Thèses sur le sujet « Self-realization in women – Poetry »

This dissertation examines the innovative subjectivity of feminine voices constructed in poetry by three women writers from seventeenth- and early nineteenth-century China: Li Yin, Wang Duanshu, and Wang Duan. Drawing primarily on their individual collections, I argue that the writers fashion poetic selves that deviate from literati representations of feminine subjectivity through the writers' intertextual dialogues with mainstream literary and cultural traditions and also their poetic exchanges with contemporary women writers. I explore specific methods employed by the three writers to create distinctive voices of their own and specify modes that distinguish the alternative feminine voices in their writings, contextualizing my reading of poems from their collected works and of mise-en-scenes in the case of exchange poetry. My close reading of the three late imperial Chinese writers' poetry reveals that subject positions in their collected works, different from those of feminine voices constructed in literati poetry, are the result of the gendered writing self seeking voices to express lived experiences, deeply felt emotions, desires, anxieties, and pleasures. These positions in turn allow the writing self to have serious intellectual exchanges with their contemporary writers, create self-definitions beyond the normative roles as prescribed by the Confucian gender system and the literati poetic tradition, and realize personal transformation in poetry.

100 years ago, there was a group of women called Zishunu who stood up against the whole society and swore off marriage for life. Zishu offered an escape for many women in the Pearl River Delta area. As forerunners in female independence and liberation, Zishunu never had the chance to be the spokesman of themselves or the recognition they deserved. Ji Sor (1997), a groundbreaking work in lesbian-themed movies, beautifully depicts this special and unparalleled historical phenomenon in detail. Released a few months after the Handover of Hong Kong in 1997, this critically acclaimed movie by Hong Kong New Wave filmmaker Jacob Cheung embodies the three biggest fears of an extremely conservative society: absence of marriage, challenges to male hegemony, and homosexuality. Although seen as representatives of strong and independent women, Zishunu had to make a lot of compromises to the patriarchal culture to be allowed not to marry. The emancipation of Zishunu, although as a huge advancement in the feminism in China, is not a complete liberation. Women emancipation cannot be achieved by women celibacy. A hundred years later, we are still asking what gender equality really means, what is women’s power, what is independence, what is feminism? Through the analyses of Zishu and Ji Sor both individually and together, this thesis explores the meanings of gender equalities and sexual identities mean in the cinematic world and in the real world. There shouldn’t be a set of standards of how women should act. The right that a woman should have, just like a real women’s movie, is the autonomy to make her own decisions.

The purpose of this study was to examine the role that self-determination played in the transition process for young African American women with disabilities who exited high school with a special diploma and participated in a local transition program. Factors under study included the young women's autonomy, self-regulation, psychological empowerment, and self-realization (Wehmeyer, 1996). This examination of the perceptions of the transition process of young African American women with disabilities involved in-depth interviews with five young women and their parent or guardian. Additionally, The Arc's Self-Determination Scale (ASDS) and the Parent Self-Determination Practice Survey (PSDPS) were administered to determine the level of self-determination of the young women as well as the level of parental promotion of self-determination. Results showed that the young women were able to use self-determination in a variety of settings. Three of the five student participants demonstrated high levels of self-determination as measured by the ASDS when compared to the normative sample. Also, the parent or guardian of the young women provided multiple opportunities for the young women to practice self-determination in their homes and employment settings. Furthermore, the young women discussed several factors that they perceived to be strengths and challenges to using self-determination throughout and beyond the transition process. The findings have implications for school systems, social service agencies, and parents and guardians.

The novel is one means by which writers can provide examples of the possibilities for women in patriarchal societies to seek greater independence. Sabina Berman (1955- ) and Silvia Molina (1946- ) are modern day Mexican novelists whose writings support the betterment of the female condition in this Latin American society. This study focuses on these two authors and describes and analyzes several of their female protagonists who can be characterized as being in search of their self-identity and self-realization. The novels of interest are La Bobe (2006) and La Mujer que Buceó Dentro del Corazón del Mundo (2010) by Sabina Berman and La Mañana Debe Seguir Gris (1977) and El Amor Que Me Juraste (1998) by Silvia Molina. The theoretical framework used to analyze these novels is based on The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir and on the writings of the Mexican author Rosario Castellanos. These novels provide examples of how women can challenge patriarchal social norms in order to seek their identity as an individual and their self-realization. However, to do this, women must be willing to accept the risks and costs that may accompany this self-searching. By seeking identity women can satisfy their longings and desires, but at the same time this may also produce undesired results. Nevertheless, these novels show that women have the ability to seek their personal identity if they take the initiative to do so.

Diese Dissertation untersucht die verschiedenen Konstruktionen poetischer Selbstrepräsentationen durch Melancholie in Gedichten englischer Autorinnen des frühen 18. Jahrhunderts (ca. 1680-1750). Die vielfältigen Gedichte stammen von repräsentativen lyrischer Autorinnen dieser Epoche, z.B. Anne Wharton, Anne Finch, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Henrietta Knight, Elizabeth Carter, Mary Leapor, Mary Chudleigh, Mehetabel Wright und Elizabeth Boyd. Vor einem ausführlichen medizinhistorischen Hintergrund, der die Ablösung der Humoralpathologie durch die Nerven und die daraus resultierende Neupositionierung von Frauen als Melancholikerinnen untersucht, rekurriert die Arbeit auf die Zusammenhänge von Medizin und Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert. Für die Gedichtanalysen werden gezielt Analysekategorien und zwei Typen poetisch-melancholischer Selbstrepräsentationen entwickelt und dann für die Close Readings der Texte eingesetzt. Die Auswahl der Gedicht umfasst sowohl Texte, die auf generisch standardisierte Marker der Melancholie verweisen, als auch Texte, die eine hauptsächlich die melancholische Erfahrung inszenieren, ohne dabei zwangsläufig explizit auf die genretypischen Marker zurück zu greifen. Die detaillierten Close Readings der Gedichte zeigen die oftmals ambivalenten Strategien der poetisch-melancholischen Selbstkonstruktionen der Sprecherinnen in den Gedichttexten und demonstrieren deutlich, dass – entgegen der vorherrschenden kritischen Meinung – auch Autorinnen dieser Epoche zum literarischen Melancholiediskurs beigetragen haben. Die Arbeit legt ein besonderes Augenmerk auf die sog. weibliche Elegie und ihrem Verhältnis zur Melancholie. Dabei wird deutlich, dass gerade Trauer, die oftmals als weiblich konnotierte Gegendiskurs zur männlich konnotierten genialischen Melancholie wahrgenommen wird, und die daraus folgende Elegie von Frauen als wichtiger literarischer Raum für melancholische Dichtung genutzt wurde und somit als Teil des literarischen Melancholiediskurses dient.
This thesis analyses different constructions of poetic self-representations through melancholy in poems written by early eighteenth-century women writers (ca. 1680-1750). The selection of poems includes texts written by representative poets such as Anne Wharton, Anne Finch, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Henrietta Knight, Elizabeth Carter, Mary Leapor, Mary Chudleigh, Mehetabel Wright und Elizabeth Boyd. Against the background of a detailed analysis of the medical-historical paradigmatic change from humoral pathology to the nerves and the subsequent re-positioning of women as melancholics, the thesis refers to the close relationship of medicine and literature during the eighteenth century. Specifical categories of analysis and two different types of melancholic-poetic self-representations are developed, in order to support the close readings of the literary texts. These poems comprise both texts, which explicitly refer to generically standardized melancholy markers, as well as texts, which negotiate and aestheticize the melancholic experience without necessarily mentioning melancholy. The detailed close readings of the poems discuss the often ambivalent strategies of the poetic speakers to construct and represent their melancholic selves and clearly demonstrate that women writers of that time did – despite the common critical opinion – contribute to the literary discourse of melancholy. The thesis pays special attention to the so-called female elegy and its relationship to melancholy. It becomes clear that mourning and grief, which have often been considered a feminine counter-discourse to the discourse of melancholy as sign of the male intellectual and/or artistic genius, and the resulting female elegy offer an important literary space for women writers and their melancholy poetry, which should thus be recognized as a distinctive part of the literary discourse of melancholy.

Dissertação de mestrado em Língua, Literatura e Cultura Inglesas
The habit of melancholy in the early modern period engendered medical inquiry, selfexamination, and artistic reverberations. The theory of the humours, combined with Aristotle’s dovetailing of melancholy and genius, exerted enormous influence on attitudes towards melancholy. Melancholy became, then, a desirable attribute, and the figure of the atrabilious man something to emulate. Women, however, because of their disorderly bodies and unruly emotions, were largely excluded from the tradition of melancholy. Their presumed irrationality precluded them from partaking in its artistic associations. Therefore, the atrabilious woman was not a woman of great intellectual capabilities, but simply a sick woman suffering from pathological melancholia. So far, it is the tradition of melancholy in poetry written by men that has been the subject of scholarly analysis and scrutiny, and only in recent years has there been a greater effort to include women poets in this major tradition. This dissertation examines a selection of poems by English women writing in the early modern period, such as Aemilia Lanyer, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Lock, Mary Sidney, and Katherine Philips, and attempts to determine how melancholy is experienced, performed, and deployed in their work, and also to what extent conceptions of melancholy are gendered. The question of women’s marginalised place in society and usual relegation to the domestic sphere is of central importance in exploring to what degree the politicisation of melancholy as subversive device figures in their poetry. The absence of agency plays an important part in the ways early modern English women poets use melancholy to challenge preconceived notions of womanhood and manipulate it in order to self-fashion representation.
O hábito da melancolia durante o Renascimento engendrou investigação médica, introspecção, e reverberações artísticas. A teoria dos humores, juntamente com a teoria de Aristóteles que alia melancolia a génio, exerceram uma grande influência nas atitudes relativas à melancolia. A melancolia tornou-se, assim, uma característica ambicionada, e a figura do homem atrabiliário algo a que se aspirar. No entanto, a mulher, por causa do seu corpo indisciplinado e emoções impetuosas, ficou largamente excluída da tradição da melancolia. A sua suposta irracionalidade impedia-a de tomar parte daquelas associações artísticas. A mulher atrabiliária não era, portanto, uma mulher de capacidades intelectuais superiores, mas sim e apenas uma mulher doente, que sofria de melancolia patológica. Até à data, é a tradição da melancolia na poesia masculina que tem sido alvo de estudo e escrutínio, e só em anos recentes tem havido um maior esforço de incluir poetas femininas nesta importante tradição. Esta dissertação, através da análise de uma selecção de poemas de poetas femininas inglesas do Renascimento, pretende determinar de que formas a melancolia é vivida, representada, e aplicada no trabalho daquelas, e também até que ponto as concepções de melancolia incitam questões de género. A questão da posição marginalizada da mulher na sociedade e a sua relegação à esfera doméstica é de grande importância na exploração do grau de politização da melancolia enquanto instrumento subversivo na sua poesia. A ausência de iniciativa tem, assim, um papel fundamental na forma como as poetas inglesas femininas do Renascimento fazem uso da melancolia para contestar noções preconcebidas de feminilidade e a manipulam de modo a gerar representação autoral.

碩士
國立清華大學
中國文學系
107
Wu Mei Tsun , as a remarkable poet in the Ming – Ching dynastic, writes a series of poetry that depicts women delicately to express his own feelings.During this process, a further question is that: How did he project image of his private self and mourn for Ming dynasty, enable his readers to understand him as well in a forbidden rough situation? First, women in Wu Mei Tsun’s poetry are clues to reveal the connection between the poet and his experiences of suffering and trauma. Hence, Wu Mei Tsun’s self-concealment and self-expression should be appeared in his poetry. The study comprises of five chapters. In first Chapter, the conception will be explained, literature review is also concluded. The second chapter aims at those women who had lived in Qinhuai, Nanjing. In Wu Mei Tsun’s poetry, Chu Godness and Xi-shi Beauty are symbols of Qinhuai Women. The talated ladies who shared literature ideas with Wu Mei Tsun are discussed in the third chapter, to deeply personal feelings, the poet’s wife and daughters are analyzed as well. In addition, Wu Mei Tsun was a former dynasty Ming official, served dynasty Ching and it gets him in disrepute. The moral dilemma Wu Mei Tsun faced and the panacea, redemption from religions describe in the fourth chapter. From the previous chapters, it can be seen that women in Wu Mei Tsun’s poetry are crucial to understand the poet. To conclude, Wu Mei Tsun was understood through the poetry; furthermore, the desire to be understood remains his main obsession, for fear of oblivion or misinterpretation.

In present-day Cuban society, women’s status is still tinted by the limitations and subjugations of the ancient Hispanic patriarchal ideology, affecting women in both their personal and their professional lives, according to the persistent “home (private)/street (public)” separation. As such, women writers suffer from a multidimensional marginalization based internally on gender, sexuality, and regionalism, as well as externally on political and economical factors. Moreover, Cuban feminism is also affected by the traditional and politicized criticism of the movement. The present work creates a dialogical space, more precisely a direct opening for the voice of four female Cuban poets from the provincial city of Ciego de Avila, on a national and more importantly international scale, otherwise unattainable to this nation. Through the innovative use and inclusion of interviews as an inter/active basis for a classical literary analysis, an “open dialogue” is created with the audience, giving access to the “illocutionary force” of the poets. Furthermore, the theoretical analysis of the condition of the woman-writer in Cuba is supported by a presentation, and my analysis, of several outstanding examples of poetry of the four women. This second part also creates an interactive space, as it integrates conceptual components s of the interviews, which underlines the role of the poetry as being one of self-liberation.

碩士
東吳大學
英文學系
94
This thesis aims to explore self-realization of women in Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate and Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters. I will apply Hélène Cixous’, Julia Kristeva’s and Luce Irigaray’s theories to analyze how the protagonists in the two novels establish self-identity and fulfill self-realization through writing herstory and clarifying the space (chora) they dwell. This thesis can be divided into five chapters. The first chapter summarizes the characters, contents, authors, and the theories which are applied in the analysis of the two novels. In Chapter Two, I will investigate how writing can be regarded as the best strategy for women to establish self-identity and thus achieve self-realization through applying Hélène Cixous’ concept of écriture féminine. The main idea of écriture féminine—releasing and accepting the multiple heterogeneous differences—will also be discussed. Chapter Three focuses mostly on Julia Kristeva’s concept of “chora” which aims to elaborate on how women live in the interlocking space: traditional rituals, racism and sexual ambivalence. Chapter Four applies Irigaray’s concept of sexual difference to illustrate the necessity for women to create “herstory”—establishing a new age of thought, art, poetry and language. Chapter Five includes a review of the previous chapters and discusses Virginia Woolf’s ideas about women’s writing in A Room of One’s Own as the conclusion.

TITLE: Novels of Božena Viková - Kunětická AUTHOR: Bc. Tereza Brzáková DEPARTMENT: Department of Czech Literature SUPERVISOR: prof. PhDr. Dagmar Mocná, CSc. ABSTRACT: This thesis is focused on the interpretation of novels writen by writer Božena Viková Kunětická. An important role in the interpretation of works plays context in which currency are the works built. Interpreting the works of contemporary issues is supported women's issues and the status of women in public and domestic spaces. The first part is the atmosphere of the period in terms of the women's movement. The second part is dedicated to the interpretation of four novels Božena Viková Kunětická. The main theme of novelistic creation is a woman in several different roles and perspectives on marriage, motherhood or adolescence. Interpretation of the novel creation of Božena Viková Kunětická closes its comparison with the writer Ružena Svobodová, which was devoted to his work in a similar topic. KEYWORDS: the status of women, the role of women, self-realization, adolescence, marriage, motherhood

D.Litt. et Phil.
The growing number of married women with children who enter the work force is widely documented. In addition, the last decade has seen the number of self-employed women increase dramatically. The homemaker role, which remains an important adult attainment fora large segment of the female population for at least some portion of their adult lives, has received little attention. The career of the homemaker is omitted both in the traditional definition of the labour force and by the career counselling profession. Because of the rise in women's labour force activity there has been increased concern with the psychological implications of occupying family and work roles simultaneously. Married women who obtain employment typically experience role expansion and such expansion has potential repercussions for the women themselves, for their families and for their employing institutions. Although these women are assuming the demanding role of employee, they are typically not free to relinquish any of their previous traditional roles - the major responsibility for household work and parenting chores still appears to be the province of women. Presently, the empirical evidence of the psychological effects of maternal employment is equivocal, suggesting both positive and negative effects are possible. On the one hand paid employment has been related to increased self-esteem, status and life satisfaction in working mothers. On the other hand, maternal employment has also been associated with role conflict, life dissatisfaction and family stress. A wide variety of correlates of home-career conflict has been studied. The accumulation of empirical studies has not, however, been integrated in a way which advances understanding of the interrelationships of variables associated with home-career conflict. The purpose of the present study was to investigate from within an integrated framework the relationship between work and family domains and their impact on the life satisfaction of women who re-enter the labour market, women entrepreneurs and homemakers.

This project begins when I find myself writing a poem to express a sudden flow of painful feelings. My lover has cancer. He will die within two years. He asks that we do not talk about it. I see that in this first poem the dominant text is from earlier times. The cancer is subtext. His shocking news with its silencing injunction has fired dark images in my imagination. As I write more poems an autoethnography evolves where I observe and reflect on the conscious and unconscious unfolding of a grieving process. The poems comprise Volume 2 of the thesis. To carry out this study a framework is set up to use poetry in the form of autoethnography as a qualitative research method. As this thesis is based on creative practice, a poet, Geoff Page is added to my supervisory panel. The poems themselves are part of the framework, as are the synergistic works and the theoretical ideas from poetry, philosophy, anthropology and psychoanalysis. I dream, remember and discover, and write a series of relatively autonomous poems over four years. The chair of my panel responds to my ideas by proposing cross- cultural ethnographies and poems of loss to enrich my inquiry. In particular I focus on research that has been undertaken into Yolngu mortuary rituals. This dialogic process fires my creative work. I analyse the poems using psychoanalytic ideas, and anthropological writings. Building on the insights of the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner, I look at what lies behind the veils of the metaphysical core of my poetry.* At the same time I discover a resonance with Yolngu philosophy, and the capacity of Yolngu rituals to transform death into life. This study generates knowledge of my unconscious grieving process. The poems show how my mind deals with the loss, and how I use my mind to free my spirit from the pull of death. I find much in common with grieving in other cultures. The poems show a way through the grieving process. They transform raw grief into unconscious elements of experience, which are linked and contained in metaphor and expressed like daytime dreams. In this way, as in the poetry of Yolngu crying ceremonies, sung by the woman who is the primary mourner, the unbearable becomes not only bearable but also expressible and inclusive. I discover that as I live and observe my own process I experience a surprising transformation. I go to the origins of shared cultural experience. Like the Yolngu, I am no longer waiting for death but anticipating birth.