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1
Machala, Marta. "At home in the world : Czesław Miłosz and the ontology of space." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a551d588-fcb4-4c5c-81c3-3e81e8f7e593.
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Space constitutes one of the main leitmotifs of Czeslaw Milosz's work, both theoretical and poetic. Central in this respect is the notion of imagination as a faculty organizing space, the faculty which, from the times of the Scientific Revolution, has been subject to erosion, especially as far as the religious imagination is concerned. The abolition of the anthropocentric, hierarchical vision of space, threw human beings into a state of alienation, conceptual nowhere. Religion was replaced by the dogmatism of scientific reductionism, the reality of Ulro. Milosz shows the way out of Ulro, the way out of nowhere to the somewhere. This thesis aims to illustrate the conceptual map of the way out of Ulro as portrayed in four selected volumes of poetry and the novel Dolina Issy, anchored in different points of Milosz's biography. The Land of Ulro, the collection of essays which encapsulate Milosz's ideas on space, constitutes a canopy work for the interpretation of the practical realization of those ideas in Milosz's poetic work. Trzy zimy (1936), Swiat, poema naiwne (1943), Miasto bez imienia (1969), and Druga przestrzen (2002) provide the material for the analysis of different aspects of Milosz's conception of space. Subject to analysis is the relationship between object and human subject as regards the formative, childhood experience of the space of the house (manor) and surrounding landscape, the act of building space on the basis of memory and retrospection in the context of distance and exile, and the workings of religious imagination in the context of the realm of second space. Through his conception of space, Milosz defends human existence in its completeness. He shows the way out of Ulro. This thesis aims to retrace Milosz's map out of the land of alienation on the basis of the poet's selected works.
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Ganczak, Iwona. "At the crossroads of politics and culture : Polish dissident art of the 1980s." Thesis, McGill University, 2005. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=83104.
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This thesis will examine the political and social significance of the new artistic language that emerged in Poland in the 1980s. The new artistic language pertains to symbols, imagery and themes that originated in the discourse of the opposition and can be defined as the amalgam of the traditional religious vocabulary and time-specific symbols of oppression under Communism. The most prominent in this category are the symbols of the cross, the flowers, the national red and white flag, exclusively contemporary symbols such as the "television-people" as well as an array of traditional religious vocabulary. This unusual relationship between symbolic language of art and the symbols of the Church and the Solidarity accounted for the inherently political nature of dissident art. This thesis will discuss dissident art in context of the contemporary discourses: the discourse of the Communist Party, the Church, John Paul II and Solidarity.
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Schrader, Villegas Julie. "The racial shadow in 20th century American literature /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1997. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9525.
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Vandenborre, Katia. "Le conte dans la littérature polonaise du XXe siècle." Doctoral thesis, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/209735.
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La présente thèse étudie le développement historico-esthétique du conte littéraire polonais au XXe siècle sur la base d’un corpus qui s’étend de la Jeune Pologne à 1989, en se limitant à la littérature pour adultes. Cette étude se combine avec une réflexion théorique sur la nature du conte en tant que forme littéraire et propose l’outil de la convention pour cerner sa dynamique et sa polymorphie. Dans le conte, nous distinguons quatre niveaux de convention :le monde représenté, les motifs, la narration et le style. Les modèles conventionnels de ces quatre catégories, exposés dans le premier chapitre, servent de repères pour évaluer l’apport des écrivains à la convention du conte dans les deuxième et troisième chapitres. Le deuxième chapitre met en évidence le dynamisme historique qui anime le conte au XXe siècle dans la littérature polonaise, tandis que la troisième partie dégage de façon transversale les principales tendances esthétiques dans l’écriture féerique. Ainsi, le fil de la convention permet de tracer un panorama historique ainsi que de dégager les tendances esthétiques majeures du conte dans la littérature polonaise du XXe siècle, se révélant par là un outil pertinent dans l’étude du conte littéraire. Notons enfin que cette étude du conte littéraire offre un nouveau regard sur quelques uns des écrivains majeurs de la littérature polonaise du XXe siècle :B. Lesmian, W. Gombrowicz, St. I. Witkiewicz, Br. Schulz, T. Konwicki, St. Lem, Sl. Mrozek, Cz. Milosz et bien d’autres. /Based on a wide corpus of adult literature, the present doctoral thesis is devoted to the historical and esthetical development of Polish literary fairy tale in the twentieth century from the Young Poland to the year 1989. It proposes at the same time a theoretical reflection on the literary form of fairy tale. Accordingly the convention is used as the main tool to apprehend its dynamics and its polymorphism. In the fairy tale, four conventional levels can be distinguished: represented world, motives, narration and style. Presented in the first chapter, the conventional models of theses four categories are used as reference points to gauge writers’ contribution to the fairy-tale convention in the second and the third chapters. The second chapter highlights historical dynamism of the fairy tale in Polish literature of the twentieth century, while the third part draws transversally the main esthetical tendencies in fairy-tale writing. Therefore the convention allows to outline an historical panorama and to define the main esthetical tendencies in Polish literature of the twentieth century, which proves its relevance in the study of literary fairy tale. Moreover this study of literary fairy tale takes a fresh look at some of the most important Polish writers of the twentieth century: B. Lesmian, W. Gombrowicz, St. I. Witkiewicz, Br. Schulz, T. Konwicki, St. Lem, Sl. Mrożek, Cz. Milosz.
Doctorat en Langues et lettres
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished
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Baker, James Andrew. "Necessary evil: rhetorical violence in 20th century American literature." Diss., Texas A&M University, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/5766.
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Wayne Booth and other rhetorical critics have developed methods for examining the rhetorical aspects of fiction. In this dissertation, I examine, specifically, the use of rhetorical violence in American fiction. It is my premise that authors use rhetorical violence and the irrationality of violence created mimetically to construct ironic metaphors that comment on the irrationality of the ideology behind the violence, pushing that ideology's maxims to its logical ends. The goal of rhetorical violence, therefore, is to create the conditions for a transfer of culpability so that the act becomes transitive-transferable-loosed from its moorings. Culpability, if indeed it reflects something intrinsically awry with an ideology, becomes the fault of the ideology-ÃÂÃÂit becomes the perpetrator of illogic and the condemnatory force associated with the act of violence gets transferred to it. Hence, if the author has created an effective metaphor, when he or she flips the violent scene'ÃÂÃÂs "ÃÂÃÂvalue," the audience is willing to follow along. The violence remains a great evil, but the culpability for the act is shifted to a representative of the ideology in question-as-victimizer; nonetheless, that transfer can only occur inasmuch as the audience is willing to force-fit the incongruities of the metaphor.I examine this rhetorical phenomenon in the works of three modern American writers: Flannery O'Connor, Toni Morrison, and Chuck Palahniuk. I seek to examine the ideologies questioned in these works, the contradictory beliefs expressed by the authors, and to explicate primary episodes in the works of fiction wherein rhetorical violence functions in a rhetorical fashion to promulgate the author's ideology by emotionally jarring the reader loose from commonly-held ideological assumptions in three specific appeals: first, to negate one socially-held ideology in order to promote a conflicting one (Wise Blood); second, to elicit compassion for victimized characters representing social ills (Beloved); third, to call into question the validity of social institutions and practices (Fight Club).
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Bachorz, Stephanie Vanessa. "Dialectics of postcoloniality : Adorno and 20th-century Irish literature." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 2010. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.517204.
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Cook, Jordan Ellington. "Space, Time, and the Self in 20th Century Literature." University of Toledo / OhioLINK, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=toledo1525456817163611.
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Ben-Sira, Tallya. "Representation of motherhood in 19th and 20th century texts." Thesis, Hong Kong : University of Hong Kong, 2002. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record.jsp?B25262312.
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Kaufman, David B. "Polish-Jewish relations during the rebirth of Poland, November 1918-June 28, 1919." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/199.
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This study examines Polish-Jewish relations during the pivotal eight months between the declaration of Polish Independence on November 11, 1918 and the formal re-establishment of the Polish state by its recognition by the Allied and Associated Powers at the Paris Peace Conference on June 28, 1919. The thesis explores the background to Polish-Jewish relations in the years immediately preceding the period under investigation in order to place the events in their political and socio-economic context. The key to the present study is a detailed examination of the controversial anti-Jewish outrages that occurred in the disputed Russo-Polish-Ukrainian borderlands, namely in Lwów in November 1918, and at Pińsk in April 1919. It is important not only to scrutinise these events in detail, but furthermore to place them in their full international perspective. The direct result was the imposition of a Minorities Treaty upon Poland, which was largely drafted during the final months of the Peace Conference. Polish anti-Jewish violence was not the only factor that influenced the Allies gathered at Versailles, yet the peacemakers felt compelled to treat Poland as a special case. The Treaty further strained the interdependent links between Poles and Jews, both in Poland and the west, as the dominant group saw it as an unfair limitation on its sovereignty. Polish resentment at the perceived influence of ‘international Jewry’ further heightened tensions between the two, yet the drafting of the Minorities Treaty was emphatically not as a result of the ‘Jewish lobby’ (which was in fact divided) that had gathered in the French capital in an attempt to further Jewish demands in both Eastern Europe and Palestine. The damage done to Polish-Jewish relationships during the crucial period of 1918-1919 not only strained interaction between those groups in the months covered by the thesis, but also exacerbated the Jewish ‘problem’ during the course of the Second Polish Republic and beyond.
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Chou, Mei-ching Tammy, and 周美貞. "Feminism and the representations of teenaged girls in 20th century children's literature." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2005. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31940201.
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Xiong, Ying. "Representing empire: Japanese colonial literature in Taiwan and Manchuria." Thesis, The University of Sydney, 2011. https://hdl.handle.net/2123/28923.
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Japan's imperialist expansion in late 19th and early 20th Asia was marked by its
official colonisation of Taiwan in 1895, of Korea in 1905, and by its subsequent
occupation of Northern China in 1931, prior to heading further to the South in the late
19305. Living as they did in the heyday of imperialism and nationalism, two significant
historical phenomena of the 20th century, Japanese colonial writers who travelled to the
colonial territories left behind them abundant stores of writing and records that deserve
scholarly attention. The dual historical processes of nationalisation and imperialisation
put these colonial writers under no little strain and, at the same time, affected their
national identification, which is the focus of this study.
Any study of Japanese national identification, and the tension between Japan’s
nationalism and imperialism reflected in colonial writings, cannot be undertaken from a
purely national perspective; rather, it demands a transnational vision that takes into
account colonial factors, which in this study includes Japan’s interaction with China and
Chinese literature. Drawing upon the examples of Nishikawa Mitsuru and Ouchi Takao,
my thesis aims to scrutinise Japanese colonial literature and cultural production in
Taiwan and Manchuria, and to identify the similarities and divergence in colonial
identities that would otherwise be neglected in a more narrow treatment.
This thesis argues that both Japanese state and imperialism were understood by
the Japanese people living in Taiwan and Manchuria in an ambiguous way. There was
inconsistency in their understanding of the relations between state, nation and empire. In
both Taiwan and Manchuria, space could be found for individual deviation from
imperialist power.
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Kay, Barbara J. Goodsell. "Conflictual representations : North American representations of war in the 20th century /." Thesis, [Hong Kong] : University of Hong Kong, 1994. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record.jsp?B13762096.
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Chou, Mei-ching Tammy. "Feminism and the representations of teenaged girls in 20th century children's literature." Click to view the E-thesis via HKUTO, 2005. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/B31940201.
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Gardam, Sarah Christine. "THE PATHOS OF TEMPORALITY IN MID-20TH CENTURY ASIAN AMERICAN FICTION." Diss., Temple University Libraries, 2018. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/487648.
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EnglishPh.D.
Lack of understanding regarding the role that temporality-pathos plays in Asian American literature leads scholars to misread many textual passages as deviations from the implied authors’ political critiques. This dissertation invites scholars to recognize temporality-focused passages in Younghill Kang’s East Goes West, Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart, and John Okada’s No-No Boy, as part of a pathos formula developed by avant-garde Asian American writers to resist systemic alienations experienced by Asian Americans by diagnosing and treating America’s empathy gap. I find that each of pathae examined – the pathos of finitude, the pathos of idealism, and the pathos of confusion – appears in each of the major primary texts discussed, and that these pathae not only invite similitude-based empathy from a wide readership, but also prompt, via multiple methods, the expansion of empathy. First, the authors use these pathae diagnostically: the pathos of finitude makes visible American imperialism’s destruction of prior ways of life; the pathos of idealism exposes the falsity of the futures promised by liberalism; and the pathos of confusion counters the destructive nationalisms that fractured the era. Second, the authors use these temporality pathae to identify the instrumentalist reasoning underlying these capitalist ideologies and to show how they stunt American empathy. Third, the authors deploy formal and thematic complexities that cultivate empathy-generating faculties of mind and cultivate alternative forms of reasoning.
Temple University--Theses
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Willis, Avery Tinch. "Euripides' Trojan women : a 20th century war play in performance." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2005. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:bb57e1d3-b560-45f2-8cd9-64befab97bba.
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In this dissertation, I approach the interpretation of a classical text in performance by examining the practical elements (directorial and design choices: set, costumes, lighting, music, etc.) and promotional materials (programmes, press releases, photographs, etc.) for a selection of significant test cases in order to determine how these production decisions engage with external factors of political, intellectual, and cultural import. Trojan Women is a particularly useful case study to explore within the parameters of this method because the dynamism and immediacy of the play is most powerfully articulated when production choices allow for it to be wielded as a weapon of protest or reaction against contemporary policy, especially the waging of war. Using a chronological approach, this analysis of Trojan Women as a text for performance provides a broad and in-depth discussion of the reception of the play in the twentieth century, the period in which the ancient text was most frequently performed. Through the investigation of several influential productions on the international stage, and through an examination of the roles of key players (particularly Gilbert Murray and Jean-Paul Sartre), Trojan Women emerges as a play that offers theatre artists a unique and effective forum for debating issues of human responsibility in times of war a central theme in the play and a considerable preoccupation during a century of armed conflict. Chapter One discusses how the play was used to criticize imperial activity and promote ideological causes in the first half of the century. Chapters Two and Three draw attention to a major cluster of performances reflecting the spirit of international war protest in the 1960s and 1970s. Chapter Four addresses productions of the play affected by delayed responses to the Holocaust. Chapter Five features performances in the 1990s that respond to crises of civil conflict and genocide.
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Janicki, Maciek. ""Incorrigible enemies of Soviet power" : Polish citizens in the Soviet Union, 1939-1942, in the light of Soviet documents and Polish witness' testimonies." Thesis, McGill University, 2007. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=101883.
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Between February 1940 and June 1941, in four major deportations Soviet authorities moved Polish citizens to work-colonies in the Soviet interior and detained others in various prisons and camps. Based on war-time information, works on the deportations published in the West during the decades of communist rule in Eastern Europe and since reported figures of over 1.5 million deportees, of whom as many as half reportedly died in the USSR. These works held a prevailing view that Soviet intentions towards the deported Poles were genocidal. Recent work with Soviet archival materials has led Polish and Russian historians to revise the number of deportees to 320,000. This substantial reduction has received a mitigated response in the work of Western commentators. A review of published archival materials and of accounts left by witnesses demonstrates that both sets of sources are indispensable to an analysis of the deportations. It also shows that Soviet policies directed against the deportees were not genocidal in their intent and adds a dimension, that of the perpetrators, to the limited conceptualization afforded to the subject thus far. The study shows that under the control of the NKVD the deportations were economic and political components of internal Soviet policy in 1939-1942 and suggests that the Soviet infrastructure was incapable of supplying the resources necessary to fulfill plans set by Moscow. Moreover, the Soviet documentation offers a glimpse into the perpetrators' planning and execution of massive population displacement, thus taking the deportations outside of the realm of conjecture and placing them more firmly within the grasp of historical understanding.
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Papanikolaou, Dimitris. "Singing poets : literature and popular music in France and Greece /." London : Legenda, 2007. http://bvbr.bib-bvb.de:8991/F?func=service&doc_library=BVB01&doc_number=016510046&line_number=0002&func_code=DB_RECORDS&service_type=MEDIA.
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Brice, Dusty A. "The Lawrentian Woman: Monsters in the Margins of 20th-Century British Literature." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2015. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/2612.
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Despite his own conservative values, D.H. Lawrence writes sexually liberated female characters. The most subversive female characters in Lawrence’s oeuvre are the Brangwens of The Rainbow. The Brangwens are prototypical models of a form of femininity that connects women to Nature while distancing them from society; his women are cast as monsters, but are strengthened from their link with Nature. They represent what I am calling the Lawrentian-Woman.
The Lawrentian-Woman has proven influential for contemporary British authors. I examine the Lawrentian-Woman’s adoption by later writers and her evolution from modernist frame to postmodern appropriation. First, I look at the Brangwens. They establish the tropes of the Lawrentian-Woman and provide the base from which to compare the model’s subsequent mutations. Next, I examine modern British writers and their appropriation of the Lawrentian-Woman. The Lawrentian-Woman’s attributes remain intact, but are deconstructed in ways that explore women’s continued liminality in patriarchal society.
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Murdock, Mark Cammeron. "In the Company of Cheaters (16th-Century Aristocrats and 20th-Century Gangsters)." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2009. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/1775.
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This document contains a meta-commentary on the article that I co-authored with Dr. Corry Cropper entitled Breaking the Duel's Rules: Brantôme, Mérimée, and Melville, that will be published in the next issue of Essays in French Literature and Culture, and an annotated bibliography of primary and secondary sources featuring summaries and important quotes dealing with duels, honor, honor codes, cheating, historical causality, chance, and sexuality. Also, several examples of film noir are cited with brief summaries and key events noted. The article we wrote studies two instances of cheating in duels: one found in Brantôme's Discours sur les duels and the other in Prosper Mérimée's Chronique du règne de Charles IX, and the traditional, as well as anti-causal, repercussions they had. Melville's Le Deuxième souffle is also analyzed with regards to the Gaullist Gu Minda and the end of the aristocratic codes of honor that those of his generation dearly respected but that were overcome by the commercial world of republican law and order.
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蘇偉貞 and Weizhen Su. "張愛玲的香港時期小說, 1952-1955." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1999. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B29913330.
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Stricklin, Rita Katherine. ""A Site of Invasion: Representations of Home in 20th Century South African Literature"." University of Akron / OhioLINK, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=akron1523015006047659.
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Feng, Dongning. "Text, politics and society : literature as political philosophy in post-Mao China." Thesis, University of Stirling, 1997. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/2216.
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The purpose of this study is to arrive at a critical overview of politics and literature in the Chinese context. The relationship has increasingly become a "field" of studies and theoretical inquiry that most scholars in either disciplines are wary to tread. This thesis tries to venture into this problematic field by a theoretical examination as well as an empirical critique of Chinese literature and politics, where the relationship seems even more paradoxical, but adds more insight into the argument. The Introduction and Chapter One set up a framework by asking some general but fundamental questions: what literature is, and how it is to be related to politics. Chapter Two examines the historical function of literature and Chinese writers in society to establish the basis of argument in the Chinese context. Chapter Three focuses the discussion on the relationship between politics and literature during the Mao era and after. Chapters Four analyses the literary works published during the post-Mao period to establish the argument that literature, as part of our perception of the world, is most concerned with human society and social amelioration and participates in the socio-political development by contributing to it through a discourse that is otherwise inaccessible. Chapter Five explores the argument further by extending it into the field of cinema, which basically comes from the same narrative tradition of prose literature, but offers a wider and different dimension to the argument pursued. Chapter Six and the Conclusion try to draw together the argument by examining literature as both form and content to argue how and why literature is related to politics and how it has functioned in a political manner in Chinese society. To summarise, Chinese literature in this period will b& shown to be involved In a process of political reform and development by way of bringing the reader to participate in a critical and philosophical dialogue with power, history and future. In the long run, it offers emancipating visions and possibilities revealed to the reader in ways that are historical, developmental, philosophical and comparative. This study focuses on the prose fiction published in this period, for it is the leading force in China's cultural development and constitutes the major trunk of the modern Chinese canon. In addition, the research also extends to drama and films, and the way they, together with prose fiction, make up the most popular perception and intellectual discovery of contemporary Chinese society and politics and best inform the argument of the study of politics and literature.
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Ferris, Natalie. "'Ludic passage' : abstraction in post-war British literature, 1945-1980." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:5b3034e6-3a32-4684-b8a0-eb91cfc756c6.
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This thesis traces a line of literary experimentation in post-war British literature that was prompted by the aesthetic, philosophical and theoretical demands of abstraction. Spanning the period 1945 to 1980, it observes the ways in which certain aesthetic advancements initiated new forms of literary expression to posit a new genealogy of interdisciplinary practice in Britain. It is the first sustained chronological study to consider the ways in which a select number of British poets, authors and critics challenged the received views of their post-war moment in the discovery of the imaginative and idealizing potential of abstraction. At a time in which Britain became conscious of its evolving identity within an increasingly globalised context, this study accounts for the range of Continental and Transatlantic influences in order to more accurately locate the networks at play. Exploring the contributions made by individuals, such as Herbert Read, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Christine Brooke-Rose, as well as by groups of practitioners, such as the British concrete poetry movement, small press initiatives and Art & Language, this thesis offers a comprehensive account of the evolving status of abstraction across cultural, institutional and literary contexts. The discussions build a vision of an era that increasingly jettisons the predetermined critical lexicon of abstraction to generate works of a more pragmatic abstract inspiration: the spatial demands of concrete poetry, language as medium in the conceptual artwork, the absence of linear plot in the new novel.
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Grace, Elizabeth Ellen. "Women, nation, narration : a comparative study of Japanese and Korean proletarian women's writing from the interwar years (1918-1941)." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2015. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.709209.
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Januzzi, Angela. "Making an "American Classic": Faulkner, Ferber, and the Politics of 20th Century Canon Formation." Fogler Library, University of Maine, 2007. http://www.library.umaine.edu/theses/pdf/JanuzziA2007.pdf.
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Gosling, Juliet. "Virtual worlds of girls : exploring the 20th-century British genre of girls' school stories." Thesis, University of Kent, 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.369642.
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Kylin, Sebastian. "Brave New World : Blind Perception of the Early 20th Century." Thesis, Karlstads universitet, Institutionen för språk, litteratur och interkultur, 2018. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kau:diva-66354.
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Huxley’s Brave New World portrays a futuristic hyperbole of mankind’s future as a result of technological advancements. From a New Historical perspective, this essay examines how BNW satirizes contemporary society by satire where the audience is both a part of the problem and solution. Through the use of satire Huxley’s novel successfully portrays horrific examples of how human life in a not so distant future may find that the technology which revolutionized our lives actually enslaves us. Post-novel examples such as Hitler and his Nazi regime is a real life example of the type of totalitarian regime that is possible as a direct result of scientific progress in many fields. In this paper, however, posterity is excluded from the analysis. Instead this essay focuses on the contemporary society as depicted in early 20th century literature and how it reflects identifiable satirical elements in BNW. The analysis depicts how several discourses of contemporary industrialized Britain such as rationalism, socialism, industrialism, freedom, religion and political indifference are reflected in the novel. Ultimately, Huxley’s dystopian reflection of human future taunts us, the audience, by directly and indirectly illuminating the dangers of blindly accepting scientific advancements in the name of progress. The one, perhaps most relevant question the novel raises is – are we truly free when we are free to have the most wonderful time?
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Piantanida, Cecilia. "Classical lyricism in Italian and North American 20th-century poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4422c01a-ba88-4fe0-a21f-4804e4c610ce.
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This thesis defines ‘classical lyricism’ as any mode of appropriation of Greek and Latin monodic lyric whereby a poet may develop a wider discourse on poetry. Assuming classical lyricism as an internal category of enquiry, my thesis investigates the presence of Sappho and Catullus as lyric archetypes in Italian and North American poetry of the 20th century. The analysis concentrates on translations and appropriations of Sappho and Catullus in four case studies: Giovanni Pascoli (1855-1912) and Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968) in Italy; Ezra Pound (1885-1972) and Anne Carson (b. 1950) in North America. I first trace the poetic reception of Sappho and Catullus in the oeuvres of the four authors separately. I define and evaluate the role of the respective appropriations within each author’s work and poetics. I then contextualise the four case studies within the Italian and North American literary histories. Finally, through the new outlook afforded by the comparative angle of this thesis, I uncover some of the hidden threads connecting the different types of classical lyricism transnationally. The thesis shows that the course of classical lyricism takes two opposite aesthetic directions in Italy and in North America. Moreover, despite the two aesthetic trajectories diverging, I demonstrate that the four poets’ appropriations of Sappho and Catullus share certain topical characteristics. Three out of four types of classical lyricism are defined by a preference for Sappho’s and Catullus’ lyrics which deal with marriage rituals and defloration, patterns of death and rebirth, and solar myths. They stand out as the epiphenomena of the poets’ interest in the anthropological foundations of the lyric, which is grounded in a philosophical function associated with poetry as a quest for knowledge. I therefore ultimately propose that ‘classical lyricism’ may be considered as an independent historical and interpretative category of the classical legacy.
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Oxley, Natasha Emma Fortescue. "Talking taboos: the personal over the political? : contemporary Polish playwriting : theme and dramatic technique in selected modern Polish plays." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:036a5a0e-aa99-40f9-b610-4a267bc1e533.
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The focus of this thesis is contemporary Polish playwriting after Poland's accession to the European Union in 2004. From a broad reading of plays by many new writers, four playwrights were selected for study on the basis of prominence and artistic merit: Pawel Demirski, Dorota Maslowska, Malgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk and Przemys law Wojcieszek. Their plays were studied as texts and in performance, and twelve main plays became the focus of closer analysis. The thesis identifies and examines three major concurrent themes in the works of these playwrights. Remembering versus forgetting the past is discussed through the lens of selected aspects of memory studies, including Nora's lieux de mémoire, Hirsch's postmemory and Assman's mnemohistory. The playwrights are shown to share an endorsement of the de-politicisation of collective memory and to advocate a cessation of the passing down of trauma to post-war generations. The human body is highlighted as another concurrent thematic concern and is illuminated by certain tenets of Catholic doctrine as well as Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology. The playwrights' rejection of the tabooisation of the body is demonstrated and the shared notion of the body as both sentient and unifying is exemplified. Social marginalisation is examined as the final concern, with an emphasis on the notion of the 'other', particularly in relation to socio-economic status, sexuality, and religious beliefs. The plays are shown to support and promote a rejection of the myth of homogeneity in favour of openness to diversity. Major dramatic techniques are then closely examined. It is demonstrated that the plays share traits with Lehmann's theory of postdramatic theatre, including a rejection of Aristotelian unities. Key commonalities are evidenced, particularly comedy, bad language, intertextualities with the outside world, and an engagement with Polish social realities. The playwrights' approach to the spectator as a socio-political being is shown to be of paramount importance.
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Rydzewska, Joanna. "East meets West meets Auteur : transnational encounters with imagined identities in British and Polish cinema." Thesis, Swansea University, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.678569.
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Sidhe, Wren. "Bodies, books and the bucolic : Englishness, literature and sexuality, 1918-1939." Thesis, University of Gloucestershire, 2001. http://eprints.glos.ac.uk/3380/.
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The hypothesis this thesis tests is that interwar hegemonic discourses of Englishness located it as originating in the heterosexual bond between a masculine national subject and a feminine nature/landscape. Discursively, this left little space for women to insert themselves in to such a cultural formation. However, a paradox of this heterosexualising cultural matrix may have been to give a voice to lesbian subjectivity, since If 'women' might not be English, could lesbians be? If national land was figured as feminine, and women desired identification with their country-as-land, to become English might mean for some women that they should become lesbian. In order to explore this, three main questions are examined. Firstly, to what extent did the dominant discourse of the rural in the interwar period define 'Englishness' as masculine and 'Nature' as feminine? Secondly, if women were excluded from this discursive heterosexual relationship, can it be seen paradoxically to have opened up a space for alternative sexualities to emerge? If lesbianism were an instance of the latter, then what writing strategies were adopted in order to articulate a relationship between Englishness and lesbianism? Thirdly, what can censored and other literary texts of the period reveal about the relations between such an English masculine national subject, the meaning and powers attributed to literature, and forbidden sexualities and subjectivities? In its analysis of the relationship between national identity, geographical location and sexuality, this thesis contributes to studies of England and Englishness through the addition of the concept of 'sexuality' to an understanding of their construction. It also contributes to lesbian and gay critical theory by examining the national processes which impinge of the construction of the homosexual subject. Beyond that, the importance of the materiality of the locations offered to different subjectivities shows how national identifies are both enabled and limited by these same locations.
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Parham, Blake. "The Invisible Man: Roman Palester and his Place in Post-war Polish Music." Thesis, University of Sydney, 2020. https://hdl.handle.net/2123/23000.
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Roman Palester (1907 –1989) was as one of the most promising and well-known composers in Poland during the inter-war period. Yet, following the creation of the Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa [Polish People’s Republic] (PRL) between 1945-52, the tightening of political control over art in 1949, and Palester’s defection to the West in 1951 he has all but disappeared from Polish musical life. This study seeks to address Palester’s absence from the musical scene by exploring how Palester, as a composer in exile, negotiated the politics of the Cold War in both Eastern and Western Europe, and what effect this had on his life, career, and music. This will be achieved by tracking Palester’s life from his early years as a student in Warsaw, through the Second World War, the instigation of a communist regime in Poland, his defection to France and later Germany, his work at Radio Free Europe (RFE), and his brief reintroduction to Poland in the 1980s. Palester’s evolving compositional voice will also be examined: exploring his use of neoclassicism, his brief foray into folklorism, the development of his own form of twelve-tone technique, experimentation with ‘limited aleatorism’, expressionist tendencies, and attempts to synthesise these various techniques into a singular compositional voice. This will be achieved by critically discussing a select number of Palester’s pivotal musical works: Psalm V, Requiem, Symphony No. 3, Preludes for Piano, La Mort de Don Juan, and Symphony No. 5. The findings of this study show that the unique political environment of the Cold War and Palester’s exile had a profound impact on his career and reception but suggest that his musical style was shaped primarily by his own artistic principles.
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曾昭楹 and Chiu-ying Venus Tsang. "Temporality in modernist literature: Ezra Pound and Virginia Woolf." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2003. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B26822428.
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Shi, Xiaoling. "The Return of the Westward Look: Overseas Chinese Student Literature in the 20th century." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/194739.
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By employing the theory of Imagology, this work examines four literature workswritten in overseas study movements in modern Chinese history: Wang Tao's shortstories in Songyin Manlu, Lao She's The Two Mas, Bai Xianyong's A Death in Chicagoand Zhou Li's Manhattan's Chinese Lady. While tracing how Chinese intellectuals workthrough the dichotomy of China/West and Tradition /Modernity, this study alsoendeavors to reveal theoretical issues arising from inter-cultural communication andrepresentation. It argues that the literary projection of the west manifests a complex senseof the Chinese self primarily due to the portrayals of western cities and westerners as anembodiment of Chinese understandings of western modernity at different periods. In theLate Qing, the depiction of London in Songyin Manlu only focuses on gunboats, cannons,museums, and factories, because western modernity for the Chinese at the time wassignified by the mighty weaponry of British navy and advanced technology. In the 1920s,however, the portrayal of London in The Two Mas shifts to reveal how Londoners'lifestyle and culture make Britain the most powerful nation in the world, as the Chineseintellectuals advocated the westernization of Chinese culture in order to strengthen China.In the 1960s, the Chinese protagonist Wu Hanhun in A Death of Chicago feels estrangedand sexually seduced in Chicago, subsequently loses his sense of purpose in life andeventually commits suicide, the depiction of which is consistent with similar themes inwestern modernist literature. This is due to the fact that the modernist movement thrivedin Taiwan in the 1960s, and as such, had a large impact on Taiwanese writers. The 1990seraManhattan's Chinese Lady displays spectacles of America's wealth on the FifthAvenue in Manhattan, as common Chinese strive for becoming rich in contemporaryChina owing to the Chinese government's promotion of market reform after 40 years ofpoverty in socialist China. The study concludes that regardless of whether or not theimages of the west presented in Chinese discourse are idealizations, demonizations, orother related cultural determinations, they all manifest a type of anxiety in regard to theChinese Self.
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Kaplan, Stacey Meredith 1973. "The modern(ist) short form: Containing class in early 20th century literature and film." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/10574.
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ix, 182 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.My dissertation analyzes the overlooked short works of authors and auteurs who do not fit comfortably into the conventional category of modernism due to their subtly experimental aesthetics: the versatile British author Vita Sackville-West, the Anglo-Irish novelist and short-story writer Elizabeth Bowen, and the British emigrant filmmaker Charlie Chaplin. I focus on the years 1920-1923 to gain an alternative understanding of modernism's annus mirabulus and the years immediately preceding and following it. My first chapter studies the most critically disregarded author of the project: Sackville-West. Her 1922 volume of short stories The Heir: A Love Story deserves attention for its examination of social hierarchies. Although her stories ridicule characters regardless of their class background, those who attempt to change their class status, especially when not sanctioned by heredity, are treated with the greatest contempt. The volume, with the reinforcement of the contracted short form, advocates staying within given class boundaries. The second chapter analyzes social structures in Bowen's first book of short stories, Encounters (1922). Like Sackville-West, Bowen's use of the short form complements her interest in how class hierarchies can confine characters. Bowen's portraits of classed encounters and of characters' encounters with class reveal a sense of anxiety over being confined by social status and a sense of displacement over breaking out of class groups, exposing how class divisions accentuate feelings of alienation and instability. The last chapter examines Chaplin's final short films: "The Idle Class" (1921), "Pay Day (1922), and "The Pilgrim" (1923). While placing Chaplin among the modernists complicates the canon in a positive way, it also reduces the complexity of this man and his art. Chaplin is neither a pyrotechnic modernist nor a traditional sentimentalist. Additionally, Chaplin's shorts are neither socially liberal nor conservative. Rather, Chaplin's short films flirt with experimental techniques and progressive class politics, presenting multiple perspectives on the thematic of social hierarchies. But, in the end, his films reinforce rather than overthrow traditional artistic forms and hierarchical ideas. Studying these artists elucidates how the contracted space of the short form produces the perfect room to present a nuanced portrayal of class.
Committee in charge: Paul Peppis, Chairperson, English; Michael Aronson, Member, English; Mark Quigley, Member, English; Jenifer Presto, Outside Member, Comparative Literature
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Pyanzina, Elizaveta Anatolyevna 1981. "Representation of the Peoples of the Caucasus in 20th Century Russian Literature and Cinematography." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/11489.
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ix, 67 p.For centuries, Russian writers have stressed the important role the Caucasus played in the Russian Empire. In the last few decades, much attention has been directed at the Caucasians in literary works and movies as a result of the two Chechen wars. This thesis addresses the evolution of the Caucasian theme in Russian literature beginning from the 18th century with a focus on the contemporary representation of the peoples of Caucasus, mainly Chechens, in three works: a Soviet-era movie by Leonid Gaidai,
Committee in charge: Dr. Susanna Soojung Lim, Chairperson; Dr. Katya Hokanson, Member
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de, Vivanco Camillo. "Misanthropy in the works of Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Thomas Bernhard." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.712505.
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Slaymaker-Jones, Lois. "Dylanwad gwaith Waldo Williams a'r ymateb iddo er 1971." Thesis, Swansea University, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.678532.
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Mbatsha, Thembisa. "A critical analysis of the screen adaptation of Saule’s Unyana womntu." Thesis, University of Fort Hare, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10353/d1018674.
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This research will concentrate on various aspects of the screen adaptation of “Unyana womntu” (Saule, 1989). This study comprises of six chapters. In Chapter 1 of this study, the research aims and objectives are formulated. The research methods that are to be followed will involve a thorough reading of the written text, as well as a comprehensive repetitive viewing of all the episodes of the screen version. In the final part of Chapter 1, background information is provided on the personal life of the author as well as on his contributions to the African literary tradition. Background information on the production of the screen version is also provided. In the Chapter 2, the theoretical aspects of the phenomenon of literary adaptation are discussed. This discussion provides a framework for the analysis of the adaptation of “Unyana womntu” (Saule, 1989) in the remaining chapters of this study. The aim of this chapter is to identify and discuss the most important principles which come into play when the written text is adapted into a screen production. Since the screen production belongs to the genre of the performing arts, this chapter is introduced with a discussion on the performing arts and on the drama, in particular. The section will be concluded with a discussion on the different sub-types of the drama which can be found, including the screen production. The main emphasis is on an analysis of the basic features and principles of the drama in screen format. Since the screen play Unyana Womntu (1998) is based upon a novel by the same title, the literary features of the novel are to be discussed here as well. The specific features of the Xhosa novel will also receive attention.
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Nardout, Elisabeth. "Le champ littéraire québécois et la France, 1940-50 /." Thesis, McGill University, 1987. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=72078.
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The decade 1940-1950 represents a decisive stage in the evolution of the relations between the Quebec literary scene and France. Whereas before the war, literary discourse keeps on upholding, in a dogmatic way, the superiority of French culture and literature, the next period is characterized, on the contrary, by a reassessment of this postulate.The historical circumstances justify the setting up of exceptional institutional conditions. Some French writers and critics, in exile in North America, partake, to varying degrees, in the French Canadian literary scene. The backing of these intellectuals is not unrelated to the process of modernization and autonomization undertaken at that time by the major sectors of the Quebecer literary apparatus.
A conflict of interest in the publishing sector as well as ideological differences spark a controversy between Robert Carbonneau and some members of the Comite National des Ecrivains. This "quarrel", to quote Charbonneau, is an unprecedented example of direct confrontation between Quebecer and French literary agents. On this occasion, Robert Charbonneau redefines French Canadian literature outside of France's sphere of influence, France being a country whose status he wishes to limit to that of just one foreign reference among many.
This desire for autonomy can also be found in literary texts which, using means available to them, bear witness to an appreciable decline of the French literature. But whereas literary discourse attempts to resist annexation to French literature, the literary apparatus is subject, upon the Liberation, to a material and symbolic domination by the French authorities, a domination it cannot fight. In this respect, the conditions of literary production in the fifties are paradoxical since the text, while voicing its rejection of the French institution and its French Canadian identity, continues to receive its ultimate consecration from France.
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Lin, Lidan. "The Rhetoric of Posthumanism in Four Twentieth-Century International Novels." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1998. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278990/.
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The dissertation traces the trope of the incomplete character in four twentieth-century cosmopolitan novels that reflect European colonialism in a global context. I argue that, by creating characters sharply aware of the insufficiency of the Self and thus constantly seeking the constitutive participation of the Other, the four authors E. M. Forster, Samuel Beckett, J. M. Coetzee, and Congwen Shen all dramatize the incomplete character as an agent of postcolonial resistance to Western humanism that, tending to enforce the divide between the Self and the Other, provided the epistemological basis for the emergence of European colonialism. For example, Fielding's good-willed aspiration to forge cross-cultural friendship in A Passage to India; Murphy's dogged search for recognition of his Irish identity in Murphy; Susan's unfailing compassion to restore Friday's lost speech in Foe; and Changshun Teng, the Chinese orange-grower's warm-hearted generosity toward his customers in Long River--all these textual occasions dramatize the incomplete character's anxiety over the Other's rejection that will impair the fullness of his or her being, rendering it solitary and empty. I relate this anxiety to the theory of "posthumanism" advanced by such thinkers as Marx, Bakhtin, Sartre, and Lacan; in their texts the humanist view of the individual as an autonomous constitution has undergone a transformation marked by the emphasis on locating selfhood not in the insular and static Self but in the mutable middle space connecting the Self and the Other.
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Bell, Pamela. "Art that never was : representations of the artist in twentieth-century Australian fiction." Thesis, The University of Sydney, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/7310.
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This thesis traces the development of the artist figure as a leading character in twentieth-century Australian novels. In Australia there have always been complex interconnections between the worlds of art and literature, perhaps the most obvious being the cluster of artists and writers centred on the journal Vision, co-edited by Norman Lindsay’s son Jack with Kenneth Slessor, who was heavily influenced by Lindsay. Slessor’s poem “Five Bells”, an elegy for his artist friend Joe Lynch, later became the subject of a mural painted for Sydney Opera House by John Olsen. Although this and other connections between poetry and art are of interest, this thesis concentrates on fiction only.
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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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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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Diazzi, Alessandra. "The reception of psychoanalysis in Italian literature and culture, 1945-1977 : Ottiero Ottietri, Edoardo Sanguineti, Giorgio Manganelli, Andrea Zanzotto." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2016. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.709511.
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Johnson, Chalamanda Fiona Michaela. "'Interpretations in transition' : literature and political transition in Malawi and South Africa in the 1990s." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/3427.
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In this thesis I explore instances of literary engagement with the major transitions in national political formation in Malawi and South Africa; both countries moved from a totalitarian regime to democratic government, brought in by multi-party elections, in 1994. Most analyses of the wave of democratic transitions in Southern Africa are either historical, political or economic in their approach. The shift of political power from one constituency to another also requires another kind of study, of the impact of the political changes on lived experience through an analysis of people's creative expression. The artistic expressions of the experi nce of change are at times strikingly similar in the two countries, especially how artists imagine newness and simultaneously negotiate a past which was subject to repression. Literature is important in this political process, for it has a licence to reinterpret conventional representations and dominant narratives, often through fictionalising and creating new imaginative possibilities. I consider whether literary production in Malawi and South Africa is comparable in the light of this idea, despite the obvious differences in political configuration, geographic factors and levels of industrialisation and urbanisation, and ask whether political transition is a legitimate point of departure for interpreting literature. In the process I seek to identify similarities, and even overt influences or alliances between the literary practices in Malawi and South Africa during and since the transition. I analyse a wide variety of literary forms, some of which may transgress conventional definitions of 'literature'. Examples include the reader-contributions sent in to a newspaper's literary pages by its readers and the two historical accounts of women's experience. I discuss the porous distinction between fiction and history, realism and magic realism, as well as the subjective distinctions between formal and popular literature. The ambiguity of the title of my thesis therefore conveys the fact that the more established modes of literary interpretation are themselves also currently in transition. My intention here is not to argue what kind of literature is good or bad, valuable or trivial, but to discuss and interpret contextually the kinds of literature which are being produced and published. Chapter 1 of my thesis discussesth e work of JackM apanje and Nadine Gordimer, two 'veterans' of censorship under their respective regimes, suggesting how their writing has changed with freedom of expression. With the transition came experimentation and a wave of writing on fantastical, magical and irrational subjects. The writers discussed in Chapter 2 serve as a contrast to the engaged realism of Gordimer and to some extent, Mapanje. Steve Chimombo, Lesego Rampolokeng, Seitlhamo Motsapi and Zakes Mda convey a burlesque, transgressive style, which I discuss, drawing on Bakhtin, under the eading 'carnivalesque'. Chapter 3's emphasis on newspaper literature from Malawi reflects the importance of the form in contrast to South Africa where popular writing largely finds its main outlet in literary journals and magazines rather than in daily newspapers. Chapters 4 and 5 are related in their considerations of memory and searches for truth. In Chapter 4 Antjie Krog and Emily Mkamanga challenge the distinction between literary and factual chronicle in their woman-centred accounts of the past. The final chapter discusses two texts that are overtly literary, yet function in a mode of mourning and reflection, returning from the bustle of the present moment to a continuing, necessary reflection of the past which defines the new present. I conclude by suggesting that the comparative analysis is viable and enriching and that this study of literature from societies in transition demonstrates how poetry and fiction tell stories of history.
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Endicott, David. "Spectacular fictions : the Cold War and the making of historical knowledge." Virtual Press, 1998. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1117103.
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The Cold War can be considered the final grand narrative of modernity because of its deterministic influence on the making of knowledge in twentieth-century America. Likewise, Cold War events and the power of their individual narratives and images (their petits recits) created the needed condition for the advent of the age of spectacle. The Cold War existed in this state of contradiction: the final grand narrative and the first postmodern spectacle. Examples of the literature of the Cold War period, what I have labelled the literature of spectacle, serve to both elucidate the social conditions of the age of spectacle and their relationship to our media society. Spectacular fictions also provide a means of examining the postmodern concept of historiographic fictionalization. Don DeLillo's Libra' presents a Lee Harvey Oswald who manipulates the traces of his life to blur the image that he knows must enter the historical record. The Richard Nixon of Robert Coover's The Public Burning evolves to an intense consciousness of the contradictions of historiography that is realized only after he is brutally molested by Uncle Sam for the entire nation to witness, a rape that both strips Nixon of any remaining masculinity and thrusts him forward into America's Cold War history as the dark shadow of his future presidency looms throughout the novel. In The Book of Daniel, E.L. Doctorow's Daniel Isaacson attempts to counteract historiography (and the narrative of his infamous parents, the Rosenbergesque Paul and Rochelle) by writing his own story, telling his history as he feels it relates to the American experience of the Cold War. Daniel's self-history differs from Oswald's selfnarratization because Oswald's text is intentionally fabricated, while Daniel realizes that his narrative is a fabrication of the nation's history. Likewise, the characterization of Nixon differs from that of Oswald, though both are inspired by their actual historical counterparts. While the Nixon of the 1970s greatly shapes the Nixon of the novel, the historical Lee Harvey Oswald remains an enigma of America's recent past, perpetually residing in the margins of unknowability. From this space of marginalization, DeLillo's Oswald emerges.Department of English
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Maslowiec, Anna. "Sonorism and the Polish Avant-Garde 1958-1966." Phd thesis, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/8205.
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Murphy, Carl. "One in heart : the marriage metaphor in nineteenth-century English-Canadian fiction." Thesis, McGill University, 1992. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=39340.
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The marriage of English and French in nineteenth-century English-Canadian fiction is a trope reflecting anglophone nationalism and the anglophone desire for identity in a united nation.The marriage metaphor can be understood within the conservative, idealistic context of nineteenth-century Anglo-Canadian intellectual history.
This study examines marriage imagery in a number of novels--most of them historical romances--published between 1824 and 1899.
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Turcot, Marie-Pierre. "Le récit au fondement d'un moi entre modernité et postmodernité /." Thesis, McGill University, 2002. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=79812.
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This thesis intends to describe the contemporary self as drawn by literary theory and writing practice. This objective implies defining the human being considering its history as well as studying its representation in narratives.In order to circumscribe today's self, we undoubtedly have to study its historical evolution. Exploring the diametrically opposed conceptions suggested by modernity and postmodernity will lead us to a better understanding of the hybrid composition of the contemporary self, which is characterized by a search for coherence and meaning to a multidimensional and constantly evolving individual.
This definition, so far theoretical, will have to be confronted with the representations of the self found in autobiographies. The study of such self-narratives will provide the opportunity to observe in concrete terms the conception of the human being today.
The essential role of narratives will be identified beforehand. Narrative form certainly allows the representation of the self, but moreover it enters in the constitution and definition of the being itself. Self-narrative permits to establish the coherence of the self, hence it clearly appears at the basis of the identity. Overall, the narrative constitutes the foundation of the contemporary self amidst modernity and postmodernity.