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Duggan, Lucy. "Reading the city : Prague in Czech and Czech-German narrative fiction since 1989." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:3827cf9c-fa91-4fb5-aa7e-8942de885729.
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In the course of its history, Prague has been the site of many significant cultural confrontations and conversations. From the medieval chronicle of Cosmas to the work of contemporary writers, the city has taken shape in literature as a multivalent space where identities are constructed and questioned. The evolution of Prague's literary significance has taken place in an intercultural context: both Czech-speaking and German-speaking writers have engaged with the city and its past, and their texts have interacted with each other. The city has played a central part in many collective narratives in which myth, history and literature intertwine. Looking at contemporary prose fiction written in both Czech and German, this thesis explores continuities and contrasts in the literary roles played by Prague. It analyses two German-speaking emigrant authors, Libuše Moníková (1945-1998) and Jan Faktor (1951- ), viewing them alongside three Czech writers, Jáchym Topol (1962- ), Daniela Hodrová (1946- ), and Michal Ajvaz (1949- ). Through close readings of eight texts, the thesis approaches the imagined city from four angles. It discusses how contemporary authors portray the search for meaning in the city by imagining Prague as two contrasting realms (the 'real' city and the 'other' city), how the discontinuities of the city are reflected by the fragmentation of the authorial stance, how these authors assemble new Prague myths from the vestiges of older topoi, and how they confront the contradictory urges to uphold the boundaries of the city and to transgress them. In post-1989 Prague, authors explore the unstable spaces between continuity and discontinuity, constructing an authorial ethos in these areas of tension.
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Dueck, Cheryl E. "Rifts in time and in the self : two generations of GDR women writers and the development of the female subject (Christa Wolf, Brigitte Reimann, Helga Künigsdorf, Helga Schubert)." Thesis, McGill University, 1999. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=35875.
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This dissertation examines the development of the female literary subject in the work of two generations of women writers of the GDR, represented by Christa Wolf (1929), Brigitte Reimann (1931--1973), Helga Konigsdorf (1936) and Helga Schubert (1941). The objectives are twofold: first, to assess the influence of two opposing discursive frameworks of subjectivity, the socialist and the psychoanalytic, on the works of these writers, and second, to examine the effects of an ideological disjuncture of two generations on their literary production.The first generation to embark on a literary career in the GDR, with great aspirations for the socialist project, is represented by Wolf and Reimann. A shift in political parameters meant that the following generation of writers, including Konigsdorf and Schubert, was faced with a pre-determined ideological structure, unsatisfactory to them. Accordingly, a diachronic investigation of the literary subject is pursued, and reveals the shift between these generations. As a result, rifts in time, in the subject, and rifts between the subject and its time are exposed.
In the 1960s, Wolf and Reimann rejected the literary female subject's role as an agent in the implementation of socialism. Crises in GDR social structures and crises of the psyche are shown to overlap and to result in divided subjects. The non-contemporaneity of Marxism begins to surface in the 1970s, and the rift in time affects the female subjects of Wolf and Reimann, which increasingly fragment Konigsdorf's and Schubert's short prose of the late 1970s reveals a rejection of the unified Marxist subject and the move toward a notion of the self informed by Freudian psychoanalysis. In the 1980s, the effects of the socio-political environment prove fatal to the individual subject in the works by both generations, and parallels are drawn to the National Socialist past. These links instigate a fundamental reevaluation of standards in language, power and cycles of history at the crossroads of life and death. The post-Wende period witnesses a shift away from problems of subjectivity in the texts of Konigsdorf and Schubert, while Wolf initially experiments with the postmodern, and most recently, surprisingly re-consolidates the female subject.
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Aston, Richard Michael. "The role of the fool and the carnivalesque in post-1945 German prose fiction on the Third Reich." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2005. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:10b3780b-66bd-4467-849f-8648ec969c55.
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This thesis examines post-1945 German prose fiction dealing with the Third Reich in the light of Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais and his World. My review of the secondary literature in Chapter 1 shows how few Germanists have examined the role of the carnivalesque in such fiction or used Bakhtin's work systematically. Having set out the shortcomings of Bakhtin's theory and shown Carnival's ambivalent position in the Third Reich, Chapter 2 builds on this theoretical and historical foundation by giving an overview of the different ways in which authors deploy the Fool and the carnivalesque in post-1945 prose fiction. This overview provides a context for the rest of the thesis, in which I discuss in detail how four authors use the topoi of the Fool and the carnivalesque in different ways to confront the past and encourage social change. Thus, Chapter 3 analyses Hans Hellmut Kirst's 08/15 trilogy (1954-55) which describes Asch's carnivalesque subversion of the NCOs who abuse power within the Army, and his subsequent development into a positive figure of authority. Chapter 4 argues that, beneath its bleak surface, Günter Grass's Hundejahre (1963) deploys the carnivalesque to transmit a sense of mourning and rebirth after the Holocaust. Chapter 5 deals with Edgar Hilsenrath's Der Nazi and der Friseur (1977), whose Fool-protagonist provokes the reader to laugh at earlier attempts to make sense of the Holocaust in order to prioritize the act of anamnesis as an end in itself. Chapter 6 examines Gert Hermann's Veilchenfeld (1987) and Der Kinoerzähler (1990). Veilchenfeld is a carnivalesque signifier of Nature whose persecution at the hands of the people of Limbach parallels the town's ecological destruction, so that the novel can be read as a critique of the exploitation of Nature. In Der Kinoerzähler Hofmann uses Karl, a Fool-figure who narrates silent films, to encourage the development of critical faculties which combat the fatalism and authoritarianism that hamper social change. It becomes clear that the authors of the above works have anticipated the shortcomings of Carnival as a model of resistance and have thus redefined the Fool and the carnivalesque. So in my view, although the way the authors deploy these topoi maps only partially with Bakhtin's ideas about Carnival, these authors have understood the central concepts of the carnivalesque's ambivalence and its powers to subvert authority and use them productively to deal with the issues raised by the Third Reich.
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Plouffe, Bruce. "The post-war novella in German language literature : an analysis." Thesis, McGill University, 1990. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=74297.
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This study examines the interpretive possibilities in the shorter fiction of Post-War German literature. The corpus includes works by Rolf Hochhuth, Friedrich Durrenmatt and Martin Walser. The historical framework of the theory of the novella and short story provides a basis for a discussion of genre, extended to include the coordinates of metaphor and metonymy. With the exception of one text designated as a novel, these works demonstrate interlocking and restricted motif complexes, repetitive and parallel structure and the integration of most narrative components. They project a tenor of hermetic plurality from a vehicle of abbreviated and truncated referential discourse. They use myth and intertextuality to show general principles to be extrapolated from specific contexts. Metafiction complements the theme of the subject not at one with itself. A partial resolution to the incertitude of existence, rendered according to Freud and Lacan, is offered through the emerging role of women as a stabilizing factor.
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Aulls, Katharina. "Mutter-Tochter Beziehungen in deutschsprachigen Romanen im Jahrzehnt nach dem "Jahr der Frau"." Thesis, McGill University, 1989. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=74348.
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This dissertation examines mother-daughter relationships in six novels written by German speaking women authors in the decade after the "Year of the Woman." Three novels depict positive mother-daughter relations: Ausflug mit der Mutter (1976), by Gabriele Wohmann, Gestern war Heute (1979), by Ingeborg Drewitz, Die dreizehnte Fee (1983), by Katja Behrens. Three others portray a negative mother-daughter relationship: Die Eisheiligen (1979), by Helga Novak, Die Zuchtigung (1985), by Waltraud Anna Mitgutsch, and Die Klavierspielerin (1983), by Elfriede Jelinek. Common to all novels is a strong autobiographical tendency and the central importance of the mother in the development of the daughter's self-identity.The complexity and problems of mother-daughter relationships are analyzed as an outcome of female socialization within a patriarchal society. Chapter I deals with historical, economic and psychological oppression of women. The resulting internalization of the role of inferiority and dependency leads to the subsequent repression of their own daughters. Chapter II discusses new contributions in the fields of psychology and sociology to the understanding of female identity formation through relationships. Chapter III provides a two-pronged analysis of each novel by describing the individual mother-daughter relationship in comparison with the outcomes of Chapters I and II, and by addressing the narrator's process of putting the experience into a unique literary form and thus contributing to women's literature.
Themes that are unique in each novel are: the emotional stress of the adult daughter trying to redefine her relationship with her widowed mother (Ausflug mit der Mutter), the dichotomy of woman in her nurturing role as mother and in her quest for self-realization (Gestern war Heute), the difficulty of breaking the repetitive cycle of the female role of dependency (Die dreizehnte Fee). All of the following novels assess the damaged self-identity of the daughter caused by a destructive mother. While the daughters survive due to fierce resistance (Die Eisheiligen) or escape into the world of art (Die Zuchtigung) there is no hope for the daughter in Die Klavierspielerin due to her identification with the oppressor.
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Weber, Undine S. "Wolfgang Koeppens auseinandersetzung mit der tradition: aspekte der intertextualität in der so genannten nachkriegs‐trilogie." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1020833.
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Wolfgang Koeppen’s three post‐war novels have often been called a trilogy, purely based on their publication in rapid succession in the early 1950s. This study establishes a connection between the works by looking at their roots in Irish, Anglo‐American, French and German modernism, and shows up links between Wolfgang Koeppen, James Joyce, E.E. Cummings, Charles Baudelaire and Thomas Mann. This comparative analysis concludes, by integrating socio‐political factors of life in West Germany after World War II, that Koeppen transcends the modernist tradition – the fact that modernism has become tradition, i.e. it has become “classic”, in contradiction to being “modern”. Koeppen’s texts do not only allude to and build on classic texts and refer to stylistic and narrative modernist elements such as stream‐of‐consciousness and sketching a fragmented society in turmoil; the very act of recurring to myths and texts of the Western canon in order to depict the disaffected individual is an almost post‐modern one.
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Tonkin, Kati. "Marching into history : from the early novels of Joseph Roth to Radetzkymarsch and Die Kapuzinergruft." University of Western Australia. European Languages and Studies Discipline Group, 2005. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2005.0085.
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This thesis takes as its starting point the consensus among scholars and interpreters of Joseph Roth’s work that his writing can be divided into two periods: an early “socialist” phase and a later “monarchist” phase. In opposition to this view, a reading of Roth’s novels is put forward in which his desire to make sense of post-Habsburg Central Europe provides the underlying logic, thus reconciling his early novels with Radetzkymarsch and Die Kapuzinergruft. The first chapter addresses the common contention that the transformation in Roth’s work is the result of a deep identity crisis. An alternative reading of the relevance of Roth’s identity to his work is offered: namely, that Roth’s conviction that identity is multivalent explains his rejection of both nationalism and other “solutions” to the problems of post-war Europe, a sentiment that finds expression in his early novels. The interpretation of these novels, which represent Roth’s early attempts to give literary form to contemporary reality, is the focus of the second chapter of the thesis. In the third chapter Radetzkymarsch is analyzed as a historical novel in the terms first proposed by Georg Lukács, as a novel which facilitates the understanding of the present through the portrayal of the past. Paradoxically, it is the historical form that most effectively captures and illuminates the complex reality of Roth’s contemporary times. The fourth and final chapter demonstrates that Die Kapuzinergruft is not simply an inferior sequel to Radetzkymarsch, a nostalgic evocation of an idealized lost Habsburg world and condemnation of the 1930s present, but rather continues the dialogue between past and present begun in Radetzkymarsch. In this novel, written before and in the immediate aftermath of the Anschluß of Austria to Nazi Germany, it is not Roth but his narrator who takes flight from reality, behaviour that Roth condemns as leading to the repetition of mistakes from the past and the failure to prevent the ultimate political catastrophe.
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Chan, Wing-chun Julia, and 陳永晉. "Towards an aesthetics of cliché: cultural recycling and contemporary fiction." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2009. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B42182311.
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阮慧娟 and Wai-kuen Jeannie Yuen. "Crisis and negotiation: a study of modern chinese fiction in the eighties." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1994. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31212050.
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胡從經 and Cong-jing Hu. "A criticism of the studies of Chinese fiction during the period 1900 to 1950." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1994. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31234173.
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Madi, S'Bongile Emmily. "Ukuvezwa kwabalingiswa kumanoveli wesiZulu amane ka 1990." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/52596.
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Thesis (MA)--University of Stellenbosch, 2001.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This work investigates characterisation in four modern Zulu novels. The objective of the study is to examine whether or not there is development in the portrayal of characters in recently published Zulu novels. The study is prompted by the view that a high number of novels in African languages have inadequate portrayal of characters (Zulu 1998). Focus has been placed on the following four Zulu novels: Izibiba Ziyeqana, Asikho Ndawo 8akithi, Isidleke Samanqe, and Itshwele Lempangele. The novels were published between 1995 and 1998 and all have won literary prizes in recognition of their high literary qualities. It has been found in the study that the way characters are portrayed in the four novels shows some signs of development. All the chief characters are 'round' in the sense that they change and adapt to changes and circumstances. Even though there are serious problems, the characters are seen to be fighting like ordinary human beings to better their lives. It is also found in the study that antagonists in some novels are round characters. It is concluded that this study identifies positive properties about the development of characterisation in the Zulu novel of the late 1990's.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie studie ondersoek karakterisering in vier moderne Zulu novelles. Die hoofdoelstelling van die studie is om vas te stel of daar 'n ontwikkeling in die voorstelling van karakters in onlangs-gepubliseerde Zulu novelles is. Die studie is gemotiveer deur die siening wat bestaan dat 'n groot aantal novelles in Afrikatale 'n onvoldoende voorstelling van karakters toon (Zulu, 1998). Die fokus van die studie val op die volgende vier Zulu novelles: Izibiba Ziyeqana, Asikho Ndawo Bakithi, Isidleke Samanqe en Itshwele Lempangele. Hierdie novelles is gepubliseer tussen 1995 en 1998 en het almal literere pryse gewen ter erkenning van hulle uitstaande letterkundige meriete. Die studie het bevind dat die wyse waarop die karakters voorgestel is in al vier novelles verskeie tekens van ontwikkeling ten opsigte van die Zulu letterkunde toon. AI die hoofkarakters is "rond" in die sin dat hulle verander en aanpas na gelang van veranderinge en omstandighede. Selfs onder ernstige omstandighede, veg die karakters soos gewone mense om hulle lewens te verbeter. Daar is ook in die studie bevind dat die antagoniste in sommige novelies ronde karakters is. Die studie identifiseer positiewe kenmerke t.o.v. die ontwikkeling van karakterisering in die Zulu novelle in die laat 1990's.
IQOQO Lomsebenzi ubhekane nokuvezwa kwabalingiswa emanovelini amane wesiZulu. Kubhekwe amanoveli amasha ngenjongo yokuthola ukuthi ngabe kukhona yini ukuthuthuka ngokuvezwa kwabalingiswa. Okwaziwayo okwamanje wukuthi ukuvezwa kwabalingiswa emanovelini amaningi wabomdabu kusezingeni eliphansi (Zulu 1998), yingakho-ke lomsebenzi ubuzama ukuthola ukuthi ngabe luyabonakala yini loguquko Iwemqubekela phambili. Kukhethwelamanoveli alandelayo: Izibiba Ziyeqana, Asikho Ndawo Bakithi Isidleke Samanqe, kanye ne-Itshwele Lempangele lapho kucubungulwa loshintsho lokuvezwa kwabalingiswa ngababhali bemnyaka yabo 1990. Lamanoveli angawoshicilelo olusuka ku-1995 ukuya ku-1998. Kuye kwakhethwa lamanoveli ngoba azuze imiklomelo yokuthi abhalwe ngezinga eliphezulu. Okutholwe kulomsebenzi ukuthi ukuvezwa kwabalingiswa yilababhali balamanovela kubonisa impumela phambili. Bonke abalingiswa abaphambili batholakala beyizindilinga. Umlingiswa nomlingiswa lapho ehlangabezana nezingqinamba uyaguquguquka azifune ebuhleni ngempilo yakhe. Nanoma kunobunzima sibathola ngasosonke isikhathi balwisana nabo bazama izindlela ezizobasa empumelelweni. Kutholakale futhi ukuthi bonke labalingiswaabangabaphikisi (antagonists)babonakala bakhula. Lomsebenzi uphethwa ngokuthi ziyabonakala zrmpewu zokukhula nokuthuthuka ekuvezweni kwabalingiswa emanovelini wesiZulu wababhali bango1990.
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Zaharchenko, Tanya. "Where the currents meet : frontiers of memory in the post-Soviet fiction of East Ukraine." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.708117.
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Pinson, Guillaume 1973. "Fiction du monde : analyse littéraire et médiatique de la mondanité, 1885-1914." Thesis, McGill University, 2005. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=102151.
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This work proposes a double analysis of the mundane society representations between 1885 and 1914, in the press and the novel. This analysis separates these two categories of media to insist on their particularities, and tries to think of them in terms of an interaction.A first part explores the organisation of the topics and the main genre of the mundane society in the press, applying the social discourse theory. The analysis is based on the perusal of a set of representative daily newspapers (Le Gaulois, Le Figaro) and of weekly and monthly publications (Le Grand monde, La Vie parisienne, Femina notably, as well as around thirty other titles). It shows that the mundane society in the newspaper is constrained by a poetics stemming from the characteristics of press writing: collective writing, periodicity of the publication, text length limitation and reference to reality. Some texts are tempted by fiction, even though they keep a reality-based referential, whereas other texts that are openly fictitious, fit the mundane fiction into the newspaper.
The second part is based on the general conclusion of the first part: the mundane society in the newspaper is a represented society, made of for a distant and anonymous public. With the advent of the medias in the 19th century, the mundane society has entered into the era of mediations and "industrial writing". Some writers, from Bourget to Proust, take these upheavals into account and present the mundane society as a metaphor of the mass media society. This is done following three main axes: the temptation of withdrawal of the fiction into a closed world (psychological and mundane movement impulsed by Goncourt with Cherie, prolonged by Bourget and Hervieux notably); the games of exchange between the novel and the newspaper (Maupassant, Toulet, Legrand, amongst others); and finally, the isolation of the mundane world and the aesthetic work on mediations (Rolland, Colette, Mirbeau, Lorrain et Gide notably). All these writings address the question of sociability at the era of the triumph of mediations: what room is left for the mundane society, for direct encounter, for exchange, in a world of mediation and mass media coverage? for immediate connections in a society of mediated ties? The epilogue proposes a journalistic reading of A la recherche du temps perdu, synthesis-work which inaugurates a modern and sociological perception: it is in the world of the imagined mundane society, distant and represented in the mass media, that the narrator draws the resources for his observation of the world.
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Shao, Dong, and 邵棟. "A study of yingxi fiction in the early republican China = Min chu ying xi xiao shuo yan jiu." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10722/206447.
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The dissertation attempted to study Yingxi Fiction, a genre of fiction, which emerged and prevailed in Shanghai during the early two decades of the twentieth century. The majority of writers of Yingxi fiction at that time were literati of the Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School. After watching the imported silent movies, they recorded the contents and adapted them as fictional texts for the purpose of introducing the stories to those who could not afford to watch the films. This type of genre was named Yingxi fiction and had been welcomed by public readers at leisure. In fact Yingxi fiction had implied how traditional literati received and absorbed western cultural elements on their way to pursue Chinese modernity. This study would like to conduct a close examination of Yingxi fiction, which has been previously ignored, through in-depth analysis of the texts and investigation of its social as well as cultural significance.
This dissertation consisted of five chapters. Chapter One was an introduction of the popular fiction, movie and Yingxi fiction in Early Republican China. Previous studies on Yingxi fiction were briefly presented as well.
Chapter Two dealt with the emergence of Yingxi fiction. The prefaces and peer reviews of some works of this genre would be especially studied in order to explore the motivations of the writers and their approaches to compose the Yingxi fiction. Three Yingxi fiction writers, Zhou Shoujuan (1895-1968), Bao Tianxiao (1875-1973) and Lu Dan’an(1894-1980), were comprehensively illustrated as case studies.
Chapter Three focused on the application of “Paradigm” in textual analyses of Yingxi fiction. Serving as an unusual spectacle, paradigm provided a thorough understanding of the hybrid narrative style of the stories. By discussing the narrative pause, redundancy, story modes and language usage, the way in which the paradigm of Chinese fiction influenced by western literature would been exposed.
Chapter Four discussed the graph-text conversion in Yingxi fiction. It was suggested that writers’ failure in identifying the moral issues and female images in western movies could be explained and might be regarded as the writers’ skills of adaptation of the stories for the sake of Chinese representations.
Lastly, the conclusion chapter summed up the distinctive features of Yingxi fiction, the prominence of the genre and its significance in modern Chinese literature. Besides, the limitations and reasons of fading away of Yingxi fiction would also be expounded.published_or_final_version
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Master of Philosophy
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Ingham, Michael Anthony. "Theatre of storytelling : the prose fiction stage adaptation as social allegory in contemporary British drama /." Thesis, Hong Kong : University of Hong Kong, 1998. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record.jsp?B20275961.
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Blatchford, Mathew. "The old New Wave : a study of the 'New Wave' in British science fiction during the 1960s and early 1970s, with special reference to the works of Brian W. Aldiss, J.G. Ballard, Harry Harrison and Michael Moorcock." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 1989. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/22150.
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Bibliography: pages 174-184.This thesis examines the 'New Wave' in British science fiction in the 1960s and early 1970s. The use of the terms 'science fiction' and 'New Wave' in the thesis are defined through a use of elements of the ideological theories of Louis Althusser. The New Wave is seen as a change in the ideological framework of the science fiction establishment. For oonvenience, the progress of the New Wave is divided into three stages, each covered by a chapter. Works by the four most prominent writers in the movement are discussed.
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Rivest, Mélanie. "Nouveau théatre et nouveau roman : la quête d'un art perdu." Thesis, McGill University, 2004. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=79975.
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The histories of the Theater and of the Novel have rarely been linked to one another. Nevertheless, studying the evolution of the two arts as of the seventeenth century, allows us to pinpoint and define the sources of contamination. It is more precisely in the nineteenth century that the history of both the Theater and the Novel became envenomed, going from fresh influences to disloyal relations during which time the Theater faded by admitting romanesque realism to take the stage. By denying its capacity to reveal the "real", the Theater failed its possibilities and let its art be disinterested from the theatricality showing all that should have been evoked. Men of theater participated at recapturing the theatrical art so to regain confidence on stage and near 1950, an avant-garde movement flourished to favor a renewal of vitality for the theater with a new language which utilizes all of what the scene could provoke. This "New Theater" is soon followed by a similar romanesque enterprise, the "New Novel", a group of novelists also wishing to acknowledge the right to explore a new style of writing.
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Shishkin, Timur. "Marginalized Characters in Contemporary American Short Fiction." PDXScholar, 2011. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/297.
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The focus of the present research work is the contemporary American short stories that bring up issues of compulsory norm and the conflict between marginalized characters and their environment. This research was based on those short stories that seemed to represent the idea of being "different" in the most complex and multilayered way, and its goal was to unfold new aspects of the conflict between "normal" and "abnormal"/"different". Variations of norm as well as diversity within the marginalized raise a number of questions about the reasons for their inability to coexist peacefully. The close reading and the analysis of the selected stories show that all the conflicts in them, in one way or another, repeat similar patterns and lead to the same root of the problem of misunderstanding, which is fear. To be more precise, all the cases of hate towards "different" characters can be explained by the hater's explicit or implicit fear of death in its various forms: inability to procreate one's own kind, cultural or personal self-identity loss, actual life threat in the form of a reminder of possible physical harm and death. Most often it would be the case where shame and fear of death overlap in a very complex way. In general, the cases of characters' otherness fall into three major groups. The nature of the alienation for each of these groups is described and analyzed in three separate chapters. Prejudice and stereotypes are playing a great role in formation of fears and insecurities which need to be dismantled in order to make peaceful coexistence possible. This work concludes with pointing out the crucial role of taking an approach of representation of various perspectives and diversification of voices in creative writing, academia and media in the context of multicultural society.
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Sabatini, Sandra. "Making babies, representations of the infant in 20th century Canadian fiction." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2001. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/NQ60564.pdf.
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Elbaum, Henry. "Rhetoric and fiction : interaction of verbal genres in the Soviet literature of the twenties and thirties." Thesis, McGill University, 1988. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=75698.
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Soviet literature of the twenties and thirties is examined in the present study in its relationship to other verbal genres, primarily, the speeches of Party leaders, newspaper rhetoric and political posters. The first four chapters of the dissertation focus on such topics as the reception of Marxist-Leninist discourse by peasants and workers as well as its representation in fiction; the refraction of official discursive formulas in characters' speech and the dialogization of Party rhetoric; the integration of political documents into fiction and their structural function. Particular attention is paid to the way the contamination of Party rhetoric by substandard language and its contextual defamiliarization lead, depending on the overall authorial intention, either to a parodic subversion of official cliches or to the internalization of didactic discourse and the enhancement of its communicative effectiveness.The theme of industrialization is examined in the last two chapters of the thesis in its dialectic interaction with various Neo-Rousseauist conceptions, which either reflect the authors' own ambivalence about socialist construction, or constitute a rhetorical device used in order to reinforce dialogically industrialist ideology.
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Ho, Julie Elaine. ""Half of life": male voices in the novels of Carol Shields." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2000. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31222596.
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Fong, Sing-ha, and 方星霞. "Continuity and transcendence of Jing School." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2007. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B39558228.
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許子東 and Zidong Xu. "Narratives of the "Cultural Revolution" in contemporary Chinese fiction." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1997. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31237915.
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李仕芬 and Shi-fan Lee. "The male characters in the fiction of contemporary Taiwanese women writers." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1997. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31235979.
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Abu-Manneh, Bashir. "Fiction of the New statesman, 1913-1939." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2002. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a2444f4a-ee6b-4063-afbf-26348bd22356.
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This thesis is the first systematic study of short stories published in the New Statesman [NS] weekly magazine from its foundation in 1913 to 1939. The main question it seeks to address is what type of fiction did a mainstream socialist publication like the NS publish then? By chronologically charting dominant literary figures and themes, the thesis aims to discern significant cultural tendencies and editorial principles of selection. Following Raymond Williams' 'cultural materialism', fiction is read in its relation to social history, as a 'representation of history'. Chapter 1 deals with the foundation of the journal and its first year of publication, mapping out the contradictions between Fabian collectivist ideology and ethical socialism, urban realism and literary Georgianism, country and city. A focus on urban problems of poverty unemployment, philanthropy, and machinofacture is at the heart of the NS's literary concern, in 1913. Chapter 2 focuses on stories published during World War I, and goes up to 1926. It argues that the reality of the War was falsified as a time of rest and relaxation, in line with the journal's political policy of supporting the war effort. The immediate post-war period is read as a time of disappointment and intensified social conflict and struggle. The General Strike of 1926 is a turning point in interwar history. It also ushers in a period of unprecedented cultural activity in the NS. As Chapters 4 and 5 show, the post-Strike period is characterised by the consolidation of the working-class fiction of socialist R. M. Fox; by the rise of the countryside realism of H. E. Bates; and by the rise of the colonial fiction of E. R. Morrough on Egypt (which is examined in the context of Leslie Mitchell's, E. M. Forster's, and William Plomer's responses to empire). Significant contributions by women writers (such as Faith Compton Mackenzie) about travel, duty, and oppression are also made in the late 20s, early 30s. Chapter 6 is dedicated to the magnificent place that Russian fiction occupies in the 30s through the work of Michael Zoshchenko. Though written during the free and experimental 20s, his satiric fiction is published as a sample of Soviet literature of the 30s, thus consolidating the Stalinist line dictated by the political editor, Kingsley Martin, that 'self-criticism' is a central part of Soviet politics and society. Chapter 7 is a tribute to the NS's contribution to reconstructing British realism away from both Victorian moralism and European naturalism. The stories of Bates, V. S. Pritchett, and Peter Chamberlain are dominant, conveying different ways of negotiating the pressures of documentary realism and the political developments of the 30s. Also discussed is the unique modernist contribution of neglected Stella Benson, which presents a strong challenge to the usual representationalism of NS fiction. The concluding chapter reads NS fiction in the whole period between 1913 and 1939 as the cultural expression of the new petty bourgeoisie, especially its progressive, politically and socially engaged side. With its focus on ordinariness and lived experience, and its formal experimentation and innovation, NS fiction exemplifies artistic commitment par excellence, a conscious cultural alignment with the actuality and potentiality of the new petty bourgeoisie.
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Magerski, Christine 1969. "The constitution of the literary field in Germany after 1871 : Berlin modernism, literary criticism and the beginnings of the sociology of literature." Monash University, German Studies, 2002. http://arrow.monash.edu.au/hdl/1959.1/8724.
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Wagenaar, Peter Simon. "The shadowed corners of sunlit ruins: Gothic elements in twentieth century children's adventure fiction." Thesis, Rhodes University, 1991. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002293.
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This thesis examines the way in which children's adventure fiction makes use of Gothic features, how these features have been modified for a younger audience and how these modifications have been influenced by other developments in children's and popular fiction: Chapter One sets out to define the nature of Gothic and isolate those aspects of it relevant to the proposed study. It puts forward a theory to account for the movement of Gothic trends into later children's fiction. Chapter Two examines the use of landscape, setting and atmospheric effects in Gothic and the way in which children's fiction has used similar trappings to create similar effects. Children's fiction, emphasising pleasurable excitement rather than fear has, however, muted these effects somewhat and played down the role of the supernatural, so intrinsic to Gothic. Chapter Three emphasises the Gothic's use of stereotypes, focusing on the portrayal of heroes and heroines. Those of children's fiction are portrayed very similarly to those of Gothic and the chapter compares and, on occasion, contrasts them noting, inter alia, their adherence to rigid moral codes and narrowly defined norms of masculine and feminine behaviour. Chapter Four looks at the portrayal of villains and the way in which their appearance defines them as such (as, indeed, does that of heroes and heroines). It examines in some detail their relationship to and interaction with the heroes and heroines, noting, for example, the 'pseudo-parental' role of villains who are characteristically older and in socially approved positions to exert power over heroes and heroines. The Conclusion addresses the fantasy aspect of these novels,referred to several times in passing in the course of earlier chapters, and comments on how the features detailed in Chapters Two, Three and Four all operate within the conventions of a fantasy.
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Masters, Benjamin Scott. "The ethics of excess : style and morality in British fiction since the 1960s." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.648740.
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程雲峰 and Wan-fung Ching. "The images of peasants in modern Chinese fiction." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1989. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31209166.
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Strecker, Geralyn. "Reading prostitution in American fiction, 1893-1917." Virtual Press, 2001. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1213148.
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Many American novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries discuss prostitution. Some works like Reginald Wright Kauffman's The House of Bondage, (1910) exaggerate the threat of "white slavery," but others like David Graham Phillips's Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (1917) more honestly depict the harsh conditions which caused many women to prostitute themselves for survival. Contemporary critical interpretations of novels addressed in this dissertation began before major shifts in women's roles in the workplace, before trends towards family planning, before women could respectably live on their own, and especially before women won the right to vote. Yet, a century of progress later, this vestigal criticism still influences our study of these texts.Relying on primary source materials such as prostitute autobiographies and vice commission reports, I compare fictional representations of prostitution to historical data, focusing on the prostitute's voice and her position in society. I examine actual prostitutes' life stories to dispel the misconception that prostitution was always a lower-class business. My chapters are ordered in regards to the prominence of the prostitute characters' voices: in Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) the heroine seldom speaks for herself; in two Socialist novels--Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) and Estelle Baker's The Rose Door (1911)--prostitutes debate low wages, political corruption, and organized vice; and in Phillips's Susan Lenox, the title character is almost always allowed to speak for herself, and readers can see what she is thinking as well as doing. As my chapters progress, I demonstrate how the fictions become more like the prostitutes' own autobiographies, with self-reliant women telling their stories without shame or remorse. My conclusion, "Revamping `Fallen Women' Pedagogy for Teaching American Literature," suggests how social history and textual scholarship of specific "fallen women" novels should affect our teaching of these texts.Department of English
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Leister, Lori, and University of Lethbridge Faculty of Arts and Science. "Closing the circle: A novel with critical commentary." Thesis, Lethbridge, Alta. : University of Lethbridge, Faculty of Arts and Science, 1998, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/10133/355.
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There are two parts to this thesis: a novel, Closing
the Circle, and a critical commentary on the process of
writing a novel from beginning to end.
The novel tells the story of Natasha, a young, late
twentieth century woman who searches for her "roots." It
begins in southern Alberta and she eventually travels to
Eastern Europe where she uncovers the voices in her dreams
and from the past. It deals with the metaphysical question
of a collective unconscious that houses past symbols
pertinent to her search as well as the question as to the
validity of dreams and memory in human life.
The critical commentary addresses issues involved in
writing a fiction vis a vis structure and other literary
devices. It also addresses questions that come with taking
personal familial historical events and writing them into
"story."28 cm.
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Winkelmann, Cathrin. "The limits of representation? : the expression and repression of desire in 20th-century German lesbian narratives." Thesis, McGill University, 2001. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=38437.
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This study investigates the expression and repression of desire in four 20th-century German-language lesbian prose texts. I examine in chronological order three novels and one novella: Der Skorpion (1919) by Anna Elisabet Weirauch; Lyrische Novelle (1933) by the Swiss author Annemarie Schwarzenbach; Der Schlachter empfiehlt noch immer Herz (1976) by Margot Schroeder; and, finally, Bilder von ihr (1996) by Karen-Susan Fessel. While not concentrating on any single literary work, the excursus on texts from the period between the Third Reich and the Second Feminist Movement in Germany provides a brief analysis of the (lack of) lesbian literary developments during this time.Drawing on diverse lesbian-feminist and queer strains of criticism, this study provides a close examination of the narrative elements, strategies, and styles used to inscribe lesbian desire into the literary works selected for analysis. The investigation explores how these texts utilize narrative conceptualizations of lesbian desire, critiques of heterophallocentric language and representation, and strategies to create lesbian narrative spaces that challenge the heterosexual presumptions and trajectories which traditionally underlie conventional Western romance narratives. The constructions of "lesbian" identity presented in the texts are fundamentally connected to the creation and operation of these narrative spaces. Thus, in order to contextualize my interpretations and literary analyses, I situate the texts in the respective socio-historical and political contexts in which they were written and received.
The unresolved problems, prevailing tensions, and their individual differences notwithstanding, the narratives examined here collectively contribute to a lesbian counterdiscourse to the 20th-century German literary establishment. By exploring the strategies invoked in these texts to represent a desiring textual lesbian subjectivity, this study hopes to make visible a tradition of Germanlanguage lesbian literature---a fragmented and often marginalized literature---over the last century and to offer German literary studies insights from the periphery of the dominant heterosexual culture. However, this investigation simultaneously and paradoxically also contests the very positioning of German lesbian literature and criticism at the margins by proposing their strategic integration into the German literary canon.
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Karolyi, Julian. "Literary renewal and the reader : the multiple pleasures of La Nouvelle Fiction." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/13406.
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In this thesis I seek to describe, analyse and characterise the contemporary literary movement La Nouvelle Fiction, a group that has received no critical attention to date. The movement is examined first in terms of its place in French literary history, taking as reference points both literary and theoretical trends: in particular, the nouveau roman and aspects of post-structuralism, with both of which the Nouvelle Fiction implicitly compares or contrasts itself. In Part I, I go on to analyse the theory of the fantastic and detective fiction, both genres that influence the Nouvelle Fiction, and provisional descriptions of the Nouvelle Fiction are thereby developed based on Umberto Eco's theory of the 'model reader'. I suggest that the Nouvelle Fiction demands a particularly active interpretative role of its reader, which is compared in the texts with moral competence in the world. Through analysis of key narrative strategies in Part II (circular narrative structures, unreliable narrative voices, parody, and mise en abyme), the movement is examined for its internal characteristics, and specific differences in practice are established between the Nouvelle Fiction and the nouveau roman. In Part III, aspects of reader-reception are examined, first, through the use of Barthes's anatomy of textual pleasure, second, through the relationship between fiction, the world and identity, and thirdly, through discussion of the extent engagement is possible in these ludic and interpretatively ambiguous texts. I argue that a picture thus emerges of a fiction that heralds a heightened role for the active reader of texts that represent a renewed relationship with reality and with the way narrative shapes it, after the reaction against representation that was an important characteristic of the modernist aesthetic.
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Seward, James W. "The German exile journal Das Wort and the Soviet Union." PDXScholar, 1990. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/4104.
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Das Wort was a literary journal published by German Communist writers and fellow-travelers exiled in Moscow from 1936 to 1939. It was to be a mouthpiece for German literature in exile and to promote the Popular Front policy, which sought to unite disparate elements in non-Fascist Europe in opposition to the Nazis. Das Wort, under the editorship of German Communist writers whose close association with the Soviet Union had been well established in the previous decade, tried to provide a forum for exiled writers of various political persuasions, but was unwavering in its positive portrayal of Stalin's Soviet Union and the policies of that country. As the level of hysteria grew with the successive purges and public show trials in the Soviet Union, the journal adopted an even more eulogistic and militant attitude: any criticism or expression of doubt about Soviet policy was equated with support for Fascism. Thus the ability of the journal to contribute to the formation of a true common front in Europe to oppose Fascism was compromised from the outset by its total support for the Soviet Union. The Popular Front policy foundered on this issue, and that portion of German literature in exile which was to form the first generation of East German literature was inextricably bound to the Soviet Union well before the German Democratic Republic came in to existence.
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Stewart, Robert Earl. "The catastrophe of entertainment : televisuality and post-postmodern American fiction." Thesis, McGill University, 1999. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=30220.
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This thesis examines the effects of television and entertainment culture on American fiction. Focusing primarily on the novels of Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace, with a secondary focus on the films of American film director David Lynch, the thesis proposes that post-postmodern fiction, fiction in which the familiarizing trends of postmodern fiction are reversed, is a response to the powerful influence of television and other forms of electronic media on American culture.
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Samperi-Mangan, Jacqueline. "Narrativa della Svizzera italiana dal '60 a oggi." Thesis, McGill University, 1999. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=36700.
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This study provides an overview of the literature of the Italian-speaking regions of Switzerland. It presents well-known authors but also lesser-known writers who have made an important contribution to the literature of the Ticino and Grigioni cantons. Dating from the 1960s to the present, the corpus bears witness to a remarkable vitality and innovative spirit, which on occasion overflow political borders and find their way into the much larger Italian market. The dynamism of local publishers has contributed to focusing attention on the high quality and importance of the literature produced by Swiss authors writing in Italian. The distinctive character of this literature lies in the unique combination of disparate factors. Italian language, Swiss culture, and European concerns interact with emotional ties to the local communities in a rich social context marked by past misery and a present characterized by advanced capitalism.The choice of authors is based on the desire to trace the evolution of narrative literature during the last four decades and present a wide range of themes and styles. In addition to the renowned Giovanni Orelli, this study considers the equally important works of writers such as Alberto Nessi, Claudio Nembrini, Anna Felder, Elda Guidinetti, Silvana Lattmann, Ennio Maccagno, among others. Very young writers whose first efforts are shaping the future of Swiss literature in Italian are also examined.
A special chapter is devoted to women writers. The goal is to identify the style and set of themes which distinguish their contribution from that of their colleagues. The study also discusses the importance of their presence on the literary scene after a time, not so far in the past, when women were confined to writing, in dialect, diaries and letters to relatives who had emigrated.
The discussion of the corpus is prefaced by a detailed presentation of the geographical, social and political context which often determines the literary outcome. The importance of this context has also influenced the way in which the texts are approached. The narratives studied reflect and interpret the problems society was facing at a particular time, as well as the intellectual movements that characterize each period. A chronological presentation of each individual author would have fragmented the dynamic background from which his or her works emerge and within which such works must be located. The name of an author will therefore resurface in different contexts when one of his or her works is discussed in connection with the given period or intellectual movement under examination. The literary history of each author, however, can be easily reconstructed through an attentive reading. What emerges at the end of the study is a widened field of knowledge for Italian studies, whose object can no longer be seen to coincide with the literary production within the borders of the Italian state.
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Wong, Chi-hung, and 黃自鴻. "Space in Taiwan urban novels." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2006. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B35808068.
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Kwong, Tsz Ching. "The archived future : North American apocalyptic fiction and the ambiguous construction of the present." HKBU Institutional Repository, 2013. http://repository.hkbu.edu.hk/etd_ra/1514.
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Chan, Wai-ying, and 陳惠英. "Chinese lyrical fiction in the period 1919-1989." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1995. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31212864.
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Behin, Bahram. "Aspects of the role of language in creating the literary effect : implications for the reading of Australian prose fiction /." Title page, contents and abstract only, 1997. http://web4.library.adelaide.edu.au/theses/09PH/09phb419.pdf.
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Yu, Yuen-yee Frankie, and 余婉兒. "Living on the margin." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2005. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B45015168.
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Kocela, Christopher. "Fetishism as historical practice in postmodern American fiction." Thesis, McGill University, 2002. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=38213.
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This study contends that postmodern American fiction dramatizes an important shift of philosophical perspective on the fetish in keeping with recent theories of fetishism as a cultural practice. This shift is defined by the refusal to accept the traditional Western condemnation of the fetishist as primitive or perverse, and by the effort to affirm more productive uses for fetishism as a theoretical concept spanning the disciplines of psychoanalysis, Marxian social theory, and anthropology. Analyzing the depiction of fetishistic practices in selected contemporary American novels, the dissertation utilizes fetish theory in order to clarify the unique textual and historiographic features of postmodernist fiction. It also emphasizes the way in which conventional ideas about history and teleology are necessarily challenged by an affirmative orientation toward the fetish. Part One of the dissertation, comprising the first two chapters, traces the lineage of Western thinking about fetishism from Hegel, Marx, and Freud to Derrida, Baudrillard, and Jameson, among others. Recognizing that traditional theories attribute the symbolic power of the fetish to its mystification of historical origins, Part One posits that poststructuralist and postmodernist contributions to the subject enable, but do not develop, an alternative concept of fetishism as a practice with constructive historical potential. Part Two of the study seeks to develop this historical potential with reference to prominent descriptive models of postmodernist fiction, and through close readings of five contemporary American authors: Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, Robert Coover, John Hawkes, and Don DeLillo. The four chapters of Part Two each examine the fictional representation of fetishism within a different theoretical framework, focusing on, respectively: temporality and objectivity in postmodern fiction theory; the interrelation between psychoanalytic theory and female fetishism in novels by Pynchon and Acker
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李仕芬 and Shi-fan Lee. "Love and marriage." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1989. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31208721.
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Johnson, Alfred B. "Net work : social networks, disruptive agency, and innovation in Howells, Fitzgerald, Heller, Pynchon, and Gibson." Virtual Press, 2006. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1343471.
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This study uses concepts from network science to analyze the agency of outsider characters who cause change or disruption without necessarily securing economic or political power for themselves. Network science as theorized by thinkers like Duncan Watts (Six Degrees, 2003) and Albert-Laszlo Barabasi (Linked, 2002) explains social networks in terms of social structures: clusters of people, bridges between them, pathways through them. Michel Foucault (The Archaeology of Knowledge, 1971) suggests that new notions must enter public or personal awareness on "surfaces of emergence"—institutions like families and social groups. Michel de Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Life, 1974) looks at inventive ways that users repurpose products, both industrial and cultural, and so become "secondary producers." To analyze the influential-outsider agency of the fictional characters featured in this study, I theorize the clusters, bridges, and pathways of network science as surfaces of emergence on which "secondary productions" can appear and then spread through a social network.The introductory chapter explores and explains the general application of network science to literary criticism. In subsequent chapters, I use a networks-based approach to examine the agency of William Dean Howells's Tom Corey (The Rise of Silas Lapham, 1884), F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby (The Great Gatsby, 1925), Joseph Heller's Milo Minderbinder (Catch-22, 1961), Thomas Pynchon's Pierce Inverarity (The Crying of Lot 49, 1965), and William Gibson's Cayce Pollard (Pattern Recognition, 2003). These characters do unusual things with and from the subject positions in which they find themselves, and—whether or not they are or remain marginalized characters in their social systems—they are innovative and influential in ways that other characters do not understand or anticipate. All five novels depict the diffusion of innovative ideas and practices as a process of unplanned, non-coercive social negotiation, where innovation can originate with any person or group of people in the social network and is dependent on the complex interaction of liminal notions and mainstream thinking. The networking approach to these novels clarifies the ways that their authors have imagined social networks to function and the particular interactions they have imagined to lead to change or disruption.Department of English
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Hutchison, Lorna. "Strategies of the grotesque in Canadian fiction." Thesis, McGill University, 2005. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=100627.
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In this study of narration, feminist theory, and grotesque Canadian fiction, my aim is to provide a narrative model with which to read characters portrayed as both female and monstrous in a way that criticism on the grotesque does not. I provide two systems for the methodology of this study: via negativa, a well-established philosophical system of definition by negation, which shows the strength of the grotesque to represent a subject that is inherently paradoxical; and a narrative model called the "middle voice," which I developed to examine narratives that confuse or render ambiguous the identity of subjects. Through these distinct but complementary frameworks I illustrate a literary phenomenon in fiction of the grotesque: that authors develop and reveal the subjectivity of characters by confounding identities.Although I provide a concise definition of the term "grotesque," my focus is on feminist theoretical approaches to the grotesque. However, whereas feminist theory on the grotesque examines the binary opposition of woman to man, this study shows that the grotesque bypasses the "male/female" dichotomy in the representation of fictional characters. Instead, the sustained contradiction of the central opposition "woman/monster" works to undermine the notion of fictional characterization.
Specifically, this study focuses on the grotesque as a narrative strategy and examines the use of the grotesque in the portrayal of female narrators. The prevalence of female grotesque characters in recent Canadian fiction combined with the rapid growth of interest in the critical concept of the "female grotesque" requires a theoretical analysis of the literature.
In the fiction I examine by Canadian authors Margaret Atwood, Lynn Coady, Barbara Gowdy, Alice Munro, and Miriam Toews, narrators are contradictory. As subjects, they have doubled identities. Authors situate identity ("subjectivity") in the realm of paradox, rather than in the realm of clarity and resolution. As a result, readers and critics must rely on ambiguity and subversion as guides when posing the ultimately irresolvable question "who is speaking?" Through analysis of this fiction, then, I argue for nothing short of a new conceptualization of subjectivity.
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Kwan, Wing-ki Koren, and 關詠琪. "Experiments in subjectivity: a study of postmodern science fiction." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2005. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B3681250X.
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Brazil, Kevin. "The work of art in postwar fiction, 1945-2001." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:f8102451-09cf-4f92-8e6e-e7c1ced2641c.
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'The Work of Art in Postwar Fiction 1945-2001' explores the responses of postwar novelists to visual art by focusing on the work of Samuel Beckett, William Gaddis, John Berger and W.G. Sebald. In doing so, it opens up a new approach to understanding the relationship between fiction and art in the postwar period as a whole, for what distinguishes these writers is that they use an engagement with visual art in order to historicize their own work as distinctly 'postwar' fiction. This thesis shows that in the writings of these novelists, long running aesthetic issues in the study of the relationship between text and image are reformulated and transformed: medium specificity; ekphrasis; and visual representation as a model for literary realism. Drawing throughout on original archival research, The Work of Art in Postwar Fiction 1945-2001 traces what T.J. Clark terms the 'processes of conversion and relation' between art, its contexts and its commentators, and it is by studying these mediations that the literary consequences of the work of art for these writers are shown. With a historicizing approach throughout, and an interest in the ways in which postwar novelists mediate their engagement with art through history, this thesis contributes to a new understanding of the literature and art of the postwar era, or what Amy Hungerford has called 'the period formerly known as contemporary'. This thesis offers a revisionary account of a relationship previously subsumed under the dominant logic of postmodernism, which according to Fredric Jameson was defined by a 'waning of historicity'. In returning historicity as method and theme to the study of the relationship between literature and art since 1945, The Work of Art in Postwar Fiction 1945-2001 shows the diverse ways in which postwar writers historicized their writing, and reflected on their techniques, in dialogue with visual art. Concerning itself with the distinct challenges posed by focusing on what Hannah Ardent called the 'most recent' past, this thesis also develops new ways of thinking more broadly about the relationships between literature, art and history. Chapter 1, 'Reviewing Postwar Fiction', situates this thesis within recent debates in literary studies surrounding what Mark McGurl has termed a discipline-wide 'hegemony of history'. Chapter 2, on Samuel Beckett, argues that Beckett's postwar art criticism responds to a specific strand of Marxist humanist aesthetics developed after the war, and it studies Beckett's manuscripts to show the relationship between this criticism and the composition of The Unnamable. Chapter 3 discusses William Gaddis's 1955 novel The Recognitions, arguing that the novel pivots around some of the central cruxes of postwar American aesthetic debate: Clement Greenberg's theory of abstraction, and Michael Fried's identification of the problem of 'art and objecthood'. Chapter 4 discusses the work of the British art critic and novelist, John Berger. It shows that Berger's critical account of Cubism shaped the narrative forms of his novels A Painter of Our Time and G., and that these narrative innovations were central to his theory of the artistic and revolutionary 'moment'. Chapter 5 focuses on the relationship between photography, painting and aesthetics in the work of W. G. Sebald. It argues that aesthetic concepts such as 'the readymade' and 'objective chance' offer a better account of Sebald's engagement with art than accounts which draw on trauma theory. The thesis concludes with a short discussion of how the writers studied in this thesis have influenced the contemporary fiction of Jonathan Franzen, Teju Cole, and Tom McCarthy.
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Bagley, Petra M. "Somebody's daughter : the portrayal of daughter-parent relationships by contemporary women writers from German-speaking countries." Thesis, University of Stirling, 1993. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/2134.
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The purpose of this thesis is to examine the complexities of daughterhood as portrayed by nine contemporary women writers: from former West Germany(Gabriele Wohmann, Elisabeth Plessen), from former East Germany (Hedda Zinner, Helga M. Novak), from Switzerland (Margrit Schriber) and from Austria (Brigitte Schwaiger, Jutta Schutting, Waltraud Anna Mitgutsch, Christine Haidegger). Ten prose-works which span a period of approximately ten years, from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, are analysed according to theme and character. In the Introduction, we trace the historical development of women's writing in German, focusing on the most significant female authors from the Romantic period through to the rise of the New Women's Movement in the late sixties. We then consider a definition of 'Frauenliteratur' and the extent to which autobiography has become a typical feature of such women's writing. In the ensuing four chapters we highlight in psychological and sociological terms the mourning process a daughter undergoes after her father's death; the identification process between daughter and mother; the daughter's reaction to being adopted; and the daughter's decision to commit suicide. We see to what extent the environment in which each of these daughters is brought up as well as past events in German history shape the daughter's attitude towards her parents. Since we are studying the way in which these relationships are portrayed, we also need to take into account the narrative strategies employed by these modern women writers. In the light of our analysis of content and form we are able to examine the possible intentions behind such personal portraits: the act of writing as a form of self-discovery and self-therapy as well as the sharing of female experience. We conclude by suggesting the direction women's writing from German-speaking countries may be taking.
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Kisawadkorn, Kriengsak. "American Grotesque from Nineteenth Century to Modernism: the Latter's Acceptance of the Exceptional." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1994. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278030/.
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This dissertation explores a history of the grotesque and its meaning in art and literature along with those of its related term, the arabesque, since their co-existence, specifically in literature, is later treated by a well-known nineteenth-century American writer in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque- Theories or views of the grotesque (used in literature), both in Europe and America, belong to twelve theorists of different eras, ranging from the sixteenth century to the present period, especially Modernism (approximately from 1910 to 1945)--Rabelais, Hegel, Scott, Wright, Hugo, Symonds, Ruskin, Santayana, Kayser, Bakhtin, (William Van) O'Connor, and Spiegel. My study examines the grotesque in American literature, as treated by both nineteenth-century writers--Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, and, significantly, by modernist writers--Anderson, West, and Steinbeck in Northern (or non-Southern) literature; Faulkner, McCullers, and (Flannery) O'Connor in Southern literature. I survey several novels and short stories of these American writers for their grotesqueries in characterization and episodes. The grotesque, as treated by these earlier American writers is often despised, feared, or mistrusted by other characters, but is the opposite in modernist fiction.
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Gallagher, Kaleen. "Female suicide in German literature and film since 1955." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2015. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.709204.
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