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M.A. (Afrikaans) / In this study the place of the death poem as genre and particularly its incidence in Afrikaans is traced. Because the corpus of poems about death is so comprehensive, a distinction is made between two significant categories: death poetry in general and death poetry with specific regard to the death of a beloved, especially with reference to a close relative. For the purpose of this study the latter is dealt with. It is established that the death poem referring to the death of a close relative has in almost every known literature been responsible not only for some of the most touching poems, but also for some of the best. In certain Iiteratures particular conventions in connection with . the death poem have crystallized. In others the theme of death has found unrestrained expression. A comparative study and an assessment of value are the two most important methods that were used in this study to ascertain the place of the death poem in literature. The death poem can be classified under several categories, each of which has contributed to a greater or lesser degree to the genre of the death poem. The category of the beloved deceased, especially the beloved close relative is emphasized in this particular study. Most poets have contributed to the corpus of the death poem, but Totius, Elisabeth Eybers, D.J. Opperman and T.T. Cloete, each representing one of the great literary eras in Afrikaans, have contributed the best death poems. It appears from the comparative study that there has been a qualitative improvement in this genre.

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Entreprenant l'étude du Roman Catholique Contemporain, nous nous sommes heurté à plusieurs difficultés. Comment maintenir un titre que renieraient les auteurs des romans que nous abordions? Uhamimement, faisant écho à la voix de Francois Mauriac, quelques décades plus tôt ils, déclarent qu'ils ne sont pas des romanciers catholiques mais des catholiques qui font des romans, rejetant une étiquette qui engagerait d'autres que leur propre personne. Comment, pourtant, choisir un titre qui ne correspondît pas à la vraie nature de ce qui devait être exposé? Nous avons donc décidé de nous en tenir à notre idée première, tout en avertissant qu'un romancier catholique ne se veut pas le porte-parole certifié de l'Eglise mais est un écrivain qui transpose dans son oeuvre le résultat de son experience et sa réflexion personnelle, éclairée à la lumiere de sa foi. Le second probleme était celui des limites à imposer à ce travail. II s'est révélé impossible d'examiner d'une facon exhaustive, une production littéraire trop vaste. Un choix s'est imposé. Nous avons, en accord avec les critiques éprouvés, résolu de porter notre attention sur les cinq auteurs les plus marquants: Roger Bésus, Jean Cayrol, Gilbert Cesbron, Luc Estang, et Paul-André Lesort. Là encore, le champ se découvrait trop vaste et il fallait se restreindre. Une nouvelle question surgissait: "Quels romans retenir dans la sélection définitive?" Nous avons inclus délibérément les premiers ouvrages en date, lorsque la critique, ne les présentait pas comme médiocres. Nous avons inscrit aussi les derniers, puisque celui qui fait le point, prolonge toujours sa courbe jusqu'aux données les plus récentes. Pour le reste, nous avons fait fond sur le jugement des sociétés littéraires et nous avons opté pour les publications primées par leur jury. Lorsque ce procédé restait insuffisant, nous nous en sommes encore remis, pour les additions supplémentaires, à l'opinion de la critique, conditionnant autant que possible notre choix au pro-rata de la production romanesque totale de chaque auteur, et prenant soin de ne mutiler en aucun cas un diptyque ou un triptyque. C'est ainsi que la liste des ouvrages sélectionnés se présente comme suit: [ … ] / Arts, Faculty of / French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Department of / Graduate

From its earliest beginning in Frances Brooke’s The History of Emily Montague, set in Canada and published in 1769, women have been prominent in Canadian literature. Since that time, a very large number of Canadian novels written by both men and women have been primarily concerned with a female character. In this thesis, an attempt has been made to determine to what extent an author's fictional world view and characterization is influenced by his sex; the area was narrowed to that of the Canadian novel in the period of approximately 1950-1965. Novels by Brian Moore, Sinclair Ross, Hugh MacLennan, Morley Callaghan, Adele Wiseman, Sheila Watson, Ethel Wilson, and Margaret Laurence were chosen as the main objects of the study. A recurrent theme emerged during the study of these novels; many of the authors appeared deeply concerned with the problem of personal and social isolation, and concluded that evil and fear, compassion and love neither originate outside the self nor remain confined to it. The metaphor used to characterize the fear-based isolation was often that of the wilderness, which might be internal, external, or both. A final conclusion about these novels, which are almost all based primarily on female characters, is that the ones created by women are generally more interesting and convincing. The male novelists tend to emphasize the sexual roles played by their female protagonists, while the women authors have a stronger tendency to write about women as people whose sexuality is important, but whose total personality is not constituted by this one aspect. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Though the notion of absent-centred structure enjoys a current fashionableness in a number of contemporary theoretical discussions, the variety of interpretations, some of them implicitly contradictory, and most of them excessively abstract, prevents "absent-centredness" from being the useful critical category it might be. By surveying the history of the term in my Introduction, and by describing the textual realizations of absent-centredness in a number of modern novels, my thesis attempts to define the term as a special strategy of narrative structure. That strategy is identifiable by such formal devices as indirect narration, anti-climax, cancellation, and negation; and by structuring images of spatial and temporal distortion, especially the anarchist explosion and the urban labyrinth. The introductory discussion of works which might or might not be considered absent-centred fiction demarcates the category more clearly, though my choice of novels for more detailed discussion is exemplary rather than exhaustive. My discussion begins with Henry James's The Princess Casamassima (Chapter II) because, in its use of anarchism, the Dickensian labyrinthine city, and anti-climax, that novel represents, albeit uncertainly, the late-Victorian beginnings of absent-centred structure which James's literary descendents shape more consistently. Hence, Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent (Chapter III) is governed, paradoxically, by a prominent absence, the unseen and indirectly narrated bomb explosion which operates as a narrative mataphor, for the temporal and spatial distortions of the text are both the logical result of the bomb's blast and a means of circumscribing the absent centre. Andrei Bely's Petersburg (Chapter IV) illustrates best the High-Modernist use of the absent centre, though it relies on the same devices of anarchist plot and foiled explosion which Conrad exploits. And while Bely's Symbolism has a particular Russian coloration, it co-opts, like Conrad's, the same fragmentary features of the bomb-threatened city as images for narrative structure. And whereas Conrad shows us that absent-centredness is an apt description of the moral vacancy which he sees as characteristic of the early twentieth-century West, Bely shows us that it is also an apt description of his mystical and metaphysical view of the early twentieth-century East. Like Petersburg,whose narrative is fragmented more literally than The Secret Agent's, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (Chapter V) exploits the chronological and spatial disruptions which result from explosion. Fragmentation in this work is mimetic of Yossarian's consciousness which, shattered by the realization of Snowden's "exploded" secret, prefers to, but cannot, forget the horror of his comrade's death. As in other works of absent-centred fiction, the hero's hyperbolic fear of his own death is transformed into the fear of apocalyptic nullity. The military establishment which prevents Yossarian's escape from that fear occasions an exploration of the blackly humorous and absurdist nature of a world with no sane centre of control. Most, if not all, of these themes, images, and strategies are gathered together encyclopedically in the most ambitious of these absent-centred works, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Here, the anarchist bomb, metaphor for absence, finds its sophisticated contemporary counterpart in the rocket which, in a rainbow arc from "point to no point," transports apocalyptic absence. Under the shadow of that trajectory moves Slothrop, a failed quester whose grail eludes him and who wanders directionless in the labyrinthine and centreless post-war "Zone" until he disappears from both landscape and text. More reflexive than earlier absent-centred works, Gravity's Rainbow makes us aware that Slothrop's experience in the Zone is also the reader's, for like Slothrop, he searches for a centre in the "zone" of a fiction too complexly structured and too exploded to reveal its unifying source, which can only be, paradoxically, the absent centre itself. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Wilson Harris is the author of fourteen novels and two books of shorter fiction. His work, cryptic and yet urgent, checks the widespread belief that experimental writing today is condemned to parody and self-referential performance. Located at the crossroads of numerous cultural traditions, African, Amerindian, and European, his novels evolve a complex language well suited to the articulation of marginal needs in an increasingly polarized world. The novels are difficult, and to examine the grounds of their difficulty, I rehearse at the outset a general theory of experiment in fiction, before reviewing .Harris's own remarks on the subject, gleaned from his critical essays. Harris's distortions appear first at the level of the line; the oddity of his style, and' its attendant vexations, are the subject of my next chapter, "Experiment and Language." Here I consider the techniques and uses of stylistic fracture and surreal montage, showing how Harris undoes the traditional concept of rhetoric by working an amalgam of the extraordinary and the commonplace. The rhetoric of unrhetoric has its structural equivalent in an unmaking of narrative sequence and causation. "Experiment and Narrative" examines the devices by which these securities are foiled, time by space, presence by absence. "Experiment and the Individual" considers the fate of character in fictions set at the ragged edges of the modern world. Harris refuses the holographic illusion of conventional identity, depicting instead those individuals whose resources are so slender as to have become invisible. Finally, "Experiment and Tradition" attempts to show how the dispossessed begin to find a voice in the experimental language of a writer whose very obscurity allows him to perplex the ideology of civil discourse. Harris has developed a style which is representative but not mimetic; his marginal discourse adds a new dimension to the "blank slate" of the avantgarde. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This dissertation develops and demonstrates a new mode of regional literary analysis. I begin by assessing the work of five Canadian literary regionalists from perspectives provided by human geographers and spatial theorists. Although discourses of Canadian literary regionalism vary, I argue that this field has tended to rely upon a reified understanding of regional analysis, a mystified conception of regional identity, and a passive construction of regional space. I offer a means of disrupting these tendencies by re-imagining the process of regional literary analysis. As I define it, literary regionalism is the process of demonstrating patterns in the way that literary texts deploy representations of sociomaterial space to enable performances of identity. This approach foregrounds literature's capacity to elucidate space's social efficacy. It also directs literary regionalism towards a more contemporary understanding of space and identity. In part two I begin to apply my mode of analysis to eight twentieth-century Canadian realist novels by introducing the concept of place. Because place-studies focus on the organization of social relations within a single text, I argue that they offer a useful means of initiating cross-textual, regional analyses. I demonstrate this point by analyzing the relationship between place and gender identity in Charles Bruce's The Channel Shore, and then looking for parallels in the way other novels articulate this relationship. In part three I construct a "region of denial and purgation" by interrogating how and why authors deploy representations of nature to deny the social origins of identity formation. I relate the power such representations have to articulate seemingly epiphanic shifts in identity to the sublime's enduring legacy. Because sublime experience enables characters to reconstitute themselves as new, it facilitates their desires to purge those aspects of their personal histories that have caused them guilt or shame. I conclude that this dissertation makes two contributions to Canadian literary studies. First, it advances a productive dialogue between human geography and Canadian literary studies. Second, by re-imagining the practice of Canadian literary regionalism through alternate disciplinary lenses, this dissertation helpfully foregrounds the heterodox character—and'unexplored potential—of a regional mode of literary analysis. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

During the 1960's a distinct change of emphasis took place in the manner in which East German novels reflected the relationship between individual and collective. Using three of the best known works of the period (E.Strittmatter's Ole Bienkopp, H.Kant's Die Aula and Christa Wolf's Nachdenken über Christa T.), this study attempts to describe the change and to consider its implications for the theory of socialist realism. Because each of the novels represents an individual author's contribution to a body of literature which must serve a collective function, his position vis-a-vis society is revealed not only in the social content of his work but also by the form in which it is presented. The central concern of this discussion is the way in which both the content and the form of East German socialist realist literature increasingly, in the course of the 1960's, reflect the potential contradictions and creative tensions inherent in the relationship between individuality and collectivism. Having in the initial, formative stages emphasized the unity of individual and collective aspirations, socialist realist literature began in the 1960's to move away from the programmatic, normative view of social relationships which had first evolved under foreign (Soviet Russian) conditions and become entrenched during the ideological confrontations of the 1950's. The work of Erwin Strittmatter, whose earlier writing typifies the perspectives and style of the 1950's, serves to introduce these changes. His novel Ole Bienkopp is generally recognized to be the first major work to deal principally with relationships within the GDR, rather than the broader issues of internal or external threats to the social structure. The major innovation of Ole Bienkopp is that its narrative interest derives from so-called "non-antagonistic conflicts." This clearly requires much more realistic differentiation of the individual characters than the simplistic, black-white confrontations of earlier works. Strittmatter's characterization is examined both from the point of view of its realism and also to assess the social perspective which it reflects. In contrast to Strittmatter's relatively conservative style and aggressive argumentation, Hermann Kant's Die Aula consistently introduces to East German prose many of the techniques of modern bourgeois novels, corresponding to its more reflective, questioning approach to life. Like Strittmatter and the third author, Christa Wolf, Kant undertakes a retrospective reassessment of the formative years of the GDR, when individual and collective attitudes towards the new society were first established. Although he hints at the importance of this undertaking for finding a satisfactory role for the individual in contemporary society, one of the great flaws of the novel is that he fails to follow this point through. However, many of the literary techniques which made Die Aula so popular and the social attitudes it revealed reappeared to much greater effect in Christa Wolf's Nachdenken über Christa T. Because of its subtle use of style and language and very "open" form and highly reflective, introspective approach to life in the GDR, this novel represents in many ways the apotheosis of the changes in both the content and the form of socialist prose in East Germany during the 1960's. The history of the reception of the novel alone suggests that Wolf had reached hitherto undefined boundaries of socialist realism. Bearing in mind the innovations of perspective and form introduced by Ole Bienkopp and Die Aula, the final chapter examines Wolf's concern that each individual – whether author or ordinary citizen – find fulfilment in the collective. / Arts, Faculty of / Central Eastern Northern European Studies, Department of / Graduate

Bibliography: pages 174-184. / This thesis examines the 'New Wave' in British science fiction in the 1960s and early 1970s. The use of the terms 'science fiction' and 'New Wave' in the thesis are defined through a use of elements of the ideological theories of Louis Althusser. The New Wave is seen as a change in the ideological framework of the science fiction establishment. For oonvenience, the progress of the New Wave is divided into three stages, each covered by a chapter. Works by the four most prominent writers in the movement are discussed.