This thesis develops and refines a term used initially by Bill Buford to refer to works of contemporary realism. Dirty realism characterises a strain of realism first appearing in American and Canadian writing during the 1960s and increasing in prominence through the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s. The study focuses on the scholarship surrounding both the term and the works of particular authors, and applies the theories of Fredric Jameson and Michel de Certeau to develop a basic critical vocabulary for engaging the fiction and poetry of Charles Bukowski, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Mark Anthony Jarman, as well as other writers treated with less intensity, such as David Adams Richards, Helen Potrebenko, Al Purdy, and Bobbie Anne Mason. In particular, the dissertation attempts to develop a critical terminology through which to discuss dirty realist texts. The most prominent of such terms, the "hypocrisy aesthetic," refers to dirty realism's aesthetic of contradiction, discursive variance, and offsetting of theory against practice. The chapters of the dissertation deal with the emergence of the hypocrisy aesthetic through a study of literary genealogy, history, and theory. The second chapter, "Dirty Realism: Genealogy," traces the development of major currents in twentieth-century American realism, particularly naturalism. Arguing for dirty realism as a variant of naturalism, the chapter traces the transmission of ideas concerning dialectics, determinism, and commodity production from Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris, through James T. Farrell and John Steinbeck and ending with an extensive discussion of Charles Bukowski's Factotum. The third chapter, "Dirty Realism: History," addresses the impact of the Cold War on the development of dirty realism. Referring to major critics on the period, this section of the dissertation follows the development of hypocrisy as a form of discourse eventuated by Cold War contradictions, particularly between that of democratic freedoms proclaimed abroad and the atmosphere of suspicion and paranoia on the domestic scene (as—in the USA—in the HUAC hearings chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy). / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Alan Burns was one of the key figures in the group of experimental writers working in Britain in the nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies, which included writers such as B.S. Johnson, Christine Brooke-Rose, Ann Quin and Giles Gordon. All of them sought ways to update and radicalize the techniques of modernism to make them relevant for their contemporary situation. Alan Burns took the novel to more radical extremes than his counterparts, eschewing traditional narrative in favour of a dense accumulation of detail. This is the first full length study of Burns' work, which has largely been neglected by scholars and, for the most part, remains out of print. I provide a thorough account of Burns' life and work and theorise the reasons for his obscurity. I examine the role of trauma in his work. For Burns the experience of the traumatic moment is one in which the violence that underpins everyday society is momentarily unveiled, the sheer and explicit violence of the event produces a rupture that displays the deeper and more insidious violence that exists beneath it and gives it structure. I draw on theories of visual art, music and cinema, both of the 'classical' avant-garde and more recent, as much as of literature and philosophy, to attempt to account for the strategies, techniques and approaches that Alan Burns engaged with in his writing. Avowedly left-wing, in interviews Burns is frequently optimistic about the possibility for political change in the world, and is even confident about the role that literature can play in fostering that change. However, I argue that his novels present a rather different, and much more pessimistic picture: each of them shows the way in which any activism can ultimately be constrained and co-opted.

Thesis (doctoral)--Université de la Sorbonne nouvelle Paris III, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 489-502).

Thesis (doctoral)--Université de la Sorbonne nouvelle Paris III, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 489-502).

This thesis uses four works by the contemporary Canadian poet Anne Carson (born 1950) to argue that it is in the embracing of failure and difficulty that modern poetics may negotiate formal erosion and the limits of language. The introduction addresses Carson’s divisive reputation, and uses two separate criticisms of her poetic skill to delineate her liminal position in the modern poetic landscape, and therefore demonstrate her potential as a valuable framework for discussing innovative form. Via an examination of the criticisms of Robert Potts and David Solway, I argue that Carson is neither high priestess of postmodernism nor a collagist of poorly produced forms. This illuminates two points: one, that she occupies a space outside several modern ideologies of poetic authenticity, expression and form, and two, that this position can be effectively used to interrogate those ideologies and investigate new possibilities for poetic creativity. In Chapter 1, Nox, Carson’s elegy for her brother Michael, is argued to experiment with traditional elegy form – but not in a mode that wholly follows Jahan Ramazani’s famous framing of 20th century elegy form as traumatically fractured. Nox is shown not to be merely subversive, but also interrogative of its own formal tradition, embracing the inherent contradiction within elegy: that absence could be rendered as presence, that a living, flawed language could make the dead speak. From this contradiction, I argue, Nox creates a solution: it occupies a position of formal non-forming, a return to the state of poesis, refusing to emerge as a completed poem or retreat into fragmentation but instead occupying a liminal space of continual creation. In the second chapter, this preoccupation with elegy’s paradox is shown to be part of a greater theme within Carson’s work. The failures of language in Carson are elucidated with reference to the sceptical 19th-century theorist Fritz Mauthner. Mauthner is argued to be the best theorist for the thesis’s framework because of his belief in the possibilities of language’s resurrection as a valid communicative medium. Through three texts, “By Chance The Cycladic People”, The Glass Essay and Just For The Thrill, Carson’s interrogation of this hope is shown to produce creativity from difficulty, creating monstrous form-combinations to render the silence beyond language’s limits as poetically productive. Carson’s texts, in their struggle with failure and their obsessive doubt, can be used to construct several means of negotiating the limits of form and the inherent fallibility of language. The conflict between the drive for authentic expression and the perceived failure of expressive mediums is one of the defining features of both Carson’s work and modern poetry in general. However, it is by inhabiting and challenging the fraught areas at the edge of meaning that poetry of the 21st century can, in the words of Carson’s influence Samuel Beckett, try again, fail again, fail better. Synopsis: The Traitor’s Symphony is an experimental novel in three voices, set in an unspecified totalitarian state known only as the Regime at some point in the twentieth century. It follows the career of David, a young composer who rises from tortured outcast to celebrated Regime talent through scheming, moral ambiguity, and a deal with the Professor, a translator and populist radio pundit. David trades the sexual attentions of Dion, a beautiful but brain-damaged boy, for the Professor’s help in rising through the ranks of the Regime’s musical system. The voices of the Professor and his doctor wife Anne, who have just lost their newborn son, alternate with David’s as the bargain binds them together in disaster. The narrative is inspired by the lives of collaborationist composers in various 20th century states, including Dmitri Shostakovich and Carl Orff, but is not focussed on any one figure. Instead, it takes various elements of their experience - the state apparatus of approval, the minute observation of ‘doctrine’ in musical content, and the humiliation and blacklisting of composers who did not produce acceptable content - as the starting point for a narrative exploring the complex relationship between art, artists and the modern totalitarian state. Research in this area was shaped by Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise: listening to the twentieth century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) and the work of Michael Kater, most notably Composers of the Nazi era: eight portraits (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), and supplemented by archival work in the Stasimuseum and Bundesbeauftragten in Berlin. More broadly, the novel focusses on the difficulties of grief, love and survival in totalitarian environments. Its setting, the Regime, was created by combining elements of daily life under the Stalinist Terror, The Democratic Republic Of North Korea, and Nazi and Stasi Germany, drawing on sources including Anna Akhmatova’s poetry and Chol-Hwan Kang’s The Aquariums Of Pyongyang (New York: Basic Books, 2001). The Regime’s embedded paranoia, hyper-vigilance, rigorous propaganda, regulated femininity, cult-like leader worship and brutal reprisal for non-conforming citizens are constructed from these historical precedents. Each of the three voices is stylised as a poetic form, as a method of expressing the repression of the individual and the culture of fear in the Regime’s system. This formal dimension draws on modernist literature in its use of language as expression of identity, but also on Wittgensteinian doubt that true communication could ever exist between such personal webs of meaning. Both David and Anne must actively suppress their private pain, he the agony of torture and burden of being labelled a traitor, she the disorienting grief of her son’s death and the loss of her husband’s love. Their inner emotional states are reflected in the forms of their vocals: David’s fractured voice, with its distressed percussive rhythm, is the voice of a musician physically and mentally smashed, while Anne’s blank, frantic segments express the dislocation of her foreignness and the gulf that grief has created in her marriage. The Professor, in contrast, begins the novel in supreme command of language, with brief breaks into sensual chaos as the only manifestation of his hidden mourning. The vocal shifts reflect and form the narrative progression.

This is a book of short stories with a critical introduction. In theme, the stories seek to find the border between the Midwest and the Southwest of America by focusing on Ohio and Arizona. Some of the stories seek to exemplify “experimental” fiction, while the critical introduction seeks to define “experimental.” In addition, the introduction theorizes about the role of setting in linking collections and characterization.

The following paper will deal with the actantial place of memory and history in the works of Ge Fei, a so-called avant-garde writer in China. Analyzing his three major novels published in the nineteen-nineties, as well as an earlier short story, the paper will discuss how Ge Fei renegotiates the status and place of the literary subject as configured through the act of writing, and its close relationship with the medium of memory and history. Contrary to the prevailing opinion, the avant-garde experiment in Ge Fei's works does not intimate the dissipation of the subject, but rather assists in reconfiguring it in an entirely new and dynamic conceptualization. Instead of a figural e/End and vulgarization of literature in the nineties, Ge Fei's experimentation with the acts of writing and reading, as well as his play with language, open up new possibilities for the writing of new literatures in contemporary China.

Thesis (doctoral)--University of Stockholm, 1986. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 115-123).

Thesis (doctoral)--University of Stockholm, 1986. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 115-123).

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