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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'English literature Self in literature. Subjectivity in literature'
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Ettari, Gary. ""That within which passeth show" : the dialectics of early modern subjectivity /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9383.
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Little, Philippa Susan. "Images of self : a study of feminine and feminist subjectivity in the poetry of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Margaret Atwood and Adrienne Rich, 1950-1980." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 1990. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/1501.
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The thesis explores the poetry (and some prose) of Plath, Sexton, Atwood and Rich in terms of the changing constructions of self-image predicated upon the female role between approx. 1950-1980.1 am particularly concerned with the question of how the discourses of femininity and feminism contribute to the scope of the images of the self which are presented. The period was chosen because it involved significant upheaval and change in terms of women's role and gender identity. The four poets' work spans this period of change and appears to some extent generally characteristic of its social, political and cultural contexts in America, Britain and Canada. (Other poets' work, for example Rukeyser, Lorde, Levertov, is included too. ) The poets were not chosen to illustrate a pre-feminist vs. feminist opposition since a major concern is to explore what I see to be the symbiotic relation between femininity and feminism (as also between orthodoxy and heresy). However the thesis is organised chronologically because periodisation is important for a consideration of the poetry's social setting. In wanting to connect the poetry with cultural and political circumstances as much as possible I have taken Edward Said's assertion of a text's position of 'being in the world', its potential as a cultural product to help reshape reality, and its value as a 'powerful weapon of both materialism and consciousness'. This is the starting point for the study which is circular and cumulative in shape, fundamentally thematic, though each chapter is a chronological exploration of the work of one specific poet, beginning with Plath and completing with Rich. A conclusion attempts to pull the strands of each together and consider the implications raised. The thesis has four general concerns which run through its particular focus on each poet. The first involves the relations between cultural practice and ideology; the second involves the ideology of gender (through exploration of femininity and feminism); the third involves authorial ideology (through the construction of self-image in relation to femininity and feminism) while the fourth involves these concerns in terms of the overall arena of women's struggle for meaning and selfdetermination in cultural practice. More specific elements of the study include collating and comparing self-images and attempting to make connections or chart changes where images such as witch, queen, handmaid, shamaness, goddess, earth mother, whore, madwoman, etc., re-occur. Usage of myth (particularly Persephone). the Gothic, 'and articulation of lesbian desire are also explored. The emergence of a female 'hero' self-image, in opposition to 'victim', seems to be a corollary of the impact , of feminism in Rich's poetry particularly, but this tendency can be traced back through Plath. I explore the celebration of nature and the power of essentialism in the construction of heroic female images, particularly in the figure of the mother flowing with milk at the centre of 'ecriture feminine'. The concluding chapter suggests that femininity did not constitute such a repressive constraint on self-image and writing practice for women as perhaps might be supposed; and that feminism, while opening up many empowering changes for women, has raised further disturbing and unresolved questions about identity, and even helped, in some of its aspects, to create a new 'orthodoxy' in which various aspects of experience cannot easily be articulated. My example is Rich's later work where it seems to admit itself limited by its own initially liberating strategies and looks further on towards new 'heresies.'
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Condon, James Joseph. "Playing with lives theatricality, self-staging, and the problem of agency in Renaissance English revenge tragedy /." Diss., [Riverside, Calif.] : University of California, Riverside, 2009. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?index=0&did=1957417671&SrchMode=2&sid=1&Fmt=2&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1269383638&clientId=48051.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Riverside, 2009.Includes abstract. Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Title from first page of PDF file (viewed March 23, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 193-202). Also issued in print.
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Arvan, Andrews Elaine J. "The Physiognomy of Fashion: Faces, Dress, and the Self in the Juvenilia and Novels of Charlotte Brontë." Ohio University / OhioLINK, 2004. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1107275437.
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Brearey, Oliver James. "Peripheral subjectivity and English-language Hong Kong literature." online access from Digital Dissertation Consortium, 2007. http://libweb.cityu.edu.hk/cgi-bin/er/db/ddcdiss.pl?1451242.
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Walby, Celestin J. "Answering looks of sympathy and love : subjectivity and the narcissus myth in Renaissance English literature /." free to MU campus, to others for purchase, 2004. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/mo/fullcit?p3144464.
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Mallory-Kani, Amy. "Medico-politics and English literature, 1790-1830| Immunity, humanity, subjectivity." Thesis, State University of New York at Albany, 2014. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3620301.
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In 1796, Dr. Edward Jenner began vaccinating individuals against small pox by using matter from the pustules of the cow pox. Though extremely controversial because of its discomforting mixture of animal and human, by the end of the Romantic period, vaccination was celebrated as the safest way to immunize the British population. Through the practice of vaccination, Britain found a way to save its body politic from a destructive epidemic while affirming the strong connection between individual health and collective well-being that writers of the period like Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley recognized in their works. From the beginning then, medical immunity was inherently connected to politics; at the same time that Jenner was experimenting with vaccination, writers were debating over the most effective way to stifle the "jacobin influenza" and the "French malady," the contagious revolutionary ideas migrating to England from France.
Importantly, the use of medical terms and concepts to define the political points to the already immunological process by which modern political subjects are born, a process explored by contemporary biopolitical theorists like Roberto Esposito and which my project grounds in the historical record of early modernity. In particular, I argue that the rupture in sovereignty caused by the French Revolution, resulted in a shift in the way that political subjectivity was conceived. Individuals, rather than being constituted in relation to a transcendental sovereign whom, according to Hobbes, they created to protect themselves, instead internalize sovereign power. In a sense, the modern political subject comes into being through an essential immunization.
The discourse of what I call "medico-politics" made its way into the literature of the period. In fact, literature distinctively influenced how the modern, medicalized political subject was imagined. Capital-L literature—itself an burgeoning kind of discipline—was drafted into the immunizing project of modern politics because of the way it disciplines readers' bodies and minds. While Saree Makdisi claims that there is a "uniquely Blakean slippage between political and biological language" during the period and other critics view the relationship between literature and medicine as unilateral and metaphorical, I argue that medical practices like inoculation not only influenced literature, but became a part of literature's own self-definition as a modern discipline.
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Smuts, Merriman Eckard. "Embedded subjectivity in the work of J.M. Coetzee." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/18698.
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Thesis (MA)--University of Stellenbosch, 2007.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis is the result of an immersion in the work of J.M. Coetzee. I have taken various of Coetzee’s novels, namely Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons, Disgrace, The Master of Petersburg, Foe, Life & Times of Michael K and Slow Man, and constructed readings of these novels from the inside out. The overarching concern of the dissertation is the notion of subjectivity and Coetzee’s methods of representing subjectivity. It is my contestation that the experience of authentic subjective awareness arises from the process of reading itself. It is not a state of being that is described by the text, but rather a layered constellation of substitutive exchanges that emerges from the process of textual relation. The notion of embeddedness serves as a description of the way in which the text materializes this experience of subjectivity. The structure of exploration in each chapter has taken as its paradigm a conceptual concern arising from the text itself. In the first chapter (Elizabeth Costello) the concern is with structure itself. The character of Elizabeth struggles against the limitation inherent in the process of representation; this struggle is read as an indication of authentic subjective experience in the face of reduction to a system of codes. The second chapter (Disgrace) attempts to formulate the dynamic of subjective awareness in romantic terms. I construct a reading of Lurie’s predicament in terms that arise from his conceptual environment, in order to indicate the primacy of textual materiality as the locus of subjective awareness. The notion of the classic informs the third chapter (The Master of Petersburg). I use an essay by Coetzee to delineate a conception of the classic, which is then applied as a theoretical framework for an exploration of Dostoevsky’s pursuit of his stepson. The fourth and last chapter (Foe, Life & Times of Michael K and Slow Man) focuses on Coetzee’s use of the body as a figure for embedded subjectivity. It emerges that the body as a trope of embeddedness forms an important aspect of Coetzee’s work throughout his career. As such it is a very suitable figure for describing the dynamics of embeddedness as a mode of representation that aligns itself with the textual materiality of subjective being.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie tesis het ontstaan as die gevolg van ‘n noukeurige ondersoek na die werk van J.M. Coetzee. Ek het myself laat begelei deur die inhoud van verskeie van Coetzee se boeke, naamlik Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons, Disgrace, The Master of Petersburg, Foe, Life & Times of Michael K en Slow Man, om intensiewe lesings van hierdie boeke te konstrueer. Die oorkoepelende bemoeienis van die verhandeling is die konsep van subjektiwiteit en Coetzee se metodes van subjektiewe voorstelling. Ek beweer dat die ervaring van outentieke subjektiewe gewaarwording gesetel is in die leesproses. Dit is nie ‘n toestand van wese wat deur die teks beskryf word nie, maar eerder ‘n verweefde raamwerk van substituwe wisseling wat kom uit die proses van tekstuele relasie. Die konsep van inlywing (“embeddedness”) dien as 'n beskrywing van die manier waarop die teks hierdie ervaring van subjektiwiteit konkretiseer. Die struktuur van ondersoek in elke hoofstuk neem as paradigma 'n konsepsuele vraagstuk wat reeds gesetel is in die teks. In die eerste hoofstuk (Elizabeth Costello) is die bemoeienis met struktuur as sodanig. Elizabeth se karakter stry teen die inperking wat noodwending saamgaan met die proses van voorstelling; hierdie stryd word gelees as 'n aanduiding van outentieke subjektiewe ervaring teenoor die druk van vermindering tot 'n stel kodes. Die tweede hoofstuk (Disgrace) poog om die dinamiek van subjektiewe bewustheid te formuleer in terme wat afkomstig is van die romantiek. Ek konstrueer 'n lees van Lurie se toestand in terme wat kom van sy konsepsuele omgewing, om sodoende die voorrang van tekstuele materialiteit as die lokus van outentieke subjektiwiteit aan te dui. Die konsep van die klassieke belig die derde hoofstuk (The Master of Petersburg). Ek gebruik 'n essay van Coetzee om 'n begrip van die klassieke te formuleer, wat dan toegepas word as 'n teoretiese raamwerk waarbinne Dostoevsky se soeke na sy stiefseun ondersoek word. Die vierde en laaste hoofstuk (Foe, Life & Times of Michael K en Slow Man) fokus op Coetzee se gebruik van die liggaam as 'n figuur vir ingelyfde subjektiwiteit. Dit blyk dat die liggaam as 'n figuur van inlywing 'n prominente aspek van Coetzee se werk vorm deur sy loopbaan. As sodaning is dit 'n baie handige figuur om die dinamiek van inlywing te beskryf as 'n modus van voorstelling wat sigself koppel aan die materialiteit van die teks.
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Wong, Tee-vee Vivian, and 黃天慧. "Between self and subjectivity: women in threenovels by Jean Rhys." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2003. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31227995.
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Fleming, Carolyn Evine Mary Elizabeth. "Ideas of the self in Medieval English literature." Thesis, University of Liverpool, 1987. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.328079.
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Bailey, Elaine. ""A singular person": Portraits of subjectivity in the poetry and prose of Matilda Betham." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/28949.
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'A Singular Person': Portraits of Subjectivity in the Poetry and Prose of Matilda Betham represents the first book-length study of Matilda Betham's literary output. A poet, biographer, and portrait artist, Betham is best remembered for her friendships with S. T. Coleridge, the Lambs, and Robert Southey. Referring to manuscript and printed material, this thesis uses feminist and New Historical critical methods to examine Betham's contribution to British Romanticism. It offers a biography of Betham and a historically contextualised analysis of her own construction of women's role in civic affairs. Betham's political affiliations, as well as the generic range of her poetic and scholarly representations of history, suggest her engagement with contemporary discussions surrounding subjectivity and self-representation. Her Biographical Dictionary participates in a construction of female identity that redefines the feminine while acknowledging the influence of preceding historians. The location and recovery of her autobiographical writings inform this examination of Betham's biographical research. The thesis argues that Betham's political views surrounding broad social representation also emerge in her exploration of the relationship between the lyrical voice and enfranchised selfhood. Betham combines her scholarly and poetic depictions of the individual enacting social change in The Lay of Marie , a historically informed metrical romance that compares to compositions by poets, both male and female, who similarly consider the demands of subjective interpretation of publicly available modes of historical discourse.
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Fick, Angelo Carlo. "Limited possibilities : agency and subaltern subjectivity in four South African allegories." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/17940.
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Bibliography: pages. 197-211.This thesis examines the representation of the negotiation of black women's subjectivity in four South African allegorical novels. Using aspects of postmodern discourse, and feminist and postcolonial literary and cultural theories on identity formation and subjectivity, I propose that it is in the allegorical mode that the four writers are able to offer black women as female gendered subalterns the space to negotiate subjectivity and to assert agency. Given the history of sexism, racism and imperialism in South Africa, the politics of place impact crucially on the practice of writing literature, so that the tensions between the representation of others and self-representation becomes crucial in identity formation. Through the four texts, I propose that there is a spectrum of practices, and that each offers different possibilities for black women's subject formation: from the most limiting liberal discourses, through the interrogation of those discourses, to an autobiographical moment of self-reclamation.
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Parkhurst, Joseph Lanius. "The rhetoric of subjectivity: The written self in the autobiographical writings of Hawthorne, Adams and James." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1990. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/185137.
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The study takes the measure to which "self" and "self-representation" do not coincide in autobiography. Each of the writers in this study--Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Adams, and Henry James--writes an autobiography that consciously divides the writing-self from the written-self. Each does this at least in part as a result of his discomfort with the patriarchal culture of nineteenth-century America. Never fitting the normative models of male action in the areas of commerce and politics, each uses his autobiographical writing to construct himself along the model of the "other." This gesture requires presenting the self as a cultural construct, fabricated in a language that is always already alienated from the writing subject. As such, the signifiers of personal and social identity are manipulable in a pervasive rhetoric of subjectivity, a rhetoric supremely adapted to the literary enterprise of autobiography. In "The Custom-House," Hawthorne insists on the separateness of the sign of the self from the signified. This separateness permits the author a dilatory space which keeps him unreadable even while being read, a gesture he reproduces in The Scarlet Letter, which is read as a fictional extention of the same rhetoric of illegibility that he presents in the autobiographical preface. In The Education of Henry Adams, Adams presents a self which figuratively corresponds to a text. The "self" is a palimpsest of all the influences that have been inscribed on it, and the job of the autobiographer is to edit that palimpsest into a self/story. Fashioning a self, therefore, is consubstantial with fashioning a book, and the two activities coincide in the autobiography. Notes of a Son and Brother shows James purporting a complementary relationship between reader and writer, whereby a reader lives in and completes the life of a writer. In the memoir, James's commemorative task as reader of the family's letters allows him to appropriate the historical personages through the acquisition of their writing. In this way, autobiography (both the activity and the product) and the self are no longer supplemental to others but originary and self-realizing.
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Franck, Kaja. "The development of the literary werewolf : language, subjectivity and animal/human bounderies." Thesis, University of Hertfordshire, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/2299/17669.
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The werewolf is a stock character in Gothic horror, exemplifying humanity's fear of 'the beast within', and a return to a bestial state of being. Central to this is the idea that the werewolf is, once transformed, without language. Using an ecoGothic approach, this thesis will offer a new approach in literary criticism regarding the werewolf. It argues that the werewolf has become a vehicle for our ambivalence towards the wolf, which itself has become a symbolic Gothic Other. Using interdisciplinary source materials, such as natural histories, fairy tales, and folklore, the notion of the 'symbolic wolf' is interrogated, particularly in relation to the dangers of the wilderness. Starting with Dracula, at the end of the nineteenth century, and finishing with an analysis of the contemporary, literary werewolf, this work explores how the relationship between humans and wolves has impacted on the representation of the werewolf in fiction. In particular, it will critique how the destruction of the werewolf is achieved through containing the creature using taxonomic knowledge, in order to objectify it, before destroying it. This precludes the possibility of the werewolf retaining subjectivity and reinforces the stereotype of the werewolf as voiceless. Following the growing awareness of environmentalism during the late twentieth century and, as humanity questions our relationship with nature, clear divides between the animal and the human seem arbitrary, and the werewolf no longer remains the monstrous object within the text. Central to this is the concept of the hybrid 'I' which this thesis exposes. The hybrid 'I' is a way of experiencing and representing being a werewolf that acknowledges the presence of the lycanthrope's voice, even if that voice is not human. Subjectivity is shown to be complex and myriad, allowing for the inclusion of human and non-human animal identities, which the werewolf embodies.
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Cumpsty, Rebekah. "Emerging HIV communities and self : the representation of self and community in South African HIV/AIDS literature." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/12371.
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Includes bibliographical references (leaves 73-75).HIV/AIDS is a prominent part of contemporary South African experience that has found expression in many forms, one of which is literature. This thesis analyses the relation between self and community as it is represented in South African HIV/AIDS literature. The argument of the thesis is underpinned by a dual theoretical strand.
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Sturgess, Charlotte Jane. "A politics of location : subjectivity and origins in the work of Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 1993. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/1603.
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This thesis attempts to discover the links between concepts of identity and origins, and Canadian women's writing. The work of three English-speaking Canadian women writers, Mavis Gallant, Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro, will be examined in order to discover the ways in which their writings problematize feminine subjecthood, and in doing so shed light on a specifically Canadian 'discourse' of identity. I posit thereby, that perceiving the absences and silences structuring their modes of representation is a (symbolic) means of perceiving Canada as a dualistic, fractured, and contradictory unity. This implies a dialogue between text and context: a reading of one through the other. The three writers in question draw on diverse, and often opposing, centres of cultural and personal consciousness. I shall attempt to demonstrate however, that the problematical concept of origins and its relation to location and to feminine self-hood defines all three. To do so I have chosen those texts, whether novel or short story, which to my mind best articulate the social, cultural and symbolic discourses informing the definition 'English-speaking Canadian Women's writing'. Other works not included would undoubtedly have proved of interest, but the type of 'close reading' which such themes required entailed an automatic limitation on the range of fiction under scrutiny
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Geustyn, Maria Elizabeth. "Representations of slave subjectivity in post-apartheid fiction : the 'Sideways Glance'." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/85854.
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Thesis (MA)-- Stellenbosch University, 2013.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Over the past three decades in South Africa, the documentation of slave history at the Cape Colony by historians has burgeoned. Congruently, interest in the history of slavery has increased in South African letters and culture. Here, literature is often employed in order to imaginatively represent the subjective view-point and experiences of slaves, as official records contained in historiography and the archive often exclude such interiority. This thesis is a study of the representations of slave subjectivity in two novels: Rayda Jacobs’s The Slave Book (1998) and Unconfessed (2007) by Yvette Christiansë. Its task is to investigate and traverse the multitude of readings made possible in these literary representations, and then to challenge such readings by juxtaposing the representational strategies of the two novels. Both primary texts are works of historical fiction that, in different ways, draw on the archive and historiography in order to grant historical plausibility to their narratives. Engaging with the distinct methods with which they approach and interpret such historical information, I adopt the terms “glimpsing” and “reading sideways”. Throughout this study, I engage each of these methods in order to demonstrate the value, and limits, of each technique in its engagement with the complexities of representing slave subjectivity in the wake of its (predominant) occlusion from historical and official data. Chapter One presents a brief overview of the emergence of the slave past in historiography and public spaces. Following Pumla Gqola’s statement that “slave memory [has] increase[d] in visibility in post-apartheid South Africa”, I move to a discussion of the theoretical perspectives on (re)memory as employed by writers of fiction that exemplify “a higher, more fraught level of activity to the past than simply identifying and recording it ” (“Slaves” 8) . In turn, I identify the imperative archival silence places on authors to write about slaves, and the relevance of genre in this undertaking. Specifically, I consider the romantic and tragic historical fiction genres as they are utilised by Jacobs and Christiansë in approaching representations of slave subjectivity, and how this influences emplotment. Chapter One concludes with a brief exposition of the literary representations offered by Unconfessed and The Slave Book. Chapter Two presents a detailed study of Rayda Jacobs’s The Slave Book as a novel of historical fiction. Jacobs takes up a methodology of “glimpsing” at the slave past through the representations available in historiography. I trace the moments at which the text seeks to convey slave subjectivity, within and without historical discourses, through such “glimpses”, and show how they are employed to establish a focus on interiority and to humanise slave characters. Chapter Three focuses on Yvette Christiansë’s Unconfessed and explores its explicit engagement with silences surrounding the protagonist Sila van den Kaap’s historical presence in the Cape Town Archives. I read Christiansë’s representation of these silences as “acts of looking sideways” at the discursive practices inherent in the historical documentation of slave voices that enact her resistance to “filling” these silences with detailed narrative. I argue that the various forms of silence in the narrative allow for a deeper understanding of the injustices and oppression suffered by Sila van den Kaap, and that it is these silences, ironically, which grant her voice. Chapter Four presents a comparison of the novels and their respective representational techniques of “glimpsing” versus “looking sideways”. While the distinct efficacy and implication of each approach is critically evaluated, both are ultimately found to make an invaluable addition to the literary exploration of slave subjectivity as attention is drawn to the interiority of each text’s characters.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Oor die afgelope drie dekades, het die dokumentasie wat opgelewer is deur historici in Suid- Afrika met betrekking tot die slawe in die Kaapkolonie floreer. Ooreenstemmend, het belangstelling in die geskiedenis van die slawe in die gebied van kultuur en letterkunde toegeneem. In hierdie konteks, word literatuur dikwels in diens geneem om op ‘n verbeeldingsryke manier die subjektiewe standpunt en die bestaan van die slawe te verteenwoording, wat vroeër in amptelike rekords dikwels sodanige innerlikheid uitsluit. Hierdie tesis is 'n studie van die voorstellings van slaaf subjektiwiteit in twee romans: Rayda Jacobs se The Slave Book (1998) en Unconfessed (2007) deur Yvette Christiansë. Dit beoog verder om ondersoek in te stel na die menigte lesings in literêre voorstellings en sodanige lesings uit te daag deur die vergelyking van die twee betrokke tekste. Ek neem die "skramse” en "sywaartse" sienings as metodiek vir die eien en interpretasie van argief-materiaal in die twee tekste. Deurgaans in hierdie studie gebruik ek hierdie metodieke op hulle beurt ten einde die waarde van elke tegniek te demonstreer, in terme van die voorstellingshandeling wat elk gebruik om slaaf subjektiwiteit te verteenwoordig. In Hoofstuk Een, word teoretiese perspektiewe oor ‘herinnering’ soos dit bestaan as gevolg van, en ten spyte van, die argief, beskryf en ontleed. In my oorsig van die rol en doel van die argief sowel as die onthou van 'n slaaf verlede in die hedendaagse Suid-Afrika, word benaderings wat in verskeie velde onderneem is om slawerny en sy slagoffers uit te beeld, ook in ag geneem. Ek identifiseer die noodsaaklikheid wat “stiltes” in die argief op skrywers plaas om oor slawe te skryf, asook die relevansie van die genre in hierdie onderneming. Ek kyk spesifiek na die romantiese en historiese fiksie genres soos hulle deur Jacobs en Christiansë gebruik word in hul voorstellings van slaaf subjektiwiteit, en hoe dit voorstellingshandeling beïnvloed. Hoofstuk Een word afgesluit met 'n kort uiteensetting van die literêre voorstellings, soos uitgebeeld in The Slave Book en Unconfessed. Hoofstuk Twee is 'n ondersoek na die funksie van Rayda Jacobs se The Slave Book as 'n historiese fiksie-roman. Jacobs se roman bepeins die geskiedenis van slawerny deur die voorstellingshandeling van ‘n "skramse kyk”. Ek ondersoek die waarde van die romanse wat in die roman opgeneem word, sowel as Jacobs se gebruik van historiografie om haar verhaal te ondersteun. Hoofstuk Drie fokus op Yvette Christiansë se Unconfessed en die wyse waarop die slaaf karakter as protagonis die stiltes as gemarginaliseerde aan die leser kommunikeer, en daaropvolgend, die wyse waarop die historiese figuur, ten spyte van die stiltes in die argief, kommunikeer. Hierdie metodiek bestempel ek as die "sywaartse kyk". Ek argumenteer dat die stiltes in die roman ‘n leemte laat vir 'n dieper begrip van die onreg en onderdrukking wat deur die protagonis gely word, en dat, ironies genoeg, dit hierdie stiltes is wat aan haar ‘n “stem” gee. Hoofstuk Vier is 'n vergelyking tussen die romans en hul doeltreffendheid. Altwee tekste, van ewe belang nagaande die bevordering van subjektiwiteit van slawe tydens die Kaapkolonie, beslaan elk 'n ander benadering tot die argief en geskiedenis self. Dit is met hierdie perspektiewe waarmee hierdie studie omgaan. Beide tekste vorm ‘n waardevolle toevoeging tot die literêre verkenning van slaaf subjektiwiteit deurdat aandag op die innerlikheid van elke teks se protagoniste gevestig word. Verder, deurdat die tekste met historiografie en die argief omgaan, spreek hulle diskursiewe kwessies rakende slaaf subjektiwiteit en die voorstellings daarvan aan.
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Paul, Nalini Caroline. "Identities displaced and misplaced : aspects of postcolonial subjectivity in the novels of Jean Rhys." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2008. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/474/.
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This thesis examines various aspects of female subjectivity in the characters of Jean Rhys’s five novels: Quartet (1928), After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, (1930), Voyage in the Dark (1934), Good Morning, Midnight (1939), and Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). These aspects are informed by race, gender and class, unique to each of the novels, and all involving a degree of performance and/or mimicry. Although the phrase, “Stages of Postcolonial Subjectivity” was considered, it was replaced with “Aspects”, as a term that more accurately reflects subjectivity in these novels. The word “stages” denotes progress, suggesting that the subject is at some point unified or fixed, and progresses from one stage to the next. However, the term “aspects” suggests some of the central themes to the thesis, including mirroring, reflecting looking and gazing. For Rhys’s characters, it conjures up their awareness of others viewing them, and the ways in which this awareness shapes their own subjectivities, which in turn are constantly undergoing change and flux, and are never at any point fixed or unified. The thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter provides a critical overview of Rhys’s last and best-known novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, building on some of the key debates in subsequent chapters, including psychoanalytical readings, postcolonial readings, race, gender, representation and the ability of the text to “write back” to the centre of power. The second chapter explores the phenomenon of the postcolonial female gaze in Wide Sargasso Sea, that of the white Creole and of Christophine as a black woman. Using film theory as a theoretical framework, the discussion focuses on Antoinette’s female gaze directed against her English husband, as well as Christophine’s ability to exert her own “other” power that lies outside of language and Englishness. The third chapter charts the fragmented subjectivity of Rhys’s female characters, examining their ambivalence towards England and an assumed other culture, from which they have originated. Postcolonial and psychoanalytical theories are applied to the analysis, which explores the female characters’ ability to challenge fixed categories of race and gender. The fourth chapter also challenges these fixed categories, exploring the performativity of the female protagonists in Rhys’s early novels, in terms of clothes, hair and make-up. These seemingly superficial details convey a deeper sense of understanding about the societies in which these characters live, the spaces they inhabit and the male figures with which they interact, and on whom they depend. The fifth and final chapter examines Rhys’s early female protagonists as metaphorical zombies, using sociological research into the Haitian zombie as a theoretical framework. Despite their zombification, however, these characters demonstrate their ability to engage in life through the use of memories and nostalgia. My analyses of Rhys’s female protagonists take into account the many, varied and often contradictory critical responses to her work and themes, which result from the complex and subtle evocations of the characters themselves.
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Tranter, Rhys Edward. "Ill seen Ill said : trauma, representation and subjectivity in Samuel Beckett's post-war writing." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2014. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/59995/.
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Over the last two decades, our understanding of Samuel Beckett’s life and work has been expanded by an unprecedented number of biographies, memoirs and personal correspondence published for the first time. As a result, academic research has been able to plot a series of connections between the writer’s literary work and the cultural and historical moments that shaped it. Beckett has been hailed as a poet whose work engages like no other with the atrocities of the Second World War. This thesis takes as its starting point an issue that often arises in evaluations of the writer, but which has never before been explored in detail: the theme of trauma. With reference to the work of prominent contemporary theorists, this project elucidates what we mean by the term trauma, and why it can be useful to our understanding of Samuel Beckett’s work. Drawing on the writings of Sigmund Freud, Cathy Caruth, and others, this thesis diagnoses traumatic symptoms and gestures in Beckett’s post-war writing. It identifies the role that ‘acting out’ and ‘working through’ plays in some of his late theatrical texts. And, moreover, the thesis begins to trace the role that trauma can play in our understanding of language and meaning. Adopting a broadly poststructuralist view, this study engages with texts by Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida to ask how trauma challenges the status of language and the Western humanist subject. It will demonstrate how how trauma problematises our understanding of walking and thinking in Beckett’s post-war prose; where the presence of live theatrical production is unsettled by traumatic repetition; and why Beckett’s plays for radio undermine our expectations of twentieth-century modernity. While charting the way that Beckett uses and adapts traumatic themes and ideas, the thesis observes how the term signals a broader crisis in Western humanist understandings of time, place and identity.
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Anandan, Prathim. "Child/subject : children as sites of postcolonial subjectivity and subjection in post-Independence South Asian fiction in English." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.711768.
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Dashiell, John C. "Time's Ungentle Tide: Disillusion, Isolation and Self-Mastery in Byron and Hemingway." W&M ScholarWorks, 1988. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539625460.
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Yang, Haihong. ""Hoisting one's own banner:" self-inscription in lyric poetry by three women writers of late imperial China." Diss., University of Iowa, 2010. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/766.
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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.
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Guldimann, Colette. ""A symbol of the New African" : Drum magazine, popular culture and the formation of black urban subjectivity in 1950s South Africa." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2003. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/1814.
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This thesis examines the emergence of black urban subjectivity in South Africa during the 1950s, focussing on the ways in which popular American genres were utilised in the construction of black urban identities that served as a means of resistance to apartheid. At the centre of this process was Drum magazine: founded in South Africa in 1951 , it became the largest selling magazine on the African continent in 1956. Drum's success was due to the way in which it enabled the relocation of black identity from the "traditional" towards the "modern'. The 1940s gave rise to widespread migration of black South Africans from rural to urban areas and this newly urbanised community was seeking models of black urban identity. Yet the Nationalist government was attempting to curtail the emergence of a black urban proletariat, which posed a threat to white political supremacy. Through apartheid legislation black identity was constructed as essentially tribal and rural. As a means of resisting this, urbanised black South Africans turned to, and appropriated, readily available forms of American culture. Drum published Americanised images and stories: gangsters, black detectives, black comic heroes, and pulp romances. This popular material appeared alongside some of the finest investigative journalism ever published. While Drum magazine is widely acknowledged as having provided a platform for the emergence of black South African writing in English, its popular content has been dismissed by critics as apolitical escapism, imitation and capitulation to American culture. This thesis challenges the dismissal of the popular that has dominated analyses of Drum since the 1960s, arguing that such a position denies the agency of local writers and audiences. My analysis reveals that American forms were adopted in critically discerning ways and chosen for their ability to convey local meaning and create positions from which to resist apartheid
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Bonner, Sarah K. "Woolf's philosophy of literary subjectivity : Virginia Woolf's 'To the lighthouse' and Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist theory." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/10091.
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Sartre's theory of existentialism is used as a lens to interpret Woolf's approach to literature as the philosophy of "literary subjectivity." The notion of subjectivity is explored within theoretical existentialism and then applied to Woolf's life and her moment of awakening to subjectivity. To the Lighthouse is examined theoretically and textually to demonstrate Woolf's philosophy of literary subjectivity.
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Bigley, Michael Erik. "Musicality, subjectivity, and the Canterbury tales." CONNECT TO THIS TITLE ONLINE, 2007. http://etd.lib.umt.edu/theses/available/etd-05312007-110614.
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Yamamoto, Traise. "Writing "that other, private self" : the construction of Japanese American female subjectivity /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1994. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9436.
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Taylor, Natalie. "Mapping mystic spaces in the self and its stories: Reading (through) the gaps in Ernest Buckler's "The Mountain and the Valley", Alice Munro's "Lives of Girls and Women", Peter Ackroyd's "The House of Doctor Dee", Adele Wiseman's "Crackpot", and A S Byatt's "Possession"." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/29374.
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In their novels, Ernest Buckler, Alice Munro, Peter Ackroyd, Adele Wiseman and A. S. Byatt have each explored moments when their characters experience expanded states of consciousness. Narratives such as these, as well as those of various mystical literatures, posit the idea that the barriers of the known self can be broken through, often repeatedly. Each of the novels to be studied here portrays a gap- or flaw-ridden self in the act of perpetuating and/or penetrating various forms of narrative and identity constructs. Each also features an encounter with what is other when these narrative and identity boundaries are breached. Reading about "mystical" occurrences of this nature challenges readers with the possibility that perceptions may be registered beyond the paradigms of the subject/object split. In this project, narrative fiction will be read in terms of its capacity to trigger a questioning of, and an expansion from within, systems of knowledge and identity, explicitly in terms of character and plot structure, and implicitly as a model for the reading self. The ability to observe and to respond to productive "gaps" or "flaws" in the stories of the self is a skill not only practiced by contemplatives and mystics, and by the characters in these novels, but by readers of imaginative fiction as well.
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Anker, Willem. "Die nomadiese self : skisoanalitiese beskouinge oor karaktersubjektiwiteit in die prosawerk van Alexander Strachan en Breyten Breytenbach /." Link to the online version, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/1088.
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Weise, Wendy Suzanne. "Gender, Genre, and the Eroticization of Violence in Early Modern English Literature." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/195129.
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In an analysis of literary and historical documents from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, Gender, Genre, and the Eroticization of Violence in Early Modern English Literature examines depictions of love, beauty, and desire and identifies within these discourses a rhetoric of violence. It explores how eroticized violence can be deployed to privilege male speakers and silence female voices. It also reveals, by pairing female- and male-authored works that make specific claims to represent gendered experience that early modern writers both recognized the mechanisms of violent representation as literary conventions and realized they could be deployed, exploited, resisted, fashioned to new ends. By integrating feminist psychoanalytic, film and architectural theories with literary analysis, this study demonstrates how spatial topographies in literary works can function as stimuli that provoke desire to turn violent. Gender, Genre, and the Eroticization of Violence ultimately identifies how this body of literature constructs and maintains genders and points to violence as a structural principle, bound by the hydraulics of subjectivity and cultural anxieties about gender, class, and literary production. Finally, this study identifies the residue of early modern ideas about desire and violence in the materials of our modern culture.
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Bartlett, Laura. "Reflection/Reflected The Construction of Female Subjectivity in Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September and The Death of the Heart." TopSCHOLAR®, 1997. http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/333.
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As I read Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September and The Death of the Heart, questions arose, persisted, and remained unanswered until I undertook the project of applying poststructuralist theories to these novels. Reading The Last September, I puzzled over the female protagonist's relationship to an ancillary character, which Bowen repeatedly represents in terms of the father-daughter relationship. Reading both The Last September and The Death of the Heart, I was struck by the fact that although Bowen is typically categorized as a "classical realist," she embarks upon the quest of depicting the identity construction of two female adolescents but abandons the representations of her main characters at the end of each novel—without completion or explication. Finally, I noticed in each novel remarkable attention to the relationship between language and identity. Particularly, in The Death of the Heart, explicit attention is given to the female's role as "author." I questioned the presence of these ambiguous, disconcerting issues in novels by a "classical realist." None of these issues has been specifically addressed by Bowen's critics, but by applying poststructuralist theories to these novels I acquired insights which "answer" my questions. Primarily, I have relied upon the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan, but I have also applied a multitude of theories provided by feminist and deconstructionalist theorists. I do not assume that Bowen wrote her novels with an awareness or conscious complicity with these theories, but I do suggest that these novels raise issues which poststructuralist theories provide an unprecedented "lens" to observe and address. While Bowen, obviously, did not have access to these specific theories, the issues which they address were indisputably a factor in her life. As an Anglo-Irish female author, she faced the implication of oppositional terms which construct identity. In Ireland, she was perceived as a colonizer, in England as one of the colonized, and as a female in the first half of the twentieth century she, faced the dichotomous roles defining her as both "wife" and "author." Psychoanalytic and feminist theory address these issues: psychoanalytic theory reveals the intersection of language/culture, gender, and identity; feminist theory illuminates the hierarchical oppositions within patriarchal discourse which structure our thinking and influence behavior. I do not presume that my application of these theories to The Last September and The Death of the Heart provides a "totalizing" reading of the novels. Inevitably these theories will fall out of "out of vogue" and new theories will replace them. Further, while I have not read these novels in a purely historical context, the theories which I use are grounded in a particular historical/ social circumstance. Lacanian theory, for example, is not of an ahistorical, universal language, but is a theory of the structures of language and identity within a specific cultural/ historical framework. However, recognition of the temporality of the theories I employ does not render my reading irrelevant or dismissable. While recognition of the hierarchical ordering structures within patriarchal discourse will modify these structures—perhaps, for example, the male/phallus will not always be the dominant signifier—the notion that language is a mediator of our beliefs and identity will endure.
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Broumels, Monique Juliette. "The ambiguous female voice : recovering female subjectivity in Elizabeth Cary's The tragedy of Mariam, the fair queen of Jewry." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/13933.
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Includes bibliographical references (leaves 105-110).The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry (circ) 1604 deals with the difficulties of a woman to express herself in a society that enjoins women to silence and to the private realm of the home. In the play Cary debates the actions of several female characters, presenting the reader with the understanding that they are wilful subjects who act to push the boundaries of the patriarchal confines of the royal household in which they find themselves. But Cary does not unequivocally endorse these women's actions. The main protagonist of the play is Mariam whose public voice and failure to comply with her husband forms the central drama of the play. Drawing on the ambiguity that is evident in Cary's play, I explore female subjectivity in the play with regards to two of the most influential ideologies in early modern England: those of marriage and religion. Every woman in early modern England, as with all the women in Cary's play, were either married, to be married or had been married. Protestant ideology became the ambiguous space where women were for the first time considered as spiritually equal. But the family and marriage were social and gendered constructions that drew on Christian discourse in order to reinstate the notions of gender difference and ensure the submission of women in the home and in the family.
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Chou, Hsing-chun. "Joyce, Bakhtin, and postcolonial trialogue : history, subjectivity, and the nation in Ulysses." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2002. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/1800/.
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In the light of Bakhtinian theories, this research focuses on Ulysses as a postcolonial modernist text, in which Joyce appropriates modernist aesthetic strategies to serve the purpose of narrating the nation. Bakhtin is helpful here, not only because his theories serve especially well to explain the meeting and intersection of social, political, and cultural forces in periods of transition, but also because his attempt to establish a “historical poetics” helps both to explore discourse as social/individual ideology constituting the text and to interpret the dialogue interaction between sociohistorical forces and textual representation. As Bakhtin seeks to think through the issue of alterity and accentuates the all-importance of dialogue construction, his thought is useful for interpretation of Joyce-s endeavour to turn the hostility of binary opposition into polyphonic orchestration of heteroglossia. Mediating between such binary oppositions as Self and Other, private and public, inside and outside, the Joycean text demonstrates the importance of engagement with the past to transform its nightmarish impact into creative power for the composition of a postcolonial history; the significance of incorporating and negotiating dichotomies in a triangular structure and recognizing their coexistence for the constitution of a postcolonial subjectivity; and the consequence of integrating nationalist projects and cosmopolitan dimensions for the construction of a postcolonial nation. While Bakhtin sheds light on Joyce, Joyce complements what Bakhtin leaves unsaid, enlarging the scope and implication of Bakhtinian theories. The dialogue between the Irish author and the Russian thinker results in mutual enlightenment. The introductory chapter surveys the relationship between Joyce, Bakhtin, and postcolonial modernism, concentrating on the applicability of Bakhtinian concepts to the Joycean text. From the notion of the chronotope, the first chapter examines Stephen’s ambivalent attitude toward history, and focuses on his transformation of the past in the present time-space for the construction of a divergent and ongoing postcolonial future. The next chapter explores Bloom’s relation to colonial Irish society and inquiries into his shaping of an architectonic self, which results from the reaccentuation of public discourse and the mediation between individualism and collectivism. In the light of dialogism and grotesque realism, the third chapter deals with Molly’s dialogue answers to Bloom’s proposal of liberation, and investigates how her androgynously grotesque body transmits the external body, through her sexual body, into the textual body which is “Penelope.” The concluding chapter focuses on the interillumination of Joyce and Bakhtin: while Bakhtin helps refigure a postcolonial modernist Joyce, Joyce triangulates the binary structure of dialogue, underscoring the significance of trialogue as potential technique for postcolonial construction.
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CHENG, On Yee Franziska. "A lacanian perspective on literature, translation and the reader's (inter-)subjectivity : read my text and tell me who you are." Digital Commons @ Lingnan University, 2012. https://commons.ln.edu.hk/eng_etd/7.
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My purpose in this research is to raise some theoretical issues in the study of literature and translation. One dominating attribute of a piece of literary text is its poetic linguistic features, e.g. ambiguity, irony, contradictions and linguistic tension. However, these traits of literary texts are theorized by Julia Kristeva as the manifestation of the drive’s dismantling of what Jacques Lacan characterizes as the Symbolic, hence an almost schizophrenic collection of disruptions of the relation between the signifiers and the signifieds. I intend to push this argument further into the realm of translation, arguing that even though it is impossible to achieve an equivalent translatum, it is possible to contain most of the meanings, or even plausible to create extra layers of meanings to the text through rendering the target text with the application of theories and the utilization of homophones.
This exploratory thesis takes Translation as its broad topic. More specifically, I am interested in the theory of translation, as well as the practice, as it applies to ‘transgressive’ texts in English being translated into Chinese (as language and culture), Jeanette Winterson as a case-study example. In the body of this paper, I provide an experimental translation of the first few complex sentences of the beginning of the first Sappho chapter in Art & Lies (2005), which demonstrates how the application of Lacanian psychoanalysis may help in the interpretation as well as translation of complicated literary texts. The target text would, ideally, preserve multiple layers of meanings and can be read in some other meaningful way after the application of interdisciplinary theories. In this dissertation, I embrace a heuristic rather than a correctness-based approach to translation which focuses on the explorations of various possible creative multileveled translations. I do not attempt to translate Winterson according to traditional translation norms, and do not attempt to apply Lacanian theory to translation in a rigid and dogmatic way. In other words, the production of the best, or even a defensible way to translate, is not my purpose of translation and hence is not any underlying premise of the birth of this thesis.
Moreover, in this dissertation I investigate the nature of reader’s intersubjectivity in reading, as neither writing nor translation may be separated from the reading activity. As for intersubjectivity, I refer to the subjectivity of the reader which is dominated by Other, for sub-ject is a person who is controlled and voiced over. The two prevalent manifestations of the Other in reading is the Other as Author-God and the Other as Text. It is the reader’s intersubjectivity (rather than simply subjectivity) because these Others do not exist ontologically but only “survive” as an unconscious force in our mutual consciousness, something similar to a shared belief, a collective phenomenon. By discussing and comparing the two Others, the Other as the Author- God and the Other as Text, I demonstrate how these two seemingly contradictory Others do not bring about dramatic differences in the two subjectivities.
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Mulder, F. Adele. "Bodies and borders : space and subjectivity in three South African texts." Thesis, Stellenbosch : University of Stellenbosch, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/2444.
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Thesis (MA (English))--University of Stellenbosch, 2009.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis interrogates the relationship between body, subjectivity and space in three antipastoral novels. The texts which I will be discussing, Karel Schoeman’s This Life, Anne Landsman’s The Devil’s Chimney and J.M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country, all foreground the female protagonist’s relationship to a specifically South African landscape in a colonial time-frame. The inter-relatedness between the body, subjectivity and space is explored in order to show that there is a shifting interaction between these registers in the novels. Arising from this interaction, the importance of perspective as a way of being in the world is foregrounded. The approach adopted in this study is based on the assumption that our experience depends upon how we make meaning of the world through our bodies as we encounter people, places and objects. The lived, embodied experience is always a subjective experience. The conceptual framework is derived broadly from psychoanalysis and phenomenology. My primary concern in this study is how marginal subject positions are explored in the space of the South African farm, which, traditionally, is an ideologically fraught locus of Afrikaner patriarchy and oppression. The novels are narrated by distinctive female voices, each speaking differently, but all having the effect of undermining and exposing the hegemony of the patriarchal farm space. In all three novels the question of genre is involved as forming the space of the text itself. The novels speak to the tradition of the plaasroman and the pastoral and, in doing so, open up a conversation with the past.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: In hierdie tesis word die verhouding tussen die liggaam, subjektiwiteit en ruimte ondersoek in drie romans wat teen die pastorale literêre tradisie spreek. Die betrokke romans is This Life deur Karel Schoeman, The Devil’s Chimney deur Anne Landsman en In the Heart of the Country deur J.M. Coetzee. Die romans speel af in ‘n koloniale tydperk waar die vroulike protagonis se verhouding met die Suid-Afrikaanse landskap op die voorgrond gestel word. Die verwantskap tussen die liggaam, subjektiwiteit en ruimte word ondersoek om die interaksie tussen hierdie drie konsepte ten toon te stel. Wat vanuit hierdie interaksie voortspruit is die ontologiese rol wat perspektief speel as wyse om met die wêreld te verkeer. Hierdie studie benader die romans vanuit die siening dat die mens se ervaring afhang van hoe hy/sy die wêreld verstaan deur die interaksie tussen die liggaam en ander mense, ruimtes en objekte. Die beliggaamde ervaring is dus ‘n subjektiewe ervaring. Die konsepsuele raamwerk van hierdie ondersoek is afgelei van psigoanalise en fenomenologie. Die kern van hierdie studie is om te ondersoek hoe die posisie van die randfiguur in die ruimte van die Suid-Afrikaanse plaas ten toon gestel word. Die plaas is tradisioneel ‘n ideologiese bestrede ruimte van Afrikaner patriargie en onderdrukking. Die romans word verhaal deur drie kenmerkende en verskillende vroulike stemme wat dien om die hegemonie van die patriargale opset op die plase te ondermyn en ontbloot. Die vraagstuk van genre is in al drie romans betrokke aangesien genre die ruimte van die teks self uitmaak. Die romans spreek teen die tradisie van die plaasroman en die pastorale roman en tree sodoende in gesprek met die verlede.
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Xiong, Shuangting. "The Problematic Formation of the Modern Self in Lu Xun’s “In Memoriam” and Ding Ling’s “Miss Sophia’s Diary”." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/22702.
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The crisis of the Chinese nation in the early twentieth century compelled May Fourth intellectuals to search for a modern self in order to modernize and strengthen the nation. They did so by self-consciously experimenting with literary forms and genres, from which the first-person narratives arose. This thesis explores how particular formal or generic characteristics produce, problematize, or even impede the formation of a modern self modeled on the Western Enlightenment notions of the self as autonomous, coherent, and bounded. I argue that despite the two authors’ attempt to create an aspirational modern self, the selves constructed in the two texts are always fragile, split and fragmented. It not only reveals the limits of the Western Enlightenment epistemology of the self but also a more complicated processes of how the concepts of the self and subjectivity, as discursive constructs, are contested and negotiated in particular historical circumstance and social reality.
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TSANG, Fei Yue. "Histrionic translation : a methodology for promoting the translator's inter-subjectivity as co-producer." Digital Commons @ Lingnan University, 2013. https://commons.ln.edu.hk/eng_etd/9.
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This thesis will focus on Ezra Pound’s poem, Histrion, its associations with Stanislavskian method acting and their interface with translation studies. The title of “Histrion” is derived from the Latin word for an actor and Pound clearly wishes to suggest strong parallels between the voice of the poet and the voice of the actor. The work evokes a clairvoyant state of heightened consciousness achieved by the poet, in which he melds the subjectivities of the modern writer and the “souls of all men great” (earlier poets such as Dante and Villon) in a translucent flame of fused form. The thesis will explore the phenomenological implications of merging two identities and then apply the seemingly far-fetched concept of metempsychosis suggested in Pound’s poem to translation studies with reference to contemporaneous (to Pound) Stanislavskian acting approaches. For Pound as creative re-writer, as for the creative method actor, all demarcation between the two subjects dissolves. Likewise, in literary translation, as much of Pound’s work exemplifies, the melding and mingling of the author’s and the translator’s subjectivities can be a viable methodology. Such histrionic translation attempts to enact and even resurrect the persona of the source text in the target version. Thus I propose to meld Stanislavskian acting theories with Pound’s sense of metempsychosis and metamorphosis with application to the study of literary translation.
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Wolf, Johannes. "The art of arts : theorising pastoral power in the English Middle Ages." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2018. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/278517.
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Gregory the Great described the government of souls as ‘the art of arts,’ a sentiment that the Fourth Lateran Council would echo in 1215. This thesis takes as its fundamental proposition that this ‘art’ can be understood as a ‘craft’, one that is responsible for producing and maintaining a Christian subjectivity marked by introspection, inwardness, and a strong distrust of externalities. Using a theoretical framework influenced by Michel Foucault I suggest a tradition of administering and producing these subjects through ‘pastoral power.’ Charting the trajectory of these ideas from the ascetics of the early church through to fifteenth-century Middle English texts, I explore the dynamics produced by texts invested in producing this specific form of subjectivity as they expand their reach from a specialised audience of monks to an increasingly laicised vernacular sphere. This investigation is broken into two halves. The thesis begins with a re-reading of Michel Foucault’s theories of power and subjection. Here I suggest that there are important conceptual connections between Foucault’s concept of ‘discipline’ and medieval approaches to the care of the soul. The first half of the thesis stresses the longue durée development of pastoral power, focussing on two particular historical moments. The first of these chapters engages with the pastoral and monastic thinkers of the early church, who developed two overlapping regimes – that of body and spirit. The second turns to the Ancrene Wisse, arguing that the it responds to the developments of twelfth-century spirituality by suggesting a form of spiritual engagement that is increasingly imbricated in the mundane world. The second half of the thesis focuses on a number of texts produced in Middle English during the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Two chapters focus on a collection of pastoral texts produced in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The first focuses on the hermeneutic dynamics of these texts whilst second chapter assesses the use of documentary imagery and theories of legal accountability in the same texts. The final chapter suggests that certain proto-autobiographical texts, represented by the work of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, are conditioned by the concerns and dynamics of pastoral power, which also affects the practices modern readers bring to bear on them.
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Ganze, Ronald J. "Conceptions of the self in Augustine, King Alfred, and Anglo-Saxon England /." view abstract or download file of text, 2004. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p3153785.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2004.Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 192-211). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.
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Saraçoğlu, Semra. "Self-reflexivity in postmodernist texts a comparative study of the works of John Fowles and Orhan Pamuk /." Ankara : METU, 2003. http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/1104231/index.pdf.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Middle East Technical University, 2003.Keywords: Self-reflexivity, Self-reflection, Mirror, Dreams, Fantasies, Reference and Difference, Self- Other Dichotomy, "I"dentity Crisis, Overt/Covert, Metafiction, Creative Process, Form, Linguistic Medium.
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Buckalew, Faye Roberta. ""Thro' Sleep as Thro' a Veil": Losing the Self to Find the Self in the Poetry of Christina Rossetti." W&M ScholarWorks, 1993. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539625824.
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Botha, Fourie. "Symbolic masters/semiotic slaves : subjectivity and subjection in Atwood, with reference to The circle game and Two-headed poems." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/13932.
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Includes bibliographical references (leaves 82-86).This dissertation explores the construction of the subject via a relationship of power in two poem sequences, 'The circle game' and 'Two-headed poems', by Margaret Atwood. I argue that Atwood proposes a subject similar to the kind of subject found in psychoanalysis. Like the psychoanalytic subject, Atwood's subject is formed in relation to its other. This relation is essentially a power relation and can become unbalanced, forcing one of the two parties into a subjugated position. Atwood not only exposes these skewed relations of power, but also explores possible solutions for escaping or reconfiguring these relationships. The first chapter briefly discusses theories of the subject by Freud, Lacan and Kristeva. I use Hegel's dialectic between the 'master' and 'bondsman', and subsequent psychoanalytic and postcolonial applications of it, to examine the construction of the subject in terms of an other in Chapter 2. Postcolonial map theory and Kristeva's ideas on the abject are used to verbalize the divisions, but also the interactions, between the subject and its other as well as possibilities of escape. Chapter 3 demonstrates these power relationships, and their expression in cartographic terms, in 'The circle game'. In Chapter 4, I show how processes analogous to the eruption of poetic language into the symbolic order are described in the poetry. Even though these processes do not provide a clear-cut solution to the position of the subjected, their presence signals the possibility of renegotiating unbalanced relationships of power.
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Gilmore, Christine Cecelia. ""Our poet the Monarch" : Sir Philip Sidney and Renaissance subjectivity /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1997. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9495.
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Taylor, Michelle Marie. "From sentiment to sagacity to subjectivity: dogs and genre in nineteenth-century British literature." Diss., University of Iowa, 2018. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/6303.
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My dissertation examines the ways that canine roles affect genre—the categories into which we place works of literature, which shape their forms and which in turn shape our expectations of what we read. For instance, if epitaphs and elegies are at least partially meant to usher the dead into heaven and praise the dead’s suitability for a Christian afterlife, what happens when the subject is a dog denied a soul by Christianity? These are the kinds of questions I address. In addition to epitaphs and elegies, I consider detective and sensation fiction as well as dog autobiographies—works of fiction written from the dog’s perspective—to explore how taking the dog as a subject forced the conventions of certain genres to change, or in the case of detective and sensation fiction, how dog-like ways of knowing helped to birth a new genre altogether. In either case, what is important is that the generic changes signal a less human-centered approach to literature: one which opens animals up to be the possessors of souls, intelligence, and subjectivity. These changes paved the way for the Victorians to consider animals as beings worthy of compassion and respect.
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Cook, Kristin A. "Executing character : of sympathy, self-construction and Adam Smith, in early America, 1716-1826." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/9688.
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This PhD thesis asks the following question: how does Adam Smith's moral sense philosophy, particularly his notion of sympathy, as articulated through his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (delivered 1762-63), rationally and relationally inform an understanding of socio-political character in Early America? Prioritising the American Revolutionary period, broadly marked by the years 1716 and 1826 (introduced by the opening of the first theatre in Williamsburg, Virginia), my analysis employs Smith's theory as a rhetorical device for understanding discursive fields of human interconnection, wherein "sensible" selves are being rationally constructed and theatrically conceived. I read the culture of sensibility and the language of sentiment as underpinning legal and logical intellectual development within this context (drawing upon scholarship by Andrew Burstein, Gary Wills, Sarah Knott and Nicole Eustace in this regard), where sympathy is foregrounded as one particular aspect of sensible self-construction. I understand the sensible self within this environment as a conceit that is always already theatrically informed and performed: this character is ever responsive to surrounding audiences and 'interpretive communities' (a la Stanley Fish, and Rhys Isaac in his dramaturgic and ethnographic approach to The Transformation of Virginia), and is bound up in underlying rhetorics of costume, composition and comportment (engaging with Jay Fliegelman's study concerning the performative underpinnings of American Independence: Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, & the Culture of Performance). I develop this thesis through the course of four illustrative case studies wherein sensible American characters (in principle) and American characters (in fact) are standing trial. With respect to these, I enact a series of rhetorical executions, engaging with Adam Smith's notion of sympathy - which is itself theatrically informed - alternately as follows: as a dialogue of conviction; as a grammar of economy; as a translative rhetoric passage; and as a rhetorical conceit of logic and law. Each study depicts a different historical narrative relative to specific modes of sensible self-construction and "transformative" character development, and I treat each scenario with the same tool in order to effectively delineate and examine the original point. This approach is timely insofar as it qualifies Jonathan Lamb's investigation into The Evolution of Sympathy during the Long Eighteenth Century (2009): it usefully extends Lamb's work on the sympathy more generally by prioritising Adam Smith's theory in particular, and by reading Smith's paradigmatic conceit (distinguished via the impartial spectator) into legal and logical fields of "lived interactions". This thesis argues that Smith's sympathetic system offers a uniquely incisive mechanism for engaging with the socio-political processes whereby American characters are being transformed into "sensible" American citizens.
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Efstratiou, Dimitris. "Disintegration of essence and subjectivity : the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and T.S. Eliot." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2001. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/79630/.
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This thesis elaborates upon Charles Baudelaire and T. S. Eliot's poetic negotiation of the erosion of the essentialist cognitive and moral foundations that hypothetically monitor human praxis and cement a stable subjectivity on the basis of the human subjects' co-inhering in a common horizon of understanding. I contend that Baudelaire's work consciously belaboured the collapse of vaulting cognitive frameworks and testimonial accountability in a way that reveals both the historical and trans-historical dimensions of the non-integratability of experience within a modem economy of existence. His work eschews the trappings of both aestheticism (history being one of its explicit and pervasive concerns) and historicism, since it reveals parameters of the reification of organic experience that are intrinsic to language and specific to the mnemonic abridgement of the subject's experiential trajectory. Moreover, Baudelaire's poetry compels the critique of the aesthetic abstraction from the social being of man, and solicits scepticism vis-a-vis straight historicism's teleological infrastructures and collateral crypto-transcendentalist angles. The examined poetry exposes the inner complicity of the two perspectives in question latent beneath their surface mutual closure. I examine T. S. Eliot's work in order to address the anti-essentialist motifs of his poetry in counterpoint to his literary criticism, and reveal the dialectic of cultural determinism (mostly materialising in the latter) and radical impersonality that resumes modernity's aporetic necessity to deploy egological categories within an agenda that has invalidated any notion of essence fundaments sustaining human experience. His poetry's homeopathic re-enactment of the experiential fragmentation that it thematically laments constitutes the privileged terrain whereupon essentialist construals of human subjectivity and history can be revealed to be inherently ideological. I have throughout drawn on Walter Benjamin's understanding of allegory and memory, along with Paul de Man's enhancement of the antagonism of the material and transcendental axes endemic in language and cognitive anchoring. This thesis explores the problematisation of essentialist configurations of subjectivity and history in the poetry of the archetypal poet of modernity, and the mutations they submitted to when they were inscribed within an aesthetic and political agenda that was far more reluctant to relinquish egological paradigms of communication and subjectivity. The underlying concern has been to elucidate Baudelaire's 'inexhaustible wealth of responsiveness vis-a-vis the collapse of organic experience, and his resistance to both historicist and reductively aesthetic appropriations. This thesis has aimed to analyse his treatment of experiential disintegration as an effect of historical juncture along with his welcoming address of cognitive and experiential reification as the outcome of the differential and semiotic character of language and memory.
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Rex, Cathy Wyss Hilary E. "Indianness and womanhood textualizing the female American self /." Auburn, Ala, 2008. http://repo.lib.auburn.edu/EtdRoot/2008/SUMMER/English/Dissertation/Rex_Cathy_12.pdf.
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Millim, Anne-Marie. "Preaching silence : the disciplined self in the Victorian diary." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2010. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/1532/.
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This thesis examines the representations of the self as a cultural agent, both reacting to and actively shaping codes of social and artistic respectability, as displayed in the diaries of the canonical Victorian writers Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, Henry Crabb Robinson, George Eliot, George Gissing, John Ruskin and Gerard Manley Hopkins. It analyses the impact of wider ideological and social imperatives on the diarists’ subjective experience and reads their tendency to silence the self as a symptom of the cultural pressure to merge their private and public persona. These diaries represented a forum in which the diarists perpetually negotiated their own value within the Victorian ideology of productivity and thus not only reflect their inner world but also the cultural climate of the nineteenth century. Chapter One traces the selected diarists’ reluctance to reveal private information, as well as their tendency to foreground professional productivity, to the social pressure to efface emotions relating to the self and to only cultivate those that nurtured the community. It identifies the similarities between the compulsive self-discipline advocated in the psychological discourse of the period, particularly Alexander Bain’s The Emotions and the Will (1859), and the willingness to both live up to and actively shape the cultural codes of respectability that Elizabeth Eastlake and Henry Crabb Robinson display in their diaries. Chapter Two compares and contrasts the desire for maximal professional productivity as exhibited in George Eliot’s and George Gissing’s diaries. Both worked obstinately in order to increase their own value: whereas Eliot sought to redeem her ‘guilt of the privileged,’ Gissing desperately needed to increase his financial solvency through literary output. Chapter Three discusses the ways in which John Ruskin’s diary helped him block out unrespectable and painful private experiences through transforming his obsessive desire to appropriate and “feel” visual experience into a professional task. Chapter Four shows that Gerard Manley Hopkins—because he was acutely concerned by his cultural otherness caused by his homosexuality—not only sought refuge and validation by joining the Jesuits, but by narrowing his realm of experience to nature, merged the private and the public self into the figure of the professional, asexual, dutiful and disinterested observer.
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Steele, Warren Donald. "Body of glass : cybernetic bodies and the mirrored self." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2008. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/163/.
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This thesis examines the ontology of the cyborg body and the politics inherent to cultural manifestations of that image, and focuses on the links between glass and human-machine integration, while tracing the dangerous political affinities that emerge when such links are exposed. In the first chapter, the cyborg’s persistent construction as a cultural Black Box is uncovered using the theories of Bruno Latour and W. Ross Ashby. It examines why the temptation to explore the cyborg solely through close readings of contemporary incarnations leads only to confusion and misreading. The second chapter builds on the work of the first by placing the cyborg within its proper historical context, and provides a detailed examination of the period in which the cyborg was not only named, but also transformed into a physical possibility with an existent political agenda. It then investigates the phallogocentricity, hyper-masculinity, and inherent racism of the cyborg body, and demonstrates how representations of human-machine integration reinforce the pre-existing racist, hetero-normative, patriarchal hegemony of the Cold War. The discussion then explores the issue of the emergent property in the cyborg body; specifically, the figure’s persistent construction as a ‘body of glass.’ It demonstrates how cyborgs are not only associated with objects like the mirror, but also how that figure is tied to visual motifs such as the double or doppelganger. Accordingly, the theories of Jacques Lacan are employed to elucidate the issues that arise when one of the most pervasive images in Western culture also doubles as a reflector. The final chapter seeks to expand upon the framework provided by Lacan, and examines the cyborg not as a mirror, but as a portal. Subsequently, this section challenges not only the cyborg’s current status as a posthuman figure, but also current theoretical assumptions which frame the cyborg as the point of transition from humanism to posthumanism.
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Barker, Carol. "To suffice to herself : female self-sufficiency in the work of women writers 1740-1814." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2002. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/1417.
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This thesis takes as its focus the concept of self- sufficiency in the works of women writers 1740-1814, in order to re-evaluate the relationship between moral and economic modes of eighteenth-century female (in)dependence. This focus comprises two more refined aims: to formulate an appropriate methodology for using the term self-sufficiency within the project by establishing its definitions and applications, both contemporary and modern (addressing, in effect, whether it can be said to establish its own discourse); and to discuss a range of work by female writers whose thematic and strategic investigation of moral and economic issues positions the nature of female self-sufficiency amongst their concerns. As part of this, the thesis seeks a broader definition of female economic behaviour than has been the case in recent critical debates in order to reconsider women's presence as economic beings in the fiction of the period. Sarah Fielding's works are discussed in terms of her fascination with exchange motifs and how this is manifested in her management of narrative forms to structure moral and economic models of self-sufficiency. The work of Frances Brooke is used to explore the implications of self-sufficiency in a range of sexual and economic categories of femininity- the spinster, the widow, the coquette and the female writer. An investigation of Frances Sheridan's novels is concerned with the relationship between individual morality and the collective values, together with the processes of acculturation, structured by female education and conduct procedures. It evaluates how the self-sufficiency of the personal economy engages with wider economies - moral, domestic and political. A fourth chapter on Frances Burney examines her sustained preoccupation with the concept of female self-dependence, and with the nature of female employment. These investigations suggest that only by encompassing non-monetary economies can the nature and scope of eighteenth-century women's economic experiences be determined.
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Meier, Björn. "Subversive narrative techniques and self-reflexivity in Vladimir Nabokov's the real life of Sebastian Knight, Lolita, Pnin, Pale Fire and Ada, or Ardor: A family Chronicle." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 1999. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/18694.
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This dissertation has three aims. First, the establishment of the theoretical foundations of deconstruction and its appropriation by literary criticism. Second, the application of deconstruction to the novels of Nabokov; it has to be stressed that this application is not itself a deconstructive reading, rather that deconstruction offers the interpretative horizon for an analysis of the inner logic of self-reflexivity in the novels in question. which is defined with de Man and against Derrida as a procedure of textual self-deconstruction. The procedure, evident in the proliferation of textual strategies in Nabokov's work, marks the point at which literary modernism transforms itself through the radicalisation of the critique of narrative, subject and meaning into a postmodern aesthetics of deconstruction. The interpretation of the novels then serves thirdly to pose the question of the value of the theory of deconstruction for the task of interpretation, or more generally. the value of deconstruction for literary theory. The interpretation of Nabokov's novels reveals a paradox: selfdeconstructive literature does not require a deconstructive reading. On the contrary, the textual deconstruction of meaning and reference requires the non-deconstructive standpoint of a coherent literary analysis for its demonstration. Comparably and conversely, a deconstructive reading presupposes a text and/or an author committed to the intention of a meaningful whole (however ambiguous). The author's distinction between deconstruction as a method of interpretation and as a literary theory thus points to the limitations of deconstruction as interpretative method in relation to modern and postmodern texts precisely because of their metafictional affinity to deconstruction. Beyond this, however, deconstruction's treatment of the text as pretext for its own operations, taken to its logical conclusion, would dissolve the very cognitive object and interest of literary studies.