According to Julia Kristeva, abjection is an unconscious process (a cut) every human being has to operate to be able to autonomize her or himself from the dyadic relationship with the mother. An autonomous subject then has access to what « sémiotique tensive » (influenced by the phenomenology of perception andstructuralism) calls « field of presence » from where she or he can enunciate and thus enter the Symbolic order. In this thesis, I posit that the field of presence changes from modernity to postmodernity, and that some avant-garde authors, such as Michel Butor in the 1960's, are articulating the shift from one to the other and modifying the relationship between subject and abject. My textual analyses focus on two of Butor's most innovative books : Mobile. Étude pour une représentation des États-Unis (published in 1962) and 6 810 000 litres d'eau par seconde. Étude stéréophonique (usually referred to by critics as Niagara, the title of its English translation, published in 1965). My hypothesis is that, on the level of enunciation, Mobile shows traces of a modem field of presence, where the margins are highly dysphoric (abject), while Niagara tends to represent a more postmodern one, using différent discursive stratégies to defuse the abject threat. I close with a reflection on the state of abjection as a subjectivity inducing process, the subject it exhausts in postmodern times, and the new relationship to the body (therefore, to perception and enunciation) it imposes.

The purpose of this dissertation is to trace the literary career of Flannery O'Connor and to show that the writer's dramatic sense could not be separated from her vision of faith and reality. This study focuses particularly on Flannery O'Connor's status in literary circles, on her critical essays collected in Mystery and Manners, on an assessment of her two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, and her volumes of short stories. As a Catholic writer in the South, Flannery O'Connor observed and interpreted reality in the light of specific doctrines of the Church. Miss O'Connor's fiction puzzled and outraged her critics and readers by its tough Christianity, Southern grotesques, its themes and its violence. Implicit in this study is the premise that a critical approach to the fiction of Flannery O'Connor according to her own statements on her position of a Catholic writer in the fundamentalist South will give the reader a fuller understanding of the author's vision of faith and reality as exposed in her fiction.Chapter I traces Flannery O'Connor's literary career and shows how the author grew from a young, talented writer at the University of Iowa into an artist whose fictional output was remarkable. A study of the criticism accorded Flannery O'Connor's fiction follows a chronological pattern and shows how reviewers and critics, confused though they were by her early fiction, took her seriously during her lifetime and acclaimed her posthumous publications as unique contributions to American letters.Chapter II is devoted to both articles and essays that Flannery O'Connor published in her lifetime and several essays she never revised for publication. These essays as a whole shed light on her Catholic theological viewpoint expressed in her fiction.Chapter III is devoted to an analysis of Flannery O'Connor's early stories which remained uncollected until the publication of Flannery O'Connor: The Complete Stories (1971). These early stories, for the most part inferior in technique and maturity of expression, deserve attention because they contain many of the elements which foreshadow the excellence of the author's mature works.Chapter IV is concerned with the study of Flannery O'Connor's two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away. In both novels Flannery O'Connor is preoccupied with religious concerns and absorbed in her Christian vision with its deep concern for the redemption and salvation of the human spirit through trials of fire and love.Chapter V deals with the bulk of Flannery O'Connor's short fiction contained in the collections A Good Man Is Hard To Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge and Flannery O'Connor: The Complete Stories. The most prevalent themes in the short stories deal with man's flight from a pursuing God, sin, and the problems of salvation and death.Regarding the extent to which Flannery O'Connor's vision has been shaped by her Catholic faith, it is my thesis that the artist's theological implications are the touchstones on which she built the vision of faith and reality which she revealed in her fiction.

This thesis argues the case for the parodic voice in a range of works by Richard Strauss. In doing so, it challenges the long-held view of Strauss as a composer whose music has little to offer beyond superficial grandeur and shallow sentimentality; music which may be impressive in some respects but, ultimately, remains stubbornly one-dimensional. Parody — a double-voiced device — plays with texts and subtexts and, by definition, insists upon the presence of dimensions additional to the one located on the surface. Thus, the grandly pompous or sweetly sentimental exterior of a given passage may function within a context in which the pomposity or sentimentality is undone, critiqued, or, at very least, dented by the critical presence of a parodic voice. Indeed, I argue that we should be particularly sceptical of reading at face value those episodes in Strauss's works where the trivial, the banal, or, very often, the sublime is (apparently) projected, for this is frequently a cue for the parodic. The emergence of Strauss's parodic voice can be traced to a work relatively early in his career: the Burleske for piano and orchestra (1886). Here, in this quasi piano concerto (or, indeed, anti-piano concerto) we find double-voiced strategies used to telling effect. This study therefore takes the Burleske as its starting point and uses the work as a means of introducing parody theory generally. Subsequent chapters consider in detail specific episodes in Der Rosenkavalier (1910), Ariadne auf Naxos (both the 1912 version and the 1916 revision), and Intermezzo (1923). Thus, the body of works that form the core of this investigation are firmly rooted in the period of Strauss's so-called 'volte-face', the post-Elektra period when the composer was conventionally thought to have turned his back on progressive trends and produced one shallow, empty, irrelevant work after another. Examination of the composer's parodic voice suggests otherwise.

This thesis proceeds from the observation that Milton is concerned by the presence of surplus material in the physical world. The blind Pharisee in Samson Agonistes dismisses his 'redundant locks, / Robustious to no purpose clustering down.' In the Ludlow masque, Comus complains that the Lady's 'moral babble' would leave nature 'strangled with her waste fertility.' Creation, in Paradise Lost, requires the expulsion of 'black tartareous cold infernal dregs' and leaves behind an abyss full of matter. Adam and Eve live in a garden where the sun shines with more warmth than they need, where the nighttime sky is bright with a perplexing canopy of lights. Vines and overgrown branches threaten to make their walks unpassable, while fruit, uncollected and uneaten, falls to the ground. An interest in superfluity is a characteristic feature of Milton's imagination. He insists on limits, then turns to what is left out as excess or waste. This habit of mind influences Milton's description of acts of choosing and gives shape to his account of the relationship between creation and God. It complicates his answer to the sort of question Augustine asks of God in the Confessions: 'Do heaven and earth contain you because you have filled them? Or do you fill them and overflow them because they do not contain you?' Milton is troubled by the idea of purposeless divine work. He is bothered by the thought of a creation that is useless or unnecessary. In Paradise Lost, I argue, the reason for the existence for the world is tied to the reason for sin.

The absence of a public dialogue, either about or between Assia Djebar and Hélène Cixous is mystifying, because they move in academic/literary/intellectual/biographical circles that overlap. Reading for the textual dialogue between Cixous's and Djebar's writing reveals the development of a narrative and writing position, referred to here as the 'border- subject', the roots of which stem from the authors' biographies. Reading Djebar's and Cixous's oeuvre, against the background of Franchise Lionnet's and Gloria Anzaldua's theoretical landscape, simultaneously enlarges the critical optic as well as the scope of each individual writer's oeuvre. What characterises the fictional border subject in Les Impatients and Dedans is a willingness to transgress boundaries. The fictional border subject negotiates with three different spatial dynamics: the separation from the other, spatial metaphors, and history's invasion of domestic space. In the subsequent 'Le Rire de la méduse' and Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement, Djebar and Cixous write as border subjects in order to craft liberating strategies intended to redress the mis-representation or absence of women's body. As a consequence of the preceding texts, L'Amour, la fantasia and Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage contain the authors' semi-autobiographical questioning of the border subject in relation to origin, language, belonging and home: this enables a re-animation of the Algerian past, both individual and collective. Lastly, in Le Blanc de I'Algérie and Le Jour où je n'étais pas là the border subject is put aside: although absent, the narrating 'je' remains connected with events and bears witness. This dimension of testimony represents an exciting development in the authors' oeuvre and their political commitment. What emerges from a comparative reading is the authors' transformation of the border subject into an engagement with the Algerian present. Solidarity amongst Algerian born writers can transform literature into an indestructible repository for the dream of a multi- lingual, multi-cultural Algeria.

This thesis analyzes the drama and prose fiction of the upper-middleclass Communist writer Patrick Hamilton (1904-62), drawing on a considerable amount of primary material. Part of the purpose of the thesis is to restore Hamilton's reputation as a writer of significance by effecting a judicious critical assessment of his unjustly neglected oeuvre. It is argued that throughout his work are discernible traces of a crisis of hegemony which afflicted the British ruling order in the interwar period and of which one aspect is of special relevance here -- viz., a certain problematization of Victorian and Edwardian codes of English bourgeois masculinity engendered by the Great War and its shell-shocked aftermath and peculiarly operative among those ex-Public School writers who, like Hamilton, were born around the mid-1900s, and became prominent in the 1930s. One, well-known, consequence of this crisis was a sexualized transfer of allegiance by some bourgeois literary intellectuals to the Soviet Union and the working-class; another was a gravitation towards (crypto-) Fascism. From the time of his 1926 novel, Craven House. Hamilton sought to anatomize the potential for fascistic 'evil' latent in the southern English petty bourgeoisie. It is demonstrated that his fictional analyses were rendered more profound by his intellectual assimilation of Marxism from 1933 onwards. It is also shown that the specific appeal of Soviet Marxism for this writer resided in its quasi-religious capacity to satisfy a craving for authenticity in a social world characterized by deceitful quotidian role-playing and, in the drama especially, to facilitate the unmasking of villainy and subserve an obsession with revenge. Congenial to this brand of Marxism, it is contended, is the monologic tradition of the realist novel, to which Hamilton's fiction almost invariably conforms. The Protestant discourse of confession which nurtures that tradition is often discernible in the impulse to confess which tends to characterize the rendition of the sexual in Hamilton's texts and, in general, his problematic representation of gender and sexuality is closely scrutinized. It is concluded that, despite its demonstrable limitations and inherent problems, much of Hamilton's work can be rendered valuable to a contemporary radical audience.

The subject of this thesis is revision in Wordsworth, and the ways in which he translates material into psychic and renewable experience. The first three chapters offer different contexts for a theory of vision theological, philosophical and aesthetic. Chapter One discusses Wordsworth's relation to Coleridge's Unitarianism, as it evolves in the philosophical poetry and in the concept of The Recluse. I examine how Coleridge's 'love of "the Great", and "the Whole"' determines his critique of Wordsworth and the self-analysis of The Prelude. Chapter Two is divided between the Wordsworthian practice of revision, which transfigures visual memory for mental use, and the Coleridgean, that reads in landscape the symbolic text of a 'God in nature'. In Chapter Three, I address the definitions of vision Wordsworth makes independently of Coleridge, and in relation to Milton and Burke, to the applied aesthetics of the picturesque, and to their extension in the scenes of The Prelude. The second half of the thesis considers the psychological content of Wordsworthian landscape. Chapters Four and Six follow the mental drama of the Tour, with its topographical notation of expectation, disappointment and recovery. These motifs are also related to the determining structures of the French Revolution, and to The Prelude's reading of the language and aspirations of the 1798 Recluse. Chapter Six examines strategies of compensation, and their function in the ideology of reconciling mind and Nature. Chapter Five is concerned with revision proper, and the figures by which it is represented. As well as revision of a textual kind, I discuss Wordsworth's development of the more literal-minded 'second sight' of eighteenth-century aesthetics.

Alarcón was writing at a time when Spaniards increasingly came to perceive Spain as a nation in decline, and to seek the remedy for their country's malaise in a whole series of economic, political, social, and, in particular, moral reforms. One consequence of this was to intensify the debate concerning effect of the theatre on the moral values of the young, another was to stimulate a renewed interest in the art of war and the martial virtues which were held to have been the source of earlier glories, and yet another was to impel political philosophers and theologians alike to consider anew how the necessities of government in this uncertain political and economic climate might be reconciled with the ethical principles promoted by the Catholic Church. This study contends that both the style and the content of his plays show Alarcón to have been both well-informed and keenly interested in such matters, and indicate that, whilst he concurs with many contemporary moralists in identifying the source of the national malaise as a self-indulgent obsession with sensual pleasure and social posturing, and in suggesting that the cure lies in an adoption of a moral code based upon stoic self-discipline and other such virtues, he makes it clear that the implementation of these virtues in the complex situations encountered in everyday life depends to a large extent upon the prudent use of deception. Thus, in his work, Alarcón presents two principal forms of deception: the lies, slanders, illusions, and acts of imposture of those who seek the illicit gratification of their worldly desires; and the cautious equivocation, concealments, disguises, and stratagems of those who know that appearances deceive and who seek to ensure the reputation, integrity and safety of their compatriots and co-religionists. I also maintain that this is a distinction which applies to the comedia as much as to the world which it portrays, and that Alarcón is critical of the indecorous actions and the ornate language, music and spectacle of the comedia as popularised by Lope, and develops a dramatic technique which requires the spectator to submit his initial emotional and imaginative response to the drama to the scrutiny of reason if he is to understand the play. In this way, Alarcón's own creative technique proves to be yet another example of the prudent use of deception illustrated in his plays.

Any composer's writings form an important source for the critical study of his music: they must nevertheless be used with care, Carter's writings are considered as part of a tradition in American music. His musical development up to 1959 is briefly sketched, with particular reference to those elements which with hindsight can be seen to have been most significant in the evolution of a mature musical language - various experimental and non-western musical traditions, influences from other domains of art, and the philosophy of A. N. Vhitehead. In order to avoid the spectre of 'merely technical analysis' of atonal music, we need an analytical approach which can describe the way in which the characteristic properties of a musical surface (principally pitch register and duration; secondarily dynamic and timbre) act to create larger structures in time. Pitch-class Set Theory is rejected as embodying an unacceptable level of abstraction, and failing to account for the dynamic, developmental aspects of musical structure, Instead, a more flexible and sensitive method is developed, drawing on an alternative analytical tradition for twentieth-century music. Precedents and justifications for this method are sought in contemporary accounts of structure in general, and parallels and distinctions are drawn between the hierarchic structures of tonal music, atonal music, and language, This context-sensitive analytical approach is then applied to three of Carter's most characteristic works: the String Quartet no.2 (1959); the Double Concerto for Harpsichord, Piano, and Two Chamber Orchestras (1961); and the Concerto for Orchestra (1969).

This thesis examines the effects of Duras's and Robbe-Grillet's intertextual relationship upon the development of their literary careers. Previous critics have predominantly studied the two writers within the mutually exclusive discourses of feminism and structuralism, with the result that the extensive areas of common ground between them have been overlooked. In order to compare their works and to read between the lines of existing criticism, a comparative and double-gendered approach, termed 'reading in pairs', is adopted. Chapter 1 provides the contextual framework for the paired readings of the subsequent four chapters: it explores the main parallel shifts between Duras's and Robbe-Grillet's corpuses, and examines how these betray the workings of a sustained, permutating psychodynamic rivalry. Chapter 2 studies how similarities of practice in works of the 1950s and early 1960s reflect a brief period of emulative alliance. Chapter 3 focuses on the combative dynamics which characterize their intertextual relationship during the 1970s and 1980s, following Duras's adoption by feminist theorists. Comparison of Duras's and Robbe-Grillet's treatment of explicit sado-erotic thematics brings into question some of the gender-related assumptions of previous approaches. Chapters 4 and 5 then study the final stages of the two writers' rivalry within the appropriately narcissistic genre of autobiography. They examine how Duras's and Robbe-Grillet's respective portrayals of the self and of literary history are influenced by the reversal in fortunes brought about by the phenomenal success of Duras's L'Amant. By comparing Duras's and Robbe-Grillet's treatment of similar thematic and generic elements, this study sheds new light on both writers' oeuvres and reassesses many of the assumptions and findings of existing criticism. The Concluding Remarks suggest that the 'reading in pairs' method might fruitfully be applied to the study of other writers of the opposite sex, and thus contribute to a more rounded picture of literary history.