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Between a rock and hard place : space, gender and hierarchy in British gangland filmWilliams, Sally Tatham Robertson January 2011 (has links)
A principal aim of this research has been to establish the capacity of British Gangland film to articulate its era of production through the cinematic interpretation of contemporary concerns and anxieties in narratives relating to the criminal underworld. In order to do so, the study has concentrated on the analysis of space, gender and hierarchy within representative generic texts produced between 1945 and the present. The thesis is divided into three sections: the first offers a general overview of British Gangland film from the 65 years under discussion with the aim of identifying recurring generic patterns and motifs. The second and third sections are more specifically focused, their chapters examining the narrative significance and development of the male and the female protagonist respectively. Within the films under discussion, the relationship between these protagonists and their environment represents a fundamental generic component, resulting in an emphasis on space and place. Space within these narratives is inherently territorial, and thus irrevocably bound up with hierarchies of power. The predominantly urban locations in which the narratives are set represent a twilight world, a demi-monde, which is rarely neutral but dominated by the patriarchal order structuring the notion of ‘Gangland’. Such spaces are therefore inextricably linked with gender, hierarchy, and dynamic power relations. Whilst it would have been possible to explore each of these areas in isolation through specifically relevant theoretical perspectives, their interdependence is central to this study. Consequently, a holistic theoretical approach has facilitated analysis of the symbiotic relationship between the three key elements of space, gender and hierarchy and the processes involved in the generation of meaning: this has resulted in a reading of British Gangland film as cultural artefact, reflecting its circumstances of production.
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Virtual Hood: Exploring The Hip-hop Culture Experience In A British Online Community.Cherjovsky, Natalia 01 January 2010 (has links)
In this fast-paced, globalized world, certain online sites represent a hybrid personal-public sphere'where like-minded people commune regardless of physical distance, time difference, or lack of synchronicity. Sites that feature chat rooms and forums can offer a deep-rooted sense of community and facilitate the forging of relationships and cultivation of ideologies. This dissertation investigates whether this trend is relevant to web sites concerning hip-hop. This genre is arguably one of the most pervasive and influential global cultural forms, yet it is markedly different from most other forms of globalized culture because it emerged within and is still embedded in a distinct subculture. The notion that the Internet could become a bastion for hip-hop fans is quite paradoxical: hip hop is a cultural form so deeply rooted in the sense of place and so invested in its relationship to spatiality that it could potentially pose a particular challenge to the notion of virtual communities. This research examines the virtual hip-hop experience in the UK in order to assess whether this music and the culture that surrounds it have been adopted in their original American form or whether they have been adapted to make them more relevant to their new locale. In particular, the study probes how the ideology, values, behaviors and attitudes that bestride American hip-hop are represented, consumed, and reproduced on the mediated world of web sites.
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Castaways and colonists from Crusoe to Coetzee / Susanna Johanna Smit-MaraisSmit-Marais, Susanna Johanna January 2012 (has links)
Generic transformation of the castaway novel is made evident by the various ways in
which the narrative boundaries that separate fiction from reality and history, the past
from the present, and the rational from the irrational, are reconfigured in Umberto
Eco’s The Island of the Day Before (1994), J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) and Yann
Martel’s Life of Pi (2002). The dissolution of boundaries reflects the dominant shift
that has occurred in the castaway novel from the 18th century literary context to the
present postmodern, postcolonial context. In this regard, the narrative utilizes various
narratological strategies, the most significant being intertextuality, metafiction,
historiographical metafiction, allegory, irony, and the carnivalesque. These
narratological strategies rewrite, revise, and recontextualize those generic conventions
that perpetuated the culture of masculinity and conquest that defines colonialism and
the traditional castaway novel epitomized by Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719).
From a postcolonial perspective, the castaway’s state of being reflects on the
condition of the colonized as well as the colonizer: his/her experience of displacement
is similar to colonized peoples’ separation from their cultural, spiritual and personal
identities; simultaneously, processes of appropriation, adaptation and control of space
resemble colonization, thereby revealing the constructed nature of colonial space. As
such, space is fundamental to individual orientation and social adaptation and
consequently, metaphorically and metonymically linked to identity.
In the selected postmodernist and postcolonial texts, the movement from the position
of castaway to colonist as originally manifested in Robinson Crusoe is therefore
reinterpreted and recontextualized. The postmodernist and postcolonial contexts
resist fixed and one-dimensional representations of identity, as well as the
appropriation and domination of space, that characterize shipwreck literature from
pre-colonial and colonial periods. Rationalist notions of history, reality and truth as
empirically definable concepts are also contested. The castaway identity is often
characterized by feelings of physical and spiritual displacement and estrangement that
can be paralleled to postmodernist themes of existential confusion and anxiety. / Thesis (PhD (English))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2013
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Castaways and colonists from Crusoe to Coetzee / Susanna Johanna Smit-MaraisSmit-Marais, Susanna Johanna January 2012 (has links)
Generic transformation of the castaway novel is made evident by the various ways in
which the narrative boundaries that separate fiction from reality and history, the past
from the present, and the rational from the irrational, are reconfigured in Umberto
Eco’s The Island of the Day Before (1994), J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) and Yann
Martel’s Life of Pi (2002). The dissolution of boundaries reflects the dominant shift
that has occurred in the castaway novel from the 18th century literary context to the
present postmodern, postcolonial context. In this regard, the narrative utilizes various
narratological strategies, the most significant being intertextuality, metafiction,
historiographical metafiction, allegory, irony, and the carnivalesque. These
narratological strategies rewrite, revise, and recontextualize those generic conventions
that perpetuated the culture of masculinity and conquest that defines colonialism and
the traditional castaway novel epitomized by Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719).
From a postcolonial perspective, the castaway’s state of being reflects on the
condition of the colonized as well as the colonizer: his/her experience of displacement
is similar to colonized peoples’ separation from their cultural, spiritual and personal
identities; simultaneously, processes of appropriation, adaptation and control of space
resemble colonization, thereby revealing the constructed nature of colonial space. As
such, space is fundamental to individual orientation and social adaptation and
consequently, metaphorically and metonymically linked to identity.
In the selected postmodernist and postcolonial texts, the movement from the position
of castaway to colonist as originally manifested in Robinson Crusoe is therefore
reinterpreted and recontextualized. The postmodernist and postcolonial contexts
resist fixed and one-dimensional representations of identity, as well as the
appropriation and domination of space, that characterize shipwreck literature from
pre-colonial and colonial periods. Rationalist notions of history, reality and truth as
empirically definable concepts are also contested. The castaway identity is often
characterized by feelings of physical and spiritual displacement and estrangement that
can be paralleled to postmodernist themes of existential confusion and anxiety. / Thesis (PhD (English))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2013
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