Rites of passage: Studies in literature, film and culture from 1950 to the present.
详细信息
- 作者：O'Rourke ; Kathryn Mercedes.
- 学历：Doctor
- 年：2003
- 导师：Axelrod, Steven Gould
- 毕业院校：University of California
- 专业：Literature, Modern.;Women's Studies.;Literature, American.;Cinema.
- ISBN：9780496572052
- CBH：3109664
- Country：USA
- 语种：English
- FileSize：18021458
- Pages：290
文摘
This dissertation studies the problem of initiation rites in modern Anglo-American literature and film. Part One notes the importance of such rites in non-industrial societies, as described by anthropologists Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner, and establishes the need shown by modern novelists, J. D. Salinger and Sylvia Plath, for such rites in The Catcher in the Rye and in The Bell Jar. In Part Two, the dissertation discusses mid-twentieth-century plays by male playwrights: Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, and Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, and the struggles that they show post-adolescent male initiates facing. This section concludes by examining the late twentieth-century Billy Bob Thornton film, Sling Blade, which shows that those struggles have not become any easier over time.;Part Three focuses on problems involved with women's rites of passage in modern patriarchal society, first in the poetry and life of Sylvia Plath, then in the conservative fantasies of Robin McKinley's The Hero and the Crown and Charles Shyer and Nancy Meyers' film Baby Boom , and finally, in the more progressive alternative scenarios provided in Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time and Fly Away Home, Doris Lessing's The Summer Before the Dark and Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Trees.;This dissertation examines the lack of deeply meaningful rites of passage in modern society, and the way that this lack causes people to continue to have identity crises long after reaching physical maturity. In this study, I speculate on the reasons for the lack of authentic rites of passage in industrial society. I also show that modern rites in literature are frequently conducted not within the society as a whole, but within the nuclear family. Interestingly, both male and female initiates usually separate from "society" by engaging in an emotional struggle with their fathers or father surrogates.;Finally, this dissertation argues that modern writers tend to show the pitfalls of reintegration back into patriarchal society and that some of the writers see the need to create smaller, communitarian subsets of the larger society into which initiates can reintegrate with integrity.