This dissertation takes a functional view of language and applies its perspective to literary discourse, both poetry and prose. Following the performative hypothesis by Ross (1970), which argues that a declarative sentence consists of the performative part and the proposition, I assume that a literary discourse also has these two parts: the performative level which consists of the author-reader level (speech act of narration) and the textual proposition. I argue that the propositional text is made of what I term 'discourse theme', 'discourse rheme' and 'the mediating function', which transforms the first into the second one in a communicative and dynamic way. The propositional content of this variety of discourse is best viewed in terms of Halliday's extended concept of the 'text-forming' functional-semantic component based on the Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP) of the Prague School linguists - the concepts of theme, rheme, transition, and Communicative Dynamism -, or, what I term 'discourse theme', 'discourse rheme' and 't4e mediating function'. I also argue that the . coherence scope of Jakobson's (1960: 358) 'equivaleI!ce' in the micro-structural arrangement's of verbal elements in a literary text,' whether sound or sense, sentence or episode, depends upon the functional theme-rheme structures. The literary texts discussed range from short poems to longer works such as those of Kazuo Ishiguro. Occasional examples from other works of English literature are also included.

The "Critical Introduction" is a concise formal essay that contextualizes and supplements the critical and philosophical ideas presented in my dissertation. It provides a critical backdrop to the work and re-traces my critical role models, literary ancestors, the points of identification from which my writing emerges. It also serves as a critical component towards the submission of the dissertation for a PhD in Critical and Creative writing, although the main body of the dissertation itself is a meta-critical blended space of both discourses. SUMMARY OF "FORM OF FIX: TRANSATLANTIC SONORITY IN THE MINORITY" Form of fix: Transatlantic Sonority in the Minority is a creative-critical text that explores White-Welsh and African-American cultural identities as plural and fragmented sequences of interpellation through sonic and visual schemas of signification. This sonicjscopic double-interpellation accommodates a conflicting dual-identification with the empirical self and with the dominant oppressor. This shifting and blending of role-models leads to a fracture of canon, loss and reapportions of ancestor, and allows parallels between traditionally disparate cultures to cross boundaries of race, space and rigid hierarchies of minority/dominant. This dissertation interrogates and surveys extremes of textual production to reflect this depolarization of binaries motivated by canon-fracture: from Shakespeare to Slave-Song, Mabinogi to Nathaniel Mackey.

This thesis is an analysis and literary history of the human-sized elf as a Significant Other. It argues that this character is in direct relation to humans while also situated beyond the boundaries of what is human, familiar, and same, and acts as a supernatural double that defines these boundaries. The first chapter relates the origin of the word elf and the creature's characteristics in the Germanic regions of Europe. Chapter 2 discusses similar beings in Celtic sources and the establishment of a realm in which they dwell. The development of Faerie, primarily in French sources, is further examined in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 scrutinises the application of the words elf and fairy to a diminutive being, here referred to as the Insignificant Other. Chapter 5 assesses the demise of the diminutive being and re-establishment of the human-sized elf. Because of his paramount influence, the central section of the thesis (chapters 6-9) is devoted to the Elves of J. R. R. Tolkien. This section begins by analysing the descriptions of Tolkien's Elves in order to evaluate his debt to earlier traditions. Chapter 7 assesses the status of Elves in Middle-Earth, while chapter 8 scrutinises the presentation of gender. Chapter 9 discusses the Dark-Elves and their place in Tolkien's developing ideas about Elves. The final section examines Tolkien's influence and the current status of the elf. Chapter 10 focuses on four recent narratives that identify human-sized fairies in comics and film. Chapter 12 investigates the popularity of the Tolkienian elf in modern Fantasy fiction, while the final chapter locates the elf as Significant Other in contemporary popular culture and media.

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Whereas the newly surveyed field of economic criticism, in literary and cultural studies, has been dominated by studies employing new historicist approaches in the analysis of past cultural or economic moments, this thesis examines the representation of economics in contemporary culture, and employs post-structuralist critical theory in its discussion of the unstable borderline between economics and culture, or text and context. Acknowledging that contemporary economic discourse regularly employs the term 'market' as a synecdoche for the economy as a whole, the thesis focuses, in particular, on representations of the financial economy in narrative texts from the late 1980s to the present. Through close readings of novels by Jane Smiley, Michael Ridpath, and Don DeLillo, as well as the film narratives Wall Street and Boiler Room, and the artwork of J. S. G. Boggs, I argue that contemporary cultural texts which represent the financial economy are always working out the borderlines between text and context, between the fictional and the real, or between the rational and the irrational. Since both narrative and financial speculation exploit the unstable border between the fictional and the real, this post-structuralist reading of the narrative representation of economics also seeks to undermine the certainties of rational economic science, which posits the possibility of referentiality in the pursuit of a finite knowledge about the world it represents, and in the stories it tells.

This thesis focuses on the works of Caribbean writers Jean Rhys, Patrick Chamoiseau and David Dabydeen, specifically as they draw upon the mythic and religious beliefs and practices of the Caribbean in their constitution of individual and cultural Creole identity through textuality. The Caribbean tropes of haunting are surreptitious passageways leading to the Creole subject's struggle with the divided affiliations, cross-racial identifications and various forms of dispossession that are colonialism's legacy. As conduits to forbidden and unspoken fantasies, fears and desires, they also serve as the means of reformulating Creole identity. The study of Jean Rhys explores her agonized formulation of Creole identity as an abjection, where the self is (un)made in the nauseating identification with the black female other in the form of the hottentot, mulatto ghost and soucriant. Rhys's racialized abjection establishes Creole identity as a vacillating border state that is fraught with sadomasochistic violence and sickness. Patrick Chamoiseau uses the zombie trope to figure the loss of history, memory and language endemic to the dehumanization of Martinican man. Suppressed Creole culture becomes a part of the collective unconscious, and its uncanny return unmasks the misrecognition of white identification and serves as a strategy of disalienating opacity. Chamoiseau's Creolist manifesto is critically examined against the framework of an erotics of colonialism, to reveal the ventriloquism of the female subaltern who is made to embody the schizophrenic anxieties of the Creole male writer. David Dabydeen's work demonstrates how the family romance of the Creole migrant is erected upon the entombments of native ancestors, literary forefathers and female figures, the phantoms of which return to haunt with the anxieties of influence and the threats of disappearance and perpetual exile. His ekphrastic revisions accomplish the destabilizing and hybridizing functions of tricksterism, but also perpetuate an otherness under the guise of postmodern rewriting.

This thesis presents a reconstruction of Deleuze's theory of literature as health. What I refer to throughout as the “literary clinic” relates to how Deleuze characterised literary practice in clinical terms as an engagement with both vital and semiotic processes. The fundamental intuition in this regard is that there is a way of conceiving health as a strength or vitality distinct from the organic and socio-linguistic categories which give to experience a liveable form. There is a “formless” or “unliveable” element attending every instantiation of form, and this is what positions the question of the inorganic life of the body alongside issues relating to literary creativity and formal renewal. It is this simultaneous concern with living and semiotic processes that characterises literary criticism as a type of clinic: the pathological exceeds organic construction just as the author discovers a mode of enunciation beyond the terms of socio-linguistic convention. However, Deleuze's own writings on these issues are extremely disparate, and his conception of literature as health was never realised in a completed form in his work. The reconstruction presented here follows the literary clinic from its origins in Deleuze's early philosophical readings and tracks its course through some of the major turning points in his career, most notably his collaboration with Guattari. I argue that, despite its incompleteness, the literary clinic constitutes a coherent account of literary theory and practice, one which, furthermore, is responsive to the philosophical and political issues most salient to the Deleuzian corpus. My goal has been not only to provide an analysis of this neglected area of Deleuze studies, but also to open paths towards a properly Deleuzian critical practice.

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