Thesis (M.A. (African Languages )) --University of Limpopo, 2013 / Refer to the document

O presente trabalho consiste em uma leitura da Obra crítica de Nestor Vítor, publicada pela Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa. Considerado pela historiografia literária brasileira como um importante crítico do simbolismo brasileiro, o estudo apresenta aspectos da trajetória sociocultural de Nestor Vítor dos Santos (1868-1932), analisando textos de sua produção intelectual, especificamente, aquela enquadrada como crítica literária. Pretende, desse modo, ressaltar algumas das linhas de força de seu pensamento no que se refere à leitura que fez de escritores nacionais e estrangeiros no período compreendido entre 1896 a 1930, logo, no interior do período conhecido como Primeira República ou República Velha (1889-1930). Apoiando-se em trabalhos já realizados acerca do crítico e do sistema literário nacional, a tese busca evidenciar as contribuições que sua obra fornece para entender a dinâmica do campo literário brasileiro, recorrendo, para isso, a aspectos da sociologia francesa de Pierre Bourdieu. Além de uma abordagem de elementos históricos e contextuais da vida e obra do crítico Nestor Vítor, a tese foca em três questões recorrentes de sua produção: a denúncia e a participação na política literária existente no meio cultural carioca, a relação com o movimento simbolista e, por fim, a aproximação crítica com autores que conformariam parte do movimento modernista brasileiro. A partir desse foco, vislumbra-se o papel de Vítor no interior da crítica literária, as estratégias de valorização ou desvalorização de obras e autores em seus escritos e a apreensão das disputas e valores em jogo no campo literário do período. Do conjunto das leituras realizadas, depreende-se uma visão mais complexa da obra de Nestor Vítor, contribuindo a pesquisa, assim, para enriquecer a história da crítica literária em nosso país. / The present work consists of a reading of the Obra crítica de Nestor Vítor, published by the Foundation Casa de Rui Barbosa. Considered by Brazilian literary historiography as an important critic of Brazilian symbolism, the study presents aspects of the sociocultural trajectory of Nestor Vítor dos Santos (1868-1932), analyzing texts of his intellectual production, specifically, that framed as literary criticism. In this way, he intends to emphasize some of the strengths of his thought regarding his reading of national and foreign writers in the period between 1896 and 1930, then within the period known as Primeira República or República Velha (1889-1930). Drawing on works already done on the critic and the national literary system, the thesis seeks to highlight the contributions that his work provides to understand the dynamics of the Brazilian literary field, using, for this, aspects of the French sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. In addition to an approach to historical and contextual elements of the life and work of the critic Nestor Vítor, the thesis focuses on three recurring issues of its production: denunciation and participation in \"literary politics\" in the carioca cultural milieu, the relation with the symbolist movement and, finally, the critical approach with authors who would conform part of the Brazilian modernist movement. From this focus, sees the role of Victor inside the literary criticism, the valuation strategies or depreciation of works and authors in their writings and the seizure of disputes and values at stake in the literary field period. From the set of readings carried out, a more complex view of Nestor Vítor\'s work emerges, thus contributing to the research to enrich the history of literary criticism in our country.

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My doctoral thesis focuses on the twentieth-century Scottish writer, Jessie Kesson, examining the effects of the cultural construction of gender from a feminist psychoanalytic perspective. Although my primary focus is on the detrimental effects traditional gender roles have on girls and women, recently published studies claiming that 'masculinity' is in a state of crisis are of particular value to my work. The reasons contemporary critics offer for this 'crisis in masculinity' vary widely. There are those who are convinced that women are to blame for abandoning their traditional roles as wives and mothers and moving too far into areas of society that are traditionally 'male'. This, they believe, results in a 'feminised' society that has an adverse effect on the development and well-being of boys and men. Those who support this argument generally believe that social, emotional and psychological distinctions between the genders are biologically inherent rather than socially constructed, and would prefer to see gender positions polarised rather than assimilated. At the other end of the scale are those who believe that the behaviours associated with traditional 'masculinity' are outmoded, fostering a form of emotional distrophy that is responsible for the increase in male suicide and autistic-like behaviours. Those who support this argument believe that males should develop a new set of behavioural traits more closely aligned to those traditionally thought of as 'feminine': traits like spontaneity, expressiveness, empathy and compassion. I have found the latter arguments exciting on two counts: firstly because an increasing number of male critics are joining female critics in acknowledging that many of the traits and behaviours traditionally associated with 'masculinity' are life-denying for both sexes; secondly, and most importantly, because these critics are echoing the findings of the feminist psychoanalytic critic, Jessica Benjamin, whose work I have found so stimulating. But, where critics have pointed to the problem ('masculine' behaviour) and recommended that it be modified to something more closely resembling 'feminine' behaviour, Benjamin has not only identified the source of the problem, she has developed a revised theory of human development, 'Intersubjectivity', which offers a positive and transformative approach to human behaviour. I examine Benjamin�s theory closely in Chapter Two, and make use of it in succeeding chapters. In May 2000, financed by the Bamforth Scholarship fund (with help from the Humanities Division of the University of Otago), I attended a conference at the University of St Andrews entitled 'Scotland: The Gendered Nation', which gave me a wider view of the concerns of contemporary Scottish writers and scholars. The paper I presented at the conference, "That great brute of a bunion!": the construction of masculinity in Jessie Kesson�s Glitter of Mica�, was published in the Spring 2001 issue of Scottish Studies Review. Following the conference I spent the rest of May in Scotland finding out more about Kesson and her writing under the generous tutelage of Kesson�s biographer, Dr Isobel (Tait) Murray, from the University of Aberdeen. Kesson wrote many plays for the BBC, and I was able to read Dr Murray�s copies of some of these unpublished works in the security of the Kings College Library, along with back copies of North-East Review to which Kesson contributed. In Edinburgh I visited the National Library of Scotland which holds back copies of The Scots Magazine containing pertinent articles by Kesson and her contemporaries. Then I travelled to those parts of North-East Scotland which feature most precisely in Kesson�s life and writing. My Scottish month was invaluable for its insight into the critical literary climate of Scotland, and for allowing me to reach Jessie Kesson imaginatively: through the boarded-up windows of the Orphanage at Skene; by the ruined Cathedral at Elgin; at the top of Our Lady�s Lane; and on the steps of her cottar house at Westertown Farm. [SEE FOOTNOTE] It was a privilege to trace Kesson�s footsteps and then to return to the other side of the world with a much keener sense of her 'place'. I would like to think this has carried over into my work, the structure of which is as follows: Chapter One gives a brief history of Jessie Kesson�s life and writing. Chapter Two focuses on Jessica Benjamin the feminist psychoanalytic critic whose work provides the main theoretical framework for my thesis. Chapter Three considers the expression of female sexuality in the novella Where the Apple Ripens, and the way society conspires to have it diminish rather than enhance a sense of female self-hood. Where the Apple Ripens is not Kesson�s first published work but, because it introduces the central concerns of my thesis through the experiences of an adolescent girl, I have chosen to begin with it rather than with The White Bird Passes and to work towards increasingly complex gender relations in succeeding chapters. In Chapter Four, The White Bird Passes, I look at the way Kesson depicts girls and women as instruments of male sexuality, controlled by a nervous patriarchy whose institutions (family, education, church) take away the promise of her female characters. Chapter Five is centred on The Glitter of Mica, and considers the consequences of a masculinity constructed around the destruction of 'the Mother'. Chapter Six considers the fate of the anonymous young woman in Another Time, Another Place, and examines the conventions of the social order that deny her self-definition. Chapter Seven also examines the social conventions that shape and limit the lives of Kesson�s female characters - this time in a selection of Kesson�s short stories and poems. In Chapter Eight I look at selected writers from the eighteenth to the twentieth-century whose work, in diverse and often contradictory ways, has contributed to an interrogation of gender in Scottish literature. This is not an historical and systematic survey of gender relations in Scotland; it is not even an historical and systematic survey of gender questions in Scottish literature. Rather, it is an impressionistic account of such matters in some selected Scottish literature - selected in part to cover some highly influential figures, and in part from Jessie Kesson�s more immediate context: feminine, rural, the North East. There is a place for such historical and systematic work, of course, and I hope that someone will do it. All I can hope for is that I may have provided some beginning but more importantly, that my work in this chapter will sharpen, further, an understanding of Jessie Kesson. I begin with the life and work of the poet, Robert Burns. As well as featuring in Kesson�s Glitter of Mica, Burns and his legacy are matters of influence in the gendered ideal of 'Scottishness' for both laymen and writers at home and abroad. Following Burns, I contrast the unconscious gender ideology which permeates Neil Gunn�s writing with the progressive awareness of gender issues that characterises the work of Lewis Grassic Gibbon and aligns the latter with Kesson�s. I then examine the idealised landscapes and sentimentalised characters of the Kailyard era and the hostile response of the anti-Kailyard writers. This leads into an examination of Hugh MacDiarmid�s poem, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. MacDiarmid, like Burns, was monumental on the Scottish literary scene and his efforts to rekindle the spirit of the primitive Scot through literature have made him influential with a smaller but equally significant group. What is of particular relevance to my work is that the ideal of 'Scottishness' fostered by writers such as Burns and MacDiarmid is heavily dependent on prescribed gender positions which promote the exploitation of women while rendering them subservient to men and politically powerless. It is from within this environment of gender-based Scottishness that Jessie Kesson and other women writers, were writing and arguing. Therefore, lastly, in Chapter Eight, I concentrate on those women writers whose work has the most relevance to the time, place and ideological content of Kesson�s writing: Violet Jacob, Catherine Carswell, Lorna Moon, Willa Muir and Nan Shepherd. The writing of all of these women is concerned with psychic well-being centred on human relations and/or self-determination and, of the five, the writings of Willa Muir and Nan Shepherd are considered more fully because of the particular contribution they make to my examination of Jessie Kesson: Willa Muir commented, both directly and indirectly, on gender matters. Nan Shepherd, quite apart from being a friend of many years to Jessie Kesson, wrote novels in which gender issues are entirely central. FOOTNOTE: I am indebted to Sir Maitland Mackie for giving me a guided tour of Westertown Farm, the setting for Darklands in The Glitter of Mica.

Dedicated to recording, portraying, and indicting the social inequities that he witnessed in nineteenth century Victorian England, one of Charles Dickens' many concerns was the roles assigned to women both in the public and private spheres. The purpose of this thesis is to examine the narratives of Amy Dorrit and Miss Wade in Dickens' Little Dorrit and Esther Summerson in Bleak House to explore the ways in which each woman conforms to, subverts, or rejects her socially prescribed roles as she seeks to create her own identity while simultaneously complying to the duties and roles assigned her. This study focuses on the oral and written narratives of these women exploring their words, stories, and symbolic imagery. It also contextualizes their narratives while answering the critical question: How does individual identity emerge amid rigorously circumscribed social roles? / Graduation date: 1995

The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the theoretical views underlying Karl Vennberg's literary criticism, and then to use these views as a starting point for a study of his poetry. Thus, the book is largely divided into two parts. The first deals with Vennberg's reviews and essays, the second with his poetry. As a critic and a modernist poet, Vennberg defends the autonomy of literature, but not from the organicist or aestheticising viewpoint common to post-romantic poetics. Instead, he brings to the fore another part of the heritage from romantic literary theory: the view of literature as ironic, critical and endlessly open. In his concept of irony as an endlessly ambiguous negativity, we encounter an understanding of literature that permeates all of his work. Poetry is, thus, defined by him as a freedom in relation to everything decided - a critical, destructive force that questions ingrained ideas, concepts and ideologies in the name of nothing more than negation. This theoretical stand also characterises Vennberg's relation to mysticism. He obviously feels affiliated to it's negative, critical side, it's via negativa, but does not accept the dialectics through which it reappropriates negativity into religious belief. The final part of the dissertation consists of close readings of specific poems, brought into relief by the theoretical context found in Vennberg's critical writings.

Considered mostly ancillary to her fiction, Virginia Woolf’s prolific career in literary criticism has rarely been studied in its entirety and in its own right. This study situates her in the common critical practices of her day and crystallizes basic tenets and a critical theory of sorts from her critical journalism published 1904–1928: the author argues that Woolf does not advocate a policing role for the critic, but rather that critics foster art in collaboration with readers and writers. Finally, this work discusses Woolf’s appeal to writers to invest all their energy in improving their skills in character portrayal to adequately depict all classes and genders in order to invent a new kind of psychological fiction.

The word poshlost’ denotes the concepts of banality, vulgarity or phlistinism, and has been an intellectual and cultural obsession since the second half of the nineteenth century, lasting well into the twentieth century. Russian author Vladimir Nabokov attempted to familiarize English-speaking readers with the notion of poshlost’ in his book Nikolai Gogol (1944); it is hard to find any English-language exposition of the term that does not cite Nabokov’s vigorous elaboration of it. Moreover, it is arguably a convention in scholarship to acknowledge the relationship between poshlost’ and Nabokov’s uncompromising moral and aesthetic values. Poshlost’ has often been discussed as a theme in Nabokov’s fiction, and its bearing on Nabokov’s role as a cultural critic has often been assessed, but there are few studies that examine how the concept influences the overall composition and interpretation of his fiction. This thesis examines how poshlost’ functions as a literary device in Nabokov’s final Russian-language novel Dar (1938), which tells the story of an émigré Russian writer living in Berlin in the 1920s. I look at poshlost’ from the perspective of the theories of aesthetic innovation advanced by semiotician and cultural theorist Iurii Lotman, and within this framework I link poshlost’ with the formation and re-formation of the protagonist’s, as well as the author’s, consciousness. I consider it a relational construct rather than simply an immanent feature of the text, as it would be considered in Russian Formalist approaches. Among the topics I focus on are individuation, self-modelling and autocommunication as facets of the process of personal and creative maturation. I argue that poshlost’ serves as a means of modelling Nabokov’s aesthetics as a textual feature and is a multisignifying and a multifaceted device whose overall artistic effect depends on the conditions under which it is employed.

Thesis (M.W.S.)--Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2001. / Bibliography: leaves 130-135.

This report argues that through his lived experiences of growing up in his hometown of Lowell, MA, and the joys and traumas he accrued from early childhood and into early adulthood, Jack Kerouac began to rewrite, reimagine, and reconstruction Lowell in several different works and iterations to attempt to address and exorcise the ghosts of his past. For my argument, I study several of Kerouac’s works: Visions of Gerard (1963), Doctor Sax: Faust Part Three (1959), Visions of Cody (1972), and Book of Dreams (1960). Pulling from the fields of Beat studies, literary criticism, childhood studies, psychology, geocriticism, and American cultural history, I attempt to highlight the translation and transformation of Lowell in Kerouac’s texts into a psycho-literary space. / text