This dissertation is a study of the relationship between the modern Künstlerromane of Arnold Bennett, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf and issues of embodiment. Born of the field of aesthetics, the literary genre of Künstlerroman inherits its conflicts. The chief dilemma of the form is how an isolated artistic consciousness connects with the world through a creative act. Bennett, Joyce, and Woolf offer different and contradictory resolutions. By examining how each writer conceives the body, I discover in Woolf the idea of an ethical aesthetics that contravenes the assumed polarity between mind and body, between self and other, and between material and ideal. Written only a few years apart, Clayhanger (1910), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and The Voyage Out (1915) tell a compelling story of the relationship between embodiment and a creative life.

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Traditional interpretations of James Joyce's Dubliners have often focused on the pervasive "paralysis" of the city, covered in the stories' range of "childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life." However, these approaches have limited their focus on the women in the stories, often spotlighting the male characters--and the author--through a Freudian lens; consequently, the interpretations have overlooked important considerations in light of developing feminist criticism. Through a selection of the stories, this thesis attempts to show how the text of Dubliners offers a cultural critique of the ways in which women were oppressed and constrained by the Irish Catholic ideology which established their roles within society. By the close of the collection, however, Joyce's creation of an inchoate image of the multi-dimensional, sexualized women of his mature works, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, is embodied in the character of Gretta Conroy in "The Dead." Using Judith Butler's theory of performative acts of gender construction and Julia Kristeva's cultural dynamic of "the maternal" in the Stabat Mater, this criticism of the text lifts the female characters from the backgrounds of Dubliners and reveals the diseased culture of Dublin from another perspective. The female characters in the text act out expected cultural roles, often modeled after the Irish Catholic ideal of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Through the speech, silence, and physical acts of the female characters in Dubliners, "the female" in Irish-Catholic-Victorian culture is constructed--and reinforced--for Joyce's audience. This reading then furthers our understanding of the institutions, values, and practices which defined "womanhood" in nineteenth-century Dublin. / Graduation date: 1999

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of English

Diss. : Zürich : 1993. / Bibliogr. p. 159-169.

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The study has two main aims: it presents an overview of Tsvetaeva's poetic world and it analyses one of her major themes, that of the conflict between the lyric hero and reality. / Close reading of Tsvetaeva's entire oeuvre reveals a system of invariant themes, motifs and their concrete manifestations; this system is hierarchically organized. / The study describes the structure of Tsvetaeva's artistic universe: its mutually opposed worlds ("this", non-authentic, and "the other", authentic) and its different types of characters. / Particular attention is given to the peculiarities of Tsvetaeva's lyric hero, notably intensity, the "two-fold nature", and the predilection for conflict. Analysis focuses on various forms of conflict of the lyric hero--with the world, with life, and with the self. This demonstrates the total disharmony of Tsvetaeva's universe.

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Zugl.: Mainz, Univ., Habil.-Schr., 2006