The purpose of this study is twofold. It focuses primarily on comparing the works of Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht within the context of recent feminist political theory and critical thought. In addition, it utilizes six different methods of feminist criticism in an effort to identify those modes which best serve both feminism and literature. / Brecht and Shaw are the subjects of this study because both are generally considered to be straightforward and progressive in terms of their socio-political perspectives, and because both have been thought to display feminist sympathies. By comparing these two apparently progressive, liberal leftist male playwrights, I attempted to show where they fit into the mainstream of male thought, and identify where they do indeed deviate from it, focusing particularly on differences between male perception and female reality. / Because this study has a dual purpose, and because each chapter utilizes a different critical method, general conclusions were difficult. Brecht seems relatively traditional in his use of female heroes: their function is largely symbolic, and too often he equates female victimization and eroticism. Shaw, who is often thought to be the quintessential male feminist, was far more surprising because I found that his plays often reflect fear of powerful women. While Brecht saw women as essentially powerless victims, Shaw specialized in the carnivorous female. In addition, as Shaw developed the concepts of the Life Force and Creative Evolution, he tended to see women's role primarily in terms of reproductive function, but I remain unconvinced that women's creativity is to be found chiefly in procreation. / Finally, in terms of feminist criticism, a pattern emerged during the course of my inquiry. In every case, whether employing archetypal, structural, socio-historical, androgyny, radical or socialist analysis, issues of sexual power politics, of dominance and subordinance, surfaced which could not be circumvented. This reflects radical feminist theory, and if the purpose of feminist criticism is to open up a text, radical criticism offers the most insights into the hierarchical, sexual political organization of culture, as well as into the ways literature both reflects patriarchal values and contributes to the oppression of women. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 45-09, Section: A, page: 2698. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1984.

Narcissism is often evoked in discussions of James Joyce and his characters, yet no critical consenus has been reached as to what the narcissistic condition entails, or whether a distinction can be made between the narcissism of Joyce the author and the narcissism of his characters. Indeed, narcissism has been a critical chimera for centuries, plaguing all disciplines that attempt to define the process of self-formation and self-recognition. A close reading of Ovid's myth of Narcissus and Echo reveals a complex of thematic motifs and narrative modes that are a crucial starting point for a study of narcissism. Like Ovid, Joyce demonstrates an understanding of the semiotic nature of the self--that it is fluid rather than fixed. In this way both authors provide us with a model of the self as myth, a work-in-progress. This assumption links Ovid's and Joyce's depiction of the narcissistic condition with the twentieth-century debate between the two dominant models of self: the psychoanalytic, which posits the self as fixed or essential, and the phenomenologic, which posits the self as shifting and situational. Theories on narcissism have undergone a related paradigmatic shift in the past thirty years from the Freudian view of narcissism as a temporal, pathological phenomenon of self-development, to a view proposed by analysts such as Jacques Lacan, Heinz Kohut, and Julia Kristeva of narcissism as an atemporal, normative endo-psychic structure. Evidence of this reconfiguration can be found in recent critical theories that consider the seminal role of narcissism in the reading process and in contemporary social dynamics. Joyce's work also demonstrates an awareness of the mythic, psychoanalytic, philosophical, sociological, and political implications of narcissistic behavior in all his major works of fiction, from Dubliners to Finnegans Wake. Working from an assumption that the self is fundamentally fictional and fragmented, Joyce depicts the creative potential of narcissism as well as its limitations. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 55-01, Section: A, page: 0090. / Major Professor: Stanley E. Gontarski. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1993.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 30-09, Section: A, page: 3940. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1969.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 31-09, Section: A, page: 4766. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1970.

Throughout his career, Malcolm Lowry deliberately used the "self" as an excavation site for revealing those hidden impulses which compel a person to create and destroy. Applying his theoretical knowledge of Freudian depth psychology, which he absorbed during his apprenticeship under Conrad Aiken, Lowry reveals himself as a writer driven by neurosis toward creative activity, striving, ultimately, to circumvent self-destructive tendencies and schizoid and manic-depressive mental states through his work. / Beginning in Ultramarine, engendered under Aiken's tutelage, Lowry brings to light oral, anal, and phallic pregenital sexual conflicts that lead to neurotic and moral anxiety, tormented dreams, sexual phobias, inhibitions, and defense mechanisms which impede maturity. By delving inward, he finds an aggravated Oedipal phase to be at the center of artistic sublimation. / In Lunar Caustic, Lowry attempts to break free of the anxiety of Aiken's influence while examining insanity at close range. Initially blurred in an alcoholic daze, patterns are soon clearly defined: oral dependency, phallic guilt, aggression, regressive infantilism, and, within the clinical situation, principles of "basic trust," transference neurosis, transference defense, and interpretation. / Under the Volcano, his major achievement, permits Lowry to devour Aiken's hovering presence while descending into his alcohol-induced "dark night of the soul." Mexico's infernal beauty operates as the psychological correlative for a people whose birth into the modern age has been fraught with violence, separation anxiety, and lapses into utter solitude. Further, his central characters are burdened by the psychological weight of their pasts--unresolved conflicts stemming from traumatic childhood and adolescent experience. Geoffrey Firmin, particularly, is victimized by the "witty legionnaires" of paranoia and his self-destructive alcoholism, assuredly a sign of chronic suicide. / Finally, Dark As the Grave and Through the Panama explore the psychological entanglements that writing inflicts on personal happiness. While turning to literary solipsism, Lowry feels himself being overtaken by his fiction, and though he had hoped his writing would help him justify himself to himself, instead, his obsessive, perfectionist demands transform it into a vehicle of self-destruction. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 51-02, Section: A, page: 0502. / Major Professor: David Kirby. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1989.

Set in New York City in the 1950's, Valentino's Hair is a short novel about a Puerto Rican barber, Facundo Nieves, and his lame young son Lupe. The focus of the novel is a series of confessional chapters in which the barber tells about a day in 1926 when he cut Rudolph Valentino's hair in an exclusive Manhattan hotel. In Rudolph Valentino, Facundo identifies a persona he envies, "a man who had probably made love to every woman he touched." However, the Valentino who Facundo Nieves meets is a disturbed, emotionally haggard, and philosophical man who carefully watches Facundo's fine hands work and comments that the barber is cutting away at the actor's life too, "time leaving me like moments falling to the floor." / When the screen idol dies a month later in a New York hospital, the barber at first feels guilty, sure that he has contributed in some way to Valentino's premature death. But after visiting a bruja, a neighborhood witch, the barber discovers something even more frightening: the hair is a powerful aphrodisiac. And so, Facundo embarks upon the ignoble cause of using the hair to seduce a young American woman whom he has lusted after, a woman who does not love him but who is helplessly drawn to Facundo through his use of the magical hair. The outcome of this relationship borders on horror. / The novel explores Lupe's relationship with his now aged father and his discovery of his father's secret practice of sympathetic magic, the environment of the barber's unique world, the various mythologies associated with hair, and Puerto Rican family and culture. But the barber's voice serves as the anchor, revealing psychological turmoil and inevitably leading to the conclusions that innocence can be lost in both the real and mystical world and that we are all morally corruptible and subject to temptation. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 51-12, Section: A, page: 4125. / Major Professor: Jerome H. Stern. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1990.

This novel is about the incarceration of four women in a Florida prison: Frankie Whittaker, the drug-addicted daughter of a rich developer in South Florida who has already lost one daughter to violence; Violet Temple, who had been abused by her husband for years before she finally murdered him; Leigh McCall, a former prostitute, who risks her freedom to help an old woman receiving questionable medical treatment; and Jewel, an ertswhile associate of of Frankie, who falls in love with a woman named Lucky. / The four women interact with each other and with the other inmates and in so doing, learn about themselves and find ways to create a community. For some this community will not suffice, but for others it is a form of redemption. Violet and Frankie join the choir, and by the end of the novel, they have formed an alliance to put out a prison newspaper. When prison officials forbid them from creating the newspaper, they violate the orders and do it anyway, willing to suffer the consequences for what they believe is right. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-07, Section: A, page: 2683. / Major Professor: Sheila Ortiz Taylor. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1995.

The Hermeneutics of Birdsong is an examination of the tensions, boundaries, and interplay between creative and critical writing. Composed principally of free-verse lyric poems grouped by theme into four chapters, the collection also includes a parallel text consisting of critical commentary, quotes from theorists, and at times, more poems. The parallel text, in its discussion of the nature of language, intentionality, intertextuality, authorship, anxiety of influence, imagination, and the creative process, attempts to make explicit the hidden theoretical assumptions which are the invisible "center" of any mode of discourse, including a poetry collection. / The primary and parallel texts function simultaneously as a collage or ideogram, in which the individual poems and critical commentaries coalesce to create a unified, though seemingly fragmented, whole. In keeping with this blending of the creative and the critical, quotes from other sources are used in both a traditional and non-traditional manner. At times, the outside critical commentary is formatted typographically as poetry or as an epigraph for a primary-text poem. The goal for this non-traditional use of source material is to explore and explode the traditional conception of the antithetical positions of the "creative" and the "critical" by challenging the reader's expectations. / Indeed, by forcing the reader to experience criticism as poetry, or poetry as criticism, the primary and parallel texts seek to demonstrate the arbitrary generic distinctions often used to label or judge writing, and thus offer the reader new positions from which to experience and assess the nature and interaction of critical and creative writing. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 57-03, Section: A, page: 1132. / Major Professor: Wendy Bishop. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1996.

In a 1962 article for Perspectives of New Music, Edward T. Cone presents a theory called stratification, interlock, and synthesis, based on the music of Stravinsky. According to Cone, stratification is the separation of musical ideas juxtaposed in time; interlock is the delayed continuation of a musical idea which has been interrupted; and synthesis is the assimilation or resolution of ideas that have been stratified. Using the disjointed structure of Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments as the prime example, Cone identifies more subtle uses of the technique in several other of Stravinsky's works and suggests that the technique may be found consistently in Stravinsky's pre-serial compositions. / In response to this assertion, the present study seeks to determine the extent to which the technique of stratification, interlock, and synthesis may be found in The Rake's Progress, the great culmination of Stravinsky's "neoclassic" period. First, a critical evaluation of Cone's article is made, including a detailed examination of his analyses of the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, the Symphony of Psalms, the "Hymne" from the Serenade in A, and also an analysis of the fugue from Orpheus to which Cone alludes in an addendum to his article. Some general conclusions are drawn, and terminology is refined so that the theory may be systematically applied to other works. Then, the theory is applied to The Rake's Progress. The Rake is Stravinsky's longest work, yet is composed in the eighteenth-century "number" style, allowing for an expansive analysis on many different structural levels. / It is determined that the Rake does indeed display the technique of stratification in various ways. In certain "numbers," the technique is the primary structural force. In several cases, elements of the technique span entire scenes and involve the dramatic situation as well as the music itself. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 50-02, Section: A, page: 0294. / Major Professor: Peter Spencer. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1988.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 40-06, Section: A, page: 3293. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1979.