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This thesis focuses on a writer who was a constant presence in the French literary field for a large part of the 20^th Century and who, by the time of his death, had established himself as one of the major post-war intellectuals, yet who is increasingly typecast simply as a 'Catholic Novelist'. The thesis aim to counter this tendency by highlighting other, intriguing and overlooked aspects of his work and career : the pervasive presence of the body in his novels, his Sartrean sensitivity to the problem of intersubjectivity, or his post-war intervention over decolonisation, and the ethical questions this forced him to confront. The distinctiveness of the thesis lies in its stress on the need to resituate literary texts and other works of art in their socio-cultural contexts - that is to say, in the context of other discourses or representations of the world in circulation at the same time. Thus, Part 1 explores how both his artistic theory and practice are shaped, in unpredictable ways, by the ideological framework of Catholicism into which he is inserted in his early years. Part 2 argues that despite, or perhaps because of, his innate conservatism, Mauriac emerges as a writer who is sensitive to, and captures the nature of, the modern world, and the experience of living in that world. His modern sensibility is reflected in his preoccupation with intersubjectivity, one he shares with other writers of the period who are, perhaps, more recognisably modern. Part 3 examines how his political interventions, and his corresponding transformation from novelist to intellectual, are managed by L'Express magazine, and how in fact he came to collaborate with a journal whose politics were radically different from his own. Overall, through an approach which can be described as materialist and, from a religious perspective, agnostic, the thesis aims to demonstrate how Mauriac can still be seen to have relevant and interesting things to say to a contemporary audience.

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Analytic ethics often neglects the exploration and appreciation of morality as it is actually practised on a day-to-day basis. But by looking at how, in a practical sense, we are able to interact with others in a morally appropriate way we can construct a compelling picture of what some of our most pervasive obligations are. This thesis takes such an approach through the concept of understanding – understanding essentially taken here to involve those processes involved in detecting and correctly responding to beings typically possessing inherent moral significance. In the first two chapters ‘understanding' and the understanding approach are themselves explicated, and placed in the context of several other related approaches in the English-speaking tradition – Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, Nel Noddings' ethics of care and Richard Hare's preference utilitarianism. This approach is then used to provide us with an alternative idea about what our moral reasoning suggests to be of fundamental ethical significance, and of what kinds of activity morality recommends to us. The activity explored in most detail here is that of engaging with fiction – or more broadly, fictive imaginings. While understanding shows us that fictional characters and events themselves cannot have an inherent moral valence or significance, it also shows us when and how it is possible and appropriate to ethically assess fictive engagement, be it as creator or consumer. This is seen after exploring how and in what ways our moral understanding can be appropriately applied to and exercised by fictions at all, and why fiction should be of particular interest to the understanding agent, looking at the work of Martha Nussbaum, Jenefer Robinson, Peter Lamarque and others on aesthetic cognitivism. Ultimately this leads us to discern a minimal ethical constraint on our interpretation of fiction and art in general, further proving understanding's usefulness.

This thesis offers a re-evaluation of the fiction of George MacDonald (1824-1905), both fantasy and non-fantasy. The general trend in MacDonald studies is to focus primarily on his works of fantasy, either ignoring the rest (which includes non-fantasy fiction, sermons, poetry, and criticism) or using them to illuminate the fantasies. The overall critical consensus is that these works, particularly MacDonald’s non-fantasy fiction, possess little inherent value. Though many critics acknowledge similarities between MacDonald’s fantasy fiction and his non-fantasy fiction, MacDonald has been the victim of a critical double standard that treats fantasy and realism as completely irreconcilable, and allows certain features to be acceptable, even desirable, in one form that are completely unacceptable in the other. The thesis begins by looking at MacDonald’s writings about the imagination and about literature, from which a clear theory of literature emerges, one with strong opinions about the function and purpose of literature, as well as about what makes good literature. By re-examining MacDonald’s fiction, its plots, characterization and narration, in the light of his own theories, the reasons underlying the artistic choices made throughout his fiction take on a more deliberate and calculated appearance. Furthermore, by placing MacDonald in his proper context, and looking at the diversity of generic options available to the Victorian writer, the critical double standard underlying much MacDonald scholarship, based on a strict fantasy/realism separation, crumbles. What emerges from this analysis is a different MacDonald—a careful craftsman who consciously and skillfully uses the tools of his trade to produce a unique and specific reading experience.

This thesis argues that Barthelme's major 1985 essay "Not-Knowing" contains within its title Barthelme's central artistic idea, and that not-knowing informs both the subject of his fiction and his philosophy of art. This study will be the first critical treatment of Barthelme that positions his work from beginning to end in terms of the dimensions of not-knowing that came out of his own reading in psychology, art theory, philosophy, religion, and education, offering coherent readings of content and suggesting the ways in which content relates to form. The Introduction explores the origins of Barthelme's ideas of not-knowing, paying special attention to the influence of Mallarmé, Joyce, and Beckett on Barthelme's first characterisations of not-knowing, creativity, and reception. The first chapter gives an in-depth reading of Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964), Barthelme's first collection of stories. Though Barthelme had not yet begun to formally theorise his ideas of not-knowing, they were already latent in Come Back, Dr. Caligari's characterisation of psychological experience, specifically in relation to anxiety, boredom, and interpretation. The second chapter looks at the ways in which Harold Rosenberg’s theories of the visual arts, and especially collage, which Barthelme encountered while co-editing Location magazine with Rosenberg in the early 1960s, address form and not-knowing, and how Barthelme treats these issues in Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968), City Life (1970), The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine (1971), Sadness (1972), Guilty Pleasures (1974), and Amateurs (1976). The third chapter shows how Barthelme's university studies in 19th century philosophy, especially Kierkegaard in The Concept of Irony (1841) and Kierkegaard's treatment of Schlegel in that treatise, inform his concern with irony, both in theory and practice, in City Life (1970), Great Days (1979), and Overnight to Many Distant Cities (1983). Chapter Four argues that Kierkegaard's theories of education and religion in Either/Or (1843) and The Present Age (1846), as well as the contemporary incarnation of Dewey's ideas of progressive education, both had a profound influence on Barthelme's ideas about the way a society is educated into knowingness, the artist's aspiration toward not-knowing, and the validity of religion in the postmodern world. The conclusion to the thesis reexamines the Introduction's argument about literary influence through a brief reading of The Dead Father (1975). Barthelme is recognised as one of the most important American postmodernist writers, and yet there has been relatively little critical treatment of his oeuvre. The major books that address Barthelme's work, which include Jerome Klinkowitz's Literary Disruptions: The Making of a Post-Contemporary American Fiction (1975) and Donald Barthelme: An Exhibition (1991), as well as Alan Wilde's Horizons of Assent (1981) and Stanley Trachtenberg's Understanding Donald Barthelme (1990), belong to a two-decade span of classifying writers such as Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, and John Barth using a limited set of ideas about postmodernism that were interesting as theory at the time, but did little to explore the actual literary, philosophical, and aesthetic content and contexts of these writers' works (with the possible exception of Pynchon). This thesis aims to rescue Barthelme from now-hackneyed ways of talking about postmodernism, which include lumping various aesthetic techniques under the rubric of "metafiction," claiming that the era's sole interest is in surface at the expense of depth, and that the dependence upon clichés is a deliberate expression of artistic exhaustion.

This thesis examines the meanings and uses of the impression in the essays and late novels of Henry James. While James found fault with impressionism in French painting and literature, he repeatedly called the novel an ‘impression of life’, and used the term to figure important moments of perception and action for his protagonists. This thesis offers the first full-length study of the impression on its own terms, rather than through the lens of a wider artistic or philosophical movement, the most obvious example being impressionism. It locates James’s impression within an intertextual history comprising British empiricist philosophy (Locke and Hume), empiricist psychology (William James), British aestheticism (Pater and Wilde), and, looking forwards, twentieth-century theories of the performative (Austin, Derrida, de Man, Butler). It offers a series of close readings of James’s non-fictional and fictional treatments of the impression in his early criticism and travel writing (1872-88), his prefaces to the New York edition (1907-09), and the three novels of his major phase, The Ambassadors (1903), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Golden Bowl (1904). This exploration does not produce any unified definition of the impression in the work of James. It finds, rather, that the impression crystallizes one of James’s main themes, the struggle between art and life, a consequence of the competing empiricist and aesthetic tendencies that the thesis distinguishes within accounts of the impression available to James. The thesis goes on to show that impressions in James may be made as well as received, and so introduces a further distinction, between ‘performative’ and ‘cognitive’ impressions. It argues that what James does with these competing impressions – empiricist and aesthetic, cognitive and performative – is to make them the narrative focus of his late novels and their drama of consciousness.

Despite the recent increase in scholarship on the subject of the female experience in exile, there is still much to be done. Exile scholars now have at their disposal an abundance of broad, general overviews of the circumstances and fates of displaced women writers, but a dearth of scholarship that considers specific literary works in an individualised fashion still exists. This is especially true of those female writers who have only recently been 'rediscovered', such as the three under discussion in this thesis. This thesis explores in detail the exile writings of Veza Canetti, Anna Gmeyner, and Lili Korber, about which little scholarship exists, and uses them as case studies to illuminate the situation of exiled women writers in general The exile works of these three authors repay study both for their own literary merits and for what they can tell us about the individual experience of exile. In their broad similarities, these writers also provide us with case studies of the larger experience of authorial exile - particularly, but by no means exclusively, the gendered experience - that allow us to derive more general lessons about the influence of forced flight on literary art. By giving due consideration to work produced in exile, this thesis calls into question some of the generalisations commonly found in recent scholarship and demonstrates that, despite hardsrnps and setbacks and contrary to common scholarly contention, all three women continued to write well into their exile years and that in those years they took their writing in new, skilful, and creative directions.

This thesis examines the use of storytelling as a tool to facilitate writing in English language learners. It examines specifically the effects storytelling had on the student use of expressive language, story structure and creativity in their writing. It also analyzed the enjoyment level storytelling brought to the writing experience of the student.

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