[Sample B: Approval/Signature Sheet] - George Mason University

This dissertation will delve into this “mazelike complexity” by examining the
contested details of Oswald’s life. There is a huge amount of material on the
assassination of John F. Kennedy, but there is no cultural history focusing on popular
portrayals of Oswald. This study will not make an exhaustive study of all these works
nor will it try to answer the question of who killed Kennedy. The forensic and other
evidence related to the assassination will not be discussed, except as it relates to how
Oswald is portrayed. Instead, this study will focus on some of the key works by the
critics and supporters of the Warren Commission, works by important literary figures
(Norman Mailer and Don De Lillo), and popular television shows and movies that portray
Oswald (including The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald, The Men Who Killed Kennedy, JFK,
and Ruby). This study will cover all the important types of Oswald portrayals, and
examine what these different interpretations can tell us about American culture in the
decades after the assassination.
In examining Oswald’s life, this study will cast a wide net over different genres,
examining popular journalistic books and exposés about the assassination, as well as
novels, films, and television shows from the time of the Warren Commission to the
present. Works of culture are “texts” that have shaped public attitudes about the
assassination. The official version of Lee Harvey Oswald’s life as described by the
Warren Commission and its defenders will be compared with alternative cultural
portrayals of the alleged assassin. The ideas of cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz,
have relevance to historians of culture. In his words, “Believing…man is an animal
suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs,
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