My thesis examines the literary relationship between Jorge Luis Borges and James Joyce. It demonstrates that Borges's conflictual relation with Joyce produces complex intersections that centre upon issues such as the reception of Joyce in Spain and Latin America; translation as an act of recreation across linguistic, historical and cultural boundaries; fictional projects concerned with the notion of infinity and total recollection; the clash of literary genres in contrasting narrative expressions (epic magnitude vs. compressed ficciones); and the ubiquitous presence of Homer, Dante and Shakespeare in their literary productions. The thesis comprises two parts. Part I consists of two chapters which examine the relationship between the two writers from a historical viewpoint that offers a comprehensive survey of Borges's reception of Joyce from 1925 to 1946 in various Buenos Aires periodicals. It suggests that Borges played a decisive role in the dissemination of Joyce's work in the Hispanic world with his pioneering reviews of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake and fragmentary translation of 'Penelope'. Part II consists of four chapters. Principally, it is concerned with the practice and methodology of comparative literature as a pluralistic forum that negotiates the complex relations between Borges and Joyce and inscribes them within a larger corpus of writings and theoretical perspectives. The first chapter develops Borges's suggested 1941 analogy between 'Funes the Memorious' and Ulysses and discusses it through a network of scientific, theological and philosophical discourses in conjunction with the ancient tradition known as the art of memory. The final chapters investigate Borges and Joyce's triadic conversation with Homer, Dante and Shakespeare. These foreground the crucial fact that their intersections with the Western tradition are mediated by a long-standing English critical heritage that informs and infuses Borges's and Joyce's twentieth-century conceptions of the three canonical writers, and equally contributes to their mutual endeavors to generate new versions or afterlives of their works, as they shift Homer, Dante and Shakespeare into new cultures, languages and ideologies

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This research examines representations of pain in literature from West and Southern Africa, written in English and French. Exploring how and why African novelists tell stories of suffering in their autobiographical and fictional writing, I consider the aesthetic and ethical issues surrounding such emotive literature. Theoretical approaches to violence and pain can be found within the existing metanarratives of African literary criticism. Bearing witness to the suffering caused by the colonial project and giving voices to the powerless in pain are key features of both nationalist and feminist theory. However, in much current academic research there seems to be an emphasis on bearing witness to the violent acts of an aggressor rather than exploring the experiences of the person in pain. This theoretical emphasis is not echoed in the literary texts I study, which instead focus almost exclusively on the subjective sensations of suffering. My research asks why this is the case and questions the motivations for and impact of literary pain narratives. I begin by exploring how Yvonne Vera uses surprising bodily metaphors and other aesthetic devices to create literary worlds of pain in her novel The Stone Virgins. Next, I examine the location of pain between minds and bodies in J.M. Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K and Bessie Head's A Question of Power. Developing questions of pain and meaning, I then turn to a series of texts from Francophone West Africa which address the cultural, individual and symbolic contexts of pain associated with gendered violence. The following chapter builds on testimonial aspects of pain writing to reflect on literature describing the Rwandan genocide, reading works by Rwandan survivors alongside those by visiting African witnesses. Finally, I consider the potential impact of narratives of healing in Ayi Kwei Armah's The Healers and Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull.

The Moral Psychotic is an exercise in psychoanalytic critical analysis, applying the theories of Bion, Klein, Lacan and Laing to an eclectic range of popular texts. The thesis presents a reconstructed account of the male homosexual psychotic to place along comparable projects regarding perversion by Silverman (Male Subjectivity at the Margins) and Dollimore (Sexual Dissidence). This figure is the moral psychotic- that is, the psychotic as an intelligible and socially connected subject as opposed to a senseless, anti-SOCial psychopath. The moral psychotic is an integrated nonphallocentric subject and the source of an 'anti-communal mode of connectedness' (Bersani) which is termed 'heterocosmic connectedness'. The prime differential category of the thesis (neurotic-psychotic) is derived from Lacanian clinical structures and established in the first two chapters through a review of the feminist madwoman. Chapter 1 reviews the feminist trauma model of madness and argues that it presents madness as neurotic lack and privileges malignant hysteria. Chapter 2 constructs a model of madness as excess represented by the psychotic subject in the theories of Laing and Lacan and the fiction of Sara Maitland. Having established this mutually exclusive categorisation, the thesis then presents a critique of certain features of neurotic homosexuality to which the moral psychotic offers a radically ambivalent alternative. Chapter 3 reviews two popular models of homosexuality as represented in Assertive Training for Gay Men and the work of Mark Simpson and argues that they both demonstrate a neurotic homosexual preoccupation with the heterosexual male. Chapter 4 observes a neurotic cycle of prohibition and transgression in the discourse of HIV prevention. Finally, Chapter 5 uses the television drama Queer as Folk to present the moral psychotiC in the figure of Stuart Allen Jones whose excess is used within the text to provide a non-phallic satisfaction of neurotic homosexual desire and whose heterocosmic connectedness produces a spectacular form of post-AIDS social liberation from restrictive Social identifications. there are certain costs to the obligation to assemble one's own identity as a matter of one's freedom. And the exercise of choice may be parodic and playful, but it seldom remains so for long. For in the choices one makes, and in the obligation to render ones everyday existence as an outcome of choices made, one's relation to oneself is tied ever more firmly to the ethics of individual autonomy and personal authenticity. To question the costs of this is not to deny its benefits nor to suggest the possibility of a form of existence which can radically escape from the nexus of power and subjectivity in which the very possibilities of contemporary experience have been formed. But it is to pose, at least as an experiment for thought, the question of what an ethic of existence might be that did not refer itself to that psy shaped space which has been installed at the heart of each modern individual. Could one not imagine another kind of freedom, whose ethics were resolutely 'superficial? An ethics whose Vectors did not run from outer to inner, and did not question appearances in the name of their hidden truth, but which ran across the outsides, between, among persons, where subjectivities were distributed, collective and orientated to action? An ethic, that is to say, that did not seek to problematize, to celebrate or to govern the soul?

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