Originally presented as the author's thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 1987.

American writers of narrative fiction frequently manipulate the words of their narrators in order to convey a significance of which the author and the reader are aware but the narrator is not. By causing the narrator to reveal information unwittingly, the author develops covert themes that are antithetical to those espoused by the narrator. Particularly subject to such subversion is the first-person narrator whose "I" is not to be interpreted as the voice of the author. This study examines how and why the first-person narrator is subverted in four works of twentieth-century American fiction: J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to , and Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus

Thesis (MA (African Languages))-- University of Stellenbosch, 2006. / The study on accounts examines how people account for the activities and experiences through our personal stories emanating from how they behave in the community, and because of the past stories they tell. The study thus provides an examination of accounts as well as account-giving. It provides a scientific understanding of the value and impact of personal stories and story-telling in people’s lives. The problem experienced in relation to accounts relates to how accounts impact on people and vice versa. One hypotheses of this study on accounts relates to the nature of the process associated with people’s presentation of personal account to others. The aims and objectives of this study crucially relate to providing an analysis and understanding of accounts. The research method used in this study provides a basis to the analysis and understanding of accounts in the sense that individuals who were interviewed in the process, provided informative accounts of their childhood stories, some of whom were not aware that they have or had an impact on their daily lives. The main findings of the research provide insights into accounts. The findings are informative and contribute to theory development as regard account-giving, including factors relating to deference and respect. The recommendation that given in this work is that personal stories have a scientific merit in terms of a comunication-theoretic approach to narratives, as shown in the study.

This dissertation comprises two parts: Part I, which discusses use of second person pronoun in contemporary American poetry; and Part II, The Museum of Coming Apart, which is a collection of poems. As confessional verse became a dominant mode in American poetry in the late 1950s and early 60s, so too did the use of the first-person pronoun. Due in part to the excesses of later confessionalism, however, many contemporary poets hesitate to use first person for fear that their work might be read as autobiography. The poetry of the 1990s and early 2000s has thus been characterized by distance, dissociation, and fracture as poets attempt to remove themselves from the overtly emotional and intimate style of the confessionals. However, other contemporary poets have sought to straddle the line between the earnestness and linearity of confessionalism and the intellectually playful yet emotionally detached poetry of the moment. One method for striking this balance is to employ the second person pronoun. Because "you" in English is ambiguous, it allows the poet to toy with the level of distance in a poem and create evolving relationships between the speaker and reader. Through the analysis of poems by C. Dale Young, Paul Guest, Richard Hugo, Nick Flynn, Carrie St. George Comer, and Moira Egan, this essay examines five common ways second person is employed in contemporary American poetry-the use of "you" in reference to a specific individual, the epistolary form, the direct address to the reader, the imperative voice, and the use of "you" as a substitute for "I"-and the ways that the second-person pronoun allows these poems to take the best of both the confessional and dissociative modes.

Avec l’essor du néo-féminisme en Italie à la fin des années 1960, un genre littéraire se développe rapidement : le roman féministe. Souvent relaté à la première personne, il présente des parcours de femmes aux prises avec une société patriarcale qui les opprime et dont elles tentent de se libérer. Dès ses premières oeuvres, Dacia Maraini s’inscrit dans cette veine narrative. Elle en fournira les exemples les plus célèbres (notamment avec Donna in guerra en 1975) et en assurera la diffusion même après la fin du féminisme militant dans les années 1980 avec des oeuvres moins marquées idéologiquement mais toujours inscrites dans une visée de dénonciation des inégalités. À mi-chemin entre création littéraire et engagement politique, les récits féministes à la première personne de Dacia Maraini s’attachent tout particulièrement à la question du corps, interface entre soi et les autres, entre le privé et le politique. Considérant la période 1962- 2001, ce travail montre comment l’auteure investit et questionne les territoires du genre, de la sexualité et de la maternité par le biais de fictions mais aussi d’oeuvres autobiographiques. Dans une optique pluridisciplinaire empruntant à la fois les outils de l’analyse littéraire et de l’histoire des idées, le je des récits du corpus est analysé en tant que modalité énonciative spécifique mais aussi en tant qu’instrument performatif de diffusion du féminisme marainien, dans un rapport circulaire entre art et société, entre culture et pouvoir. / With the rise of neo-feminism in Italy in the end of the 1960's, a new literary genre quickly developed: the feminist novel. The first-person narrative was frequently used to portray women who fought against an oppressing patriarchal society from which they tried to get free. From her first works, Dacia Maraini followed this narrative style. She provided its most famous examples (especially in Donna in guerra, in 1975) and she guaranteed its propagation – even after the end of activist feminism in the 1980's – through works that were not as ideologically engaged as the first ones but that still aimed at denouncing inequalities. Halfway between literary creation and political commitment, the first person feminist narrative of Dacia Maraini particularly focuses on the topic of the body, as a link between one and the others, between the personal and the political. I will study the 1962-2001 period, and I will show how the author concentrates on the territories of gender, sexuality and motherhood and how she questions them through fiction and autobiographical stories. I choose a multidisciplinary perspective that takes the tools of both literary analysis and the history of ideas, in order to analyse the use of the first person as a specific enunciative modality and as a performative instrument for the propagation of Marainian feminism in a circular relationship between arts and society, between culture and power.

O principal objetivo desta tese é a investigação do foco narrativo nos romances Nenhum olhar e Cemitério de pianos, de José Luís Peixoto, com vistas a defender a hipótese de que o narrador em primeira pessoa promove a assunção de duplos. Ambas as obras trazem personagens que contam a sua história e, no processo da narração, entram em contato consigo mesmas, sob uma perspectiva pautada nas deformações intrínsecas à passagem do tempo. Nesse sentido, a faculdade da memória assume um papel fundamental na relativização do passado. Trata-se, em primeiro lugar, de uma análise do plano da expressão. Concomitante à questão do narrador e seus duplos, observamos que o conteúdo de ambos os romances evoca o tema da busca da salvação. Compreendemos que a concepção de mundo que permeia as referidas obras está pautada na jornada de Cristo na Terra e, em especial, ao drama da Paixão. Concluímos, pois, que, ao desejo do narrador em primeira pessoa de contar a sua história, estão intimamente relacionados o fenômeno do duplo e a negação da morte. Desse modo, por meio da duplicação, as personagens entram em contato com uma realidade supratemporal, fundada no mito. / The main objective of this thesis is the investigation of narrative focus on novels Nenhum olhar and Cemitério de pianos, by José Luís Peixoto, in order to defend the hypothesis that the first-person narrator promotes the assumption of doubles. Both works bring characters to tell their story and in the process of narration, get in touch with themselves, a perspective based on the deformations intrinsic to the passage of time. In this sense, the faculty of memory plays a key role in the relativization of the past. It is, firstly, an analysis of the level of expression. Concomitant with the question of the narrator and his double, we observed that the contents of both novels evoke the theme of the quest for salvation. We understand that the world view that permeates these works is based on the journey of Christ on Earth and in particular the drama of the Passion. Therefore we conclude that the desire of the first-person narrator to tell his story, are closely related to the phenomenon of the double and the denial of death. Thus, by duplicating the characters come into contact with supratemporal reality, founded on myth.

Au début du XVIIIe siècle, les récits à la première personne abondent dans les lettres françaises. Parmi les narrateurs soucieux de retranscrire le cheminement de leur vie se signalent plus spécifiquement des personnages de philosophe. De 1721 à 1731, les lecteurs découvrent par exemple Usbek, le spectateur français, l’indigent philosophe et Cleveland, quatre personnages de fiction romanesque qui sont autant d’épistolier, de journaliste ou de mémorialiste philosophes. Auteurs, ils exercent leurs pensées sur le fond de leurs expériences intimes. Notre travail tend à examiner de quelle façon, à l’époque de Marivaux, Montesquieu et Prévost, la littérature de fiction à la première personne place le philosophe face à lui-même, nouveau Narcisse censé réfléchir le sens d’une existence. Intégré à la trame narrative, le philosophe (ou le moraliste) du premier XVIIIe siècle n’est plus cet observateur d’une objectivité détachée qui se retranche derrière des discours : il devient lui-même figure, c’est-à-dire forme observable livrée à l’appréciation des lecteurs. Ils ne manqueront d’ailleurs pas de relever les ambiguïtés de cette figure paradoxale qui ne parvient pas toujours à concilier les impératifs de la sensibilité et ceux de la raison. Précisément les œuvres du corpus interrogent les conditions du déploiement de la pensée dans l’esprit humain et dans le monde des choses concrètes. Les implications – littéraires et philosophiques, mais encore poétiques, esthétiques, morales ou cognitives – de la figuration du philosophe dans la fiction constituent ainsi l’objet de notre étude. / In the early 18th century, first-person novels would abound in French literature. Philosophers would become a prominent figure among the various kinds of narrators that specify their personal way of life. From 1721 to 1731, readers discovered Usbek, the spectateur français, the indigent philosophe, and Cleveland, four fictional characters who are letter writers, journalists or memorialists. As authors, they were inspired by their personal life experience and wrote to share their thoughts. The purpose of this work is to analyse at the time of Marivaux, Montesquieu and Prévost how the first-person literature makes philosophers face up their own image. Therefore, the philosopher becomes a new Narcissus supposed to reflect the meaning of existence. While integrated into the narrative, the philosopher (or the moralist) is no longer an objective observer who could hide behind a speech: he is himself a figure facing the judgment of readers. Moreover, they point out the ambiguities of this paradoxical figure that does not always manage to deal with sensitivity and reason. The works of the corpus are questioning the conditions for the deployment of thought in the human mind and the world of concrete things. The implications of the representation of the philosopher in fiction are the object of this study, whether on the literary or philosophical fields, but also on the poetic, aesthetic, moral or cognitive fields.

Unreliable homodiegetic narration presents a unique mode of narrative transmission which demands the encoding within the text of 'translational indices', that is, signifiers of several kinds which justify the reader/receiver in over-riding the sincere first person avowals of the apparent mediator of the discourse. The argument establishes the presence of an epistemologically primary 'immanent' narrative situation within an ostensibly unitary narrative situation. Such a stereoscopic perspective upon the presented world of the literary 'work provides the reader/receiver with a warrant for a rejection of the epistemological validity of the homodiegetic narrator's discourse. Moreover, the thesis advances a typology of such translational indices as they occur in the dense ontology of the literary work of art. The narratological theory of unreliable homodiegetic narration developed in the first half of the dissertation is applied in the second half to selected exemplars of such narrative transmissions, demonstrating thereby the theoretical fecundity of the model for the discipline of narratology. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1988.

Originally presented as the author's thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 1987. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 238-244).

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