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This thesis deals with violence in the language of Timothy Findley's work: both the language of narration and the language of dialogue between the characters. In the thesis, I will examine the way language is violated for the purpose of re-assembling it into a more competent vehicle for communication. Bakhtin's theory of dialogics and Robert Kroetsch's theory of violent silence will be examined with regard to Findley's consistent focus on the way language must be violated to render it useful, and why any character of Findley's who refuses to violate language and chooses instead to submit to silence, is destroyed. According to Findley, the only means of validating existence and literature is to dispel silence with dialogue. I will prove that Timothy Findley treats violence as a positive and necessary precursor to any sort of creativity, asserting again and again through his texts that nothing can be constructed until something is first torn down.

"Poetic Attention" reveals how John Ashbery's ties with past literary traditions elucidate his own personal aesthetic. Starting with a review of Ashbery's critical reception, the thesis shows how Ashbery's poetry and its reception are polarized in two major post-Romantic approaches to poetry: the Romantic, and the "objectivist" tradition of modernism. Beginning with a look at how Ashbery's early poetry reflects both paradigms, I focus on moments where both are simultaneously active. I demonstrate how impressionism, as a sensibility with certain methodological, epistemological, and technical concerns and devices having to do with the conjunction of consciousness and the world in perception, best describes the interaction between Ashbery's Romantic and modernist strains. Impressionism helps us understand how Ashbery negotiates the Romantic desire for resolutions to spiritual crises and the modernist focus on objects in and of themselves by treating a searching attentiveness to those objects as a value in itself.

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This dissertation employs categories of analysis that previously have been under-appreciated, Ignored or unapplied in Soseki studies-gender, the body, and desire-both for textual explication and to examine the intrapersonal relationships in the novels of Natsume Soseki (1867-1916), with emphasis placed on his final, uncompleted work, Meian (Light and Darkness, 1916). Instead of presenting literary representations of prevailing Meiji ideological positions such as risshin shusse (rising in the world) entrepreneurism and success scenarios for men or ryosai kenbo (good wives, wise mothers) domestic scenarios for women. Soseki focuses on erotic triangles which expose gender difference and gender inequalities of Meiji-Taisho Japan. Investigation of fictional erotic triangles also reveals the possibility of homosocial desire in an age when discourse was increasingly antithetical to non-normative expressions of male-male desire. Soseki's gender representations frequently invert conventional gender expectations with his depictions of passive males and women desiring mastery over the male, and these depictions in turn are mapped and analyzed throughout the novelist's brief ten-year career as a novelist. Foucault's observation of the body-where local social practices are linked up with organization of power-assists in our better comprehending the formation of gender identities and the development of a national subject. Always embodying a historical moment, Soseki's novels open a window onto gender conflict, further the historicization of gender concepts, and finally suggest the possibility, in some cases, of resistance to gender/role stereotyping, as well as narrativize the author's personal ambivalence toward Western egalitarianism of the sexes. / Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 221-241). / Also available by subscription via World Wide Web / xvi, 241 leaves, bound ill. 29 cm

Typescript. / Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1990. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 211-225) / Microfiche. / x, 225 leaves, bound 29 cm

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 154-160). / v, 160 leaves, bound 29 cm

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