Since 1960, the first-person narrative form has dominated the Quebec novel. As first-person novels often imitate non-fiction forms (autobiographies, diaries, etc.), it follows that this narrative choice would involve a certain degree of self-revelation. We will see though that this is not the case in the "nouveau roman" of Quebec. In fact, the Quebec narrator employs a number of techniques to distance him or herself from the "I" that is the object of the narrative. / In this work, we will attempt to identify some of the main characteristics of this new face of the Quebec novel. We will start with an exploration of two novels from the pre-1960 period: Maria Chapdelaine and Poussiere sur la ville. We will then study the contemporary era through our choice of four of Quebec's most famous novels: Le Libraire, Prochain episode, Kamouraska and L'Hiver de force. We will see that the "nouveau roman" is not as "personal" as its form suggests and that the distance between the narrator and his or her "self" is not only a constant but is also an evolving characteristic of the Quebec novel. / This work is therefore a study of the contemporary Quebec novel and its narrative properties, and of the distance that the narrator imposes between his or her present and past self.

The rise in feminist consciousness and the growth of Women's Studies has brought Yiddish women writers into sharp focus. Kadye Molodowsky was one of the most prominent of the modern Yiddish women poets. / Her biography is a typical summary of the modernization of Eastern European Jewry in the early twentieth century. / Molodowsky was a leading figure in Yiddish cultural life in interbellum Poland. As a writer, her primary affiliation was with the Literarishe bleter (Literary Leaves, 1924--1939). This periodical, founded by prominent Yiddish intellectuals in Warsaw, became the world tribune of secular Yiddish culture. Molodowsky's association with this high-profile publication placed her at the centre of the vibrant Jewish literary, cultural, and social life of the time. / What follows, is an annotated bibliography of her publications and work about her in Literarishe bleter, from her debut there in 1925 until her departure for the US in 1935.

This dissertation examines the development of the female literary subject in the work of two generations of women writers of the GDR, represented by Christa Wolf (1929), Brigitte Reimann (1931--1973), Helga Konigsdorf (1936) and Helga Schubert (1941). The objectives are twofold: first, to assess the influence of two opposing discursive frameworks of subjectivity, the socialist and the psychoanalytic, on the works of these writers, and second, to examine the effects of an ideological disjuncture of two generations on their literary production. / The first generation to embark on a literary career in the GDR, with great aspirations for the socialist project, is represented by Wolf and Reimann. A shift in political parameters meant that the following generation of writers, including Konigsdorf and Schubert, was faced with a pre-determined ideological structure, unsatisfactory to them. Accordingly, a diachronic investigation of the literary subject is pursued, and reveals the shift between these generations. As a result, rifts in time, in the subject, and rifts between the subject and its time are exposed. / In the 1960s, Wolf and Reimann rejected the literary female subject's role as an agent in the implementation of socialism. Crises in GDR social structures and crises of the psyche are shown to overlap and to result in divided subjects. The non-contemporaneity of Marxism begins to surface in the 1970s, and the rift in time affects the female subjects of Wolf and Reimann, which increasingly fragment Konigsdorf's and Schubert's short prose of the late 1970s reveals a rejection of the unified Marxist subject and the move toward a notion of the self informed by Freudian psychoanalysis. In the 1980s, the effects of the socio-political environment prove fatal to the individual subject in the works by both generations, and parallels are drawn to the National Socialist past. These links instigate a fundamental reevaluation of standards in language, power and cycles of history at the crossroads of life and death. The post-Wende period witnesses a shift away from problems of subjectivity in the texts of Konigsdorf and Schubert, while Wolf initially experiments with the postmodern, and most recently, surprisingly re-consolidates the female subject.

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This thesis is concerned with the "Americanity" of Quebec literature and the existence of a cultural formation specific to the New World, based on a context of renewal, distancing and rupture with respect to European influence. The "real maravilloso" is perceived as an inherent American mode of expression, and its presence is examined in the work of Yves Theriault and Alejo Carpentier. An analysis of the short stories, Contes pour un homme seul (1944) by Theriault and "Histoire de lunes" (1933) by Carpentier, and of the novels Agaguk (1958) and Le royaume de ce monde (1949), allows us to compare the evolution from primitivism to the "real maravilloso americano", revealed in the novel through the "figures of the Other" and the status of the character, characterized by duality (contrast between the primitive forces and civilized world), its quest, its integration with nature, and the importance of sacred ritual.

Spectacles of justice preoccupy contemporary American culture. Legal culture---including the Watergate trials, the Lewinsky scandal, and OJ Simpson's trial for alleged murder---assumes a central place in the American imaginary. Configurations of the law are not limited to media reportage and televised docudramas. Nor are arbitrations confined to law faculties and the spaces of formal courts. Working through depictions of due process in different ways and in different zones, contemporary American writers point up the prevalence of legality in everyday life. Whether on college campuses, in TV studios and suburban homes, or at theatres and racetracks, justice mediates interpersonal relations. Personal narratives proliferate as modes of self-justification. Everyone has a right to represent her side of a story. As interpretations of reality, however, none of these stories can claim absolute justness. No one has a monopoly on the law or victimhood. / This dissertation inspects how Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo, and Jane Smiley present the inconsistencies of the law. These American novelists emplot global escapes into their work as a means to inform notions of liberty and jurisprudence. For these writers, freedom requires the recognition of contradictory---and unanticipated---narratives. "Justice Theory" emerges where media, gambling, performance, and suburban studies intersect with ethics, globalism, and narratology. In Franzen's novel The Corrections and essay collection How to Be Alone, self-validation requires the appreciation of the stories of others. In DeLillo's later works, particularly the plays The Day Room and Valparaiso, justice materializes in terms of isolation and the will to alter personal stories. For Smiley, as construed in her long novels The Greenlanders and Horse Heaven, dynamic responsive actions attend risky, unpredictable encounters in competitive milieus like the racetrack. These authors reveal that executions of justice and the perpetration of injustice involve varied consequences. The law is not only about punishment and recompense. Rather, legality directs the consequences of its applications toward the ideal of justice, which evolves alongside the subjects that it serves and the stories that they relate.

The title of our thesis is The Myth of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe in Michel Tournier's Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique and J.M. Coetzee's Foe. We intend to show how Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe story has become a renewed, transformed myth in the fictional works of Michel Tournier and J.M. Coetzee. In the first chapter, we will analyse the attitude of critics to Daniel Defoe, Michel Tournier and J.M. Coetzee's works, and we shall review the pertinent aspects of the three novelists' life. In the second chapter, we will define the concept of myth according to the African and European thinkers. We shall also stress the types, functions and myth's expressions in literary work. In the third chapter, we shall analyse and compare the characters of the three novels following the theory of A.J. Greimas which will be enriched by Evgueni Meletinski. We will divide the characters into protagonists, accessories, opponents, neutrals and absents. Analysis and comparison of the fictional characters will identify two major groups: colonizer and colonized. There will also be an examination of the meaning of characters' names used by the three novelists as well as our opinion on the fictional characters of Defoe, Tournier and Coetzee. Analysis of plot structures will show how the three novels are composed according to a cyclical pattern. The fourth chapter will be devoted to a comparative thematic analysis of solitude, sexuality and education. This will reveal the two faces of each theme as well as the hidden philosophy of the three novelists. And the fifth chapter will identify the narrative and stylistic techniques of the novels. It will show the kind of genre used by Defoe, Toumier and Coetzee as well as the letter and journal. It will also show the types of stylistic aspects of the three novels which are present in the novels. We will examine in the sixth chapter the spaces and the time framework of the three novels. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2007.

Playwright, Sarah Kane emerged as a new voice in British writing in the early 1990s. Her work, recognized most notably for its shocking content, was the source of media hype, and rendered her work, with that of her peers, as In-Yer-Face Theatre. This dissertation analyses the use of shock in Kane‟s work, with particular reference to her first and last plays: Blasted and 4.48 Psychosis. I discuss the shock elements employed by Kane in these texts and consider the reasons behind their use, particularly Kane‟s break with realism and subversion of form. My research draws upon social constructionist thought as a strand of the larger discourses of postmodernism, in particular those which inform the existence of war, violence and trauma. Focusing too, on the work of theatre practitioners such as Antonin Artaud, whose „Theatre of Cruelty‟ is reminiscent of Kane‟s own theatre. I discuss the origin of In-Yer-Face Theatre as well as its forerunners by examining Post-War British Theatre from the 1940‟s, especially those plays that have resonated on a provocative level. My research also explores the social and political factors influencing theatre over the decades and in relation to Kane, particularly the Thatcher government of the 1980s. I argue that the social and political climate of the 1980s and 1990s played a direct role in the formation of Kane‟s theatre and examine Kane‟s work and its reception in relation to other playwrights of the time. I have deliberately chosen to locate my research in terms of British theatre. / Thesis (M.A. (Drama and Performance Studies)) - University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2008.

This study places the poetry of Ingrid de Kok in a critical context that is strongly influenced by the political climate. Unlike political rhetoric, the nature of the lyrical poem is personal and complex, arguably rendering it defunct in a democracy that seeks to serve majority interests. De Kok’s challenge is to be a lyrical poet in the public sphere, to contain and represent the public interest within the personal form. I will examine how she rises to the historical occasion and extends her medium to incorporate the public event. At the same time, if she is to retain her voice as a lyrical poet, she must guard the privacy of its expression and the intimate spaces it seeks to delineate. In this way she asserts the validity of every-day concerns and of spaces traditionally designated as female. By interrogating the categories of personal and public I hope to project a complex vision of the possibilities of the lyric within contemporary South Africa. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2010.

The aim of this thesis is to give an account of the position taken by certain women dramatists in the context of both box-office success and theatre criticism in Brazil in the latter half of the twentieth century in order to provide a panoramic view of the way the Brazilian theater canon reacts to the work of women authors, by either incorporating it or not, according to political and social circumstances. It is hoped then that a more comprehensive vision of these dramatists will result than that of the traditional academic criticism which either elevates by acceptance or dismisses by ignoring or playing down their work. The production of three dramatists will be analysed here, namely, those plays by Leilah Assuncao, Maria Adelaide Amaral and Isis Baiao which fall into the period 1969--1999, and which exemplify two key tendencies in the Brazilian theatre of the last thirty years. These tendencies are: first, the attempt to widen the traditional horizon of politicized theatre by adding to its socio-political concerns a focus on the individual and his/her particular agenda, and, secondly, the break with any specifically aesthetic or conceptual format on stage in a blurring of the legacies of tradition and the vanguard, in which a "hybridism" of form and language is particularly noticeable in the privileging of a kind of writing that is not bound by formal limits. Such an analysis has made it possible to highlight how determined types of reaction may be altered along the time when different interpretive parameters are used by the critical community and by the public. While a certain sympathy is shown here for the feminist reading of the ideological bases of the literary canon, this is done not only to corroborate the masculine bent of such a canon to the exclusion of the Other, but also to prove that the criteria regulating excellence are products of a specific ideology which changes according to its sociohistorical context. The ultimate goal here is, thus, to make