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Holt, Travis V. "The legacy of a failing father dysfunctional father figures in William Faulkner's fiction /." Lynchburg, Va. : Liberty University, 2009. http://digitalcommons.liberty.edu.
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Peters, Audrey D. "Fatherhood and Fatherland in Chimamanda Adichie's "Purple Hibiscus"." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2010. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/1769.
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Purple Hibiscus, a novel by third-generation Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie, appears at first glance to be a simple work of adolescent fiction, a bildungsroman in which a pair of siblings navigate the typical challenges of incipient adulthood: social ostracism, an abusive parent, emerging desire. However, the novel's setting-a revolutionary-era Nigeria-is clearly intended to evoke post-Biafra Nigeria, itself the setting of Adichie's other major work, Half of a Yellow Sun. This setting takes Purple Hibiscus beyond the scope of most modern adolescent fiction, creating a complex allegory in which the emergence of self and struggle for identity of the Achike siblings represent Nigeria's own struggle for identity. Adichie achieves this allegory by allowing the father figures of the novel to represent the different political paths Nigeria could have followed in its post-colonial period. The Achike siblings' identities develop through interactions with each of these patriarchs.
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Zeni, Bruno Gonçalves. "Sinuca de malandro: narradores, protagonistas e figuras paternas em João Antônio." Universidade de São Paulo, 2012. http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8151/tde-13032013-120103/.
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Este trabalho analisa os contos e textos autobiográficos de João Antônio (1937- 1996) nos quais as figuras paternas exercem papel decisivo para os protagonistas. A análise literária parte da identificação de elementos fundamentais do texto de ficção (tais como narrador, personagens e ação) e de como eles se articulam e interagem. As interpretações combinam elementos da crítica literária, da historiografia, de pesquisas bibliográfica e biográfica, apontando ainda para questões da sociologia e da psicanálise. O estudo parte das reflexões de Antonio Candido, crítico que formulou conceitos importantes para o autor em foco, para a crítica literária e para a linha de pesquisa que relaciona literatura e sociedade. As análises conduzem a questões sobre a trajetória dos personagens ficcionais, sobre o conceito de malandragem, sobre o conto na obra de João Antônio e sobre as relações entre biografia e literatura na vida do autor.This thesis analyses João Antonios short stories and autobiographical narratives where father figures are crucial and intimately related to main characters. The critical work identifies essential elements of fiction (such as narrator, characters and plot) and the way they interact. Our research is based upon Antonio Candidos essays on João Antônio and on literature and society. The effort of interpretation combines literary criticism, history of literature, biographical approach and bibliographic research, also including psychoanalysis and sociological theoretical references. The interpretations lead to conclusions about the journey of the main characters, the concept of trickery (malandragem), the short story form in João Antonio and the relationship between life and work of this Brazilian writer.
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Stewart, James C. "The ghost of Godwin intertextuality and embedded correspondence in the works of the Shelley circle /." Birmingham, Ala. : University of Alabama at Birmingham, 2008. https://www.mhsl.uab.edu/dt/2008m/stewart.pdf.
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Thesis (M.A.)--University of Alabama at Birmingham, 2008.Additional advisors: Randa Graves, Daniel Siegel, Samantha Webb. Description based on contents viewed Feb. 10, 2009; title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 68-71).
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Martínez, Samper Pablo. "Padre e hijo: una historia del cine a través de las figuras de Ulises, Abrahan y Hamlet." Doctoral thesis, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/668174.
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Esta investigación propone una “historia del cine” a través de dos figuras que recorren todas sus historias, el padre y el hijo. La hipótesis principal de la que partimos es que el modelo paterno-filial es una trama heredada de la tradición literaria y que, desde sus inicios, el cine carga con esa herencia imaginando soluciones posibles. ¿Cómo aparece representado el padre en la historia del cine? ¿Cuáles son los rasgos que lo definen? ¿De qué forma fue configurada esta relación, padre-hijo, en cada “período” cinematográfico? ¿Cómo se reflejan las soluciones formales de cada autor y de cada movimiento en torno a la representación de esta relación? El lugar y el rol que cumplen los padres y los hijos no se encuentran prefijados de antemano sino que se transforman según los cambios históricos y la construcción de las figuras. Esta investigación plantea, por lo tanto, estudiar el binomio padre-hijo como el lugar desde donde leer las tensiones formales e históricas de cada periodo cinematográfico.This research work sets out a "history of the cinema" through the research of two figures that are present in all its histories, the father and the son. The main hypothesis is that the filial-paternal model is a storyline that the cinema inherits from the literary tradition and, from its beginnings, takes this inheritance on imagining possible solutions. How does the father appear represented in the history of the cinema? What are the traits that define him? How was this relationship, father/son, configured in each cinematographic "period"? How are the formal solutions by each author and each movement reflected around the representation of this relationship? The place and the role of parents and children are not predetermined beforehand but are transformed according to historical changes and the construction of the figures at the same time. Therefore, this research proposes to study the couple father-son as the place from which the formal and historical tensions of each cinematographic period are read.
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Remic, Andy. "The Ghost of Your Father." Thesis, Edge Hill University, 2018. http://repository.edgehill.ac.uk/10442/.
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The thesis contains a creative text, along with a poetics of the work. The Ghost of Your Father is the story of unusual childhood adventures in the small village of Ramsbottom, Lancashire, with chapters also dedicated to exploring the forests, mountains, rivers and family members of Trebija, Yugoslavia, during the long summer holidays of the 1980s. Remic’s father, Nikolas, was a child of Yugoslavia, enlisted in the army at the age of seventeen and captured by Germans during WWII. He subsequently escaped from a POW camp, was rescued by US troops, and brought to the UK where he joined the RAF and met the author’s mother, Sally, a Liverpudlian working in the NAAFI. The thesis is a childhood memoir of clashing worlds: village life in Lancashire, contrasted with village life in Trebija, Yugoslavia, and is infused with the new dawning age of the 1980s computer revolution, and the author’s conflicting desire to become both an author and computer game programmer. A strange merging of country life and 8-bit technology, of Tolkien fantasy novels and differing cultures and customs, the text reveals these two very different worlds, searching for linking threads, and is the source of what made Remic the genre novelist he became. The text explores life in Ramsbottom and life in Slovenija – and presents childhood adventures in the 1980s, and those same places and faces experienced a quarter of a century later. The text contains a travel section detailing an account of the events that occurred when Remic returned to Slovenija to meet his long, lost, beloved Aunty Mary, taking his children on that same voyage of discovery he experienced as a boy, and which he believes shaped his imagination and fired his creativity to create a genre novelist working in the field today. Part memoir, part travelogue, part exploration and decoding of a child’s-eye view of a world filled with fantasy monsters, pixellated graphics, mountain-top escapades and small-town haunted houses, The Ghost of Your Father is a book of contrasts, of exploring imagination, creativity, ethics, and the very twisted essence of subjective memory. It is a story of a child then, and a child now, based on memories, interviews and new experiences. It is a fictional representation of a factual past, and a factual exploration of a fictional present. It is the truth, perhaps not as it was, but as it might have been. The poetics is an exploration of the writing process of The Ghost of Your Father. It’s an investigation of why, and how, Remic decided to create this text, examining contextualisation, where this work sits in the field of contemporary memoir, reflecting on the process of writing the text, including how Remic was inspired and arrived at conclusions over memory, tone and research for form, and ultimately concluding with how this project has altered Remic’s perspective of research, creative writing, and how it has informed Remic’s genre writing and creative writing as a whole.
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Fankhauser, Rochelle A. "Dear Father." Diss., CLICK HERE for online access, 1998. http://patriot.lib.byu.edu/u?/MTAF,34215.
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Hamou, Patricia. "Figures de l'Aborigene dans l'imaginaire français." Thesis, The University of Sydney, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/1327.
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Hamou, Patricia. "Figures de l'Aborigene dans l'imaginaire français." University of Sydney, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/1327.
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Jones, Ffion Wynne. "Relative strangers : father-daughter incest in contemporary literature." Thesis, Bangor University, 2005. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.432794.
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Brown, Andrew Stephen. "Roland Barthes : the figures of writing." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1988. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.292859.
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McWilliams, Sara E. "Disturbances: Figures of hybridity and the politics of representation /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1992. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9411.
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Cox, Kempton John. "Visualizing Borges: Figures of Interpretation." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2015. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/5245.
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In this work I explore the geometry found both in the narrative structures and the internal shapes proposed in Jorge Luis Borges’ short stories and seek to arrive at new interpretations of those works by mapping out—in graphical form—the shapes found therein. I move from basic two-dimensional shapes (lines, triangles, quadrilaterals) to those involving the element of temporality and atemporality (circles, interruptive loops, chiasmus) to shapes dealing with repetition—both geometric and temporal—and eternity (labyrinths, fractals, and Alephs). In each case and for each short story analyzed, either an existent interpretation is favored or a new interpretation is set forth.
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Deutsch, Katherine Ariela. "Platonic Footnotes: Figures of Asymmetry in Ancient Greek Thought." Thesis, Harvard University, 2015. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:26566091.
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In 1953, Maurice Merleau-Ponty claimed, “It is useless to deny that philosophy limps…. [In the philosopher’s] assent something massive and carnal is lacking. He is not altogether a real being.” My dissertation is a critical rereading of the Platonic dialogues and their reception through the lens of one key trope: “limping.” I trace limping through philosophical and literary texts and rhetorical treatises – through authors ranging from Plato, Sophocles, and Hippocrates to Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Derrida. I show that this metaphor, a figure for one-sidedness or deficiency, offers new material for the longest and most-footnoted debate, the debate over Platonic idealism. My project is grounded in a sustained re-examination of Plato’s Phaedo – the most body-denying or “somatophobic” of the Platonic dialogues. I demonstrate how the figure of limping works in conjunction with other metaphors of the body – and the figure of Socrates itself, in all its corporeality – to subvert one-sided or somatophobic readings of the Phaedo and of Platonism.
Part One of my dissertation looks at the rhetoric of the body; Part Two examines the body of rhetoric. Part One asks how Socrates’ body, in its satyr-like ugliness and strangeness, itself constitutes a deformity in ancient Athens. Examining the philosopher’s “body techniques,” I show that the Phaedo – which is framed by Socrates’ legs and feet – is mediated by the body it denies. Part Two closely examines Socrates’ terminology in the Phaedo’s first argument for the immortality of the soul. Focusing on the Greek abhorrence of nature as a “limping” body, I study associated tropes of completion and incompletion, balance and imbalance, and metaphors that rely on somatic, circular, and compensatory structures (among them, the periodos, or sentence, and the diaulos, the double racecourse).
My project, which draws its title from Alfred North Whitehead’s famous characterization of European philosophy as a “series of footnotes to Plato,” concerns itself with the metaphorical feet, legs, and gait of philosophy itself. In examining the “lame inheritance” the ancients have provided the moderns, my project uses the rhetoric of disability and prosthesis to reframe Classical reception studies.Comparative Literature
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Eastin, Jennifer Flood. "Impact of Absent Father-Figures on Male Subjects and the Correlation to Juvenile Delinquency: Findings and Implications." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2003. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4332/.
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This study was predicated on the belief that a father brings something unique to the family, thus, making irreplaceable contributions to the life of a child. Fathers are unique in that they provide something different from mothers. They are irreplaceable because when they are absent, children are said to suffer emotionally, intellectually, socially, and behaviorally. The contributions of fathers to a child's well being cannot be fully replaced by better programming, ensuring child support programs, or even by well-intentioned mentoring programs. A review of literature relevant to delinquency and adolescent behavioral and academic success revealed that there may be a correlation between a male role-model and the teaching of self-control and socially appropriate behaviors. Indeed, much of what the large body of research pertaining to fatherhood reveals is that, compared to children raised in two-parent homes, children who grow up without their fathers have significantly worse outcomes, on average, on almost every measure of well being (Horn, 2002). In addition, an understanding of the factors that may influence delinquent behaviors, in particular within the family unit, can better equip parents and educators to support those who may be exhibiting the beginning signs of delinquent behavior. This study was designed to determine the influence of, or correlation between, juvenile delinquency and the presence or absence of a father-figure in a child's life. Responses made on the Delinquency Check List between two sample sets, delinquent and non-delinquent adolescents, were examined. The study attempted to determine if delinquent activity among adolescents was differentiated by the absence or presence of a father-figure in a child's life. This study also investigated the frequency and severity of delinquent activities between adolescents in the determined sample groups.
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Shugart, Helene Anna. "Disinheriting the father: the nature and function of feminist rhetorical appropriation /." The Ohio State University, 1994. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1487854314871775.
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Mann, Erin Irene. "Relative identities: father-daughter incest in Medieval English religious literature." Diss., University of Iowa, 2011. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/4873.
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Medieval tales of father-daughter incest depict more than offensively dominant fathers and voiceless, victimized young women: these stories often contain moments of surprising counternarrative. My analysis of incest narratives foregrounds striking instances of feminine resistance, where daughters act independently, speak unrestrainedly, adopt masculine behaviors, and invert masculine gazes. I argue that daughters of incestuous fathers participate in a complex back-and-forth of attraction and rejection that thrusts the fraught nature of the incest into sharp relief, revealing the ways in which medieval families--as well as the medieval church and state--constructed and deconstructed identities and sexualities. Extending Judith Butler's insights on how incest tales interrogate state and kinship networks, I show how the liminal position of daughters in the family destabilizes the sex/gender system as it functioned in both the family and the larger world, secular and sacred. My dissertation thus relocates daughters from the periphery to the center of the medieval family. Christian thematics likewise provide a key framework for both my argument and medieval audiences: biblical translations and retellings, saints' lives, and moral exempla offered familiar points of reference. By revealing how authors and artists employed well-known religious stories to impart political readings of sexuality and of the family, the four chapters of my dissertation assert daughters' key role in medieval Christian culture. I examine both Anglo-Saxon texts--the biblical epic Genesis A and the prose Life of Euphrosyne--as well as the late medieval poem Cursor mundi and Chaucer's Clerk's Tale. My readings are enhanced by recourse to the medieval visual record offered by three manuscripts that illustrate the Lot story--British Library MS Cotton Claudius B.iv, the Old English Hexateuch, and Oxford Bodleian Library MSS Junius 11(the Genesis A manuscript) and Bodley 270b, a Biblé moralisée. Artistic renderings of father-daughter incest are no less unsettled than their literary counterparts, and demonstrate that the position of daughters was so fundamentally unstable that it often varied not only within an era, but also within a single manuscript. I argue that authors and artists radically reimagined the fundamental texts of the Middle Ages, including the Old Testament, to establish new narratives of sin and salvation, self and other, and power and submission.
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Yegenoglu, Dilara. "Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Quest for the Father." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1996. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc279212/.
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This dissertation explores Elizabeth Barrett's dependency on the archetypal Victorian patriarch. Chapter I focuses on the psychological effects of this father-daughter relationship on Elizabeth Barrett. Chapter II addresses Barrett's acceptance of the conventional female role, which is suggested by the nature and the situation of the women she chooses to depict. These women are placed in situations where they can reveal their devotion to family, their capacity for passive endurance, and their wish to resist. Almost always, they choose death as an alternative to life where a powerful father figure is present. Chapter III concentrates on the highly sentimental images of women and children whom Barrett places in a divine order, where they exist untouched by the concerns of the social order of which they are a part. Chapter IV shows that the conventional ideologies of the time, society's commitment to the "angel in the house," and the small number of female role models before her increase her difficulty to find herself a place within this order. Chapter V discusses Aurora Leigh's mission to find herself an identity and to maintain the connection with her father or father substitute. Despite Elizabeth Barrett's desire to break away from her paternal ties and to establish herself as an independent woman and poet, her unconditional loyalty and love towards her father and her tremendous need for his affection, and the security he provides restrain her resistance and surface the child in her.
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White, Barbara A., and mikewood@deakin edu au. "'Beyond God the father' : The metaphysical in a physical world." Deakin University. School of Literary and Communication Studies, 2002. http://tux.lib.deakin.edu.au./adt-VDU/public/adt-VDU20050825.154051.
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Spieker, Sven. "Figures of memory and forgetting in Andrei Bitov's prose." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1992. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.335709.
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von, Sneidern Maja-Lisa 1945. "Figures of appetite and slavery from Milton to Swift." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1997. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/289300.
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Here, employing materialist and colonial discourse theory, I contend that the reality of the "new world," so tightly bound to new appetites and new servitudes, pervasively informed literary works which have been traditionally immune to interpretations asserting their complicity with and critique of English, later British, colonialism. While scholars have always known that Milton was Secretary of Foreign Languages for an English ruler with an aggressive colonial policy, and they have identified Samuel Purchas and Peter Heylyn, churchmen turned geographers, as sources for Milton's geography, and have even argued that Satan is a colonizer, my work addresses the colonial situation at the center of Paradise Lost. Positing that England experienced "culture wars" (epistemic and ideological, as well as political and social, instability) during the period between the beheading of Charles I (1648/9) and the publication of Linnaeus' Systema Naturae (1735), in subsequent chapters I address a group of interrelated paradoxes: How was it that acquisitiveness and consumerism expanded among the middling sort who concurrently cultivated the pleasures of deferred gratification and the "paradise within"? How was it that God's Englishmen could pride themselves as defenders of "Liberty herself" while they aggressively enslaved millions? How was it that the Augustan age so concerned with decorum and taste could produce literary works so obsessed with deformity and excrement? By placing non-literary texts (travel accounts, geographies, natural histories, dictionaries, dispensatories, philosophical transactions) alongside Miltonic texts and later literary texts, we can partially account for what have been vexing interpretive problems: Raphael's astronomy, Samson's misogyny, the "coarseness" of the Restoration stage, the eighteenth-century "taste" for "monsters," Swift's scatology. We can recognize a historically specific strategy for containing the oddities and commodities issuing from the "American experience." Relying on Scripture for justification, early agents of the First Empire appropriated land and controlled bodies; relying on Science, the Second Empire sought to appropriate and control hearts and minds. This study addresses the mechanisms and literature of that shift.
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Tillson, H. "The image of the father in the novels of Claude Mauriac." Thesis, University of Exeter, 1985. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.370651.
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Tyers, Meryl Lois Sylvia. "Figures of fiction : a study of Nerval's Les Illumines." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1992. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.282008.
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Masse, Vincent. "Figures de l'Amérindien dans la littérature québécoise, 1855-1875." Thesis, McGill University, 2002. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=79792.
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This thesis observes the various representations of the Amerindian in Quebec literature between 1855 and 1875. Those twenty years are set as a sample both sufficiently rich and narrowly delimited as to permit a synchronic analysis.The analysis itself is a close inspection of a large quantity of poetry and fiction read in search of pan-textual recurrences. Constant features found as such are presented in a quasi-index of characteristics and quasi-characters-like figures, both seen as cliche, or topoi, and both linked to various imaginary constructs about cruelty, fear and security, forestry, religion, womanhood, alcoholism, etc. The poetics constraints in which those figures take place are considered: for example, what role may or may not play an Amerindian character in a narrative? Also analysed are underlying micro-narratives, particularly those linked to progress and decay.
The whole is not a unified system which would account for every possibility; it may instead be conceptualized as series of trends which may or may not combine or clash.
Those cliches are read as signs of larger and collective questionings, most notably about Quebec's self-image.
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Magnani, Roberta. "Constructing the father : fifteenth-century manuscripts of Geoffrey Chaucer's works." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2010. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/54128/.
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This is a study of the multiple constructions and appropriations of Geoffrey Chaucer’s paternitas of the English literary canon. It examines the evidence from the compilatio and ordinatio of fifteenth-century manuscript anthologies containing the poet’s works, and it interrogates the social conditions of production of these codices, as well as the ideology informing their compositional and paratextual programmes. Conceptually, my thesis is underpinned by a broad engagement with manuscript studies, as the codices to which I attend become objects of bibliographical and codicological examination, while being scrutinised through a post-structuralist framework. This theoretical approach, which comprises Michel Foucault’s revisions o f historiography and the contiguous debates on translation practices and queer theories, allows me to read critically the socio-cultural situations which inform the plural incarnations and appropriations of Chaucer's paternal authority. My study is structured in four chapters. I begin in Chapter I by engaging with Thomas Hoccleve's literary and iconographic mythopoeia o f Chaucer who is positioned as the clerical and sober fons et origo of English vemacularity. In Chapter III interrogate the appropriations of this initial paradigm of paternal authorship and I demonstrate how fifteenth-century manuscript collections fabricate Chaucer as a courtly and lyrical Father whose work is validated by his affiliations to and reproduction of dominant aristocratic literary practices. Chapter III situates these hegemonic modes of composition and mise-en-page in the context of French manuscript culture with which Chaucer's patemality of the English canon is inextricably intertwined. These associations with the ‘master’ culture, however, disperse the Father's authority in an intervemacular site of linguistic and cultural negotiations. Similarly, Chapter IV engages with the displacement of Chaucer's paternitas in the material space of the codex, as the glossarial apparatus of the manuscript copies of his works articulates voices of dissent. No longer the stable patriarch constructed by Hoccleve, Chaucer occupies a fluid and permeable space of authority that can be inhabited by a polyvocality of hermeneutic voices and is, therefore, susceptible to perpetual acts of co-option.
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Dias, Claire. "Under his roof : father-daughter relationships under renovation." Thesis, McGill University, 2005. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=82700.
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My thesis is a collection of non-fiction and fictional narratives focused on domestic space and its impact on father-daughter relationships and vice versa. In all of the narratives the notion of a house under renovation serves as a vehicle for the figurative tension between members of the family and family space. The narratives offer no internal markers to indicate whether they are fiction or non-fiction, which demonstrates my conviction that only factors external to the text---relation to fact or to imagination---can determine a narrative's status as fiction or non-fiction.The required afterword to my narratives discusses the theoretical problem of the distinction between fiction and non-fiction as well as the living nature of material culture and space as reflections and mediators of father-daughter relationships.
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Brownlee, Victoria Margaret Roberta. "Reforming figures : biblical interpretation and literature in early modern England." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.580119.
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This thesis considers how Protestants read the Bible, understood the Old and New Testaments, and how this impacted upon early modern literary production. In particular, it explores the way in which individual biblical figures and particular biblical texts became enmeshed with specific political and cultural concerns and enveloped into the period's writings. As part of this, it probes the uneasy relationship between the reformed commitment to a literalist hermeneutic and the reality of their interpretative methodologies. Considering the use of exegetical practices, including typology, the thesis contends that reformed 'literalism' is more capacious, and indeed figural, than it claims to be. Structured around individual biblical books and figures, the thesis presses these considerations across a variety of early modern writers and genres. Chapters one and two look at the biblical figures of Solomon and Job, exploring how they are read in relation to ideas of kingship and suffering and symbolically represented in image, print and on stage. The third chapter considers how the reformers' alternative 'literal' reading of the Song of Songs both shapes and destabilises the contemporary poetry that engages with this biblical text. The final two chapters shift discussion to the New Testament. The penultimate chapter explores how a typological understanding ofMary facilitates re-readings of motherhood in writing by women. Discussion concludes with a consideration of the end-point of typological history, apocalypse, tracing how the idea of revelation is contested on the early modern stage. Demonstrating how Protestant interpretative practices both contribute to, and problematise, literary constructions of a range of contemporary debates, this thesis offers a reassessment of the interaction between early modern literature and the Bible.
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Leavens, Janet Kristen. "Figures of sympathy in eighteenth-century Opéra comique." Diss., University of Iowa, 2010. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/844.
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Eighteenth-century opéras comiques often turn around moments of sympathy--moral and affective bonds through which the Enlightenment imagined a natural basis for the social order as well as the pleasures and transformative potential of art. Through musico-literary analysis informed by models of moral and aesthetic relationality that I derive from Dubos, Marivaux, Rousseau and Diderot, I argue that opéras comiques written and performed between 1835and the Revolution feature three distinct forms of sympathy: 1) a worldly-sensuous sympathy most typically found in the common subgenre of the sentimental pastorale and characterized by a happy blending of moral and sensual connections; 2) an amorous intersubjectivity found occasionally in sentimental comedies and characterized by a sometimes empowering, sometimes trying encounter with an other experienced as a site of subjective freedom; and finally 3) a sacrificial sympathy found most frequently in Michel-Jean Sedaine's sometimes pointedly anti-worldly, morally sober lyric dramas and characterized by an obstacle-triggered leap into an identificatory, affective imagination.
Although there is much that distinguishes these forms of sympathy, they are all shaped by eighteenth-century empiricist assumptions as to the existence of a basic relationality between the self and his or her social environment and thus resist a standard critical model that sees such emotional ties as merely the effect of some more fundamental separation between self and other.
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Lorenz, Johnny Anderson. "Haunted cartographies : ghostly figures and contemporary epic in the Americas /." Digital version accessible at:, 2000. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/main.
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Strauss, Werner. "The representation of male figures in the fiction of Irmtraud Morgner." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/11289.
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This study describes and analyses the treatment of male characters in the work of the East German author, Irmtraud Morgner. The main focus of the thesis is on Morgner's handling of masculinity in relation to her treatment of the fantastic. Given that the majority of scholarship on Morgner concentrates on feminist aspects of her work, the aim of this thesis is to redress this imbalance by concentrating on the importance to her fictional narratives of male figures. The ways in which Morgner portrays her male characters shed significant new light on the function of the fantastic in her work. A detailed analysis of her texts shows that Morgner excludes all but a few of her male characters from the fantastic. By investigating the reasons for this, the thesis seeks to contribute to a better understanding of Morgner's complex views on gender issues. The argument is advanced that Morgner's treatment of her male characters and their interaction, or lack of interaction with the fantastic, reveals a more nuanced disillusionment with society than emerges from examinations of her female characters alone. Such a reading therefore permits a deeper and more differentiated understanding of her work.
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Neel, Travis E. "Fortune’s Friends: Forms and Figures of Friendship in the Chaucer Tradition." The Ohio State University, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1492705588117003.
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Phipps, Gregory. "Figures in American literary pragmatism: Henry James and the metaphysical club." Thesis, McGill University, 2011. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=96930.
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This dissertation explores the literary and philosophical intersections between Henry James's works of fiction and the writings of William James, Charles Peirce, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. The latter three were primary figures in the development of Pragmatism, a philosophical movement which emphasizes that the value of a belief or idea emerges through action and tangible, social consequences. Applying a Pragmatist approach to Henry James's fiction provides a basis for clarifying new readings of his narratives, but, at the same time, applying a literary approach to Pragmatism leads to new understandings of the philosophy. The main purpose of this project, then, is to articulate and examine the workings of a literary Pragmatism by tracing interrelated uses of metaphors and figurative language in the works of Peirce, Holmes, and William and Henry James. On the one hand, these literary components establish links between the fictional and philosophical writings by functioning as key rhetorical vehicles in interrelated constructions of subjectivity. On the other hand, this figurative language also connects the works of these four writers to their shared cultural environment by incorporating references to large-scale developments and transformations in late-nineteenth-century America – specifically, the Civil War, the expansion of a corporate capitalist economy, the growth of the railroad, and the ongoing resonances of the American Revolution. In this way, the Pragmatist approach to age-old philosophical issues is inflected by literary incorporations of major dynamics and tendencies central to the workings of late-nineteenth-century American culture, providing a uniquely American perspective on the relationship between individual subjectivity and the external environment. Henry James's fiction serves as the laboratory where the ramifications of Pragmatist representations of subjectivity play out through the relationships his characters negotiate between their private beliefs and ideas and the evaluations of these beliefs and ideas in their social spheres. Among other things, James's literary works reveal that the processes through which "Truth happens to an idea" are complex, multilayered, and often unexpected.Cette thèse examine les intersections littéraires et philosophiques entre les œuvres de fiction d'Henry James et les écrits de William James, de Charles Peirce, et d'Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Ces trois derniers étaient des personnages clés dans le développement du pragmatisme, un mouvement philosophique qui met l'accent sur l'émergence de la valeur d'une croyance ou d'une idée à travers une action ou des conséquences sociales tangibles. Appliquer une approche pragmatiste à la fiction d'Henry James nous permet de clarifier de nouvelles interprétations de ses récits, tandis qu'en même temps le fait d'appliquer une approche littéraire au pragmatisme nous amène à des nouvelles compréhensions de cette philosophie. Le but principal de ce projet est donc d'articuler et d'examiner le fonctionnement d'un pragmatisme littéraire en traçant l'emploi des métaphores et du langage figuratif semblables dans les œuvres de Peirce, d'Holmes, et de William et Henry James. D'un côté, ces composants littéraires établissent des liens entre les écrits fictifs et philosophiques en faisant fonction de véhicule rhétorique important dans différentes constructions de la subjectivité qui sont étroitement liées. D'un autre côté, ce langage figuratif relie aussi les œuvres de ce quatre écrivains à un environnement culturel partagé en incluant des références à des développements et des transformations de grande échelle dans l'Amérique de la fin du dix-neuvième siècle, notamment, la guerre civile, l'expansion d'une économie capitaliste et corporative, l'expansion du chemin de fer, et les échos de la Révolution américaine. De cette façon, l'application de l'approche pragmatiste à des vieux problèmes philosophiques est infléchie par des intégrations littéraires des dynamiques et des tendances majeures qui sont primordiales au fonctionnement de la culture américaine de la fin du dix-neuvième siècle, ce qui donne une perspective exclusivement américaine sur la relation entre la subjectivité individuelle et l'environnement externe. La fiction d'Henry James sert de laboratoire où les ramifications des représentations pragmatistes de la subjectivité se jouent à travers les relations négociées par ses personnages entre leurs croyances et leurs idées privées et l'évaluation de celles-ci dans leurs domaines sociales. Entre autres, les œuvres littéraires de James démontrent que les processus à travers lesquels « la vérité arrive à une idée » sont complexes, multi-stratifiés, et souvent inattendus.
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Lowe-Dupas, Hélène Marie. "Figures de la coupure : une etude de l'oeuvre fictionnelle de Charles Nodier /." The Ohio State University, 1993. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1487843688959534.
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Franson, Craig. "Suspended pangs : figures of agony in the discourse of Romanticism /." view abstract or download file of text, 2007. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1421623051&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=11238&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2007.Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 222-230). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.
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Feltrin-Morris, Marella. "Hanging by a thread marionette figures in twentieth-century Italian literature /." Diss., Online access via UMI:, 2005.
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McNeil, Andrea F. ""Moments of being" Elizabeth Dalloway: A study of Virginia Woolf's daughter figures." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/6363.
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This thesis traces the trajectory of a number of Virginia Woolf's daughter figures in their struggle to achieve selfhood. The four chapters of this project thus examine Woolf's early daughter figures, Phyllis and Rosamond, title characters of a 1906 work of short fiction; Rachel Vinrace, the heroine of the 1915 novel The Voyage Out; Elizabeth Dalloway, the daughter of the central figure of Woolf's 1925 novel, Mrs Dalloway, and, finally, the various daughter figures of the 1937 novel, The Years: Eleanor, Delia and Rose Pargiter, Kitty Malone, and Peggy Pargiter. The thesis is structured around my close readings of these texts, and is informed by psychoanalytic and feminist theory. The central focus of this project is a study of Elizabeth Dalloway, who I read as Woolf's pre-eminent daughter figure, as this character alone transcends the fixed gender roles which limit each of the other daughter figures studied in this project. I look to Woolf's concept of "moments of being" to explain this character's vision of a future outside of the marriage plot and domestic existence in which her fictional predecessors and successors are inescapably inscribed. My examination of the motifs that recur in each of the texts, particularly images of silence and self-abnegation and of the strained mother-daughter relationship, allows me to analyse the author's revision of the developmental stories of her daughter figures over the course of her career. Moreover, Virginia Woolf's narrative strategies, most particularly the question of closure in Mrs Dalloway, as well as the representation of female characters who defy the standards of conventional femininity, provide insight into Elizabeth Dalloway's position as a figure of affirmation, emancipation and potentiality.
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Topping, Margaret Eileen. "Christian and mythological figures of speech in the works of Marcel Proust." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.244230.
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Emmett, Christine. "Devouring the father: family and recuperation in Triomf and the Native Commissioner." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/14142.
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This thesis seeks to account for the largely unprecedented vigour of white writing in post- apartheid South Africa. Though there are a number of contributing socio-economic factors, it argues that there is an inherent ambivalence in many texts written by white South African authors. Texts that are generally designated as 'reconciliatory' or 'reconstitutive' have a latent imperative. The ambivalence of these texts is exposed by my analysis of two prominent South African novels, Marlene Van Niekerk's Triomf and Shaun Johnson's The Native Commissioner. Alongside this concern, is the fact that the white South African family, regulated and constructed by apartheid legislation, provides one means through which post-apartheid white identity can be anatomized. Therefore, the methodology of this thesis is acritical application of Freud's Oedipal family structure and its attendant primal scene. Through this application we find that Van Niekerk's novel is preoccupied with subverting patriarchal Oedipal structures. This is expressed by the dysfunction of the Benade family. One aspect of this subversion is the dissipating and illegitimate patriarch, and his unremarkable death Mol, the mother, is analysed in terms of her disruptive and chaotic power, as well as her dispensation of narrative. The problem with Van Niekerk's text is that itis incapable of suggesting a post-apartheid Afrikaner (white) identity. This is indicated both by slippages in her portrayal of Mol, and by her attempt to counter-position lesbianism as a viable post-apartheid identity. Therefore, the text exposes an anxiety about paternal authority, suggested by the patriarch's death on voting day. Ten years later, I argue, Shaun Johnson attempts to recuperate this paternal white power in his text, The Native Commissioner. In Johnson's novel, George Jameson is represented as a benevolent bureaucrat and a loving father. I argue that though Johnson attempts to represent George's profession as encroaching upon the benign space of family. This is a false opposition in that colonial paternalism is implicit in George's identity as a father. By focussing on the recurrent image of the garden, I proceed to indicate that this novel is primarily about negotiating the Oedipus complex. By reliving the conflict through narration, the narrator identifies with the dead father. In the Oedipus complex, identification results in remorse and guilt, enacting a transmission of power from father to sons. I argue that this text is latently invested in this transmission of power. This indicates that at the heart of the text is an imperative to recuperate the lost paternalistic white power which the narrator's father represents. Therefore, through these analyses I show that the ten year trajectory represented by Triomf and The Native Commissioner latently enacts a process of loss and recuperation which concerns itself with white illegitimated power. This positions mothers in the novels as representing the illegitimacy of this power, and has the capacity to reflect on the ambivalence inherent in post-apartheid white narratives.
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Baderoon, Gabeba. "Oblique figures : representations of Islam in South African media and culture." Doctoral thesis, University of Cape Town, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/7965.
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Includes bibliographical references.In 1996 stories in South African newspapers about the group Pagad articulated a new vision of Islam. In this thesis I conduct a long reading of the ways in which Islam has been represented in South Africa to provide a context for analysing the Pagad stories. Drawing on Edward Said's Orientalism and later elaborations that emphasise gender, the thesis is attentive to the latent weight of fantasies of 'race' on non-fictional representations. In the introduction I look at the use of the offensive word 'kaffir' in colonial South Africa and contend that, in the context of slavery and the displacement of indigenous people, the proliferating use of the term functioned to recast indigeneity as misplaced and unfit, facilitating settler claims to the land. Through the example of this deformation of a word originally drawn from Islam, I show how the meanings and experiences of Islam are transformed by specific circumstances and histories. Islam arrived in South Africa when Dutch colonists brought slaves and servants to the Cape from 1658. The context of slavery and colonial settlement is crucial to the way Islam has been represented in South Africa. Muslim slaves were characterized as industrious, placid and picturesque. I contend in analyses of nineteenth century landscape paintings that the figure of the 'Malay' played a role in discursively securing a settler identity in the Cape Colony. This occurred through their 'oblique' positioning near the edge of the frame, where they appear to certify the boundaries of the settled space of the colony. I follow these readings of the picturesque vision of Islam by exploring instances of its underside - the discourse of oriental fanaticism.
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Baginski, Nathalie. "Figures de Dionysos dans l'oeuvre de L.-F. Céline." Villeneuve d'Ascq : Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2000. http://books.google.com/books?id=N3FcAAAAMAAJ.
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Williams-Duplantier, Rebecca. "Amazon figures in German literature : the theme and its variations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries /." The Ohio State University, 1992. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1487775034179755.
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Shiga, Esther Melo 1985. "Reflexões sobre o desamparo : a questão do pai na religião e na psicanálise." [s.n.], 2015. http://repositorio.unicamp.br/jspui/handle/REPOSIP/269512.
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Orientador: Maria Rita Salzano MoraesDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem
Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-27T16:55:23Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Shiga_EstherMelo_M.pdf: 946434 bytes, checksum: ea7932872cfb4ff5abe947a158f0774e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015
Resumo: A partir de algumas questões trazidas pela clínica, este trabalho traz uma reflexão teórica sobre o que se passa com a "fé religiosa" no processo de análise. Como nos aponta Lacan ([1960] 2005), a psicanálise não apenas surge no meio judaico-cristão, mas toda sua referência ética gira em torno dessa tradição, assim como todas as questões a respeito da função pai. A morte de pai primordial anunciada pelo mito criado por Freud nos aponta o mito do nosso tempo: Deus está morto. No entanto após o assassinato do pai, os filhos, com saudades, criam um substituto ¿ o totem ¿ a primeira religião. Todavia a psicanálise nós aponta um outro caminho diante a falta do pai: realizar seu luto. Realizar o luto desse pai Onipotente é algo que se pode esperar de uma análise, e que pode colocar em jogo a relação do sujeito com a religião. O mito de Freud permite a Lacan afirmar, não apenas que Deus está morto desde sempre, mas que Deus é inconsciente, o que aponta a irrepresentabilidade de Deus ¿ muito diferente da figura do Pai zeloso que olha por nós - e supõe encarar a falta do pai como um fato de estrutura. A psicanálise dá assim um outro valor ao pai, ele ganha uma dimensão espiritual. No livro do Êxodo, Deus se apresenta como "ehyeh asher ehyeh", e duas traduções são feitas, cada uma trazendo um discurso diferente; a primeira nos apresenta um Deus, cujo nome é impronunciável, um Deus feito de nada; a segunda, Deus é apontado como um ente suficientemente superior e onipotente, a ponto de preencher o homem em sua falta. Essa diferença se articula na separação entre o Gozo de Deus e o Desejo de Deus, algo fundamental para pensar as mudanças do lugar do pai em análise
Abstract: This research draws a reflection upon what happens with "religious faith" inside the analysis process, having as a starting point issues brought by the clinic. As pointed out by Lacan (2005, 1960), psychoanalysis not only comes up in the judeo-christian community, but all its ethical reference revolves around this tradition, as well as all the questions about the function of the father. The death of the primordial father announced by the myth created by Freud presents the myth of our time: God is dead. However, after the father¿s murder, the sons, missing him, create a substitute ¿ the totem ¿ the first religion. Nonetheless, psychoanalysis shows us another way to face the lack of the father: mourning for him. Mourning for this Omnipotent father is something that one can expect from an analysis, and that the relation of the subject with religion can be put at stake. Freudian myth enables Lacan to say not only that God is dead forever, but that God is unconscious, which means that God is not representable ¿ differently from the zealous father figure who watches over us ¿ and assumes facing the lack of the father as a fact of structure. Psychoanalysis, therefore, gives a different value to the father, who is raised to a spiritual dimension. In the book of Exodus, God introduces himself as "ehyeh asher ehyeh", and two translations are made, each bringing a different speech; the first presents us with a God, whose name is unpronounceable, a God made of nothing; the second, God is designated as an omnipotent and sufficiently superior entity, ready to fill the man in his lack. This difference is articulated in the division between the Jouissance of God and the Will of God, something fundamental to think the changes of the father¿s place in analysis
Mestrado
Linguagem e Sociedade
Mestra em Linguística Aplicada
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Imran, Mamdouh Yousef. "A study of the plays of Howard Barker, with special reference to the artist figures." Thesis, University of Kent, 1989. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.328722.
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Reck, Casey M. "Laying Bare the Sins of the Father: Exploring White Fathers in Post-Apartheid Literature." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2010. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/63.
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This Thesis is an exploration of white fathers in three post-apartheid novels: Mark Behr's The Smell of Apples, Nadine Gordimer's The House Gun, and J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace. By examining the link between private white hegemonic masculinity and the apartheid government, the Thesis analyzes the transitional process as these men try to adopt less authoritative identities.
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Zamostny, Jeffrey. "FAUSTIAN FIGURES: MODERNITY AND MALE (HOMO)SEXUALITIES IN SPANISH COMMERCIAL LITERATURE, 1900-1936." UKnowledge, 2012. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/hisp_etds/4.
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I contend in this study that commercial novels and theater from early twentiethcentury Spain often present male (homo)sexual characters as a point of constellation for anxieties regarding modernization in Madrid and Barcelona. In works by Jacinto Benavente, Josep Maria de Sagarra, El Caballero Audaz (José María Carretero), Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent, Carmen de Burgos, Álvaro Retana, Eduardo Zamacois, and Alfonso Hernández-Catá, concerns about technological and socioeconomic change converge upon hustlers and blackmailers, queer seducers, and chaste inverts. I examine these figures alongside an allegorical interpretation of Goethe’s Faust in Marshall Berman’s book All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982) in order to foreground their varying responses to modern innovation. They alternately sell themselves to prosper under consumer capitalism, seduce others into savoring the pleasures of city life, or fall tragically to the conflicting pressures of tradition and change. In the process, they reveal the fear and enthusiasm of their creators vis-à-vis rapid urbanization, fluctuating class hierarchies, the commercialization of art, and the medicalization of sex from the turn of the nineteenth century to the Spanish Civil War.
From a methodological standpoint, I argue that close readings of commercial works are worthwhile for what they reveal about the discursive framing of modernity and male (homo)sexualities in Spain in the early 1900s. Hence, I use techniques of literary analysis previously reserved for canonical writers such as Federico García Lorca and Luis Cernuda to discuss texts produced by their bestselling contemporaries, none of whom has been equally scrutinized by subsequent criticism. Existing scholarship on modernity and sexuality in Spain and abroad helps contextualize my detailed interpretations. Although my project is not a sustained exercise in comparative literature, I do situate Spanish works within historical and literary trends beyond Spain so as to acknowledge the interplay of transnational and local concerns surrounding modern change and sexual customs. By considering the primary texts in relation to varying temporal and geographic contexts, the dissertation aims to be of interest to a readership in and outside Hispanism, and to supplement important studies of modernity, (homo)sexualities, and literature that overlook Spain.
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Rapoo, Connie. "Figures of sacrifice Africa in the transnational imaginary /." Diss., Restricted to subscribing institutions, 2008. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1610482411&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=1564&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Nakajima, Taro. "Les figures religieuses dans l'oeuvre de Gustave Flaubert." Thesis, Paris Est, 2009. http://www.theses.fr/2009PEST1021.
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Nous traitons des figures religieuses dans l’œuvre de Gustave Flaubert et des questions qu’elles posent, en particulier celles associant La Tentation de Saint Antoine à Bouvard et Pécuchet. Ce qui nous a conduit à traiter du dialogue entre la religion et la science à travers des personnages démoniaques et des figures de sages. Le drame de la croyance et la pensée anti-religieuse qu’ils incarnent, chacun à sa manière, seront repris dans les débats théologiques du roman encyclopédique. La science du Diable, en remontant aux origines du christianisme, dévoile à l’ermite la variété des formes religieuses et ébranle sa foi. De même, les deux héros du dernier roman mettront en doute le dogme chrétien et l’autorité cléricale par la lecture d’un manuel d’exégèse moderne, composé de savoirs ayant servi à la critique du Diable. La figure du prêtre, quant à elle, constitue une mosaïque d’idées reçues religieuses que Flaubert a glanées dans les ouvrages d’apologistes modernes. L’ambiguïté de la sainteté caractérise les figures religieuses partagées entre le besoin de croire et le désir de savoir, l’aspiration mystique et l’amour sensuel. Le thème du désir et de la sainteté rapproche La Tentation, Salammbô et les Trois contes. Nous y examinons la manière dont les savoirs du XIXe siècle, religieux et scientifiques entre autres, ont alimenté les figures religieuses dont les attitudes à l’égard des symboles tendent à en évacuer le contenu dogmatique. La critique du dogme n’est pas une négation des enthousiasmes religieux, mais un moyen d’inventer une poétique de la pluralité et de retrouver le sentiment religieux qui est à l’origine de toutes les croyancesPas de résumé en anglais
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Holder, Laura L. "Common Christs| Christ Figures, American Christianity, and Sacrifice on Cult Television." Thesis, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2015. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3687688.
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Shifts in social attitudes towards American Christianity have resulted in a changed representation of Christ figures, specifically in their representation on television. Traditional Christ figures, those who believed in unconditional love and self-sacrifice for the greater good, clung to the church view and were figures of virtue and innocence. Modern Christ figures have become what I call "Common Christs"—people who are less likely to be the image of sinless perfection and more often violent and profane saviors. These modern stand-ins are usually from blue-collar or lower class backgrounds; they are the Christs of the common man. Generally, these Common Christs are in opposition with the dogmatic authority of the Christian church. The storylines that have Common Christs as their heroes often depict the organized religion of the church as an enemy, a negative institution trying to prevent the salvation of the common man by the common man. The purpose of my dissertation is to examine Common Christs as they appear in cult television shows that embrace and make strong use of Christian mythology without being considered Christian television, specifically The X-Files, Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, and Supernatural, to show how this changed image works as evidence of what I call the development of a textual religion. Ultimately, I hope that my discussion of Common Christs and textual religion will lead into a larger discussion between the academic camps of religious studies, pop culture studies and literary criticism about the importance of cross-disciplinary focus.
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Hodge, Anita Obermeier. "Handmaidens of God : the female figures Judith, Juliana, and Elene in Old English heroic poetry /." View online, 1985. http://repository.eiu.edu/theses/docs/32211130497875.pdf.
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Schnippering, Claudia. "Literature of the Holocaust perpetrator. A comparative literary analysis of Jonathan Littell's "The Kindly Ones" with German Väterliteratur (Father literature)." Thesis, University of Canterbury. School of Language, Social and Political Sciences, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10092/10338.
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Undoubtedly the historical settings and aspects of the Nazi Holocaust have been examined for many decades. Research has focused much on the victims of the Holocaust. However, the examination of the perpetrators of the Nazi Holocaust continues to cause anxiety and controversy.
In my thesis I examine what possible constraints are imposed on authors/narrators and also readers by the sensitive and explosive subject of the representation of Holocaust perpetrators. I compare four texts of German Väterliteratur with Jonathan Littell’s “The Kindly Ones” to examine the questions of aesthetics and ethics in the literary representation of Holocaust perpetrators, and if we can deduce their motives and motivations from these representations. The examination of these Holocaust perpetrator representations is an important contribution to our understanding of the past as well as a contribution to the formation of public cultural memory and identity.
All of the examined narratives form part of a continuously growing body of literary expressions of the Holocaust perpetrator and highlight a distinct obligation to the history they narrate – be it fictional or real.
My research includes a comparative literary analysis of authentic narratives featuring fictional perpetrators in order to find meaning in these representations that enable the reader to form not only a connection with a dark part of the German past but also with post-war and post-unification debates on the representation of the Holocaust. It also demonstrates a recognition that Holocaust perpetrators are as multifaceted and multidimensional as the narratives they occupy.
My thesis is not an exhaustive compilation but rather forms a small sample discussion that enables the reader to emphasise the Holocaust perpetrator. The narratives representing Holocaust perpetrators in contemporary literature serve to transmit history into the future as part of public and personal memory discourse, and the remembrance of history.