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This essay is an analysis of the character María Josefa in the play 'The House of Bernarda Alba' (1936) by Federico García Lorca. It is hypothesized that the character of María Josefa can be considered a distorting mirror of the femininity presented in the play, and that through María Josefa this femininity is both revealed and problematized. The analysis adopts theories from the field of the (female) grotesque, using terminology both from Mikhail Bakhtin and Mary Russo. Throughout the analysis it is demonstrated how the character of María Josefa challenges the boundaries and norms which are dictated by Bernarda to control the women of the house. These conventions are challenged by María Josefa with the use of her loud speech, her dressed up appearance, and in her physical resistance. In this manner María Josefa is creating and embodying an alternate feminine view that is uncovered through her consistent provocation and by making herself into "a spectacle", a transboundary behaviour that is well interpreted within the theories of carnival, the grotesque body, and the spectacle of the female grotesque.

Criticism that involves the linkage of the terms ‘environment’ and ‘literature’, or ‘ecocriticism’, has focused largely on texts such as nature writing or on fiction that is set in rural or wilderness settings. This project attempts to widen the scope of ecocriticism by analysing the contemporary British novel, in which nature conceived in such stereotypical ways is largely absent. However, in my analysis of the fifteen texts selected here, I demonstrate that British women writers employ new discursive constructions of nature in order to contest deterministic formulations that subjugate both women and nature. My focus on female textual bodies enables me to explore representations of the fluid interfaces of nature and culture. In my analysis of novels from an environmental standpoint, `environment' is reconceived to refer to `where we live, work, and play' and may include not only the countryside and urban nature, but also the female body itself. Thus, the nature of my title is an inclusive term that includes contemporary discourses of nature employed by the sciences of biomedicine, genetics and technology. This project examines the ecofeminist premise that discourses of mastery not only affect subjugated others such as women, animals and others, but also influence the treatment of the natural environment. Analysing novels that employ forms of embodiment that foreground extreme bodily conditions such as pregnancy, monstrosity and death, I employ the theoretical constructs of Mikhail Bakhtin (the grotesque body, carnivalisation and dialogism) and Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection as tools of analysis to provide a new conception of ecological bodies. Novelists such as Jeanette Winterson, Fay Weldon, Penelope Lively, Zadie Smith, Margaret Drabble, Kathy Lette and Eva Figes provide a wide range of viewpoints from which to gather evidence of the insistence of the recurring trope of the endangered body within the troubled landscape of contemporary Britain.

O trabalho objetiva uma análise do corpo grotesco enquanto elemento construtivo da poética de três autores do início do século XX: Mário de Sá-Carneiro (Portugal); Augusto dos Anjos (Brasil) e Ramón López Velarde (México). Os escritores foram escolhidos pelo fato de, na mesma época, abalarem as respectivas sociedades em que viveram com produções poéticas inovadoras. Baseando-se nisto, a abordagem é feita a partir das teorias de W. Kayser, sobre o grotesco romântico e Mikhail Bakhtin sobre o realismo grotesco. A pesquisa identificou a necessidade de relacionar o corpo grotesco com a teoria do Decadentismo, pois esta estética constitui uma das primeiras rupturas rumo ao que convencionou chamar de modernidade. Por fim, analisamos a definitiva entrada do grotesco no cânone dos três países e a relação existente entre a categoria literária (e o corpo grotesco) com a poesia moderna. / The present work aims to analyse the grotesque body as a constructive element in the poetics of the three authors from the begining of the XXth Century: Mario de Sá Carneiro (Portugal), Augusto dos Anjos (Brazil) and Ramón López Velarde (Mexico). These writers were selected due to the fact that they had shocked their respectives societies creating innovative poetics elements. Based on that, the approach was done from the theories of W. Kayser concerning the romantic grotesque and Mikhail Bakhtin, regarding the grotesque realism. The research identify the need to relate the grotesque body to the Decadentism theory because this esthetics can be considered as one of the first ruptures towards what is known as Modernity. Also, the work identify the admission of the grotesque in the canon of these three mentioned countries as well as the relationship between the literary cathegory (and the grotesque body) and the Modern Poetry.

O trabalho objetiva uma análise do corpo grotesco enquanto elemento construtivo da poética de três autores do início do século XX: Mário de Sá-Carneiro (Portugal); Augusto dos Anjos (Brasil) e Ramón López Velarde (México). Os escritores foram escolhidos pelo fato de, na mesma época, abalarem as respectivas sociedades em que viveram com produções poéticas inovadoras. Baseando-se nisto, a abordagem é feita a partir das teorias de W. Kayser, sobre o grotesco romântico e Mikhail Bakhtin sobre o realismo grotesco. A pesquisa identificou a necessidade de relacionar o corpo grotesco com a teoria do Decadentismo, pois esta estética constitui uma das primeiras rupturas rumo ao que convencionou chamar de modernidade. Por fim, analisamos a definitiva entrada do grotesco no cânone dos três países e a relação existente entre a categoria literária (e o corpo grotesco) com a poesia moderna. / The present work aims to analyse the grotesque body as a constructive element in the poetics of the three authors from the begining of the XXth Century: Mario de Sá Carneiro (Portugal), Augusto dos Anjos (Brazil) and Ramón López Velarde (Mexico). These writers were selected due to the fact that they had shocked their respectives societies creating innovative poetics elements. Based on that, the approach was done from the theories of W. Kayser concerning the romantic grotesque and Mikhail Bakhtin, regarding the grotesque realism. The research identify the need to relate the grotesque body to the Decadentism theory because this esthetics can be considered as one of the first ruptures towards what is known as Modernity. Also, the work identify the admission of the grotesque in the canon of these three mentioned countries as well as the relationship between the literary cathegory (and the grotesque body) and the Modern Poetry.

本論文藉由艾德蒙．懷特<已婚男人>愛滋書寫裡、對男同志性愛/死亡在愛滋年代的辨證關係，探討愛滋文學所能扮演的文化功能。第二章、利用傅柯式圓形監獄概念衍生下主體自我內化規訓，討論男同志性愛原先具有的顛覆本質，如何隨著80年代、HIV病毒出現，在生物醫學論述下對男同志進行”再次病理化”的辨證關係。 第三章參考喬瑟夫．凱迪在1993年發表的文章、 分類愛滋書寫為深刻書寫和反深刻書寫，討論<已婚男人>裡愛滋深刻書寫裡、藉由呈現詭異疾病身體來製造驚嚇感、引發讀者對於愛滋議題另一層次的反思。第四章、則是探討<已婚男人>呈現無病徵的衣櫃身體、其造成主體／客體在視覺上/心理上、介於有病/無病的模糊詭譎狀態，可以被視為愛滋文學、一種提供讀者在愛滋年代裡、在絕望中仍可懷抱希望的正面力量。透過以上探討、艾德蒙．懷特＜已婚男人＞豎立愛滋書寫之中、呈現男同志文化與愛滋病複雜關係的傑出作品。 / This study discusses Edmund White’s AIDS writing in his The Married Man, a fiction that depicts the issue of gay sex and death in the age of the Epidemic. In chapter two, I intend to discuss about how biomedical discourse of HIV/AIDS fosters a Focauldian apparatus of panoptical surveillance and self-discipline in relation to gay sex. With the advent of HIV virus, the once subversive lifestyle of gay sex becomes more problematic. In chapter three, I attempt to employ Joseph Cady’s definition of AIDS writings as either immersive or counter-immersive, and argue that Edmund White’s The Married Man should be viewed as an immersive AIDS writing wherein the ugliness of the grotesque body is used as a literary weapon to engender its readers a sense of shock. In chapter four, I contend Austin’s HIV asymptomatic/closet body in The Married Man should be viewed as an ambiguous symbol by which a dialect between hope (future) and despair (no future) is discussed. To conclude, Edmund White’s The Married Man, a subversive text as it is, thus stands as a masterpiece of AIDS writing not only explicitly depicts the history of HIV/AIDS of the 1990s but that promises its gay readers a potentiality of hope for the misty future.

This thesis analyzes the major theme of ‘postcolonial genealogy’ in portraying the African bending under the weight of colonial history in Le vieux nègre et la médaille, Une vie de boy of Ferdinand Oyono and Le Chercheur d’Afriques of Henri Lopes. Being a product of a colonial Genesis, the African character runs behind the colonizer’s mirror through his Civilizing Mission. René Girard’s ‘double bind’ theory explains how this cultural assimilation is, in Le vieux nègre et la médaille and Une vie de boy, a dead end because the colonizer needs a subordinate and not an equal. The cohabitation of a black housewife with the French Commander in Le Chercheur d’Afriques should be seen as simply an allegory of postcolonial Africa’s dependency on the West. The consequences of the feminization of the African continent are enormous in the post-colonial imaginary. While the colonizer had conquered Africa with his Herculean body, in Oyono’s novels, his Fall is obtained through the aesthetics of Bakhtinian ‘rabaissement’ which degrades his ‘grotesque body’ to that of the colonized. The colonizer and the colonized are neutralized and leveled in their perishable bodies, thus, making futile the Civilizing Mission that operated by ranking races. Power is never total. It is always imperfect, and can never destroy a subjectivity that resists it. In Oyono’s novels, the Fall of the colonial Father is also obtained through the inquisitive gaze that the colonized return back to the colonizer, and through their ‘subversive mimicry’ that parodies his codes. In Une vie de boy and Le Chercheur d’Afriques, the ‘son-Father’ relationship between the hero and the colonial Father, is also symbolic of the ‘Africa-West’ rapports. Living under the specter of the Father, the son has to negotiate his survival between weaning and parricide. The biological miscegenation in Le Chercheur d’Afriques is a metaphor of the ‘rhizome identity’ of the postcolonial African who renounces both the Fathers of Negritude and those of the Civilizing Mission. / Thesis (Ph.D, French) -- Queen's University, 2011-06-24 12:43:30.006