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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Hysteria in literature'
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Brennan, Karen Morley. "Hysteria and the scene of feminine representation." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1990. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/185047.
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In the sense that women have been hystericized by male theories about femininity, Freudian psychoanalysis has functioned as an institution which seeks women's silence. Hysteria is the dis-ease of this silence; that is to say, it is a set of eloquent symptoms--a "writing" on the body--which signify women's oppression/repression. It is within this apparent contradiction that feminine representation takes place. The figure for such representation is, therefore, hysteria: working "in the gaps," "between the lines," telling the story of patriarchy only to disrupt this story, Frida Kahlo, Anais Nin, and Kathy Acker create feminine fictions. Kahlo's autobiographical painting is inextricable from her obsession with husband Diego Rivera, just as Nin's erotica is inextricable from her relationship with Henry Miller. Likewise, Acker's postmodern production is entangled in the androcentric agenda which attempts to recuperate patriarchy by appropriating the figure of Woman. The "engine" of transference/counter-transference becomes the most viable description of the hysterical process these women employ to represent themselves. The epilogue contains original fictions which extend comment on both hysteria and feminine representation.
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Stoddart, Helen. "Constructions of gender and hysteria in the modern Gothic." Thesis, University of Reading, 1991. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.306859.
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Wooler, Stephanie. "Performance Anxiety: Hysteria and the Actress in French Literature 1880-1910." Thesis, Harvard University, 2012. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:10246.
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My dissertation uses close readings of four texts dealing with the actress, spanning the naturalist novel (Zola’s Nana, 1880, and Edmond de Goncourt’s La Faustin, 1882), autobiography (Sarah Bernhardt’s Ma double vie, 1907) and autobiographical fiction (Colette’s La Vagabonde, 1910), in order to examine late nineteenth-century representations (and self-representations) of the actress in relation to the discourse of hysteria. I argue that in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century France, pathology and performance came together in the stereotype of the hysterical actress. In the wake of the French Revolution, and the subsequent political upheavals of the nineteenth century along with the emergence of a consumer capitalist society, \(fin-de-si\grave{e}cle\) society was living a moment of particular anxiety. This anxiety found a focal point in the hystericised figure of \(la com\acute{e}dienne\), who came to embody a threatening blurring of gender and class distinctions. Actresses were pathologised in a discursive gesture which sought to identify and contain the threat which they were seen to pose, and which seemed to offer an objective narrative which re-established boundaries and identities. The discourse of hysteria, however, was by no means as secure or monolithic as it might seem. I argue that the discourse of hysteria is underpinned by a fundamental performativity which has the potential to be profoundly subversive. By examining different modalities of response to the phenomenon of the hystericisation of the actress, I show how in both male and female-authored texts the discourse of pathology is undermined and reappropriated in a way which foreshadows twentieth-century feminist theories.Romance Languages and Literatures
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Fordham, Finn William Montague. "'Languishing hysteria The clou historique?' : Lucia Joyce in 'Finnegans Wake'." Thesis, Birkbeck (University of London), 1997. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.263602.
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Mahbobah, Albaraq Abdul. "Discourse of resistance: Reading hysteria in Hardy, James, Dickens, and modern anorexia." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1994. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/186672.
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Discourse of Resistance explores the representation of the mad woman in Nineteenth Century literary texts by such authors as Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and in modern Freudian psychoanalysis. Generally, in those representations, the figure of the mad woman appears as the outsider to a representational system which fails in representing her: her madness reveals the limits of the logical systems that govern representation; her language shows the failure of the censor; and her body mocks the codes of medicine and hygiene. In Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, Charles Dickens' Little Dorrit, and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Hysteria appears as a textual space which marks both the representational system's attempt at containing the female subject and her resistance to it. The Anorexia essay extends the scope of the study by analyzing the limits of the psychoanalytic representation of the women who suffer from this disease. In effect, each specific case studied reveals the representational systems' attempt to repression and containment, an attempt which only succeeds to a certain extent.
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Daly, Claire. "Constructing Difference: An Examination of Madness and Hysteria as Tools to Subjugate Women in Literature." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2017. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/923.
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This thesis examines the constructions of madness and hysteria as diagnoses used to subjugate the protagonists in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. In juxtaposing these texts, themes including “lone womanhood” surface to identify both protagonists’ means for liberation from patriarchal and colonialist oppression. While for Edna of The Awakening, liberation from the hysteria diagnosis comes through bodily sovereignty, A Question of Power’s Elizabeth is freed from the madness rendering by reclaiming her mental interiority.
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Jackson, Laura Ann. "Representations of the hysteric in contemporary women's writing in French." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2014. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/8944.
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This thesis explores how the celebratory figure of the hysteric as imagined by proponents of écriture féminine is developed and complicated in more recent representations of hysterical female bodies in contemporary women’s writing in French. With the aim of understanding the evolution of the hysteric from a traditionally negative embodiment of patriarchal parameters of femininity to a potentially revolutionary female figure, this thesis undertakes single-chapter studies of the most telling contemporary representations of hysterical bodies. The first chapter focuses on the physicality of Lorette Nobécourt’s writing in La Démangeaison (1994) and La Conversation (1998), and argues that the abject subject matter of the former coupled with the innovative and experimental form and style of the latter constitutes an almost physical performance of ‘madness’. The second chapter focuses on Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996) and argues that Darrieussecq’s hybrid narrator harnesses the anti-establishment carnival force of the hysteric in a shifting and grotesque body which forms the epitome of all that threatens order. The final two chapters focus on anorexia as a contemporary equivalence of Victorian hysteria. The first of these deals with Petite (1994) by Geneviève Brisac and Thornytorinx (2005) by Camille de Peretti and examines how these writers recreate the fragmentation of the anorexic self through a realist, performative ‘rhetoric of anorexia’. The second deals with Amélie Nothomb’s Robert des noms propres (2002), Biographie de la faim (2004) and Métaphysique des tubes (2000), and argues that Nothomb privileges a disembodied aesthetic that presents a masculine fantasy of the female body which all but erases the feminine. Ultimately, this thesis seeks to discover how and why selected contemporary female authors choose to engage with – and reject – 1970s models in which writing by women was presented as a means of finding one’s own voice, as well as a platform for politically significant action. It argues that new configurations of the hysteric nevertheless achieve a certain social and political impact.
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Borossa, Julia. "Hysteria, discourse and narrative : Freud's early case histories of women in context." Thesis, McGill University, 1988. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=61919.
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DuCharme, Rose. "Mad Love and Narrative Uncertainty in the Twentieth Century: A Study of the Good Soldier and Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2014. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/415.
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This thesis examines narrative uncertainty in the twentieth century novel as it relates to madness, adultery, and the convention of the unreliable narrator. The unreliable narratives of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier and Marguerite Duras’ Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein expose their characters’ investment in illusions, the doubling of the narrators’ and readers’ desires to interpret, the transfer of madness through narrative, and the possibility that a void of meaning underlies the text.
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Brundan, Katherine. "Mysterious women : memory, madness, and trauma in the nineteenth-century sensation narrative /." view abstract or download file of text, 2006. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1192179961&sid=4&Fmt=2&clientId=11238&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2006.Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 204-216). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.
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Rheeder, Elle-Sandrah. "Pathologies of vision : representations of deviant women and the cyborg body." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1020319.
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This thesis investigates the figure of the cyborg as conceptualised by Donna Haraway in The Cyborg Manifesto (1991). The figure of the cyborg, as a transgressive figure in the late twentieth century within socialist feminist discourse, is problematized with regard to its efficacy as a creature that challenges the constructed nature of gender and contests the boundary between human and machine through its ambiguous nature. Haraway’s notions of the cyborg, which she bases partly on cyborg characters from Science Fiction literature, deny the ocularcentric traditions that have structured gender and the body. Similarly, Haraway does not engage adequately with the figure of the cyborg with regard to situating it historically. This thesis unpacks both the visual and the historical aspects that have structured the cyborg body. By engaging with these concepts, the cyborg emerges as a figure that is identified through visual signifiers of female deviance and pathology. By reading female deviance and pathology on the body of the nineteenth-century hysteric, similarities can be drawn between the hysteric and the cyborg. Through a reading of Alien (1979); Blade Runner (1982); and Star Trek: First Contact (1996) key cyborg texts of the late twentieth century, the figure of the cyborg, and its relation to the deviant pathologised female can be understood when read against the body of the hysteric and how it was visually coded and communicated
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Schäfer, Iris [Verfasser]. "Von der Hysterie zur Magersucht / Iris Schäfer." Frankfurt : Peter Lang GmbH, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2015. http://d-nb.info/1080461353/34.
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Jacobson, Karin Kay. "Unsettling Questions, Hysterical Answers: The Woman Detective in Victorian Fiction." The Ohio State University, 1997. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1392764399.
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Puoskari, P. L. (Pirkko-Liisa). "”Me olemme maan sontaa ja siksi vapaita”:arktisen hysterian ja korpelalaisuuden representaatioista Bengt Pohjasen Korpela-trilogiassa." Master's thesis, University of Oulu, 2016. http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:oulu-201609292852.
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Tarkastelen korpelalaisuuden ja arktisen hysterian representaatioita Bengt Pohjasen Korpela-trilogiassa. Trilogia kertoo lestadiolaisuudesta irtautuneesta hurmosliikkeestä ja sen aiheuttamasta häpeästä Ruotsin Tornionlaaksossa. Kuvaa 1930-luvun tapahtumista hahmotetaan 1980-luvulla monien kertojien kautta. Kristalliarkki (1987) edustaa realismia, Kolmen kyynärän jumalissa (1988) kerronta muuttuu postmoderniksi, Korpelan enkeleissä (1989) postmoderni kerronta virittyy äärimmilleen. Nimitän uniikkia muotoa portaikkotrilogiaksi. Selvitän, millaisia representaatiota arktiseen hysteriaan ja korpelalaisuuteen liitetään ja millaisin kerronnallisin keinoin niitä representoidaan. Arktinen hysteria on koettu kiusalliseksi pohjoisen kirjallisuuden ilmiöksi, ja etsin siihen myös uudenlaista lähestymistapaa. Subjektin problematisoituminen on ominaista postmodernille romaanille, samoin kerronnan hajoaminen ja metafiktiivisyys. Selvitän, miten metafiktiivisyys trilogiassa ilmenee ja mihin se liittyy. Pohdin myös, miten teosten rakenne ja kerrontakeinot kytkeytyvät temaattiseen sisältöön ja miksi romaanisarja on rakennettu portaikkotrilogiaksi. Teoreettista taustaa tarjoavat Bahtinin romaaniteoriat, etenkin hänen ajatuksensa polyfoniasta ja karnevalismista. Hyödynnän Bahtinin ajatuksia myös Kristevan suodattamana. Metafiktion kohdalla tukeudun Hutcheonin ja Waughin teorioihin Hallilan näkemyksillä täydennettynä. Trilogian kontekstualisoinnissa hyödynnän postkolonialismin ja kulttuurintutkimuksen ideoita. Pohjasen trilogia tarjoaa radikaalisti uudistavia representaatioita korpelalaisuudesta. Representaatioiden polyfonisuus suhteellistaa tulkinnat, ja korpelalaiset saavat takaisin heiltä riistetyn ihmisarvon. Korpelalaisuus ja arktinen hysteria näyttäytyvät trilogiassa yleisinhimillisinä ilmiönä. Totutut luonnehdinnat arktisen hysterian ilmenemismuodoista toteutuvat Korpela-romaaneissa, ja niitä myös parodioidaan ja ironisoidaan. Ilmiön aiheuttama kiusaantuneisuus voi osaksi johtua etelän pidättyvän tunneilmaisun ja lestadiolaisuuden vaikutuspiirissä sitä sallivammaksi kehittyneen pohjoisen tunneilmaisun törmäyksestä. Torjunnalle löytyy myös sisällöllisiä syitä: kapinallisena ja provokatiivisena arktinen hysteria heittää koko elämän absurdin kauhun lukijan silmille pehmentämättä sitä lainkaan. Esitän, että arktinen hysteria tulee nähdä karnevalismin introverttina vastinparina; se haastaa vallitsevan järjestyksen synkkyydellään ja hillittömyydellään. Ironia, parodia ja karnevalismin groteski ovat koko trilogian keskeisiä tyylikeinoja. Totuuden illuusioluonne ja faktan ja fiktion rajojen hämärtyminen tematisoituvat muun muassa postmodernin leikittelyn kautta. Subjektin problematisoiminen ja kerronnan hajoaminen kuvastavat yksilön voimattomuutta hahmottaa ympäröivää todellisuutta. Metafiktiivisyys ilmenee teoksissa kerronnan polyfonisuutena, itserefleksiivisyytenä, hierarkiasuhteiden rikkomisena sekä parodian ja ironian kautta, ja se paljastaa niin fiktion, tutkimusten, maallikkojen historiallisten esitysten kuin korpelalaisjuttujenkin sepitteellisyyden ja konstruktioluonteen. Kerronnalliset, rakenteelliset ja sisällölliset ratkaisut tuottavat yhdessä teosten merkityksen: portaikkomuotoa käytetään siis Pohjasen trilogiassa merkityksen muodostamiseen.
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Hayward, Helen. "Hysterical relations : a comparative study in selected nineteenth-century European narratives." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 1995. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/1465.
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This study of hysteria is indebted to Freud, and it is equally indebted to certain authors who came before him: Balzac, Charlotte Brontë, Tolstoy, George Eliot, and Florence Nightingale. As particular works of these authors show, the hysteric was a touchstone in cultural and scientific research due to her exemplification, in striking ways, of unconscious internal forces. The interconnectedness of social and psychological issues in the work of Balzac in the 1830s and George Eliot in the 1870s is highlighted, with attention to the degree that all the authors treated inflect Freud's exploration of hysteria in the century's final decades. By moving between European cultural traditions and languages, both in French and in translation, I focus on the overlap between literature and psychology whenever the representation of interpersonal and sexual matters is foregrounded. I intend my use of psychoanalysis to complement a textual analysis in order to emphasize notions like character, choice, fate, and destiny. Within the textual analysis I make conceptual, social, and psychological links to animate that most topical and implicitly hysterical nineteenth-century question: the Woman Question. I assume that the extent to which hysteria can be understood is the extent to which it can be communicated and read, transcribed from without, in the narrative form which is its bent. Further that the hysteric cannot give expression to desires without the involvement of an intermediary and the provocations of plot. The hysterical question 'Who am I to become? ' (man or woman, father or mother, lover or sister) is formulated differently by each of the authors on whose works I draw, being modulated by aesthetic as well as intellectual shifts within the nineteenth century. In the earliest novel I treat, Balzac's Eugénie Grandet (1833), a brief blossoming and slow withering of Eugénie's desire for Charles indicates what happens when an implicitly forbidden relation, in this case fraternal love, suffers the blight of its betrayal. Once Charles, initiator and guide of Eugénie's desires, absents himself, Eugénie's love is transformed into a defence against erotic incursions such that youthful love results in resigned melancholy. Charlotte Brontë's protagonist and hysterically unreliable narrator in Villette (1853) complains of that curse, an over-heated imagination'; a creative malady which results in hallucination, resistance, denial, and evasion, all features of a scenario where accession to desire prompts an elaborate narrative that finally quells the desire which began it. Tolstoy's early pastoral works attest to the way hysteria, index to a suppressed relation to a primordial loved one, can spill over into consciousness and thence into literature. In his wily Childhood, Boyhood, Youth (1852-55) and nostalgic Family Happiness (1859) Tolstoy shows how deceptive imaginative powers can be when in thrall to hysterical impulses that fuel it, such that a promising image in fantasy is rendered not just fleeting but illusory. Gwendolen Harleth, a perpetual object of interpretation to Deronda, narrator, and subsequent critics alike, figures the still centre of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876). The dynamic lure of Eliot's heroine soon dissipates alongside characters who bind themselves to symbolic values - to music, charity, and Judaism, and who thereby avoid the pull of hysterical attachments. Florence Nightingale's Cassandra (1860) prompts many more questions than it resolves, yet its significance is multiple, written by a woman who became a nineteenth-century hysteric par excellence her impassioned cry against those conditions - psychic, physiological, moral, and social - which circumscribed feminine potential remains a powerful testament to the possibilities and limits of literary discourse. For all these authors, and for Freud after them, the hysteric was together muse and sacrifice, unsung heroine and dejected sufferer, whose plaint, however encoded, was also a sign of deliverance. 'Words are the most important media by which one man seeks to bring his influence to bear on another; words are a good method of producing mental changes in the person to whom they are addressed' (SE 7, p. 292). Although these remarks by Freud date from 1890, its premise is shared by each author I evoke, bearing on a dynamism at the core of human relations. To empathize with the hysterical dilemma was not however to identify with it. rather it was to articulate it as a scenario in order to posit one's distance from it. It was this psychological feat, of identifying in order not to identify with the hysteric, which authors and scientists of the nineteenth century collaboratively brought off, thus cutting across divisions of culture and discipline. Above all, it was the ephemeral and fluid aspects of hysteria which provided ongoing stimulus to its representation, a stimulus which, in revised form, continues its pressure up to the present day.
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Crider, Ryan. "The Believing Game, a Novella with Critical Introduction| "Character"-izing Hysterical Realism." Thesis, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2016. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10163261.
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The dissertation consists of an extended critical essay entitled “‘Character’-izing Hysterical Realism: Postmodernism, 9/11, and the Realistic Aesthetic” and original fiction in the form of a novella, The Believing Game. The critical essay contextualizes the development of the subgenre of hysterical realism in the literary fiction of the 1990s and examines its regression in the years following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. I suggest that hysterical realism can be partly understood as a hybrid of realism and postmodernism and a “bridge” from postmodernism to a new, still-emerging post-postmodern fiction. The Believing Game, set in a Midwestern college town, examines the challenges, fears, and desires of a young woman on the verge of falling into disillusionment. In her struggle to maintain self-confidence in the face of various personal crises, the main character may represent the general plight of twenty-something millennials. The novella deals prominently with themes such as faith, desire, love, and the tension between personal independence and social expectation.
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Vestin, Sofia. "Att vara kvinna är att vara galen : Galenskap och hysteri i Woman on the Edge of Time ur ett feministiskt perspektiv." Thesis, Umeå universitet, Institutionen för kultur- och medievetenskaper, 2021. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-179470.
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This essay has a feminist focus on the formation of "mad women" in Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy. Through the lense of time it tries to gain an understanding into how womens mental health issues have been treated by the medical community and how this can be applied to the reading of the book. It also discusses the medical use of the term hysteria and how it has affected the way womens mental health is percieved. The essay have a theoretical foundation in Michel Foucault as well as Simone de Beauvoir and an disertation in psychology.
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Reeher, Jennifer M. "“The Despair of the Physician”: Centering Patient Narrative through the Writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman." Ohio University / OhioLINK, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1523435451243392.
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Herzog, Stefanie [Verfasser], Claudia Akademischer Betreuer] Hammerschmidt, and Edoardo [Akademischer Betreuer] [Costadura. "George Sand oder der Traum vom Glück. : Idealisierung, Begehren und Hysterie in Indiana, Lélia und Jacques / Stefanie Herzog. Gutachter: Claudia Hammerschmidt ; Edoardo Costadura." Jena : Thüringer Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Jena, 2015. http://d-nb.info/107207267X/34.
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Samé, Emmanuel. "La question du père et du fils dans l'autofiction (S. Doubrosky, A. Robbe-Grillet, H. Guibert)." Phd thesis, Université de Bourgogne, 2012. http://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00687656.
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A travers Fils de S. Doubrovsky, Le Miroir qui revient d'A. Robbe-Grillet et A l'ami qui ne m'a pas sauvé la vie d'H. Guibert, notre étude abordera par une approche psychanalytique le fantasme à l'oeuvre dans l'autofiction. Reprenant la formule d'A. Robbe-Grillet sans toutefois nous imputer le propos, notre réflexion s'articulera autour de deux axes rendant compte du discours autofictionnel. Dans un premier temps, l'autobiographe est appréhendé dans cette pente à " faire sa propre statue ". Dans un second temps, l'autofictionnaliste y oppose cette volonté à " se projeter hors de soi ". Peu à peu se construit face au père-analyste ou au père-médecin l'imaginaire adolescent d'un fils en proie à ses apories : l'un devient une figure rivale et gémellaire de l'autre autour de cette parole-pulsion et de son économie. Dans ce rapport d'addiction à la Loi qui est autant de désintrication et d'ironie que de nostalgie et d'adhésion, le gynogenre autofictionnel ne semble exister qu'en miroir du phallogenre autobiographique. L'autofictionnaliste ne cesse d'évoquer par une ironie tenant lieu d'exorcisme cet autobiographe qui sommeille en lui. Par une rhétorique psychanalytique volontairement simple, il se présente sous l'image d'un fils soumis à une structure hystérique face à un père dont il déjoue la censure et les pudeurs. Cette figure d'ultra-autobiographe, plus intègre que le père lui-même, ferait de ses voeux autobiographiques une promesse donjuanesque à seule fin de susciter le désir de l'auteur. L'autofictionnaliste jouant à être cet autobiographe plus " ultra " que le père essaimerait quelques leurres se révélant être des figures gratuites, abandonnerait çà et là quelques aveux véridiques mais insignifiants, tendrait à séduire le lecteur et à le faire entrer dans une mécanique du désir dont la fin serait de dominer sa victime par l'indécidable. Il tiendrait le jeu de l'énigme autant qu'il écrirait. Il soutiendrait le désir du lecteur plus qu'il ne dévoilerait. Ainsi, se construirait un texte blanc qui serait ce secret d'un texte à venir sans cesse promis mais qui neviendrait pas, tout le jeu consistant à le faire oublier.
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James, Lisa. "“To shape God, Shape Self”: The Political Manipulation of the Human Body and Reclamation of Space in Octavia E. Butler’s The Parable of the Sower." Thesis, Malmö universitet, Fakulteten för kultur och samhälle (KS), 2018. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-23673.
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This paper considers the role of the human body in Octavia E. Butler’s The Parable of theSower and the way it interacts with defined space to stage expressive forms of politicalopposition. Understanding the relationship between physical or metaphorical space and thecontradictions of the societies they encompass is crucial to deciphering Butler’s near-futuredystopia; a world where the problems of real-life Los Angeles and Southern California aredistorted into a gross carnivalesque of gender stereotypes, sociopolitical tensions, and vigilante warfare. This paper places a special emphasis on the areas of social and political stagnation found in Butler’s vision of near-future L.A., and analyses the dangers of clinging to archaic, patriarchal systems that no longer resonate with contemporary audiences. Focus is also placed on potential methods of resistance against oppressive social institutions, particularly exploring the limitations met by protagonist, Lauren Oya Olamina, in her attempts to voice concerns in a society where language is so nuanced by “traditional” gendered qualities that the female voice carries no political value. This papers also questions theories which promote violent confrontation as a means to social reform, disregarding collateral damage and victims of war in favour of insurgency. By exploring the movement of the human body away from defined space, this paper supports Butler’s notion of alternative prosocial action which celebrates the margins of society, positing a nurturing, constructive means to resist political opposition.
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Erikson, Kajsa. "No Need for Penis-Envy : A Feminist Psychoanalytic Reading of The Bell Jar." Thesis, Högskolan i Gävle, Avdelningen för humaniora, 2021. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hig:diva-36034.
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This essay analyzes Esther Greenwood’s identity crisis, mental illness, and recovery in Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar (1963) from a feminist psychoanalytic perspective. The purpose is to understand the cultural and psychological mechanisms behind the main character’s situation. Esther is a talented and hardworking student who dreams of a literary career in 1950’s America. At the age of nineteen, events and realizations launch Esther into an identity crisis that leads to severe depression. Why she falls ill, and the nature of her illness and recovery, are up for interpretation. The thesis of this essay is that Esther Greenwood’s identity crisis, mental illness, and recovery can be explained using a feminist interpretation of Freud’s theories of hysteria and melancholia, and the development of the differences between the sexes, which includes the Freudian concepts of castration, bisexuality, and the Oedipus complex.
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Silva, Raquel Lima. "Transformações urbanas e psicopatologia na ficção naturalista de Aluísio Azevedo /." São José do Rio Preto : [s.n.], 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/11449/94173.
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Orientador: Lúcia GranjaBanca: Antonio Manoel dos Santos Silva
Banca: Marcelo Bulhões
Resumo: Pensando no tema central da representação da doença no romance naturalista, principalmente no que se refere às moléstias de cunho urbano e de natureza psíquica, e em todas as séries de determinismos fisiológicos, ambientais e sociais, buscamos averiguar em quatro obras de Aluísio Azevedo - O Mulato (1881), O Homem (1887), Casa de Pensão (1884), e O Cortiço (1890) - como o escritor brasileiro incorporou à sua ficção naturalista alguns assuntos patológicos, provenientes, em grande parte, das reflexões sobre as teses cientificistas que inflamaram o final do século XIX. Buscando entender, portanto, como Aluísio Azevedo elaborou artisticamente os temas provenientes da problemática social e das questões médicas em geral, e enfocando as relações entre texto e contexto, temos por objetivo mostrar que, na elaboração desses quatros romances naturalistas, Aluísio Azevedo adotou uma visão artística que enfocou as enfermidades degenerativas da condição humana de seu tempo. Explorando tanto os aspectos das epidemias urbanas como os mecanismos somáticos relacionados à patogenia nervosa, e submetendo seus personagens ao exame social e psíquico minucioso, o romancista aderiu à equação científica, num momento histórico que possibilitou uma aproximação entre ciência e literatura, como alternativa de se aplicar, no campo da ficção, os procedimentos experimentais próprios do método científico
Abstract: The present work aims to investigate how the Brazilian novelist Aluísio Azevedo has tried and incorporated into his naturalist novels O Mulato (1881), O Homem (1887), Casa de Pensão (1884), and O Cortiço (1890) pathological issues which mostly originate from reflections on the scientificist theses that inflamed the late XIX century. To do so, this research particularly focuses on the representation of the disease in the naturalist novel, precisely on the urban maladies of psychic nature, as well as on all sorts of physiological, environmental and social determinisms. We try and evince how Aluísio Azevedo has artistically elaborated themes concerning the social problematic and medical issues as a whole. Therefore, we aim to ascertain, by laying emphasis on the relations between text and context, that Aluísio Azevedo, has adopted an artistic point of view that focused on the degenerative diseases of the human condition back in his time so as to compose the four novels under scrutiny. By exploring not only aspects of urban epidemies but also the somatic mechanisms related to the nervous pathology, let alone by his submitting the characters to minute social and psychic scrutiny, the novelist adhered to the scientific equation in a historical moment which caused literature to get closer to science. That in turn reveals an attempt to apply the experimental procedures typical of the scientific method to the fictional realm
Mestre
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Silva, Raquel Lima [UNESP]. "Transformações urbanas e psicopatologia na ficção naturalista de Aluísio Azevedo." Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP), 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/11449/94173.
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Pensando no tema central da representação da doença no romance naturalista, principalmente no que se refere às moléstias de cunho urbano e de natureza psíquica, e em todas as séries de determinismos fisiológicos, ambientais e sociais, buscamos averiguar em quatro obras de Aluísio Azevedo – O Mulato (1881), O Homem (1887), Casa de Pensão (1884), e O Cortiço (1890) – como o escritor brasileiro incorporou à sua ficção naturalista alguns assuntos patológicos, provenientes, em grande parte, das reflexões sobre as teses cientificistas que inflamaram o final do século XIX. Buscando entender, portanto, como Aluísio Azevedo elaborou artisticamente os temas provenientes da problemática social e das questões médicas em geral, e enfocando as relações entre texto e contexto, temos por objetivo mostrar que, na elaboração desses quatros romances naturalistas, Aluísio Azevedo adotou uma visão artística que enfocou as enfermidades degenerativas da condição humana de seu tempo. Explorando tanto os aspectos das epidemias urbanas como os mecanismos somáticos relacionados à patogenia nervosa, e submetendo seus personagens ao exame social e psíquico minucioso, o romancista aderiu à equação científica, num momento histórico que possibilitou uma aproximação entre ciência e literatura, como alternativa de se aplicar, no campo da ficção, os procedimentos experimentais próprios do método científico
The present work aims to investigate how the Brazilian novelist Aluísio Azevedo has tried and incorporated into his naturalist novels O Mulato (1881), O Homem (1887), Casa de Pensão (1884), and O Cortiço (1890) pathological issues which mostly originate from reflections on the scientificist theses that inflamed the late XIX century. To do so, this research particularly focuses on the representation of the disease in the naturalist novel, precisely on the urban maladies of psychic nature, as well as on all sorts of physiological, environmental and social determinisms. We try and evince how Aluísio Azevedo has artistically elaborated themes concerning the social problematic and medical issues as a whole. Therefore, we aim to ascertain, by laying emphasis on the relations between text and context, that Aluísio Azevedo, has adopted an artistic point of view that focused on the degenerative diseases of the human condition back in his time so as to compose the four novels under scrutiny. By exploring not only aspects of urban epidemies but also the somatic mechanisms related to the nervous pathology, let alone by his submitting the characters to minute social and psychic scrutiny, the novelist adhered to the scientific equation in a historical moment which caused literature to get closer to science. That in turn reveals an attempt to apply the experimental procedures typical of the scientific method to the fictional realm
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Lowther, John. "To Keep on Knowing More(?): Seminar XVILL, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2009. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_theses/65.
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This is an explication of Lacan’s Seminar XVII. The introduction situates the Seminar in its time and in relation to other theories of discourse. In part one I examine the changes which it brings to a variety of ideas already known in Lacan’s oeuvre such as Jouissance, Master Signifier(s) and Oedipus. Part two looks the four discourses in detail after considering the positions common to each. I provide accounts of each discourse as taking place internally to a subject and between subjects. The coda examines areas where further research is possible, reviews and critiques some scholarship on this seminar and inquires into the use value of the discourse theory, both generally and as a means of getting beyond Lacan.
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"Quivering Adam: Male hysteria and the construction of masculinity in early American literature." Tulane University, 2002.
Find full textAbstract:
As its title implies, this study offers an elaboration of the Adamic myth in American literature that was popularized by R. W. B. Lewis in his influential book, The American Adam (1955) by examining that myth through the lens of hysteria as a means to understand better the construction of American manhood. Covering roughly the same period that Lewis does, this inquiry focuses on the anxiety that some of these heroes felt when they were forced to confront the psychological realities of self-definition in the new republic. By looking at the anxiety that necessarily accompanied the American Adam's feeling of possibility and promise, a richer and more complex understanding of the era's construction of a national subject emerges A number of writers used the emergent language and dramatic imagery of nineteenth-century hysteria, with all its contradictory meanings and pejorative connotations of femininity, to address their fears about what it meant to be a national subject in the new republic, a subject that was unsurprisingly gendered male. Examining these texts in light of the contradictions involved in contemporary understandings of hysteria reveals important incongruities within the texts themselves about who or what constitutes a national subject. Although primarily considered a feminine illness for most of its history, the specific language that developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century around hysteria provided a rich vocabulary of symptoms and cures for the authors examined here, Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe, to describe the anxiety inherent in nascent American masculinity. In fact, I contend that it is precisely because of hysteria's connection to femininity that writers found its language such a useful tool for expressing the undefined and uncertain masculinity of the early republicacase@tulane.edu
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Stern, Pamela Anne. ""A sudden seizure of a different nature" - illness, accident and death in Jane Austen's novels." Thesis, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/707.
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Ill health, accident and death are themes common to all of Jane Austen's novels. Some illnesses are physical, whereas some of her heroines experience excessive psychological, emotional and spiritual traumas. These references are too numerous to be either coincidental, glossed over or ignored.
Austen expressed an interest in the mind/body relationship, believing that illness could be brought upon in certain personalities by the sufferer herself, and it seems that she might have held theories similar to those advocated by Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and even have anticipated those on feminine hysteria, and the effects of unconscious motives on behaviour, which were advanced by Freud in works such as The Interpretation of Dreams.
This study examines Austen's novels, and the origin and purpose of physical and psychological illness in these, and looks at how Austen uses illness, accident and death, and more particularly how their roles progressively change and develop. For Austen's handling of these common issues appears to vary and to develop in line with the order of composition of her novels. She places increasing emphasis on them, not just to further plot, but also to reflect character change and development.
Many of the parents or guardians of Austen's heroines are inadequate. And so Austen's heroines are often deprived of commendable models, left to find their own way, alone and in need of emotional support, to confront their youthful excesses, to work their way through these and to find their own destiny despite their handicaps.
Self-improvement is neither pleasant nor easy, especially where one is young, inexperienced and alone. And, where heroines exhibit unhealthy or excessive interests in anything that diverts them from their paths of virtue or usefulness, the correction may frequently be painful. Thus most of the novels are, to a greater or lesser degree, filled with references to both physical and psychological ill health.
This thesis examines how Austen used these illnesses, accidents and deaths in the various novels, both in the development of plot, as well as in the development of the character of the heroine in each instance.English Studies
M.A. (English)
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Boudreau, Brigitte. "Daughters of Lilith : transgressive femininity in Bram Stoker’s late gothic fiction." Thèse, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1866/11123.
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