Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Imagining A Home For Us: Representations Of Queer Families In Contemporary Japanese Literature, Patrick Carland

Masters Theses

This thesis addresses popular works of fiction written or produced near or after 1989 in Japan and examines the roles that sexual orientation, gender and 20^th century social and discursive history have had on the conceptualization of familial relations in postwar Japan. This thesis will analyze the means by which writers and artists during the 1980s and 1990s have engaged discourses of family in their works and will argue that these writers explicitly use queer (hereby defined as non-heterosexual and/or non-gender conforming) individuals and narratives to question, reshape and propose alternatives to culturally received images of heterosexual marriage and …

Dialects Into Films----The Element Of “Dialect” In Chinese Films, Shun Yao

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

In recent years, using dialects in Chinese films has become more and more popular. By observing this phenomenon and investigating its history, I find out three functions that dialect has in cinema: severing as fun maker, indicating the identity of the speaker, helping to describe the speaker’s characteristics.

In order to understand why dialects have these functions in cinema, semiotic analysis and discourse analysis are employed in finding the reasons.