Thesis (M.S.)--Florida State University, 2003. / Advisor: Dr. Kathleen Erndl, Florida State University, College of Social Sciences, Dept. of International Affairs. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Mar. 2, 2004). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Indiana University of Pennsylvania. / Includes bibliographical references.

published_or_final_version / Comparative Literature / Master / Master of Philosophy

The work of Maya Deren, Marguerite Duras and Margarethe von Trotta, three filmmakers who are also authors, inhabits a space between patriarchy and polemic feminism. The result, a refocusing and re-arrangement of traditional literary and cinematic discourse, may be termed a feminine authorship. The principles of this authorship mainly derive from Laura Mulvey’s controversial but influential application of psychoanalytical theory to feminine cinema in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (Screen, 1975), an investigation of the “male gaze” in film. Her propositions have been further developed by critics such as Teresa de Lauretis (1980), Mary Anne Doane (1987) and Judith Mayne (1990) as well as Mulvey herself (1981). Mulvey’s approach shares with classical psychoanalysis an emphasis on the unconscious and its visual manifestations in dream and memory. Deren, Duras and von Trotta encode the latter in spatial imagery expressive of both women’s repression and their hidden resourcefulness, most frequently drawing on the gothic novel and the exotic tale. In order to accomplish their vision, the three filmmakers variously offer original interpretations of well-established modes and genres such as surrealism (Deren), the nouveau roman (Duras), and the documentary (von Trotta), but none could have done so without conceding to a number of compromises with patriarchal discourse, partly for economic, partly for ideological reasons. This thesis asserts (in contrast to Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Peggy Kamuf) that these compromises need not be read as a flaw, but contribute to a discourse in its own right. By analyzing authors from diverse cultural, social and linguistic backgrounds who, moreover, cannot be clearly categorized within the alleged dichotomy of patriarchy and feminism, this study seeks to expand the definition of feminism across national and ideological boundaries. In so doing, it may contribute to the study of other women authors and filmmakers whose views and methods have been similarly unorthodox.

No description available.

No study of Virginia Woolf can do justice to the complexity of her life and work without taking into account the numerous contradictions present in her thought. Though Woolf is recognized as a revolutionary contributor to the development of modernism, it is also important to remember that she was born in 1882 and that the nineteenth century also left its mark on her. The first chapter will examine this double sensibility. The second chapter will trace the development of Woolf's modernist aesthetic. She was obviously rebelling against the realism valued by her Victorian and Edwardian predecessors when she conceived of a literary style capable of abstracting from purely formal elements a more "profound reality" than that captured by objective and representational descriptions. Despite this revolutionary tendency, she constructs a hierarchy of "realities" that is somewhat elitist in its mysticism and runs counter to the revolutionary feminist and Marxist thought evident in so much of her work. The last chapter will examine the contradictions that riddle Woolf's feminist writings.

No description available.

Thanks, in part, to critical studies like Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic and Patricia Beer's Reader, I Married Him, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte has come to be regarded as the standard feminist text; that is, when someone wants to demonstrate a particular principle of feminist criticism or a traditionally feminine concern, she generally points to Jane Eyre. As critics like Gilbert and Gubar have shown us, Bronte's novel is not merely a Gothic romance; it reveals a feminine consciousness struggling to assert itself within the nineteenth-century patriarchal social and religious structures. Jane Eyre, therefore, would naturally lend itself to a critical study based on the concerns of feminist spirituality, especially the notion of women's communities and reflections of a feminine divinity. I propose a critical study of Jane Eyre, like the one Carol Christ conducted on the works of Kate Chopin, Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing, Adrienne Rich and Ntozake Shange in Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on a Spiritual Quest, in which Christ examines spiritual awakening of a female consciousness in the writings of these five authors.Though Jane Eyre, seems at first glance to work within a standard Christian, or patriarchal, religious structure, there are elements of a feminine divinity, even an attempt to re-create (as Mary Daly would say) God so that He perhaps more closely resembles the early, androgynous Hebrew Yaweh: Iahu-Anat, or Ashtoreth (Diane Stein, The Women's Spirituality Book, Llewellyn Publications, 1987, pp. 78). Jane Eyre asks guidance from the Moon, who in turn addresses her as "daughter'; then too, she clearly rejects the Christian Church, as evidenced by her highly symbolic refusal of St. John's proposal of marriage, for instance. However, despite her intuitive recognition of the feminine power and wisdom that is hers to draw upon and her rejection of the institution of patriarchal religion, she does not ultimately, I believe, reject a masculine God, nor does she replace Him with an androgynous God. Yet the aspects of the feminine divinity she discovers and the women's community (the nurturing influence of her cousins Diana and Mary, so named for the archetypal moon and the virgin) in which she finds herself lead lead her to a subconscious acceptance of the feminine divinity within herself.I propose then to trace the development of a feminine divinity in Jane Eyre, which culminates in a rejection of the Church and follows the individuation process of Jane Eyre herself. Completion of this project will requires research into four principal areas:1) Feminist literary criticism on Jane Eyre--in order to familiarize myself with the feminine and feminist significance of such a reflection, and possibly place Jane traditions it falls into and those, like Gilbert & Gubar's, that center on it and also to determine to what extent the notion of a feminine divinity has been recognized in the novel.2) Archetypal psychology and criticism--strictly concerning the process of individuation and manifestations of the Goddess and those figures associated with Her; for example, near the end of the novel Mr. Rochester is compared to Vulcan and I would like to pursue to what extent he can be seen in light of a Hephesties/Demeter syzygy.3) Jane Eyre criticism that discusses the spiritual or religious aspects of the novel--since Jane Eyre has obvious religious implications, spiritual issues have not been ignored by the critics (I am most eager to read Elisabeth Jay's The Religion of the Heart: Anglican Evangelicalism and the Nineteenth Century Novel, for instance); however, my previous research has not unearthed a feminist spirituality critical approach to Jane Eyre.4) Issues of women's spirituality--particularly those concerning communities of women, Goddess worship and ritual behavior, and images and symbols of the Goddess. Such research will allow me to determine to what extent a sense of a feminine divinity is reflected in Jane Eyre, come to a conclusion about the meaning and Eyre into a tradition of women writers on a spiritual Research in community management of the severely mentally ill has been scarce. Two primary components of community care in particular need evaluation,residential arrangements and styles of "case management." The purpose of this study was to evaluate the interaction of two types of residential arrangements (single- and double-occupancy) and two types of case management ("assertive" and "limited") in a 2 X 2 design. Participants were individuals with a severe mental illness served by CMHS, Inc. Individuals were matched on DSM-III-R diagnoses and sex: 8 had roommates and received assertive case management, 5 had roommates and limited case management, 5 lived alone and received assertive case management, and 5 lived alone with limited case management. Data were obtained from three independent sources: (1) each client was interviewed using the Denver Community Mental Health Questionnaire (DCMHQ) and the Inventory of Socially Supportive Behaviors (ISSB) on four separate occasions over three consecutive months; (2) frequency of client contact with family members over the same time interval was tracked by case managers; and (3) concurrent attendance in day treatment sessions, diagnosis, number of previous hospitalizations, and approximate number of months of previous hospitalization were obtained from community mental health center records. DCMHQ scores for acute symptoms and interpersonal conflict were combined into an index called problems, while ISSB scores measured social support received. Monthly followups for. three consecutive months were used to obtain stable estimates of problems and support. Significant positive correlations were found between family involvement and problems, family involvement and residential arrangements, social support and problems, group attendance percentage and age, problems and social support, and a marginal relationship between residence and social support. Statistically significant negative correlations were found between case management and problems, social support and number of previous hospitalizations, group attendance percentage and problems, and residence and age. In multiple regression involving all predictors, the variables other than roommating and case management, (i.e., average family involvement, number of previous hospitalizations, program attendance, and age, considered together) predicted both problems reported and support received, while as second and third steps in the regression analysis case management and residence did not significantly predict problems or social support. In other words, once chronicity (i.e., number of previous hospitalizations), family contact, age, and group attendance were controlled, case management and residence both vanished as predictors. Future studies should consider these factors, and other aspects of the natural context, when evaluating community interventions for the mentally ill in a more controlled experimental design. With respect to developing new research for community adjustment, recommendations for more controlled studies were made and two new community intervention procedures were described. / Department of English

Adverse economic and social conditions during the 1930s prompted fears that Britain and its populace were becoming feminized. Mass unemployment, the collapse of the older forms of masculinist industry, and the sudden expansion of London's consumer culture were three major events that contributed to perceptions of declining masculinity and rampant feminization. Unemployment, it was feared, transformed muscular, self-reliant laborers into emasculate, dependent idlers. The demise of industry (coal mining, ship building, and iron/steel working) turned symbolic garrisons of imperial strength and power into derelict wastelands. London's consumerism in the form of cheap goods and escapist entertainment was thought to pacify and enfeeble the (male) inhabitants. These three pivotal events fueled apprehensions about the breakdown in traditional, patriarchal structures and heightened sensitivities to and furthered the use of masculine/feminine dichotomies within public discourse.The aim of my dissertation is to explore the ways in which complex networks of gender anxieties resonate in 1930s British fiction through the establishment and erosion of rhetorical gender/ed boundaries. Although fears regarding the political landscape, social unrest, and war were instrumental in shaping the literary responses of the decade, those fears were also informed by and articulated through a gender-conscious rhetoric. Emasculation imagery worked in concert with the complementary feminization imagery to capture the popular imagination. Apprehensions about women's potential to disrupt traditional boundaries (sexualized women, i.e. women taking men's jobs) merged with generalized fears of the feminine (constructed Woman, i.e. an undefined fear femaleness), and both were inscribed with the power to disrupt, threaten, and subsume. These "discourses of gender and gendered discourses," to adopt Lyn Pykett's phrase, played an integral part in shaping how the 1930s populace interpreted their rapidly changing world. By promoting gender to the center of my interpretive paradigm, I aim to identify how representations of the private realm interact with and contribute to the public/political narrative thrusts. / Department of English

In this thesis I contend that evolutionary scientific discourses were integral to the work of "New Woman" writers of late Victorian literary culture in Britain. In the cultural debates that raged over the new gender politics and their relationship to social and moral values at the fin de siècle, the questions raised about femininity, modernity and the "woman question" were also central to the "new sciences" of sexology, eugenics, psychology and anthropology. This thesis investigates the issue of whether the new sciences offered an enabling set of discourses to New Women through which to produce new artistic, professional and personal feminine identities and to campaign for feminist goals. An understanding of the field of cultural production informs this discussion; I argue that science functions as cultural and symbolic capital in literary production of the period, and consider the dynamics between constructs of value, status, and the feminine in the literary market-place and their relationship to scientific narratives. This analysis is developed through the illumination of the relationship between New Woman novelists and poets, female aesthetes, and other forces in the field, in discussion of the thematic concerns and literary strategies of those participating in these debates: amongst others, Mona Caird, "Iota" (Katherine Mannington Caffyn), Victoria Cross(e) (Annie Sophie Cory), Sarah Grand (Frances Elizabeth McFall), Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), Alice Meynell, May Kendall, Constance Naden, and the anti-New Woman male writer, Grant Allen. An examination of a variety of literary forms and genres, in addition to the novel — the principal focus for much scholarship on the New Woman — such as the feminist periodicals, poetry, journalism and the short story, is central to the thesis and enables identification of shared literary strategies and techniques as well as consideration of readers and critical contexts. The roles and representation of "woman" in this period were produced within biological determinist concepts of sex and Nature. The study concentrates on ways in which essentialist dichotomies of cultural and biological reproduction redefined notions of literary and artistic "genius", motherhood and female citizenship, as they intersect with "race" and sexuality in imperial contexts. Women's critique and construct of these subjectivities differed; study of the women's journals reveals a consumer culture saturated in discourses of health and hygiene, negotiated by a divided community of readers. Focus on theories and representation of the child in late Victorian culture finds that Alice Meynell's writing challenged evolutionary psychology, and relates Sarah Grand's child genius to emergent Galtonian eugenics. I argue that late nineteenth-century feminism was intimately involved in imperialism and eugenics, and suggest that current feminist scholarship must confront and analyse these investments. In this thesis I find that boundaries between the groups' identities are fluid; points of intercourse and affiliation are revealed, such as the ways in which scientific constructs of "race", as in Mona Caird's use of the Celtic, are deployed in order to comment on literary value. I have highlighted the ambivalences at work in these appropriations, and suggest that the New Woman text was not always polemical, nor did it reject "high art" values, and that the female aesthetes also express feminist convictions. I contend that for many feminist writers, participation in these late nineteenth-century debates was a necessary and productive critical intervention, with radical, if not always progressive, implications.