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This thesis develops a complex theoretical model for conceptualizing the relationships among philosophy, religion, and art and, then, examines the philosophical writings and the novels of Iris Murdoch from this perspective. The theoretical model in its most general form is based on the premiss that philosophy, religion, and art can be thought of as conventionally defined linguistic fields analogous to Wittgensteinian language-games. Relations among the linguistic fields are, in turn, analysed as exclusive ("Disparate" Model), inclusive ("Reductionist" Model), or interactional ("Dialectical" and "Tensional" Models), the latter pair being most appropriate for figurative language, the former pair for non-figurative language. The Dialectical and Tensional Models are assimilated, respectively, to Roman Jakobson's theory of metaphor and metonymy as the fundamental poles of language. Emphasis falls upon the continuum between the dialectical-metaphoric and the tensional-metonymic poles as the area in which creative, imaginative activities, such as the writing of novels or deliberation upon ethical problems, takes place. Iris Murdoch's theories of "crystalline" and "journalistic," "open" and "closed" novels and the related ways of thinking are coordinated with this continuum as a paradigm. Moreover, a creative tension is revealed in her philosophical writings between a resisted impetus towards totalizing explanations and the experience of the inherent contingency of philosophical thought. Thus, there is in Murdoch's philosophy, as in her creative prose, an exploration of the dynamics between the dialectical-metaphoric pole of thought and language and the tensional-metonymic pole, with an increasing, though never finally realized tendency towards the tensional-metonymic pole. Detailed analyses of Murdoch's aesthetic and ethical thought and of a wide selection of her novels illustrate this thesis.

This study focuses on the first three historiographic novels in a projected quartet---The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, and Babel Tower---which historicises what we now refer to as the "crises in representation" that occurred over the late 50s and into the 60s. I trace the figure of the Undifferentiated Narrator, both as it is referred to and read by the characters in the world of the novels, and as it is invoked or broken up by the forms of the narratives themselves. / My methodology is outlined in the first section, wherein I place a reading of Byatt's work within the context of contemporary debate regarding the ethics of representation. Then I treat each novel separately, since each is a self-contained novelistic experiment with a different form of literary realism. / In the end I conclude that Byatt's use of polyvocality and multiple histories help us to come to terms with nostalgia for the self-present self, by showing us that it haunts every narrative (and anti-narrative) and is a coercive figure in every life.

This thesis analyzes the relationship between collaboration and learning to cope with grief in Denise Desautels' poetic works. It shows that this writing strategy influences the representation of mourning and contributes to the learning process, which is characterized by a constant oscillation between opposing poles, such as life and death, the past and present, the self and other, the private and public realms, as well as art and writing. The thesis further demonstrates that Desautels' development of an interdisciplinary approach gives rise to a community of the bereaving and enables the poetic subject to distance herself from melancholy in order to foster a new aim toward happiness. It concludes that the mourning process never reaches completion, but is constantly renegotiated.

Typescript. / Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1986. / Bibliography: leaves 206-211. / Photocopy. / Microfilm. / xi, 211 leaves 29 cm

This thesis provides a detailed socio-political and literary analysis of &quot / A walk in the night : seven stories from the streets of Cape Town&quot / . It investigated and systematically compared each short story to the novella or compared the short stories with each other and showed their thematic and formal similarities and differences.

The poetry of Edwin Muir has inspired a distinctive body of criticism. Realizing that his poetry is inexorably linked with his life, Roger Knight, Michael Phillips, Peter Butter and others have produced fine studies of his work against a biographical background. Margaret Anderson has contributed an important dissertation on the importance of dualism in the poems. R. P. Blackmur, J. R. Watson and Kathleen Raine have published articles that are central in informing any new Muir scholarship.This study intends to illuminate the source of Muir's inspiration, to show that his imagery is drawn from the mythos. A general review of Muir criticism supports the theory that the imaginative background he knew as the Fable, which underlies all temporal human behavior (labeled as the Story) is also the collective unconscious of Jung, the Spiritus Mundi of Yeats, the "inseeing" of Rilke, and the Mythos of Aristotle.The study reviews Muir criticism and the poetic technique of Muir, develops a special definition of "mythos" and goes on, through the explication of selected Muir poems, to show how his poetic and philosophical growth was influenced by his unique ability to gain access to the most powerful of Aristotle's four modes of Rhetoric. Finally, the study crystalizes Muir's overall aesthetic in the oxymoronic conclusion to his 1956 masterpiece, "The Horses," the term "free servitude."Muir felt that we can only function at our full potential when we use the power of our imagination to realize the essential duality of the human condition. We are, to an extent, free, and in a state of servitude. In Freudian terms, the superego enslaves us through guilt and our debt to the concept of civilization, while the id urges us on the ultimate freedom represented by the unchecked expression of violence and sex.The study concludes with an examination of Muir's final enigmatic symbol, found in the title of his last collection of poems: One Foot in Eden. Man, through the imaginative realization of his immortality, may plant one foot in Eden; the other foot remains trapped in the Labyrinth, Muir's symbol for the bewildering, impersonal complexity of our twentieth century beaurocractic wasteland. The transcendence of this entrapment gave Muir his purpose, in life and in art.

This thesis studies the concept of the baroque as applied to the works of the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980). It revisits the original inspiration that the writer found in baroque architecture and sculpture, as expressed in the articles he wrote from Spain in the early 1930s, and follows his use of baroque culture in each of his novels. It is found that, through his attempt to create a period ambience for his historical fictions by incorporating into his novels descriptions of the art and architecture of the Baroque era, and by imitating the literary style of Spanish Golden Age writers, he ultimately produced a parodic and ironic style that was put to a highly original use even in those works set in the contemporary period. Finally, the mature works produced in the last decade of Carpentier's life are studied, and the continuities and discontinuities between these works and those of previous periods are examined, in order to arrive at a critical assessment of the potential to renovate the Latin American novel created by this writer's use of the baroque. Throughout this thesis the primary focus is placed upon the role played by the visual arts, including architecture, in Carpentier's development of baroque themes and style, a secondary focus being placed upon literary influences. Thus the importance for Carpentier of various writers and artists is examined, such as Cervantes, Quevedo, Piranesi, Vico, Goya, Barr????s and d'Ors. It is found that Carpentier's use of baroque themes, motifs and style enabled him to make a unique contribution to literature in a number of ways: by creating an original means of representing the position of the individual with regard to society and the historical process, by reevaluating Latin American culture and environment vis-????-vis is Europe, and by adopting a postcolonial perspective of cultural self-assertiveness that was to pave the way for the 'boom' in the Latin American novel.

This thesis takes up J. G. Ballard's contention, that 'the act of intercourse is now always a model for something else,' to show that Don DeLillo uses a particular sexual, cultural economy of adultery, understood in its many loaded cultural and literary contexts, as a model for semantic reproduction. I contend that DeLillo's fiction evinces a promiscuous model of language that structurally reflects the myth of the adulterous triangle. The thesis makes a significant intervention into DeLillo scholarship by challenging Paul Maltby's suggestion that DeLillo's linguistic model is Romantic and pure. My analysis of the narrative operations of adultery in his work reveals the alternative promiscuous model. I discuss ten DeLillo novels and one play - Americana, Players, The Names, White Noise, Libra, Mao II,Underworld, the play Valparaiso, The Body Artist, Cosmopolis, and the pseudonymousAmazons - that feature adultery narratives. I demonstrate that these narratives resist conservative models of language, space, and sex by using promiscuity as a method of narrative control. I argue that DeLillo's adultery narratives respond subversively to attempts to categorise his work, and that he extends the mythologised rhetoric of the adulterous triangle by adopting sexual transgression as a three-sided semantic structure that connects language, sex, and space. I refer to theories of narrative, postmodernity, space, desire, and parody to show that DeLillo's adultery narratives structurally influence his experiments with linguistic meaning. My analysis reveals that contradiction performs at several spatial, sexual, and dialogical levels to undermine readings that suggest DeLillo's language models pure meaning. I identify the sexualised fissure within DeLillo's semantic style that is exposed by the operation of contradiction. I believe this gap distinguishes DeLillo from postmodern fiction's emphasis on the placeless, because it is a meaningful space that emphasises the reproductive adulteration of signification. I expose several sites of dialectic rupture, including the hotel/motel room, oppositional and metaphorical description, the journey, the image, and the secret. I contend that sex in these transgressive narratives is a model for something else: promiscuous meaning. This thesis demonstrates that DeLillo's fiction charts the typography of the mythical third side of the adulterous triangle in order to respond to language's own promiscuity.

Bibliography: leaves 338-360. / 360 leaves ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of English, 1997?