Thesis (Ph.D.)--Baylor University, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 248-257)

Thesis (Ph. D. in Comparative Literature)--Vanderbilt University, May 2005. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Acadia University, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 111-119). Also available on the Internet via the World Wide Web.

M.A. (English) / This study approaches a much neglected area, not only of English literary research in South Africa generally, but also more specifically of Nadine Gordimer's writing career. Over the last fifty-one years Gordimer has produced approximately 126 short stories. These have variously been taken up in twelve collections, ranging from Face to Face in 1949 to Jump in 1991.However, most of the recognition she has received pertains to her novels which are frequently praised for their historical awareness and their commitment to the disfranchised in South Africa. Yet the short stories are a significant part of Gordimer's output - altogether eight original collections of short stories exist, as compared to ten novels. Nor are the short stories of any less historical significance.Even a cursory glance at the periodization of the stories as reflected in this dissertation unquestionably reveals a developing historical perspective in Gordimer's short fiction. What is most remarkable about this unfolding perspective is Gordimer's ability from time to time in the stories to break out of the limitations imposed on her consciousness by her position in South African society as a white, upper middle-class woman. The most important reason for the dearth of research on the historical consciousness in Gordimer's short fiction seems to be the choice of literary-critical approaches adopted in previous works. Broadly these may be classified as either formalist or new critical. Given the importance to these approaches of the autonomy of the text vis-a-vis the life history of the authoress or the wider socio-political environment within which the work exists, it is not surprising that these works have rather limited their focus to such aspects as theme, structure, short story development and imagery. By examining the interaction of race, gender and class in Gordimer's short stories this dissertation pins its exploration of the developing historical consciousness of these texts not only to specific issues, but to issues with which Gordimer clearly concerns herself. This dissertation therefore asserts that the structures of race, gender and class are indeed pertinently explored in the short stories, not only individually but often with an understanding of their intertwined aspect, and that using this approach a more subtle and appropriate reading of the stories and of their development may emerge.

Dissertation--Universität Bochum, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 337-349).

Thesis (MPhil)-- University of Wales, Aberystwyth, 2009 / Bibliography.

This dissertation explores how contemporary, small-press, speculative fiction deviates from other genres in depicting the processes of consciousness in narrative. I study how the confluence of contemporary cognitive theory and experimental, small-press, speculative fiction has produced a new narrative mode, one wherein literature portrays not the product of consciousness but its process instead. Unlike authors who worked previously in the stream-of-consciousness or interior monologue modes, writers in this new narrative mode (which this dissertation refers to as "the little weird") use the techniques of recursion, narratological anachrony, and Ulric Neisser's "ecological self" to avoid the constraints of textual linearity that have historically prevented other literary modes from accurately portraying the operations of "self." Extrapolating from Mieke Bal's seminal theory of narratology; Tzvetan Todorov's theory of the fantastic; Daniel C. Dennett's theories of consciousness; and the works of Darko Suvin, Robert Scholes, Jean Baudrillard, and others, I create a new mode not for classifying categories of speculative fiction, but for re-envisioning those already in use. This study, which concentrates on the work of progressive, small-press, speculative writers such as Kelly Link, Forrest Aguirre, George Saunders, Jeffrey Ford, China Miéville, and many others, explores new ideas about narrative "coherence" from the points of view of self as they are presented today by cognitive, narratological, psychological, sociological, and semiotic theories.

Despite radical differences in their political commentary, Amiri Baraka and V.S. Naipaul’s literary careers have obsessively centered on the divided Self of the colonized artist. Esther Jackson argues that Baraka’s “search for form” becomes “symbolic of a continuing effort to mediate between warring factions within the perceiving mind” (38). Similarly, many critics have interpreted Naipaul’s grave manifestos as the outpourings of a writer disenchanted with his own past and national identity. For Selwyn Cudjoe, Naipaul’s work is “reflective of a man who failed to discover any psychological balance in his life” (172-173). This thesis analyzes how Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman and V.S. Naipaul’s Guerrillas engage with various fairy tale conventions in order to narrate the colonized victim’s divided Self. These narratives ultimately function as anti-fairy tales, revealing the black protagonist’s accursed position in the symbolic order. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2014. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

The central argument of my study is that, among other matters, in his works, J.M. Coetzee could be said to demonstrate that the known Self is an embodied being and is not autonomous. With regard to the latter contention, Coetzee intimates that any two Subjects are implicated in each other’s subjectivities in a reciprocal process that involves what Derek Attridge has called “irruptions of otherness” (2005: xii) into the Subject’s subjectivity. These irruptions, which happen during the encounter, lead to a double loss of autonomy for each Subject and this phenomenon renders the relationship between Subjects non-dichotomus or non-binaric. In other words, the Subject does not produce the contents of his or her consciousness in a sui generis and ex nihilo fashion, and his or her ontological indebtedness to the Other constitutes his or her first loss of autonomy. As for those Others that do possess consciousness, the Subject is implicated in their consciousness and this constitutes the Subject’s second loss of autonomy. These losses counter the near solipsistic Nagelian neo-Cartesianism and paves the way for imagining both intra- and inter-species “intersubjectivity”. It is my view that this double loss of autonomy accounts for the sympathetic and empathetic imagination that we encounter in Coetzee’s fiction. Following Coetzee’s intimations of intersubjectivity through irruptions of otherness, what I see as my contribution to studies on this author’s work through this study is the link I have established between the physicalist strain within the philosophy of mind (whose central thesis is that consciousness is an embodied phenomenon) and a modified Kantian “metaphysics”, especially Immanuel Kant’s conception of concepts as comprising form and content. I have deployed this conception in demonstrating the Subject’s ontological indebtedness to external sources of the content part of consciousness. And, through the Husserlian concept of intentionality, and Kant’s (1929: 27) observation that we cannot have appearances without something that appears, I have linked the Subject to the sources of his or her content and thereby also demonstrated that the Subject is not eternally separated or alienated from those sources. Instead, the Subject is not simply contiguous but coterminous and co-extensive, albeit in a mediated way, with the external sources of the content part of his or her consciousness. Thus, while accepting the thesis of the Other’s radical otherness, I modify the thesis of the Other’s radical exteriority. Ultimately, then, ontologically speaking, the Coetzeean project could be described as one of embodying and grounding the supposedly autonomous, solipsistic and freefloating/disembodied Cartesian Subject. This he does by alerting this Subject, first and foremost, to its embodiedness and, further to that, pointing out its ontological indebtedness to its Others and its implication in the Others’s consciousnesses and so prevent it from continuing with its imperialistic and ecological barbarities. However, ethically speaking, beyond the reciprocal ethics that arises from mutual ontological indebtedness and implication, it is the selflessness that characterises a cruciform logic that comes across as the epitome of Coetzeean ethics.