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The main objective of this study is to understand how Valery, Pessoa and Jaccottet created or recreated the figure of the master. This figure has truly made its entry into the literary scene in the second half of the nineteenth century, and it contributed to impose a profane and more egalitarian vision of writing. In the writing of the three authors studied, the master is still seen as a strategy to develop a concept of creation, since it allows the writers to define their poetic. It is therefore a matter of maitres a penser (literally "thinking masters") or, better yet, maitres a ecrire ("writing masters"). / For Valery, the desire to make Mallarme his master is best explained by his search for mastery. Even if he is eager to understand what makes Mallarme an exceptional creator, Valery's quest is hindered by Mallarme's refusal to explain his poetic. This resistance seems to encourage Valery to make the creative act a major concern of his work. / By coming up with a "non-existent coterie" made up of imaginary writers, and by recognizing one of them as his own master, Pessoa hopes to fill the gaps in his literary filiation. In the concert of voices that compose his work, it is yet the master himself which undermines the very legitimacy of the master, and that is why Pessoa finally gets rid of his invention. / Finally, Jaccottet creates his masters for the learning they could provide to him: in Jaccottet's unique story, the character of the master fails, allowing the poet to take his distance from assumptions related with the romantic vision of creation; then, a "good master" whose agony is described by poems becomes a model whose wisdom is inseparable from a kind of ignorance. / The presence of the master generates a story elaborated from the writings of these writers: the development of their poetic requires not only the creation of a master figure, but also its removal. Ultimately, the maitre a ecrire is not only one who induces writing in a unique way, but also the one which should be written in order to succeed.

This thesis is in three chapters. Chapter one is about Harold Bloom's theory of the Anxiety of Influence. Bloom's argument is that literary history is shaped by the anxiety of "strong" poets at their belatedness. I show that he depends upon a subjective interpretation of literary production in order to defend a rigidly traditional canon. / Chapter two deals with theories of intertextuality, principally those of Julia Kristeva and Michael Riffaterre. As alternatives to theories of influence, neither proves satisfactory. Both founder on the contradictory goal to explain all literature, at the expense of recognizing literary diversity. / Chapter three concerns literary variations. These are texts which are deliberately premised on pre-existing texts. I focus on three examples from this class of literary texts which is not satisfactorily dealt with by any of the theories I consider. I pursue a less wide-ranging approach in order to unearth important features of literary variations.

This dissertation focuses on the politics of self-narration and the use of visual images and strategies in Margaret Laurence's The Diviners , Daphne Marlatt's Ana Historic and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Cat's Eye. I argue that these authors are reworking the metafictional form by using visual strategies (such as reflection, distortion and point of view) to explore the complex relationship that us created when the woman narrator when she is both subject and object of her own fictional autobiography. / I use the artistic form of anamorphosis as the overriding metaphor for discussing this relation and its manifestation in these texts. Paintings and drawings in which the anamorphic form is used depend upon strategic distortion, indirect viewing and perspective for their effect. Anamorphoses present exploded, fragmented images which, through the strategic positioning of the viewer, are reconfigured into recognizable forms. The emphasis in these works of visual art is upon the moment at which these images are reconfigured. In literary works, I argue, the emphasis is on the process of creating a distorted image and on that which is contained in the spaces that are revealed through the process of exploding that image. This metaphor allows me to explore the interdependence of the visual and written elements of self-representation in these novels and the simultaneous, shifting, mutually informing relation between a narrating, subjective "I" and a narrative "eye" (with its emphasis on the visual, on perspective, and on point of view). / The resistant, reinscriptive and interrogative strategy of "literary anamorphosis" moves these novels beyond the confines of linear, literary forms to create a distinct, feminist, narrative space in which women writing in Canada can articulate the complex politics of their positions in but not of the masculinist Master Narratives that have historically defined and controlled them.

Typescript. / Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1976. / Bibliography: leaves 404-427. / Microfiche. / vi, 427 leaves

In order to explore the range of indirect metafiction as presented in three exemplary novels, this dissertation begins by examining how the assumptions of "realism" on the one hand and "postmodernism" on the other relate to the paradigmatic triad of story-teller, story, and audience. From this context emerges the view that the range of metafiction is determined by how it reveals the processes and nature of fiction according to a spectrum of mediation: that of the writer between his "raw materials" and the text, that of the text between writer and reader, and that of the reader between the text and his interpretation. Indirect metafiction (or "pretend realism") mediates between realism and postmodernism, revealing without breaking the illusions of realism. Each of the next three chapters, after initially placing the key novel within the context of the author's work as a whole, discusses in detail a novel whose metafictional focus is on one of the three mediations. Accordingly, Chapter II focusses on Randolph Stow's The Girl Green as Elderflower (1980) and on the way it reveals the mediation of the author by presenting a writer's fiction as a synthesis of his personal and literary experiences. Chapter III notes how M. K. Joseph's A Soldier's Tale (1976) reflects the mediation of the reader by depicting a writer's interpretation and literary redaction of an oral tale. And Chapter IV shows how Timothy Findley's Famous Last Words (1981) demonstrates the mediation of the text by presenting a writer whose text "crystallizes" the illusions of fiction, then undercuts and exposes them. The analyses of the key texts employ both postmodern and traditional critical approaches, demonstrating them to be complementary; by noting the interpenetration of metafictional and traditional import and significance, the analyses also highlight the mediary nature of indirect metafiction. The fifth chapter draws theoretical conclusions from ideas in the practical chapters: from metafictional revelations through the paradigm of mediation comes an "anatomy" of fiction, delineating its elements; from a sense of how the mind "structures" experience through "fictional" representations of both "reality" and fictional texts comes a "physiology," a sense of how fiction works through language. This discussion leads to definitions of realistic, unrealistic, and self-conscious fiction, and of metafiction, both direct and indirect; the dissertation concludes by remarking on the inter-relations of language, "fiction," and "reality." / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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This dissertation focuses on the elements of performance that contribute to the actress's development of somatic practices. By mastering the art of articulation and vocalization, by transforming their bodies and their environment, these actors created their own agency. The female actors lived the life of the characters they portrayed, which were full of multicultural models from various social and economic classes. Somaesthetics, as a focus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation and somatic awareness, provides a pragmatic approach to understanding the unique way in which the woman of the early modern Spanish stage, while dedicating herself to the art of acting, challenged the negative cultural and social constructs imposed on her. Drawing from early modern plays and treatises on the precepts and practices of the acting process, I use somaesthetics to shed light on how the actor might have prepared for a role in a comedia, selfconsciously cultivating her body in order to meet the challenges of the stage. / by Elizabeth Marie Cruz Peterson. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2013. / Includes bibliography. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / System requirements: Adobe Reader.