<p> The pervasive perspective of Western culture views spirit as enmeshed or entombed in matter, an interpretive frame that drives us to periodic socio-political disintegration and bourgeoning planetary illness because it neither honors flesh as vehicle for spirit nor tends spirit as animating flesh. Rather, our dominant paradigm emphasizes disdaining the body and lamenting the spirit, thereby either indulging the former or discounting it, while either disempowering the latter as incarcerated in flesh or seeking its "liberation" from flesh. This is an <i>Anti-Life Equation</i> denigrating both body and spirit, and playing a fundamental role in humanity's current crises in faith, politics, and sustainability. </p><p> The Myth of Orpheus has traditionally been interpreted as exemplifying this emphasis by portraying him as a failure both of body because attached to his mortal lover and of spirit because unable to refrain from dooming her to eternity amongst the shades of Hades. In this frame, the mythic master of the lyre becomes a proponent of a transcendentalist imperative to free spirit from carnal prison. But what if Orpheus was not a failure &ndash; not because he failed in bringing Eurydice's spirit shade back to the day world, but because he succeeded in relinquishing his love from her carnal form and from his attachments to and projections upon her? </p><p> From this perspective, that of a Recombinant Mythology, we may reclaim our foundational stories from the anti-life perspectives and interpretations that color them. Thus we may recognize Orpheus as the very image of perceiving, acknowledging, and embracing the spiral gift of life, in which spirit enters body as a journey of experience for the tempering of soul, for transforming or transmuting phenomenal, incarnate being, rather than as a trap of separation, dislocation, and isolation from divinity.</p>

<p> This study analyzes "culture" in late colonial Korea, 1937 to 1945, with the methodology of worldly repetition. By embedding culture between quotation marks, I intend to clarify that the object of this study is not an object per se. Korean "culture" is constructed around the three names that the present researcher is barred from objectifying. The names Yi Sang, Ch'oe Chaeso&caron;, and Mun Yebong are not mere indexes of three persons with their particular intrinsic qualities. They are names that represent the Korean culture of the time. However, their representativeness does not mean that they enable the present researcher to reconstruct a general view of Korean culture of the time through them. They are representative to the extent that they allow the present researcher to reflect his own positionality in his research on a past event in history. This reflexive return is induced by the names' essential self-reflexivity; reflections on them are not to be objective if they are aiming at others through the names. The three names are representative of Korean culture of the time to the extent that they are the "origin" of the "culture" that is being formed within the present researcher's time.</p>

Anne Hebert has produced a variety of works which act like a mirror with multiple reflection effects. The main themes of love, death, and of writing are integrated in the majority of the novels, in the framework of a fictitious autobiography of a character. Reconstructing the past, the main character daydreams and looks at a mirror which reveals changes. The reflection of this person in the plot is doubled at the level of the writing which reflects itself through the process of autorepresentation. Lucien Dallenbach's theory expressed in The Mirror in the Text, helps us bring out the components of autorepresentation in the novels by Anne Hebert. The first chapter deals with the reflection of the enunciation taking into account the aspects of the production and of the reception of a text as well as the variety of textual metaphors. The second chapter concerns the reflection of the fiction. It analyzes the position and the importance of the "mise en abyme" in the novels as well as the different degrees of the text. The concept of "hypertextuality" in Gerard Genette's Palimpsest allows us to define the relationship Anne Hebert's novels maintain with other French, British and American literary texts. The problem of the origin of the work of art and of poetic creation forms the subject of the third chapter. The texts reflect their origin, which in Anne Hebert's novels stem from an encounter of the main character with death, thus reenacting Orpheus's plight. Via a real or a mental trip to the kingdom of the dead, the main characters draw their possibilities of art. At the same time they compensate for the absence which death has produced in the act of narration. The presence of orphic poets and texts appearing in Anne Hebert's works through intertextuality and "hypertextuality" enhance the characters' orphic experience in the fiction. To a varying degree, all the novels renew and reflect the orphic myth of creation and liberation.

<p> While studies of fantastic literature have often focused on their structural and genre characteristics, less attention has been paid to the manner in which they address social issues and concerns. Drawing on theoretical, taxonomic, and historical approaches, this study argues that 19th-century England represented a key period of transformation during which fantastic literature evolved away from its folkloristic, mythic, and satirical origins and toward the modern genres of science fiction, feminist fantasy, and literary horror. </p><p> The thesis examines the subversive and transformative function of the fantastic in nineteenth-century British literature, particularly how the novel <i> Frankenstein</i> (1831), the poem &ldquo;Goblin Market&rdquo; (1862), and the novel <i>Dracula</i> (1897) make deliberate uses of the materials of fantastic literature to engage in social and cultural commentary on key issues of their time, and by so doing to mark a significant transformation in the way fantastic materials can be used in narrative.</p><p> <i>Frankenstein</i> took the materials of the Gothic and effectively transformed them into science fiction, not only through its exploration of the morality of scientific research, but more crucially through its critique of systems of education and the nature of learning. "Goblin Market " transformed the materials of fairy tales into a morally complex critique of gender relations and the importance of women's agency, which paved the way for an entire tradition of such redactions among later feminist writers. <i>Dracula</i> draws on cruder antecedents of vampire tales and the novel of sensation to create the first modern literary horror novel, while addressing key emerging anxieties of nationalism and personal identity. </p><p> Although historical connections are drawn between these three key works, written at different points during the nineteenth century, it does not argue that they constitute a single identifiable movement, but rather that each provided a template for how later writers might adapt fantastic materials to more complex literary, social, and didactic ends, and thus provided a groundwork for the more complex modern uses of the fantastic as a legitimate resource for writers concerned with not only sensation, but significant cultural and social concerns.</p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Duke University, 2006. / (UMI)AAI3250087. Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-02, Section: A, page: 0577. Adviser: Ranjana Khanna.

Inaug.-Diss.--Leipzig. / Vita. "Litteratur": prelim. leaf 4.

Thèse--Rennes. / Errata slip mounted on p. [2]. "Books consulted": p. [5]-6.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Comparative Literature, June 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of Comparative Literature, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 503-559). Also available in print.