xiv, 141 p. : ill. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / Twentieth-century British figurative painter Francis Bacon (1909-1992) is perhaps best known for his near-obsessive series of papal paintings inspired by Diego Velazquez' renowned portrait Pope Innocent X (1650) and created over the course of Bacon's entire artistic career. The artist's working process plays a crucial role in understanding this celebrated and varied series. Bacon deliberately avoided Velazquez' "original" portrait, preferring instead to work with photographic reproductions of the piece alongside a large collection of seemingly disparate visual material in his chaotic studio at 7 Reece Mews (South Kensington, London, England). This thesis proposes that Bacon explored issues of mechanization, fragmentation, and repetition through these visual juxtapositions in order to offer a critique of artistic and religious institutions. / Committee in Charge: Dr. Kate Mondloch, Chair; Dr. Lauren G. Kilroy; Dr. Ellen Rees

This thesis investigates the capacity of mourning to transform one's life into writing. Since mourning impacts each individual in a very unique way, its effect in the field of life-writing is incommensurable. In this respect, the changes brought about in the 20th century by the works of Serge Doubrovsky are remarkable: through the exploration of his eight autofictions (word which he coined in 1977) in addition to his six essays on literature, this study demonstrates how his experience of mourning has challenged and redefined the borders of autobiography. This investigation starts with the observation of the writer-narrator's writing drive, which emerges from a threefold experience of death: the loss of his mother, the trauma of World War II, and the perspective of his own death. The first section argues that writing transforms the private experience of mourning into memory. Since forgetfulness threatens memory, memory must be saved and disseminated; this is why Serge Doubrovsky composes his autofiction as literature which is made of, and which belongs to, memories. The second section observes how mourning transforms the experience of writing and reading: a focus on ‘ressassement' shows the impact of mourning on writing and how the writer-narrator turns this uncontrollable sign of trauma into his own distinct writing style, called ‘écriture consonnantique'. These transformations participate in the mutation of the writer-reader, fiction-reality, and autobiography-autofiction relationships. The last section observes these abnormal alloys through the lens of the monster. Autofiction could be considered as a monstrous genre, insofar as it recognises the work of the writer to fashion a whole new story out of fragmented and repeated memories in a creative process. Overall, this study assesses Serge Doubrovsky's ability to challenge existing literary boundaries, and to create, beyond the breach of mourning and within the splits of language, an interdisciplinary work that deeps on renewing literature.

James's belief that "it is art that makes life" is essential to his own literary technique and to the reading experience within and in relation to his novels. The thesis seeks to posit the notion of reading as a fundamental concern in Henry James's fiction. Drawing largely on the phenomenological and anthropological approaches to the reading process of Wolfgang Iser, this thesis examines the Jamesian text as a performative event involving author, reader and character in creative and interpretative narrational struggles. Iser uses "play" as an integral term to describe the dynamic between author-reader-text which produces a literary work of art. In James's fiction the doubling of the author/reader and reader/character role within the text crucially structures a narrative form which is itself an inquiry into the human use of fiction. The Iserian conception of the act of reading as an engagement with the "gaps" within the play-space of the literary text can elucidate James's structural and thematic use of such sites of indeterminacy to foreground the enlivening necessity of an indeterminate "felt life" within human narrative structures. What Maisie Knew highlights the most important rule in the game -- the necessity for the reader to create meaning from the indeterminate aspects of the text. The shared exercise for author-reader-character is the attempt to access the child's unformulated inner reality to ascertain what Maisie knows. In the section on The Portrait of a Lady Iser's notion of reading as an ideational activity aids an inquiry into the human use of mental fictive picturing to compose reality. The Ambassadors demonstrates the "anthropological" need for the particular mode of consciousness brought about by the literary text when we engage in a world as real as but different to our own. Strether is the reader's ambassador in this world and his interpretative activity mirrors the reader's quest. In The Golden Bowl the bewildering multiplicity of readings made possible by the indeterminate aspects of the literary text instigates a contest for narrative forms in which the chosen fictions of the readers/characters must be actively willed into existence.

In this study I focus on a number of collections of short fiction by the South African writers Joël Matlou, Sindiwe Magona, Zoë Wicomb and Ivan Vladislavić, all of which evince certain of the characteristics of short story cycles or sequences. In other words, they display what Forrest L. Ingram describes as “a double tendency of asserting the individuality of [their] components on the one hand and of highlighting, on the other, the bonds of unity which make the many into a single whole”. The cycle form, thus defined, is characterised by a paradoxical yet productive and frequently unresolved tension between “the individuality of each of the stories and the necessities of the larger unit”, between “the one and the many”, and between cohesion and fragmentation. It is this “dynamic structure of connection and disconnection” which singularly equips the genre to represent the interrelationship of singular and collective identities, or the “coherent multiplicity of community”. Ingram, for example, asserts that “Numerous and varied connective strands draw the co-protagonists of any story cycle into a single community. … However this community may be achieved, it usually can be said to constitute the central character of a cycle”. Not unsurprisingly, then, in its dominant manifestations over much of the twentieth century the short story cycle demonstrated a marked inclination towards regionalism and the depiction of localised enclaves, and this tendency towards “place-based short story cycles” in which topographical unity is a conspicuous feature was as pronounced in South Africa as elsewhere. However, the specific collections which are my concern here increasingly employ innovative and self-reflexive narrative strategies that unsettle generic expectations and interrogate the notions of regionalism and community conventionally associated with the short story cycle. My investigation seeks to explain this shift in emphasis, and its particular significance within the South African context.

From the preface: The purpose of this thesis is exposition rather than criticism. Pound's position in the hierarchy of the 'New Criticism' would provide an extremely interesting subject; but I have rather tried to outline; the standards which he has laid down as being central in the technics of good poetry and to show how closely he has adhered to them in his own verse. I have limited the period to be discussed because all of the essential principles which he employs in his writing after 1920 are discernible in the body of his work published before that date.

By drawing on the two waves of critique of the Enlightenment and its version of reasonone after the French Revolution and the other after WWIIthis research pushes the timeline to an even earlier point and tries to study the critique of the Enlightenment and its version of reason within the Enlightenment itself. In doing so it chooses the English/Irish writer Jonathan Swift for case study, because in his works he repeatedly levels scathing criticisms of his age and the reason upheld by many of his contemporaries.;In his critique of the Enlightenment and its version of reason Swift appeals to a long tradition in Western intellectual history which regards human reason as twofold: a discursive part which proceeds in a step-by-step manner, through analysis, calculation, and demonstration; and an intuitive part which reaches the conclusion directly, immediately, and with much certainty. The Enlightenment, however, breaks the balance between the two by promoting discursive reason and eliminating intuitive reason. As a result, discursive reason is easily instrumentalized without the check of intuitive reason, which is thrown into oblivion.;Swift's critique is essentially a protest against this trend that was going on at his time. In contrast to it, he denounces discursive reason while champions intuitive reason. In his critique, the main target is discursive reason, and it necessarily also involves the most representative embodiment of discursive reason that was prospering at the time, namely, natural science. The critique of discursive reason and of science is made partly by relying on intuitive reason, which makes it, in a sense, also reason's critique of itself.;Of course, Swift does not regard human reason, either intuitive or discursive, as the panacea for human beings. As a priest of the Anglican Church, he thinks reason should always be subordinate to faithin other words, reason is limited. But perhaps ironically, in his emphasis on the limit of reason and the consequent need for faith as embodied and ensured in an authoritative institution, Swift reveals his own bigotry, intolerance and authoritarianism, which shows how he was historically and ideologically limited.

On a creative and a personal level, Sylvia Plath seems to have been fascinated by the relationship between life and death. Her work reflects an ongoing preoccupation with duality and a sense of tension between two opposing forces suffuses virtually every poem she wrote in the period from 1956 to early 1963. Because her attitude to both life and death is deeply ambivalent, Plath's poetry rests on a strong awareness of conflict and her art is characterized by a continual pull between extremes. This thesis is an examination of how she uses images of life in poems that ostensibly deal with death.While Plath draws on the events of her own life for her poetic material, she also converts her personal experiences into a universal myth. She was familiar with Robert Graves's eclectic study of the pagan nature deity, The White Goddess, and she seems to have incorporated part of his symbolism into her own code of images. In particular, she adopts Graves's triple goddess of nature as one of the dominant figures in her created world, for the White Goddess is associated with life and death alike.Plath's dichotomy of life and death works on different planes. Firstly, she frequently envisages the self as divided and the opposition between life and death takes on the dimensions of an internal psychological war. Secondly, she extends the battle between life and death to the creative sphere. Thirdly, she explores the idea of life as a journey from birth to death. The White Goddess is linked with the three natural realms of earth, sky and underworld. And Plath relies largely on seasonal, lunar and chthonic images in her poetry. Furthermore, the three colours of the goddess - white , red and black - are the dominant hues of her poetry.

From Chapter 1: In this chapter I hope to illustrate in general terms how de la Mare's interest in dream and the preternatural pervades his work. His views on reality and in what it truly consists will be considered and definitions provided of various terms used throughout this study. These will approximate as closely as possible the meanings they acquire through de la Mare's own use of them. Some detailed reference to his work, especially to his prose introduction to the anthology Behold, This Dreamer! and to his poem "Dreams", will provide support for the statements made. Finally, an attempt will be made to place de la Mare, briefly and in broad outline, within his literary context, again with particular reference to his interest in dream and the preternatural and where it corresponds to or deviates from what one could expect from a poet of this period.

From Introduction: This thesis then is a detailed study of Lessing's novels in an attempt to show her development as a writer. Her short stories are handled briefly in connection with her novels. For, although the short stories are among her finest work, focus on the novels is sufficient to show her growth as a writer. Hers is the small individual struggle to overcome the limitations of both her content and her form. To overcome the limitations of her content means expanding her own consciousness and re-forming life itself. Only when she is free and the world is free can she overcome the limitations of her content. Then, of course, she need no longer and can no longer write. The task seems as impossible as that of the dung beetles, but she nevertheless continues. Like the sacred beetles with "the sun between their feet" she carries on rolling the muck of the world into symbols of the truth.

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