Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Literature, English (0593)'
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Arulanandam, Santha Devi. "'The London Prodigal': A critical edition in modern spelling." Thesis, University of Auckland, 1989. http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/fullcit/9313712.
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Von, Bergen Megan Kimberly. "Spiritual meaning and the prophetic mode in T.S. Eliot’s Four quartets." Thesis, Kansas State University, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/2097/4147.
Full textDepartment of English
Michael L. Donnelly
Among the body of criticism on T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, critics such as Cleo McNelly Kearns and Alireza Farahbakhsh have recently interpreted the poet’s “intolerable wrestle / With words and meanings” (EC II) in light of deconstructionist theory. Although the poetry does recognize the difficulty of speaking about spiritual experience, it does not embrace the resulting linguistic miscommunication. In fact, the poems resist such a move, identifying the spiritual danger of such miscommunication; instead, they seek to overcome these difficulties and accurately communicate spiritual experience – an aim achieved in the context of biblical prophecy. Louis Martz argues that the Quartets are, in fact, not prophetic; however, he defines prophecy in terms of its social interests, rather than in terms of the interest in the human-divine relationship that characterizes both biblical tradition and Eliot’s poetry. I want to argue that reading the Quartets in the context of biblical prophecy, filtered through mystical tradition, explains their ability to transcend linguistic difficulty and explore spiritual experience in human language. In biblical tradition, the prophets overcome linguistic difficulty through a direct encounter with God, which purifies language of error and equips them to speak of divine reality. In Eliot’s Quartets, the poetry undergoes a similar purifying experience meant to replace linguistic error with a meaningful exploration of spiritual experience. For the Quartets, linguistic purification is accomplished by means of the mystical via negativa. Appropriating images associated with the via negativa, the poetry denies language tied to direct perception of spiritual reality and adopts instead a language that conveys such experience through unfamiliar words and images. In that language, the poetry is purified of its errors and made capable of exploring the human relationship with God. A poetry identified with the Incarnation, this solution communicates in human language the reality of spiritual experience. In this communication, the poetry at last explores spiritual experience in a way freed of miscommunication and meaningful for the audience, thereby fulfilling its prophetic aims.
Al-Athari, Lamees. ""This rhythm does not please me" : women protest war in Dunya Mikhail's poetry." Thesis, Manhattan, Kan. : Kansas State University, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/2097/865.
Full textDvorak, John N. "Lukácsian aesthetics in a post-modern world: understanding Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon through the lens of Georg Lukács’ the historical novel." Thesis, Kansas State University, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/2097/3896.
Full textDepartment of English
Timothy A. Dayton
This thesis project seeks to reconcile the literary criticism of Marxist critic and advocate of literary realism Georg Lukács with the writing of postmodern author Thomas Pynchon in order to validate the continued relevance of Lukácsian aesthetics. Chapter 1 argues that Lukács’ The Historical Novel is not only a valid lens with which to analyze Pynchon’s own historical novel, Mason & Dixon, but that such analysis will yield valuable insight. Chapter 2 illustrates the aesthetic transition from the historical drama to the historical novel by using Lukács’ ideas to explicate The Courier’s Tragedy, a historical drama found within the pages of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Chapter 3 applies Lukács’ ideas on the “world-historical” figure and the “mediocre” hero of the classic historical novel to Mason & Dixon. Chapter 4 asserts that Mason & Dixon enables contemporary readers to experience the novel as what Lukács calls a “prehistory” to the present. This chapter also illustrates how the prehistory of Mason & Dixon anticipates Pynchon’s nonfiction essay “A Journey into the Mind of Watts.” Finally, this chapter demonstrates how Pynchon avoids the pitfall of modernization in Mason & Dixon, which Lukács defines as the dressing up of contemporary crises and psychology in a historical setting. Chapter 5 ties together the work of the previous four chapters and offers conclusions on both what Pynchon teaches us about Lukács, as well as what Lukács helps us to learn about Pynchon.
Halpe, Aparna. "Between Myth and Meaning: The Function of Myth in Four Postcolonial Novels." Thesis, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1807/26507.
Full textYeager, Stephen. "Poetic Properties: Legal Forms and Literary Documents in Early English Literature." Thesis, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1807/32962.
Full textKolentsis, Alysia Michelle. "Shakespeare's Telling Words: Grammar, Linguistic Encounters, and the Risks of Speech." Thesis, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/1807/16760.
Full textLanpher, Ann. "The Problem of Revenge in Medieval Literature: Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, and Ljósvetninga Saga." Thesis, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1807/24360.
Full textCastravelli, Lianne C. "Building Beyond Limits : Fantastic Collisions Between Bodies and Machines in French and English Fin-de-Siècle Literature." Thèse, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/9691.
Full text“Building Beyond Limits: Fantastic Collisions Between Bodies and Machines in French and English Fin-de-Siècle Literature” explores late-nineteenth-century texts that emerged in response, or in reaction to, the rapidly evolving scientific and technological environment and which specifically consider man’s relationship to the machine by fantasizing about the grey area where they intersect. The core texts examined include Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s L’Ève future, Alfred Jarry’s Le Surmâle, George Du Maurier’s Trilby, Jules Verne’s Le Château des Carpathes, and a selection of short stories which we may refer to as contes à appareils, most prominently Marcel Schwob’s “La Machine à parler.” Using systems theory as its underlying structure, this dissertation sets out to reinterpret late-nineteenth-century texts that navigate the limits of the human and the mechanical and the sensitive surfaces where they touch and interact by re-inscribing them into a greater project of identity-building that defies chronological time and mathematical scale. As such, the connection between systems theory and architecture – as a method of organizing blank space into space that is inhabitable – is explored in order to understand the way in which we shape and make sense of the void at the origin of individual, and by extension collective, identity by engaging in the literal act of body mapping and building. Authors such as Villiers and Jarry set up the building of bodies as a scientific endeavor which must necessarily rely on available materials and technologies only to level this proposition by condemning the technological body to destruction. The construction of a technologically-enabled identity thus takes on promethean proportions which are perpetually redesigned in the cyclical acts of raising and razing, and reflected in the palimpsestic qualities of the texts. At stake is the integrity of the organic body, of the very nucleus of what it means to be human which, as evidenced by the equating of pathology with the loss of voice in the texts of Du Maurier, Verne and Schwob, may very well prove to be a structure which is distinctly unsound.
Karimi, Golnar. "Linguistic imperialism : a study of language and yoruba rituals in Wole Soyinka’s Death and the king’s horseman." Thèse, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/13481.
Full textThe aim of this thesis is to demonstrate the significant role of language in the development of the play Death and King’s Horseman by Nigerian author Wole Soyinka. The first chapter discusses the implications of writing a postcolonial text in the English language and revisits the language debates of the 1950s and 1960s. In addition to English, the thesis observes the use of other forms of communication such as Nigerian Pidgin English, local dialects, and Yoruba metaphors. Consequently, the intersection between language and culture becomes apparent through the description of the rituals. The final section of the thesis explores Soyinka’s primary focus of creating a “threnodic essence.” With the use of ritual masks, dance and music, he develops a type of dialogue that transcends the written form and is accessible only to those who are equipped with Yoruba cultural sensibilities.
Kouki, Safa. "Against oblivion : narrating the refugee camps in contemporary literary works in english." Thesis, 2020. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/25566.
Full textMy dissertation undertakes a critical assessment of and accounting for what I call “refugee camp literature” as both a cultural commodity and a literary and interdisciplinary genre on its own terms. Taxonomically, the appellation “refugee camp literature” runs the risk of falling in the very homogenizing discourse, that conflates the different accounts of the lives of the refugees, it is countering. Categorizing the selected narratives as a literary genre discloses the elusiveness of such an endeavor because the narratives themselves oscillate between various genres (Humanitarian life writing, testimonies, postcolonial bildungsroman, etc.) and such a genre is, given its political context, rather transgressive. Facing such a risk, a reconceptualization of one’s view of ‘ethical responsibility’ is needed in order to rethink our own subject-position and complicity and to make room for the Other that narrates to exist. Thus, while grouping narratives from and about refugee camps, “refugee camp literature” often dismisses the mainstream allocation of ready-made labels such as “victims,” “disposable subjects” or “speechless emissaries” to the refugees and unveils their political engagement and active participation in (re)shaping their own lives. Furthermore, particular thematic aspects explored in the chapters allow for a provisional use of the term “refugee camp literature.” These thematic affinities include, inter alia, the aspect of “waiting,” when the lives of the refugees seem to freeze in time, present and future. Another defining feature of the “refugee camp literature” is the refugees’ ability to reinvent themselves as the camp becomes “a place of new beginnings” (Simon Turner, 2015, 1). Thus, despite the precarity of life, another thematic similitude, in the refugee camps, the refugee camp dwellers exhibit survival strategies that grant them back the humanity almost stripped from them through systemic dehistorization and depoliticization. Depoliticization, Simon Turner tells us, “creates its own opposite: hyper-politicization,” (Turner, 7) which is another crucial thematic upshot. Accordingly, iv my dissertation aims at participating in the understanding of the ongoing “process by which a section of our common planet is today being put in quarantine” (Michel Agier, 2006:3). My intent is to look at the specific space from which refugee camp literature emerges and how such a liminal space may affect specific forms and strategies of narrating the self. To this aim, my first chapter distinguishes Dave Eggers’ novel What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng (2006) from the humanitarian life writing tradition it has been inscribed into. In this chapter, I study the camp as a geographically demarcated excluded/exceptional space. I try to understand the humanitarian governance of the camp and its political implication. My second chapter studies Elias Khoury’s novel Gate of the Sun (2006) and its cinematic rendition directed by Yousry Nasrallah (2004). Here, I move a step further from the camp as a purely physical limited space to study the camp as space where the dwellers question their existence and resist their confining reality and their acquired ability to infinitely reinvent themselves. The third chapter offers yet another reading of Dionne Brand’s novel What We All Long For (2005) as it problematizes the systemic differentiation between the figure of the refugee and that of the migrant. Then, it follows the crack in the narrative (the Quy sections) from which the refugee emerges as an excessive figure.
Hamdi, Houda. "Faulkner revisited : narrating property, race, gender and history in William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses, Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Gloria Naylor's Mama Day." Thèse, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/16011.
Full textMa thèse est une étude comparative entre William Faulkner, Toni Morrison et Gloria Naylor. Elle me permet d’explorer comment les protagonistes males construisent leur identités en se référant à la possession matérialiste et en se basant sur la subordination de la femme, qui est une autre forme de possession, afin de consolider leur masculinité. Dans leurs textes respectifs, Go Down, Moses, Song of Solomon, et Mama Day, les trois auteurs, malgré leur différences culturelles et même littéraires, partagent l’idée que l’identité, l’histoire, et la vérité ne sont que des construits culturels et sociales. On se basant sur la théorie de Judith Butler et d’autres théoriciens poststructuralistes et contemporains, ma thèse reflète qu’il n’y a pas d’identité « naturelle » ou de réalité objective. La perception identitaire n’est qu’une illusion imaginaire et idéologique ou le sujet ne fait que répéter et performer le discours de son environnent. Faulkner, Morrison, et Naylor basent leurs oeuvres sur le thème de la liberté. Ils explorent comment, à partir de leurs corps, leurs caractères se conforment ou bien se détachent de l’idéologie qui confine leurs identités sexuelles, raciales et sociales. En critiquant, non seulement l’identité’ mais aussi l’histoire, ma thèse montre que les trois écrivains détruisent la perception que la vérité est objective surtout dans les documents historiques. Ainsi, la vérité devient qu’une forme de distorsion qui consolide une certaine idéologie. Ma thèse montre que les trois auteurs mettent en valeur la voix de la femme Afro-Américaine. Elle joue le rôle d’une médiatrice pour les protagonistes males. Elle rejette le discours matérialiste et sexiste. Cette voix féminine représente le thème de l’amour et la survie de sa communauté noire et la résistance raciale. La femme Afro-Américaine préserve la culture Africaine à travers son attachement à la tradition orale et à la connaissance intuitive. En se basant sur la tendance subversive de l’art et de la littérature postcoloniale qui est promulguée par les théories de Henry Louise Gates, Paul Gilroy, W. E. B Du Bois, James Clifford et Arjun Appadurai, je montre qu’à travers Toni Morrison et Gloria Naylor, le texte de Faulkner reste logocentrique et essentialiste dans sa vision hiérarchique de l’identité raciale et sexuelle. Morrison et Naylor se référant au mythe de l’Africain volant afin de justifier qu’il n’y a pas d’identité fixe et stable, donnant ainsi la voix a une identité hybride et fluide. En se basant sur l’article, « Parler en Langues » de Mae Gwendolyn Henderson, ma thèse explore comment en réécrivant d’autres textes, Gloria Naylor déconstruit non seulement Faulkner, mais aussi le sexisme qui demeure résident dans le texte de Toni Morrison. L’histoire de Willow Springs se base sur le mythe féminin d’une ex esclave Sapphira Wade, qui en étant volatile, son histoire et son identité résistent toute forme de catégorisations. En étudiant l’hybridité’ dans la culture Afro-Américaine, ma thèse montre que le Sud qui est décrit dans l’oeuvre de Mama Day est plus hybride que celui de Faulkner et Morrison.
Vézina, Marie-Ève. "Faith lost and regained : the evolution of Anne Rice's critique of christianity in The Vampire Chronicles." Thèse, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/3704.
Full textThis thesis brings together three of Anne Rice's novels from The Vampire Chronicles series – The Vampire Lestat, Memnoch the Devil and Blood Canticle – in order to study the evolution of her critique of religion in her writing. A precise and complete examination of Lestat de Lioncourt, the series' main protagonist, allows the reader to better understand the impact of his spiritual transformation on Rice's literary career as a whole. In The Vampire Lestat, Lestat's rejection of religious beliefs as well as the deconstruction and eroticization of traditional religious rituals hint at the influence of atheism. Memnoch the Devil represents the transition between Lestat's refusal to believe in religion and his subsequent return to the Catholic faith. Finally, Blood Canticle symbolizes both the protagonist's and the writer's return to the faith, in addition to the conclusion of Rice's Vampire Chronicles. The analysis uses elements from Rice's biography to indicate religion's importance in her works without considering these novels as autobiographies.
Gonthier, Chloé. "Trauma, hybridity, and creolization in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, eyes, memory and The dew breaker." Thesis, 2020. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/24188.
Full textEdwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994) tells the story of Sophie Caco, a young Haitian girl who moves from Croix-Des-Rosets, Haiti, to New York City to reunite with Martine, her birth mother. Her coming-of-age-narrative becomes an exploration of cultural displacement, political violence, and intergenerational sexual abuse. The Dew Breaker (2004), a novel as short stories, recounts the tales of different characters whose lives intersect under the Haitian regimes of both François and Jean-Claude Duvalier. The text explores a multiplicity of perspectives representing the long-term effects of political terror on a host of characters. At their center are Ka Bienaimé, a young Haitian-American woman, who has idealized her father, whom she has perceived as a victim of the Duvalier regime, and her father, a Haitian immigrant hiding his past as a dew breaker, a Tonton Macoute, working as a violent enforcer of the dictatorship. Both novels depict the psychological, interpersonal, and cultural damage caused by the violence of an authoritarian regime. In my thesis, I investigate how Danticat uses the characters of Sophie and Ka to interrogate questions related to trauma and emotional betrayal. My study argues that in these texts the author creates a space where notions of hybridity and creolization mingle and give birth to new forms of discourse. More particularly, I provide an account of how the Creole language helps the reader to "come to a better understanding of the cultural, physical, and the historical realities of Haiti" (Sarthou 20). In acknowledging the traumatic experiences of their past as part of themselves, Danticat’s characters exercise agency by choosing to address the past. I will thus divide my thesis in three chapters. In Chapter One, I explore hybridity and creolized language as a space to articulate new forms of identity. In my second chapter, I examine how the author uses Breath, Eyes, Memory to reformulate memory and reclaim tradition. In Chapter Three, I analyze how The Dew Breaker interweaves explorations of violence, remembrance, and forgiveness to interrogate the potential for emotional healing.
Mehta, Bijalpita. ""Unchaste" Goddesses, Turbulent Waters: Postcolonial Constructions of the Divine Feminine in South Asian Fiction." Thesis, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1807/26298.
Full textHannachi, Madiha. "Variations on charisma : Shakespeare's saintly, villain, and lustful leaders." Thèse, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/4528.
Full textVariations on Charisma: Shakespeare’s Saintly, Villain, and Lustful Leaders is an investigation of the mechanisms of charismatic leadership in Shakespeare’s Henry V, Richard III, and Antony and Cleopatra respectively. It explores certain tools, such as rhetoric, irony, and resignification, which allow the leaders to gain the followers’ love, recognition, and even awe. This thesis will not deal with the essence of charisma as such but rather with the techniques of charismatic leadership. In the first chapter, I have studied the character of King Harry in three different aspects: as a military leader, as a spiritual leader, and as a political leader. Among the techniques of charismatic leadership which Henry V deploys to gain his followers’ love and devotion is rhetoric. The ability to deliver the right discourse in the right conjuncture and to persuade the followers even in the moments of hardship forms his key strength as a central figure in the play. The second chapter deals with Richard III’s charismatic leadership which is assessed ethically because it is gained through murder. I have tried to examine the possible relations that might exist between charisma and moral agency. In this chapter, I have raised questions about the extent to which charisma is ethical and how a leader, who usurpes power via murder, is charismatic. One technique which reinforces Richard’s charismatic leadership is irony. Richard III deploys irony to gain the audience’s complicity. In the third chapter, the focus is on the character of Cleopatra. The question raised in the chapter concerns the relationship between charisma and the struggle for an oriental feminine identity. Cleopatra’s sexual politics is also at the heart of my study because it is revisited and resignified by Shakespeare in a way that highlights Cleopatra’s charismatic qualities. Key words: charisma, rhetoric, moral agency, resignification, William Shakespeare
Bernard, Jean-François. "No Laughing Matter: Shakespearean Melancholy and the Transformation of Comedy." Thèse, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/10104.
Full textMy dissertation argues for a reconsideration of melancholy as an integral component of Shakespearean comedy. I analyse its presence across the comic canon, from early farcical plays through mature comic works, to the late romances that conclude Shakespeare’s career. In doing so, I denote its shift from an individual, humoural characterization to a more spectral incarnation that engrains itself in the dramatic fabric of the plays it inhabits. Ultimately, its manifestation purports to the cyclical nature of emotions and the mixture of mirth and sadness that the aforementioned late plays put forth. The thesis repositions Shakespearean melancholy away from humoural, psychoanalytical and other theoretical frameworks and towards an early modern context, where the term “melancholy” channels a plethora of social, scientific, and dramatic meanings. After a brief overview of the prevalence of melancholy in early modern England, the following chapters attest to the pervasiveness of melancholy within Shakespeare’s comic corpus, suggesting that, rather than a mere foil to the spirits of mirth and revelry, it proves elemental to comic structures as an agent of dramatic progression that fundamentally alters its generic make-up. I initially consider the ways in which melancholy is developed in The Comedy of Errors and Love’s Labor’s Lost, as an isolated condition, easily dismissible by what I refer to as the symmetrical structure of comic resolution. In both plays, I suggest, the failure to completely eradicate melancholy translates into highly ambiguous comic conclusions that pave the way for subsequent comic works, where melancholy’s presence grows increasingly cumbersome. Chapter three reads Much Ado about Nothing and The Merchant of Venice as prime dramatic examples of the phenomenon by which prominent comic characters not only fail to offer a clear cause for their overwhelming melancholy, but refuse to mitigate it for the benefit of the plays at hand. The melancholy found here creates emotional loose ends from which a sense of malaise that will take full effect in later comedies emanates. In the next chapter, As You Like It and Twelfth Night are held as a landmark in Shakespeare’s treatment of comic melancholy. The chapter suggests that these plays complete the break from individual melancholic characterization, which no longer seem suitable to the comic style towards which Shakespeare progressively turns. Consequently, the final chapter undertakes an analysis of Pericles and The Winter’s Tale to demonstrate the fact that, in his concluding dramatic phase, Shakespeare returns to the comic taxonomies of melancholy in order to foster more forceful, lingering emotional impacts as a form of dramatic impressionism, a relinquishing of details in favour of more powerful emotional responses. In a brief coda, I read The Two Noble Kinsmen as the culmination of the dramatic treatment in melancholy in Shakespeare, where the spectral wistfulness that characterized the late plays reaches a breaking point. I suggest that the play bears witness to a passing of the torch, as it were, between the Shakespearean dramatization of melancholy and the one propounded by Fletcher, which was to become the norm within subsequent seventeenth-century tragicomic works.
Lor, Prathna. "Queering the Cross-Cultural Imagination: (Trans)Subjectivity and Wilson Harris's The Palace of the Peacock." Thèse, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/10004.
Full textThis study contains two parts: a theoretical component and a literary text. The theoretical component discusses desire as a thematic and philosophical methodology in Wilson Harris’s The Palace of the Peacock. Chapter one argues that Harris paradoxically makes use of forms of empirical desire to demonstrate its epistemological limits. Chapter two discusses the problematic situation of female subjectivity in relation to male subjects, through environmental and anatomic metaphors, which Harris’s writing necessitates. Chapter three discusses contemporary poetics in order to situate my impetus for literary writing and attempts to salvage some of Harris’s theoretical concepts in dialogue with my own poetics. Chapter four contains the creative writing project, HEROISM/EULOGIES—an excerpt from a larger project—that charts the movement of various subjects across an imagined American landscape.
Guesmi, Haythem. "The aesthetics and politics of political violence in West African literature." Thèse, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/22636.
Full textHachaichi, Ihsen. "Eye and Ear in Wordsworth's Poetry." Thèse, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/9864.
Full textThis thesis is concerned with the visual and aural phenomenology in Wordsworth’s poetry. It places Wordsworth’s aesthetics between the most immediate embodied experience and the most exalted operations of the mind. My contention in the first two chapters is that one way to understand Wordsworth’s ambivalence toward the eye is to consider that visual perception is not a substratum on which imagination is coated or fabricated. Both bodily vision and imagination constitute characteristic and, strictly speaking, necessary ways of seeing. In the third chapter I deal exclusively with the ear, its status as an “organ of vision” as well as its impairments. The fourth chapter concentrates on the notion of synesthesia and delineates how beyond their negativity the eye and the ear contribute evenly to the growth of the poet’s mind.
Khemakhem, Zied. "Conceptual blending and the mapping of the inner recesses of the mind in Virginia Woolf's The Waves." Thèse, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/10005.
Full textThis dissertation starts with the premise that Virginia Woolf’s The Waves is to be read as a “mind thinking” and as an expression of “the exact shapes” that the mind holds. It establishes the link between Woolf’s experience of writing The Waves and her obsession with the “voices that fly ahead;” i.e. the very voices that used to prey on her mind as a result of her manic-depressive illness. It also offers a reading to the novel inspired by Conceptual Blending Theory: this framework helps (1) account for the “blend” of sensory impressions, feelings, and imaginative thoughts that constitute the essence of The Waves, (2) make up for the dispersed and seemingly fragmented nature of the narrative by emphasizing the various “mental patterns” weaved by/among the mind’s different voices, and (3) enable the reader to pin down a sense of the protagonists’ identities by carefully following their “blended” mental processes. The argument of this dissertation is developed in three chapters: the first chapter uses blending theory to highlight the mental processes that lead to the crystallization of intense “moments of visions.” It shows how a sense of the protagonists’ subjectivities would emerge by virtue of the “patterned” insight gained in those peculiar moments of revelation. The second chapter reads The Waves as a “society of selves.” Using Blending Theory, it emphasizes the “patterned” mental connections weaved among the different voices, which allows them to gain a “situated” or inter-relational form of insight about their own subjectivities. The third chapter follows the mental processes that enable The Waves’ protagonists to construct a stable and coherent sense of identity through the mental integration of different aspects of their subjectivities. In this chapter, Fauconnier and Turner’s notion of “living in the blend” is used to show how, in the course of their subjective development, The Waves’ voices would achieve an overall sense of psychological and identitary “wholeness.” The chapter also accounts for Rhoda’s unfortunate suicide in terms of her inability to continue to live in the very blend of her personal identity.
Tourki, Mohamed Ali. "The Place of the Gods : Biblical, Tragic, and Humanist Modes in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra." Thèse, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/10825.
Full textThis thesis focuses on Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra in relation to biblical thought, Renaissance humanism, and tragedy as a literary genre and Greek philosophy. The fall of Adam and Eve as well as the conflict between the tragic hero and the gods are two themes that are at the center of this work. The myth of the fall of Adam and Eve functions as a model for the fall—and thus the tragedy—of Antony and Cleopatra and is also the very structure of this study. If the first chapter talks about heaven, the second evokes the original sin. The third chapter investigates a ‘counter-redemption’. The first chapter refers to the idea of heaven, or Eden in the Bible, in order to examine the idea of Eden in Antony and Cleopatra. Fertility, Epicureanism, and Dionysian excess are all elements that are present in the conception of a biblical and a Shakespearean Eden. The second chapter is a study of tragedy as a genre fundamentally related to ancient Greek religious thought and philosophy—which is also the case in Antony and Cleopatra. This chapter demonstrates that the two Shakespearean protagonists are indeed similar to Greek tragic heroes, constantly defying gods and fate, thus, engendering their own tragedy (or ‘fall’, to continue with the myth of Adam and Eve). If the second chapter seeks to bridge Greek tragedy and Shakespearean drama, the third, however, shows that the ending in Antony and Cleopatra is different from the endings in plays by Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus. Analyzing the philosophy of the Renaissance, especially the notion of humanism, the final chapter of this work introduces Shakespeare’s protagonists as eternal rebels, humanists who are determined to defy the forces of fortune.
Lassoued, Nesrine. "Transgression in Matthew Lewis's The Monk and the Fragmentation of the Self." Thèse, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/11048.
Full textAgharazi, Hoda. "Why Say No? : Marriage Proposal Rejections in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre." Thèse, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/23721.
Full textThis thesis studies the purpose of multiple marriage proposals in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. I will show that Austen’s and Brontë’s inclusion of two proposals – by Darcy and by Rochester, respectively – are central to the narrative structures of their work. I will examine how Austen and Brontë present their heroines with multiple proposals in order to demonstrate the proper moment at which a proposal should be accepted. This thesis will contextualize the choices of Elizabeth Bennet and Jane Eyre by engaging in conversation with several literary scholars who work on Austen and Brontë. The first chapter will be dedicated to Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and the analysis of Darcy and Elizabeth’s changing relationship. The second chapter will examine Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Jane’s individual journey as it relates to her relationship with Rochester. I will also examine how each author demonstrates how gender roles and stereotypes can serve as a threat to a healthy relationship as well as to one’s own self-development. Through multiple proposals, Austen and Brontë demonstrate the importance of independence and equality in entering a marriage. They also dismantle traditional notions of masculinity.
Debbiche, Amal. "Social rejection of minority groups and its impacts on the individual's identity and perception of the self : exploring homosexual and racial identities in James Baldwin's Giovanni's room and Just above my head." Thèse, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/11484.
Full textThe present thesis examines the construction of identity as a complex process in which many factors interact. A person's identity comprises both the personal self and the collective self. Having an aspect of identity that is judged as deviant or devalued will lead to the individual's confusion between maintaining an image that fits social prototypes or embracing his personal identity. My work demonstrates that the exclusion or repression of certain aspects of identity may lead to disconnection from one's inner self. Yet, it is only through self-acceptance and the embracing of all elements of the self that one manages to resist hostility and gain the liberation of the soul and body. In the first chapter, a social psychological approach is employed in order to explain group functioning and the role that group interaction plays in shaping one's identity. External factors like social ideals influence people's behaviors and choices. Therefore, they represent a threat to personal differences and unique traits. The second chapter examines the implications of having an identity that transgresses social norms by exploring David's quest for the self in James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room. David's insecure identity because of his homosexuality fills him with destructive feelings of shame and guilt. I maintain that sacrificing aspects of the self to satisfy social paradigms may cause the loss of the individual's integrated self. David fails in freeing the self which remains imprisoned in fixed internalized perceptions of manhood and male sexuality. I analyse theoretical views about sex and gender that vary from rigid and traditional opinions to more tolerant and universalizing ones that accept possibilities of diversity in human identity. iv In the last chapter, I will examine Baldwin's depiction of male's bonding in Just Above My Head. The characters confront their emotions. Homosexuality is portrayed as a sacred way of expressing love. The characters' feelings are revealed both in gospel singing and in bodily connection. In this novel, Baldwin demonstrates that it is only through sincerity, disclosure and love that one can attain the liberation of the self.
Ashrafi, Shah Jehan Begum. "The self and its complicated relationship with writing in The Diary." Thèse, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/19348.
Full textMa mémoire présente ma nouvelle «The Diary». J’explore les conflits psychologiques qui surgissent chez une personne lorsqu'il n'est pas à l'aise avec sa façon de penser et d'agir. Mon histoire représente le complexe d'infériorité de Shadi, sa culpabilité et sa conscience. Sa soeur jumelle, Shadia, est le soi de l'écrivain, Shadi. Il se cherche en elle depuis son enfance. Shadi devient un escroc pour explorer des thèmes pour sa nouvelle pièce de théâtre. L'ego de Shadi est une résultante du patriarcat. Dans l'analyse de «The Diary», mon approche est principalement psychanalytique. J'utilise The Mad Woman in the Attic par Sandra Gilbert et Susan Gubar pour soutenir le thème principal de mon histoire. Shadi emprisonne sa soeur Shadia dans ses écrits car il veut se battre contre son complexe d'infériorité provenant de l'intelligence de sa soeur jumelle. Shadia sort du texte de l'écrivain pour parler à l'auteur. Les travaux de Sigmund Freud contribuent à expliquer la démence de Shadi. La soeur est la partie inconsciente de l'esprit de Shadi. Elle est son super-ego alors qu'elle est sa conscience. J'utilise aussi Madness and Modernism de Louis A. Sass pour la étudier la démence de mon protagoniste, Shadi. Simone de Beauvoir déclare que la femme est considérée comme l'autre. J'utilise l'autre en psychose comme un concept positif bien qu'il invoque des sentiments de terreur. The Anxiety of Influence de Harold Bloom m'aide à décrire la rébellion de mon protagoniste masculin contre ses précurseurs. «The Laugh of Medusa» d’Hélène Cixous explique l'importance de l'écriture féminine dans les poèmes de Shadi qui les écrits dans un état de démence.
Koay, Elvina. "Building Blocks : Children's Literature and the Formation of a Nation, 1750-1825." Thèse, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/9692.
Full text“Building Blocks: Children’s Literature and the Formation of a Nation, 1750-1825” examines how children’s literature imbues young readers with a sense of nationalism and national identity through the understanding of spaces and spatial relationships. The thesis studies various children’s works by Thomas Day, Sarah Fielding, Mary Wollstonecraft, Richard Lovell and Maria Edgeworth, Charles and Mary Lamb, Sarah Trimmer, Lucy Peacock, Priscilla Wakefield, John Aikin, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld. The various thematic subjects utilised reflect how boundaries between the exterior and interior dimensions, between the physical world and the psychological realm, are blurred. Drawing from the works of educational thinkers, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, writings for children highlight the importance of sensory experiences, which inform the internal developments of individuals. In return, the projection of imagination and the investment of feelings help shape the way people interact with the material world and with one another to form a nation. Using a Foucauldian approach, this thesis shows how discipline is instilled in children, turning them into regulated subjects. Through confessions and discourse, children subscribe to the notion of surveillance and transparency while an appreciation of public opinion further encourages the practice of self-control. Children become not only blank slates, susceptible to impressions, but readable bodies of writing. The values and norms of society are internalised, as children become part of the system that they adopt. The significance of visibility is also underscored in the popularity of the Linnaean system, which emphasises close observation and categorisation. Natural history in children’s literature reinforces the hierarchical structure of society, underscoring the need to respect class boundaries and perform individual roles for the wellbeing of the collective. The religious connotations in natural history may seem to justify class inequality; however, they also disseminate messages of charity, benevolence, and empathy, offering an alternative or “feminine” form of national identity that stands in contrast with militarism and patricianism. The second half of the thesis looks at how Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities” becomes a possibility through the development of national taste and an understanding of the interconnection between individuals. The figure of the bard points to the centrality of communal spirit in national identity. Alongside the growing commercialisation of cultural and national products in the period were increasing emotional attachments to objects and the necessity in discovering the authentic in the practise of critical reflection. Property is redefined in the question of “true” ownership and becomes shared in the communal imagination. Dissected maps teach children how to visualise spaces and boundaries and conceptualise one’s place within society. Children learn that disparate actions performed in the domestic sphere have larger implications in the public realm of the nation.
Touihri, Hanen. "Deictic shifts and discursive strategies in Othello." Thèse, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/9657.
Full textThis thesis, Deictic Shifts and Discursive Strategies in Othello, is a study of the linguistic tools and strategies used by different characters in the play. It explores how the text is built and the different techniques that govern it from within. It also studies the use of certain tools such as deictic shifts, indexical references, speech acts, and rhetoric, and the way they allow the speakers to achieve various results depending on the situation they are in. This thesis is divided into three chapters: the first is dedicated to the public-oriented speeches wherein I trace the different techniques used by the characters to monopolize the conversational floor, defend themselves or convince their addressees. The second chapter focuses on the one-addressee oriented discourses and shows how discourse can be used to have an effect on the addressee. The first part of this chapter deals with the semiotics of shock. The second part is dedicated to the semiotics of deception and manipulation. The last chapter deals with soliloquies and focuses on the discrepancy between Iago’s words and emotional responses as well as the changes in Othello’s personality and the related effect of these changes on his language.
Ben, Gouider Trabelsi Hajer. "Rethinking community in Dionne Brand’s What we all long for, Ahdaf Soueif’s The map of love, Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s ghost and Joseph Boyden’s Three day road and through black spruce." Thèse, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/7074.
Full textThis dissertation studies alternatives to communities in crisis proposed in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For, Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love, Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road and Through Black Spruce. Using a number of keywords (longing, subversive (cultural) translation, healing, touch and self-determination), I examine each novel’s contestation of a normative, oppressive configuration of community as well as the alternative community it proposes. Juxtaposing three diasporic novels and two Indigenous (Canadian) texts, I establish a dialogue between different worldviews and the ways they read and respond to communal crises. Unlike the alternative conceptions of community presented in the diasporic novels under consideration, the alternative conception proposed in Boyden’s novels stresses the importance of strong families to the building of an alternative postcolonial society. The diasporic texts, however, do not align their alternative communities with the traditional family as a unit of social organization and trope. These alternative communities evolve around affiliation rather than filiation. They build solidarities with the other beyond national, cultural, religious and ethnic lines of division. The first chapter studies an alternative to Canadian multiculturalism in Brand’s What We All Long For. The second chapter examines the alternative community and the mezzaterra from which it emerges in Soueif’s The Map of Love. The third chapter explores the tightly-knit relation between healing, touch and the emergence of an alternative community in Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost. The last chapter studies the contribution of legal autonomy and storytelling to discovering the vision that guides the Cree community portrayed in Boyden’s novels in its attempt to build an alternative postcolonial community. Keywords: Alternative communities, subversive (cultural) translation, affect, normative communities in crisis, multiculturalism and healing
Loiselle, Eric. "The Broken "I" : fragmentation of self and otherness in modern urban narratives." Thèse, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/3751.
Full textThis paper blends theoretical and creative writing in order to explore the narrative device of the performative “we”. The first chapter highlights the role of discourse in the process of identity formation and will move on to show how the performative role of language is used in the creation of social constructs such as the self and the other. Focusing on the limits of such a system, this paper attempts to create a narrative entity that is free of these boundaries. After some creative writing examples, a second theoretical chapter focuses on the in-depth study on the narrative entity of the flâneur, which, through its relationship with the city, highlights a complex dichotomy present in the relationship between the self and the other. The flâneur will emerge as a site of translation through which the performative “we” can begin to take action. However, the flâneur’s limits as a narrative device prevent it from being the definitive representation of this new relationship. After more creative writing examples, a third chapter combines what was learned from the previous chapters in order to demonstrate that the performative “we” and its dissolution of the “I” and the “you” leads to a narrative that is responsible, self-aware, and highly representative of modern urban reality and its effects on the creation of identity.
Cotnoir-Thériault, Crystelle. "Gender Performativity in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida." Thèse, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/20104.
Full textDzialowski, Louis. "Sideshadow views : narrative possibilities in Charles Dickens's late novels." Thèse, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/19287.
Full textAyari, Mohamed. "Gender, globalization and beyond in Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange and Jhumpa Lahiri's The Interpreter of Maladies." Thèse, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/22480.
Full textKøhlert, Frederik Byrn. "Drawing in the margins : identity and subjectivity in contemporary autobiographical comics." Thèse, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/12014.
Full textThis dissertation argues that the comics form can be mobilized to destabilize dominant notions of identity in an autobiographical context. Drawing on current theories of life writing that stress the construction of the self through the autobiographical process, it explores how the specific formal properties of comics provide opportunities for women and minority artists to assert subjectivity and contend with hegemonic ideas concerning the representation of gender, trauma, sexuality, ethnicity, and disability through the embodiment of the self on the comics page. Through formal visual analysis, the dissertation shows how the highly personal and hand-drawn aesthetics of a form that thrives on generic instability and the continual (re)mixing of verbal and visual codes allows artists to destabilize conventional representational schemes in a complex dance of appropriation and resignification that is always open to the creation of new meanings. Following the introduction, Chapter 2 shows how Julie Doucet resists the visual pleasure associated with looking at women in comics by using the originally misogynistic concept of grotesque female materiality as a generative principle from where she articulates a critique in both form and content of normative and restricting representations of the female body. Chapter 3 examines the comics form’s ability to depict trauma, and focuses on Phoebe Gloeckner’s attempts to come to terms with childhood sexual abuse through a recursive return to key visual memories. Chapter 4 argues that the form’s serial nature, multimodality, and association with zine culture provides Ariel Schrag with the tools to experiment with visual and verbal codes in order to delineate and assert a sense of the in-flux and queer teenage self in an experimental four-volume Künstlerroman. Chapter 5 argues that Lebanese-born artist Toufic El Rassi uses the visual form to expose the mechanism behind the production of anti-Arab prejudice, and that he asserts personal identity through the temporary rhetorical power afforded by the inhabitation of a known stereotype. Chapter 6 shows how Al Davison employs the comics form to stage dynamic staring encounters with the implied observer that have the potential to help the author elude the objectifying gaze commonly associated with looking at disability.
Stepanova, Olga. "Women, sources, and rhetoric in George Pettie’s A petite pallace of Pettie his pleasure." Thèse, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/11660.
Full textThis thesis, Women, Sources, and Rhetoric in George Pettie’s A Petite Pallace of Pettie his Pleasure, studies the early modern English collection of novellas A Petite Pallace of Pettie his Pleasure (1576) and indentifies it as a collection for women and a forerunner of the euphuistic style. The thesis consists of three chapters. In the first chapter I consider women’s position in early modern England, as A Petite Pallace is dedicated to ladies. The second chapter deals with structural elements of each story included in the collection. I also trace modifications made by the author to his source stories in order to adapt them for his readers and to attract more attention. The last chapter focuses on linguistic devices used by Pettie to dazzle his audience and to demonstrate the possibilities of the English language.
Maxwell, Ashley-Marie. "Japanese Macbeth : Shakespeare's role on the international stage." Thèse, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/21985.
Full textMestiri, Asma. "Sign, meaning and violence in Laurell K. Hamilton’s novels : a postmodernist approach." Thèse, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/11655.
Full textTufenkjian, Viken. "Eventual benefits : kristevan readings of female subjectivity in Henry James’s Late Novels." Thèse, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/14113.
Full textCook, Trevor. "Plagiarism and Proprietary Authorship in Early Modern England, 1590-1640." Thesis, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/1807/35725.
Full textBoudreau, Brigitte. "Daughters of Lilith : transgressive femininity in Bram Stoker’s late gothic fiction." Thèse, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/11123.
Full textZamanpour, Ali. "Deterritorialized male subjectivity : liminality, in-betweenness, and becoming in migrant literary and cultural contexts." Thèse, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/23416.
Full textThis dissertation stems from the search for a subject without reference to the webs of relations that hold it. Through rhizomatic movements, it breaks territorialities of narrative and moves beyond the subject’s thresholds by following literary and cultural lines of escape away from imprisoning forces of subjugation. The investigation flows along marginalized sites of transformation and displacement and through sites of resistance and decolonization. In my readings of migrant and Indigenous literatures, deterritorialization and decolonization intertwine at three major sites: liminality, in-betweenness, and becoming. These sites are not only innovative aesthetic forms that cross the threshold of identity in our contemporary culture; they also participate in the project of reinventing and rearranging the relation of self and other toward new beginnings. The new perspectives that are offered engage ethically, avoid judgment, and foresee the possibilities for revolutionary political, social, and economic transformation. The movements of deterritorialization that emerge within the writings and artistic production of Richard Mosse, Chris Abani, Leslie Marmon Silko, Thomas King and Rawi Hage provide possibilities for reflection at the thresholds of different male subjects in crisis. This project first addresses the underlying Thing that moves in between territories and confounds the desire to capture its essence; instead, following Deleuze and Guattari, it moves along with the male subjects’ nomadic movements as they become desubjectified simulacra in various sites of unlearning. In Richard Mosse’s Incoming and The Castle, for example, such a site of unlearning separates the materiality of the displaced from its image and informs discourse about the ways in which representation endangers, limits and violates existence. Through Abani’s GraceLand, this project further investigates modes of liminality and initiation ceremonies and acknowledges the lived experiences of male subjects in different cultural structures. In Rawi Hage’s novels, I explore the ways masculinity arranges or rearranges itself creatively in acts of performance. The dissertation also again turns to liminality by way of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, and Thomas King’s post-apocalyptic narrative of identity. In this way, the harmonious conjunction of Indigenous voices and Indigenous and migrant literatures attempts to locate where these lines of escape might come together, refuse to cross, or crumble back upon themselves in flows of violence.
Moyer, Alexia. "Literary meals in Canada : the Food/books of Austin Clarke, Hiromi Goto, Tessa McWatt and Fred Wah." Thèse, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/8804.
Full textLiterary Meals in Canada examines Austin Clarke’s Pig Tails ’n Breadfruit, Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms and The Kappa Child, Tessa McWatt’s This Body, and Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill. It asks, what does food mean to these stories, what does it allow the writers in question to say—about social structures, culture, language, and subjectivity—and how do they go about making these connections or drawing these conclusions? In other words, what are their food-writing strategies? I also read these texts as part of a larger conversation about food, a conversation taking place in academic circles as well as at the supermarket, on food labels, on television, and other media outlets. I look for moments in which my literary corpus responds to and challenges food-centred discourse. Comprised of four chapters—Production, Procurement, Preparation, and Consumption—this dissertation explicates Rachel Bowlby’s term, “literary supermarket,” through Michael Pollan and Hiromi Goto; it compares Escoffier’s haute cuisine with Austin Clarke’s “hot-cuisine”; it tracks the kinship between “doing-cooking” and writing cooking, as articulated by Luce Giard, Austin Clarke, and Fred Wah; it reads Emily Post’s advice on table manners against Hiromi Goto’s cacophony of gnashing and nibbling; and it pairs Tessa McWatt with Elspeth Probyn, both of whom share a similar approach to, and interest in, bodies that eat. The texts that make up this corpus are foodbooks. Food and the activities and processes associated with it are therefore mediated by language. For this reason the dissertation attends to the particularities and the potential effects of writing food.
Snelgrove, Allison. "Engendered Conversations: Gender Subversion Through Fictional Dialogue in Lawrence, Hemingway and Forster." Thèse, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/12176.
Full textDimakis-Toliopoulos, Panagiota. "The Abuser and the Abused : impropriety in Selected Texts by Jane Austen." Thèse, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/3577.
Full textThe focus of this study is women’s rights in Jane Austen’s novels. Despite the increasing awareness of individuality and human rights, psychological (and often physical) abuse exists. After Marilyn Butler’s seminal study Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, Austen is better understood within the contexts of her time. Human relationships are much more complicated as mothers try to “sell-off” their daughters to the highest bidder. These women attempt to secure their own financial future regardless of their children’s wishes or patriarchal norms. Moreover, widows who once exercised power through their husbands see this power relinquished, as society tries to identify their social status. Austen criticizes independent widows who try to obtain power by using their sexuality and manipulative language. The need for control spreads to all females no matter their social standing. This develops a competitive nature amongst them that limits the growth of society. This lack of unity allows men to abuse women themselves. Finally, with the advent of film studies, it is important to look at Austen novels translated into this media. Directors interpret abuse in various degrees, but most acknowledge its presence.
Mouratidis, Maria. "The Aesthetics of Madame de Staël and Mary Shelley." Thèse, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/10097.
Full textThe Aesthetics of Madame de Staël and Mary Shelley discusses the art of improvisation and the concept of enthusiasm in the writings of these two authors. In this project, I explore Madame de Staël’s aesthetics of improvisation and enthusiasm as represented in Corinne by drawing from her other novel Delphine, her play Sapho, and her short stories as well as her philosophical texts such as De l’Allemagne, De l’influence des passions, and De la littérature. I argue that Madame de Staël embraces through Corinne an anti-utilitarian aesthetic. I maintain that she represents a cosmopolitanism that values indigenous culture as opposed to Napoleon’s Imperialism. Furthermore, I examine how Corinne’s improvisations derive from an enthusiasm that can be associated to Plato’s elucidation of the term in Phaedrus and in Ion. This is evident by Madame de Staël’s own definition of enthusiasm as presented in the closing chapters of her De l’Allemagne. I interpret Corinne’s illness that is manifested in the loss of her genius as having psychosomatic origins and as being a slow suicide that is an expression of anger against patriarchy. The character of Corinne allows Madame de Staël to explore the conflict that women artists faced between having an artistic career and adhering to the domestic ideology. Chapter two focuses on the interest that Shelley takes in the art of improvisation as is manifested in her letters about the improvisator Tommaso Sgricci. Despite her fascination with extempore poetry, she regrets that this art form is evanescent. Moreover, I examine her enthusiastic response to another artist, Nicolò Paganini. Her fascination with this virtuoso violinist is linked to discourses about the unnatural talent of improvisatores. I argue there is a continuum of improvisation from the ballad form of the common people to the high-cultured improvisatore. I hold that the Shelleys were collaborating in defining the theory of inspiration through their interest in the art of improvisation. Chapter three considers the link between cosmology and aesthetics of inspiration through the function of music, especially Joseph Haydn’s The Creation, in Shelley’s The Last Man. I examine the representation of the sublimity of the Alps in the narrative through discourses that associate the Alps with the primordial forces of creation. The roles of Necessity, Prophecy, and Time can be understood in the novel by taking into account the notion of the music of the spheres. Chapter four explores the different meanings of the word enthusiasm in Shelley’s writings, primarily in Valperga and The Last Man. I discuss Shelley’s views on Madame de Staël as presented in Lives. I analyze Corinne-inspired characters in Shelley’s texts. In addition, I consider the meaning of enthusiasm in Shelley’s writings in relation to the English Civil War and the French Revolution. I present how enthusiasm was linked in the seventeenth-century to medical discourses about melancholia and how this is reflected in Shelley’s characters.
Olguin, Suyin. "Revisiting the gentleman : a study of hegemonic masculinity in the works of Jane Austen." Thèse, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/10671.
Full textThe increasing amount of attention to literature and female novelists in masculinity studies invites academics to revisit iconic figures like the gentleman in order to explore how literature responds to idealizations of manliness in eighteenth-century society and how these standards contribute to our own view of gender differentiation. This thesis analyses male characters in Jane Austen’s Emma, Persuasion and Mansfield Park under the scope of R.W. Connell’s concept of “Hegemonic Masculinity,” a concept that has been influential in the study of how history and hegemony influence social and national expectations of English masculine character. Conduct books that instructed genteel men how to be a manly gentleman perpetuated these ideals. Through the study of how politeness, sincerity, and heroism were continuously transformed to incorporate new ideals of manhood, this thesis examines influential conduct books by Locke, Knox, and Secker in order to understand how hegemonic masculinity became an essential part of Regency masculine education and discourse. Austen’s works highlight the vulnerability of hegemony by reminding the reader about the importance of human experience and growth regardless of gender. Nevertheless, her novels respond to appropriate education that instructs on principle, self-governance, industry, and sincerity, all of which, as the history addressed in this thesis demonstrates, also belonged to ideals of English nationalism and masculinity.
Sheckler, Catherine. "Dancing on the Edge of the Word : Ursula K. Le Guin and Metaphor." Thèse, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/21712.
Full textBelghiti, Rachid. "Dance and the colonial body : re-choreographing postcolonial theories of the body." Thèse, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/9690.
Full textClassical texts of postcolonial theory rarely address the embodied expression of dance as they examine the colonial body only through the imperial discourses about the Orient (Said), the construction of the Subaltern subject (Spivak), and the ambivalent desire of the colonial gaze (Bhabha). The Cyprian theorist and dancer Stavros Stavrou Karayanni has emphasised the centrality of dance as a key category of analysis through which discourses of resistance can be articulated from the perspective of the colonial heterosexual and queer body. However, Karayanni adopts the psychoanalytic method according to which the dancing body of the colonised subject has an ambivalent effect upon the Western traveller and / or coloniser who both desires and derides this body. In contrast to this approach, my study examines dance as a space in which the colonial body choreographs its collective history which colonial amnesia suppresses so as to de-historicise colonised subjects and disfigure their cultures. Departing from Frantz Fanon’s emphasis on the relevance of dance in colonial studies, I argue that the colonial body choreographs its collective memories in dance and prompts us to rethink hegemonic discourses of postcolonial identity formation that revolve around ambivalence and elusiveness. I borrow the notion of “choreographing history” from the Western contemporary discipline of dance studies which has integrated cultural studies since mid 1980s and influenced postcolonial inquiry of dance over the last decade. I include various cultural traditions in my project so as to re-direct today’s predominantly ethnographic research which describes dance as an encoded articulation of culture in specific postcolonial societies. I also include different cultural traditions to show that while choreographing silenced memories in various historical experiences of colonial violence, the dancing body allows us to construct discourses of resistance in ways that postcolonial theory has not addressed before. The re-choreography of postcolonial theories of the body, as developed in this dissertation, articulates an ethical imperative because it shows how the subaltern body not only choreographs memories that colonial amnesia silences but also produces cultural knowledge with a difference. Methodologically, this study brings together Western and indigenous theories of dance as well as postcolonial theories of the dancing body from both heterosexual and queer perspectives. My study discusses Susan Foster and André Lepecki’s contemporary theories of dance and the body in the context of postcolonial theories of Oriental dance and eroticism. It also examines the socially and politically transformative potential of the erotic in dance through textual and cinematic representations of the body. My study equally opens a dialogue between Western and indigenous theories of dance in the context of Canadian indigenous literary work of Tomson Highway. A critical examination of Trinidad Carnival and Calypso in a novel by Earl Lovelace demonstrates that dance is a central paradigm of analysis for a postcolonial critique of the body and the categories of identity that inscribe it.
Brousseau, Roxanne. "The "Effect of Education" on kinship ties in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park." Thesis, 2020. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/25450.
Full textDrawing on Mary Wollstonecraft’s and John Locke’s philosophies of female and childhood education, respectively, this thesis examines “the effect of education” (Austen 211) on kinship ties in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. Like many novelists and writers of conduct books during her lifetime, Austen addresses the state of education in the early nineteenth century. She proposes a more gender-neutral education that revolves around reason and virtue, like Locke and Wollstonecraft, and involves personal development and lifelong learning, which allows the individual to develop a sense of self and consequently form strong interpersonal bonds. Inhabiting a society undergoing rapid transformations, Austen also discusses the influence of social learning on the individual and their relationships. The first chapter addresses childhood education within the home and family and examines the ways various types of learning are instrumental to identity formation and determine relationships. This chapter also compares and contrasts Austen’s conception of education with Wollstonecraft’s and Locke’s. The second chapter considers the interdependent relationship between the individual, the family, and society and discusses in which respect power dynamics in home and country determine interpersonal relations. This chapter focuses on the inequality and oppression inherent in British colonialism, slavery, and female subjugation in the early nineteenth century, which hinder the development of profound attachments between individuals, as shown in the novel.
Janvier-Jalbert, Francis. "Super-héros victoriens : la transfictionnalité dans The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, suivi de Fiction Party." Thèse, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/23735.
Full textTransfictionnality, a concept close to that of transtextuality, is defined by Richard Saint Gelais as "the phenomenon by which at least two texts, from the same author or not, relate jointly to the same fiction, whether by resumption of characters, extension of a previous plot or sharing a fictional universe". This Master’s thesis in research-creation examines Alan Moore's and Kevin O'Neill's use of transfictionnality in their graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999-2019), and more specifically their recycling of narrative material from nineteenth century Great Britain, which is marked by the Industrial Revolution and the imperialist policies of the reign of Queen Victoria. Our aim is to better understand how the characters of literature of the Victorian era are appropriated by the authors, transformed and recontextualized so as to criticize the culture and the society that first generated them. Fiction Party is a transfictive and autofictional narrative in which Francis, the main character, is mistakenly invited to a party in honor of fiction at Dracula's Castle. He meets countless literary characters from every country and every epoch, including Antigone, Meursault, Emma Bovary, Don Quixote, and the sheriff of Nottingham. During the festivities, however, a murder is committed, and these great literary characters must then solve the mystery and identify the culprit, in a tribute to the detective fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie.