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In this thesis, I argue that the question of ethics, despite claims to the contrary, is a central concern in Cormac McCarthy’s fiction. My principal contention, in this regard, is that an approach that is not reliant on conventional systems of meaning is needed if one is to engage effectively with the moral value of this writer’s oeuvre. In devising such an approach, I draw heavily on the ‘immoralist’ writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. The first chapter of the study contends that good and evil, terms central to conventional morality, do not occupy easily definable positions in McCarthy’s work. In the second chapter, the emphasis falls on the way in which language and myth’s mediation of reality informs choice. The final chapter focuses on the post-apocalyptic setting of The Road, in which normative systems of value are completely absent. It argues that, despite this absence, McCarthy presents a compassionate ethic that is able to find purchase in the harsh world depicted in the novel. Finally, then, this study argues that McCarthy’s latest novel, The Road, requires a reconsideration of the critical claim that his work is nihilistic and that it negates moral value.

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Many American novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries discuss prostitution. Some works like Reginald Wright Kauffman's The House of Bondage, (1910) exaggerate the threat of "white slavery," but others like David Graham Phillips's Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (1917) more honestly depict the harsh conditions which caused many women to prostitute themselves for survival. Contemporary critical interpretations of novels addressed in this dissertation began before major shifts in women's roles in the workplace, before trends towards family planning, before women could respectably live on their own, and especially before women won the right to vote. Yet, a century of progress later, this vestigal criticism still influences our study of these texts.Relying on primary source materials such as prostitute autobiographies and vice commission reports, I compare fictional representations of prostitution to historical data, focusing on the prostitute's voice and her position in society. I examine actual prostitutes' life stories to dispel the misconception that prostitution was always a lower-class business. My chapters are ordered in regards to the prominence of the prostitute characters' voices: in Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) the heroine seldom speaks for herself; in two Socialist novels--Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) and Estelle Baker's The Rose Door (1911)--prostitutes debate low wages, political corruption, and organized vice; and in Phillips's Susan Lenox, the title character is almost always allowed to speak for herself, and readers can see what she is thinking as well as doing. As my chapters progress, I demonstrate how the fictions become more like the prostitutes' own autobiographies, with self-reliant women telling their stories without shame or remorse. My conclusion, "Revamping `Fallen Women' Pedagogy for Teaching American Literature," suggests how social history and textual scholarship of specific "fallen women" novels should affect our teaching of these texts. / Department of English

LD2668 .T4 1947 G75 / Master of Science

This dissertation provides a feminist reading of the works of Latin American women writers since the decade of the sixties to the present who focus on the particular historical moment of their times from a political perspective. A systematic study of the narrative figure in novels by Dora Alonso, Elena Poniatowska, Claribel Alegria and Darwin Flakoll, and Isabel Allende, reveals an awareness of the undercurrents of oppression existent in their societies based on racial and class stereotypes with a growing understanding of oppression based on sex. From the perspective of the female narrator in Tierra Inerme by the Cuban writer Dora Alonso, the Cuban social structure before 1959 is condemned for its inequality on the basis of class, race, and sex. However, the perspective of the narrator reveals that she has not entirely escaped the prejudices that permeate her society concerning women. Hasta no verte Jesus mio, by the Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska concentrates on the testimony of Jesusa Palancares who condemns the structural inequality existent in Mexican society. Although Palancares' perspective reveals an awareness of the unequal treatment of women, because of her underprivileged status she concentrates on oppression based on class. In Cenizas de Izalco by Darwin Flakoll from the United States and the Salvadoran Claribel Alegria, the 1931 massacre of the peasants in El Salvador is condemned. However, through the contrasting perspectives of the male and female narrators, oppression on the basis of sex is most emphasized. La casa de los espiritus by the Chilean Isabel Allende depicts brutal class, racial and sexual oppression in Chile from the 1920's to 1973. It is in this novel that sexual oppression is portrayed most vividly, again through the contrasting perspectives of the male and female narrators. Although a growing awareness of sexual oppression emerges in the novels studied becoming most emphatic in this decade through an awakening feminist consciousness, the perspective of the narrators emphasize to varying degrees the importance of solidarity among women to combat injustice of every form to achieve a more equitable existence for all oppressed people.

Esta tesis esta estructurada mediante el uso de las tecnicas narrativas, y la evocacion de la historia y la literatura mexicanas en la obra literaria de Gustavo Sainz. La Introduccion constituye el primer capitulo y presenta el marco teorico utilizado: filosofia para un fin de epoca de Villoro, cultura nacional, mito y literatura, y novela y sociedad. La Introduccion se subdivide en: (1) Entrevista con Sainz; (2) Biografia; (3) Gazapo y la literatura de la Onda; (4) Contexto social, economico y politico de Mexico de la obra de Sainz. El Segundo capitulo estudia el Mexico-Tenochtitlan en Fantasmas aztecas: el nahuatl, lenguaje neobarroco, tiempo, espacio, y contexto historico real: instituciones y ritos. El tercer capitulo examina el Virreinato de la Nueva Espana en el Retablo de inmoderaciones y heresiarcas: la cultura indigena, la flora y la fauna, el arte barroco, las razas, la encomienda y la iglesia y los intelectuales: la Ilustracion. El cuarto capitulo trata acerca del Mexico moderno de la decada de los sesenta, el cual se refleja en El Muchacho en llamas y en A la salud de la serpiente: genero autobiografico: escritor, generacion, epoca, y el lenguaje de la Onda. El quinto capitulo analiza y evalua, literariamente, la masacre del 2 de octubre y el Movimiento Estudiantil de 1968, en Compadre lobo y en A la salud de la serpiente.

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Most primitive mythologies recognize that suffering can provide an opportunity for growth, but Western man has developed a mythology in which suffering is considered evil. He conceives of some power in the universe which will oppose evil and abolish it for him; God, and more recently science an, technology, were the hoped-for saviors that would rescue him. Both have been disappointing as saviors, and Western culture seems paralyzed by its confrontation with a future which seems death-filled. The primitive conception of death as that through which one passes in initiatory suffering has been unavailable because the mythologies in which it was framed are outdated. However, some post-World-War-II novels are reflecting a new mythology which recognizes the threat of death as the terrifying face the universe shows during initiation. A few of these novels tap deep psychological sources from which mythical images traditionally come and reflect the necessity of the passage through the hell of initiation without hope of a savior. One of the best of these is Wright Morris's The Field of Vision, in which the Scanlon story is a central statement of the mythological ground ahead. This gripping tale uses the pioneer journey west to tell of the mysterious passage the unconscious can make through the ccntempoorary desert to win the bride of life. It serves as an illuminator and normative guide for evaluating how other novels avoid or confront the initiatory hell. By the Scanlon standard, some contemporary mythology is escapist. Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Cat's Cradle express the youthful desire to arrive almost automatically at a new age, either with help from a new Christ or through practicing a simplistic morality. Other novels tell of the agony of modern Grail questers who sense that a viable myth is possible, but cannot completely envision it nor accomplish the passage through the void to gain it. The hindrances in each case are powerful forces which exert control over society. These forces are scientific objectivity and racism in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and an unbeatable Combine which forces people to be rabbits and like it in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Thomas Pynchon's The Cring of Lot 49 makes clear thet the confining forces are sustained because the secret of life has been lost, and man needs protection from the void which he cannot face without the secret. Saul Bellow deals directly with mythologies in Mr. Sammler's Planet. On the one hand is the popular view which ignores what every man knows is right and asserts instead that whatever one wants, he should have. This view replaces the archetypal sustaining images with a myth of continuous progress which, now that progress has faltered, makes living seem overwhelmingly hopeless. However, Sammler believes that meaning is established in life even as it collapses. The good man is part of an elite which is unusually intelligent and discerning, able to develop the will to carry out the contract with life and to enjoy the mystic potency in living. The novels in this study indicate a trend toward a reformulation of the basic mythological structures of Western man. Possibly the belief is weakening that something from somewhere will save him from his given situation, and a mythology is emerging which tells of significant life in the common, discovered through an awareness of the archetypal consciousness.