Em uma entrevista feita por Travis Elborough para uma edição especial de quarenta anos da editora Picador, exatamente no ano em que o romance The Sea (2005), de John Banville, recebe o Booker Prize, o escritor irlandês responde da seguinte maneira a uma indagação sobre o título da obra: Acho que eu tinha o título antes de qualquer coisa, e gosto de pensar num ritmo oceânico através de cada página (p.2, tradução nossa). Realmente Banville consegue produzir o deslumbrante efeito de um movimento marítimo que percorre ciclicamente os três eixos espaço-temporais e narratológicos do romance. Entretanto, não há linearidade cronológica na orquestração desses momentos. Apresentam-se na realidade os percursos criativos de uma mente irrequieta, revelando assim os diferentes estados de consciência de Max Morden, o narrador e estudioso dos quadros de Pierre Bonnard. Nota-se, sobretudo, que essa passagem fluida de informações mnemônicas e cognitivas dentro do universo subjetivo do herói é mediada pela presença de outras artes essencialmente as visuais, tais como a pintura e a fotografia , resultando não apenas numa prosa poética que é a marca registrada de Banville, mas igualmente numa rica linguagem interartística, as quais tornar-se-ão o instrumento essencial para a construção metaficcional da narrativa do romance. Não menos relevante é o centro catalisador dessas memórias, ou seja, o recorrente e doloroso sentimento de perda de pessoas queridas, o qual impulsiona Morden na escrita de seu diário. Portanto, buscaremos investigar as características, propósitos e desdobramentos dessa estética multiforme na obra Banvilliana, considerando, mediante noções teóricas sobre ekphrasis, como a interface entre uma linguagem incrivelmente embuizada de poeticidade e o recurso de representações visuais contribuem para uma nova síntese narratológica diante de um mundo mnemônico que tende a se esfacelar, e como a metaficção de The Sea reconstitui, reproduz e, em última instância, celebra os processos intrigantes das memórias de um ser humano. / In an interview carried out by Travis Elborough for a special edition celebrating Picadors 40th anniversary, in the same year the novel The Sea (2005) by John Banville is awarded the Booker Prize, the Irish writer gives the following answer to a question concerning the title of his work: I think I had the title before I had anything else, and I like to think an oceanic rhythm through every page (p. 2). In fact, Banville is able to convey a mesmerising effect of an oceanic movement that cyclically flows through the novels three narratological and spatiotemporal axes. However, there is no chronological linearity in the orchestration of these moments. Actually the creative meanderings of a restless mind are shown, thus revealing the different states of Mordens conscience, the narrator who studies Pierre Bonnards paintings. It is seen, above all, that this fluidic passage of mnemonic and cognitive pieces of information within the heros subjective domain is mediated by the presence of other forms of art especially the visual ones, such as painting and photography , resulting not only in a poetic prose that is Banvilles hallmark, but similarly in a rich interartistic language. These formal aspects will serve as the essential tool for the metafictional construction of the novel narrative. The galvanising centre of these memories has equal importance, that is, the recurrent and painful feeling of losing endeared people, which propels Morden to write his diary. Therefore, we will investigate the characteristics, purposes and unfoldings belonging to this multiform aesthetics of the Banvillian novel, considering by means of theoretical notions of ekphrasis how the interface between an incredibly poeticised language and the resource of visual representations contributes to a new narratological synthesis in the face of a mnemonic world that tends to fall apart, and how the metafiction of The Sea reconstitutes, reproduces and ultimately celebrates the intricate processes of a human beings memories.

<p> West African Women writers are constantly looking for ways to maneuver the patriarchal system within their indigenous cultures. To say maneuvering implies the dilemma in consciously navigating patriarchal epistemology as West African women, which in reality is not exotic to other feminist struggles outside the continent. To deal with the dilemma of constantly maneuvering, this thesis suggest for an indigenous framework. It suggests <i>Osun </i>&ndash;a Nigerian goddess&ndash; as a response to the theoretical problems and as a methodology to navigating a postcolonial patriarchal worldview in order to express West African feminist discourse. The specificity of <i>Osun</i> is essential, but the fluidity of <i>Osun</i> across borders cannot be undermined as it paves the way for flexibility within feminist and gender discourse and draws upon various gender oppressed experiences. The idea of specificity and fluidity is fundamental to developing <i> Osun</i> as West African feminist discourse because of her ability to transcend space. The combination of specificity and fluidity are necessary within any feminist discourse as it allows for women from different regions to relate and align the tenets to their specific struggles found in the diversity of <i>Osun</i>.</p><p>

<p> This dissertation constructs a philosophy of perception that creates what I call a &ldquo;perceptive ontology of objects.&rdquo; This ontology emphasizes, not the subjective perspectivalism of human identity, but the dynamic emergence of objects into objecthood through impersonal modalities of space, time, light, and sound. Objecthood is an attempt to render perceptive experience as something neither wholly subjective nor wholly objective. Here objects are connected with subjectivity and yet still external. I argue that modernist authors present changeable, novelistic surfaces, which submit the novel&rsquo;s material objects to epistemological doubt. This creates radically interruptive moments of heightened perception, rupturing immediate experience from the more conventionally mimetic, referential, and social surfaces of the novel found within literary realism. These perceptive experiences create representational effects which I call &ldquo;the mimesis of sensation.&rdquo; This creates a sensory surface in the story world through which the reader aligns with the perceptive experiences of characters. This form of readerly connection is distinct from either Aristotelian empathy on the one hand, or Brechtian estrangement, on the other. &ldquo;The moment,&rdquo; a temporality distinct from the present, the modernist works of authors like Mallarm&eacute;, Woolf, Joyce, and Kafka foreground perception itself, altering visions of time to construct discrete and static temporalities. These discontinuous moments create forms of abstract continuity. They thus create a dialectical relationship with narrative. </p><p> These event-like ruptures, occurring through encounters with the surface of objects, offer two distinct notions of time that could serve as alternatives to the post-structuralist critique of the materiality of the signifier as seen in theorists like Derrida and Barthes. First, the surface of the text becomes an expansive medium of perception: a collection of perpetual gestures, interruptions, reflections, and possibilities which arises, not through linguistic play, but through a composite surface of language and perception. A totality emerges through perceptive processes in relation to this medium, not through the infinite deferral of the signified, but through the ongoing logical recession of the object through epistemological immanence. Here I also take an important departure from the work of other theorists of modernity&mdash;Baudelaire, Bergson, Benjamin, and Deleuze, and others&mdash;who suggest an imagistic immediacy to the experience of non-chronological time. My notion of the modernist literary object is distinctively not a ready-to-point-to image. I critique the centrality of images in 20^th-century theories of temporality, arguing that modernism constructs moments of readerly critical alignment not through the satisfaction of visual desire, but by foregrounding processes of apprehension, perception, and inquiry: attempting to decipher an object which is never quite fully known. </p><p> Even as the modernist techniques I study draw attention to the artifice of representation and the difficulties of constructing knowledge, they also frame objects of perception, constructing scenes of aesthetic totality&mdash;available to the spectator so long as she acknowledges the mediated lens through which she looks. I see totality as the possibility that perception could be made whole, the possibility that there is a form of subjectless experience in which perceptive inquiry creates order (as forms of abstract continuity). These totalities, perceivable not in chronologies of external perceptible phenomena, but within impersonal faculties of apprehension, as they coincide with these forms of deeper time, also invoke pathos (through the acknowledgment of dimensions of fate). In four chapters, each devoted to a respective modernist author, the project shows how the works of Mallarm&eacute;, Woolf, Joyce, and Kafka reveal relationships between what I call modernism&rsquo;s &ldquo;moments&rdquo; and the receding totality of the object. </p><p> Chapter 1 of the dissertation argues that a relationship exists between Mallarm&eacute;&rsquo;s reception of impressionism and the poet&rsquo;s linguistic theory. Here I examine Mallarm&eacute;&rsquo;s writings on the impressionist <i> plein air</i> technique in his essay, &ldquo;The Impressionists and &Eacute;douard Manet&rdquo; (1876). <i>Plein air</i> means more for Mallarm&eacute; than just painting outdoors. Air, in Mallarm&eacute;&rsquo;s eyes, is a full presence. Atmosphere is the key to a deep and abstract form of naturalism in his work. Other subjects in this chapter include atmospheric modalities like breath or respiration, speech and the sounds of words, or aspects of nature like weather. In Chapter 2, the novelistic objects of perceptive ontology in Woolfian impressionism create a temporal rupture from realism&rsquo;s more conventional referential representation. I argue that Woolf creates <i> another type of realism</i> through her experiments with time. Importantly, I break from the work of 20^th-century continental theorists of radical time influenced by Bergson (like Deleuze) in which the image plays a central, functional role. Woolf&rsquo;s moments challenge the idea of a Bergsonian image-form not subject to doubt in order to open the imaginative field of literature to what I call &ldquo;the mimesis of sensation.&rdquo; (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.) </p><p>

<p> Victorian culture was constantly engaging with nature and garden imagery. In this thesis, I argue that the literary gardens of Anne and Charlotte Bront&euml; function as a trope that enables an examination of nineteenth-century social concerns; these literary gardens are a natural space that serve as a &ldquo;middle ground&rdquo; between the defense of traditional social conventions and the utter disregard of them. In <i>Agnes Grey </i> (1847), <i>Jane Eyre</i> (1847), and <i>The Tenant of Wildfell Hall</i> (1848) the female characters have significant encounters within the gardens and outdoor spaces; Agnes, Jane, and Helen venture into these environments and emerge changed&mdash;whether by experiential knowledge or from the temptation of social and moral transgression. In AG, Anne Bront&euml; uses the image of the garden and natural landscapes, in order to explore Agnes&rsquo;s education within her governessing experience. In <i>JE</i>, the garden functions as a space that appears to offer Jane a reprieve from the Gothic terror of the house, yet it actually extends that influence. The entire estate is a literal boundary point for Jane in her life, but it also represents the metaphorical barrier between Jane and potential social transgression&mdash;one that she must navigate because of her romance with Rochester. In <i> Tenant</i>, the house, the garden, and the landscape symbolize Helen&rsquo;s identity, as the widowed artist Mrs. Graham, an identity that only exists during her time at Wildfell. Helen&rsquo;s identity as a professional female artist living in a wild landscape accentuates Gilbert&rsquo;s sexual desire towards her. Anne Bront&euml; critiques Victorian marriage and class expectations through Helen&rsquo;s final circumvention of social rules. In these novels, the scenes in the gardens and natural landscapes serve as a way for these authors to engage with the complexities of &ldquo;The Woman Question&rdquo; through the characterization of the governess and the artist.</p><p>

After the conquest of 1282, Wales increasingly fell under the dominion of England and in 1535, the first Laws in Wales Act officially annexed the country. During this period of political and legal instability, Welsh men and women fought to regain independence, a struggle that led to the development of a nascent national identity. For many authors, this identity was fundamentally rooted in the topography of Wales and the mythical histories concerning the cultivation of its land. This interest in native mirabilia corresponded with a period of increased availability of English and continental geographical treatises and travelogues that provided Welsh authors with a new vocabulary for discussing wonder. Medieval and early modern Welsh authors incorporated these exotic geographies into their accounts of native landscapes in order to differentiate Wales from England and argue for a sense of Welsh cultural exceptionalism based in its alterity. / Celtic Languages and Literatures

This thesis is a postcolonial study of the work of Padraic O Conaire. From the great surge of the Cultural Renaissance to the reconsolidating of conservative forces under the Free State, O Conaire's career encapsulates the defining period of modern Ireland. As the Introduction discusses, this thesis sites his work centrally in that revolutionary era, with O Conaire influenced by the great writers of European Realism who made a profound critique of their own societies with their central focus on the lived experience of the individual. Instead of the modern alienation of his characters, or the radicalism of the author's own politics, both of which comprise the most prominent strands in his critical portrayal to date, O Conaire is seen to make that necessary synthesis between the psychological and the political aspects as a creative writer. Though rooted in the historical experience of the race, the anti-authoritarian project of Postcolonialism is defined as an ongoing challenge in an age of global capitalism and the working through of the psycho-cultural effects of colonization. Noting their emphasis on the biographical element, the Literature Review examines the main contemporary full-length critical studies of 6 Conaire: P6.draic 6 Conaire - Deorai (1994) by Padraigin Riggs which investigates the themes of alienation and exile in the life and the work; Padraic 6 Conaire - Sceal a Bheatha (1995) by Eibhlin Ni Chionnaith which unearths a wealth of biographical information to finally create a portrait of a bohemian Romantic; and Reabhloid Phadraic Ui Chonaire (2007) by Aindrias O Cathasaigh, which directs its attention on O Conaire's journalism and his articulation of a revolutionary socialism; and Saoirse Anama Ui Chonaire (1984) by Tomas O Broin's which is a monograph on O Conaire's one novel Deoraiocht and argues for its socialist expressionism based on the author's lived experience. Three significant short studies out of the wide range of essays on the writer are then reviewed: 'Padraic O Conaire' by Seosamh Mac Grianna (1936) which portrays O Conaire as a heroic literary pioneer for all his faults, 'Padraic 6 Conaire agus Cearta an Duine' by Declan Kiberd (1983) which emphasizes his eccentric individualism and his socialism, and 'An tOrsceal Readach III' by Alan Titley (1991) which claims a special kind of literary realism for Deoraiocht. The remaining works of the Literature Review develop and deepen the postcolonial basis of this thesis, being significant studies in the international and in the Irish context: The Colonizer and the Colonized by the Tunisian writer AlbeIt Memmi, which is a piercing sociological and psychological exposure of the phenomenon of colonization; Tren bhFearann Breac - an Dilaithriu Culruir agus Nualitriocht na Gaeilge Ie Mairin Nic Eoin which applies a wide range of postcolonial theorizing to modern Irish language literature; and 'Decolonizing the Mind: Language and Literature in Ireland' by Gearoid Denvir which is a polemical account of the psycho-cultural aspect of colonization and also treats of the marginalization of modern Irish language and literature. The Review includes a brief examination of the work which inspired the title of Denvir's essay, namely Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature by Ngugi wa Thiong'o. The first chapter of this thesis discusses Deoraiocht as a powerful anti -colonial novel, a monologue of rebellion located in the heart of empire. The second chapter examines important statements from O Conaire's journalistic output concerning the role of the writer in society, and about Irish society itself in the troubled period from 1917-1921, in a critical context that compares the basic radicalism of the modern Russian writer with the Gaelic literary tradition. The third chapter considers O Conaire's five plays, from their original inspiration in Douglas Hyde's plays about traditional Gaeltacht society, to their development of the comic hero of European theatre. The selection of his short stories in the fourth chapter reflects the arc of O Conaire's opus, from Paidin Mhaire, the tragic victim of the colonial system, to the subversive comedy of Fearfeasa Mac Feasa with his challenge to conventional officialdom. The Conclusion looks forward as well as back in that O Conaire as a postcolonial writer straddled the official British colony founded on political, social and economic repression and the official Free State with its emerging conservative, bourgeois and religious ethos. Just like the great modernist pioneer in Irish writing in English, James Joyce, who was born in the same month as O Conaire, his own work is seen to be intimately bound up with the project of decolonization and with the realization of the individual as the embodiment of a changed society. Also, like the dispossessed Gaelic poet of the seventeenth century and the modern underground writer of the Soviet State, O Conaire's work is shown as retaining from beginning to end the integrity of the outsider committed to the truth of individual expression against the ideological control of the dominant institutions of pre- and post-imperial Irish society. If we Irish want the genuine freedom that O Conaire advocated, then we can discover the hidden foundations of our contemporary society in his work, in which there is a truthful reflection of, and liberating insight into, the period that formed today's Ireland.

This is a comparative study between Elizabeth Bishop and Carlos Drummond de Andrade which examines the trajectory of their poetry towards maturity. Inspired by Mikhail Bakhtin's notions on literary interpretation and intertextuality, this is an analysis that does not include the anxiety of influence, but rather explores the dialogic relations between poet (subject, personality), text, and context. A historicity of texts divided in four acts observes a progressive relation between poet and world. Beginning with the poet, the first act examines a trait of personality common to both poets—their gaucherie —and the projection of this trait in their art. The second and third acts successively discuss the relation between the poet and his/her family, the poet and the world, or more precisely, how the “strange idea of family” travels through poetry while it opens up more and more to a larger world. The final act closes the poet's dialectic with the world with a reading of crepuscular poems, combining a ripening of memories in the “creative time/space distance” with the voice of the mature poet.

This study examines and explains the politically, ecclesiastically and socially motivated perceptions of Joan of Arc by the French and the British focusing on late medieval and early Renaissance depictions. Joan was tried by the British in France. Even so, she had a text-book British heresy trial according to the precedent set during John Badby's trial in 1401. Equally importantly, close examination of fifteenth century French texts shows French ambivalence towards, diminution of and, in some cases, complete rejection of Joan and her role in French history. Indeed, the British perceptions about the Maid are the only perspectives on Joan that remained constant through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Our modern perceptions of Joan of Arc seem fairly stable. Yet what became evident during the research for this project is that this stability is a recent development we have simply inherited Napoleon's view of the Maid of Orléans. Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the British characterized Joan of Arc as a witch and a great threat to their political well-being. British ideas about Joan of Arc, however negative and contrary they may seem to our modern ideas about her, are the only ideas that remained constant during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

The Independent Theatre's production of Ghosts at the Royalty Theatre, London in 1891 precipitated one of the most famous theatrical quarrels in European theater history. Although many have commented on the extremity of the response from the conservative reviewers, few have remarked on the fact that the majority of these reviews were laden with disease metaphors. Ibsen, in the age of the classic epidemic, comes to be perceived by his English hosts as a contagious entity. The importance of Ghosts , then, lies in its ability to "introduce into the cultural matrix a germ, a foreign body, that cannot be accounted for by its existing codes and practices" (Attridge 55–6). In this dissertation, I examine the theatrical reviews as serious cultural artifacts in order to avoid reducing them to mere entertaining invective. In "Myth Today," Barthes powerfully concludes that "[h]owever paradoxical it may seem, myth hides nothing: its function is to distort, not to make disappear" (121). The myth of Ghosts was all about "making public" to such a degree that it quickly overshot its usefulness. Thus I reconsider the myth of Ghosts in order to engage with the distortions of Ibsen, of theater, of disease and of England itself in the early 1890s. Ultimately, I trace the transmission of modern dramatic innovation from Ibsen to Arthur Wing Pinero. Pinero writes a series of plays in the 1890s distinctive both for their seriousness and their seeming similarity to Ibsen. The Second Mrs. Tanqueray and The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith establish Pinero as both a popular and a serious writer, something Ibsen could never quite accomplish. Although it is unfair to lay the "improvements" in Pinero's method solely at the feet of Ibsen, it is fair, I think, to demonstrate that without Ibsen's boundary-breaking work, Pinero could never have produced these important plays.

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary interpretation of modernism that argues the problem of memory is a central theoretical link between the diverse cultures, genres, and forms of experimental twentieth century art and literature. The dissertation reads the literary history of modernism and the philosophical redefinition of memory offered by writers such as Freud and Nietzsche in the light of contemporary theorists of memory associated with Holocaust and trauma studies. I locate Virginia Woolf's work in the context of a London beset not only by the losses of the Great War but also by the burden of memorializing the war's losses. I show how the experience of transnational exile—a predominant, formative phenomenon in the twentieth century culture—is accounted for in the work of one of America's seemingly most provincial modern poets, Wallace Stevens. My recontextualization of Stevens takes the specific form of a comparison between his poetry and the artwork of Marcel Duchamp. When rigorously and exhaustively explored by Beckett, the limits of representation call out, on the one hand, for new forms while on the other hand his work for the theater complicates any attempt to reconstitute or reconfigure the past. I argue that this locates his drama in the context of the Holocaust. I describe a particular way in which memory is figured by the literary work, or I analyze a particular way in which memory is figured in twentieth century culture that the artist critiques or counteracts. I use the term "gesture of memory" to distinguish between these figurations and the notion of stable memories either held in the mind or inscribed in collective forms like monuments. I contend that each writer recognizes, on the one hand, that in the wake of events like World War One and the Holocaust the duty of the artist is to make viable an aesthetic of critique, undermining collective forms of memory. However, each writer recognizes this critique does not obviate the need to memorialize. I thus define the gestural as that which exists in the middle-ground between purposeful memorial inscription and the withholding of this determinate shape typical of modernist art.