This dissertation examines the treatment, forms, and representations of spirituality in contemporary American fiction. Drawing on recent theories in cultural and critical theory, sociology, and rhetoric, I argue that postmodern fiction finds sacredness in creative memory and information systems. I analyze E.L. Doctorow’s (2000) City of God, Leslie Marmon Silko’s (1991) Almanac of the Dead, Richard Powers’(2006) Echo Maker, and William Gibson’s (1948) Neuromancer. In their quest for the sacred, these works acknowledge the mystic along with the rational as a legitimate vehicle of knowledge; accordingly, the mysterious and the incomprehensible are accounted for within the epistemological structure of such spirituality. Contrary to the disparaging views of postmodern discourse as depoliticized, the fiction examined in this dissertation redefines the relationship between the sacred and the secular to engender social change and transformation. The dissertation stresses the significance of reconsidering the role of literary spiritualities as a vehicle of transformation. By advancing such reconsideration, the dissertation achieves two goals. First, it argues for the impurity of the secular as a construct and sees in this impurity a chance for theory to transcend diagnosis and deconstruction and move toward transformation. Second, by revealing a redemptive sensibility within postmodern discourse, the dissertation challenges Hutcheon's characterization of postmodern culture and discourse as "complicitous critique," showing how culture weaves narratives of restoration to counteract the pressure of fragmentation brought about by global capitalism.

Concurrent with a bloom of interest in the archive within academic discourse, an intense cultural fascination with museums, archives, and memorials to the past has flourished within the United States. The ascendency of digital technologies has contributed to and magnified this “turn” by popularising and habituating the archive as a personal memory tool, a key mechanism through which the self is negotiated and fashioned. This dissertation identifies a sustained exploration of the personal archive and its place in contemporary life by American novelists in the twenty-first century. Drawing on theories of the archive and the collection, this dissertation analyses the parameters of the curated self through close-readings of recent novels by five US authors. The first two chapters read Paul Auster’s Sunset Park through trauma theory and Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved through psychoanalysis, noting that in each the system of archiving generates moments of catharsis. The two chapters argue that, for the subject shattered by trauma, archiving activates and fulfils psychoanalytic processes that facilitate the self’s reintegration and prompts a discursive revelation about the painful past. The texts, thus, discover in the archive strategies for achieving, however provisionally, a kind of stability amongst unexpected change. The next two chapters reveal the complicity of archival formations with threats posed in the digital age and articulate alternative forms of self-curation that counteract these pernicious forces. To ward off information overload, E.L. Doctorow’s Homer and Langley advocates the ethical flexibility of “blind” narration that, wending through time, accommodates a broad range of perspectives by refusing to fantasise about its own ultimate and total claim to accuracy. Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, meanwhile, diagnoses the cultural anxiety over increasingly invasive surveillance measures. While the novel situates the digital archive, or database, at the heart of this new dataveillance, it recommends investing the self in material collections, where personal meaning is rendered in the inscrutable patois of objects that disintegrate over time. For Egan, the material archive thereby skirts the assumed readability and fixity of data on which this surveillance thrives. The conclusion analyses Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia, observing within it and the other novels a consistent concern with archival destruction, erosion, and stagnation. Together, the texts suggest that the personal archive is persistently stalked by disintegration and failure. Yet, within this contemporary moment in which curation has become a widespread means of self-fashioning, they also show how these hazards can be creatively circumvented or actively courted, can threaten the subject or be harnessed by it.

Taken In is a collection of poems about coming to terms with death, love, and the social responsibilities people owe to each other.

Belly Laughs: Body Humor in Contemporary American Literature and Film Scholars are more than happy to laugh at but seem somewhat reluctant to discuss body humor, which is perhaps the most neglected form of comedy in recent criticism. In this dissertation, I examine the ways in which contemporary American writers and filmmakers use body humor in their works, not only in moments of so-called "comic relief" but also as a valid way of exploring many of the same issues that postmodern artists typically interrogate in their more somber moments. The writers discussed in this project-Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Charles Johnson, and Woody Allen-were chosen for the divergent ways in which they present the body's comic predicament in psychological, metaphysical, and historical situations. The introduction explains the diverse traditions that these artists draw upon and considers how various theoretical approaches can affect our understanding of body humor. The first chapter examines Jewish-American novelist Philip Roth's use of absurd and grotesque body imagery as manifestations of his characters' moral dilemmas. The second chapter looks at how slapstick comedy informs a worldview dominated by paranioa and chaos in Thomas Pynchon's novels. Chapter Three looks at Woody Allen's early films, in which he parodies and revises the slapstick cinematic tradition of artists like Charlie Chaplin and The Marx Brothers. Chapter Four considers African-American writer and cartoonist Charles Johnson's depiction of the ways in which the body's desires and pitfalls complicate the quest for spiritual enlightenment.

In this dissertation, "An Archive of Shame: Gender, Embodiment, and Citizenship in Contemporary American Culture," I use the affect of shame in its multiple forms and manifestations as a category of analysis in order to examine complex relationships between gender, sexuality, the body, and citizenship. Through chapters on incest, gender normalization, and disease, I build an "archive" of the feeling of shame that consists of literary texts such as Sapphire's Push: A Novel, Jeffrey Eugenides?s Middlesex, Tony Kushner's Angels in America, and Katherine Dunn?s Geek Love, as well as materials from popular culture, films such as Philadelphia, court cases, and other ephemera such as pamphlets and news coverage. In order to construct this archive, I bring together seemingly disparate materials and create readings of American culture that illustrate how the category of citizen is produced by the shaming of women, the gender non-conforming, and the diseased. Using feminist theoretical models, I critique previous discussions of citizenship, the state, and the body in queer theory, which have reified the privilege of whiteness and maleness by evacuating the bodies of women, the gender non-conforming, and the diseased of their radical potential to undermine oppressive state institutions. The texts I analyze in this project interrogate normalized processes of documentation and archiving, and through their subject matter as well as their form, these texts participate in the archival process?theorizing and exploring alternative methods of documentation, collecting, and historicizing and so illustrate how the discourses produced by mainstream history are built upon the maintenance of social hierarchies. By bringing these texts together, I am developing a theory of the archive and its processes, its bodies, and its feelings. Archiving as a practice collects and documents, and in that collection, develops a coherent narrative about a particular event or history. Critical theory is also a process of making meaning through the collection of events, documents, and texts into a cohesive set of terms in order to make particular abstract claims. This process is often obscured both in archiving and in theorizing by naturalizing the selection of the materials that matter. The alternative archives in this dissertation make that process explicit in order to foreground its erasures and elisions; they register material difference and the ways in which the archive is reproductive of social relations. The transient and unstable nature of the archives produced within the texts of this project makes them difficult to pin down and make coherent, but that is what makes them powerful and transformative. I read these materials as sites where questions about the official histories of the nation, which are constructed through race, gender, and sex, might be played out. The archive of shame I compile in this project, therefore, can be read as a collection of partial sites of struggle against oppressive power relationships.

Orientador: Cleide Antonia Rapucci / Banca: Thomas Bonnici / Banca: Antonio Roberto Esteves / Resumo: O principal assunto desta dissertação é a técnica narrativa cut-up, desenvolvida e empregada pela primeira vez no gênero romance em 1959, pelo escritor norte-americano William Burroughs, em sua obra-prima Naked Lunch. O processo da técnica consiste na sobreposição e justaposição de fragmentos textuais de diferentes teores. Esse processo é similar a alguns artifícios usados pelas Vanguardas, principalmente a "escrita automática" dos surrealistas. A intenção fundamental é conceder novos e inusitados significados às palavras e sentenças e, ao mesmo tempo, envolver o leitor num esforço cognitivo. Além disso, o escritor aponta a linguagem enquanto suporte ideológico, e assim revoga o sistema aristotélico presente nela. Os capítulos de abertura contêm uma exposição ampla a respeito da Beat Generation, um importante grupo literário surgido no período pós-guerra nos Estados Unidos. Os membros ligados à Geração militaram numa outra noção referente à vida intelectual e artística, e criaram obras guiadas nesse sentido. William Burroughs foi o mentor intelectual deles. A Beat Generation está incluída numa tradição literária norte-americana que começa com Thoreau e Whitman, uma tradição de enfrentamento social e estético. / Abstract: The main subject of this research is the narrative technique called "cut-up", developed and employed in the novel genre by American writer William Burroughs, for the first time in 1959, in his masterpiece Naked Lunch. The process of the technique consists in the superposition and juxtaposition of textual fragments with different purports. This process is similar to some artifices used by Vanguards, mainly the "automatic writing" by surrealists. The principal intention is to concede new and unusual meanings to the words and sentences, and, at the same time, to involve the reader in a cognitive effort. Besides, the writer notes the language while ideological bearer, and thus revokes the aristotelian system present in it. The opening chapters contain an ample exposition about the "Beat Generation", an important literary group that arose at post-war period in the United States of America. The members linked to the Generation were engaged in another notion concerning artistical and intellectual life, and they created works guided in this sense. William Burroughs was their intellectual mentor. The Beat Generation is included in a literary tradition, in the U.S.A., that starts with Thoreau and Whitman, a tradition of social and esthetical struggle. / Mestre

L’œuvre de Rick Moody échappe à toute tentative de catégorisation générique, elle est à la croisée de styles qui s’entrechoquent et se heurtent pour donner naissance à une prose hétéroclite. Cette fiction protéiforme n’en demeure pas moins traversée par la répétition d’un motif invariant : l’accident. C’est le paradoxe de cette observation qui constitue le point de départ de cette thèse. Comment l’accident, dont le surgissement paraît toujours fulgurant, instantané et unique, peut-il se voir répété, décliné et transformé en un principe structurant qui préside à la composition de l’oeuvre de Rick Moody ? Pour répondre à cette question, il faut nécessairement changer le présupposé sur lequel repose la définition de l’accident pour qu’il ne soit plus seulement envisagé comme ce qui arrive de manière accidentelle mais pour que soit révélée également sa dimension essentielle. Cela revient à proposer l’hypothèse que l’accident est toujours déjà là, qu’il est ontologique. Ce changement de perspective, rendu possible par une manipulation temporelle, encourage, sur le plan de l’analyse littéraire, une étude de la temporalité de l’accident. Son surgissement induit plus largement la question de la représentation de la réalité tandis que sa répétition autorise son inscription dans une durée. Provoquant toujours une rupture, la temporalité de l’accident est double car elle a la possibilité à la fois de mettre un terme et de faire éclore un nouveau début. L’accident crée des formes et des cycles, il surgit, dure, détruit, mais aussi régénère. / The books of Rick Moody evade all possibility for a generic categorization. They standat the crossroads of different styles which collide with one another and give birth to a heterogeneous prose. However, at the heart of Moody’s protean fiction is to be found a recurring motif : the accident. The repetition of this pattern and the paradox it arises are what started this dissertation. How can such a motif be repeated and transformed into an unvarying organization principle since, at its core, the accident is supposed to happen in a flash, only once? The answer to this question lies in a change of perspective. The definition of the accident needs to be challenged so that it allows for the possibility to consider it not only as what happens accidentally but what is bound to happen by necessity. It all amounts to suggesting that the accident is ontological ; it is always already present, on the verge of happening. This temporal shift makes it necessary, in aliterary perspective, to analyze the temporality of the accident. The sudden appearance of the accident raises questions about the strategies fiction has at its disposal torepresent reality. The repetition of the accident induces also a reflection on its duration.The break-up it necessarily generates reveals its dual temporality: it either comes as an ending or as a possibility for a new beginning. The accident creates different shapes, forms and cycles as it comes up, destroys and regenerates.

La fragmentation apparente de l’écriture de David Markson, de Reader’s Block (1996) à TheLast Novel (2007), s’assortit d’une continuité assumée par une voix narrative mise en scènejusque dans sa prétendue disparition. Malgré le rejet des conventions fictionnelles annoncédans This is Not a Novel (2001), Markson fait preuve d’un attachement paradoxal au roman,jouant du caractère protéiforme du genre jusqu’à l’excès plutôt que jusqu’à l’épuisement, dansun style aussi prolifique que minimaliste qui fait la part belle au non dit malgré la présenceoccasionnelle de commentaires métafictionnels. L’analyse de l’ensemble éclectique des écritsde David Markson (1927-2010) montre que la pratique de la citation, qui constitue l’essentielde la matière de ses derniers textes, est à l’oeuvre dès ses débuts d’auteur, et que sousl’apparence d’une différence radicale ses derniers « romans » comportent des traces de sonpassage par le roman policier, l’anthologie, le western, la poésie, ou des formesd’autobiographie et de monologue intérieur. L’influence de Malcolm Lowry dépasse le cadrede l’étude que David Markson consacra à Au-dessous du volcan, ou de son propre « romanmexicain ». Des instruments linguistiques, énonciatifs et cognitifs, permettent d’explorer lefonctionnement du roman « expérimental » de David Markson, et de mettre en évidence lerôle liant de l’anaphore et des marques d’énonciation dans une écriture faussement disjointe etneutre. Donnant à voir ce que masque l’idée de rupture, devenue conventionnelle, le lien soustendla phrase, le texte, et l’oeuvre, malgré un éclatement – partiel – de l’écriture en fragments,et un bouleversement – relatif – de la linéarité / The seeming fragmentation of David Markson’s writing from Reader’s Block (1996) to TheLast Novel (2007) is combined with a form of continuity led by a narrative voice whoseapparent vanishing is merely staged. Despite his claiming to reject all fictional conventions inThis is Not a Novel (2001), Markson proves paradoxically attached to the novel as a form,exploring the multiple possibilities of the genre rather than driving it to exhaustion. His styleis both minimalist and profuse, and leaves much unsaid despite existing – if occasional –metafictional comments. A close reading of the miscellaneous works by David Markson(1927-2010) shows that his extensive use of quotations, making up the main material of hislater works, was a very early hallmark of his writings. For all their apparently radicaldifference, his later texts still bear signs that can be traced back to previous literaryexperiments as varied as detective novels, an anthology, a western, poetry, quasiautobiographyand interior monologue. Malcolm Lowry’s influence on Markson’s workreaches beyond his early study of Under the Volcano and his own « Mexican novel ». Placingthe text under close scrutiny by means of linguistic tools, mainly enunciative and cognitive,provides evidence of the linking role of anaphoric devices and of a subjective handling of adeceitfully disconnected and neutral writing. The search for breaks and breaches has nowbecome conventional, but actually conceals what can be revealed when looking forconnections. Indeed, continuity still underpins sentence, text and work, despite a (partial)splitting of the text into fragments and a (relative) upsetting of linear order

La fiction de Steven Millhauser est caractérisée par le mouvement perpétuel : un mouvement générique du réalisme au fantastique, avec des intrigues qui résistent aux dénouements et des personnages, des lieux et des objets en transformation constante. Son œuvre nous présente exploration de la métamorphose littéraire, qui se manifeste à la fois comme style d'écriture et comme motif. Enracinée dans une conception typiquement américaine de la métamorphose, née de la philosophie Ralph Waldo Emerson, la métamorphose millhauserienne attire l'attention du lecteur sur le pouvoir transformateur de l'art et plus spécifiquement de la littérature. Utilisant la relation entre l'art et l'identité culturelle comme point de départ, notre thèse montre que la fiction de Millhauser développe la nature métamorphique de l'expérience esthétique. Au cœur de la dynamique de la métamorphose littéraire se trouve la relation entre lecteur, texte et auteur, relation transformatrice que Millhauser met en scène à plusieurs reprises, afin d'explorer les possibilités et les limites du language. Si sa fiction illustre le potentiel destructeur de la métamorphose linguistique, et manifeste aussi une certaine angoisse concernant les limites du langage, son œuvre est néanmoins dominée par un sentiment d'émerveillement et d'espoir dans la valeur régénératrice de la fiction, et son pouvoir de faire resurgir la beauté d'un monde devenu ordinaire. / Steven Millhauser's fiction is characterized by perpetual movement: a transition from realism to the fantastic, with plots which resist denouement and characters, places and objects in constant transformation. Millhauser's work offers the reader a literary metamorphosis which is both stylistic and thematic. The millhauserien metamorphosis is typically American, the offspring of Emersonian philosophy, and it highlights the transformative power of art and, specifically, of literature. Using the mutually transformative relationship between art and cultural identity as a starting point, this thesis demonstrates the ways in which Millhauser's fiction develops the metamorphic nature of the esthetic experience. The relationship between the reader, the text and the author is at the heart of literary metamorphosis, and this transformative relationship, which often appears in Millhauser's work, sets the stage for an exploration of the possibilities and limits of language. If Millhauser's fiction illustrates the destructive potential of linguistic metamorphosis, and articulates a certain anxiety concerning the limits of language, his work is nonetheless dominated by the sentiment of wonder and hope in the regenerative value of fiction and its power to reveal the unusual beauty of a world which has become ordinary.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:29:50Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2004-03-11Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T20:20:14Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 paulinojunior_j_me_assis.pdf: 515440 bytes, checksum: 06e1d330c5483f056dc028fc22d894ac (MD5) / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / O principal assunto desta dissertação é a técnica narrativa cut-up, desenvolvida e empregada pela primeira vez no gênero romance em 1959, pelo escritor norte-americano William Burroughs, em sua obra-prima Naked Lunch. O processo da técnica consiste na sobreposição e justaposição de fragmentos textuais de diferentes teores. Esse processo é similar a alguns artifícios usados pelas Vanguardas, principalmente a “escrita automática” dos surrealistas. A intenção fundamental é conceder novos e inusitados significados às palavras e sentenças e, ao mesmo tempo, envolver o leitor num esforço cognitivo. Além disso, o escritor aponta a linguagem enquanto suporte ideológico, e assim revoga o sistema aristotélico presente nela. Os capítulos de abertura contêm uma exposição ampla a respeito da Beat Generation, um importante grupo literário surgido no período pós-guerra nos Estados Unidos. Os membros ligados à Geração militaram numa outra noção referente à vida intelectual e artística, e criaram obras guiadas nesse sentido. William Burroughs foi o mentor intelectual deles. A Beat Generation está incluída numa tradição literária norte-americana que começa com Thoreau e Whitman, uma tradição de enfrentamento social e estético. / The main subject of this research is the narrative technique called cut-up, developed and employed in the novel genre by American writer William Burroughs, for the first time in 1959, in his masterpiece Naked Lunch. The process of the technique consists in the superposition and juxtaposition of textual fragments with different purports. This process is similar to some artifices used by Vanguards, mainly the automatic writing by surrealists. The principal intention is to concede new and unusual meanings to the words and sentences, and, at the same time, to involve the reader in a cognitive effort. Besides, the writer notes the language while ideological bearer, and thus revokes the aristotelian system present in it. The opening chapters contain an ample exposition about the Beat Generation, an important literary group that arose at post-war period in the United States of America. The members linked to the Generation were engaged in another notion concerning artistical and intellectual life, and they created works guided in this sense. William Burroughs was their intellectual mentor. The Beat Generation is included in a literary tradition, in the U.S.A., that starts with Thoreau and Whitman, a tradition of social and esthetical struggle.