The objective of this dissertation is to converge and apply Elijah P. Anderson’s concept of “Nigger Moment,” as delineated in his 2011 work, The Cosmopolitan Canopy, as a particular category of trauma, experienced exclusively by Africana men, women, and children, with William E. Cross’ theory of racial socialization called “Nigrescence,” to Comparative Black Literature (CBL). While experiences with racism in both individual and structural forms have played a fundamental role in analyses of Africana literature, a focus on the incidence of these “Moments,” as they contribute to the subject’s “Nigrescence” (the series of racial encounters both within and without the group that precipitate the subject’s exploration of their racial identity) through an intersectional lens applied to CBL, allows the analyst or critic to observe how the means by which the “Moment” is experienced, in what context it is experienced, and how the identity of the literary subject(s) manifest patterns of Africana identity formation within fiction and non-fiction narrative, and, ultimately, Africana individuals. Ultimately, I will explore the pedagogical implications of applying the “N-Moment” to Comparative Black Literature within a multi-cultural and multi-racial classroom in the interest of social cohesion and positive identity formation. This will be done by outlining the various dimensions of the N-Moment within classed, gendered, and migrant contexts, as they apply to Claude McKay’s Banana Bottom, Jessie Redmon Fauset’s There is Confusion, Toni Morrison’s Bluest Eye, James Baldwin’s Another Country, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s Americanah, and Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory. / African American Studies

This thesis aims to position Circe by Madeline Miller as an example of feminist revisionist mythmaking and investigate some of the novel’s revisionary practices. I thus begin by introducing the project of feminist revisionism, as conceptualized by several different feminist thinkers. I then move on to describe two methods by which Circe reimagines the stories of the Epic Cycle. I argue that the first method, in the analysis of which I primarily use the work of the formalist Caroline Levine on hierarchies, is to subvert gender and immortality – two world-organizing binaries of Greek myth. I then make the argument that Circe also revises myth on the level of narrative, which I support with Teresa de Lauretis’ work on narrative morphology. The study concludes that both these methods are being employed in Circe and are successful in reimagining myth from a feminist perspective. My thesis results in a better understanding of the ways in which Greek myth is being rewritten by contemporary feminists in popular literature.

<p>This dissertation applies Paul Ricœur’s theory of narrative identity to Chaucer’s poetry. The idea of a narrative subjectivity addresses gaps and synthesizes key movements in Chaucer studies, engaging with key scholars such as George Lyman Kittridge, Carolyn Dinshaw, A.C. Spearing, and Mary Carruthers. Using Ricœur’s hermeneutic phenomenology, the chapters articulate how narrative is necessary to the construction and expression of both individual and collective identity and experience. Each chapter focuses on a key element of Ricœur’s narrative hermeneutic phenomenology and how that modality of narrative is used to construct a particular kind of identity. I argue for a self-in-relation: the self as constituted through relations to others, or intersubjectively, which is expressed in and as narrative. Ricœur’s hermeneutic distills several of Chaucer’s key interests: time, history, fictionality, and poetics; selfhood and alterity; the significance of language and of fidelity to one’s word; and agency, passivity, and suffering. By applying that heremeneutic, we can consider the extent to which Chaucer’s poetry may use narrative to represent or resolve those interests and their connection to identity.</p> <p>Chapter 1 explores the identity construction of three Chaucerian women by identifying patterns of yielding discursive authority that either subvert or redirect narrative structures of masculine authority. I argue that women like Criseyde have more control over their own lives and a more positive subject-position than previously recognized. In Chapter 2, I argue that racialized narratives shared by the Canterbury pilgrims structure their community by defining what kind of identity is acceptable—in this case, a white Christian identity, shared by all the pilgrims, that reproduces a Western hegemonic whiteness. In chapter 3, I argue that in Chaucer’s talking-animal poetry, the recognition and response that narrative facilitates results in an ethic of care that is invested in principles of solicitude and friendship. In Chapter<b> </b>4, I argue that Chaucer’s dream visions represent narratives of poetic subjectivity that are embedded in issues of memory and sociality that take shape in and as space. Finally, in conclusion I tie these arguments back to a question asked of the fictional representation of Chaucer himself: Who are you? This question animates much of Chaucer’s poetry and I have endeavored to show how Chaucer answers that question with and in narrative. </p>

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This thesis examines literary texts that represent encounters with model organisms in ways that enact an interspecies ethics that turns the narrative of bodily relationality embedded within the model organism into a source of care, friendship, respect, and mourning. My project understands model organisms as material beings as well as semiotic and narrative entities; I suggest that the very ‘materiality’ of the model organism’s body is symbolic precisely because it is designed to refer to bodies other than its own. The model organism involves a double relationality between the categories of ‘animal’ and ‘human’ because it serves as a mediator between human nature and nature at large. This is not to say that that human biology is not part of ‘nature’ but rather that anthropocentric and human exceptionalist ideologies pervade discourses of human biology and thus the model organism provides a link to our biological and corporeal ‘selves’ in a way that maintains species divisions. The texts I analyze throughout this dissertation offer alternative ways of thinking about the model organism by exposing the multiple meanings and narratives that coexist within them both as representations and as living sentient beings. This project centers around two questions: How do cultural texts represent and negotiate disconnects between how model organisms signify within scientific discourses and their broader cultural identities? How does literature specifically engage with scientific knowledge in ways that both disrupt and affirm the status of the model organism as a scientific object? / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis deploys Homi Bhabha's perspective of postcolonial literary theory as a critical procedure to examine particular instances of fiction, as well as reportage on Botswana. Its unifying interest is to pinpoint the shifting nature or reality of Botswana and, by extension, of African identities. To that end, I use Bhabha's concept of liminality to inform the work of writers such as Unity Dow, Alexander McCall Smith, and instances of reportage (by Rupert Isaacson and Caitlin Davies), from the 1990s to date. The aims of the thesis are, among other things, to establish the extent to which Homi Bhabha's appropriation of the term liminality (which derives from Victor Turner's notion of limen for inbetweenness), and its application in the postcolonial context inflects the reading of the above works whose main motifs include the following: a contestation of any views which privilege one culture above another, challenging a jingoistic rootedness in one culture, and promoting an awareness of the existence of several, interlocking or even clashing realities which finally produce multiple meanings, values and identities. In short, it is proposed that identity is not a given but rather a product of a lived reality and therefore a social construct, something always in process. The thesis begins by theorizing liminality in Chapter 1 within the context of Homi Bhabha's understanding and interrogation of the colonial discourse. This is followed by the contextualization of liminality through the reading of, firstly, the fiction of Unity Dow in Chapters 2 and 3, and then the "detective" fiction of Alexander McCall Smith in Chapters 4 and 5. In the discussion of these works, I also touch on instances of reportage which relate to the lives of the authors. In the case of Smith's "detective" fiction, for example, reportage refers to his incorporation of actual historical events and personages whose impact, I argue, suggests the liminality of culture. In Chapter 6, the idea of reportage varies slightly to denote works of fiction in which there is a great deal of historical fact. Thus Rupert Isaacson's The Healing Land: A Kalahari Journey and Caitlin Davies' Place of Reeds are treated as works of reportage in line with Truman Capote's application of that term. What comes out most evidently in this study is the shifting idea of (Botswana/African) identity. It should be noted that rather than present an all-embracing account of the fiction on Botswana, the study only looks at the selected examples of writing and reportage. / University of South Africa National Research Foundation / English Studies / D. Litt. et Phil. (English)

This dissertation offers an examination of Delany's critical trajectory from structuralism to poststructuralism and postmodernism across a gamut of genres from SF to sword-and-sorcery, pornography, autobiography and literary criticism. Delany's engagement with semiotics, Foucault and deconstruction form the theoretical focus, together with his own theories of how SF functions as a literary genre, and its standing and reception within the greater realm of literature. The impact of Delany as a gay, black SF writer is also examined against the backdrop of his varied output. I have used the term 'dislocation' to describe Delany's tackling of traditional subjects and genres, and opening them up to further possibilities through critical engagement. Lastly, Delany is also examined as a postmodern icon. A frequent participant in his own texts, as well using pseudonyms that have developed into fully-fledged characters, Delany has become a critical signifier in his own work. / English Studies / M. A. (English)

The first part of the thesis comprises Chapters 1 to 40 of the novel, written under a pseudonym, followed by a synopsis of the remaining chapters, 41 to 155. The potential jacket copy will refer to the protagonists, a male and a female detective. The second part of the thesis is a critical study of the novel. Literary theory and critical methods are used to investigate the writing process and to explicate the text’s layers of meaning, not all of which were clear to the author at the time of writing. Chapter 1 considers literary and creative writing theory, paying particular attention to conceptualisations of author and reader. In Chapter 2, the chosen pseudonym is explained and compared with those of other authors; the novel’s title is also examined. Chapter 3 covers the issue of genre, looking at theories and discussing both crime novel and Gothic fiction. In Chapter 4, critical approaches to character are applied. Chapter 5 does the same with plot. Chapters 6 and 7 take account of the manifestations of power. Chapter 6 covers the body and gender, while Chapter 7 deals with race and class. As a conclusion, Chapter 8 describes how the first draft was transformed to one acceptable for publication.

This thesis investigates the literary fantastic in Italy from the late nineteenth century to the second half of the twentieth century. The purpose is to analyse the way in which the fantastic functions in a story—its ʻmechanicsʼ—and to see how the fantastic evolved structurally over the first century of its existence in Italy. This investigation is carried out by the development of a new theoretical methodology together with the close reading of a selection of texts from four key Italian authors of fantastic literature. The thesis is divided into six chapters. The first chapter is a historical overview of the emergence of the fantastic in Italy in the late nineteenth century up to the second half of the twentieth century; it examines the obstacles the fantastic has faced and some of the thematic and structural characteristics of texts which emerge. The second chapter is a literature review of the theoretical models used to analyse and understand the fantastic, followed by an outline of a new model, entitled Different Mimetics, which looks at the internal logic of the fantastic. In the following four chapters Different Mimetics is applied to the study of a selection of fantastic texts by four authors. Chapter three focuses on Ugo Tarchetti, and shows that his stories are defined by coexistence and coincidence in both historical and thematic terms. Chapter four demonstrates how Giovanni Papini reverses the mechanics one might expect, and how his stories are structured as internal narratives. Chapter five looks at how Dino Buzzatiʼs stories are characterised by instability and stretched narrative paradigms; and finally, chapter six looks at how Italo Calvinoʼs narratives focus on world creation and paradox and how they question the stability of narrative paradigms.

This thesis brings to light evidence for the circulation and first-hand reception of Aristotle's Poetics in sixteenth-century England. Though the Poetics upended literary thinking on the Continent in the period, it has long been considered either unavailable in England, linguistically inaccessible to the Greekless English, or thoroughly mediated for English readers by Italian criticism. This thesis revisits the evidentiary basis for each of these claims in turn. A survey of surviving English booklists and library catalogues, set against the work's comprehensive sixteenth-century print-history, demonstrates that the Poetics was owned by and readily accessible to interested readers; two appendices list verifiable and probable owners of the Poetics respectively. Detailed philological analysis of passages from Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesie proves that he translated directly from the Greek; his and his contemporaries' reading methods indicate the text circulated bilingually as standard. Nor was Sidney’s polyglot access unusual in literary circles: re-examination of the history of Greek education in sixteenth-century England indicates that Greek literacy was higher and more widespread than traditional histories of scholarship have allowed. On the question of mediation, a critical historiography makes clear that the inherited assumption of English reliance on Italian intermediaries for classical criticism has drifted far from the primary evidence. Under these reconstituted historical conditions, some of the outstanding episodes in the sixteenth-century English reception of the Poetics from John Cheke and Roger Ascham in the 1540s to Sidney and John Harington in the 1580s and 1590s are reconsidered as articulate evidence of reading, thinking about, and responding to Aristotle's defining contribution to Renaissance literary thought.