This thesis seeks to cohere two strands in the work of Jules Verne, namely that of science and utopia. The role of science is of paramount importance to Verne's fictional practice in the Voyages extraordinaires, yet its elucidation, I will argue, is dependent upon aesthetic innovations that lend science a spatial and temporal structure. The spatial and temporal manifestations of science help form a 'chronotope of science' that allows Vernian protagonists to gain access to scientific phenomena using an aesthetically charged epistemology. The chronotope of science is accompanied by further motivic chronotopes, which I identify as key in the depiction of Vernian utopia and dystopia respectively. The vehicles of some of Verne's earlier and most successful novels, such as the Victoria of Cinq semaines en ballon (1863) or the Nautilus of Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1870), illustrate the ways in which Verne reconfigures ideology and history in new spatial and temporal categories. These utopian figurations will be subverted, so I argue, in the Vernian utopian community as depicted in the Voyages extraordinaires of the 1870s. Here, the utopian communities of L'Ile mysterieuse (1874) and France-Ville from Les Cinq cents millions de la Begum (1879) are subverted by a chronotopic recalibration of their utopian content, which sees the anti-utopian Le Chancellor and the Germanic Stahlstadt emerge as thematic opposites. This dystopian turn becomes more concretely established in Vernian production of the 1880s and 1890s, which sees various of Verne's earlier utopian motifs transformed into instruments of dystopia and terror, from destructive cannons to tyrannical airships. The thesis will conclude that the challenges initially met by Verne in the depiction of science and the rapidly changing industrial world of the nineteenth century led to the development of a unique aesthetic and spatio-temporal constructions that could frame not only the changing spatial environment, but also the unfolding temporal field of human history. These structures, both scientific and utopian, would help inform the generic development of science fiction, whose use of science and positing of alternative futures owes much, thematically and stylistically, to the Vernian literary aesthetic.

This thesis discusses the aesthetic experience of reading in Proust’s A la Recherche du temps perdu, with a special emphasis on the Narrator’s proposition that a literary work may enable its readers to become ’les propres lecteurs d’eux-memes’ (RTFIV, 610). This view prompts two crucial questions about self-understanding through reading: (i) what is meant by ’self and (ii) what makes the process of reading literature special, as opposed to other aesthetic experiences and the reading of other kinds of texts. The first part of the thesis focuses on subjectivity and the relation between primary experience and mediation in Proust, addressing the underlying tension between two views of selfhood in the Recherche - a self which evolves around some kind of essence at the centre of experience, and a much more fragmented subject which needs to be constantly recomposed. Rather than being an exclusively metaphysical enquiry into how subjectivity is presented in the novel, this study focuses, though close analysis of Proust’s text, on the ways in which this potential self-understanding can be attained through literature; the second part therefore compares reading to other aesthetic experiences - those of visual art, music and performance - while the third and final part focuses specifically on literature’s communicative possibilities and the different modes of reading in the novel. The thesis argues that the specificity of aesthetic reading is attached to the absence (or at least subsidiary role) of material, sensory stimuli from the artwork itself, which compels readers’ imagination to work closely with (and largely depend on) their past and present experiences outside the text at hand. This collaboration is the germ of the Proustian ’moyen de lire en soi-meme’ (RTFIV, 610) as it enables the reader to overcome the separation between the actual, direct, affective experience 'in' the world and the mediated, reflective experience 'of' the world, and to realise the in-dwelling and reciprocal affiliation between the two.

This thesis explores in detail three academically neglected novels by Milan Kundera: Slowness (1995), Identity (1998) and Ignorance (2002). Originally written in French, the author’s second language, after six novels, a short-story collection and a play originally written in Czech, these texts are often bracketed off from the rest of his writing and seen as something of an inferior addendum. This is despite clear thematic similarities that cross the linguistic divide and that I demonstrate here are of central significance to the author’s entire novelistic project. This exploration not only reveals that these three French novels place in the foreground themes that have rippled in and out of focus across Kundera’s earlier Czech work and so are of central importance to Kundera as a novelist. It also shows that the lateness of the variations on the themes of slowness, identity and ignorance within these three French novels does not hold everything in common with the lateness that Adorno locates in late Beethoven. It is true that like late Beethoven, Kundera’s late variations on these themes demonstrate the manoeuvres of an oeuvre sensing its death across the horizon. But through the specific nature of the late variations on slowness, identity and ignorance, the oeuvre works hard to pull its readers down into the textual spaces of these three late novels with a fresh urgency, rather than truculently push them away, so that Kundera’s audience might be adequately prepared to continue its own voyages once the oeuvre has played its final notes.

Going against the grain of the formalist annulment of history's impact upon a writer's psyche, this dissertation employs postcolonial strategies in an analysis of Beckett's tangential response to the psychological-sociological impact of twentieth-century events that witnessed both the nominal end of colonialism in Ireland and the dissolution of European imperialism abroad. Despite Beckett's adoption of an elliptical modernist style and the subjective focus and introspective nature of his characterisation of Belacqua, Murphy, Watt, Molloy and Mahood, the socio-historical approach that underpins this reconstruction of a socially engaged Beckett, re-evaluates the significance of cultural nuances and extra-literary referents in the author's pre-war 'Irish' fiction and his more European-orientated post-war prose fiction. Operating within a postcolonial framework, I will explore the extent to which the socio-cultural ennui and misanthropy of Belacqua, Murphy and Watt is traceable to both the colonial legacy and the post-independence mood of disillusionment that enveloped the new state. Beckett's 'Irish' fiction' - More Pricks than Kicks, Murphy and Watt - contains the quasi-allegorical communique that the atrophying socio-cultural conformity that stymied the cultural, spiritual and artistic development of its citizens was engendered by the Irish State's postcolonial drive to normalise political and social relationships after the uncertainties and bitterness engendered by Civil War rivalries and the psychosocial impact of the cultural suppression which accompanied British colonialism. Referencing Watt, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, I will show how Beckett relentlessly interrogates the pitiless rationalisations underlying much of right-wing European politics in the course of the twentieth-century's third decade from the subaltern perspective of those experiencing postcolonial and post-war psychosocial alienation. By the same token, I will also examine how Beckett's resistance took the form of a conscious dehegemonising and a social-ethical resistance to the suppressions engendered by authoritarian rule - whether nationalist, colonialist or totalitarian in derivation. Exploring the extent to which the Beckettian protagonist resists ideological interpellation, I will show how Beckett's novels and short stories trace the psychic dilemma of his characters when confronted by the overarching and institutionalised ideologies of British colonialism, Irish nationalism, European imperialism and inter-war totalitarianism. My postcolonial reading of Molloy and The Unnamable will focus on the socio-ethical implications of the oppositional identity binaries which inform these novels' dyadic structure. I will also explore the impact of the psychosocial consequences of war upon Europe's metropolitan citizens. In particular, J will consider the socio-cultural tension generated by the conflict between old and new world orders, the reverberations of which can be heard - however faintly - within the Beckettian text.

My research relates to the works of Michel Houellebecq and his re-formulation of the contemporary scientific episteme within the aesthetic and subjective domain of the novel. His artistic influences, which encompass early German Romanticism, Balzac, Auguste Comte and the science-fiction writings of HP Lovecraft, all attest to a philosophical shift in the place given to the human body within the series of industrial and scientific revolutions that took place since the Enlightenment. By including contemporary scientific discourses on tourism, sexuality, prostitution and advertising in his novels and poems, Houellebecq fictionalises the position of the subject within the boundaries of modern knowledge. His poetry acts as a critique of scientific prose on human and animals in the context of global-market economics, which tends to frame and define the subject as a transparent and complete object of study and therefore economic transaction. If human beings are transparent to modern forms of knowing, Houellebecq seems to ask, can humans still speak as subjects? In light of this question, the “I” of the modern poet acts as a form of sceptical resistance to the rationalisation of humans as living beings and consumers. The fiction of human cloning in Houellebecq’s novel La Possibilité d’une île, on the other hand, fictionalises the outcome of the rationalisation of human interaction through the discourse of sexuality. I compare this novel with J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace in which the figure of the dog becomes a symbol of humanity. In La Possibilité d’une île, the dog Fox symbolises human domestication through cloning and the institutionalisation of the human body through technological reproduction. This is explained in the thesis in the light of Foucault’s notion of biopower. Through his critique of the dominating discourse of sexuality in La Possibilité d’une île and his former novels, Houellebecq suggests that state control over biological matter in the name of sexuality and knowledge threatens in fact to transform subjects into raw material for exploitation.

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'Samuel Beckett: The Aesthetics of Shortness' sets out to answer the question: What does Beckett's prose achieve through its convention defying approach to expression? The project explores this phenomenon through an examination of a range of Beckett's prose, which includes a selection of less well-known texts by the author. Seemingly, the further from 'convention' a text is the less likely it is to attract the attention of critics. By prioritising these texts the project contributes to knowledge by inviting discussion of those that have generated less critical debate, whilst also framing the more predominant texts within the wider Beckett oeuvre. The thesis uses a narratological methodology to provide a theoretical vocabulary for distinguishing the component parts of fiction which Beckett reduces and removes through his experimentation. It argues that the fewer narrative components a text has the more unconventional it is and, by extension, the more challenging it is to read. Nevertheless, by using aesthetic theory it is possible to assess the success of each text as a piece of literature. These appraisals form the basis of the investigation. The research question is posed to each of the texts analysed in the main body of the thesis and a summary of the findings is provided in the conclusion. The thesis found that the success of each artwork, in relation to traditional models of aesthetic value, varied considerably. The contrast between Beckett's early work in the conventional modern short story in English is contrasted with his subsequent transition into aesthetically short postmodern stories in French.

The relationship between memory and imagination is at the heart of twenty-first century war fiction. This literature engages with the unmaking and remaking of a history that has not been experienced at first hand. The concept of postmemory, developed by Marianne Hirsch with photography as a primary source, examines the role of memory in reconstructing and recollecting history imaginatively and creatively. The act of remembering is transformed into a malleable and innovative activity. This dissertation analyses how the concept of postmemory, when applied to fiction as a form through which to experience unlived memories, approaches experiences of war with a sense of freedom which opens up new narrative perspectives. Focusing on the largely unstudied works of two contemporary French writers, Philippe Claudel and Laurent Gaudé, the first two chapters explore the problematic relation of memory, history and mimetic representation as they unfold in postmemory. Under the shadow of a trauma into which these writers remove themselves temporally, their writings produce a series of distortions that reflect on the fluidity of memory. The third chapter identifies intertextual patterns and generic experiments in the internal movement of each text, and argues that they are an integral part of the dynamic process involved in addressing the past. Underpinned by the ambiguous structure of postmemory, a creative oscillation emerges between continuity and rupture, proximity and distance. The last chapter examines more closely the constitution of the postmemorial subject by focusing on the internal mechanism of belated memory - here, Claudel’s familial postmemory and Gaudé’s prosthetic memory - which articulates memory in terms of responsibility, and creativity in terms of ethics. By embracing a temporal and literary space for remembering events that have not been experienced, the texts examined here call into question the readers’ as well as the author’s ethical positioning. They suggest a new space-time through which to represent the fragmented, problematic recovery involved in postmemory.

Stories of the Trojan War and its aftermath are the oldest – apart from those in the Bible – to be retold in medieval literature. Between 1165-1450, they catch the imagination of French-language writers, who create histories in and for that burgeoning vernacular. These writers make Troy a place of origins for peoples and places across Europe. One way in which writers locate origins at Troy is through the device of translation. Geoffrey of Monmouth, Benoît de Sainte-Maure and the writers of the prose Troie, the Histoire Ancienne and the Roman de Perceforest all claim to have translated old texts; for Benoît and the prose Troie writers, this text is a Latin copy of an eyewitness account of the Trojan War. The writers thus connect their locations with Troy retroactively, in both space and time. Within this set of highly successful stories, writers’ presentations of translation therefore have important consequences for understanding what is at stake in medieval French textual production. Taking Derrida’s Monolinguisme de l’Autre as my theoretical starting point, this thesis sheds new light on medieval writers’ concepts of translation, creation and origins by asking two questions: • To what extent is translation considered integral to creation and textual production in medieval French texts? • Why does the conceit of translation from a lost source seem to shape narratives even when this source is a fiction? All these writers produce texts in French, or translate from that language, but these texts were written in geographically distinct areas: the Roman de Troie comes from Northern France, the prose Troy traditions are copied mainly in Italy, John Gower wrote in London, Christine de Pizan was at court in Paris and the extant Perceforest manuscripts were produced in Burgundy. The Trojan material therefore inspires writers throughout this period all over Western Europe.