Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2017, Popular Culture

Kenya boasts of its high production of popular culture materials. Music, TV shows, movies, popular fiction and now, in this social media age, memes, GIFs and short video clips. All these are tailored to respond to the prevailing social, economic and political conditions in the country. While they are mostly humorous and entertaining, the primary goal of many of these popular culture artefacts is to critique contemporary Kenya. Despite its consumption though, popular culture has remained highly undervalued and unappreciated as a tool for cultural, social and political transformation. Many Kenyans consume popular culture texts solely for entertainment purposes. Popular fiction, since it is studied and examined in Kenya's exam-oriented schools, is arguably the only form of popular culture that is seen as a means to an end – passing one's exams. This end however, is hardly what authors usually have in mind when they produce the texts, considering their contents. This thesis examines Kidagaa Kimemwozea, a Swahili novel by Ken Walibora, as a representation and critique of postcolonial Kenya's social, cultural and political situation. Exploring the political leadership of postcolonial Kenya, class dynamics and relations as well as gender issues, I argue that Walibora's novel does not only expose the Kenyan bourgeoisie's cunningness in their oppression of the proletarians and the male ruse to dominate their female counterparts, but it also proposes excellent paths of emancipation for the proletarians and women, and should thus be given scholarly attention.

Committee: Jeremy Wallach Dr. (Advisor); Esther Clinton Dr. (Committee Member); Kristen Rudisill Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: African Literature; Literature

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2015, French, Italian, and Classical Studies

This thesis, composed in French, explores the use of bourgeois urban space in two novels of Emile Zola's Les Rougon-Macquart. Specifically, by situating these works in the context of Zola's moralistic naturalism, this paper examines the ways that the author uses literary techniques to effect an imbrication of the spatial and the social, and analyses how these instances of hybridity take on critical weight. While the main focus of this study is on the attention given to descriptions of space and to characters' interactions with it, Zola's use of rhetorical strategies, including but not limited to metaphor and metonymy, also undergoes close inspection. In addition to current scholarship on Zola, the theoretical framework developed in this thesis comprises seminal works on the philosophy of space, most notably Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia. Having elucidated the the methods by which Zola simultaneously depicts and critiques the socio-spatial evolutions of the Second Empire, the conclusion illustrates the contemporaneity of his assessments of urban space.

Committee: Jonathan Strauss (Advisor); Elisabeth Hodges (Committee Member); Anna Klosowska (Committee Member) Subjects: Cultural Anthropology; European Studies; Gender Studies; Labor Economics; Modern History; Modern Literature; Philosophy; Rhetoric; Science History; Social Structure; Urban Planning