Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1973. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliography.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2007. / "Graduate Program in Literatures in English." Includes bibliographical references (p. 210-221).

Thesis (M.A.) -- Central Connecticut State University, 2005. / Thesis advisor: Jason B. Jones. "... submitted as the capstone requirement for the Master of Arts Degree in English." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 64-69). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Conversation in Martereau is largely an affair of platitudinous and banal statements masking the antagonistic content of the subconversation. Consisting mainly of dialogue, The Sacred Fount presents the polished talk that evolves as the characters attempt to unravel an enigma. Though the aims of both authors are very different in many respects, Sarraute and James share a common fascination with the way in which language constitutes a means of dissimulation rather than communication. Dialogue is consequently a problematic element of both novels, registering the drama of the unspoken through commonplace remarks, echoes, and pauses which suggest the presence of a discrete psychological reality. In seeking to renew the dialogue form in the novel, both authors depict dramatic situations in which speech functions as a means of manipulation. The nature of reported discourse in the two novels will be discussed using Jakobson's six-part model of communication, examining in detail the constitutive elements of Jamesian and Sarrautian conversation. The stylistic traits of each author will be considered as a function of the specific constraints of indirect and duplicitous communication. In juxtaposition to the "trompe-l'oeil,” or illusory, reality presented in the dialogue, a pattern of repetitive social exchanges becomes apparent as characters make contact in conversation. While James is most interested in the way in which covert strategies are expressed in speech through implication and allusion, Sarraute examines the effect of speech upon the listener: in both cases, indirect language is perceived as accomplishing certain acts and producing unpredictable effects. The interplay between hidden strategies in James or tropistic activity in Sarraute and dialogue becomes more evident in the narrative discourse, which develops the suggestions and possibilities inherent in the reported speech. The polyphony of the dialogue form is dominated in the narrative discourse by an obsessive observer, who, in the case of The Sacred Fount, is patently unreliable, or at best, unduly sensitive, as in Martereau. An examination of the various forms of narrative intervention, from sporadic inquit interpolations to sustained commentary, suggests the contribution of each novelist in innovating the dialogue form. The post-Victorian experimental novel of Henry James is considered in relation to the nouveau roman, the latter illuminating the autonomous play of language in The Sacred Fount, which documents—if not "l'aventure d'une ecriture"—the adventure of the creative imagination. Placed in parallel with the more traditional dialogue form, Sarraute's work is seen to exemplify the subconscious impulsions generated by the nature of the dialogue. Each author sheds light on the artistic project of the other: incipient, subconscious motivations are brought to light in the Jamesian text, while reported speech is revealed as having a major significance in Sarraute's fiction. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

This study situates the late work of Henry James in the tradition of Romantic revisionism. In addition, it surveys the history of James criticism alongside the academic critique of Romantic-aesthetic ideology. I read The American Scene, the New York Edition Prefaces, and other late writings as a single text in which we see James refashion an identity by transforming the divisions or splits in the modern subject into the enabling condition for renewed creativity. In contrast to the Modernist myth of Henry James the master reproached by recent scholarship, I offer a new critical fiction – what James calls the man of imagination – that models a form of selfhood which views our ironic and belated condition as a fecund limitation. The Jamesian man of imagination encourages the continual (but never resolvable) quest for a coherent creative identity by demonstrating how our need to sacrifice elements of life (e.g. desires and aspirations) when we confront tyrannical circumstances can become a prerequisite for pursuing an unreachable ideal. This study draws on the work of post-war Romantic revisionist scholarship (e.g. Northrop Frye, Frank Kermode, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, and Paul de Man) as well as French theory (e.g. Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida) and other traditions (e.g. Kenneth Burke, R.P. Blackmur, and Lionel Trilling) to challenge new instrumentalizing scholarly methodologies that aim to overcome the ironies of critical vision. I argue that James’s man of imagination not only presents a critical agency that profits from criticism’s penchant for ironic repetition but also a politics that can help us navigate the tension between artistic self-stylization and the social constraints intrinsic to the liberal rule of law. / English

From Introduction: The present work is about the nouvelles of Henry James and not about phenomenology. That is to say that I am more concerned with James's use of the form of the nouvelle than with the illustration of a method. But, as Roland Barthes has pointed out: "How can we tell the novel from the short story, the tale from the myth, suspense drama from tragedy ... without reference to a common model? Any critical attempt to describe even the most specific, the most historically orientated narrative form implies such a model. "I Hence, because phenomenology is somewhat alien to the Anglo-American critical sensibility, I must temporarily reverse this emphasis and discuss the phenomenological "model" that underlies my investigation of James and the nouvelle form. Elsewhere phenomenological theory will take precedence only when it throws light on what is a highly elusive genre.

The process of metaphrasis denotes the translation of a work of art from one medium into another. Opera is fundamentally an adaptive art form and contemporary opera has increasingly turned to the novel as the sophistication and range of the resources of modem music theatre have expanded. This dissertation will examine the contemporary operatic adaptation of five works of fiction. The method employed is a comparison of fictional and operatic discourse and an analysis of the translation of fictional narrative into operatic narrative. Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights poses particular narrative problems for operatic adaption while Herman Melville's Billy Budd is characterised by its intrusive narrator and a pervasive ambiguity. Joseph Conrad's novel, Under Western Eyes, exemplifies many of the narratological complexities of modernism, whereas Patrick White's Voss, a seminal postcolonial text, offers the operatic adaptor opportunities for the transcendence of language through music. The final chapter of this study will examine Henry James's tale, liThe Aspern Papers II , which incorporates many of James's reflections on literature and the literary life. The postmodernist operatic adaptation transmutes this self-reflexive fictional work into an opera profoundly concerned with the ontology of opera itself. This study will test the thesis that opera's affinity lies with the novel rather than with drama: that the fundamental narrative mode of opera is diegetic rather than mimetic. The main theoretic thrust proposes that the orchestra in opera performs a similar function to the narrator in fiction. As fictional characters exist only through the medium of their 'text' therefore, it will be argued, operatic characters exist only as part of their 'musical' text. Fictional narrative, while frequently conveying the impression of mimesis is essentially diegetic; operatic characters appear to possess a similar autonomy to their counterparts in drama, but can be seen as analogous to those in fiction and as a function of the diegesis of operatic narrative. Operatic characters are 'created' by the orchestral-narrator and have their being only as part of this narrative act. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1994.