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Hiding in Plain Sight: The Aesthetic of Plainness and the Nineteenth-Century Novel FormAmy L Elliot (6597107) 15 May 2019 (has links)
<p>This dissertation argues that nineteenth-century
novelists depended on aesthetically unremarkable—or plain—women characters to
establish the realist novel as the genre of the British middle class by mapping
class values onto plain women’s bodies. By creating female characters with an
unremarkable appearance, novelists train readers in the skills necessary to
read the realist novel by focusing on interiority rather than materiality. I
theorize plainness as a middle ground between beautiful and ugly that allowed
authors to define a morality distinct from the upper and lower classes; plain
heroines’ unremarkable exteriors embodied middle-class British values of
authenticity, restraint, and morality. More than merely the non-beautiful,
plainness delineated a very specific kind of moral and classed female
subjectivity.</p>
<p>The aesthetic of plainness
allowed novelists to engage with cultural discussions of modern female
subjectivity, for in creating plain female characters, novelists wrote against
idealized depictions of passive women. To accentuate a female character’s inner
life, plainness in novels functions primarily through comparison, through
networks of represented women. Whereas the literary angel-whore binary has been
well-established, I am interested in how the presence of a plain woman—neither
angel nor monster—complicates our understanding of heroines in novels. The
progressive potential of plain woman speaks to a contemporary movement that
rebukes the misogynistic trope of distrusting a woman’s surface and instead
portrays plain women with deep feeling and individuated identities.</p>
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Paths towards self-discovery: transitional objects and intersubjectivity in four late-twentieth-century British novelsCaissie, Denis January 2003 (has links)
This thesis explores the psychological development of liminal characters in four late-twentieth-century British novels. Studies of Julian Barnes’s Flaubert's Parrot, A. S. Byatt’s Possession, Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, and John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, by using D. W. Winnicott’s transitional-objects theory and Jessica Benjamin’s intersubjective theory, show how characters who are little more than infants socially and psychologically attempt to transcend the transitional, liminal status defined by Victor Turner. With the aid of significant objects or equal other subjects, these characters, whose subjective self-constructions at the beginning of the novels have become stalled in an immature position of emotional development or been inhibited by dominating individuals, progress psychologically towards controlling their own subjectivity.
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Optiques de la fiction. Pour une analyse des dispositifs visuels de quatre romans britanniques contemporains : Time's arrow de Martin Amis, Gut Symmetries de Jeanette Winterson, Cloud Atlas de David Mitchell, Clear de Nicola Barker / Optics of Fiction. Analysing Visual Dispositives in Four Contemporary British Novels : Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis, Gut Symmetries by Jeanette Winterson, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, and Clear by Nicola BarkerLeblond, Diane 25 November 2016 (has links)
À l’aube du XXIe siècle, la fiction britannique se trouve aux prises avec des représentations conflictuelles du voir. Inscrite dans le contexte du « tournant visuel », elle rend compte de la place prépondérante que les technologies et médias visuels occupent dans l’espace culturel. Dans le même temps, elle entre en dialogue avec un discours anxieux, qui met en avant l’idée d’une crise du visuel. Privilégié pendant des siècles comme le plus intellectuel et le plus noble des sens, le voir semble devenu l’un des lieux où s’orchestrent la manipulation et le contrôle des citoyens, surveillés et exposés au spectacle du capitalisme tardif. Faisant état de ces inquiétudes, la fiction élabore une poétique et un imaginaire de l’optique dans lesquels un sens trouve cependant à se construire. Contre l’exercice d’une autorité visuelle supposée absolue, elle produit des dispositifs dont le fonctionnement subvertit les processus d’assujettissement visuel, et invente de nouvelles pratiques de subjectivation. Ce travail implique un changement de paradigme dans notre appréhension du voir. À la confrontation dichotomique d’un sujet qui voit et d’un objet visible, notre corpus substitue des scènes de rencontre, dans lesquelles le regard se fait réciproque. L’imaginaire épistémologique qui associait la perception visuelle à une forme de connaissance, et la concevait ainsi comme un processus d’appropriation, laisse alors place à une conception politique et éthique du voir, selon laquelle le sujet émerge sous le regard de semblables dont il est, immédiatement, responsable. Ainsi voir c’est toujours s’offrir au regard de l’autre, et prendre le risque que l’échange prenne un tour inattendu, que la reconnaissance dérape. Cette appréhension de l’expérience visuelle, qui compose avec ses imperfections et envisage le lien réciproque par lequel le sujet et le sens émergent, nous engage à envisager une phénoménologie pragmatique de la lecture. / At the turn of the 21st century, British fiction finds itself negotiating conflicting perceptions of vision. In the context of the “visual turn,” it reflects the increasingly influential role that visual technologies and media play in today’s cultural landscape. At the same time, it addresses anxious accounts of what is often presented as a crisis of the visual. For centuries vision was celebrated as the most intellectual of the senses; today, however, it is more often presented as a key component in practices of manipulation and control. Far from standing as a master of the visible world, the seeing subject appears as subjugated, living as he does under constant surveillance, and among the simulacra of the late capitalist spectacle. While taking such concerns into account, contemporary fiction creates optical dispositives that subvert the mechanisms of visual subjectification, and pave the way for new practices of subjectivation. This calls for a shift in the paradigms used to delineate the workings of vision. The novels we analyse here leave behind optical models defined by the binary separation between seeing and seen, subject and object. What they create instead are visual encounters in which one pair of eyes necessarily meets another. The epistemological understanding of visual perception as a vehicle of knowledge is replaced by a political and ethical interpretation of vision: the seeing subject emerges under the gaze of others, whom he acknowledges as his responsibility. In seeing therefore we run the risk that the encounter might go awry, that recognition might turn into misrecognition. This conception of visual experience emphasises the reciprocal structures of discourse and perception within which subjects and meanings emerge, but also reckons with the imperfections inherent in any interactive exchange between seeing and speaking subjects. It suggests that we engage with the phenomenology of reading through the pragmatics of discourse.
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Storytelling and Self-Formation in Nineteenth-Century British NovelsHyun, Sook K. 16 January 2010 (has links)
This dissertation aims to examine the various ways in which three Victorian
novels, such as Wilkie Collins?s The Woman in White (1860), Anne Bront�?s The
Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Charlotte Bront�?s Villette (1853), address the
relationship between storytelling and self-formation, showing that a subject
formulates a sense of self by storytelling.
The constructed nature of self and storytelling in Collins?s The Woman in
White shows that narrative is a significant way of attributing meaning in our lives
and that constructing stories about self is connected to the construction of self,
illustrating that storytelling is a form of self-formation. Anne Bront�?s The Tenant of
Wildfell Hall exemplifies Bront�?s configuration of the relational and contextual
aspect of storytelling and self-formation in her belief that self is formed not merely
through the story he/she tells but through the triangular relationship of the
storyteller, the story, and the reader. This novel proves that even though the writer?s role in constructing his/her self-concept through his/her narrative is
important, the narrator?s triangular relationship with the reader and the text is also
a significant component in his/her self-formation. Charlotte Bront�?s Villette is
concerned with unnarration, in which the narrative does not say, and it shows that
the unnarrated elements provide useful resource for the display of the narrator?s
self. For Charlotte Bront�, unnarration is part of the narrative configuration that
contributes to constructing and presenting the storyteller?s self-formation.
These three novels illuminate that narrative is more than linguistic activities
of the symbolic representation of the world, and that it cannot be fully conceived
without taking into consideration the storyteller?s experience and thoughts of the
world.
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Cultural exchange in selected contemporary British novelsLente, Sandra van 13 February 2015 (has links)
In dieser Dissertation werden die Repräsentationen von Kulturtransfer in zeitgenössischen britischen Romanen untersucht (Monica Ali: Brick Lane (2003), Nadeem Aslam: Maps For Lost Lovers (2004), Gautam Malkani: Londonstani (2007) und Maggie Gee: The White Family (2002)). Für die Analyse der Begegnungen und Kulturtransferprozesse werden narratologische Analysekategorien mit denen der Kulturtransferanalyse verknüpft. Neben den textimmanenten Aspekten werden außerdem die Produktions- und Rezeptionskontexte der Romane mitberücksichtigt. Dazu gehören u.a. auch das Buchmarketing und Buchumschlagdesign sowie Rezensionen und öffentliche Reaktionen auf die Romane. Mit diesem Instrumentarium werden z.B. folgende Fragen untersucht: Wie werden Begegnungen und Austauschprozesse repräsentiert und bewertet? Welche Gründe für Aneignung oder Abschottung werden formuliert? In diesem Kontext konzentriert sich die Arbeit auf die Repräsentation von Mediatorinnen und Mediatoren, Kontaktzonen und -situationen, Machtstrukturen sowie Selektions- und Ablehnungsprozesse. Außerdem wird untersucht, mit welchen ästhetischen Mitteln die Austauschprozesse gestaltet werden, beispielsweise durch die Untersuchung der Plotmuster und der Charakterisierungen auf Stereotype hin. und welche Effekte dies bewirkt. Die Analysen haben ergeben, dass Kulturtransfer als erstrebenswert bewertet wird. Gleichzeitig findet aber oft nur Assimilierung statt und kein reziproker Austausch auf Augenhöhe. Die ausgewählten Romane setzen sich vorwiegend mit Hindernissen des interkulturellen Austauschs auseinander. Besonders häufig werden in diesem Kontext Gründe wie mangelnde Bereitschaft, mangelnde Bildung und extremistische (religiöse) Ansichten der Einwandererfamilien angeführt. Die Romane verstetigen Stereotype, die dem Lesepublikum bereits aus vielen Massenmedien vertraut sind, u.a. durch entwicklungsresistente Charaktere, typisiert als ungebildete und unverbesserliche Migranten, die Parallelgesellschaften entwerfen. / This thesis analyses representations of cultural exchange in contemporary British novels in the context of migration and the British literary field. It offers a multilayered approach: the combination of cultural exchange theory and its categories with narratological tools do justice to the aesthetic side of the novels as well as their socio-political and historical contexts that are particularly relevant for novels dealing with migration. Cultural exchange theory analyses appropriation and transformation processes, i.e. how the concepts, cultural practices as well as representations change when they are transferred into a different cultural context. Furthermore, this thesis takes into consideration that all novels exist as material objects within a literary field that is affected by editors, marketing people, reviewers, and other agents. The results support the following theses: Contact and exchange are implicitly and explicitly depicted as something positive, with two of the novels emphasising the virtues of selective appropriation. However, the exchange processes mainly work in one direction only and contact between (British) Asian and (white) British characters is limited. The blame for this is often put on the immigrants and their families. The selected texts focus on obstacles and conflicts in exchange processes without offering solutions to the conflicts. In this context, religion or religious fervour along with a lack of education are most often depicted as the main obstacle for reciprocal cultural exchange. The aesthetic means employed are analysed as well as their effects, e.g. whether form and content reinforce each other or produce contradictions. Finally, the thesis shows which novels deconstruct and contradict existing stereotypes and which ones are complicit in reproducing them. Primary texts: Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (2004), Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani (2006) and Maggie Gee’s The White Family (2002).
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