Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2006. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 249-256). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

The relationship of James to Hawthorne and of Hemingway to James certainly indicates the close literary relationship of the three writers. This development makes it seem only natural that three such self-conscious artists would have recourse to similar interests and would employ in their writings common themes, ideas, and methods.

Cette recherche a pour but d’identifier une personnalité féminine révisionniste dans le modernisme littéraire américain. Cette personnalité révisionniste a pour nom «American Eve» et défie le «American Adam» qui est un personnage mythique patriarcal de R.W.B. Lewis provenant du dix-neuvième siècle. Cette conceptualisation est accomplie à l’aide d’une analyse socio-critique et comparative des trois protagonistes féminins dans les romans modernes The Awakening (1899) de Kate Chopin, The Sun Also Rises (1926) d’Ernest Hemingway, et The Great Gatsby (1925) de F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ma construction de cette personnalité féminine est divisée en trois chapitres, chacun étant dédié à un protagoniste en particulier. En comparant ces personnages littéraires sur un plan socio-critique et féministe, je permets à mon étude d’établir en quoi les personnages en question contribuent ou ne contribuent pas à la personnalité de «American Eve». Cette approche comparative est un excellent moyen d’évaluer l’évolution du potentiel révisionniste de la femme au vingtième siècle et les différentes façons par lesquelles elle emploie ce pouvoir.

In recent years, there has been an undeniable shift in how we think about nonhuman animals. A growing philosophical literature on animal rights has encouraged a deep consideration of the moral status of animals, while scientific research has simultaneously confirmed the fact that many animals have complex cognitive, emotional, and social capacities that strongly mirror our own. Although there is still disagreement about what all this implies in terms of our responsibilities to animals, the idea that animals can experience physical or emotional pain or pleasure is the starting point and not the conclusion of the present inquiry. Many species of animals are sentient beings who possess a viewpoint from which they experience and act in the world around them - and hence may be said to be agential. My dissertation explores what it means for us to extend, conceptually and morally, agency to animals. I address this "extension of agency" predominantly from an aesthetic perspective, although in doing so I in no way intend to limit the range of related philosophical concerns. On the contrary; to extend agency to animals, I argue, calls for a revised understanding of our habitual spectatorial stances--how we look at animals. To grasp these stances, I investigate how animals have been looked at in literary works of art. Does the literature show our spectatorship to extend agency to animals or do we objectify them so as to deny their capacities as agents altogether? My dissertation focuses on excerpts from three significant works of literature--works by Nathanael West, Ernest Hemingway, and Leo Tolstoy--each of which stages a specifically athletic engagement involving animals, in this way bringing focus to the issue of our spectatorship. Each excerpt serves as philosophically illuminating material and as an exemplary case regarding humanity's willingness or refusal to extend agency to animals. I am particularly interested in the role of animals in human-engineered sports, and in how extending agency to animals in sports changes or ought to change the way we watch sports that involve animals. Within the philosophy of sport, the accepted approach has been to liken animals to sporting equipment or tools, and thus to make no substantive distinction between animal and non-animal sports. This, I argue, reflects a refusal to extend agency to animals, which has led also to an oversimplification and mischaracterization of sports involving animals in the first place. Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust takes up cockfighting, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises centers around bullfighting, and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina includes a memorable, emotionally stirring, steeplechase episode. In addition to investigating what I refer to as the "extension of agency" to animals in these literary works, I revise some of the basic assumptions that have recently guided the burgeoning subfield of the philosophy of sports. I argue that we must acknowledge that there exists a fundamental difference between the modes of spectatorship that accompany sports that only involve humans, and those that involve animals. For to extend agency is to extend the moral domain to that or those who are "other" than ourselves. Once animals are introduced into a sport, they imbue the sport with all the aesthetic complexities that come with looking at an animal outside of sport: the unique exotic beauty of the animal body and its fitness to function, but also its vitality, wild autonomy, expressiveness, and reciprocity of gaze. This means that our interactions with animals, even in the case of organized sport or performance, are not purely aesthetic in a formal artistic sense; they are also expressive and communicative. The concept of the formal aesthetic that many employ when talking about art - the formal qualities that we attribute to the arts - is not sufficient to accommodate sports that involve animals and a spectatorship of animals. Animals are expressive, and this expressiveness is fundamental to correctly understanding our spectatorship of them. Animals are far more than our equipment. The aesthetic of animal sports must, I conclude, accordingly incorporate expressiveness and empathy, such that we see animals in fellowship with us as participants in sports. Extending agency to animals is the core concept of a morally inflected aesthetic of inter-subjectivity.

In this thesis I examine the ideological mechanisms that work to constitute, construct, and maintain subject identity. Such mechanisms include repetition, performativity, identification, and interpellation. I incorporate structuralist, post-structuralist, and psychoanalytic theories as a means to discuss the ways in which gender, sexuality, and identity are performative masquerades. Furthermore, these ideological mechanisms and heteronormative paradigms have the paradoxical power to produce both incurable melancholia and unrealized possibilities alike. Given this conversation, I turn to theorists such as Louis Althusser, Slavoj ��i��ek, and Judith Butler; these theorists employ different theoretical approaches and consequently their explanations regarding how and why identity is manufactured frequently differ. From this productive point of difference, I apply the theories to a literary analysis of Jack Kerouac's On the Road and Ernest Hemingway's The Garden of Eden. Paired together, the critical theories and literary works act to complicate and nuance each other, and collectively introduce valuable insights regarding who or what is subject. / Graduation date: 2013

Since Presocratic Greece, suicide in the West has been “known” and controlled, both politically and discursively. Groups as diverse as theologians and literary critics have propagated many different views of self-killing, but, determining its cause and moralizing about it, they have commonly exerted interpretive power over suicide, making it nameable, explicable, and predominantly reprehensible. The four modernist authors that I consider in this dissertation -- Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner -- break completely with the tradition of knowing suicide by insisting on its inscrutability, refusing to judge it, and ultimately rendering it “almost unnamable,” identifiable but indefinable. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Victory, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Sound and the Fury, respectively, these authors portray illustrative, but by no means definitive, modernist self-killings; they construct a distinctive representational space around suicide, one free of causal, moral, theoretical or thematic meaning and, I argue, imbued with the power to disrupt interpretation. “‘Almost Unnamable’: Suicide in the Modernist Novel” examines the power of self-killing’s representational space in early twentieth-century fiction, arguing for its importance not only to the history of suicide in the West but also to the portrayal of death in the twentieth-century novel. / text

Thesis (All-College Honors) - - State University of New York College at Cortland, [2006] - - Department of English. / Includes bibliographical references (p.49-50).

No description available.

This thesis is divided into two main parts. The first, comprising the three initial chapters, looks, in chapter one, at the specifically German origins of the Bildungsroman, its distinctive features, and the difficulties surrounding its transplantation into the literary contexts of other countries. Particular attention is paid to the ethical dimension of the genre, i.e. to the relation between the individual self and the exterior world, and how it affects individual formation. The focus then shifts to American literature, and the term 'narrative of initiation' is recommended as a credible alternative to 'Bildungsroman'. Allowing for similarities between them, it is none the less strongly suggested that the Bildungsroman of German origin and the American narrative of initiation should be seen as being intrinsically different, principally because of the different cultural backgrounds that shaped them. Several features of the theme of initiation are postulated as decisive factors in the discrepancies between the initiatory narrative and the Bildungsroman. Analysis of six texts - three of each literary tradition - follows, to provide support for the theoretical discussion of the terms introduced in chapter one. Three Bildungsromane are considered in the second chapter, namely Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Stifter's Der Nachsommer and Keller's Der grune Heinrich, and three narratives of initiation in chapter three: Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Crane's The Red Badge of Courage and Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. Their relevance to the tradition of German and American fiction as a whole and as precursors of Mann's Der Zauberberg and Hemingway's The Nick Adams Stories is considered. A direct comparison between Mann's and Hemingway's texts constitutes the second part of this thesis, wholly contained in chapter four. In addition to a comprehensive critical reading of both narratives, the contemporaneity of Der Zauberberg and The Nick Adams Stories is taken into account, and consequently special consideration is given to the texts' close relation with the cultural and historical realities of the early twentieth century, particularly the impact of the First World War. With the assistance of Jung's theories, an increased awareness of death and of the dark side of the psyche - though dealt with differently in both texts - is put forward as a significant factor in the deviation of Der Zauberberg and The Nick Adams Stories from the traditions of the Bildungsroman and of the narrative of initiation. This departure leads to a re-appraisal of the relation between the protagonists and their society, and to a new ethical attitude that presupposes different, more modem conceptions of what Bildung and initiation represent in the context of the early twentieth century. How and why they changed and if they survived as literary notions are questions this thesis attempts to answer.