Academic literature on the topic 'DeLillo, Don - Criticism and interpretation'

This essay reads Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis as a novelization of social theories of time and space as expressed across various academic disciplines. Changing conceptions of time and space point to an underlying change in the social structure. I thus view DeLillo’s novel as social theory. Economist Jeremy Rifkin recently wrote, “[t]he great turning points in human history are often triggered by changing conceptions of space and time. Sometimes, the adoption of a single technology can be transformative in nature, changing the very way our minds filter the world” (89). Eric Packer lives in a world with a multitude of adopted new technologies. His reflections on language embody this mental filtering. Cyber-capital, and digitization in general, represent these new technologies. Packer’s desire to “live on a disc” (105), epitomizes the novel’s portrayal of changing conceptions of time and space. This paper thus explores expressions of the inadequacy of contemporary language under these “turning points in human history.” It demonstrates how statements on language reflect society’s mental filtering or changing orientation to time and space. Cosmopolis could be viewed as a redescription project.

While technological advancement and artistic creations have amazingly diversified the (re-)presentation of images, infinite image proliferation becomes an irresistible trend. To resist the subsuming power of the image-laden society, the renewed perceptions and interpretations of the image presentation are explored both in artistic presentation and in literary writing. Point Omega is a convergence of such an attempt. The paper explores how the time-featured image in Point Omega activates new idea, sensuous responses, and self-perception. Point Omega represents Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho which is an adaptation of Hitchcock’s Psycho. By reframing the running speed to two frames a second, Gordon drastically challenges the familiar recognition and interpretation. Writing about Gordon’s work, DeLillo stresses the emergence of various perceptions, imaginations, and association in the video-watching process. No longer resting on the cultural critique on the media society as what has been done in his earlier works, DeLillo marks time as the prominent variable for the emergence of the new and the unknown. Moreover, DeLillo’s image representation highlights the physical condition which is both an essential feature of Gordon’s video installation and the hinge for DeLillo’s distinct writing. For one thing, the emergence of the new and the unthought lies in the interweaving between the spectator’s awareness and imagination of the physicality and his responses to the reframed image. For another, the physicality of the time-reframed image resonates with the desert underscored in the main story. In the story, DeLillo contends about the relation between the time-featured space and the transient self. The desert mirroring the time-featured image renders the distinctive conditions for different self-perception. Hence, the image representation in Point Omega proffers the condition for the unexpected and unthought, reconfigures the selfhood, and, significantly, enacts the alternative writing which trespasses from the filmic to the fictional, from the visual to the verbal.

The interrelationship of natural and cultural history in Don DeLillo’s Underworld presents an ecology of mimesis. If, as Timothy Morton argues, ecological thought can be understood as a “mesh of interconnection,” DeLillo’s novel studies the interpretation of connection. Underworld situates its action in the Cold War era. DeLillo’s formal techniques examine the tropes of paranoia, containment, excess, and waste peculiar to the history of the Cold War. Parataxis and free-indirect discourse emphasize the contexts of reference in the novel, illustrating how hermeneutics informs the significance of boundaries. DeLillo’s use of parataxis exemplifies the conditions that propose and limit metaphor’s reference to reality, conditions that offer the terms for meaningful action. I utilize Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics to demonstrate how Underworld situates the reference to reality in its temporal and narrative condition. The historical situation of the novel’s narrative structure allows DeLillo to interrogate the role of discourse in producing and interpreting connection. Underworld offers layers of significance; the reader’s engagement with the novel’s discourse reaffirms the conditions of a meaningful relationship with reality in the pertinence of a metaphor.

Considering the recent critical perspectives on the fictions of the late 1990s, the paper interprets the narrative structure and the construction of the networks of time in the novel Underworld by Don DeLillo. Reviewing the dominant theoretical frames for the interpretation of history and narrative, historiographic metafiction proposed by Linda Hutcheon and the postmodern understanding of history as a collage of elements by Frederic Jameson, the paper examines the ideas of structuring the time in narrative from the perspective of now. Timeframe is thus interpreted as a sequence of present moments designed, recorded and repurposed as “future past moments” defined by the process of archive fever and the accelerated recontextualization of the ‘snapshots’, characters and historical figures. We propose that the idea of this structure is to bring light to seeing history as a series of contingencies rather than a teleological sequence with a predesigned outcome, and to emphasize the view on the past as a series of accidental nows. To illustrate these points the paper analyses the positioning in the structure of the narrative of the two key motifs of the novel, the baseball and the character of J. Edgar Hoover.

ABSTRACT In a recent essay, Carolyn Abbate argues for a ““drastic”” rather than ““gnostic”” conception of music and would want to see musicology's efforts redirected accordingly. In the wake of the 1985 call by Joseph Kerman urging musicologists to shift their attention from ““positivism”” and ““formalism”” to ““criticism”” or ““hermeneutics””——that is, to musicology centered on interpretation——Abbate issues a call for a new disciplinary revolution, one that would shift our attention from works to performances and thus undo what she perceives as the fatal weakness in Kerman's position. When we ignore the actually made and experienced sounding event in favor of the disembodied abstraction that is the work, we bypass the sensuous, audible, immediate experience (the ““drastic””) and put in its place the intellectual, supra-audible, mediated (that is, interpreted) meaning (the ““gnostic””) and thus avoid what is of real value in music——the experience, the powerful physical and spiritual impact it may have on us. While I am in fundamental sympathy with Abbate's arguments and aims, I believe that the opposition between the real performance and the imaginary work——the former the object of immediate, sensuous experience, the latter the vehicle of mediated (that is, interpreted, ““hermeneutic””) intellectual meaning——on which her argument rests is overdrawn: The hermeneutic element cannot be wholly banished from the arena of performance; there is no such thing as pure experience, uncontaminated by interpretation.

El presente artículo pretende proporcionar un contexto hermenéutico adecuado a la interpretación que Harold Bloom hizo de Don Quijote en un capítulo sobre Cervantes de The Western Canon (1994). La generalizada recepción negativa que este libro ha tenido en ámbito hispano, en gran medida debido a la denunciada (des)atención del crítico norteamericano hacia las literaturas hispanas, ha provocado una paralela (des)atención de la crítica hispana hacia un ensayo que, sin suponer una contribución decisiva al cervantismo filológico, constituye un valioso juicio implícito sobre el sentido de lo literario. De acuerdo con este juicio, la gran literatura o es violenta inscripción de autoridad o es melancólico duelo ante la defección de la violencia autorial, duelo que con frecuencia adopta la forma de venganza crítica en forma de arbitraje. El presente artículo pretende, pues, situar el ensayo sobre Cervantes en el contexto amplio de toda la producción crítica de Bloom. Dicha contextualización arroja luz tanto sobre la continuidad desconstructiva de la mirada crítica de Bloom como sobre la naturaleza irrenunciablemente anómala del texto cervantino. This article aims to provide an appropriate hermeneutic context to Harold Bloom's interpretation of Cervantes' ​​Don Quixote in a chapter of The Western Canon (1994). The widespread negative reception this book has had in the Hispanic scope, largely due to the reported (un)attention of the American critic to Hispanic literature, has led to a parallel (dis)attention of Hispanic criticism to an essay that, without being a decisive contribution to philological cervantism, provides a useful implicit judgment about the meaning of literature. According to this view, great literature is either violent inscription of authority, or melancholic clash at the defection of authorial violence, a duel that takes often the form of critical vengeance as arbitration. This article therefore aims to situate the essay on Cervantes in the broader context of all critical production by Bloom. Such contextualization sheds light on both deconstructive continuity of Bloom's critical gaze and the undeniably anomalous nature of Cervantes' text.

AbstractThis paper reviews Louw’s (1993 and subsequent publications) deployment of reference corpora in the light of existing philosophical and linguistic milestones when it comes to the notion of the truthfulness of a proposition. Louw (William Ernest. 1993. Irony in the text or insincerity in the writer? The diagnostic potential of semantic prosodies. In Mona Baker, Gill Francis & Elena Tognini-Bonelli (eds.), Text and technology: In honour of John Sinclair, 152–176. Amsterdam: John Benjamins) resorts to reference corpora in order either to explicate a rhetorical device (in Louw 1993, that of irony) or to attempt to reveal the true attitude of the speaker to his/her own proposition (including instances of insincerity). Using two methods (co-selection and wildcarding), an author’s collocational patterns in context are checked against those in the reference corpus, also in context. The frequent lexical variables of grammar strings are taken to represent that string’s corpus-derived subtext. Recently, Louw’s Contextual Prosodic Theory (CPT) has revealed the mechanism of prospection, whereby the grammatical pattern in the first line of a poem anticipates by its most frequent lexical collocates the themes in the remainder of the poem (Louw, Bill & Milojkovic, Marija. 2016. Corpus stylistics as contextual prosodic theory and subtext, 176–183. Amsterdam: John Benjamins). The philosophical background of Louw’s CPT is the works of Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein (Louw, William Ernest. 2010a. Collocation as instrumentation for meaning: A scientific fact. In Willie van Peer, Vander Viana & Sonia Zyngier (eds.), Literary education and digital learning: methods and technologies for humanities studies, 79–101. Hershey, PA: IGI Global and subsequent works) and could be said to be in need of further explanation and illustration. The paper discusses Louw’s take on insincerity (1993) as the speaker’s attitude to the truthfulness of her own statement from the point of view of Frege’s Sinn/Bedeutung distinction, Russell’s logical language, and Wittgenstein’s attitude to the relationship between language and reality. Since prospection may be considered objective proof of the effectiveness of Louw’s approach, an instance of prospection from a poem by Brodsky is used to show that Wittgenstein’s concern for the truthfulness of propositions may be viewed as both the guarantor and the beneficiary of Louw’s views. Additionally, the paper presents an example of prospection in the first line of a novel, Don DeLillo’s White Noise. However, other grammatical patterns in the passage studied in this paper do not contain deviations from the corpus norm, which conforms to the existing commentary on DeLillo in the field of literary criticism. The paper concludes by stating that reference corpora used inductively (Louw, William Ernest. 2017. Uneasy humour as discovery: Collocation and empathy as Whewellian consilience. Studying Humour: International Journal 4) may shed light on the speaker’s attitude to the truthfulness of their own statement.

La interpretación pan-europea de la personalidad de don Quijote empezó y siguió por todo el XVII enfocada en la comicidad de su locura, pero con el paso de los siglos ha vivido distintas etapas que reflejan las preocupaciones de las culturas que lo consideran hijo suyo. Los existencialistas del XX, herederos de la exaltación romántica del rebelde individualista, lo veían cuerdo, un modelo moral para imitar en una sociedad corrupta, a pesar de que Cervantes, y con él la crítica historicista, ponía hincapié en la resequedad de su cerebro. En el XXI el posmodernismo, inmerso en rápidos cambios mundiales, lo considera un actor que astutamente transforma su personalidad según las circunstancias. Madame d’Aulnoy, aristócrata de la corte de Louis XIV, conocía bien el Quijote y vivió un tiempo en España, pero empezó a escribir una historia de marco para una colección de sus cuentos de hadas con el típico desprecio de su clase por un burgués de sueños caballerescos que ambiciona colarse entre los ‘bien nacidos’. Sin embargo, ella no pudo dejar de percibir las similitudes entre este y su propia situación como forjadora de historias fantásticas, y decide que su protagonista va a triunfar. Dando fin a la novela desde una auténtica perspectiva cervantina de haz y envés, se deja llevar, si bien a regañadientes, por el soñador que se imagina un mundo menos exigente. The pan-European interpretation of Don Quixote’s personality began, and continued to be throughout the 17th century, focused on his comical madness, but with the passing of the centuries that view has shifted to various alternatives that reflect the concerns of the cultures that consider him theirs. 20th-century existentialists, heirs to the Romantic exaltation of individualist rebels, saw him as sane, a moral model to be imitated in a corrupt society, in spite of the fact that Cervantes, and with him historicist criticism, stressed that his brain had dried up. In the 21st century postmodernism, caught up in rapid worldwide changes, consider him an actor who cleverly transforms his personality to fit the circumstances. Madame d’Aulnoy, an aristocrat at the court of Louis XIV, knew Don Quixote well and lived for a time in Spain, but still she began to write a frame story for a collection of her fairytales with typically upper-class scorn for a bourgeois with chivalric dreams whose ambition is to be accepted among the ‘well born,’ and so she decides to have her main character win out. Writing an end to the novel from an authentically Cervantine perspective of seeing both sides of the coin, she lets herself be carried away, even though she fights against it, by the dreamer who imagines a less demanding world.

In 2016 during the inventory and transportation of the archaeological finds from temporary archaeological storage at Pheophania to the present-day storage facility of the Institute of Archaeology, the materials of the excavations of the expeditions of 1980 and 1985 were selected and processed. The excavations and surveys were conducted by expeditions under the lead of O. G. Shaposhnikova and D. Ya. Telehin on the territory of the Starobilsk district of the Luhansk region. The surveys in 1980 were conducted at only two locations located close to each other — the settlements of Aidar-Bila and Pidhorivka. Aydar-Bila. Because the location plan is missing (it is also missing from the 1986 report), it was not possible to locate the settlement on the map. However, it can be assumed that the multilayered settlement of Aydar-Bila is located in the eastern part of the village Pidhorivka of the Starobilsk district of the Lugansk region, on the low floodplain terrace of the right bank of the river Bila (the right tributary of the Aydar river). At the location of the settlement, the width of the valley of both rivers is 2.23 km. In 1986, additional research was conducted and the site was named Hyrlo Biloyi. In fact, this name is more common and widely used in the scientific literature. The settlement is multilayered, as indicated by the code on the finds. The largest number of finds is associated with layer 4. Given the vertical distribution of the finds, it can be assumed that there are at least three episodes of occupation in the history of the settlement, two of which, given the peculiarities of the finds, occurred in the Neolithic Period and one in the Late Bronze Age. Pidhorivka. The multilayered settlement of Pidhorivka is located on the off-shore terrace of the right bank of the Aydar River, at the point where the coast recedes to the west, thus forming a sufficiently wide floodplain, on which the depressions of the old-aged lakes are noticeable. In total, about 10 different settlements were found within the specified floodplain, 5 of which are known from the research of S. O. Loktushev in 1939. In 1963, the Pidhorivka settlement was investigated by V. M. Gladilin, however, no report or publication on the results of the research appeared, as correctly pointed out by Y. G. Gurin in 1998. It is only known that the expedition V. M. Gladilin cleaned up the coastline of the Aydar River, where the Neolithic materials were discovered. Some findings revealed by the expedition led by V. M. Gladilin appear in the monograph V. M. Danilenko as an example of the material culture of the Azov culture he identified. In 1980, the expedition of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR under the direction of O. G. Shaposhnikova laid out an excavation area on the Pidhorivka settlement. The results of these studies are unknown (missing report, field documentation, and findings). In the same year an expedition led by D. Y. Telegin excavated a trench with a total area of 5 m2. Later (in 1984), the site was explored by an expedition under the general guidance of K. I. Krasilnikov and Y. G. Gurin. The total number of findings revealed as a result of the research by O. G. Shaposhnikova reached 295 units. The material analysis demonstrates the settlement is multi-layered. The upper horizons with the Middle and Late Bronze Age materials being the latest. In the conditional horizon of 0.8/0.9 m, a rather informative fragment of the Late Copper Age vessel was found, and at the same time, it is accompanied by a flint complex, which has the appearance of the Early Copper Age or Neolithic. The artifacts found in the conditional horizons of 0.9/1.0—1.1/1.2 m appear to be relatively «pure» in that the cultural and chronological terms clearly define their affiliation with the Early Neolithic Period and allow them to be associated with the Lower Don culture/Nizhnedonska culture of the Mariupol Cultural and Historical Area. At the same time, the presence of earlier artifacts, such as a conical single-platform core and multiple-truncated burin, makes one more cautious to interpret the complexes. Both the core and the burin look more logical in the flint complexes of the lower horizons of the site. In this sense, it is important to pay attention to the description of the stratigraphic section of the excavation area 2 of the settlement Pidhorivka, presented by Y. G. Gurin in a monograph about the Early Copper age sites of the Siversky Donets Basin. It states that, at a depth of 1.7/2.0 m and below, the layer of floodplain alluvium contains «Mesolithic materials». Y. G. Gurin did not publish the materials themselves that he claimed were from the Mesolithic era. In 2006, O. F. Gorelik issued a publication dedicated to the interpretation of the materials of the lower layer of Pidhorivka. In this work, he linked the affiliation of the flint complex with the early stage of Donetsk culture, and considered the site one of the centers of the Mesolithic industries with the yanishlavitsa type of projectile points. This conclusion is based on the similarity of the materials of the lower layer of Pidhoryvka with the flint complex of the site Shevchenko hamlet, one of the features of which is the presence of a yanislavitsa type of projectile point. In 1999, the materials of the site Zelena Hornitsa 5 were published, which is located on the second floodplain terrace of the lake on the left bank of the Siversky Donets River. In the material culture of this site, even if there are multiple elements, they in no way affect the overall situation. The complex of projectile points of the site consists of trapezes, a yanislavitsa type, points with truncated edges, and so on. The presence of the collapse of the stucco vessel along with these flint products, gave rise to criticism of the idea of O. F. Gorelik about the Mesolithic character of complexes with a yanislavitsa type of projectile points. Later V. O. Manko, in a more detailed form, questioned the theory of O. F. Gorelik. To the present day we can state that there has been some stagnation in this issue. The surveys in 1985 were conducted at the valley of Aidar river from v. Lyman to v. Losovivka. In this area, sites lots have been found, which in chronological terms date back to the Paleolithic—Medieval times. For this reason, we believe that the introduction into scientific circulation of even a small amount of archaeological materials, allows the creation of a more complete picture of the processes that took place in the basin of the middle stream of the Siversky Donets River during the Neolithic—Copper Age.

Criticism of Michael Herr’s Dispatches (2015) and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) can be divided into two mainstream interpretations. On the one hand, they are both marked as psychic trauma texts. Herr’s writing of Dispatches can be read as a therapeutic process that allows him to deal with his trauma experienced as a war correspondent during the Vietnam War. The intimate and domestic trauma in DeLillo’s Falling Man focuses on the disconnected lives of a couple and their child in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center. On the other hand, critics have aligned each text with the national trauma narrative. This article aligns itself with the latter interpretation. I propose, through a postmodern reading, that the national trauma narrated in both Dispatches and Falling Man is an example of Lyotard’s “incredulity toward metanarratives” (xxix). I argue that both texts represent the failure of the metanarrative of American Exceptionalism; the ideology that defines the essence of America as the embodiment of “supremacy” and “power”. Narrative fails in each text when the nature of each conflict deconstructs this metanarrative of national identity. This deconstruction arises from the way conflict appears to alienate Herr as author, and DeLillo’s characters from preconceived notions of knowledge. As a result of this, both authors explore the fictive nature of the human condition to present the national trauma caused by each conflict.

By tracking the intersection of contemporary fiction and the information technologies of the digital age, this thesis argues that the narratives being produced over the past ten years have evolved into a distinct genre of literature, one where the aesthetics of fragmentation and postmodern uncertainty must confront the new realities of a digitally saturated culture and society. In order to demonstrate this alteration in contemporary fiction, this thesis considers novels written within the past ten years that reflect on this new form of textuality, namely Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003) and David Eggers’ The Circle (2013). These texts demonstrate a paradigm shift in contemporary literature, a new kind of fiction in which American society, culture, economics, and politics, are all directly affected by various forms of digital mediatisation. These authors reflect an altered cultural zeitgeist within their fiction—writings which can be differentiated from the postmodern literary aesthetic—prompted by neoteric digital technologies coupled with the ubiquitous nature of the Internet. Although this topic is broad and covers multiple fields of scholarly interests, my thesis nonetheless concerns itself with a very specific line of questioning: will our authors have the imaginative wherewithal and social sensitivity to keep pace with changes brought forth by the explosion of information technologies? If so, what type of fiction is likely to emerge from this new digital environment? By taking a focused approach and using contemporary literature as representative of these massive social, economic, and political transformations, my research recalls Kurt Vonnegut’s “Canary in the Coal Mine” dictum: the writer has always been the first to notice the dramatic effects of technology on the individual and the culture at large.

This is a study of the poetry of Don Maclennan in four chapters. Chapter One explores the poetry's deep involvement with the immediate world, and with the being that encounters it. Chapter Two examines the corpus's mistrust of abstract thought, and its suggestions for alternative ways of intepreting (or at least approaching an interpretation of) our existential situation. Chapter Three deals with Maclennan's writing on the subject of death, while the final chapter looks at the response of the poetry to the fact of death: put simply, this is to learn to love the situation we are in, and to record our thoughts for future generations, thus reaching beyond death to share with others the necessarily unique experience of our one and only life.

Spectacles of justice preoccupy contemporary American culture. Legal culture---including the Watergate trials, the Lewinsky scandal, and OJ Simpson's trial for alleged murder---assumes a central place in the American imaginary. Configurations of the law are not limited to media reportage and televised docudramas. Nor are arbitrations confined to law faculties and the spaces of formal courts. Working through depictions of due process in different ways and in different zones, contemporary American writers point up the prevalence of legality in everyday life. Whether on college campuses, in TV studios and suburban homes, or at theatres and racetracks, justice mediates interpersonal relations. Personal narratives proliferate as modes of self-justification. Everyone has a right to represent her side of a story. As interpretations of reality, however, none of these stories can claim absolute justness. No one has a monopoly on the law or victimhood.
This dissertation inspects how Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo, and Jane Smiley present the inconsistencies of the law. These American novelists emplot global escapes into their work as a means to inform notions of liberty and jurisprudence. For these writers, freedom requires the recognition of contradictory---and unanticipated---narratives. "Justice Theory" emerges where media, gambling, performance, and suburban studies intersect with ethics, globalism, and narratology. In Franzen's novel The Corrections and essay collection How to Be Alone, self-validation requires the appreciation of the stories of others. In DeLillo's later works, particularly the plays The Day Room and Valparaiso, justice materializes in terms of isolation and the will to alter personal stories. For Smiley, as construed in her long novels The Greenlanders and Horse Heaven, dynamic responsive actions attend risky, unpredictable encounters in competitive milieus like the racetrack. These authors reveal that executions of justice and the perpetration of injustice involve varied consequences. The law is not only about punishment and recompense. Rather, legality directs the consequences of its applications toward the ideal of justice, which evolves alongside the subjects that it serves and the stories that they relate.

Orientador: Marcos Antônio Siscar
Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem
Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-23T15:09:48Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Santucci_IsabellaCristinaStangherlin_M.pdf: 1947248 bytes, checksum: a55952ad63ed1c55a1055229aa8d2f54 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013
Resumo: Em 1789 um novo século se impôs ao mundo. Das Luzes à Escuridão, o homem francês tornou-se apenas homem. O medo, o silêncio e o tédio invadiam o coração de uma sociedade. O sublime, ou o grotesco, como diria Victor Hugo, inevitavelmente levaria a outra revolução. Na política, nos costumes, nas artes, o novo urgia por eclodir. Nesse cenário, Stendhal, homem, crítico e escritor de seu tempo, quer-se portador de uma reviravolta nunca antes concebida. Quer, assim, olhar para sua nação e refletir através do reino das palavras o que nela encontrava. Quer, da mesma maneira, retratar a alma de seus contemporâneos, ávida de emoções e de algo que há muito a França desconhecia, o amor-paixão. Para tanto, decide exumar como herói o demônio das terras do midi, o transgressor por natureza, o amante indomável, Don Juan. A presente dissertação, diante desse fato, tem por escopo a análise dessa figura que se torna central na produção romanesca do autor ao se transfigurar em miroir de um século e de uma nação pós-revolucionários. E nesse percurso, passando pelos diversos modelos de Don Juan da história literária pelo próprio Stendhal relembrados e criticados, observaremos de que maneira se constituiu seu ideal de Romantismo, o Beau moderne, em meio à incessante busca por um herói verdadeiro
Abstract: In 1789, a new century imposed itself on the world. From Light to Darkness, the French man became just a man. Fear, silence and boredom invaded the heart of a society. The sublime, or the grotesque, as would say Victor Hugo, nothing else could provoke but the revolution. In politics, in mores, in arts, the new urged to hatch. In this scenario, Stendhal, man, critic and writer of his time, wants to hold a twist never before conceived. He wants, then, to look to his nation and reflect through the realm of words that which he could find in it. He wants, in the same way, to portray the soul of his contemporaries, eager for emotions and of something that remained unknown to France for a long time, love-passion. Therefore, Stendhal decides to exhume as hero the devil of midi's land, the transgressor by nature, the untamed lover, Don Juan. This thesis, in the face of this fact, has as its goal the analysis of this figure that became central in Stendhal's novelistic work as he is transfigured in miroir of a century and of a post-revolutionary nation. And along this path, passing through many different Don Juans of literary history, remembered and criticized by Stendhal, we will observe how it has constituted his ideal of Romanticism, the Beau moderne, amid the ceaseless quest for a true hero
Mestrado
Historia e Historiografia Literaria
Mestra em Teoria e História Literária

Né en 1630, sous la plume du moine espagnol Tirso de Molina, le personnage de Don Juan n'a cessé d'inspirer les auteurs, au point de devenir un véritable mythe littéraire. On ne saurait, désormais, l'évoquer sans mentionner quelques œuvres majeures, telles que le Dom Juan de Molière ou le Don Giovanni de Mozart. S'il est difficile de trouver, au 20ème siècle, des réécritures du scénario mythique susceptibles de rivaliser avec ces illustres noms, il est indéniable que ce dernier demeure productif. La France offre, à elle seule, des preuves de cette vitalité. En effet, l'histoire de Don Juan continue à inspirer les auteurs. Elle semble même avoir conquis de nouveaux genres littéraires : longtemps cantonné au théâtre, c'est, pourtant, dans le genre romanesque que le héros mythique trouve actuellement ses traitements les plus originaux.Mais ces réécritures littéraires sont enrichies, au 20ème siècle, par deux apports fondamentaux. La critique, tout d'abord, qui multiplie les angles d'approche sur le mythe et entretient, à son tour, un dialogue fertile avec les œuvres de fiction. Cette dimension réflexive renouvelle considérablement le regard porté sur la fable donjuanesque. Le cinéma, ensuite, qui, en s'emparant du mythe, en propose de nouvelles lectures. Cependant, cette productivité ne doit pas occulter un constat : pour s'adapter à notre époque, le canevas mythique a souffert de nombreuses modifications. Ces dernières sont-elles la preuve de la plasticité du mythe et la garantie de sa survie ou, au contraire, des étapes pouvant aboutir à sa déconstruction ? Il importera de se demander, en définitive, si Don Juan ne risque pas d'être victime de la fascination qu'il inspire.

Part 1: ‘True Receivers': Rilke and the Contemporary Poetics of Listening In this part of this thesis I argue that a contemporary ‘poetics of listening' has emerged in the UK, and explore the writing of three of our most significant poets - John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie and Don Paterson - to find out why they have become interested in the idea of the poet as a ‘listener'. I suggest that the appeal of this listening stance accounts for their engagement with the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, who thought of himself as a listening ‘receiver'; it is proposed that Rilke's notion of ‘receivership' and the way his poems relate to the earthly (or the ‘non-human') also account for the general ‘intensification' of interest in his work. An exploration of the shifting status of listening provides context for this study, and I pay particular attention to the way innovations in audio and communications technology influenced Rilke's late sequences the Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus. A connection is made between Rilke's ‘listening poetics' and the ‘listening' stance of Ted Hughes and Edward Thomas; this establishes a ‘listening lineage' for the contemporary poets considered in the thesis. I also suggest that there are intriguing similarities between the ideas of listening that are emerging in contemporary poetics and Hélène Cixous' concept of ‘écriture féminine'. Exploring these similarities helps us to understand the implications of the stance of the poet-listener, which is a counter to the idea that as a writer you must ‘find your voice'. Finally, it is proposed that ‘a poetics of listening' would benefit from an enriched taxonomy. Part 2 of the thesis is a collection of my poems entitled ‘Small Weather'.

Rethinking the Dualism: Don DeLillo's White Noise and the Ecocritical Possibilities of the Nature/Culture Mix questions current applications of ecocriticism and offers that these applications are inadequate in dealing with the perceived nature/culture dualism. This thesis suggests that ecocritics need to stop thinking in dualistic terms, but instead must consider that the separation between nature and culture is an illusion created by the postmodern culture. Don DeLillo's White Noise, then, is used to illustrate the possibilities of rethinking the relationship between nature and culture. DeLillo exposes the illusion of the dualism by constantly implicating humans in the alteration of nature and, despite humans' attempts to live within the illusory dualism by controlling nature through tecimology, by revealing that man's efforts will always fail through unintended consequences. This thesis culminates by proposing that considering nature and culture as connected entities that constantly reshape each other will absorb dualistic thinking and provide opportunities for ecocritics to expose truths that are vital to fueling the desire to alter destructive relationships between nature and culture.
Graduation date: 2004