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The thesis critically evaluates Jacques Derrida's conferral of the rights of reality on writing, focussing on his theory of an arche-text in light of the speculative nature of this theory. The theory is initially considered in the context of Derrida's elucidation of the usurpatory status of writing within the Platonic and Nietzschean texts. This consideration reveals an admission of writing's usurpatory status by both writers while at the same time demonstrating their awareness of the intrinsically speculative nature of this view, the significance of writing lying in its ability to exteriorise the radically indeterminate status of consciousness m relation to reality rather than its ability to displace consciousness or reality The analyses, therefore, not only bring the Derridean hypothesis of a repressive or phonocentric metaphysical episteme into question but also exhibit the historical and philosophical role of potentiality in relation to writing, writing's ultimate significance lying in its capacity to exteriorise our existence as a mode of potentiality. Accordingly, in the second half of the thesis the Derridean theory of writing is countered with a specifically Aristotelian theory of the text as it is exhibited in the prose of Samuel Beckett, an author whose significance lies in his close alignment with Derridean theory within contemporary criticism. It is demonstrated that this identification has obviated an awareness of the significance of potentiality within the Beckettian text, his work consequently being appraised in the previously neglected context of Aristotelian metaphysics.

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This thesis is a literary investigation of sacrifice in works of tragic literature and the Bible. In Part I, this thesis critiques René Girard’s scapegoating model of sacrifice and demonstrates the interpretive limitations that his theory of sacrifice imposes upon works of tragic literature and the Bible. In the first chapter, this thesis examines Eurpides’ play The Bacchae. Contrary to Girard’s assessment of works of classical Greek tragedy as texts that come to the defense of the tragic victim, I argue that this play participates in an elaborate re-mystification of scapegoating. Next, I conduct a tragic reading of the first twelve chapters of Exodus—focusing specifically on the birth of Moses and the story of the Passover. Contrary to a Girardian reading which simplifies the conflicts in Exodus to an irreducible opposition between Egypt and Israel, a tragic reading of the biblical narrative reveals a much more complex relationship between these groups. Using Christopher Fry’s play The Firstborn as a literary framework for investigating the biblical narrative, I read Moses as a tragic figure who struggles to come to grips with his own identity as a man raised by Egyptians and yet born an Israelite. Most importantly, Fry’s play dramatically highlights the sacrificial costs of the Israelites’ deliverance in Exodus—namely the infanticidal genocide of the firstborn of Egypt. In Part II of this study, I describe an alternative to Girard’s model of sacrifice which appears in the Gospel of Mark as well as in the work of Flannery O’Connor. In my reading of the Gospel of Mark as a work of Christian tragedy, I argue that at the Last Supper Jesus poetically improvises a model of eucharistic sacrifice that radically reconfigures the relationship between humans and the divine. According to this eucharistic model of sacrifice, the sacred is configured within the very materials of artistic representation. Consequently, the Jesus of Mark’s Gospel not only transfigures the opposition between oppressors and the oppressed but most importantly the opposition between the sacred and the profane. This study concludes with an investigation of the Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor. Through a close reading of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and Wise Blood, I argue that O’Connor’s work employs a model of eucharistic sacrifice to bring about a moment of transfiguration that defies interpretive closure. Finally, this thesis argues that by exploring this eucharistic model of sacrifice it may be possible to conceive of new approaches to imagining the relationship between readers, texts and the sacred.

This thesis aims to characterize the poetics of partial sight. It first places these poetics within a theoretical framework and then enacts them in a collection of poems. The thesis treats partial sight not primarily as a physiological fact but rather as symbolic of the limitations of human vision. It draws inspiration from the Homeric epics, which acknowledge these limits and show the dependency they bring, whether on the Muse or on other factors external to the poet’s conscious self, as central to poetic composition. The persistent trope of the blind poet, who loses his sight but gains creative vision, highlights links between partial sight and the partial apprehension that poets experience as they engage with an emerging poem. Both situations highlight the partial nature of human perception in a mysterious world and both necessitate dependency on factors beyond the self for success. Critically and creatively the thesis charts an evolving awareness of the importance of partial sight in poetic composition. This awareness has gradually inspired perspectival and methodological changes. The project began as a desire to challenge those poetic representations of blindness that cast it less as a valuable creative perspective than as a symbol of anxiety about dependency and consequent lack of agency. Early versions of the thesis sought to challenge this pattern by asserting the selfhood of figures with visual impairment as part of a disability-based identity poetics. This practice encouraged the use of relatively closed forms that stressed a speaker’s personal vision. However, as the thesis developed it took more account of the power dynamics that underpin poetic form. It became apparent that an overly closed approach could undermine the project’s aims by replicating poetic practices that have facilitated the use of blindness in poetry as an edifying spectacle for sighted readers. Such formal choices can also create a sense of certainty that troubles an aesthetic of partial sight. Moreover, the thesis argues that to confine discussions of partial sight to identity poetics radically restricts our understanding of the poetics of partial sight, dependency and open forms and leaves these poetics insufficiently imagined. It draws on the work of Alan Grossman, Rae Armantrout and Larry Eigner among others, to reimagine partial sight and dependency as a route to poetic knowledge. The poetry collection moves from exploring partial sight as a source of identity to using the combination of partial sight and dependency as a generative principle. Different poems express this principle through troubled syntax, variable lineation and the deformation by erasure of pre-existing texts on blindness. The thesis seeks to demonstrate that partial sight and dependency are experiences shared by, and relevant to, all writers and readers of poetry. It returns to an earlier understanding of these factors, which sees them not as sources of social anxiety, but rather as creative catalysts that open the way to new poetic possibilities. In so doing it aims to challenge understandings not only of poetics but also of the meaning of disability.

This thesis analyses how the British South Asian diaspora is conceptualized, understood and reflected in a selection of female-authored literary texts which engage with the multicultural policies of the British state from the 1950s to the present. The primary sources include Attia Hosain’s Phoenix Fled (1953) and Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961), Kamala Markandaya’s Possession (1963) and The Nowhere Man (1972), Ravinder Randhawa’s A Wicked Old Woman (1987), Meera Syal’s Anita and Me (1996), Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), Shelina Zahra Janmohamed’s Love in a Headscarf: Muslim Woman seeks the One (2009) and Rosie Dastgir’s A Small Fortune (2012). I conceive of British multicultural state policies as unfolding in three major phases: Assimilation (1950- 1979), Integration (1980-2001), Social Cohesion/Interculturalism (2001- present). The thesis examines these policy changes and illustrates how these shifts are mirrored in and shape the character of British South Asian women’s writings. In the light of this I argue that British South Asian women writers’ engagement with a sense of exile, dislocation or a ‘teleology of return’ along with a symbolic longing to create imaginary homelands has produced new alliances which exist outside what has been called the national time/space in order ‘to live inside, with a difference’. Through the selected writers’ individual attempts to configure new fictional home spaces, a new architecture for the diasporic imagination is constructed around the poetics of home and the multicultural politics of identity. Such cross-cultural literary interventions exist both within and outside colonial and postcolonial genealogies, reconfiguring the critical geographies by which they have been mostly defined. The first two chapters of the thesis attempt to define the complex configurations of the concept of multiculturalism and its interconnections with the terminology of diaspora. I have adopted a reading strategy tracing the South Asian migration history to Britain and the early literary representations which powerfully illuminate the fragmented imagination of the South Asian diaspora in terms of contemporary theoretical paradigms. The next three chapters analyse literary representations by Attia Hosain, Kamala Markandaya, Ravinder Randhawa, Meera Syal, Monica Ali, Shelina Zahra Janmohamed and Rosie Dastgir, who highlight and complicate the issues of race, ethnicity and gender in relation to the rhetoric of multiculturalism and multicultural policies. The writers use various strategies that testify to the innate relation between the political ‘real’ and the literary ‘imaginary’ and explain how real life experiences provide fuel to the ‘diasporic imaginary’ and affirm the transnational potency of literature.

In 1792, the inventor and illusionist Paul Philidor unveiled the ‘Phantasmagoria’ to the people of Paris. Coined by combining the Greek words ‘phantasma’ (appearance, vision, ghost) and ‘agora’ (assembly), Philidor had intended the name to suggest a vast crowd of the undead, a riotous carnival of phantoms. He promised his audience that, using the projections of a magic lantern and other ingenious mechanical devices, he would show them the illusory shapes of ghosts and monsters, reunite lovers separated by death, and call fiends out of hell. However, this exhibition of illusory spectres was to become something far more than a mere footnote in the history of Romantic popular entertainment. The Phantasmagoria was to assume a metaphorical function in the mindscape of the period; this cavalcade of spectres was to come to serve as an image for not only the fantastic terrors of dreams and hallucinations, but also for the unbounded creative power of the imagination. Besides this, the metaphor of the phantasmagoria was to subsume into itself an idea which had its origin in the ‘Curiosity Culture’ of the previous century: the curious collection. As time wore on, this Curious – or Phantasmagorical – collection became a symbol by which writers of the late Nineteenth Century could signal their resistance to bourgeois conformity and their own paradoxical celebration and rejection of consumer culture. This work examines the evolution of the Phantasmagoria metaphor as well as the development of its associated aesthetic: the aesthetic of the curious collection – the collection of weird and fabulous objects that astonishes the senses and confuses the mind, erasing the boundaries between reality and fantasy.

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The aim of this dissertation is to show that precisely in the indeterminacy of literature we can find the possibility of ethics and it will start with the examination of a work that clearly has a paradoxical nature. The work in question is Sreten Ugričić's Infinitive. The paradox of Infinitive consists in the fact that it is a monograph, but a monograph about a non-existent book. The examination of the paradox on which Infinitive is based will be associated with Maurice Blanchot's analysis of the (im)possibility of literature from his essays “Orpheus's Gaze” and “Encountering the Imaginary.” This dissertation will claim that two most important features of the (im)possibility of literature are: the passage from je to il and the temporal paradox of the time of time's absence. These two features are interconnected: a loss of personality (and the inability to subsume the work of art under terms of decision and intention) leads to a strange realm that is governed by the time of time's absence. This is the realm of imaginary or a place where, to paraphrase Blanchot, language becomes its own image. Through the analysis of specific literary works (Infinitive, Marbot: A Biography and The Lost Estate) this dissertation will try to describe the most important paradoxes of literature. In the final part of this dissertation, through a dialogue between Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas, two theses will be formulated: 1.) the passage from je to il will be associated with the impossibility of death. Close reading of Blanchot's reworking of Levinas's concepts will open a perspective according to which art is capable of offering the experience of fundamental alterity. 2.) the time of time's absence will be described as the temporality of artwork, but also as the temporality of the other.