Georges Bizet (1838-1875) is best known for his operatic masterpiece, Carmen, but his other works have received much criticism. Much of this criticism stems from the belief that his work was simply derivative of other composers, including the father of French musical exoticism, Felicien David (1810-1876). However, there has never been any formal study comparing the two composers' compositional techniques.The purpose of this study is to compare the approaches that both Bizet and David took to portray the exotic in their operatic works, and to categorize any differences or similarities between the two composers' styles. The operas chosen for this study include Bizet's Les Pecheurs de perles (1863) and Djamileh (1872), as well as David's La Perle du Bresil (1851) and Lalla-Roukh (1862). Detailed historical background and musical analysis will be provided for each opera. / School of Music

That marginalized discourse communities practice differing modes of communication is a claim recently argued; critics have focused on the trope of metonymy as a means of signifying a discriminated-against group's silenced status within the mainstream society. What seems to be ignored in this discussion is how differing media--literature, music, painting--constitute texts that cut across discursive space (the site of these media) in a similar fashion. By positing the intertextuality (i.e., the similarity) of psycholinguistic metonymy and jazz phraseology, this thesis demonstrates how literary texts issuing from marginalized discourse communities can speak their subjectivities' full names. In Langston Hughes' "The Blues I'm Playing," metonymy and jazz serve as methods of analysis which show the subject-object relationship in artistic production. Jack Kerouac's On The Road constitutes a narrative subjectivity that, like jazz music, metonymically disrupts itself as silences speak from the realm of an Other. By accounting for the similarities between metonymy and jazz, this thesis asserts that more accurate readings can be derived from literature issuing from discourse communities which use jazz to signify. / Department of English

A thematic and formal analysis of Jean-Aubert Loranger's poetic tale "Le Passeur" [1920], and of Gabrielle Roy's novel La Montagne secrete [1962], shows that the construction of the two heroes' respective identity is directly related to the representation of small and large rivers in the two stories. Considering the generic difference between the two texts, these similarities---which are shaped up in a four steps "organizing scheme"---suggest the existence of a real structure in the construction of the modern identity (quebecoise). La Grande traversee, an historical novel about the massive Irish emigration of 1847, narrates the quest of identity of Seamus Doyle, while following the same four steps of this particular movement.

This dissertation provides a critical, systematic survey of economics in literary theory and practice. Since Aristotle, economic categories have been used as interpretive grounds on which to conceptualize the literary text and distinguish it as a moral or normative sphere. Because economic categories presuppose different norms of individual and social action, the use of a specific category as an interpretive ground generates a particular outlook or moral perspective. / In the first part of the discussion, we critique theories in which the literary text is conceptualized as an economy. After distinguishing three distinct models of the "textual economy," we evaluate them in terms of their logical consistency and normative presuppositions. Selecting the model that is the most logically consistent and normatively valuable, we study two early modern works to see if this model operates as an intentional device implicated in a work's form and content. The works chosen are William Shakespeare's Sonnets and William Bradford's history "Of Plimoth Plantation," both of which display a facination with economic discourse. / The second part of the discussion takes up the question of economics in the theory and practice of putting texts in context. We distinguish four different models of contextualization that depend on economic categories. Explicitly or implicitly, contemporary research agendas and critical positions depend on these categories to situate a literary text in a specific setting. An economic category like exchange, for example, is frequently privileged as a common ground, a shared quality or characteristic used to integrate a text with a context. After critiquing models of contextualization, we synthesize the best they have to offer into a new framework. We then use this framework to situate the texts by Shakespeare and Bradford into the historical settings of their production and reception. The result is a picture of the text in context that is vital, a moving picture, quite unlike the customary still life of artifact and background.

No description available.

This study is an investigation of the autobiographical narratives of two authors, the Pole Marek Hlasko, and the American Henry Miller. Though they lived in different times and places Miller and Hlasko, share some remarkable features with respect to temperament, philosophies of writing, and modes of narrative output. In the chapters that follow I will examine both the biographical and the textual points of contact between these two men, concentrating on the problem of self-inscription in the autobiographical novels, and on the games played with identity that both men engaged in throughout their artistic careers, especially during their periods of exile. / The first section provides a recapitulation of relevant biographical data together with a summary of the social and historical contexts as these affect the personal ideology of each writer. I begin with an expose of some parallels in the biographies and the autobiographical narratives of the two men, and subsequently turn to a summary of the broader polemics of authorial representation in works written in the first person. Here the traditional notion of equating the author of an autobiographical novel with its subject will be rejected in favour of examining the network of relationships that exist among the writer, the writer's cultural "persona", and the textual voice. Following this theoretical framework, I explore each author's personal script of emigration, his sense of self-understanding and self-positioning in the world, and the strategies of self-construction and self-invention undertaken both in the narratives and in the public arena. My analysis of each author's most representative autobiographical works of the exile period will finally suggest the conclusion that while the autobiographical impulse supplied the form for virtually all of Hlasko's and Miller's writing, it is the experience of exile that furnished the content for successful narrative self-revelation.

In a Victorian Britain in crisis, Chartism was as it remains an exemplary site for contestation of various forms of authority--social, political, theological, historical, and literary. When Carlyle in his Chartism essay demands what "the under classes intrinsically mean," he discounts "these wild inarticulate souls" unable to recognize or express their own true state (122). But even as Carlyle authorizes detached observation, he also helps cement those unpredictable alliances that haunt his work. In an increasingly statistical culture, the representation of Chartism has much to tell about technologies of power, the cultural inflection of difference, and the production and reproduction of knowledge, value, and legitimacy. Thus, it seems timely to re-examine Chartism and its diverse representations within and beyond the so-called social-problem novel. Like other forms of knowledge production, the novel both helped shape and was reshaped by Chartism which tested to the limit the novel's pretension to adequate representation of a common world. / Such investigation indicates the importance of interpretation despite its being attacked by everyone from political economists to postmodernists. I thus interpret Victorian reform through its literary mediations, and in relation to the kinds of authority and accounting associated with a history and theology in crisis. In reading for reform largely male middle-class experts, I deploy a double strategy, reading them to bring out the power and agency of the underrepresented, and realigning texts and contexts to reform the ways they are read. While Carlyle and Peter Gaskell defined the terms of succeeding debates on Chartism, they did not fully determine the interpretations of their own words or other pertinent evidence by the underclasses or by writers like Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Kingsley. By the forms of their fiction, these two writers helped legitimate the lives and utterances of the working classes and exposed the class- and gender-based hierarchies of literary genres and social and political conventions. Elizabeth Gaskell and Kingsley rework such authoritative discourses as history and theology and reform reading and writing in ways that frustrate the efforts of literary taxonomists then and now, and accept the burden of interpretation to make a difference in the literary and social scene. / By socializing and historicizing literary categories in the light of Mikhail Bakhtin and others, I aim to escape those intellectual "tramlines" that have constrained commentary. The careful generic and other demarcations and hierarchies of traditional critical discourse and unexamined allegiance to stable notions of class, gender, nation, and religion have operated against the disruptive power and productivity of the work of Gaskell and Kingsley. Equally, whereas historians like Dorothy Thompson turn to "empirical data" (Chartists x) to dispel the confusion of interpretations of Chartism, my practice is theoretical, as my story of the past is continuous with my understanding of the present. Even Gareth Stedman Jones (part of the linguistic turn in historical studies) cannot sufficiently rethink Chartism when he concedes determining force to government policy and Carlyle's terms, although he usefully shifts attention from the economic to the political. He operates, however, within a rigid binary logic that separates the social and political while underplaying the cultural and a range of linguistic practices and forms of dissemination that constituted Chartist identity.

No description available.

This thesis traces the connections between Dorothy Livesay and William Blake, especially with respect to the construction and symbolization of the self. Models of influence relevant to Livesay and Blake are examined resulting in a contextual model of influence which considers artists' "anxiety" and the importance of gender issues. Archival documents supplement, and sometimes transform the implications of, Livesay's poetry and other published works in relation to Blake. The discussion moves from tracing the general points of intersection between Livesay and Blake (ancestors, traditions), to focusing on the different levels of influence that can be claimed between the two poets. The presence of Blake in Livesay's writings is examined closely, especially with respect to the imaginative states which each sets up to describe the self. Finally, Livesay's construction of the journey of her own life and her movement towards an ideal of self-completion which culminate in her celebratory late works are compared with Blake's ideal of the self as set forth in his Prophetic Works.

The reputation given to Adolf Loos and Gustav Klimt as opposites, as well as the understanding of Loos's writings as supporting this reputation, correspond less to the works as such than to the general dichotomic mode of understanding that we inherited from the so-called platonic dichotomy of being and appearance. / Indeed, common to their respective work are the relationships in which stand the elements forever understood as antagonistic. Neither opposition nor transparency, their work bring forth an intermediary state, the state of coexistence of difference. / By questioning the relationships between elements taken as opposites, Loos and Klimt are challenging the secular dichotomy of being and appearance, and with it the whole understanding of artistic creation and of the work of art as such.