Different Attitudes to Esotericism in Peter Ackroyd's and Dan Brown's Novels

In this doctoral dissertation, two differing approaches to the fictional utilisation of esoteric motifs are compared in the selected novels by contemporary British writer Peter Ackroyd and American writer Dan Brown. They represent contemporary Anglophone literature and draw their inspiration from a similar pool of esoteric ideas. On the one hand, Peter Ackroyd’s profound obsession with Englishness and the English literary tradition positions him as a visionary literary figure among fiction writers. By employing anti-realist methods, he offers brand new looks through his transcendental interpretations of both existent and non-existent events and characters from English literary history and culture. In contrast, Dan Brown uses conspiratorial accounts of existing religio-cultural (hi)stories and presents them as alternative historical narrations. These variables underlie the authors’ unique ways of representing occult ideas in their literary endeavours. Being the products of the latest centuries, the novels under study can be categorised within the realms of postmodern literature, with realist elements in Dan Brown’s works. Contemporary literature significantly benefits from the diverse array of occult practices, presented in particularly intriguing manner. Therefore, the primary objective of this dissertation is to explore the use of such esoteric conventions in the contemporary literary contexts crafted by these two widely acclaimed authors. Through the analysis of selected novels by Peter Ackroyd and Dan Brown, my research postulates the questions of how and to what extent esoteric motifs affect the historiography in Peter Ackroyd’s novels and the factual aspects of Dan Brown’s fictions. Furthermore, I aim to identify the motivations that drive these authors to take resources in esotericism. I believe that the findings to these inquiries will help in filling the existing gap in the comparative study of Peter Ackroyd’s and Dan Brown’s novels and contribute to the broader exploration of contemporary literary representations of esotericism

Smutty Little Movies: The Creation and Regulation of Adult Video, 1976-1986.

This dissertation examines the cultural and legal efforts to regulate, contain, limit, or eradicate pornography as the adult film industry transitioned from celluloid to home video. Beginning with the Panoram visual jukebox of the 1940s, through the peep show booths of the 1960s, and into the adult motels of the 1970s with their closed-circuit television systems, I trace the pre-history of privacy in terms of pornography and spectatorship, and then identify the key people, companies, and films involved in the early period of adult video in the late 1970s. The regulatory efforts against pornography signal larger cultural anxieties surrounding “appropriate” gendered and sexual behaviors for women. The industry self-regulated by appealing to narrative as a marker of “quality” and “respectability,” values that are central to the cultural battles over pornography and women’s sexuality. I explore how this historical struggle played itself out in a number of key texts and moments, including "Adult Video News," the first adult video trade journal, the formation of Femme Productions by former adult film performer Candida Royalle, and the establishment and consequences of the Meese Commission in 1986, which attempted to shift the national discourse on pornography. Drawing on a wide variety of material, including newspapers, mainstream and adult magazines, industry publications, trade journals, interviews, and other discourses to locate this somewhat liminal history, I de-center the film text in favor of industrial histories and contexts. In doing so, this dissertation argues that the struggles to contain and regulate pleasure represent a primary entry point for situating adult video’s place in a larger history, not just of pornography, but media history as a whole.PhDScreen Arts & CulturesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/99760/1/alilunas_1.pd

Breaking Binaries: Transgressing Sexualities in Japanese Animation

As a visual medium that articulates all genres of fiction, from children’s card games to extreme pornography, Japanese animation, better known simply as ‘anime’, is an art form that has gained international recognition among both academics and passionate devotees. The central purpose of this thesis is to closely examine representations of sexuality in mainstream adult anime – in this context, non-pornographic anime primarily aimed at teenagers and adults – and to interrogate the main themes and concepts which are used to engage in discussions of it. Using specific anime titles as literary texts and thereby analysing the symbolism, characterisation, and key scenes being depicted, this thesis investigates the ways in which sexuality is portrayed, and how this portrayal through animation entails radically distinctive forms of representation and narrative. I also employ the current body of anime criticism to illuminate these anime titles, in conjunction with a contextualisation of these sexual representations within a Japanese cultural context. As an aid to analysis, I utilize the aesthetic philosophy of Robin George Collingwood and the gender theories of Judith Butler, whose arguments on the topics of art as artistic expression and on gender as a performative act respectively allow for both an exploration of the aesthetics of anime, as well as a means of navigating the often distinctively complex representations of sex and gender in anime. Both Collingwood and Butler have been chosen for their utility in opening up the highly aestheticized representations of gender and sexuality in anime – a medium well-known for its artistic sensibilities – combined with formalised and, at times, ritualised extremes. These are to be read as closely as possible in terms of the anime-ic art form itself, rather than in terms of psychoanalytic categories or abstract symbolism. The aim of this thesis is not to interpret anime through one or more specific conceptual lenses, as has been done in the past, but instead to critically examine what Collingwood calls the imaginative space, and to make observations based on Butler’s approach to gender and sexuality gender as it appears when no longer defined by biological or binary fact. This thesis is therefore structured around a breakdown of dualistic thought, with the main sections designed to transcend boundaries of dualism, even – or especially when – this requires the viewer to step back from what is considered as being ‘normal’ or ethically acceptable. In studying a form of popular art that has been written about extensively in terms of its history, aesthetic design, and audience consumption, this thesis explores new territory in that it examines a topic which has not previously been the subject of much academic discussion from the perspective of aesthetics that predates post-modern theory and post-World War II psychoanalysis. From harems and sexbots to portrayals of homosexuality and incest, the primary interest of this thesis is to study how representations of sexuality in anime – no matter how unconventional, fantastic, or disturbing – are brought to life on screen as art

Skyscraping Frontiers

As a space of extremes, the skyscraper has been continually constructed as an urban frontier in American cultural productions. Like its counterpart of the American wilderness, this vertical frontier serves as a privileged site for both subversion and excessive control. Beyond common metaphoric readings, this study models the skyscraper not only as a Foucauldian heterotopia, but also as a complex network of human and nonhuman actors while retracing its development from its initial assemblage during the 19th century to its steady evolution into a smart structure from the mid-20th century onward. It takes a close look at US-American literary and filmic fictions and the ways in which they sought to make sense of this extraordinary structure throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries. More traditional poststructuralist spatial theories are connected with concepts and methods of Actor-Network Theory in a compelling account of the skyscraper’s evolution as reflected in fictional media from early 20th-century short stories via a range of action, disaster and horror films to selected city novels of the 1990s and 2000s

Commodified Anatomies: Disposable Women in Postcolonial Narratives of Sexual Trafficking/Abduction

This dissertation explores postcolonial fiction that reflects the structural situation of a genocidal number of third-world women who are being trafficked for sexual purposes from postcolonial countries into the global north—invariably, gender, class and race play a crucial role in their exploitation. Above all, these women share a systemic disposability and invisibility, as the business relies on the victim’s illegality and criminality to generate maximum revenues. My research suggests that the presence of these abject women is not only recognized by ideological and repressive state apparatuses on every side of the trafficking scheme (in the form of governments, military establishments, juridical systems, transnational corporations, etc.) but is also understood as necessary for the current neoliberal model to thrive undisturbed by ethical imperatives. Beginning with the turn of the twentieth century, then, I analyze sexual slavery transnationally by looking at James Joyce’s “Eveline,” Therese Park’s A Gift of the Emperor, Mahasweta Devi’s “Douloti the Bountiful,” Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon, Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail, and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, concentrating on the political, economic, and social discourses in which the narratives are immersed through the lens of Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial theory. By interrogating these postcolonial narratives, my project reexamines the sex slave-trafficker-consumer triad in order to determine the effect of each party’s presence or absence from the text and the implications in terms of the discourses their representations may tacitly legitimize. At the same time, this work investigates the type of postcolonial stories the West privileges and the reasons, and the subjective role postcolonial theory plays in overcoming subaltern women’s exploitation within the current neocolonial context. Overall, I interrogate the role postcolonial literature plays as a means of achieving (or not) social change, analyze the purpose of artists in representing exploitative situations, identify the type of engagement readers have with these characters, and seek to understand audiences’ response to such literature. I look at authors who have attempted to discover fruitful avenues of expression for third-world women, who, despite increasingly constituting the bulk of the work force worldwide, continue to be exploited and, in the case of sex trafficking, brutally violated

Depressives and the Scenes of Queer Writing

My dissertation attempts to answer the question: What exactly does a reparative reading look like? The question refers to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick\u27s provocative essay on paranoid and reparative reading practices, in which Sedgwick describes how the hermeneutics of suspicion has become central to a whole range of intellectual projects across the humanities and social sciences. Criticizing this dominant critical mode for its political blindness and unintended replication of repressive social structures, Sedgwick looks for an alternative in what she calls reparative reading . Past attempts to expand on Sedgwick\u27s brief yet suggestive remarks regarding reparative reading have foundered due to a lack of critical language. My dissertation is an attempt to develop this language. Retiring the term reparative , I return to the figure of the depressive within the works of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein and experimental psychologist Silvan Tomkins, as well as Sedgwick herself, and trace the recursive contours of a depressive mode. I demonstrate how such a recursive mode is responsive to its own contingency and changing environment and how it offers alternatives to the normalizing teleologies and assumptions of paranoid critical practices. Experimental in form and method, my dissertation enacts the same depressive mode it purports to describe, ultimately locating the depressive within particular forms, or scenes, of queer writing

Homosexuality is a Poem: How Gay Poets Remodeled the Lyric, Community and the Ideology of Sex to Theorize a Gay Poetic

SourceURL:file://localhost/Users/christopherhennessy/Desktop/DISS/Dissertation_Hennessy._Final.doc This dissertation approaches the work of three canonical post-war gay poets in an effort to construct a discourse on sexuality and the minoritized writer that argues the lyric functions as a historically contingent, politically invested, value-laden genre in which some subjectivities might be prohibited from or find their expression made to signify in ways that re-inscribe oppression. The first chapter theorizes the possiblitites of a gay poetic and analyzes the gay poet’s subjectivity as one obsessed with the ways in which he is marginalized due to expression. In the chapter on Frank O’Hara, the poet is shown to disfigure the lyric through the unliterary to allow it to speak for the perverse. In the chapter on Jack Spicer, the poet’s concept of ‘we alone’ is shown to outmaneuver subjugating identificatory structures. The chapter on John Wieners shows how his queer failure frustrates the normative lyric’s reception to produce the very marginalizing the gay writer must resist. The final chapter analyzes the poetry published in the years following the beginning of “gay liberation” (1969-1973) and suggests some poets relied on lyric expressivity in their work; others sought to fashion a poetics that married graphic content with radical experimentation and thus produced a more politically and poetically complex liberationist text

The Anarchist Cinema

There has been only a minimal amount written in academic circles on the connections between political anarchism and cinema. Alan Lovell focuses on allegorical readings of films by Jean Vigo, Luis Bunuel, and Georges Franju. Richard Porton examines the historical representation of anarchists and their ideas. More recently, Nathan Jun lays out ideas for a proposed ‘cinema of liberation’. Yet these three writers, who provide the most notable attempts at wrestling with the subject, barely refer to one another. This means that there are disconnections in the areas of existing scholarly research, and it fails to fully analyse the complex series of relationships that exist between anarchism and film. My thesis attempts to address these gaps, and suggests ways in which anarchist theory can be used as a framework to inform our understanding of cinema as a cultural and industrial institution, and also provide an alternative process of reading and interpreting films. In analysing the dynamics between anarchist theory and film, it focuses on three key areas. Firstly, it considers the notion that cinema is an inherently anarchic space, based around fears of unruly (predominantly working class) audiences. Secondly, it attempts to delineate what the criteria for an anarchist film could be, by looking at a range of formal characteristics and content featured in a number of popular movies. And thirdly, it examines the place of grassroots and DIY filmmaking in the wider context of an anarchist cinema. My thesis finds the continuities that exist between radical film culture of the present and the past, and I propose that there is an innately anarchic undercurrent to several key aspects of cinematic culture. The thesis concludes by stressing the distinction that exists between film as a text, and cinema as a range of cultural activities. I propose that the ultimate embodiment of a study of an anarchist cinema should combine film analysis with that of an examination of cinema as a social and physical space. In turn, this can help us to consider the ways in which film and cinema may form part of a culture of resistance – one which fully articulates the concerns and questions surrounding anarchist political theory