Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1969. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.--Continuing and Vocational Education), University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1999. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2006. / Title from title screen (site viewed on September 12, 2006). PDF text of dissertation: viii, 203 p. : ill., ports ; 3.93Mb. UMI publication number: AAT 3208049. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in microfilm, microfiche and paper format.

The connection between social change and marriage is of critical concern for nineteenth century English novelists, and the progression of both class shifts and alterations in marriage are discernable through these novelists' respective works. Due to the Industrial Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, England's social hierarchy began to shift allowing for the rise of a middle class; with the professional class's ascension came the decline of the landed gentry. These social changes blurred class boundaries and created an increasing socially mobile society. Additionally, they coincided with changes to marriage framework, as matrimony was moving towards being based on love rather than the traditional socioeconomic foundation. As both class lines and the love-revolution took place around the same time historically, there was a key change in marriage suitability, making cross-class and love-based marriages more of a reality. Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy are two of the most notable authors from the nineteenth century who chronicle this tension between marriage and class in their respective novels. This thesis focuses specifically on Austen's Persuasion and Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd, arguing that they both visualize a successful marriage that is predicated on both love and socioeconomic status. Their similar image of the sustainable marriage gives value to both the socioeconomic-based and love-based marriages, depicting a realistic conceptualization of marriage.

Au travers de ses six romans, Jane Austen a revisité sans cesse une seule et même histoire, l’accession d’une héroïne au mariage. Dans Histoire de Madame de Montbrillant, Madame d'Épinay dresse le portrait de l’échec d’un mariage, et plus généralement de l’échec d’une femme à conférer un sens à une existence décevante. A priori, rien de plus éloigné que ces deux manières de relater une existence féminine. Pourtant, les deux œuvres s’avèrent extrêmement proches dès lors que des fissures apparaissent dans le tableau brossé par Austen : loin de dessiner l’accomplissement d’une existence, les romans de cette femme de lettres font toujours ressortir les multiples déceptions et échecs d’une existence traversée par la soumission et par les clichés. Bien plus, est-ce seulement de la vie des femmes que traitent les deux auteures ? À travers leurs héroïnes, et à travers une écriture qui délaisse la fluidité au profit de l’accroc, de la rature, de la mise en évidence des faiblesses, ces deux femmes s’interrogent sur les moyens dont disposent les femmes pour acquérir une voix qui leur soit propre : trop marquée par l’autorité des siècles passés, la voix féminine est-elle irrémédiablement vouée à répéter des codes sur lesquelles elle n’a pas prise ? Les œuvres de Jane Austen et de Madame d'Épinay s’inscrivent dans un courant littéraire apparu dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle, caractérisé par l’épanouissement des romans écrits par des femmes et par la reconduction de stéréotypes d’un ouvrage à l’autre, dont les principaux, inspirés en grande partie de Samuel Richardson, sont le respect accordé à la tradition, un schéma diégétique invariable, l’autorité indéfectible de la voix narratrice, et la focalisation autour de l’héroïne. Cette reconduction presque inchangée de traits communs permet de réunir ces romans sous la commune appellation de romans de l’immuable. Si les deux femmes de lettres étudiées n’attaquent pas frontalement ce courant, et même en réutilisent de nombreux traits caractéristiques, elles fondent leur écriture sur sa contestation, en soulignent les insuffisances et mettent en évidence son inadéquation à la réalité. Ainsi, l’écriture se trouve saturés par des références qui sont l’une après l’autre dénoncées comme inappropriés pour le monde contemporain : l’héroïne perd son rayonnement exclusif, le schéma dramatique est montré comme artificiel, et le narrateur est dépossédé de sa toute-puissance (si Jane Austen utilise l’ironie pour contester cette figure, Madame d'Épinay emploie la multiplicité des voix narratives propres au roman épistolaire). Les clichés du roman de l’immuable sont donc violemment attaqués ; cependant, ils continuent d’occuper l’espace romanesque, comme autant de cicatrices dans une écriture qui ne parvient pas à se débarrasser entièrement d’eux. Cela signifie-t-il que les deux auteures sont impuissantes à expulser des préceptes adoubés par la tradition et destinés à imprégner leurs œuvres ? Ou bien Austen et Madame d'Épinay posent-elles comme préalable à cette expulsion la dénonciation systématique, fût-ce au prix de la pureté idéale d’une écriture affranchie de toute tutelle antécédente ? L’impossibilité de se détacher d’un passé omnipotent dissimule en effet un questionnement autour des moyens dont dispose l’expression féminine pour exister, qui sont étudiés au travers des différentes héroïnes et des autres personnages féminins. Austen et Madame d'Épinay se concentrent ainsi sur le moment où l’expression naît, plus que sur une parole achevée : c’est l’éclosion qui est considérée, non l’aboutissement. Et de fait, toutes ces personnes nées de la fiction échouent à construire un langage commun ; bien plus, les stratégies utilisées dans l’avènement du discours sont invariablement débusquées ou contournées par leurs homologues masculins, qui s’assurent ainsi la mainmise sur le dialogue. Mais cet échec du discours féminin n’est pas seulement celui des personnages. Il concerne tout aussi bien les auteures, incapables de congédier définitivement les influences qui pèsent sur leur expression, et contraintes de montrer cette impuissance au cœur de leurs ouvrages. Il s’agit donc bien d’ouvrages de dénonciation, mais qui, pour faire éclore cette dénonciation, sont obligés d’en exhiber les stigmates. Nulle tranquillité née d’un accomplissement total chez les deux auteures, mais au contraire l’inquiétude d’une parole forcée de s’avouer sous tutelle, et toujours menacée de se découvrir vaine (les personnages féminins, de même que les narrateurs, ne cessent de proclamer leur incapacité à rendre compte du réel, et craignent perpétuellement de tomber dans l’ineffable). Pourtant, de cet échec naît aussi une ambition : Jane Austen et Madame d'Épinay fixent les exigences pour la constitution d’une écriture nouvelle. L’expression féminine doit s’édifier dans la conscience de ce carcan primordial, et les deux auteures ont pour tâche de faire ressortir la puissance, mais aussi les limites de celui-ci. Si bien que l’on assiste à une écriture inquiète, mécontente d’elle-même, mais aussi une écriture qui se refuse à la naïveté, et qui fait du roman un espace complexe où la mise en perspective devient possible : les auteures n’écrivent plus dans la droite ligne d’écrits et d’autorités antérieurs, elles contestent ceux-ci en les confrontant à leurs impasses, et, si elles ne proposent pas de voie résolument nouvelle, font du roman le lieu d’un nouveau scepticisme. Les certitudes anciennes sont abolies, et leur est substituée une expression insatisfaite mais consciente d’elle-même, prélude, peut-être, à l’avènement d’une autre écriture, que les deux auteures se refusent, ou échouent, à envisager. / In her six novels Jane Austen has constantly revisited the same and only story of a heroine eventually acceding to marriage. In Histoire de Madame de Montbrillant Madame d’Épinay has described the failure of married life and more generally the impossibility for a woman to give meaning to her disenchanted life. At first glance nothing could be farther removed than those two ways of relating a woman’s existence. Yet the works of both writers prove quite close from the moment that some cracks appear in the picture painted by Jane Austen : far from depicting the fulfilment of a lifetime, she keeps bringing out in her novels the many disappointments and setbacks suffered by women tangled up in submission and mediocrity. But do the authors only deal with women’s lives after all ? Through their heroines, and through an écriture where fluidity is abandoned and leaves the field clear for cutting and slashing and the uncovering of all kinds of weaknesses, the two women-writers wonder about the means left to women to win a voice of their own — because the authority of past centuries has imprinted too heavy a mark on woman’s voice, would it then not be irrevocably doomed to repeat codes which it has no hold on ? The works of Jane Austen and Madame d’Épinay fit in with a new literary movement that appeared in the second half of the 18th century and which was characterized by a blossoming of novels written by women and the re-using of the same stereotypes novel after novel. Those stereotypes, mostly inspired by Samuel Richardson, dealt with the respect of tradition, an invariable diegetic pattern, the unfailing authority of the narrative voice and focalization on the heroine. The recurrence of these dominant features in 18th century fiction has led us to distinguish the novels that shared the same characteristics as novels of the immutable. If the two women-writers have made no frontal attack upon this literary movement and have even used for themselves most of its relevant features, they have nevertheless based their writing on the contestation of it, stressed its weaknesses and emphasized its inadequacy to reality. As a consequence their writing is overloaded with references that are denounced one after the other as unsuitable to the contemporary world : the heroine has lost her particular radiance, the dramatic pattern is shown as artificial and the narrator is deprived of her omnipotence (if Jane Austen makes use of irony to dispute this figure, Madame d’Épinay uses all of the narrative voices that belong to the epistolary novel). The clichés of the immutable novel are thus vigorously questioned but they are maintained in the fictional space like as many scars in an écriture that could not get rid of them. Does that mean that both authors are powerless to do away with precepts dubbed by tradition and intended to permeate their works ? Or do Austen and Madame d’Épinay have systematically recourse to denouncement as a prerequisite, should it be at the expense of absolute purity of writing freed from all previous constraints ? The impossibility for Jane Austen and Madame d’Épinay to get rid of an overpowering past actually conceals their questioning about the means — explored through their heroines as well as other female characters — for feminine expression to exist. Austen and Madame d’Épinay focus their attention on the very moment when expression is revealed rather than on the accomplished parole, on birth rather than achievement. And it is a fact that all these characters born out of fiction fail to construct a common language, with the result that the strategies used to bring speech into existence are invariably driven out or bypassed by their masculine counterparts who thus secure their hold on dialogue. The failure of feminine discourse does not only belong to the characters but is also due to the authors who are unable to do away with the influences that weigh heavy on their manner of writing, and who are compelled to show their impotence to the core of their novels. We are thus faced with novels of denouncement in which the stigmatae have to be displayed for denouncement to be brought to light. No peace then after full achievement for our two women-writers but the restlessness of an expression forced to admit its dependance and always threatened to be faced with its uselessness — the female characters, and the narrators as well, keep proclaiming their inability to account for reality and never-endingly fear to fall into the ineffable. Yet, an ambition has been born of that defeat : Jane Austen and Madame d’Épinay have set the requirements for new writing. Feminine expression has to be built while the two writers are being aware of its original shackles and have to bring out the power as well as the limits of it. So much so that we can observe a kind of restless écriture, unhappy with itself but an écriture that refuses naïvety and turns the novel into a new complex space where a new viewpoint has been made possible. The two authors no longer write in the main thread of former writings and authorities which they dispute and set against their dead ends and impossibilities, and if they have proposed no really new way, they have nonetheless turned the novel into a locus for new scepticism. Old certainties have been done away with and have left the room for a new expression, unhappy with itself but self-aware, as a possible prelude to the rise of another écriture that the two women-writers have refused or failed to consider.

Thesis advisor: Peter Skerry / The most important political fault line in American politics today is marked by the postwar liberal consensus itself. What is often overlooked, however, is that both liberals and anti-liberals assume a modern, progressive view of history in which the world is growing up to become more secular, technologically advanced, and egalitarian. Liberals celebrate this trajectory as they see themselves “on the right side of history.” They consider their opponents backward holdouts or, more generously, those not yet enjoying the goods of modern life. Anti- liberals on the right see the world according to liberalism proceeding apace to undo traditional morality, globalize economies, automate jobs, replace the nation-state, and undermine cultural norms. A nostalgic politics of reaction aspires to reverse the course of history and return to an unmolested golden age. In the words of one recent variation on this theme, only such a reversal can “Make America Great Again.” This dissertation offers intellectual portraits of three American social critics: Christopher Lasch, Paul Goodman, and Jane Jacobs. Each was a critic of progressive habits of mind in different ways, but all three offer an alternative to the progressive optimism and nostalgia for the past at work in today’s debates. If, then, these thinkers were reactionaries in resisting progressive programs of their times, they were enlightened reactionaries insofar as they rationally resisted the deeper assumption of inevitable progress that animates both left and right. While I address a specific concern in the work of each writer, I draw out three points common to their thought. First, each thinker dissolves the dichotomy between past and future that is central to progressive history. The progressive view of history shared by liberal and anti-liberal alike points toward, alternatively, an inevitably improved future or a past that is slipping away. Lasch, Goodman, and Jacobs, however, point to the continuity of past and future and resist subsuming the present in a deterministic account of history. Second, the thought of each embodies a defense of tradition – historically conditioned ways of knowing, as opposed to supposedly trans-historical universal reason. That defense is expressed not only in each thinker’s view of the past as a resource for the present, but in his or her resistance to the very idea of an Archimedean point that is assumed by claims to have seen the end of history. Indeed, each thinker’s arguments are presented explicitly as part of a tradition, and the work of each points to the importance of tradition as an indispensable lens on the world. Each author shows how the assumption of progress, despite progressives’ claims to have escaped tradition, does not reflect an inescapable law of history but is itself part of a modern tradition that we are free to modify. This in turn points to the political possibilities of recovering tradition as the basis of common discourse. To the extent we are conscious of the decisive role of tradition, we will be aware of the degree to which we are responsible agents: responsible for the contingent way we see the world, and for the contingent choices made by the light of our traditions. Finally, I argue that Lasch, Goodman, and Jacobs’s use of tradition stands in contrast not only to transcendent, objective reason but also to an understanding of traditions as closed language games, coherent in themselves but rationally inaccessible to one another. Lasch, Goodman, and Jacobs present a view in which traditions are dynamic, self-correcting, ongoing arguments within and between themselves. Their use of tradition-bound arguments to develop counter-traditions against dominant progressive perspectives exemplifies the way in which traditions might confront and correct one another. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science.

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