<p> Esta investigaci&oacute;n explora, a trav&eacute;s de la novela de El sue&ntilde;o del celta (2010) de Mario Vargas Llosa, una nueva postura sobre lo que implica ser un h&eacute;roe. El cuestionamiento que surge sobre el concepto heroico es lo que posibilita examinar la composici&oacute;n heroica del personaje principal de El sue&ntilde;o del celta, Roger Casement. Se conceptualiz&oacute; al personaje como un h&eacute;roe moderno, ya que el rasgo que lo identifica es su car&aacute;cter contradictorio. Para demostrar la caracterizaci&oacute;n de Casement como h&eacute;roe moderno se estudiaron diversas instancias narrativas que representaban tanto los rasgos heroicos como antiheroicos. Tambi&eacute;n se examin&oacute; la ambig&uuml;edad del personaje a trav&eacute;s de sus textos escritos y por medio de la construcci&oacute;n narrativa de la obra. </p><p> A trav&eacute;s de este estudio se lleg&oacute; a la conclusi&oacute;n de que Roger Casement, forma parte de la disgregaci&oacute;n &eacute;pica del h&eacute;roe que propuso Mija&iacute;l Bajt&iacute;n. Seg&uacute;n la teor&iacute;a de Bajt&iacute;n, Casement como h&eacute;roe novelesco se caracteriz&oacute; como un personaje inconcluso y con m&uacute;ltiples matices. Lo que permiti&oacute; demostrar que los g&eacute;neros literarios como la &eacute;pica y la novela pueden influenciar en c&oacute;mo se constituyen los personajes heroicos. En fin, en esta investigaci&oacute;n se cuestiona la conceptualizaci&oacute;n del h&eacute;roe tradicional trabajada por Hugo Francisco Bauz&aacute; en su libro El mito del h&eacute;roe: morfolog&iacute;a y sem&aacute;ntica de la figura heroica y por Joaqu&iacute;n M. Aguirre en su art&iacute;culo H&eacute;roe y sociedad: El tema del individuo superior en la literatura decimon&oacute;nica. Tanto Bauz&aacute; como Aguirre sostienen que el h&eacute;roe cl&aacute;sico manifiesta juicios elevados de valor, no son cobardes ni sienten miedo, sino m&aacute;s bien exteriorizan los rasgos heroicos m&aacute;s elevados. Entre ellos, el m&oacute;vil &eacute;tico de su acci&oacute;n, la transgresi&oacute;n, la ilusi&oacute;n, el sentido de mediaci&oacute;n, el valor, el deseo de vencer, el sentido de b&uacute;squeda, el valor que los dem&aacute;s le otorgan, entre otros. </p><p> No obstante, la nueva postura heroica que presenta El sue&ntilde;o del celta propone que el verdadero hero&iacute;smo no consiste en carecer de miedo, sino en superarlo. Ya que el verdadero h&eacute;roe es aquel que, a pesar de ser consciente de todas sus deficiencias, como el miedo y la debilidad, logra superar y enfrentar los problemas. Son estas caracter&iacute;sticas las que permiten presentar a Roger Casement como un h&eacute;roe en contraposici&oacute;n al h&eacute;roe tradicional al mostrar un car&aacute;cter contradictorio y aproximarse a la ambig&uuml;edad de la condici&oacute;n humana.</p><p>

Emily Dickinson's work can be understood in terms of dynamic and variable interactions with uncertainty. Sometimes uncertainty is horrifyingly meaningless, whilst on other occasions it is liberating and meaningful; Dickinson's grotesque is predicated upon the interplay of both these perspectives. Dickinson's grotesque dialectic between enabling and disabling interactions with uncertainty resists monolithic critical appropriation. Theories of the grotesque enable us to unify the critical discord between conservative and radical depictions of Dickinson's work. Using the psychoanalytic theories of Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion, I explain the dialectic between the different interactions with uncertainty and demonstrate how they are shaped contextually. Gothic context engenders fearful responses to uncertainty; female creativity engenders ambivalence; embodying contexts produce liberating uncertainty. Dickinson's gothic elucidates a need for meaning, and a corresponding fear of representational insufficiency. This desire for certainty is extrapolated from a Calvinist sensibility, whereby uncertainty denotes unregenerate being. The apophatic poems move towards meaning by perpetually surpassing their own conceptual limitations. However, this process becomes self-defeating as the act of negation itself turns into the kind of uncertainty it was supposed to overcome. Female creativity is achieved through internalizing overwhelming, masculine power as the basis of poetic autonomy. Dickinson's poetic self partially overcomes the oppressive, binary distinction between male and female positions. I compare Dickinson with Harriet Prescott Spofford, illustrating how both writers narrate their assimilation of alterity as a terrifying encounter with an omnipotent male muse.

<p> Humor is an ever-present aspect of American Literature, and, in particular, short fiction. While the construction of the comedic has been studied and broken down into its constituent parts, the reasons for its application are less studied and understood. This dissertation examines the application of humor and the comedic in the works of American writers: Raymond Carver, Flannery O&rsquo;Connor, George Saunders, and Denis Johnson in order to gain understanding about the decision to include humor in a variety of their works. The goal of the critical introduction portion of <i>Pieces</i> is to illustrate the use of comedy as a means of creating engagement in works of short fiction, which may be less engaging as a matter of plot or character, and then to come to a conclusion about the decisions these authors make about humor while writing. The creative portion of <i>Pieces</i> is a collection of short fiction, which attempts to illustrate the same comedic application. </p><p>

John Cheever published over two hundred short stories in an array of small-, mid-, and large-circulation magazines between 1930 and 1981. One hundred and twenty of these stories appeared in The New Yorker. During Cheever’s career and since his death in 1982, many critics have typically analysed his short stories in isolation from the conditions of their production, lest Cheever’s subversive modernist tendencies be confused with the conservative middlebrow ethos of The New Yorker, or the populist aspect of other large-circulation magazines. Critics, including Cheever’s daughter and his most recent biographer Blake Bailey, also claim that Cheever was a financial and, ultimately, artistic victim of the magazine marketplace. Drawing on largely unpublished editorial and administrative correspondence in the New Yorker Records and editorially annotated short story typescripts in the John Cheever Literary Manuscripts collection, and using a historicised close-reading practice, this thesis examines the influence of the magazine marketplace on the short fiction that Cheever produced between 1930 and 1964. It challenges the critical consensus by arguing that Cheever did not dissociate his authorship from commerciality at any point during his career, and consistently exploited the magazine marketplace to his financial and creative advantage, whether this meant temporarily producing stories for little magazines in the early 1930s and romance stories for mainstream titles in the 1940s, or selling his New Yorker rejections to its rivals, which he did throughout his career. Cheever also developed strong working relationships with his editors at The New Yorker during the 1940s and 1950s. This thesis re-evaluates these relationships by analysing comparatively the drafts, archival materials that have hitherto been neglected by critics, and published versions of some of Cheever’s best known New Yorker stories. In so doing, this thesis demonstrates the crucial role that editorial collaboration played in Cheever’s writing process.

This thesis critically explores the “difference” of contemporary South Asian American women’s fiction and their fictional narratives of women’s lives, away from the ethnic postcolonial depictions of diasporic women. The selected novels of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Amulya Malladi, Bharti Kirchner, V.V. Ganeshananthan, Nayomi Munaweera, Nausheen Pasha-Zaidi and Shaila Abdullah studied here interrogate the depiction of South Asian women characters both within diasporic American locations and in South Asian settings. These writers establish individual identities that defy homogeneity assigned to regional identities and establish heterogeneous characters that are influenced through transnational travel. This dissertation’s engagement with exotic identities, foodways, ethno-social identities and diasporic and native socio-cultural pressures for women, offers a “different” reading of contemporary South Asian women’s fiction. The identities that are being reinvented by the selected Indian, Sri Lankan and Pakistani American women writers destabilise established boundaries for women’s identity in South Asian American women’s fiction by using old and new tropes such as folkloric myths, nostalgia, food and ethnic relationships. The transnational cosmopolitan locations that enable the re-negotiation of identities enable the women characters to fashion their own uniqueness. I argue that a “difference” in South Asian American women’s contemporary writing has emerged in recent times, that looks beyond ethno-social diasporic identities. These changes not only advance the already established tropes in women’s literature, but also address important issues of individuality, personal choices and societal pressure affecting self-reinvention and reception of these women within their societies. The analysis of under-researched yet powerful contemporary women writers makes this an important addition to the existing literary debates on varied women’s identities in fiction. I identify existing trends and evolving trends which help to map the emerging changes, making it a significant contribution to the understanding of the development of contemporary South Asian American women’s literature as a distinct body of work.

This thesis brings together two distinct areas of scholarship – trauma studies and comics. I focus on representations of trauma, specifically trauma arising from conflict and war, in post-Vietnam American comics. Trauma studies is an established area within literary research, both in terms of conflict trauma and also personal trauma. For the most part, comics have been ignored. It is my contention that, by the nature of its form, comics is able to mimic the symptoms and presentation of a traumatic rupture in order to represent a traumatic event as accurately and viscerally as possible. My primary texts are taken from across the full spectrum of the comics form. I consider mainstream superhero comics alongside alternative and art comics; all primary texts were published after 1975 by American creators. The theoretical basis is drawn from Freudian, post-Freudian and contemporary clinical thought. The application of trauma theory to the comics form is a largely untraced path so in using this solid theoretical base I hope to reinvigorate these theories in light of a ‘new’ form. I also draw on the small corpus of critical texts in the field of comics studies. This thesis is structured around 6 key issues in conflict and traumatic representation. I conduct close analyses of my primary sources to consider the effectiveness of comics, both formally and thematically, in the areas of mourning, dreams and personal identity. I further consider how the formal concern of temporality and problematizing issue of postmodernism affect, and are affected by, the dual focus of comics and trauma.

No description available.

<p>The technological advances in surveillance over the past 20 years have been astounding and are used in both the private and public sectors progressively each day. The extent of technological advances and the impact on our society seem almost reflective of something out of a work of science fiction. This study involves a qualitative content analysis of three early 20th century dystopian novels and news articles from newspapers such as The Guardian, that display current events pertaining to surveillance, including NSA surveillance methods leaked by Edward Snowden. The study relies upon macro sociological constructs, specifically formal social control to explain the social control imposed by our current government with the use of surveillance methods. Upon examination of the novels and news articles, it is revealed that there is a parallel between the novels and our current society which suggests that we live in a surveillance state. The importance of this study is to educate the public on data collection, analysis, and storage involved in the surveillance process. By showing that our current society is a surveillance state, this study expresses the importance of safeguarding our privacy, liberties, and civil rights as a means of reducing governmental social control.

No description available.

This thesis examines Herman Melville's representations of the material text and the literary marketplace in the novels he published between 1846 and 1857. Thus far, scholarship has emphasized Melville's hostility towards literary production in mid-nineteenth century America, and positioned the book object as a constraint on his imagination. However, this thesis argues that the industrially produced and commercially circulated book was also a powerful source of inspiration for Melville, and that the printed book is both the subject of and a tool for literary representation in his novels. Combining book history and literary criticism, the thesis considers Melville's aesthetic engagements with the material text in order to provide new perspectives on central concerns in Melville's writing: authenticity, ambiguity, irony, and originality. Chapter 1 gives an overview of the technological, economic and social conditions of literary production in antebellum America, contemporary responses to those conditions, and previous studies of Melville's representations of and relations with the literary marketplace. Chapter 2 examines Melville's ludic uses of print in Typee and Omoo, and Chapter 3 considers the relationship between book covers, the market, and selfhood in Redburn and White-Jacket. Chapter 4 explore's the circulation of the book object in markets and metaphors in Moby-Dick. Chapters 5 and 6 return to the materiality of the text, examining the ambiguities of paper and papermaking in Pierre, and The Confidence-Man's construction of original writing through technologically reproducibility. The Conclusion then suggests that the material text and literary marketplace can be best understood as embodying potential for Melville, functioning as partial and contingent spaces in his works, in which a union of aesthetic and economic value is never fully realized, but is always possible.