Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Carolina Wilmington, 2008. / Vita. Title from PDF title page (viewed September 22, 2008) Includes bibliographical references ( p. 38-40)

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Serial killers are present in most Media today: TV-shows, books, magazines, news shows and music. Research about them has been made in many fields, such as criminology, psychology and psychiatry. There is also research about the serial killer as a cultural being. In my paper I have looked into the serial killer in fiction. I have chosen to compare two novels that deal with the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. The novels are Lotta Lotass’ Min röst skall nu komma från en annan plats i rummet and Joyce Carols Oates’ Zombie. By examining how the novels relate to the actual case and how they describe the violence and the person,I wanted to see if fiction can give a contrasting picture of how serial killers are usually described. I wanted to know if itis possible for fiction to represent serial killers as persons rather thanas inhuman monsters. My paper shows that although the novels differ in a lot of aspects, they both manage to contrast the picture of Dahmer. Zombieis more loosely based on Dahmer than Min röst, but focuses more on the violence. The Dahmer character in Zombie is more psychologically complex than the one in Min röst, but they both manage to describe the characters as human and they both avoid the stereotypical representation of serial killers.

This essay investigates the gender roles in Joyce Carol Oates' The Falls. The novel concentrates ona family who live by Niagara Falls in the US, but the novel's main focus is on a woman namedAriah. Ariah is considered as an outcast and different from her surrounding socialites and thereforeit is interesting to investigate how society and its norms affects her. This essay concentrates on themain character Ariah and how the society's norms affect her and contribute to her alienation. Theessay focus on the key norms in the novel and analyzes them with the help of Betty Friedan'stheories in The Feminine Mystique to investigate if there is any correlation between society's normsand the main character's alienation. The aim of this essay is to investigate the connections betweenthe main character's alienation and her refusal to succumb to society's expectations of her as awoman.

Partial Minds argues that contemporary American novels strategically break conventionally-defined norms for the representation of fictional minds to highlight unusual character thoughts. Certain states of mind—including traumatic experiences, conflicting feelings, some memories, and the simultaneous possession of multiple identities—are more difficult to represent than others, and so some authors or narrators reject conventional cognitive representations, such as naming feelings, if they seem poor tools for effectively communicating that character’s exceptional quality to the reader. For example, the trauma of Marianne in Joyce Carol Oates’s We Were the Mulvaneys is represented by the narrator, her brother Judd. But in attempting to represent the state of Marianne’s mind on the night she was raped, Judd finds that simply turning to a verbalized account of her thoughts, such as “I felt terrible,” or a seeming-omniscient gloss of her mental state, such as “She suffered incredible mental turmoil,” is insufficient and incommensurate with the traumatic and painful mental state she must have endured. In cases like these, authors and narrators reject conventional models of representation and turn to partial minds to effectively articulate to the reader the mental state that the character experiences. These more effective representations are pivotal in communicating to the reader a more adequate—whether from a mimetic, synthetic, or thematic perspective—understanding of characters’ experiences. Partial minds are often the very required conditions for readers to empathize with a character. By looking at several different instantiations of partial minds in recent American novels, I show how this technique both heightens the value of cognitive narrative criticism and revises the way we read many of literature’s most interesting characters.

Écrites dans le vague souvenir des romans d’apprentissage du début de l’ère industrielle, les œuvres de Marcel Proust, Osman Lins, Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, Joyce Carol Oates et Roberto Bolaño reviennent avec mélancolie à une question qui marque la modernité : comment tracer l’histoire de l’arrivée dans une grande ville ? À la Recherche du temps perdu et Blonde examinent des rituels mondains au sein des capitales transformées par la guerre. L’absence d’ordre produit des fils énigmatiques, à l’image du kaléidoscope, de la spirale, du labyrinthe et de la cité de sable, ces dispositions s’appliquant à l’écriture de l’espace urbain et du récit qui y conduit. L’Énigme de l’arrivée les relie aux problématiques de la migration, de la langue mondiale et de l’empire multiculturel qui se consolide dans la deuxième moitié du XXe siècle. L’œuvre de Lins fait converger l’urbanité, l’ésotérisme et des mondanités intellectuelles : l’imitation, la citation, la bibliographie. L’urbain devient une satire chez Bolaño : ses arrivistes et ses carriéristes, qui sont des poètes et des professeurs de littérature, appartiennent à la famille des meurtriers de masse. La nostalgie du roman d’apprentissage urbain, désormais sous le signe du regret, demande une réévaluation intégrale. Alors que la métaphore végétale indique des processus stylistiques de décomposition qui joignent la désurbanisation et l’émergence de la vie de l’esprit, l’écriture des plantes peut conduire plus largement à de nouvelles possibilités d’individuation, moins motivées par la pulsion mondaine qui caractérise les récits capitalistes, et plus discrètement marquées par l’inscription non instrumentale et involontaire, autrement violente, dans la nature. / Written with the vague memory of the novels of formation of the beginning of the industrial era, the novels of Marcel Proust, Osman Lins, Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, Joyce Carol Oates and Roberto Bolaño return with melancholy to a question that has marked modernity: how do we record the story of the arrival in a big city? In Search of Lost Time and Blonde examine the worldly rituals at the heart of the capitals transformed by war. The absence of order produces enigmatic forms: in the image of the kaleidoscope, the spiral, the labyrinth and the city of sand, these forms arrange the writing of the urban space and the narrative that leads into it. The Enigma of Arrival links those processes to the problematics of migration, global language and the multicultural empire that has taken shape during the second half of the twentieth century. The work of Lins brings together urbanity, esoterism and elements of intellectual worldliness: imitation, quotation, bibliography. The urban becomes a satire in Bolaño: his arrivistes and his careerists, who are poets and teachers of literature, belong to the family of mass murderers. The novel of urban formation, now available only as a lost object, a target for nostalgia under the sign of regret, merits thorough reevaluation. Seeing that the vegetal metaphor points to stylistic processes of decomposition that bring together de-urbanization and the emergence of the life of the mind, the writing of plants may lead to new possibilities of individuation, less motivated by the worldly pulsion that characterizes capitalistic narratives, and bearing more discreet traces of the non-instrumental and involuntary, more violent inscription into nature.

Scholarship has firmly established that the short story cycle is well-suited to representations of community. This study considers eight North American examples of the genre: four by Canadian authors Stephen Leacock, Duncan Campbell Scott, George Elliott, and Alice Munro; and four by American authors Sarah Orne Jewett, Sherwood Anderson, John Cheever, and Joyce Carol Oates. My original idea was to discover whether there were significant differences between the Canadian and American cycles, but ultimately I became far more interested in the way that all of the cycles address community formation and disintegration. The focus of each cycle is a small community, whether a small town, a village, or a suburb. In all of the examples, the authors address the small community as the focus of anxiety, concern, criticism, and praise, with special attention to the way in which, despite its manifold failings, the small community continues to inspire longings for the ideal home and source of identity. The narrative feature that ultimately provided the critical framework for the study is the recurring presence of the metropolis in all of the eight cycles. The city, set on the horizons of these small communities, consistently provides a backdrop against which author and characters seem to measure and understand their lives. Always an influence (whether for good or bad), the city’s presence is constructed as the other against which the small community’s identity is formulated and understood. The relationship between small community and city led me to an investigation into the mythology of the small community, a mythology that sets the small community in opposition to the city, portraying the former as the keeper of virtue and the latter as the disseminator of vice. The cycles themselves, as I increasingly discovered, challenge the mythology by identifying how the small community depends, in large part, on the city for self-understanding. The small community, however, as an idea, and a mythic ideal, is never dismissed as obsolete or irrelevant.

Scholarship has firmly established that the short story cycle is well-suited to representations of community. This study considers eight North American examples of the genre: four by Canadian authors Stephen Leacock, Duncan Campbell Scott, George Elliott, and Alice Munro; and four by American authors Sarah Orne Jewett, Sherwood Anderson, John Cheever, and Joyce Carol Oates. My original idea was to discover whether there were significant differences between the Canadian and American cycles, but ultimately I became far more interested in the way that all of the cycles address community formation and disintegration. The focus of each cycle is a small community, whether a small town, a village, or a suburb. In all of the examples, the authors address the small community as the focus of anxiety, concern, criticism, and praise, with special attention to the way in which, despite its manifold failings, the small community continues to inspire longings for the ideal home and source of identity. The narrative feature that ultimately provided the critical framework for the study is the recurring presence of the metropolis in all of the eight cycles. The city, set on the horizons of these small communities, consistently provides a backdrop against which author and characters seem to measure and understand their lives. Always an influence (whether for good or bad), the city’s presence is constructed as the other against which the small community’s identity is formulated and understood. The relationship between small community and city led me to an investigation into the mythology of the small community, a mythology that sets the small community in opposition to the city, portraying the former as the keeper of virtue and the latter as the disseminator of vice. The cycles themselves, as I increasingly discovered, challenge the mythology by identifying how the small community depends, in large part, on the city for self-understanding. The small community, however, as an idea, and a mythic ideal, is never dismissed as obsolete or irrelevant.

Scholarship has firmly established that the short story cycle is well-suited to representations of community. This study considers eight North American examples of the genre: four by Canadian authors Stephen Leacock, Duncan Campbell Scott, George Elliott, and Alice Munro; and four by American authors Sarah Orne Jewett, Sherwood Anderson, John Cheever, and Joyce Carol Oates. My original idea was to discover whether there were significant differences between the Canadian and American cycles, but ultimately I became far more interested in the way that all of the cycles address community formation and disintegration. The focus of each cycle is a small community, whether a small town, a village, or a suburb. In all of the examples, the authors address the small community as the focus of anxiety, concern, criticism, and praise, with special attention to the way in which, despite its manifold failings, the small community continues to inspire longings for the ideal home and source of identity. The narrative feature that ultimately provided the critical framework for the study is the recurring presence of the metropolis in all of the eight cycles. The city, set on the horizons of these small communities, consistently provides a backdrop against which author and characters seem to measure and understand their lives. Always an influence (whether for good or bad), the city’s presence is constructed as the other against which the small community’s identity is formulated and understood. The relationship between small community and city led me to an investigation into the mythology of the small community, a mythology that sets the small community in opposition to the city, portraying the former as the keeper of virtue and the latter as the disseminator of vice. The cycles themselves, as I increasingly discovered, challenge the mythology by identifying how the small community depends, in large part, on the city for self-understanding. The small community, however, as an idea, and a mythic ideal, is never dismissed as obsolete or irrelevant.