This thesis considers the early dissemination and critical/cultural/literary reception of the nouveau roman in Britain, roughly between the years 1957–73. The nouveau roman is considered in its capacity as an avant-garde grouping of writers and texts coming from France, and as articulated at the interface of the novel and its theoretical metalanguage; the main nouveaux romanciers considered are Michel Butor, Marguerite Duras, Robert Pinget, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Claude Simon. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which the nouveau roman's status as nouveau was presented in Britain in the period in question. One of the major arguments of the thesis is thus: that the question of the nouveauté of the nouveau roman became a nodal point for negotiations over the legacy of modernism, and over the meaning of the 'contemporary' in literature in the postwar period. Part I charts the emergence of the nouveau roman in Britain. It looks first at the origins and the methods of the nouveau roman's initial dissemination, drawing on a range of previously undocumented archival sources. The main focus here is Calder & Boyars – the nouveau roman's main British publisher – and in particular the notions of publics that framed its activities involving the nouveau roman. Subsequently, the nouveau roman's British reception is considered with reference to an extensive survey of periodicals and books. Part II looks at the literary impact of the nouveau roman. First, a range of novels is considered as bridging the critical and the literary response in Britain to the nouveau roman. The authors considered are: Pamela Hansford Johnson, J. I. M. Stewart, Muriel Spark, John Fowles, J. B. Priestley, William Cooper, Rayner Heppenstall, and Christine Brooke-Rose. Then, other novels are considered more directly within the domain of the nouveau roman, seen against the background of Robbe-Grillet's approach to objects and materiality, and with reference to notions of 'project-work' in Butor's novels. Novels are considered by: Brian W. Aldiss, Muriel Spark, Denis Williams, Eva Figes, B. S. Johnson, and Alan Sheridan. Finally, the nouveau roman is looked at in relation to an emergent avant-garde in the British novel. Here, the nouveau roman is seen as providing terms with which British writing from the period in question was able to present itself as avant-garde beyond the manifestations of individual works. The conclusion briefly surveys more peripheral and non-novelistic British responses to the nouveau roman, considering the way in which they inscribe the nouveau roman as 'contemporary'. The thesis turns finally to the legacy of the nouveau roman for the British novel of the present day.

This thesis examines how the reading and writing of the post-war British novel is altered by the emergence of an 'everyday' cinema-going culture amongst young people in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. The thesis demonstrates how viewing and reading practices converge in the twentieth-century and how the resulting modification of the visual literacy of this new, 'movie-made' generation of 'cinesthetic' writers and readers refigures realism in this period. Such cinesthetic realism can be differentiated from the modernist mode of the 'camera-eye' by how it elicits interactive (and often sexist) affects and leads to techniques such as 'indexical characterisation' and a consideration of 'extratextual' narratives. Thus, the thesis argues for the post-war period as one of literary innovation as opposed to the regressive, anti-modern epoch it is still widely labelled. The work encompasses a broad range of novels and novelists: 'Invitations to a Candy-Floss World?' explains how John Braine's 'documentary' fiction engages with cinematic escapism, how Colin MacInnes incorporates cinema-going as an emblem of marginalisation, and how Alan Sillitoe positions cinema as a 'valid' literary influence; 'I Could Have Bitten Her' examines the influence of Philip Larkin's addiction to cinema in his debut novel, John Wain's investigation of the cinesthetic reification of the post-war novelist, and Kingsley Amis' extratextual and (surprisingly) feminist endeavours; 'Passionate Detachment' explores Muriel Spark's employment of cinema to represent a crisis in feminine ipseity, Lynne Reid Banks' use of 'sexist' cinema as a proto-feminist trope (in conjunction with an interview with Banks), and Iris Murdoch's relationship with cinema as 'Plato's Cave', which leads to refigurations of realism and feminist forms of escape. Ultimately, this thesis aims to foreground an underestimated aspect of the transition between the 'late modernist' and the 'contemporary' in British fiction.

Submitted in fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Technology: Public Management (Peacebuilding), Durban University of Technology, Durban, South Africa, 2015. / One of the major issues following the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 was what to do with the huge number of people (around 100 000) accused of crimes during the genocide. Western legal approaches dealt with a handful of such cases at huge expense but the vast majority of the accused languished in prison. The government decided to employ a modified version of Gacaca - the traditional way of dealing with disputes and lower level crimes at community level. Using a qualitative research methodology and employing focus groups and individual interviews as data collection tools, this research investigate perceptions about the operation of Gacaca in three Rwandan communities, with particular reference to truth, justice, forgiveness and reconciliation. The research suggests that in the three communities, Gacaca was seen as bringing the truth out into the open and to provide a measure of justice, although limitations were noted in both of these respects. Given the enormity of the genocide crimes, however, there seemed to be little progress in the areas of forgiveness and reconciliation. / M

Thesis advisor: Kenneth Himes / The category of jus post bellum (jpb, postwar justice and peace) is a welcome addition to discussions of the justice of war. The goal of this dissertation is to review the significance of this recent development within the just war tradition. This project is based on a proposition that just war should aim at just peace; peace does not mean the absence of armed conflict, but it requires the establishment of justice. There is no true peace if it exists for the strong but not for the weak, for the victor but not for the vanquished. At the heart of jpb is the establishment of a just peace. With this preliminary proposition in mind, this dissertation endeavors to challenge the view of those who argue that reconciliation, mainly political reconciliation, is the first and foremost ambition of jpb. Instead, it attempts to justify the proposition that achieving just policing, just punishment, and just political participation are key to building a just peace, of which the fundamental characteristic must be human security. In the immediate aftermath of war there is little or no policing, punishment, or avenues for political participation to protect the civilians of defeated states, especially the most vulnerable ones. Therefore, this project argues (i) that human security is a neglected theme in the discourse of moral and theological intellectual traditions; and (ii) that a more balanced understanding of jpb must pay direct attention to the elements comprising human security in a postwar context as well as the quest for reconciliation. In particular, holding a realistic view that war is inherently destructive of people, institutions, and infrastructure, this project focuses on justice in reconstruction—reconstruction of just policing, just punishment, and just political participation. This destruction raises questions about the fulfillment of justice in the damaged postwar society. Considering these issues through the lens of human security and political reconciliation theories, I propose my “maxim(um) of ethical minimalism” for jpb—the principle of achieving to the highest extent possible human security, which is the necessary and essential outcome for jpb. It is the norm for jpb of achieving the common good to the highest extent possible, with priority on human security, using nonviolent means insofar as possible and violent means when necessary. This proposal contends that determination of the content of the responsibilities for just war reconstruction should be specified on the basis of the damage to relationships that need to be not merely restored, but also fundamentally transformed in the postwar society that prevents future threats. This thesis pays particular attention to civil society peacebuilding, which needs to be considered only to the extent that it is an objective of the postwar discussion and to the extent it is affected by jpb decisions. Yet, my primary thesis is that this transformative vision of jpb should be distinguished from an extensive buildup of a civil society scheme, which requires a wider and longer range of peacebuilding efforts. Instead, it must be tempered by realism in a careful and concrete manner, since the priority should be given to human security in the immediate aftermath of war. This study is an exercise in applied political ethics that employs various disciplines—security studies, international law, and peacebuilding work—to address the topic of jpb as a means of illuminating the theological discourse. Plainly, I employ this literature to explore how contemporary scholars view the idea of jpb and how this relatively new development fits within the Christian tradition of just war, a moral tradition that is historically interdisciplinary. Further, this attempt is a valuable contribution to the just war tradition by identifying what I view as three key themes of jpb, namely, three practices that are essential to implementing jpb immediately after a war: just policing, just punishment, and just political participation. While examining the interrelated challenges of moral and social norms in both political and legal domains, this dissertation proposes an innovative methodology for linking theology, ethics, and social science so that the ideal and the real can inform each other in the ethics of war and peacebuilding. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

The American Revolution and its aftermath posed the greatest challenge to the institution of slavery since the first Africans landed in Jamestown. Revolutionary defenses of the natural equality of man provided ammunition for generations of men and women opposed to racial subordination while the ideological strains of the struggle sounded the death knell for slavery in Northern states and led significant numbers of Southerners to question the morality and safety of slaveholding. Most importantly, the bloody and chaotic war in the South provided an unprecedented opportunity for slaves to challenge their bondage as tens of thousands of black men and women fled to the British, the swamps, or the relative anonymity of the cities. In examining the “reconstruction” of Southern slavery in the post-Revolutionary decades, Merging social, military, and economic history, "Origins of the Old South" examines how, in the attempt to rebuild their society from the ravages of war, black and white Southerners together created the new and historically distinct slave society of the “Old South.” The first two chapters of the dissertation demonstrate how the struggle to contain the disorders of a civil war amongst half a million enslaved African-Americans transformed the Southern states—the scene of the war’s bloodiest fighting after 1778—into a crucible in which men, land, and debt melted into capital. State governments redistributed thousands of slaves and millions of acres of land to purchase supplies and raise troops from within a weary populace; the estates of many of the South’s most important planters, comprising roughly ten percent of the region’s real and personal wealth, were confiscated and sold at auction at a fraction of their value; and wartime prestige coupled with the departure of prominent loyalists allowed a legion of “new men” to come into control of the new state governments. The result was the ascendance of a new class of merchant planters, who pushed the locus of Southern development inland, and major changes in the contours of black life in the region. The remaining three chapters of the dissertation examine these twinned consequences of the Revolution over the following three decades. Chapter three follows the experience of enslaved men and women after the war, tracing their movement throughout the Atlantic World and across the boundary between slavery and freedom during the conflict. Chapter four then looks at the impact of the region's ill-fated antislavery push during and immediately after the war, while chapter five shows how early national state governments drove slavery's expansion and closed the revolutionary moment in the process.

This dissertation tracks the effects of state recognition across a series of vanishing and emerging social worlds in post-Fukushima Japan. Based upon two years of fieldwork, the dissertation focuses on ethnographic sites at which the failure of state subjectivization activates both a reinvigoration of state discourse, and the formation of counter-discourses within the temporality of Japan’s endless “postwar” (sengo). In so doing, the dissertation seeks to disclose the social violence and iteration of shame as it is mobilized by the state to produce an obedient subject – willing to die for the nation in war – and as the failure to conform precipitates alternate socialities that may be either opposed to or complicit with state interests. The ethnographic sites of which I write concentrate on: the compulsory enactment of propriety in public school ceremonies, and the refusal by teachers to stand for, bow to the “national flag” (kokki), and sing the “national anthem” (kokka), the self-same imperial symbols under which Japan conducted World War II; a group of Okinawan construction workers in the old day laborer district of Tokyo, Sanya; the stigmatized “radical” (kageki) leftist student organization, the Zengakuren; the “internet right-wing” (netto uyoku) group, the Zaittokai, whose street protests are performed live before a camera; and “Fukushima,” where the charge of guilt has short-circuited memories of the Japanese state sacrificing its citizens during World War II. As a foil for the remaining ethnographic sites, the obviousness of giving “respect” (sonchō) to state symbols in public school ceremonies discloses the formation of subjects in a constitutive misrecognition that eliminates – or kills – difference in the enactment of social totality. A veritable stain on which the Japanese state drive to war was dependent, the singular figure of the sitting teacher formed part and parcel of what rightist politicians referred to as the “negative legacy” (fu no rekishi) of World War II. S/he constituted the object of an overcoming that – alongside the Okinawan construction worker, the “radical” (kageki) leftist, the “resident foreigner” (zainichi) as object of Zaittokai hate speech, and “Fukushima” – at once marked the ground of intensification and failure of state discourse. For the graduation ceremony of March, 2012, the official number of teachers who refused to stand and sing fell to “1” in Tokyo, where the state employs 63,000 teachers. With neither family ties, romantic involvements, nor social recognition that would confirm their masculinity, the vanishing day laborers of Sanya made all the more insistent reference to the trope of otoko or ‘man.’ Closely articulated with the mobster world of the yakuza with which many workers had connections, the repetition of masculinity in work, gambling, and fighting constituted a discourse that repulsed the shaming gaze of general society. Thus, the excessive life-style of the otoko was located at the constitutive margins of the social bond of propriety, where he also provided a dying reserve army of labor that could be mobilized to undertake the most undesirable tasks, such as work at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Echoing the death of Sanya, the Zengakuren numbered in the tens of thousands in the 1960s and 1970s, but had dwindled to under 100 active members in 2012. While the anti-war “strike” (sutoraiki) constituted the apotheosis of the Zengakuren discourse, their espousal and shameless mandate of “violent” (bōryoku) revolution subverted the origins of the Zengakuren into a prohibitive discourse which replicated the form of state rhetoric, and demanded the eradication of the Stalinist from within their own ranks. No less shameless than the Zengakuren, the emergent hate speech of the “internet right-wing” (netto uyoku) iterated state discourse among the working poor. Having grown from 500 to 10,000 members within only four years, the Zaittokai’s notorious hate speech aspired to the instantaneous effect of “killing” (korosu) another legacy of World War II: the “resident foreigner” (zainichi). Yet, replicating online forms of writing, the iterability of their performative triggered repetition, and in a shamelessness specific to cyberspace – in which the reciprocity of the gaze and shame were lacking – the Zaittokai directed their paranoid speech at the state, whose representatives were said to be controlled by zainichi. Lastly, “Fukushima” marked the apogee of the effectivity and failures of the state in containing both the excesses of capitalism, and the “negative legacy” (fu no rekishi) of World War II, the memories of which were short-circuited by radioactive outpour.

This dissertation engages French-language films in the 'moraliste' tradition. The French word 'moraliste' has no exact English equivalent. It does not evoke the didactic sense of “moralist;” rather a 'moraliste' is someone who explores the inner workings of the mind, rather than the outer actions of a character. Beginning with the publication of Montaigne’s Essays in 1580, 'moralistes' including Descartes, La Rochefoucauld, Pascal, and La Bruyère created moral literature – literature concerned with personal reflections and the feelings of an individual over the dogma of good society. The emergence of film in the late nineteenth century provided a new medium for raising questions in the 'moraliste' tradition. Éric Rohmer, for example, described his Six Moral Tales as “films in which a particular feeling is analyzed and where even the characters themselves analyze their feelings and are very introspective. That’s what 'conte moral' (moral tale) means.” I argue that the films of Bresson, Rohmer, and the Dardennes are narratively, thematically, and stylistically interrelated in their connection to the specifically French 'moraliste' tradition. I contend that these films surfaced in post-World War II France – growing out of the deep ambiguities that existed in French society in the aftermath of occupation and liberation – and continue to appear in the increasingly transnational landscape of contemporary European cinema. This new approach to film history offers a counterweight to the narrative of French New Wave cinema, which privileges the work of more explicitly political and experimental filmmakers such as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.

The Beats were one of the most influential communities of the 20th century, and this dissertation focuses on the critically underrepresented women who were part of their influence. Today, the Beats are largely celebrated for their literary legacy, popularizing a spontaneous poetic style as well as promoting an antimaterialist ethos and globe-trotting mystique in opposition to Cold War attitudes of confinement and consensus. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Beats were seen as harbingers of cultural disillusionment, taking to the road in search of God, championing the “beatific” nature of the disenfranchised, the poor, and the lowly across America. Today, the Beats are considered to be the progenitors of pacifist “hippie” culture and a revolutionary postwar spirit. Despite this democratizing goal, a prevailing critical consensus holds that the Beat movement was primarily a “boy’s club,” in which the homosocial bonds between the key male figures fostered a system of literary mentorship that largely excluded women writers. Although the canon is frequently narrowed to give precedence to Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, and the male writers who joined their cadre, my project focuses on the many women writers who were part of the Beat community and the lasting impact of their work. My goal is to reconceptualize Beat aesthetics, themes, and communities in light of these women’s writing. The project entails close textual analysis of these writers’ work across multiple genres, including poetry, memoir, and fiction, as well as research toward historical and cultural contextualization, including interviews. Their writing emphasizes the centrality of the domestic sphere to Beat publishing and the utility of the road in seeking healing and empowerment, in addition to offering new perspectives on Beat spirituality and life writing. In addition to bringing well-deserved attention to these marginalized writers, this research is valuable for American literary history in expanding knowledge of women’s writing at midcentury. More broadly, these writers are of significance to our understanding of modern feminism as well. The majority of these women worked to support their families at a time described by Betty Friedan as the age of the “feminine mystique,” and they pushed back against the rigid social conventions of their time by escaping into bohemian life. The Beat women wrote frankly about reproductive roulette, single motherhood, abortion, social stigma about being women who lived alone, and difficulty starting careers in a sexist culture. For their shared values of self-sufficiency and dedication to their work, these women could be seen as feminist forerunners to the major crest of second wave feminism. However, feminism is not a single, static, monolithic push, and my interrogation of Beat women’s texts complicates and enriches understandings of postwar gender conventions. These writers’ thought contributes to ongoing discussions in modern feminist thought, including shifting cultural attitudes toward domestic labor, the importance of women’s communities, and forms and contradictions of female leadership.

Adopting historical perspectives, this thesis explores domestic, aesthetic, and cultural conflicts in modern Japan surrounding Masuji Ono, the protagonist in Kazuo Ishiguro¡¦s An Artist of the Floating World, as he looks back on his past. His memory narrative reveals his transformation from an iconoclastic young artist to a militarist propagandist in pre-war time, and finally to an old man who comes to terms with the loss of his prestige through none too reliable remembrances. Reading Ono¡¦s narrative in cross reference to historical texts, I argue that his transformation is in step with Japan¡¦s shift from a thriving nation to a militarist empire, and ultimately to a defeated nation subject to the Occupation after World War II and subsequent social changes. These changes are induced by democratization and disarmament engineered by the American army, which drastically undermine Japanese values, including the apotheosis of the Emperor, patriarchy, and social hierarchy. Forced to redefine themselves in the midst of the drastic social transformation, the Japanese harbor mixed feelings toward the emperor, regarding him as a guardian of the nation and a traitor. This ambivalence is profoundly felt by Ono, whose fall parallels the emperor¡¦s, since his authority as a father and a painting master is interrogated by the younger generation, most notably his daughter. In particular, his interaction with his grandson, who is brought up with American values, registers the Japanese attitudes toward the American, considering the occupier as both a welcomed authority and an alien monster. By examining three prominent authority figures in the novel¡Xfather, master, and monster¡Xthis thesis uncovers Ishiguro¡¦s agenda for negotiating an interface between history and personal memory.

Thesis (M.S.)--Naval Postgraduate School, 2003. / Title from title screen (viewed May 10, 2004). "December 2003." Includes bibliographical references (p. 162-175). Also issued in paper format.