Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciada en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa / The scope of this work is to understand the ways in which different elements concerning a postmodern view of Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things come together to conform a comprehensive understanding of this narrative. I plan on considering urban subjects and their movements within the city by means of space ―the place they occupy inside the city, their activities―how they plan on surviving, and the ways in which history and memory collide to form a sense of community that is long gone. Also, elements such as the city itself as a place where interactions between people living in duress are conducted, and the space as background for those interactions. All of these aspects will play part in finally acknowledging to what extent is this a city of ‘Last things’ a place which is on the verge of destruction, but that recycles and transforms the last things into new ones. This will take on the form of the point of view of a newcomer to the city, someone who experiences these new situations as she finds herself into them, with the fresh eyes of someone who has been outside it, and understands what the difficulties are in finding a sense of belonging in a place which does not lend itself to do so, but in doing so finds herself entangled in the city’s movements.

Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa. / “People everywhere have hopes, but America is the only nation to claim its own collective dream. Politicians have invoked The American Dream ever since historian James Truslow Adams first coined the phrase in 1931. In his best-selling book, “the epic of America”, he described the dream as the average American’s “star in the west which led him on...in search of a home where toil would reap a sure reward, and no dead hands of custom or exaction would push him back into ´his place`”. The phrase caught on like wildfire and endures still, though its meaning is often vague. To some the “sure reward” is a luxury car. To others it’s a college degree, a steady job that pays the bills, or a house in the suburbs and a family of four `a la Ozzie and Harriet. But the dream is above all America’s own brand of optimism, which was brought over by the first settlers and which presumes no limits to what anyone can have or achieve.”

Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa. / The aim of this investigation is to discover and analyze the ways in which Paul Auster, through his narrative, conveys a postmodernist view of man and his environment, specifically through a recurrent theme of his fiction: Nothingness. Nothingness is herewith regarded as a characteristic of the post-modern, fragmented city- urban nothingness- and the effects of this nothingness dimension upon the city’s inhabitants is further analysed.

Facultad de Filosof?a y Humanidades / Departamento de Ling??stica / Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciada en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa / Introduction From the emergence of the term Utopia in Thomas More?s book of the same name, many controversial and prolific discussions have appeared throughout time. These discussions involved not only cultural and sociological aspects, but also those concerned more with the inner dimension of the self: his desires, ambitions and transformations. What More really meant by using this term we have no certainty, because in it he refers to several different factors that have an effect in the life of the island portrayed in his book. In opposition to Utopia, meaning ?a happy place where a person has nothing to worry about because his/her government provides everything they need?, there is Dystopia, which could be defined as ?a society being controlled by a repressive state, in both individual and collective ways?. Starting from this point, the general topic that gives rise to the object of study in this work is the urban subject, Anna Blume in Paul Auster?s In the Country of Last Things, immersed in a dystopian city nearly to be extinguished and conditioned by spaces that exert powerful forces on the prevalence of the self.

Paul Auster¡¦s The Invention of Solitude is not merely an autobiography, but an attempt to render such a genre to challenge writing itself by trying to write what is of no possibility to be written. In addition, Auster further adds elements of photography in The Invention of Solitude, which on the one hand enhance the genre itself (as an autobiography with photos attached as solid evidences to the written words), and on the other hand, by doing so, the author as a matter of fact deconstructs everything he has been trying to construct. By adding photographs and descriptions of the photographs very consciously, he actually, beyond the ostensible purpose of trying to lend credibility to the autobiographical work, tries to challenge the solidity of such work. Lots of researches have been done on Paul Auster, for whom has already recognized world-widely as an important contemporary American writer, most of them focus on his renowned New York Trilogy (1987),The Music of Chance (1990), or The Brooklyn Follys (2005), while little researches have been done to The Invention of Solitude¡V¡Voften referred to as a memoir of Auster. The book is structured with ¡§Portrait of an Invisible Man¡¨ and ¡§The Book of Memory;¡¨ the former is written right after the sudden death of the author¡¦s father Samuel Auster and the latter is Auster¡¦s own account on matters that later have become his re-occurrent themes throughout his works. I study the utilization of involving photographs in fictional autobiography by looking at the two photographs Paul Auster has reproduced in The Invention of Solitude. Namely, how photography and fiction put together to ¡§renew¡¨ each other (Louvel 31). In chapter one I discuss autobiography and photography, the intertextuality between photographs and texts, and the selection of the two photographs in The Invention of Solitude (including different arrangements of the two photographs in various editions). In chapter two, I mainly focus on Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes¡¦ reading on photographs; I aim to conclude that each of them talks about one particular essence of photography respectively only with different terms¡V¡Vas aura and punctum¡V¡Vthe endeavor is to illustrate and attest to a certain and unique quality of human that can never be portrayed any how and by any means. Auster¡¦s usage of putting together the words and the photos is also a means to pursuit the same untraceable human quality; he testifies the unseen by presenting something to be seen. The Invention of Solitude requires reader to treat it with the way of reading photographs and pictures; a pictorial reading of words is of necessity in tackling the work, just as in Liliane Louvel¡¦s words, to treat ¡§the image as a means to study fiction through the lens of what I call the ¡¥pictorial third¡¦¡¨ (31). In chapter three, I delve into the anxiety and hunger for portrayal, linking which to the act of writing that functions as a healing process for the writer. I then concentrate on the text, demonstrating how this text itself can possibly be decoded with ways analyzing a picture. In its form and way of writing, the composition of The Invention of Solitude is just like the early procedure of long exposure in taking photographs, the distance and aura have both remained through the writing and the given photographs. In addition, the text is far more than simply combination of words, each word has been rendered as if an element of photography; that is, words can be read with multiple layers of meanings that are all linked with photographs. And I would explore this point through the reading of ¡§room¡¨ in the book. Besides, I¡¦ve involved Susan Sontag, Henri Van Lier, John Berger, Edward W. Said and Thierry de Duve in the three chapters, serving to converse with my argument. Chapter four includes the film Smoke as the subject, the film not only contains photographs as a heavy ingredient and one of the major themes; what¡¦s more, the sequence of weighting smoke also best serves as the footnote, penetrating Benjamin, Barthes and Auster.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 279-304).

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Queensland, 2004. / Includes bibliography.

Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa. / Chance is a key figure in our daily lives, since we are uncertain about events in our future that may affect our health, economic stability, or personal interactions. It comes, therefore, as no surprise that chance affects a human life deeply -- as deep as a person's convictions, beliefs, and other matters central to someone‟s life-plan. If she had not missed her train, she would never have met her spouse. Had she lived in other times, she may have been a black slave in Georgia instead of an American citizen with equal rights.

Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa. / The purpose of this work is to study Paul Auster’s feminine characters in terms of their dramatic contribution and relevance as women. They will show us their strength and firm attitudes to face life’s adversities, which are conditioned by the author’s recurrent themes of chance, solitude, urban nothingness and desolation.

Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades / Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licencia en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa / Our research began through Blake’s poetry, by seeing how the people he portrayed were engulfed by the city, how this new modern construct affected their daily living. As Heather Glen has very accurately stated in her Blake’s London: “The eighteenth-century London street was […] a place where that sense of the other as object –often as feeble and wretched object- […] was the dominant mode of relationship (148).” This new type of urban mode of living is extreme to the 18th century Englishman, a place where the rule becomes to survive, if you can, in this distant society. “This world simply is. Reciprocal human relationships in which otherness is acknowledged and the needs of all harmonized do not exist: the only relationships […] are instrumental ones. People have become objects (155).” As is very well shown through Glen and Blake in this case, this is a very bleak prospect. Cities become in a way, object-enemies, by this I mean that the city is distant and unfamiliar, in much the same way people are according to Glen, and each citizen has to do what he can to survive in this hostile world. Glen specifically focuses her analysis on Blake’s London, a portrayal of this growing metropolis that pushes the common Londoners further into ‘their’ corner; they watch it with fear because it is becoming distant. They belong in the city, for without them the city would not function, yet they are mere objects, they are not part of its creation or development. They are not free in the city.