Alors que la plupart des etudes concernant Alain Robbe-Grillet ont jusqu'a present examine l'aspect formel de l'oeuvre, cette these vise a proposer une nouvelle lecture de l'ensemble des romans robbe-grilletiens en confrontant ceux-ci aux opposes alchimiques. Abordee a partir de traites dus a des alchimistes d'envergure tels que Fulcanelli, Canseliet et Alleau, et de commentaires formules notamment par des inities (Guenon, Evola) ou des scientifiques (Eliade, Jung) reconnus, l'alchimie est consideree ici comme une philosophie doublee des preceptes d'un art. Aussi la demarche est-elle ideologique, l'objectif etant a la fois de deceler l'existence de l'episteme alchimique dans le texte robbe-grilletien et de decouvrir le role joue par celle-ci dans l'economie et la portee de l'oeuvre romanesque. La premiere partie met en evidence la presence des opposes alchimiques, dans lesquels peuvent etre reconnus la conscience et l'inconscient, sur le triple plan des personnages, de l'espace et du temps. Il est montre comment ces opposes fonctionnent a l'interieur du texte au point de generer un certain nombre de constantes thematiques et narratologiques. La seconde partie met au jour le processus dynamique qui, anime par un intermediaire pouvant etre identifie a Eros, provoque d'abord l'eclatement de l'unite primordiale et l'apparition consecutive des deux opposes, puis instaure, entre ces contraires, des relations conflictuelles au cours desquelles ceux-ci subissent une serie de metamorphoses conduisant progressivement a la reconstitution de l'unite. La structure de l'oeuvre romanesque robbe-grilletienne epousant la succession des differentes phases de l'oeuvre alchimique, l'oeuvre au Noir est principalement traite dans les trois premiers volumes (Un regicide, Les Gommes et Le Voyeur), l'oeuvre au Blanc dans les trois romans suivants (La Jalousie, Dans le labyrinthe et La Maison de rendez-vous), et l'oeuvre au Rouge dans les quatre derniers romans (Projet pour une revolution a New York, Topologie d'une cite fantome, Souvenirs du triangle d'or et Djinn). L'ensemble des romans d'Alain Robbe-Grillet apparaissent ainsi comme une fidele allegorie de l'opus hermetique dans laquelle le role de l'alchimiste est tenu par le narrateur, personnage fragmente dont tous les autres personnages symbolisent les divers etats de conscience et au travers duquel est visible la figure de l'auteur.

After receiving the transcript of one of her interviews, Anne Sexton archly commented to D. M. Thomas: "It's fascinating to read though in places highly inaccurate. I am known to lie, and I never let myself down" (M 279). The overlapping spaces between biography and confessional poetry are immediately vexed, particularly when Sexton's confessions relate directly to a problematic self, a multifaceted personality. The genre of confessional poetry, by definition, demands an intense use of personal experience, and Anne Sexton's The Book of Folly does indeed spill out the secrets of personal failure, emotional pain, sexual abuse, and mental illness; but the self that is created through art, the self that is expelled onto a page, vacillates between a number of ostensible truths and threatens to undermine the very core of confessional American poetry. What become finally the tenuous "truths" of the body emerge through questions of maternity which are ultimately important to Sexton. She variously interrogates the relationships with her own mother and her two daughters and articulates the mother/daughter theme into visions which redound significantly on the division between the Imaginary and Symbolic stages of psychoanalytic development. Sexton plays out this distinction in images of language, hunger, and excrement, all of which hold a central focus in The Book of Folly. Accessing these realms through the theory of Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, and pelipherally through Mary Douglas' anthropological investigations, allows one to interrogate the fictional coherence of these notions more closely and to perceive the inevitability of Sexton's final act of self-sacrifice.

This thesis examines the pursuit of forms derived from personal experience in (late-) modern American poetry, with a focus on four significant writers of the 1950s: Robert Creeley, Philip Whalen, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg. The study begins with a brief overview of the theories that most profoundly influenced these writers: Ezra Pound's Imagism, William Carlos Williams' "Relative Measure," and Charles Olson's "Projective Verse." This overview raises a central issue in American letters, a belief first expressed by Emerson, in "The Poet," that inherited formulations cannot adequately reflect or represent the truly indigenous writer's experiencing of a living world. Pound, Williams, and Olson all experimented with open forms in an effort to document experience in its original energy. For the late-modern writers that centre this study, though, Paterson figures as the defining example of such experimentation, and provides a paradigm of the American poet's struggle to break free from the trammels of received, standard forms. A close study of this text reveals something of the aesthetic problems that the authentically American poet must overcome in order to make form new, the chief of these problems being the necessity to determine the place of tradition in contemporary writing. Readings in the four principal poets of immediate concern follow the commentary on Paterson. Each individual reading begins with an exploration of the author's poetics, indicating substantial connections with the theories of his main mentors or predecessors. Each of Creeley, Whalen, Kerouac, and Ginsberg has explicitly affirmed his belief that poetic form must not be preselected or predetermined, but shaped by the act of composition itself, from the needs of the poem at hand. A demonstration of the poet's theory-in-practice then follows, in the form of a close reading of a representative text from each author's production: Creeley's Hello: A Journal, February 29-May 3, 1976, Whalen's Scenes of Life at the Capital, Kerouac's San Francisco Blues, and Ginsberg's The Fall of America. As the postscript of this study indicates, the authors of these texts represent but a few of the participants in this major trend in American writing during the past fifty years. A brief overview of the theories, and some of the practice, of Paul Blackburn, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, and Amiri Baraka shows that Williams, Pound, and Olson influenced many contemporary American poets, and that this preference for personal forms is not isolated to a few of the perhaps more widely-recognized figures of twentieth-century American literature.

Cette these est consacree aux problematiques de l'art, le desespoir, la verite et du nihilisme dans Le tunnel d'Ernesto Sabato. Notre approche est epistemocritique; c'est dire que nous etudions les savoirs textuels en fonction d'une perspective fondee sur plusieurs disciplines, dont la philosophie, l'analyse du discours et la psychanalyse. Il existe une abondante litterature critique portant sur ce roman, mais peu a ete fait dans cette optique. Notre approche traite la narration du peintre Juan Pablo Castel comme une facade qui dissimule une autre realite, plus problematique, qu'il convient d'identifier. Le langage du narrateur est regi par le stereotype, un mecanisme qui deforme le reel en lui donnant des apparences trompeuses. Le recit d'un crime se revele des lors etre un journal desespere, qui devoile la profonde angoisse d'un homme moderne en quete de reconnaissance affective. Mais cette quete est doublee d'une remise en question des valeurs de la modernite. Ce questionnement, ou quete de verite, est un processus nihiliste, puisqu'il propose, a travers le tableau Maternite, la dissolution de certaines valeurs et leur remplacement par une nouvelle authenticite. Tous les elements problematiques de ce journal desespere convergent vers Maternite, clef de voute symbolique du roman. Notre travail comprend quatre chapitres, qui suivent le fil conducteur de la quete desesperee de reconnaissance affective. Premierement, nous analysons les techniques narratives de Castel et comment se dissimule le desespoir dans son discours. Dans le second chapitre, nous etudions le role central de l'art dans le roman. Le troisieme chapitre est consacre aux problemes de communication et a la violence comme exutoire du desespoir. Finalement, nous etudions dans le dernier chapitre le cote philosophique de la quete de Castel: la remise en question des valeurs modernes.

This paper will examine the autobiographical writings of German-Jewish author Barbara Honigmann. Hongimann was born in East Berlin in 1949. She studied theater arts and worked in the theater in Berlin until 1975, when she became a free-lance writer and artist. She moved to Strasburg, France in 1984 in order to live in a community more accepting towards Jews. Since this time, she has written several novels, which many scholars have characterized as "autobiographical fictions." The main themes of her novels center around Judaism in Germany and identity as a German Jew. Autobiographical writings are very different from fictional writing, since the main character or characters in the writings are reflections of the author's experiences. Considering the characteristics of autobiographical writing as an avenue for literary analysis is important, since central themes in Honigmann's writings treat her identity as a German Jew after the Holocaust. The autobiographical aspect of Honigmann's writing, as seen in her novels Damals, dann und danach, Eine Liebe aus nichts, and Roman von einem Kinde, is extensively examined in this paper. Parallels among the books are drawn to demonstrate the autobiographical content of her writing. After a brief discussion concerning Jews in Germany after 1945, with a concentration of Jews in East Germany, the discussion of the autobiographical content in Honigmann's novel Damals, dann und danach turns to her reflections on Judaism and her German Jewish identity. / A Thesis Submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester, 2005. / April 1, 2005. / Jewish German Identity, Autobiographical Writing, Barbara Honigmann / Includes bibliographical references. / Birgit Maier-Katkin, Professor Directing Thesis; Winnifred Adolph, Committee Member; John Simons, Committee Member.

Woman by the Water and Other Stories is a collection of four short stories that range in setting from a touristy beach town in the Florida Gulf to a party school in northern Appalachia, and from old-fashioned Midwestern suburbia to a farming homestead in pre-Depression era Iowa. The common thread among them is that each story is narrated by a young woman who is embroiled in a dilemma that usually ends up being largely by her own making. Furthermore, the style of each story relies heavily on its narrative voice and point of view. I believe that my work fits in to the larger dialogue of contemporary women's literature that places value on story-telling, familial and relationship issues, self-identity and, ultimately, raw narrative honesty, even if it traditionally may seem "unbecoming" for female characters. / A Thesis Submitted to the Department of English in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts. / Spring Semester, 2011. / February 25, 2011. / women, contemporary, short stories / Includes bibliographical references. / Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Professor Directing Thesis; Julianna Baggott, Committee Member; David Kirby, Committee Member.

The aim of this dissertation is to examine the role of Molière in Danish theatre. More specifically, this dissertation identifies the extent to which Danish productions are faithful to the original French plays and discusses factors that have contributed to the success or failure of such productions in recent years. Factors relevant to this analysis include cross-cultural contrasts and similarities between France and Denmark, the themes of the individual plays and their transformations when translated into Danish, the quality of translations and adaptations and the use of modern or traditional dress. Included are comparisons of Danish translations of Molière from the seventeenth century to present-day productions. Methodologically, I proceed by examining the above-mentioned factors in relation to six plays: L'Avare, Tartuffe, L'École des femmes, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, Les Fourberies de Scapin and Le Misanthrope. In each case, I compare the original text with Danish translations and adaptations and draw on interviews with Danish directors, scenographers, other theatre practitioners, scholars, translators and journalists. The extensive interviews combined with research in theatre archives and national libraries, were conducted in order to analyze the ways in which Molière has been adapted for and received by the Danish public. After interviewing the above-mentioned people, after examining a vast number of manuscripts and newspaper reviews and conducting extensive research in Danish archives and libraries, I have documented and thus established that Molière has had a crucial and lasting effect upon the development of Danish theatre ever since the early eighteenth century. After researching the various productions, I have identified the extent to which Danish theatre professionals remain faithful to the original plays including aspects such as theme, language and costumes. From this research, it is clear that Molière has had a tremendous impact on and remains a cornerstone in contemporary Danish theatre. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2007. / February 1, 2007. / Les fourberies de Scapin, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, L'Ecole Des Femmes, Tartuffe, L'Avare, Drama, Denmark, Danish Theatre, Moliere, Le Misanthrope, Translations / Includes bibliographical references. / William J. Cloonan, Professor Directing Dissertation; Dennis D. Moore, Outside Committee Member; Alec G. Hargreaves, Committee Member; Mark F. Pietralunga, Committee Member; Mary Karen Dahl, Committee Member.

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