Writing a Way Home examines ways that Cherokees in the latter half of the 20th century who have been marginalized through the privileging of state narratives have deployed literature as a way to challenge narratives of state domination and to imagine and work toward more critical, ethical Cherokee nationhood. I examine the ways that Robert K. Thomas and Natachee Scott Momaday used literature during the federal Termination and Relocation programs to imagine functioning tribal nations against the United States' assimilation narrative of the time. I further delve into how the Cherokee Nation's state narrative of the Cherokee Freedmen has denationalized Freedmen descendants and how, by using the WPA narratives of former Cherokee slaves and Tom Holm and Thomas' Peoplehood Matrix, we can re-narrate the Freedmen descendants into a more ethical Cherokee Nation. Finally, I close the study with an examination of Daniel Heath Justice's Way of Thorn and Thunder trilogy that uses storytelling to re-imagine a place of reverence for gay and queer-identified Cherokees at a time when the Cherokee Nation passed a ban on same-sex marriage, claiming that such relationships defied what the Cherokee state narrates as tribal tradition. I aim to show in this study the danger of uncritically accepting the state model for tribal nations and the importance of periodically challenging tribal nations when leaders behave unethically. Likewise, this study demonstrates the power of story to not only check the excesses of state sovereignty that marginalize people based on their history, politics, race and sexuality, but also the power to re-imagine a nation -- a home -- that welcomes all its relations. / text

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published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Philosophy

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The subject matter of my study is representations of Russia in Anglo-American and Russian spy novels, mysteries, and action thrillers of the 1990s. Especially suitable for representing the world split between good and evil, these genres played a prominent role in constructing the image of the other during the Cold War. Crime fiction then is an important source for grasping the changes in representing Russia after the Cold War. My hypothesis is that despite the changes in the political roles of Russia and the United States, the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union continued to have a significant impact on popular fiction about Russia in the 1990s. A comparative perspective on depictions of Russia in the 1990s is particularly suitable in regard to American and Russian popular cultures because during the Cold War, Soviet and American identities were formed in view of the other. A comparative approach to the study of Russian popular fiction is additionally justified by the role that the idea of the West had played in Russian cultural history starting from the early eighteenth century. Reflection on depictions of Russia in crime fiction by writers coming from the two formerly antagonistic cultures poses the problem of representation in its relationship to time, history, politics, popular culture, and genre. The methods used in this dissertation derive from the field of cultural studies, history, and structuralist poetics. A combination of structuralist readings and social theory allows me to uncover the ways in which popular detective genres changed in response to the sentiments of nostalgia and anxiety about repressed or lost identities, the sentiments that were typical of the 1990s. My study of Anglo-American and Russian spy novels, mysteries, and action thrillers contributes to our understanding of the ways American and Russian cultures invent and reinvent themselves after a significant historical rupture, how they mobilize the past for making sense of the present. Drawing on readings of literature and culture by such scholars as Mikhail Bakhtin, Tzvetan Todorov, Siegfried Kracauer, Andreas Huyssen, Fredric Jameson, and Svetlana Boym, I show that differences in Anglo-American and Russian representations of Russia are a result of cultural asymmetries and cultural chronotopes in the United States and in Russia. I argue that Russian and American crime fiction of the 1990s re-writes Russia in the light of cultural memory, nostalgia, and historical sensibilities after the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union. Memories of the Cold War and coming to terms with the end of the Cold War played a defining role in depicting Russia by Anglo-American detective authors of the 1990s; this role is clear from the genre changes in Anglo-American thrillers about Russia. Similarly, reconsideration of Russian history became an essential characteristic in the development of the new Russian detektiv.

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Le medianoche amoureux is a collection of short narratives by Michel Tournier that was published in 1989. Being introduced as a collection of "Contes et nouvelles" and being compared with Boccacio's Decameron, Le medianoche amoureux has raised many questions. Some of its traits, however, were not explored: is the Medianoche amoureux a "recueil-ensemble"? If so, can it be classified as a "recueil a recit cadre", just like the Decameron? These are the questions this thesis tries to answer. After the characteristics of the different types of short narratives collections have been established, Le medianoche amoureux is confronted to it. In the same vein, it is compared to short narratives collections belonging to the Decameron 's tradition. This analysis' results do not allow to conclude that Le medianoche amoureux has enough resemblance with the Decameron and other collections of the same type to be included in this tradition. However, some traits that are unique to it, for example the progression from "nouvelles" to "contes" and the interactive structure, suggest that it should be seen as a "recueil a recit cadre" as well as being recognized as original in its construction. Le medianoche amoureux hence opens the way to a new generation of collections. This thesis' "creation" part is trying to construct that type of collection. Le second banquet can be seen as a progression from "nouvelle" to "conte" and it has an interactive structure. One must search the same kind of progression that is found in Le medianoche amoureux and see that the opening and closing texts establish an interactive structure, for the reader will have to reconstruct the context in which the narratives appear.

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The five short stories which comprise this creative project are designed in exploration of the contemporary woman's state of mind. In accordance with this design, each of the stories is told. from the point of-view of the woman who is its main character. Though each of the five protagonists is of the Midwestern middle class, the women vary in the details of age, education, and, marital status as well as in the qualities of maturity, intelligence, and, self-awareness. Whether the woman is a flighty girl in her early twenties inanely trying to establish something worthwhile in herself, a middle-aged housewife attempting to deny the vapidity of her life, an aging widow seeking to recapture the contentment she found with her first husband, or a shrewd., elderly woman scheming to manipulate her fellow inmates in a sterile convalescent home, each one finds herself in conflict with the facts of the life she has created for herself. And because few such conflicts reach the best of all possible resolutions in life outside of fiction, the struggles of these women are not sophomorically resolved, but remain to them as sources of dissatisfaction, confusion, and alienation.

Collected Stories of William Faulkner, published in 1950 and awarded the National Book Award for Fiction in 1951, is more than an arbitrarily arranged selection of representative stories. Indeed, it is remarkably similar in form and theme to many of Faulkner's novels, especially Go Down, Moses, and can profitably be read as a unified work.Like Go Down, Moses, As I Lay Dying, Light in August and other Faulkner novels, Collected Stories is structured around a center, in this case a theme: the relationship between man and his environment. The six chapters of Collected Stories and the stories within each chapter are arranged in a "counterpointed" fashion; together, they offer myriad ways of looking at the central theme.Each chapter of the work is unified thematically, and each ultimately has relevance to the theme of man in relationship to his environment. "The Country" is set in ruralYoknapatawpha County and concerns the idea of self-assertion.