Most critical acclaim of William Faulkner has focused on his innovations of narrative technique, and while critics have frequently noted the correlation between form and meaning in his novels, the central focus of these novels--race--has largely been ignored in the criticism. The purpose of this paper is to examine Faulkner's narrative methodology and arrangement of material in order to demonstrate that the structures of his novels, particularly Light in August and Absalom, Absalom!, consistently enhance and dramatize the major subject and themes of the novels. Under careful scrutiny, these structures reveal an effective and dramatic parallel between Faulkner's rhetorical methodology and the complexity of his subject matter--the South, and the issue of race.

The corpus of this project consists of the five volumes of Simone de Beauvoir's memoirs: Memoires d'une jeune fille rangee, La force de l'age, La force des choses I, La force des choses II and Tout compte fait. In this study, we have considered the difficulties of self-analysis and examined the limitations and demands of the genre of autobiography. / A memoir is not simply the reconstruction of the author's past, but a personal interpretation of this past which often includes discrepancies between the narrative and the reality of his or her life. The autobiographer's primary objective is not to deliver the historical facts of his or her existence, but to show a self beneath the person that appears to the world. In our research, we have found that the value and truth of Simone de Beauvoir's autobiography arise from her creation of a character she sees as embodying her own distinct personality.

This thesis examines selected prose fiction works of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in an effort to establish a clearer understanding of the creative principles informing her writing, based on more evidence than her well-known novel Frankenstein provides. Overturning the hitherto dismissive and/or reductive critiques of her lesser-known works, this thesis challenges negative assessments by reinterpreting the structure of Shelley's fiction. Concentrating particularly on the early Frankenstein(1818), Mathilda (written in 1819), and The Last Man (1826), with a focus on the use of insistent embedded quotations, this thesis begins by exploring Shelley's belief in textuality as a form of "grafting." As scholars have suggested, Shelley's literary borrowings are a result of her materialist-based views of human reality. The persistent use of embedded quotations is one way in which Shelley's fiction represents texts as collations of materials. The core of the argument posits that citational "grafting" has distinctive and striking effects in each of the works examined. In Frankenstein, quotations underscore existential alienation by pointing to the need for texts to fill in the lacunae of human understanding; in Mathilda, the narrator uses citations to create a sense of personal identity; and in The Last Man, citational excerpts are used with the assumption that they are shared pockets of meaning belonging to a community of human readers. This reconceptualization of Shelley's writing contributes to the generic taxonomies that are now being used to retheorize "the novel" in more inclusive and specific ways.

This essay focuses on the moral aspect of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's political thought. It constitutes an extensive review and analysis of his work in the field of literature as well as social and political criticism. The first part deals with Solzhenitsyn's critique of Marxism, which remained for many years the main target of his attacks. The second part looks at Solzhenitsyn's historical analysis of the Soviet Communist experience. Subsequently, the essay examines the critique of the West expressed by the Russian writer during his exile in Europe and America. The last part deals with Solzhenitsyn's perception of post-Communism Russia and some of his major propositions for the future.

The aim of this study is to analyse the web of meaning underlying the presence of plots and images from paralitterature in the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet. This presence is explained by a transformation in the bookmarket, cultural environment and literary landscape, and corresponds to the malaise in the social discourse raised by the crisis. / The bookmarket changed rapidly in the years following the war. Its reorganization along industrial lines lead to recurrent periods of crisis. That part of the market consisting of mass produced books came under the influence of American popular fiction. This situation had repurcussions on the literary field. People no longer saw books and authors as special, and the readership of serious literature decreased markedly. The avant garde itself seemed exhausted. Works of paralitterature, on the other hand, entered in a process of legitimation. / The New Novelists, and especially Robbe-Grillet, find in paralitterature expressions of the social discourse more powerful than those available in canonical literature. Popular fictions, rife with violence and agression, capture the worries and pessimism about society and the alienation of the individual. In Robbe-Grillet's work, the world is conceived as containing a cancer, one that threatens the social order. Reality is distorted in his fiction, and the characters are fragmented and lost in their imaginary world. The image of a cancerous society is crystallized in the motif of the ritual sacrifice of a woman. For Robbe-Grillet, though, this motif also suggests the origin of fantasy, and in doing so might rejuvenate the creative impulse. Behind the violence and eroticism of his fiction, then, and behind the anomia contaminating literature, is the desire to retrace the lightening of fantasy in the hope of dealing with both the modern world and the predicament of the novel, and possibly find a catharsis through it.

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