In this dissertation, I investigate American specular narrative which displays a significant level of visual empiricism and examine the implications of the eyewitness perspective such narrative assumes. Based on the epistemological assumption that "to see is to know," specular narrative imagines an empirical access (via visual processes of the gaze) to a knowable reality, and uses the figure of the eyewitness (by way of narration, focalization, and narrative technique) to render a supposedly transparent relation between narrative and reality. This study draws upon theories of narrative, realism, subjectivity, and the gaze to explore this narrative eyewitness, tracking how the impulse to construct an authentic American identity, which materializes during American colonization, influences early American discourse and recurs as a specular realism in later American narrative. I examine how the illusion of the eyewitness sustains Realist ideology in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century narrative (William Dean Howells' A Hazard of New Fortunes, Henry James' The Spoils ofPoynton, and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth); how new spatial and temporal paradigms created by automotive technology affect the eyewitness (and a particular vision of America) in the American road book, specifically Theodore Dreiser's A Hoosier Holiday, and how the specular fetishism of the nonfiction novel, particularly Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, problematizes narrative objectivity and sutures the reader into the narrative as eyewitness / Department of English

This study proposes that modernity is constitutively based upon a synchronic temporality which perpetuates the present of the ego. Within this matrix, history is subject to the processes of subjectivization and the 'otherness' of the past disappears. Postmodernism, it is argued, designates the attempt to disinter a properly historical thinking, or historicity, from the recursive temporality of the modern. This attempt is predicated upon the retroactive temporality of the future perfect which, whilst also a synchrony, arises from a productive tension between the past, the present and the future. The self-divisive time of the future perfect expedites the discomfiture of the ego and its concomitant subjectivization of the past and, by so doing, registers the historicity of that past. The relation between the modern and the postmodern forms of temporality is expressed by the Lacanian distinction between the imaginary and symbolic orders. It is argued, moreover, that this distinction is manifest in the narrative forms of the contemporary novel. Whilst the modern form of the contemporary novel replicates the structures of an egocentric repletion of synchrony, the postmodern novel displaces this imaginary problematic to the symbolic. By employing a variety of techniques founded upon retroactivity, postmodern novels are thereby shown to foster a disclosure of the structure of historicity. Within this rubric five novels are given extended consideration: William Gibson's Neuromancer, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and John Banville's Doctor Copernicus.

The "essai crepusculaire" was one of the most popular literary genres during the 1980's and 1990's in France. Among those, the essays warning of the impending end of French literature offer a view of the world which idealises the past while condemning a shameful present in order to justify the return of lost values. / Our project consists of an analysis of the argumentative rhetoric contained in the four essays of our corpus, which together form the Discourse on the death of French literature. We studied how the authors set up an argumentative construct likely to convince the reader that French literature has fallen into decay. By analysing the rhetorical processes as well as locating the tacit discourse, we sought to single out the ideology which they promote and to make out the contours of the literary ideal which they delineate. In light of these observations, we ended with the broad outline of a typology of the genre, liable to exemplify all "essais crepusculaires".

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Ever since Joseph Conrad chose fin de siecle London as the place to begin and end his Heart of Darkness, the city of London has been host to literary meditations on the darker aspects of empire and imperialism. The decline of the British Empire in the twentieth century has had far-reaching consequences for the former heart of empire. In the second half of the twentieth century, immigrants from the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia have transformed Britain into an ethnically and racially diverse nation. The colonies have 'come home to roost.' / Following Conrad's narrative in Heart of Darkness, my thesis begins in London and then moves to the margins of the empire. The long shadow of imperialism shapes the novels of J. M. Coetzee and Bessie Head. In their works these two writers depict the evils of apartheid South Africa and reflect upon the complex psychological mechanisms that underlie encounters between different groups. Such encounters result in a pattern of nonrecognition and misrecognition that in turn create relations based upon domination and servitude. Coetzee's and Head's works speculate on the psychological structures that have shaped the history of colonialism in Africa. / Returning to London, my thesis then examines the works of two writers who combine experience of the colony with knowledge of the centre of Empire. Doris Lessing's experience of coming-of-age in Southern Rhodesia supplies her with powerful insights into both the plight of new immigrants to Britain and the concerns and prejudices of native Londoners. Her knowledge of identity politics in Southern Africa deepens her fictional response to post-war British society. The detective writer Mike Phillips came to Britain from Guyana as a child and he now resides in London. While his novels reflect the concerns of a first-generation black immigrant to the United Kingdom they also depict the challenges and rewards of being black in the London of today.

This study contends that postmodern American fiction dramatizes an important shift of philosophical perspective on the fetish in keeping with recent theories of fetishism as a cultural practice. This shift is defined by the refusal to accept the traditional Western condemnation of the fetishist as primitive or perverse, and by the effort to affirm more productive uses for fetishism as a theoretical concept spanning the disciplines of psychoanalysis, Marxian social theory, and anthropology. Analyzing the depiction of fetishistic practices in selected contemporary American novels, the dissertation utilizes fetish theory in order to clarify the unique textual and historiographic features of postmodernist fiction. It also emphasizes the way in which conventional ideas about history and teleology are necessarily challenged by an affirmative orientation toward the fetish. Part One of the dissertation, comprising the first two chapters, traces the lineage of Western thinking about fetishism from Hegel, Marx, and Freud to Derrida, Baudrillard, and Jameson, among others. Recognizing that traditional theories attribute the symbolic power of the fetish to its mystification of historical origins, Part One posits that poststructuralist and postmodernist contributions to the subject enable, but do not develop, an alternative concept of fetishism as a practice with constructive historical potential. Part Two of the study seeks to develop this historical potential with reference to prominent descriptive models of postmodernist fiction, and through close readings of five contemporary American authors: Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, Robert Coover, John Hawkes, and Don DeLillo. The four chapters of Part Two each examine the fictional representation of fetishism within a different theoretical framework, focusing on, respectively: temporality and objectivity in postmodern fiction theory; the interrelation between psychoanalytic theory and female fetishism in novels by Pynchon and Acker

This master's thesis in creative writing is divided into two parts. The first constitutes a critical analysis of "minimalist" writing, a term which has been used to describe the work of certain contemporary American writers but which might equally be applied to a portion of the world literature. This literary form has two fundamental characteristics from an aesthetic point of view: brevity and realism. In fact, it could be defined as the short story taken to its ultimate expression. Furthermore, it represents one of two poles by which we can evaluate all literature. The second part of the thesis is a collection of short stories which embody the minimalist aesthetic with everyday life and relationships between couples as their central theme.

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