The overarching theme of these stories is the relationship between love and hate, especially the connection between kindness and violence. In this fictional world, love often begets hate, and hate, love: a man's capacity for empathy serves as the catalyst for an act of brutality; a character's loneliness, his desire for love, causes him to chivvy members of his church congregation, while the same character's unambiguous overtures of friendship produce revulsion in the narrator; the victim of a man's complicity coaxes him to take a beating that, in effect, heals him; and a sexual encounter, violent in its impersonality, its objectification of a woman, gives rise to a comment that awakens the abuser's conscience as well as his regard for his victim. One may undermine the other: in the story involving sexual abuse, the woman treats the men lovingly, like people, and in so doing erodes their ability to treat her as something less than human; a character's habitual spite finds its way into his marriage, damaging the most important (and the only loving) relationship in his life. And they sometimes exchange clothes: a man's attacks on his neighbor and the neighbor's quest for revenge mimic a courtship, are the beginnings of a relationship; the character who hurts his wife does it by perverting an act of love; friends and coworkers express affection by insulting one another and by pretending to fight. What is the point of this juxtaposition and mingling of supposed opposites? To be honest, I'm not sure I know. I wrote these stories without conscious intent, and gathered them into the same collection accidentally: there were others that didn't quite work, and which had nothing much to do with amity and strife, that might have been included, too, had they been better or more finished. Still, I, like any other reader, can divine a few meanings. With their frequent inversion and mingling of love and hate, these stories might serve as one piece of evidence that all things contain the kernel of their opposite. Given the right circumstances--enough time, a narrative--they will demonstrate affinity. This Hegelian interdependence of opposites implies a correlary--narratives procede by dialectic: love heads into hate, or hate into love, and the synthesis of these two spawns a hybrid possessing bits of its progenitors. "Angel of Tough Love" provides an example of this sublation: boy's complicitous response to a beating alienates him from himself--thesis; he accepts an invitation to enter a crucible of hate and love, to do the opposite of remaining a bystander--antithesis; he emerges whole and yet changed, at peace for the first time--synthesis. Another conclusion, one that does not contradict the first: if love may lead to hate and hate to love, then the value of each impulse and action depends on context. Fine motives, however pure, might produce ghastly results if a full understanding of circumstances, a broad and informed point of view, is not present, too: perspective, point of view, is seminal. And yet--with the possible exception of those with mystical gifts, who may rely on Dionysian rapture or its equivalent to grant them views of entire causal chains--our points of view are limited; we cannot know all the ramifications of our actions. (And, at least in one sense, it seems that we aren't supposed to know: a story hatched whole is bound to be boring and, well, predictable.) So we are left to examine our motives and anticipate what consequences we can. It's not much, but it will have to do. Love conquers all, sometimes. A kind word--or just an honestly felt one--may change a mind or an afternoon, now and then. We're all in the same dirt boat, heading somewhere, so we might as well use the oars provided and hope that our imaginations, incrementally, will point us in the right direction. Some of the time, we may row in concert. / Graduation date: 2001

Thesis--Gothenburg. / Thesis statement inserted. Bibliography: leaves 263-268.

Thesis--Gothenburg. / Thesis statement inserted. Bibliography: leaves 263-268.

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1963 C43 / Master of Science

This study constitutes an attempt to isolate and elucidate the event of personal relations in the later writings of Henry James. I argue that James' singularity rests on his treatment of personal relations in a radical and unfamiliar way. The main goal of this piece is, then, to trace the workings of personal relations, and to understand the peculiar way in which they figure and unfold in the later narratives. By reading James through the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, I wish to reconstruct James' major phase as primarily "ethical." Levinasian ethics differs from the branches of moral philosophy in its insistence on the absolute priority and exteriority of the ethical relation between persons: its disengagement from the realms of psychology and consciousness. The ethical relation is envisioned as flourishing precisely in the absence of cognition and thought. Rather than relating to one another as potentially knowable beings, then, persons in James and Levinas relate to one another as mutually unfathomable others. I maintain that this breaching of cognition and knowledge essentially characterizes Jamesian sociality. Read through ethics, as divorced from ideas of consciousness, James' major phase finds its meaning outside the traditional reign of James studies, which takes James as the master of complex elaborations on modes of consciousness. Not consciousness but alterity is James' defining feature, and it is through the readings of alterity that the fundamental event of Jamesian sociality emerges as both primary and unique. "Ethics" thus opens up a new horizon in which the Jamesian is no longer synonymous with consciousness, a horizon which transforms the understanding, not only of James in particular, but of literature in general.

Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on March 2, 2010). The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file. Dr. Trudy Lewis, Dissertation Supervisor. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis--Uppsala. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 136-140).

The notion, which has persisted over many years, of Mary Shelley as the conservative daughter of a radical, proto-feminist mother can be traced to the views of Edward Trelawney, a contemporary and fair-weather friend of Shelley. This study, by exploring female identity, largely in terms of modern feminist psychoanalytic theory, in several of Shelley's lesser-known novels, attempts to contribute to the efforts of those who have challenged such notions and who have strived to render a more accurate portrait of Mary Shelley. / Anne Mellor's discussion of female identity in Shelley's sentimental novels, Mathilda, Lodore and Falkner, (in her book Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters) does much to dispel the notion of Shelley's apathy with regard to gender politics. Mellor convincingly argues that these novels celebrate what she terms the "relational" identity of their heroines, and thus "support a feminist position which argues that female culture is morally superior to male culture." She further maintains, however, that these novels simultaneously reveal the damage that such an identity can do to a woman's personal development. / My paper challenges Mellor's assertion that Lodore and Falkner Shelley's last novels, portray relational identity with ambivalence. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

Although David Mamet is one of the most frequently studied of the postmodern American playwrights, scholarly criticism has neglected to examine the dynamic that is unique to his two-person plays, or duologues. This study explores various aspects of that duologic dynamic, concentrating on two of Mamet's two-person plays, A Life in the Theatre and Oleanna. The relationships in both plays are sustained by the characters' desire for power. As is typical of a Mametian play, power is obtained through language and dialogue. The fact that there are two characters in each of the plays serves to intensify the conflict and to remind the audience of the binary nature inherent in drama. / Department of English

This thesis provides an analysis of the portrayal and function of relationships between women in the following Erzahlungen by Ingeborg Bachmann: "Ein Schritt nach Gomorrha," "Das Gebell," and "Drei Wege zum See." The major research questions include whether there is a similar representation of female-female interactions and a common conception of gender and identity construction arising from these interactions. In addition to offering a unique perspective on relationships between women, this analysis presents "Das Gebell" as the story of two women, rather than one that focuses on the relationship between a mother and her son, which has predominately been the interpretation in the previous literature. Findings indicate that parallels exist in the way women are portrayed in the above three Erzahlungen and that the female-female interactions serve certain common narrative functions in each of these texts.