Great Britain

Great War veteran David Jones's poem about the war, In Parenthesis, has been attacked by literary critics Paul Fussell and Evelyn Cobley on the grounds that the poem, usually read as an instance of "literature of protest" against the war, indicates Jones's ideological complicity with the war through its extensive allusions to heroic Celtic myth, British literature, and Catholic liturgy. This thesis argues that Jones's intricate allusive network represents a mythopoetic method of endurance, a way of making order amidst the chaos of the Western Front. Jones's mythopoetic method, which I call allusive "seeing," serves as both a psychological defense mechanism against the war's strangeness and horror and a protest against the perception that because of the industrial, unheroic nature of the Great War, the soldiers who fought and died in it cannot be considered heroes.

This thesis examines recent explanations of racial violence in the Los Angeles Riots of 1992, the Oldham Riots of 2001, the French Riots of 2005, and the racial violence of 1992 in Germany. In each case I outline traditional theories claiming that racial violence is caused by competition between ethnic groups for housing, jobs, and cultural identity. These theories may benefit from consideration of the historical elements that have institutionalized racial discrimination in the systematic processes of integration. In conclusion, I argue that the governmental mechanisms of integration; including citizenship models, context of state formation, immigration policy, and nationalist ideology, suggest that the framework of racial prejudice and ethnocentrism may predispose a society to racial conflict.