published_or_final_version / Fine Arts / Master / Master of Philosophy

This study examines Mary McCarthy's three major female-protagonist works of fiction--The Company She Keeps (1942), A Charmed Life (1955), and The Group (1963)--in terms of the author's attitude towards femaleness. It confronts Elizabeth Janeway's assessment in Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing (1979) that McCarthy's works need not be reviewed in a survey essay on "Women's Literature" because they are "essentially masculine even if not conventionally so" (345). The thesis is that McCarthy's fiction receives a pattern of criticism faulting its lack of imagination and its inability to create "living" characters precisely because she maintained a high degree of self-censorship and control over parts of her awareness that were not male-identified. She was not free to imagine in areas that might unleash the horrors beneath what Norman Mailer has called "the thin juiceless crust" upon which McCarthy's "nice girls" live their lives.Each novel finds the protagonist at a different stage of modern womanhood and using a variety of male-identified responses. Meg Sargent of Company is a young New York sophisticate dealing with divorce, employment, travel, social life, political activism, casual sexual encounters, and the resolution of childhood trauma through psychoanalysis. Martha Sinnott of Charmed is a married woman returning with her second husband to the bohemian artists' community of her first husband in order to resolve the conflict of literary mentorship and patriarchal dominance that had marked the old relationship. In The Group Kay Strong and eight other Vassar Class of '33 females serve as literary embodiments of the social ailment that Betty Friedan cited in her 1963 polemic, The Feminine Mystique.McCarthy's three autobiographies--Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957), How I Grew (1985), and Intellectual Memoirs (1992)--illuminate many reasons for and consequences of her male-identified approach to living and writing. Social context for such a fate stems in part from having come of age in the 1930s, being a member of what Elaine Showalter refers to as "The Other Lost Generation." McCarthy's texts provide literary illustration of a common response to patriarchy. / Department of English

Proefschrift--Godgeleedheid--Utrecht, 1978. / Mention parallèle de titre ou de responsabilité : Gerrit Jan Vos, Az. Résumé en allemand. Bibliogr. des œuvres de G.J. Vos Az. p. 220-223. Bibliogr. p.215-220. Index.

The texts in this study interrogate the dominant myths which have affected the constructs of identity and history in the white Australian socio-historical context. These myths are exposed by White as ideologically determined and as operating by processes of exclusion, repression and marginalisation. White challenges the autonomy of both European and Australian cultures, reveals the ideological complicity between them and adopts a critical approach to all Western cultural assumptions. As a post-colonial writer, White shares the need of both post-colonising and post-colonised groups for an identity established not in terms of the colonial power but in terms of themselves. As a dissident white male, he is a privileged member of the post- colonising group but one who rejects the dominant discourses as illegitimate and unlegitimating. He offers a re-writing of the myths underpinning colonial and post-colonising discourses which privileges their suppressed and repressed elements. His re-writings affect aboriginal men and women, white women and the 'privileged' white male whose subjection to social control is masked as unproblematic freedom. White's re-writing of myth enbraces the post-modern as well as the post- colonial. He not only deconstructs and demystifies the phallogocentric/ethnocentric order of things; he also attempts to avoid totalization by privileging indeterminacy, fragmentation, hybridization and those liminary states which defy articulation: the ecstatic, the abject, the unspeakable. He himself is denied authority in that his re-writings are presented as mere acts in the always provisional process of making interpretations. White acknowledges the problematics of both presentation and re-presentation - an unresolved tension between the post-colonial desire for self-definition and the post-modern decentring of all meaning and interpretation permeates his discourse. The close readings of the texts attempt, accordingly, to reflect varying oppositional strategies: those which seek to overturn hierarchies and expose power-relations and those which seek an idiom in which contemporary Australia may find its least distorted reflexion. Within this ideological context, the Lacanian thematics of the subject, and their re-writing by Kristeva, are linked with dialectical criticism in an attempt to reflect a strictly provisional process of (re) construction

This study represents an exploration of White's concept of transcendence in The Tree of Man and Voss by means of a detailed account of some of the key patterns of imagery deployed in these novels. White's imagery is a key mode of expression in his work, not simply manifesting in overarching religious symbols and framing structures but figuring in constantly modulated tropes continuous with the narrative, as well as in minor, but no less significant images occasionally susceptible to etymological or onomastic reading. While no attempt is made to provide an exhaustive exploration of the tropes at work in these novels, a sufficient range of material is covered, and its metaphoric density adequately penetrated, to highlight and explore a fundamental concern in White's work with a paradoxical unity underlying the dualities inherent in temporal existence. A useful way of approaching his fiction is to view the perpetual modulations of his imagery as the dramatisation of an enantiodromia or play of opposites, in which the conflicts of duality are elaborated and paradoxically - though typically only momentarily - resolved. This resolution or coincidence of opposites is a significant feature of his notion of transcendence as well as his depictions of illuminatory experience, and in this respect White's metaphysics share an essential characteristic, not only of Christianity, but a range of religious and mythological systems concerned with expressing a transcendent reality. Despite these analogies, however, the novels at hand are not so tightly bound to Christian, or any other, meaning-making systems so as to constitute sustained allegories, and hence this study does not aim to chart a series of correspondences between White's images and biblical or mythological symbols. Indeed, a criticism often levelled at White - with The Tree of Man and Voss typically figuring in support of this claim - is that he too rigidly imposes religious frameworks on his work. An extension of this view is formulated in the Jungian critique of White's corpus offered by David Tacey, who argues that White's conception of transcendence is consistently challenged by the archetypal significance of the images he employs, which point to a contrary process of psycho-spiritual regression in his protagonists. In a fundamentally text-based approach, this study explores White's use of imagery while taking biblical resonances and archetypal interpretations into account, and suggests that, though White's images are highly allusive, they are not merely agents of imported Christian, or other traditional symbolic values. Nor do they undermine the authenticity of his depiction of the spirituality of his protagonists, or obtrude on the fabric of the narrative. Instead, the range of his images are - though often ambivalent - integral to a network of mercurial tropes which articulate and constantly evaluate a notion of transcendence through inflections and oscillations rather than equations of meaning.

The focus of this thesis has been to engage in a hermeneutic dialogue with Patrick White's novel The solid mandala, to provide an explication of the dual nature of narcissistic wounding. To this end a brief review of Patrick White's novels is given, which traces a thematic development of the hero's strivings to attain wholeness and merger with an idealized image. This struggle is understood to reflect man's strivings to return to a state of omnipotent fusion with the maternal image, be it God, nature, the idealized other, or the self. Literature which reflects the dual nature of narcissistic wounding is reviewed, and the concept of narcissism is traced from the historical roots of Freud, to current understandings of the function and experience of narcissism. Emphasis is given to understanding the experiential nature of narcissistic wounding. As such it is implied that narcissism is a normal developmental component which requires the facilitation of containment and reflection for its transformation into appropriate adult functioning. The importance of the maternal environment is discussed, together with the various theoretical conceptualizations of the consequences of failure of the environment. The hermeneutic dialogue with the novel's description of the experiences of the twins, Waldo and Arthur provides the basis for an amplification of the experience of narcissistic wounding. This amplification is used as clinical material from which a number of psychoanalytic formulations are drawn. These formulations are supported by a number of clinical examples from the researcher's own practice. There appears to be evidence for the value of focusing on the dual nature of the experience of narcissistic wounding. This focus reveals two aspects of experience, a damaged, positive, libidinal aspect and a defensive, pathological destructive aspect. Amplification of these two aspects of experience contribute to further the understanding of the conflictual experience of narcissistic wounding, and suggest the necessity for such an understanding for effective therapeutic intervention

According to parliamentary theory, an executive that is made and unmade by the Lower House of the legislature alone is responsible to that House. But an executive whose existence is not solely dependent on the legislature is not responsible to the legislature. In such systems, usually the main branches of government have specific functions, possess limited rights of veto over one another, and have independent existences. They are known as separation-of-powers systems. The purpose of the thesis is to discover whether the prewar Japanese polity approximated more closely to a parliamentary system or a separation-of-powers system. Its method is to identify all the political institutions which made and unmade the executive in 1890-1940. When institutions are not easily identifiable, for example, when a cabinet resigned because of public rioting, the influences responsible for Cabinet changes are translated into politico-institutional forces. Because there was always a struggle over the selection of Prime Ministers and then over Cabinet seats, the selection of Prime Ministers is examined separately from the formation of cabinets. A classification of the reasons for Cabinet composition and its rise and fall is used to determine whether institutional relationships are better understood in terms of parliamentary or separation-of-powers theory. The results of the investigation reveal that: i) Each of the prewar political institutions had a separate identifiable function and tried to have the executive pursue the policies it desired in matters related to its function. ii) Each institution possessed a limited veto power over each of the others and used this power to ensure that the Cabinet included representatives from it. The Cabinet regularly consisted of representatives from most institutions: the two Houses of the Diet, the Army, the Wavy, and the Civil Service. iii) Each institution had an existence independent of each of the others, and only the Cabinet never had an independent power base. Usually at least three institutions had to support a new Prime Minister before he could assume office, and usually two had to conspire to force his resignation. Because only rarely could any single institution on its own raise or pull down an entire ministry, the existence of the Cabinet was separate from each individual institution and the Cabinet was not responsible to any. Separation-of-powers theory alone emphasises the lack of the executive's total dependence on the legislature, or on any other institution for that matter. The need for at least three institutions to raise and two to pull down a ministry indicates that the Cabinet never had a completely independent existence. Not having its own separate power base, it was the joint creation of other institutions. Though its existence was separate from each individual institution, its rise and fall was not independent of combinations of other institutions. The prewar Japanese polity, however, bore only a slight similarity to a parliamentary system, in which the executive is entirely dependent on the Lower House of the legislature. Because only very rarely could the Lower House of the legislature on its own pull down an entire ministry, only occasionally were parliamentary type forces present, and the polity functioned regularly as a separation-of-powers system. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate

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Saint-Denys Garneau est connu pour être le premier poète québécois moderne, mais sa pensée philosophique et esthétique est peu connue du grand public, sans doute parce qu'elle est dispersée dans des fragments de son journal, de sa correspondance et quelques articles de revue. Ce mémoire s'est donné comme objectif de rassembler cette pensée pour en montrer la cohérence profonde et la beauté. « C'est l'être qui fut présent, visible, par le côté de la beauté », écrit Garneau. Cette phrase illustre bien comment l'auteur situe le beau, dans le sillage de la pensée thomiste, comme un transcendantal, c'est-à-dire un versant de l'être, comme le sont la bonté, l'unité et la véracité. La mission de l'artiste consiste à aborder le réel par ce versant; d'en pénétrer les richesses pour en gravir les degrés, et en indiquer le sommet dans l'être subsistant.

La presente tesis "Las multitudes políticas de Lima y Callao de 1912 y la elección de Billinghurst" para optar el grado de Doctor en Historia, mereció larga dedicación desde que apareció como inquietud por investigar el gobierno y la administración de dicho mandatario (1912-1914), pero por la magnitud y alcances de la misma hubo que reformularla y orientarla a una propuesta de caracterización de aquél período: el populismo temprano y urbano, el primero del siglo y, tal vez el segundo en aparecer en la Historia del Perú. / Tesis