To see the other types of publications on this topic, follow the link: Space in literature.
Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Space in literature'
Create a spot-on reference in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and other styles
Consult the top 50 dissertations / theses for your research on the topic 'Space in literature.'
Next to every source in the list of references, there is an 'Add to bibliography' button. Press on it, and we will generate automatically the bibliographic reference to the chosen work in the citation style you need: APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago, Vancouver, etc.
You can also download the full text of the academic publication as pdf and read online its abstract whenever available in the metadata.
Browse dissertations / theses on a wide variety of disciplines and organise your bibliography correctly.
1
Garrington, Abbie. "Modernist literature and the concept of space." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/24602.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis attempts to reassess the relevance of the concept of space in the modernist period. To complete this reassessment I take an interdisciplinary approach in which I offer a series of snapshots of different cultural symptoms of shifts in the space concept at this time. I have selected these snapshots because they either stem from, relate to or interrogate the capitalist economic system in a relatively explicit way. My central argument is that while we tend to think of postmodern or late phase capitalism as primarily operating through an ordering of space, we intuitively think of the rapidly developing economic system of the modernist period as being structured around time. I argue that it is possible to offer an alternative history that sees capitalism as always a spatial endeavour, and to suggest that the spatial nature of the modernist period ahs been partially hidden from view by the temporalising tendencies of philosophy, Marxist social theory and the social sciences throughout the twentieth century. I suggest that the cultural output of the modernist avant-garde operates as a kind of barometer of the true spatial nature of the modernist period, offering an illumination of the way in which the capitalist system was reconfiguring social life at this time. I focus on the paintings and pasted paper works of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, on the newspapers and advertisements of the modernist period, and on novels by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf in particular, in addition to those by Dorothy Richardson, Joseph Conrad, George Orwell and Alfred Döblin.
2
Blacker, U. "Representations of space in contemporary Ukrainian literature." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 2011. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1318068/.
Full textAbstract:
The thesis examines representations of space in Ukrainian literature from the late 1980s to the late 2000s. It argues that space in this period became an important preoccupation for Ukrainian writers. Representations of cities, architecture, regions, geopolitical spaces, the spaces of the home and of the body became common tropes through which authors tackled the pressing cultural and political issues of the era, and sought cultural and personal identity. The thesis discusses a wide range of leading contemporary Ukrainian authors, looking at their use of space and the aesthetic, cultural and political implications of this use. The thesis is divided into four chapters. The first focuses on the carnivalesque urban writing of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the second on postcolonial and post-Soviet space, the third on gendered space, and the final chapter on the relationship between time, space and text. The thesis argues that the preoccupation with space defined the way in which Ukrainian literature represented the world in the period in question, placing space as an equal and often privileged dimension over time. The second important consequence of this was the development of a spatial conception of text and language itself. The thesis demonstrates that in order to understand Ukrainian literature of the post-independence period, it is necessary to think of it in terms of space. It also argues that study of these texts can provide an understanding of space, both in literature and beyond it.
3
Bundy, Dallin J. "Magical Realism and the Space Between Spaces." DigitalCommons@USU, 2012. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/etd/1309.
Full textAbstract:
Magical realism comes from Franz Roh, a german art historian and critic, who first used the term to describe the Post-Expressionism movement in visual art. His seminal writings and definitions on Post-Expressionism, then known as magical realism, were translated into Spanish and made available to Latin America in the mid twentieth century. Authors like Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez adopted Roh's writings and re-appropriated magical realism into literary art, and from there the new genre proliferated through the Latin American Boom and magical realism in literary fiction reached global recognition, inspiring authors across the world to take it up and continue the tradition into the present.
4
Sikkink, Lisa Mae. "I just need some space! space, invasion, and gender relations in restoration drama /." Pullman, Wash. : Washington State University, 2009. http://www.dissertations.wsu.edu/Thesis/Spring2009/l_sikkink_042209.pdf.
Full text
5
Scheel, Kathleen Mary. "Space, time and the pilgrimage in modernist literature /." Burnaby B.C. : Simon Fraser University, 2005. http://ir.lib.sfu.ca/handle/1892/2076.
Full text
6
Mizrahi, M. X. "Lyrical space : the construction of space in contemporary architecture, art and literature in Argentina." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 2014. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1425681/.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis proposes that since 1990 a significant part of contemporary Argentine literature, art and architecture has been characterized by an identifiable quality: spatial lyricism. This new quality manifests in the spatial the aesthetic values that identify the lyric principle, normally related to sound and the verbal. The aim is to define ‘lyrical space’, and to show that space-making processes that validate introspective approaches in literature and visual arts can lead to the emergence of new form and content in architectural space, giving relevance to subjective experience and to the affective response induced in the user. Framed in neo-baroque aesthetics, the evidence puts experience, emotion, memory and identity as the critical material for the construction of space, inducing an ‘exceptional’ state of mind in the user/reader/spectator that recaptures the subjective dimension of seventeenth-century Baroque. A selection of short stories by Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, several novellas by César Aira, and a lyrical essay by Alejandra Pizarnik, are read in relation to the visual work of Guillermo Kuitca, Fabián Marcaccio, Lucio Fontana, Leandro Erlich, Dino Bruzzone, Tomás Saraceno and my own. The investigation explores the literary principles on lyricism, linking Hegel’s Aesthetics to post-structuralist thinking, and the category of the figural. To support the analysis further, interviews conducted by myself and by others are also used. Several aspects are unique about the project. The literary is located in the spatial, while the material is located between the spatial and the self. This collision of reading literary work centred on the construction of space, with the reading of spatial qualities in the visual and the verbal in terms of their aesthetic affective response—the emotional effect it arouses—has not been attempted before. The aesthetic affinities that emerge from the interdisciplinary analysis are also new.
7
Pollard, Kathryn Anne. "Gender, Space and Identity in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature." Thesis, University of Leeds, 2007. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.487382.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis explores the cultural impact of Locke's Essay Concerning Human , Understanding in forging a new and highly influential gendered language of ideas. It examines a range of early. eighteenth-century literature by men and women to explore the ways in which' alternative forms of property were harnessed to differently define the spaces of,the male and female minds. Engaging with recent criticism which has pinpointed this period as being central to a number of new'conceptions and categorisations of space, it therefore examines the consequences of this new language of intellectual property on the ways in which men and women differently perceive and represent the changing world around them. Focussing . particularly on the early periodical it analyses the problems and possibilities of the coffee-house and the drawing room for writers of, and within, Jiirgen Habermas's,emerging public sphere to discover the ways in which real or textual access to, and manipulation of, these spaces determined the authority of the publication. It then examines theways in which metaphors of landed property, linked particularly to colonial exploration and aligned with the male mind, enabled the male writer to assume a textual dominance over the unfamiliar terrain of the postFire city and which defined the archetypal urban observer as exclusively and enduringly male. Finally, it examines the w,llrk of Benedict Anderson and Linda Colley in order to explore contemporary responses to, and perceptions of, new understandings of the nation. It investigates the ways in which metaphors of consumption used to define the female mind meant that the concept of nationhood was anathema to women. Rather it explores the ways in which, through a language of commodity goods, women were able to come to a more extensive knowledge of the world.
8
Pohl, Nicole Barbara. "Gender and utopian space in women's literature, 1660-1789." Thesis, Birkbeck (University of London), 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.286365.
Full text
9
Cook, Jordan Ellington. "Space, Time, and the Self in 20th Century Literature." University of Toledo / OhioLINK, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=toledo1525456817163611.
Full text
10
Ribeiro, Marilia Scaff Rocha. "Intimate geographies: Space and experience in contemporary Brazilian literature." View abstract/electronic edition; access limited to Brown University users, 2008. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3318355.
Full text
11
Sorensen, Steven W. "Space and memory in Asian transnational writing." Thesis, Click to view the E-thesis via HKUTO, 2007. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/B38762018.
Full text
12
Blondel, Nathalie Isabelle. "Two kinds of non-realist modernist space : a comparative reading of the 'deep-space' and 'layered-space' works of Mary Butts (1890-1937) and Jane Bowles (1917-1973)." Thesis, University of Liverpool, 1989. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.240794.
Full text
13
Owens, Wendy Michelle. "Identity and the In-Between Space in Transracial Adoptee Literature: Making Space for the Missing Voice." Kent State University / OhioLINK, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent152283718139289.
Full text
14
Fraser, Benjamin Russell. "The Difference Space Makes: Bergsonian Methodology and Madrid's Cultural Imaginary through Literature, Film and Urban Space." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/195820.
Full textAbstract:
In the present effort, the philosopher Henri Bergson’s (1859-1941) seminal philosophical work functions as a revitalizing force and even an implicit point of departure for the more urban-oriented critique of Henri Lefebvre’s (1901-1991) watershed text L’Producción de l’espace/The Production of Space (1974). Both Lefebvre and Bergson in fact share a common perception of space—it is neither a static ground, nor an apriori condition of experience as Kant argued, but is instead a process inseparable from time and implicated in thought itself. Grounded in this resulting novel understanding of space, time and difference, I use an interdisciplinary approach to analyze Madrid’s cultural imaginary through novels by Belén Gopegui (1992), Pío Baroja (1911) and Luis Martín-Santos (1961); films by Carlos Saura (1996), Alejandro Amenábar (1997), and American Jim Jarmusch (1992); and the urban space of Madrid’s Retiro Park. The purpose of this work is twofold. On the one hand it is an attempt to reconcile the spatial issues of concern to cultural or human geography with an approach to social life grounded in the humanities. On the other it is a call for a deeper understanding of methodology taken in its widest sense. The former seeks not only to introduce spatial questions to the analysis of literature and film but also to articulate the intimate relation of cultural products to the urban processes in which they are formed, interpreted and sold. The latter requires an investigation of the philosophical preconceptions that structure our spatial practice and interpretation, as well as an awareness of the consequences these preconceptions hold—not only for understanding our common world, but also for producing it and finally for the possibility of changing it through action. These twin purposes—bringing geographical concerns into the humanities and assessing the philosophical bases of our spatial production and interpretation—are not so far removed. Through a careful reading of the above key literary, filmic and urban texts from twentieth century Madrid, this work explores the important consequences of conceiving of space as simultaneously mental and physical. In the Bergsonian fashion, these explorations seek to dispense with the stagnant and irreconcilable philosophical tropes of both pure materialism and pure idealism in order to yield a more precise understanding of cultural forms as living processes.
15
Romanow, Rebecca Fine. "The postcolonial body in queer space and time /." View online ; access limited to URI, 2006. http://0-digitalcommons.uri.edu.helin.uri.edu/dissertations/AAI3225329.
Full text
16
Hepworth, C. N. "Struggle and identity : Chicano/a literature in "the space between"." Thesis, Swansea University, 1995. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.637265.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis challenges Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.'s contention that the United States in disuniting. He believes the forces of multiculturalism have caused the national voice to splinter, resulting in a "space between" the nation's various cultural groups. These allegations are brought under scrutiny through an examination of Chicano/a literature, the product of an ethnic group which itself inhabits a "space between". Conceiving of the cultural group as an occupant of a particular "space", the psychological attributes of the centre and the border are examined through the notion of the territorial imperative. Particular attention is paid to the issue of the border because Chicano/as are deemed occupants of a border culture. The contention is made that it is impossible for the ethnic groups to exist in isolation from one another. In the same way that the Chicano/a holds Mexico and the United States in mutual relationship, so the dual constructs of ethnicity and history constitute an incontrovertible bond. Allegations that the Spanish language is divisive are examined and textual analysis reveals that the boundaries of the Chicano/a's language are not as restrictive as some have claimed. The literature, in fact, illustrates that cultural boundaries are permeable and it is the reader who is invited to examine the preconceptions he or she might bring to the act of reading about a cultural "other". Far from promoting disunity, then, it is maintained that the voice of the Chicano/a operates to show that the "space between" should be understood as a site of cultural negotiation. In the self-professed land of the brave, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant populace must summon the courage to approach its cultural borders. Only then will the separate "spaces" be United.
17
Kelly, Helena. "The politics of space : enclosure in English literature,1789-1815." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2009. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.517176.
Full text
18
Steinmann, Heather Marie. "Energetic Space: The Affect of Literature in a Composition Classroom." Diss., North Dakota State University, 2015. https://hdl.handle.net/10365/27689.
Full textAbstract:
Rhetorical and critical theory have both prescribed and proscribed the way
scholars view affect. With the exception of Reader Response Theory, literary and
rhetorical theory tend to use a more long-term and permanent frame of reference when
addressing the emotional relationship between reader and writer. This disquisition
explores a framework where the reader and writer find emotional connection in particular
and emergent times and spaces. This work extends the import of Kairos, as a rhetorical
figure and theory, to contemporary research and theories like Maria Takolander?s
?Energetic Space? and Louise Rosenblatt?s ?Aesthetic Reading,? theories that link writer
to reader. Rather than returning to the stagnating debate regarding the societal import of
literature and its inclusion in or exclusion from university course curriculum, this work
will use grounded theory to qualitatively examine students? affective responses to a novel
over a period of 4 years to describe how the emotional relationship between an author
and audience can be located and marked in the transformative moment.
19
Nir, Oded. "Nutshells and Infinite Space: Totality and Global Culture." The Ohio State University, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1404773762.
Full text
20
Boxall, Peter. "Negative geography : fictional space in Beckett's prose." Thesis, University of Sussex, 1997. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.360553.
Full text
21
Kvidera, Peter James. "Narrating Americanization : space and form in U.S. immigrant writing, 1890-1927 /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1999. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9461.
Full text
22
Wiechert, Nora L. "Urban green space and gender in Anglophone Modernist fiction." Pullman, Wash. : Washington State University, 2009. http://www.dissertations.wsu.edu/Dissertations/Summer2009/n_wiechert_071309.pdf.
Full text
23
Carroll, Siobhan. "The blank spaces of the Earth a typical space in the Romantic Century, 1750-1850 /." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2009. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3373497.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of English, 2009.Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 6, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-10, Section: A, page: 3862. Advisers: Deidre Lynch; Nicholas Williams.
24
Longust, Bridgett Renee 1964. "Reconstructing urban space: Twentieth-century women writers of French expression." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/282108.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation examines the importance of urban space in the works of feminist writers from France, Quebec, the Maghreb and Francophone West Africa. Each author writes women as subjects of their own experience in the city, identifies the representations of power and gender in urban landscapes, restores a feminist voice to the polis and supports women's claim to enfranchisement in urban space. My analysis is based upon the fundamental premise that urban space reflects power dynamics and is, like gender, a social and political construction borne of a dominant patriarchal ideology. The urban type of the female flaneuse, or ambulant heroine, is prevalent in several of the texts. These are women whose personal trajectories through the metropolis serve as a common referant to define their identity. Exploitation, disciplinary surveillance and disillusion characterize (1) Claire Etcherelli's urban dystopia in Elise ou la vraie vie. (2) Annie Ernaux's observations of life in the periphery of Paris in the Journal du dehors are centered on the market economy of the city and women's status as commodity. The deviant behavior of (3) Andree Chedid's virtually homeless, elderly heroine in La cite fertile thinly veils a provocative inquiry into the notion of urban identity. (4) Christine de Pizan and the Quebecoise writer, (5) Nicole Brossard both employ the metaphor of construction--architectural and textual--and share utopian visions of women's writing as the site for feminist praxis and cultural transformation. (6) Nina Bouraoui's cloistered Algerian heroine in La Voyeuse interdite and the women in (7) Assia Djebar's novels dare to defy and transgress the boundaries which exclude women from the urban realm in the Maghreb. (8) Calixthe Beyala's novels depict young African women struggling with issues of identity and survival in metropolises dominated by a repressive, patriarchal mentality. Throughout the texts, the city appears in multiple guises: as a text, a body, a marketplace, and a prison. For these authors, writing on the city constitutes a feminist act asserting women's right to claim a voice in that space. These works situate the city as a locus of cultural and political critique, whose spatial configurations reflect the social constructions of gender.
25
Smethurst, Paul. "Space, time and place in the postmodern novel." Thesis, Birkbeck (University of London), 1996. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.309297.
Full text
26
Grafton, Janet Marie. "Girls and green space : sickness-to-health narratives in children's literature." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/27999.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis examines the vital role of green space in the lives of young female protagonists in Jane of Lantern Hill by Lucy Maud Montgomery, The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher. The transformations from illness to wellness that each protagonist undergoes are linked to experiences in rural environments. The application of ecocriticism, ecofeminism, and ecopsychology to fiction from the past unearths the ways in which the pastoral nature of the texts is connected to contemporary environmental concerns.
27
Duff, Kimberly. "Station to station : contemporary British literature and urban space after Thatcher." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/43620.
Full textAbstract:
“Station to Station: Contemporary British Literature and Urban Space After Thatcher,” examines specific literary representations of public and private urban spaces in late 20th and early 21st-century Great Britain in the context of the shifting tensions that arose from the Thatcherite shift away from state-supported industry toward private ownership, from the welfare state to an American-style free market economy. This project examines literary representations of public and private urban spaces through the following research question: how did the textual mapping of geographical and cultural spaces under Margaret Thatcher uncover the transforming connections of specific British subjects to public/private urban space, national identity, and emergent forms of historical identities and citizenship? And how were the effects of such radical changes represented in post-Thatcher British literary texts that looked back to the British city under Thatcherism?
Through an analysis of Thatcher’s progression towards policies of privatization and social reform, this dissertation addresses the Thatcherite “cityspace” (Soja) and what Stuart Hall calls the “deregulation of the city” (23) as these open my research to issues of spatially affected identities in literary representations of the British city at the turn of the century. My four case studies move from a broad discussion of the effects of the heritage industry on the city and the individual (Iain Sinclair’s Lights Out for the Territory [1997]); to the relationship between space, identity, and the rolling back of the welfare state as it plays out in the stigmatization and neglect of council estate housing (Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting [1993]); to representations of race and entrepreneurialism in the Thatcherite city (Monica Ali’s Brick Lane [2003]); and, finally, to representations of space, gay identities, and class during a period of institutionalized homophobia (Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty [2004]). The project takes as its aim the tracing of various tentacles of Thatcherism as they creep across the spaces of the British city in a way that draws attention to how the processes and flows of Thatcherite neoliberal policies circulate across the spaces of the city, forever altering the ways in which individuals move and form identities within those spaces.
28
Bernard, Marion. "Repossession of a cultural space in Francophone native literature from Quebec." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2005. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/2756/.
Full textAbstract:
Francophone Native literature from Quebec is a relatively recent phenomenon. Although Native writing started as early as the 18th century with the teaching of missionaries, it is only since the 1970s that Native authors from Quebec began to write fictional works increasingly. Due to their historical past, social and economic situation, Native authors have only recently slightly moved away from political issues. This thesis aims at highlighting the core elements of this literature and at demonstrating its specificities. The main corpus for this research is composed of seventeen works written by nine authors. Poetry and plays tend to be favoured by Native authors over novels and short stories; their closeness to oral tradition can be seen as one of the main reasons for such choices. By way of introduction, I summarise the historical, social and literary evolution of Native people in Quebec. I problematize my research with references to postcolonial theories as the authors’ situation as ex-colonised people echoes the issues raised in this particular field. However, I also refer to other theorists like Doreen Massey or Anthony Giddens when necessary. The focus of the next chapters derives from these considerations. The second chapter examines how they represent themselves and others. The third chapter highlights how their recurrent representations of past events serve to the construction of a Native discourse. The fourth chapter is concerned with their representations of their own environment and demonstrates how they tie in past conceptions of nature with modern needs. The final chapter shows how using the French language can contribute to their repossession of a cultural space within Quebec society.
29
Haga, Koichi. "The critique of virtual shifting discursive space in Japanese literature, 1960s-1980s." Diss., Restricted to subscribing institutions, 2008. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1682825951&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=1564&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
Full text
30
Hogan, Kathryn J. "Student subjectivity and the study of literature : the possibility of free space /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9388.
Full text
31
Tampalini, Serge. "Affective space (looking back)." Thesis, Tampalini, Serge (2006) Affective space (looking back). PhD thesis, Murdoch University, 2006. https://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/id/eprint/331/.
Full textAbstract:
It may be argued that a historically accepted model of an academic career begins with having completed a PhD and in so doing identifying a body of theory that will inform and constitute one's practical academic work. While it may be an accepted model it does not necessarily take precedence as the only model. The relationship between theory and practice is symbiotic and as such it is possible, and indeed at times desirable, that practice inform theory. It is not advisable to be solely operating from a position of theory when making creative work; the risk is far too great.
The gravitational force of theory can all too easily disturb the fragile innocence of creativity. Pulled and constrained by the logic of theory the work risks becoming too didactic and its creativity sacrificed for the sake of rationalism...a symptom almost diagnostic of our culture.
I appreciate that the term creative is open to a plethora of readings, each with their own cogent claim to usage. When I employ the term I am referring to a particular type of decision-making process involved in the solution of problems. I will argue that a creative decision differs from other types of decisions [such as, practical or scientific] in the way the resultant solution of the problem remains open to a greater number of potential readings. I will also argue that it is precisely in those heuristic moments of potential impasse, often associated with a problem's resolution, where creativity hangs out.
In any creative venture, I have always been guided by the importance and significance of doing...in the doing is the theory. This is not meant to dismiss theory but simply to see it in much the same way as when we see objects in our peripheral vision. Just as objects in our peripheral vision do not take their place in our visual field, theory [for me] participates in creative processes by subconsciously serving as an early guiding system that helps monitor the work. In this age of information we are no longer innocent of theory -it is ineluctable. What is crucial is that we have a command of theory in order that we may go through it and regain our creative innocence. If we do not, we only achieve an artificial innocence born of enthusiasm, exuberance and imprecision. Creative innocence is re-found in doing. This assertion conceives of theory as participating as part of a creative subconscious and goes someway towards explaining the sudden epiphany of understanding that is frequently associated with prolonged and intense work, or the immense pleasure at retrospectively recognising the theory that seemed to have informed one's work without being conscious of it -as if the theoretical component had always been there. This phenomenon is of fundamental concern to my thesis, especially when considering the theatre productions that constitute my creative oeuvre. Upon close inspection, my works ultimately reveal that the defining distance between a visceral creative decision [one whose manifestation is immediately felt as apposite] and one that is conceptualised as the illustration of a theory, is not that great...I just happen to begin working outside of the brackets of theoretical narration.
Throughout my thesis I will refer to all visuals as images but I will argue that there are specific types of images, namely signs, symbols and metaphors.
In language the term image can imply more than a verbal description of a purely visual experience; it can also mean the metaphoric, ornamental, rhetorical figurative use of language as opposed to its literal use.
For the surrealists image meant more than the representation of an external thing in the material world, it also meant the revelation of an internal mental state, a psychological verity occluded from consciousness.
Images [of this kind] were incandescent flashes linking two elements belonging to categories that are so far removed from each other that reason would fail to connect them and that require a momentary suspension of the critical attitude in order for them to be brought together.
Having already built a body of practical work [spanning thirty years] the challenge was to see if it was possible to identify a coherent theory that consistently functioned as the catalyst of the work - albeit disparate in its nature. The analytical process proved to be the reverse of that which may be observed in the historically accepted model of academic discourse...where the process is cumulative. In this instance the process was deductive -a forensic assignment akin to tracing the diverse creative elements to their creative source or motivation. The venture proved illuminating in much the same way as when one is asked to crystallise a complex theoretical argument; you have to reinvent the argument in a way that helps to simplify its complexity without attenuating its integrity -a complexity that is well known to you but that eludes the uninitiated reader.
Whenever I try and think about my theatre practice I am vexed -particularly when I filter my own experiences and try and extract the meanings that seem genuinely inherent in them. At first glance it is satisfying because of a sense of coherence or pattern in a whole host of discrete events. However a closer inspection quickly reveals the fractal complexity of the pattern and demands a reappraisal of how we see and decipher it. Any attempt to understand its disparate nature by investigating one part in isolation from the whole proves initially unsatisfying and finally futile, for each part seems to be informed by and refer to other parts, as if participating in a greater organising principle; a principle that resists traditional cartography; one that is best seen as one sees the earth from outer space. When the earth is seen from outer space one becomes aware of the greater organising principle [the universe] within which it functions. Similarly it is only when the topology of my work is seen from a distance that its coherence is apparent...the further away one is, the more clearly one recognises its constituent parts.
Despite our desire to lose ourselves in the living depths of a work, we are constrained to distance ourselves from it in order to speak of it. Why, then not deliberately establish a distance that will reveal to us, in a panoramic perspective, the surroundings with which the work is organically linked?
When I am in the middle of a theatre production, I have only the slightest idea of how it will end; I trust in the doing, and at the end I am always surprised by what I have created. Ambiguity and paradox and consequently indeterminacy ultimately emerge as the common features of my work; they appear as sign posts that mark a way of finally mapping it. Each individual piece of work remains coherently intact despite its seemingly obscure coalescence with others, but it is when the works intersect at these points of commonality that one may observe the greater organising matrix.
The phenomenological world is not a pure being, but the sense which is revealed where the paths of my various experiences intersect, and also where my own and other people's intersect and engage each other like gears.
32
Tampalini, Serge. "Affective space (looking back) /." Access via Murdoch University Digital Theses Project, 2006. http://wwwlib.murdoch.edu.au/adt/browse/view/adt-MU20071116.144247.
Full text
33
Mejia, Lillian Lynette. "Snow White in Space| Science Fiction Reimagines Traditional Fairy Tales." Thesis, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2015. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=1593257.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis explores the intersection of fairy tales with late twentieth and early twenty-first century science fiction - specifically, the reimagining of classic fairy tales within science fictional settings. I will begin with an overview of the ways in which fairy tales and science fiction seem particularly well-suited for such an endeavor, in terms of similarity of common themes, structure, and narrative device. Next, I will examine two recent examples: Caitlín R. Kiernan's "The Road of Needles," and Tanith Lee's "Beauty," noting deviations from the traditional source material and highlighting the ways in which the original stories have been updated for modern audiences. Finally, I will offer several of my own stories that reimagine fairy tales in science fiction settings: "Curiosity," a retelling of "The Little Mermaid," "I Dream the Snowfall, the Red Earth of Mars," a retelling of "Snow White," and "Match Girl," a retelling of "The Little Match Girl."
34
Prescott, Holly. "Rethinking urban space in contemporary British writing." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2011. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/3011/.
Full textAbstract:
Rethinking Urban Space in Contemporary British Writing argues that the prose literature of its featured authors offers a unique forum through which to perceive and account for the multifarious agency of urban space. Chapter one examines the limitations of using the Marxist spatial theory of Henri Lefebvre, widely adopted by literary scholars, to account for the widespread appearance of abandoned, subterranean and transient spaces in contemporary British writing. The thesis then develops new ways of reading which, unlike Lefebvrean theory, allow such spaces to emerge as affective and narrative agents, shaping narrative form and action. Chapter two focuses upon reading abandoned spaces in the work of Iain Sinclair and Cheshire-born author Nicholas Royle; chapter three examines the agency of the subterranean city-space in narratives by Neil Gaiman, Tobias Hill and Conrad Williams; and chapter four interrogates the agency exerted by the hotel space in contemporary hotel novels by Ali Smith and Monica Ali. Throughout, the materialism of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer is combined with affect theory to stress the narrative and affective agencies achieved by such urban spaces, precisely due to their transcendence of the networks of production and exchange which dominate the capitalist-driven cities of their fictional worlds.
35
Lyster, Rosa Frances. "Space and censorship in Nadine Gordimer : a literary geography." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/13942.
Full textAbstract:
In South Africa, questions of space and censorship are inseparable. It is impossible to discuss one without discussing the other. The apartheid censors set themselves up as "guardians of the literary", purporting to create a protected space where a particularly South African literature could flourish. In this thesis, my argument is that to be a "guardian of the literary" meant to be a guardian of space in literature, the way it was represented and the way characters moved through it. In order explore this argument I have focused on the censors' response to one writer in particular, Nadine Gordimer. My argument will show that in Gordimer, some spaces seem to be more acceptable than others, as evidenced by the censors' response to her work. Six of her novels were submitted for scrutiny by the Censorship Board. Three were banned, and three were passed. In The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences, Peter McDonald asks "If all her novels ... engaged with the historical circumstances of apartheid South Africa in especially powerful and critical ways, then why were they not all deemed equally threatening to the established order?" My argument is that while it is difficult to provide a definitive answer, it is possible to make sense of the censors' decisions regarding her work by undertaking an analysis of the novels' literary geography. Focusing on the prevalence of certain spaces and the absence of others, and the way that characters move through these spaces, it is clear that they represent differing degrees of threat to the established order. In the censors' reports on Gordimer's work, crossing a physical boundary was the equivalent of crossing a moral boundary. Both the apartheid planners and the censors were fixated on boundaries and borders, on the importance of keeping some people in and more people out. My argument is that what the architects of apartheid tried to do in reality, the censors tried to do in fiction. Their attempt to police the borders of the imaginary meant that some spaces were more acceptable than others, that some stories were told while others were ignored. In my final chapter, I argue that the effects of this can still be seen in contemporary novels written about South Africa. The censors had such a powerful hand in "deforming" literature that their fingerprints can still be detected today. A close analysis of certain elements of Patrick Flanery's Absolution (2012) will show that the structure and form of the novel corresponds in interesting ways with the apartheid censors' ideas of what literature should do and be.
36
Tyrrell, Thomas. "Remapping Milton : space, place and influence, 1700-1800." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2017. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/111233/.
Full textAbstract:
In my examination of the influence of John Milton’s poetry on eighteenth century literature, I argue that eighteenth-century writers engage with ideas of space and place as they seek to transform Miltonic verse into a suitable medium for describing the Newtonian astronomy and imperial geography of their day. My first chapter examines John Philips’s Cyder and John Dyer’s The Fleece alongside county maps and commercial atlases, as part of a study of how their verse appropriates Milton’s politics and revises his geography. In my second chapter, I use digital mapping technology to explore the different viewing perspectives James Thomson uses in The Seasons, how they derive from Milton, and how they support his project to describe a harmonious, providential global geography. My third chapter investigates adaptations of Milton’s A Mask Performed at Ludlow Castle (1634). Across the eighteenth century, A Mask generated an opera, a play and a novel, and I examine how the meaning of each adaptation changes due to the altered place and context of performance. In my last two chapters, I argue that the female tradition of astronomical poetry seeks to reconcile Miltonic verse with Newtonian science whilst also critiquing it from a devotional perspective. Finally, I claim that Ann Yearsley and Charlotte Smith used Milton’s influence as a means to usurp the exclusively male territory of the eighteenth-century prospect poem, through poetry written from Clifton Hill in Bristol and Beachy Head on the South Downs. In my coda on William Wordsworth I conclude that to view him as the culmination of eighteenth-century engagement with Milton is to bias our understanding of both authors. Reconsidering Milton’s eighteenth-century influence is a vital part not only of understanding the worldview of the age, but also of distinguishing Milton himself from what the eighteenth century made of him.
37
Zheng, Yiran. "Writing Beijing: Urban Spaces and Cultural Imaginations in Contemporary Chinese Literature and Films." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/195306.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation investigates some literary configurations of Beijing through contemporary Chinese literature and films. These configurations are built upon three specific urban spaces (military compound, siheyuan and some modern constructions) by three significant literary groups. The literary groups discussed in this work are Dayuan wenhua quan (Compound Cultural Group), Dierdai jingweier zuojia (Second-generation Beijing Flavor Writers), and Beipiao diliudai dianyingren (Beijing Floater Sixth-generation Filmmakers).This study adopts a particular methodology. Inspired by Henri Levebvre, it establishes a framework which connecting urban spaces (representations of space), writers and literary productions (representational space). It examines what these urban spaces mean to Chinese writers and filmmakers and how these people thus adopt them to configure particular urban images of Beijing. It argues that these different configurations are actually the projections of those writers and filmmakers' own cultural imaginations, emotional catharsis, and manifest their own cultural positions. "Compound Cultural Group" interprets Beijing as "compound Beijing," which represents revolutionary culture in communist China. Their nostalgia toward the compound in the Cultural Revolution indicates the decline of the once ruling social group. As for "Second-generation Beijing Flavor Writers", Beijing is a traditional and a masculine city. In their novels, siheyuan is considered as the embodiment of Chinese tradition and Beijing girl is portrayed as masculine women. This imagination fulfills their own cultural appeal to reconstruct traditional values in the "Cultural Fever" in the 1980s. In the eyes of "Beijing Floater Sixth-generation filmmakers," Beijing is a cosmopolitan metropolis. In their films, this globalized modern city is an urban dream for migrants.
38
Sainsbury, Lisa Anne. "The postmodern carnival of children's literature : necessary playgrounds and subversive space in the protean body of children's literature." Thesis, University of Surrey, 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.246056.
Full text
39
McDonald, Timothy E. G. "The space of Kafka /." Thesis, McGill University, 1994. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=69777.
Full textAbstract:
The following study investigates the fictional works of an early twentieth century Czechoslovakian writer named Franz Kafka. "The space of Kafka" is explored primarily through the "identity" of his characteristic monster figures and the temporally disjunctive narratives through which they travel. Monstrosity is qualified here as a principal mode of translation through which Kafka engaged the very terms of "identity" which an "individual" faces in the appearance of any "work". The intimations of a monstrous self are probed through Kafka's work in relation to human experience, intentionality, alterity and a "present" which is en-acted specifically as one form of the past. Through Kafka's paradigmatic "monster", "double" and "bachelor" figures, we find not "alternative" orientations of the "self" which contemporary literature and architecture may choose to undertake, but intrinsic re-presentations of the very relation which any self, any author, already is in the appearance of a "work".
40
Rojas, Yuko. "Space and female consciousness in Virginia Woolf's fiction: idealist and phenomenologicalperspectives." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2003. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31245882.
Full text
41
Jones, Mary C. "Fashioning Mobility: Navigating Space in Victorian Fiction." UKnowledge, 2015. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/24.
Full textAbstract:
My dissertation examines how heroines in nineteenth-century British Literature manipulate conventional objects of feminine culture in ways which depart from uses associated with Victorian marriage plots. Rather than use fashionable objects to gain male attention or secure positions as wives or mothers, female characters deploy self-fashioning tactics to travel under the guise of unthreatening femininity, while skirting past thresholds of domestic space. Whereas recent Victorian literary and cultural criticism identifies female pleasure in the form of consumption and homosocial/erotic desire, my readings of Victorian fiction, from doll stories to the novels of Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, and Marie Corelli, consider that heroines find pleasure in deploying fashionable objects – such as dolls, clothes, cosmetics, and jewelry – which garner access to public space typically off limits for Victorian women. In the first chapter, girls use dolls to play in wilderness spaces, fostering female friendships. Muted dress provides a cloak of invisibility, allowing the heroine to participate in the pleasure of ocular economies in the second chapter. The third chapter features a female detective who uses cosmetics to disguise her infiltration of men’s private spaces in order to access private secrets. Finally, the project culminates with jewelry’s re-signification as female success in the publishing world.
Tracing how female characters in Victorian fiction use self-fashioning as a pathway, this study maps the safe travel heroines discover through wild landscapes, urban streets, and professional arenas. These spaces were often coded with sets of conditions for gendered interactions. Female characters’ proficient self-styling provides mobility through locations guarded by the voices of neighbors, friends, and family who attempt to keep them in line with Victorian gender conventions. Female characters derive an often unexplored pleasure: the secret joy of being where they should not and going against what they are told. In the novels I examine, female protagonists navigate prolific rules and advice about how to arrange and manage their appearances, not to aspire to paragons of Victorian beauty and womanhood but in order to achieve physical and geographic mobility outside domestic interiors.
42
Armellino, Pablo. "Ob-scene spaces in Australian narrative an account of the socio-topographic construction of space in Australian literature." Stuttgart Ibidem-Verl, 2009. http://d-nb.info/994959613/04.
Full text
43
Seminet, Georgia Smith. "Redefining nation : space and desire in contemporary Mexican women's writing /." Full text (PDF) from UMI/Dissertation Abstracts International, 2000. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/fullcit?p9992909.
Full text
44
Mullholland, Terri Anne. "The literature of the boarding house : female transient space in the 1930s." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:f465b620-5d86-4634-83c7-69ea9b9d1054.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis investigates a neglected sub-genre of women’s writing, which I have termed the literature of the boarding house. Focusing on unmarried women, this is a study of the alternative rooms ‘of one’s own’ that existed in the nineteen thirties: from the boarding house and hotel, to the bed-sitting room or single room as a paying guest in another family’s house. The 1930s is defined by the conflict between women’s emerging social and economic independence and a dominant ideology that placed increased importance on domesticity, the idea of ‘home’ and women’s place within the familial structure. My research highlights the incompatibility between the idealised images of domestic life that dominated the period and the reality for the single woman living in temporary accommodation. The boarding house existed outside conventional notions of female domestic space with its connotations of stability and family life. Women within the boarding house were not only living outside traditional domestic structures; they were placing themselves outside socially and culturally defined domestic roles. The boarding house was both a new space of modernity, symbolising women’s independence, and a continued imitation of the bourgeois home modelled on rituals of middle-class behaviour. Through an examination of novels by Elizabeth Bowen, Lettice Cooper, Stella Gibbons, Storm Jameson, Rosamond Lehmann, Dorothy Richardson, Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, and E. H. Young, this study privileges the literary as a way in which to understand the space of the boarding house. Not only does the boarding house blur the boundaries between public and private space, it also challenges the traditional conceptions of the family home as the sole location of private domestic space. I argue that by placing their characters in the in-between space of the boarding house, the authors can reflect on the liminal spaces that existed for women both socially and sexually. In the literature of the boarding house, the novel becomes a site for representing women’s experiences that were usually on the periphery of traditional narratives, as well as a literary medium for articulating the wider social and economic issues affecting the lives of unmarried women.
45
Pavey, Alexander John. "Crime, space and disorientation in the literature and cinema of Los Angeles." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 2018. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/10052444/.
Full textAbstract:
Participation in the rhythms and processes of twentieth-century capitalism depended upon physical mobility, particularly in a city as geographically dispersed as Los Angeles. This fluid individual mobility also served to justify the introduction of new law enforcement practices that increasingly sought to rationalize urban space. How did the literature and cinema of Los Angeles represent the experiences of citizens for whom mobility was both vital and potentially incriminating? Within such an environment, I propose, successful orientation became particularly crucial. I develop an original but historically grounded theorization of disorientation as a concept through which to interpret the unease and vulnerability of individual protagonists as they navigate the city. Whilst drawing on a wide body of theoretical sources, my research remains rooted in the close analysis of cinematic and literary texts, and the specific historical and geographical context with which they engage. The automobility of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe allows him to navigate the dispersed topography of 1940s LA, but his investigations are often ineffectual and leave him weary and jaded. The protagonist of Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) struggles to orientate himself within a wartime Los Angeles in which racism is manifested spatially. Himes’s novel provides a lens through which to view the experience of 1970s South LA depicted in the films of Charles Burnett and Haile Gerima, in which the city’s African-American community confronts disorientating conditions of circumscribed movement and arbitrary incrimination. Lawenforcement officials exert spatial control in the novels of Joseph Wambaugh and James Ellroy, but they also find themselves compromised by jurisdictional conflicts. Pursuing careful analyses of character, form and setting, this project explicates some of the compelling and troubling visions of urban experience that Los Angeles has prompted, and challenges a critical tendency to elide aspects of the city’s racial past.
46
Choy, Gregory. "Sites of function in Asian American literature : tropics of place, agents of space /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1999. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9454.
Full text
47
Machala, Marta. "At home in the world : Czesław Miłosz and the ontology of space." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a551d588-fcb4-4c5c-81c3-3e81e8f7e593.
Full textAbstract:
Space constitutes one of the main leitmotifs of Czeslaw Milosz's work, both theoretical and poetic. Central in this respect is the notion of imagination as a faculty organizing space, the faculty which, from the times of the Scientific Revolution, has been subject to erosion, especially as far as the religious imagination is concerned. The abolition of the anthropocentric, hierarchical vision of space, threw human beings into a state of alienation, conceptual nowhere. Religion was replaced by the dogmatism of scientific reductionism, the reality of Ulro. Milosz shows the way out of Ulro, the way out of nowhere to the somewhere. This thesis aims to illustrate the conceptual map of the way out of Ulro as portrayed in four selected volumes of poetry and the novel Dolina Issy, anchored in different points of Milosz's biography. The Land of Ulro, the collection of essays which encapsulate Milosz's ideas on space, constitutes a canopy work for the interpretation of the practical realization of those ideas in Milosz's poetic work. Trzy zimy (1936), Swiat, poema naiwne (1943), Miasto bez imienia (1969), and Druga przestrzen (2002) provide the material for the analysis of different aspects of Milosz's conception of space. Subject to analysis is the relationship between object and human subject as regards the formative, childhood experience of the space of the house (manor) and surrounding landscape, the act of building space on the basis of memory and retrospection in the context of distance and exile, and the workings of religious imagination in the context of the realm of second space. Through his conception of space, Milosz defends human existence in its completeness. He shows the way out of Ulro. This thesis aims to retrace Milosz's map out of the land of alienation on the basis of the poet's selected works.
48
Kinnison, Dana K. "Defiant landscapes : space and subjectivity in early twentieth-century women's farm novels /." free to MU campus, to others for purchase, 1998. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/mo/fullcit?p9904853.
Full text
49
Silva, Marcia Rosa dos Santos. "Luuanda e Texaco : espaços de resistência e subversão." Universidade de São Paulo, 2016. http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8156/tde-29062016-120128/.
Full textAbstract:
Esse trabalho tem por objetivo analisar comparativamente o espaço nas obras Luuanda, do escritor angolano de língua portuguesa Luandino Vieira, e Texaco, do escritor martinicano de língua francesa Patrick Chamoiseau. Para esse fim, partimos do pressuposto que, como se pode observar a partir de seus títulos, os protagonistas das narrativas são os espaços: os musseques luandenses e a favela martinicana, chamada bairro Texaco. Eles configuram os tempos, os narradores, os personagens e os enredos. E configuram, sobretudo, uma linguagem literária que subverte as línguas dominantes o português e o francês incorporando aos textos as línguas dominadas: o quimbundo angolano e o crioulo martinicano. Vemos, portanto, a partir dos espaços analisados nas narrativas que a história oficial é contestada e reescrita pelos autores e, em seu lugar, temos as histórias dos vencidos que nunca se calaram, que resistiram às invasões, às dominações, às assimilações e procuram sobreviver. Verificamos, pois, que o modo de sobrevivência, nas obras, é pela ocupação e subversão dos espaços e pela subversão da forma de narrar.This dissertation aims at analyzing relatively the spaces in two literary works Luuanda, by Luandino Vieira whose native language is Portuguese and Texaco by Patrick Chamoiseau whose native language is French. It is assumed that the narrative protagonists are the spaces, as it can be initially observed in the titles. These spaces are the Luanda musseques and the Martinican slums, which is considered a district called Texaco. They comprise the time, narrators, characters and plot. What is more they comprise a literary language that subvert the dominant languages, which are Portuguese and French incorporating the dominated ones, which are the Angolan Kimbunder and the Martinican Creole. Therefore it is possible to understand from the analysed spaces in these narratives that the official history is contested and rewritten by the authors, highlighting the people who has never ceased struggling against the invasions, domination, assimilation and who have been bravely surviving. Thus it was verified that the way people survived in the narratives occurred not only through the occupation and subversion of the spaces, but also the subversive narrative.
50
Bullock, Kurt E. "Narrative space and time : the rhetoric of disruption in the short-story form." Virtual Press, 2001. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1213154.
Full textAbstract:
This study traces spatial and temporal disturbances in the modem short story structure. Edgar Allan Poe's "indefinitiveness" and Kenneth Burke's "actualization" serve as historical foundations for this investigation, which leads to contemporary frameworks proposed by such theorists as Gerard Genette, Umberto Eco, Wolfgang Iser, Paul Ricoeur, Peter Brooks, James Phelan, and Susan Sniader Lanser. In particular, I explore how effect operates as a predominant concern of short fiction. Short fiction is a rhetorical interaction encumbered by spatial and temporal constraints, and its narrative teleology is necessarily disrupted by rhetorical techniques. Narrative's boundaries are purposefully violated, its tempo twisted and contorted, exposing a purposeful tension in the rhetorical engagement of author, text and reader. Instabilities crafted within the text disrupt time-space expectations of readers.Importantly, effect is perceived as a rhetorical device within short fiction, and so in this study the text serves as a site of transference privileging equally writer and reader. Conditions of possibility and understanding are invested in the text by the author through techniques of spatial disruption and temporal discontinuity, and then reinvested in the reader by the narrative through the text's generation of uncertainty. Short fiction serves as an invitation by the author for the reader to construct explanations; devices work to disrupt the time-space constraints of the genre, establishing as they do a narrative contract between author and reader that is resolved in and from the text.Burke considers this to be shaping prose fiction to the author's purposes, an act which "involves desires and their appeasements" - and one which purposefully aims for a particular effect. But what are the limits of purposefulness in short fiction? I examine both textual effect and reader affect, relying particularly on Iser and Eco, and turn to Brooks in conclusion to summarize the role of desire in and from the text, and to Phelan to critique the place of rhetoric in establishing and maintaining that desire. My analysis discloses that time-space disruption, employed as a rhetorical strategy by short story writers, serves to heighten rather than threaten the mediated engagement of writer/text/reader in short fiction, producing a measured effect.Department of English