Thesis (Ph.D.)--Brown University, 2005. / Vita. Thesis advisor: Enric Bou. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 194-204). Also available online.

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No description available.

This thesis endeavors to show how Charles Dickens revealed himself and his life in his works.

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Johannesburg, June 2016 / The study explores the ways in which the self and other are constructed and represented in a wide range of Zimbabwean political autobiographical narratives from 1972 to 2011. In particular, it focuses on the machinery of autobiography and the various narrative strategies deployed by autobiographers of different races, gender, ethnic origins and political persuasions to construct the self and other. It also considers how these representations of the self and other, combined with the narrative strategies used, bear upon the history and politics of Zimbabwe. The argument is advanced that through strategic and careful deployment of narrative in transforming lives lived to lives told, the selected narratives not only reconstruct the self and other but also narrate the history and politics of the nation. Therefore, the deployment of different narrative strategies, which include the uses of: authentication, patronage of authorship, historical recurrence and narcissistic rage, erasure, palimpsest and collaborative voices, and hauntology has resulted in the emergence of a seemingly minor genre into a competing narrative that is threatening to take over the place of hegemonic grand narratives and histories of Zimbabwe. These have all along been largely nativist and based on racial, ethnic and patriarchal prejudices, especially in the manner in which they narrated the political history of Zimbabwe. The study thus argues that the machinery of autobiographies has been deployed as political weaponry to present bleached images of the self and other. This situates Zimbabwe’s political autobiographies as literary and political projects and archives that narrate the nation through the story of the self and other. / MT2017

Thesis (doctoral)--Stockholms universitet, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 172-184).

Thesis (doctoral)--Stockholms universitet, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 172-184).

No description available.

D.Litt. et Phil. / Marguerite Yourcenar was already famous as a writer of historical novels like Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951) and L’Œuvre au Noir (1968), when the first volume of her three-volume autobiography, Le Labyrinthe du Monde, appeared in 1974. Readers expecting to find out at last who Yourcenar really was, were to be disappointed for in Le Labyrinthe du Monde, the author meticulously explores her genealogy but gives very little direct information about herself. The first volume, Souvenirs pieux (1974), is devoted to the genealogy of the maternal branch of Yourcenar’s family. The second, Archives du Nord (1977), deals with her father’s genealogy and the final, unfinished volume, Quoi? L’Eternité, published in 1988 after the author’s death, should according to Yvon Bernier, to whom Yourcenar entrusted the care of her documents in her will, have dealt with her father’s death, with some of her earlier writings and with her own life up to the declaration of the Second World War. As it is, of the 624 pages occupied by Le Labyrinthe du Monde in the Gallimard edition of Yourcenar’s collected Essais et Mémoires, only 20 deal specifically with her early childhood. A further 30, recounting the life of her immediate family before and during the First World War, are interspersed with some information on her life between the ages of 11 and 15. The fact that the autobiographical subject’s own story is largely absent from this text, left students of Yourcenar’s work with the question whether Le Labyrinthe du Monde could still be considered an autobiography. Several articles were published on the subject, but only one detailed study by Simone Proust who explains the unconventional autobiographical form of Yourcenar’s text by linking it to the influence of Buddhism on the author’s thought. The present study pursues the hypothesis that although the author does not tell her own story in detail in a conventionally autobiographical form, she represents herself in several ways. This analysis is carried out in four phases. The first identifies the main theoretical issues regarding the question of self-representation in language which are the subject of an ongoing debate. Secondly, a detailed analysis of self-representation in the three volumes of Le Labyrinthe du Monde is undertaken. Thirdly, possible links between Yourcenar’s autobiography and the rest of her œuvre are explored. The last section is an attempt to situate Yourcenar’s special kind of self-representation within the broader context of some twentieth century trends of thought. The study arrives at the conclusion that although the story of the autobiographical subject is granted such limited space in Le Labyrinthe du Monde, self-representation does take place in an unconventional and oblique way. Marguerite Yourcenar reveals herself in the way she talks about other people, and the selfportrait that takes form in the text gives a privileged position to the artist at work. Le Labyrinthe du Monde in fact illustrates Yourcenar’s belief that her identity is to a large extent determined by her writerly activity, and reflected in the books she wrote.

Rooted in his painfully fractured identity as an Arab-speaking Jew in the (then) French colonial Tunisia, Albert Memmi' s novels and essays evolve in a single autobiographical space. The author will explore and remodel this space from different angles in an attempt to resolve a double predicament through his writing, leading to a progressive (re )construction of the self, which we have called "autography". Memmi's double predicament - his shattered identity and his problematic relation to the Other - is revealed in the analysis of his first two novels (or auto fictions ), La Statue de sel and Agar, where an agonising deconstruction of the self first emerges. The autobiographical and chronological plot of these works is subverted in the third novel, Le Scorpion, where the reconstruction of the self through writing is downplayed and the Other is afforded some measure of alterity, while the writing, both symbolic and playful, becomes therapeutic. The fourth novel, Le Désert, pursues the reconstruction, reasserting the North-African roots of the author's triple identity, but hardly at all its Jewishness. In the last novel, Le Pharaon, the second dimension of the predicament - the relation to the Other - stalls and leaves Memmi' s novel writing in an impasse. This is the subject of the first part of this study. No further novels will be written. However, the essays - examined in the second part ¬starting with Portrait du colonisé, will proliferate, progressively asserting Jewish identity with Portrait d'un Juij and La Liberation du Juij. From the conflictive duo, the work evolves towards the pacific triad of the concept of dependence, where the relation to the Other progresses from oppression to mutual exchange. Henceforth, the dependence relationship will characterise the later essays, including Le Racisme. Through the essays, the omnipresent "I" gradually gives way to the humanist "we", enveloping the reader, who coincides with the Other and becomes the centre of the author's concern. This space granted to the Other is consolidated in writing of an increasingly fragmented nature. The discourse becomes sparse, in an apparent deconstruction of the writing, which, paradoxically, far from signalling a drying up, consummates the autographic project. / Thesis (DLitt (French))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Modern European Languages / unrestricted