Habiltation--Universität, Stuttgart. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 425-464).

Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2005. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The stories and histories of the human race are littered with the remnants of utopia. These utopias always exist in some "far away" place, whether this place be removed in terms of time (either as a nostalgically remembered past, or an idealistically projected future), or in terms of space (as a place that one must arrive at). In our attempts to attain these utopias, we construct our worlddefinitions in accordance with our projections of these ideal places and ways of "being". Our discourses come to embody and perpetuate these ideals, which are maintained by excluding any definitions of the world that run counter to these ideals. The continued existence of utopia relies on the subjects of that utopia continuing their belief in its ideals, and not questioning its construction. Counter-discourse to utopia manifests in the same space as the original utopia and gives rise to questions that threaten the stability of the ideal. Questions challenge belief, and therefore the discourse of the ideal must neutralise those who question and challenge it. This process of neutralisation requires that more definitions be constructed within utopian discourse - definitions that allow the subjects of the discourse to objectify the questioner. However, as these new definitions arise, they create yet more counter-definitions, thereby increasing the fragmentation of the aforementioned space. A subject of any "dominant" discourse, removed from that discourse, is exposed to the questions inherent in counter-discourse. In such circumstances, the definitions of the questioner - the "other" - that have previously enabled the subject to disregard the questioner's existence and/or point of view are no longer reinforced, and the subject begins to question those definitions. Once this questioning process starts, the utopia of the subject is re-defined as dystopia, for the questioning highlights the (often violent) methods of exclusion needed to maintain that utopia. Foucault's theory of heterotopia, used as the basis for the analysis of the three texts in question, suggests a space in which several conflicting and contradictory discourses which seemingly bear no relation to each other are found grouped together. Whereas utopia sustains myth in discourse, running with the grain of language, heterotopias run against the grain, undermining the order that we create through language, because they destroy the syntax that holds words and things together. The narrators in the three texts dealt with are all subjects of dominant discourses sustained by exclusive definitions and informed by ideals that require this exclusion in order to exist. Displaced into spaces that subvert the definitions within their discourses, the narrators experience a sense of "madness", resulting from the disintegration of their perception of "order". However, through embracing and perpetuating that which challenged their established sense of identity, the narrators can regain their sense of agency, and so their narratives become vehicles for the reconstitution of the subject-status of the narrators, as well as a means of perpetuating the counter-discourse. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Utopias spikkel die landskap van menseheugenis as plekke in "lank lank gelede" of "eendag", in "n land baie ver van hier", en is dus altyd verwyderd van die huidige, óf in ruimte, óf in tyd. In ons strewe na die ideale, skep ons definisies van die wêreld wat in voeling is met hierdie idealistiese plekke en bestaanswyses. Sulke definisies sypel deur die diskoers, of taal, waarmee ons ons omgewing beskryf. Die ideale wat dan in die diskoers omvat word, word onderhou deur die uitsluiting van enige definisie wat teenstrydig is met dié in die idealistiese diskoers. Die volgehoue bestaan van utopie berus daarop dat die subjekte van daardie utopie voortdurend glo in die ideale voorgehou in en onderhou deur die diskoers, en dus nie die diskoers se konstruksie bevraagteken nie. Die manifestering van teen-diskoers in dieselfde ruimte as die utopie, gee aanleiding tot vrae wat die bestaan van die ideaal bedreig omdat geloof in die ideaal noodsaaklik is vir die ideaal se voortbestaan. Aangesien bevraagtekening dikwels geloof uitdaag en ontwrig, lei dit daartoe dat die diskoers wat die ideaal onderhou, diegene wat dit bevraagteken, neutraliseer. Hierdie neutraliseringsproses behels die vorming van nog definisies binne die diskoers wat die vraagsteller objektiveer. Die vorming van nuwe definisies loop op sy beurt uit op die vorming van teen-definisies wat bloot verdere verbrokkeling van die voorgenoemde ruimte veroorsaak. "n Subjek van die "dominante" diskoers van die utopie wat hom- /haarself buite die spergebiede van sy/haar diskoers bevind, word blootgestel aan vrae wat in teen-diskoers omvat word. In sulke omstandighede is die subjek verwyder van die versterking van daardie definisies wat die vraagsteller - die "ander" - se opinies of bestaan as nietig voorgestel het, en die subjek mag dan hierdie definisies bevraagteken. Sodra hierdie proses begin, vind "n herdefinisie van ruimte plaas, en utopie word distopie soos die vrae (soms geweldadige) uitsluitingsmetodes wat die onderhoud van die ideaal behels, aan die lig bring en, in sommige gevalle, aan die kaak stel. Hierdie tesis gebruik Foucault se teorie van "heterotopia" om die drie tekste te analiseer. Dié teorie veronderstel "n ruimte waarin die oorvleueling van verskeie teenstrydighede (diskoerse) plaasvind. Waar utopie die bestaan van fabels en diskoerse akkommodeer, ondermyn heterotopia die orde wat ons deur taal en definisie skep omdat dit die sintaks vernietig wat woorde aan konsepte koppel. Die drie vertellers is elkeen "n subjek van "n "dominante diskoers" wat onderhou word deur uitsluitende definisies in "n utopia waar die voortgesette bestaan van die ideale wat in die diskoers omvat word op eksklusiwiteit staatmaak. Omdat die vertellers verplaas is na ruimtes wat hulle eksklusiewe definisies omverwerp, vind hulle dat hulle aan "n soort waansin grens wat veroorsaak is deur die verbrokkeling van hul sin van "orde". Deur die teen-diskoers in hul stories in te bou as verteltaal, of te implementeer as die meganisme van oordrag, kan die vertellers hul "selfsin" herwin. Deur vertelling hervestig die vertellers dus hul status as subjek, en verseker hulle hul plek in die opkomende diskoers deur middel van hulle voortsetting daarvan.

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This dissertation examines representations of deep time in nineteenth-century British novels in order to argue that these texts help carve a path for our contemporary definitions of deep time and the Anthropocene. Examining fiction by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, H. Rider Haggard, H. G. Wells, and Joseph Conrad, I suggest that these novels participate in the secularization of deep time by transforming the concept of vast spiritual time that had been in use earlier in the nineteenth century into a scientifically-informed model that anticipates our current understandings of deep time. While the concept of geological time emerged in the late-eighteenth century and became widely recognized in the nineteenth, the phrase “deep time” originates in nineteenth-century literature when Thomas Carlyle first used it in a non-scientific context. By studying a wide range of fiction, I demonstrate how nineteenth-century authors employed innovative narrative strategies to convey these potentially inconceivable timescales in non-numerical terms, and thereby make them more accessible to human comprehension. I also challenge conventional distinctions between literary realism and popular romance in the period by analyzing the complementary ways in which both genres of fiction engage with vast temporal scales in their narratives. I develop my argument by examining how these novels use a model of what I call “folding time” to incorporate remote time periods into their texts. Departing from the novel’s linear narrative structure to bring distant historical moments into direct contact with one another, folding time situates human activity in relation to vast pre-and-post-human periods and in doing so acknowledges an age of humans within deep time; in this sense, these novels articulate an early concept of the Anthropocene. By including deep time in the novel’s traditionally individual and familial framework, these authors simultaneously expand the novel’s temporal scope and humanize vast scientific timescales. Further, as these novels illustrate characters’ psychological responses to overwhelming scientific timescales, they reposition deep time in relation to private temporal experience. This study employs an interdisciplinary approach to acknowledge the mutually reciprocal relationship between science and literature in the nineteenth century, and draws on temporality studies, history of science theory, and literary criticism to situate its argument in relation to current critical discussions. I also consider the work of scientists such as Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin, and William Thomson in order to contextualize my novels’ scientific references. By studying nineteenth-century British novels in relation to scientific temporalities, this dissertation recovers an overlooked component of the history of deep time that has had significant and lasting cultural influence given the enduring popularity and wide readership of these texts.

This study arranges symptoms of polarity into a causal sequence# beginning with the origin of contrarieties and ending with the ultimate effect. The origin is considered as the fall of man, denoting both a mythic concept and a specific act of betrayal. This study argues that a sense of separateness precedes the fall or act of separation; the act of separation produces various kinds of fragmentation; and the fragments are reunited through paradox. Therefore, a causal relationship exists between the "fall" motif and the concept of paradox.

This dissertation considers the role of affective management in realist aesthetics and British imperial culture. Drawing on formalist analyses of English novels, nineteenth-century theories of emotion, and postcolonial accounts that identify the colonizer’s affective desensitization as the ground from which ongoing violence can be perpetrated, this study explores how domestic English novels developed new techniques for deflating the heightened feelings surrounding empire and distant intimacy. Through satires of sensibility, the replacement of epistolary style with impersonal omniscience, and newly dispassionate presentations of villains and protagonists alike, realist novelists explored affective restraint as at once a generic characteristic and an increasingly central element of British imperial and racial identities. This dissertation therefore argues, through readings of works by Jane Austen, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, and Joseph Conrad, for the deep influence of imperial culture on the realist novel’s distinguishing formal features. At the same time, it prompts critics to revisit longstanding accounts of the relationship between the novel and sympathy. Since the Victorian era, critics have readily understood the realist novel as concerned with the expansion of readers’ sympathies: this study reframes this important account by examining how the insistence on sympathy in novels often rerouted more turbulent reactions to empire’s dislocations—such as longing, desire for vengeance, and guilt—into cooler, more tractable feelings.

This dissertation argues that climate is both a meteorological reality and an ideological term that operates in the discursive matrix of empire. Nowhere was this more perceptible than the tropics, which were the most prolific theater for conquest and colonization, generating discourses that traveled across empires, constructing the tropics as a region of untold wealth that was hostile to European health. This dissertation considers how figurations of the climate in works set across the tropics from 1899 to 1992 negotiated the ideological paradoxes that surrounded the end of empire, the political and aesthetic project of decolonization, and a postcolonial reckoning with Atlantic World Slavery. Through readings of works by Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, Alejo Carpentier, Pepetela, and Caryl Phillips, I show how colonial theorizations of the tropics as a counter-civilizational force resonated across British, Spanish, and Portuguese discourses of the tropics that cut across Africa, South Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. This shared theorization, which imagines tropical climates as destructive to the trappings of European colonial modernity, interrogates the stability of empire and becomes a means to imagine alternate political realities.

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This dissertation seeks to understand the idea of a boundary between humans and non-human creatures in the early modern era. The idea of a boundary between people and non-people, while implicit among most sixteenth-century theologians, is still an important feature of early modern history. However, the boundary, while rhetorically very important and static, did not match with the reality of the boundary in theology and culture as fluid. Theologians argued at length that humanity, being made in the “image of God,” retained a fundamental difference from animals and other nonhuman creatures, in which that boundary could not be crossed. However, they also allowed for animals to possess positive traits and even moral and legal culpability. They also accepted creatures that challenged the boundary, whether monsters (including exotic creatures and misbirths) or humans who were not thought to possess all of the constituent characteristics of the “image of God,” such as those with mental or cognitive deficiencies. Thus, they struggled to reconcile the experiential reality of a fluid boundary with the theological conviction of an anthropocentric hierarchy of creation. This dissertation will address the inherent tension between these two views and assess the ways in which theological and cultural figures helped to resolve the tension. Using early modern commentaries on Genesis, we will first examine the rhetorical insistence on a firm boundary articulated by figures both mainstream and heterodox. Then, we will examine the popular perception of a fluid boundary, in which nonhuman creatures could be addressed and understood morally in bestiaries, saints’ lives, and trial records. Finally, we will examine how proto-scientific thinkers of the sixteenth century, like Conrad Gessner, Andreas Vesalius, Johann Weyer, and Ambroise Paré, actively challenged existing authorities and helped to resolve the tension to a state in which humans and nonhuman creatures were different, yet both existed within the broader sphere of nature. By the end of the sixteenth century, violations of the boundary between people and non-people come to be rejected more for their natural than theological implications.

Ausgehend von dem vielfach formulierten Befund, dass körperliche Gewalt ein dem Erzählen widerständiges Ereignis ist, untersucht die Arbeit Romane, in denen mittels erzählter Räume dem Ereignis der Gewalt dennoch eine literarische Mitteilung abgerungen wird. Romane von Jospeh Conrad, Edlef Köppen, Imre Kertész und Norbert Gstrein werden dahingehend befragt, wie "Areale der Tat" erzählt werden und wie dadurch - gerade in seiner Entzogenheit und Unzugänglichkeit - ein Ereignis der Gewalt lesbar wird.