thesis consists of a study of the motivational, cognitive and personality implications of adherence to New Age practices and beliefs. The New Age, unlike traditional Western religion, possesses no church-like structure and is usually characterised as a loose network of self-development practices, with a belief system centred on the spiritual evolution of the individual through successive reincarnations and the idea of a magical interconnectedness between all things. The studies carried out used a series of psychological measures, including self-report scales, analysis of self-concepts, autobiographical episodes and attributions to life events, and experimental visual and semantic tasks. Groups of traditional religious and non-religious individuals were also assessed to serve as contrasts to the New Age group. Following from previous sociological literature on the individualist character of the New Age, the first study dealt with individualist and collectivist motivations. New Age individuals were found to emphasise more individualistic values than Catholics, but still differed from non-religious individuals in that they stressed more self-transcendent universalism values and global-holistic self-concepts. This pattern was labelled as 'holistic individualism' and the second study sought to define it more accurately by focusing on the analysis of agency and communion motivations through the analysis of autobiographical episodes. In this study, the New Age group showed a higher frequency of agency and a lower frequency of communion themes than traditional religious and non-religious participants and, in particular, emphasised life stories of self-empowerment by non-material 'energies' or entities. The last two studies looked more closely at the New Age tendency towards highly abstract cognitions, in particular its sense of connectedness, by focusing on magical thinking and personality traits. New Age individuals were found to attribute events to magical rather than naturalistic causes much more often than the other groups. This cognitive disposition was confirmed in the last study, which found a positive association between the adherence to New Age practices and schizotypal personality traits, emotional hypersensitivity, and cognitive-perceptual looseness. Women were also found to be keener adherents to the New Age than men. Given this set of results, it is suggested that the New Age should be thought of primarily as a magical, rather than a religious, system of practices and beliefs. It is also proposed that an individual may be drawn to the New Age not only because of its modern individualistic appeal, but in virtue of possessing a particular personality and cognitive disposition towards magical ideation and unusual perceptual experiences.

Dans la première partie du présent mémoire, l’essai Entre poésie, réalisme magique et postmodernisme : Madman Claro, je tente d’abord de définir les concepts du réalisme magique, de la littérature postmoderne et de la « mi-fiction » (qui englobe peut-être les deux premiers) afin de situer l’oeuvre de l’écrivain et traducteur français Claro au sein du spectre réflexif-mimétique que je propose. Je décris ensuite sa vision de l’écriture et de la littérature avant d’analyser la dissolution des personnages principaux du roman CosmoZ entraînée par le mauvais traitement qu’ils reçoivent aux mains des médecins et du Magicien d’Oz. J’essaie de montrer en quoi ces devenirs-autres sont liés au début et à la fin du monde (qui, lui, ne cesse de recommencer) dans cet ouvrage fabuleusement réaliste où Claro rend des personnages fictifs réels et les fait vivre des aventures rocambolesques et tragiques au début du XXe siècle en Europe et en Amérique. La deuxième partie du mémoire, intitulée Les Fleurs compliquées, est un recueil de nouvelles surréalistes qui demeurent toutefois ancrées dans le monde contemporain et qui mettent parfois en scène des versions diffractées de figures réelles. Alors que le premier récit mêle des contraintes formelles à des questions ontologiques et généalogiques, la deuxième nouvelle, davantage marquée par l’oralité, porte sur une expérience extracorporelle dans une boîte de nuit montréalaise. S’ensuit alors une version satirique et cauchemardesque de la désastreuse tournée 777 de la chanteuse Rihanna, rebaptisée La Reina, qui culmine en un combat inspiré des légendes amérindiennes. La dernière nouvelle comporte six courtes parties enchâssées racontant un même récit de façon non linéaire. Globalement, je vise une certaine saturation baroque : le travail sur l’image, les élans imaginatifs débridés et le rythme jouent donc un rôle important dans ces récits. Sur le plan thématique, je consacre autant mon attention aux silences éloquents du quotidien qu’au legs du colonialisme occidental sur la culture populaire d’aujourd’hui, le tout présenté d’un point de vue féministe et volontairement « ex-centrique ». Enfin, j’essaie, sur un fond d’humour tirant sur le noir, d’accorder une place aux voix marginalisées tout en évitant l’écueil du sentimentalisme et du moralisme sermonneur. / In the first part of this project, the essay Entre poésie, réalisme magique et postmodernisme : Madman Claro, I attempt to define the concepts of magical realism, postmodern literature and “midfiction” (which might transcend the first two) in order to situate the work of French writer and translator Claro within the reflexive-mimetic model that I have laid out. I then describe his view of writing and literature before analyzing the dissolution of the main characters in the novel CosmoZ that is caused by the poor treatment they receive at the hands of various doctors and the Wizard of Oz. My aim is to show how these becoming-others are related to the beginning and the end of the world (which, in turn, never ceases to begin anew) in this work that is both fable-like and realistic, as Claro makes fictional characters real and has them go through incredible and tragic adventures over the course of the first half of the XXth century in Europe and America. The second part of this thesis, entitled Les Fleurs compliquées, is a collection of surrealistic short stories that remain grounded in the modern world and which sometimes feature diffracted versions of public figures. While the first story mixes formal constraints with ontological and genealogical concerns, the second narrative, more conversational in tone, recounts an out of body experience in an after-hours nightclub in Montreal. This is followed by a satirical and nightmarish version of the singer Rihanna’s (renamed La Reina) disastrous 777 Tour, which culminates in a battle inspired by Amerindian folklore. The last story contains six brief interlinked parts that recount a single narrative in a non-linear fashion. Overall, I have aimed for a kind of baroque saturation: my work is thus mostly focused on creating vivid imagery by following flights of fancy while paying attention to rhythm. Thematically, I am interested in the eloquent silences of the everyday as well as the legacy of Western colonialism in modern popular culture, which I have presented from a feminist and consciously “ex-centric” perspective. I have tried, finally, to craft tales that are sporadically darkly humorous and which lend a voice to those who have been marginalized while avoiding the pitfalls of sentimentalism and preachy moralizing.

Submitted by admin tede (tede@pucgoias.edu.br) on 2016-12-12T17:54:05Z No. of bitstreams: 1 LUCAS RODRIGUES COELHO.pdf: 792518 bytes, checksum: b83c3b74ded9744558548239c84e64ea (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-12-12T17:54:05Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 LUCAS RODRIGUES COELHO.pdf: 792518 bytes, checksum: b83c3b74ded9744558548239c84e64ea (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-12-18 / The object of this study is Os pecados da tribo, by Jose J. Veiga. The reflection on the artist's fictional work, with its elements of fantastic literature and wonderful Latin American realism, led us to analyze the procedures of artistic creation that were not intuitive in the first readings, and a more accurate analysis of the resources And the stylistic language in literary art. The universe of the characters made the research more attractive to be imbricated with theories that denote the meanings of terms like real, reality, natural, supernatural, among others. To that end, we refer to the following authors: Tzvetan Todorov (1982), William Spindler (1993), François Laplantine (1996), Alejo Carpentier (1987), Irlemar Chiampi (1980), among others. From there, we choose to observe in the objectives the questions of unusual, magical realism, the fantastic and the marvelous, considering them as outstanding characteristics of the discourse, as well as demonstrating how the play of words occurs that affects the relations of the languages of Frontiers, with inferences in the artistic-literary allegory. The construction of strangeness, the fantastic and the marvelous aligns in this asymmetrical space, to generate the effect of the fiction of the narrative, in an imaginary world that is established by its senses / O objeto deste estudo é Os pecados da tribo, de José J. Veiga. A reflexão sobre a obra ficcional do artista, com seus elementos da literatura fantástica e do realismo maravilhoso latino-americano, levou-nos a analisar os procedimentos da criação artística, que não se mostrou intuitiva nas primeiras leituras, sendo necessária uma análise mais acurada dos recursos e da estilística da linguagem na arte literária. O universo dos personagens tornou a pesquisa mais atraente ao ser imbricado com teorias que denotam as significações de termos como real, realidade, natural, sobrenatural, entre outros. Para tanto, recorremos aos seguintes autores: Tzvetan Todorov (1982), William Spindler (1993), François Laplantine (1996), Alejo Carpentier (1987), Irlemar Chiampi (1980), entre outros. A partir daí, optamos por observar nos objetivos as questões do insólito, do realismo mágico, do fantástico e do maravilhoso, considerando-as como características marcantes do discurso, bem como demonstrar como se dá o jogo de palavras que incide nas relações das linguagens de fronteiras, com inferências na alegoria artístico-literária. A construção do estranhamento, do fantástico e do maravilhoso se alinha nesse espaço assimétrico, para gerar o efeito da ficção da narrativa, num mundo imaginário que se estabelece pelos seus sentidos.

Do you hope to promote, encourage and foster critical thinking and creativity in your library? Visit this session to discover reader response, literature-based, and interdisciplinary activities appropriate to selected works of magical realism (grades 4-7).

The Sad Kitchen, a work of magical realism, tells the story of a saintly woman named Helen. She opens an underground kitchen where people who feel guilty can come to be comforted and nurtured in the middle of the night. The story is, at its heart, a reflection on forgiveness. Song of Neon, also of the magical realist genre, is an existential work about a nurse named Avery and her husband, an owl house maker, named Saul. Their town, Milliard, is under a trance. Avery and Saul struggle with their respective identities in the quiet, vacuum the town has become.