No description available.

The BBC was the laboratory for major experiments in modernism. Notions of aesthetics, audience, and form were tried out before the microphones of 200 Oxford St., London and heard around the world, often before they were in England. The format of the radio address and the instant encounter with listeners shaped both the production and politics of Anglophone modernism to an extent hitherto unacknowledged in literary studies. This dissertation focuses on how innovative programming by modernist writers, transmitted through instantaneous radio links, closed the perceived physical, cultural, and temporal distances between colony and metropole. Charting the phenomenon of writing for, about, and around broadcasting in the careers of E. M. Forster, Mulk Raj Anand, James Joyce, and C. L. R. James, the dissertation revises the traditional temporal and geographical boundaries of modernism. Contrary to the intentions of the BBC's directors, who hoped to export a monolithic English culture, empire broadcasting wreaked havoc on the imagined boundaries between center and periphery, revealing the extent to which the colonies paradoxically affected the cultural scene "at home." The Eastern Service (directed to India), where the abstract idea of a serious, cultural station was put into practice, was the laboratory for the Third Programme, England's post-war cultural channel. Yet the effects of Empire radio are hardly limited to its considerable impact on postwar British broadcasting. The intellectual demands of Indian listeners set the parameters of and bankrolled the literary work performed by modernist writers in England. Addressing authors and readers in India from a studio in London, Mulk Raj Anand embodied a crucial aspect of the Eastern Service, its treatment of English and Indian culture as mutually influential and coeval. Anand's broadcasts and 1945 novel The Big Heart (written during his BBC years) critique imperialism by positing the simultaneity of Indian and English temporality. In so doing, Anand's works offer a rejoinder to narratives of colonial belatedness pervasive both at the time and in the present. When tackling such transnational work, radio studies is uniquely positioned to provide an archive and a radical new model for modernist studies as it grapples with critiques of the western diffusionist model of culture. Literary production in and around the BBC registers radical cultural upheaval with a diagnostic power that reveals the attenuated ability of hypercanonical modernism alone to illuminate modernity's complex relays. Modernism on the BBC was not an exclusive canon of works, singular set of formal features, or even a unique posture. Instead, writers such as James, Forster, Anand, and Joyce offered complex responses to the pressures of modernity, including disruptions wrought by colonization, immigration, and war.  / English

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Bochum, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [413]-427) and index.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Bochum, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [413]-427) and index.

No description available.

Thesis (MPhil (Ancient Studies))--Stellenbosch University, 2008. / This thesis seeks to investigate the possible influence of Iranian apocalyptic on the Judaean apocalyptic literature, which was widely disseminated in the Near East during the Hellenistic and Roman phases of the Second Temple Period (c. 539 BCE- 70 CE). The similarities between Zoroastrianism and Judaism have been the object of scholarly study for more than a century. Iranologists such as Zaehner, Widengren and Boyce were particularly partial to the notion that Zoroastrianism influenced Judaism. They felt such influences were an inevitable consequence of the Judaeans living under Achaemenian rule for almost two centuries, and in close proximity of Persian communities for some centuries after the demise of the Achaemenid Empire. They based their conclusions on literary parallels between some key biblical passages and Persian literature, linguistic evidence and the obviously dualistic nature of both religions. Recently, however, this point of view has come in for criticism from biblical scholars like Barr and Hanson, who have pointed out that many seemingly Iranian concepts could as easily have emanated from other Near Eastern influences or evolved from within the Judaean tradition. The similarities between the Iranian and Judaean world-view are particularly apparent when considering the apocalyptic traditions from Zoroastrianism and Judaism: Both traditions view the course of history as a pre-determined, linear process in which good and evil are in constant conflict on both a physical and metaphysical level, until a great eschatological battle, introduced by a “messiah” figure, will rid all creation of evil. A judgment of all humanity and resurrection are envisaged in both traditions, as well as an utopian eternal life free of evil. However, it is very difficult to prove that these two apocalyptic traditions are in any way related, as most of the apocalyptic works from Iran are dated considerably later than the Judaean apocalypses, which mostly originated during the Hellenistic period. The apocalyptic phenomena within the two traditions are also not always entirely similar, raising the possibility that they are indeed not the result of cultural interaction between the Iranians and Judaeans. Furthermore, one must also consider that many phenomena constituting apocalyptic occurred widely during the Second Temple Period in the Ancient Near East, on account of the general state of powerlessness and disillusionment brought about by the Macedonian conquest of the Achaemenid Empire and the resulting political unrest. This study investigates the relations between Judaeans and Iranians under Achaemenian rule, the political and religious background and apocalyptic traditions of both these peoples in an attempt to ascertain whether Iranian beliefs did indeed influence Judaean apocalypticism. These investigations will show that, given the cultural milieu of the Ancient Near East in the Second Temple period, contemporary Greek evidence of Zoroastrian beliefs and the interpretative bent of Judaean scribal and priestly classes, there is a strong likelihood that seemingly Iranian concepts in Judaean apocalypticism were indeed of Iranian origin.

Le rapport occidental moderne au sacré s’est transformé de façon importante au 20e siècle avec le processus de sécularisation. Cette désagrégation d’un sacré traditionnel laisse un vide – principalement existentiel et spirituel – là où auparavant certains contenus associés au sacré permettaient de se positionner dans et face à l’universel, c’est-à-dire d’occuper une place dans le monde et les institutions qui l’organisent et d’investir cette place d’un sens compris, accepté et partagé autant individuellement que collectivement. De toute évidence, un tel processus d’effritement ne s’opère pas sans restes et la littérature est un espace qui recueille ces vestiges d’un sacré en transformation, d’un sacré qui fait l’objet d’une quête. L’écriture de Cioran représente un lieu exemplaire où sont concentrés ces vestiges et elle est aussi l’outil ou le médium par lequel la quête s’effectue. Son écriture tiraillée, pétrie d’un malaise existentiel et d’un doute profond, témoigne d’un refus, pensé comme une incapacité, à souscrire aux visions traditionnelles, surannées, du sacré. Généralement considérée par la critique comme inclassable – ni tout à fait philosophique, ni tout à fait littéraire – l’œuvre de Cioran souligne pourtant l’importance de la littérature comme modalité de l’esprit. Cette œuvre met en lumière le rôle de la littérature pour la pensée dans la mesure où elle est un espace qui permet d’accueillir la pensée en quête d’un sacré hors-cadre, en même temps qu’elle se fait le moyen d’une recherche plus libre, plus personnelle, du sacré. La littérature devient donc le réceptacle autant que le moyen d’une quête pleinement existentielle, une quête qui n’est ni représentée ni confessée, mais bien mise en scène, c’est-à-dire dramatisée. Le « je » qu’on retrouve partout dans l’œuvre de Cioran n’est pas le « je » d’une confession, mais bien un « je » narratif qui n’équivaut pas au « je » de l’écrivain. C’est précisément dans le décalage lié à la dramatisation qu’apparaît le paradoxe propre au savoirparticulier que porte la littérature: soit ce caractère personnel, incarné, particulier qui devient le véhicule d’une expérience universelle dans la mesure où elle a le pouvoir ou le potentiel d’abriter l’expérience personnelle d’un lecteur qui performe, pour lui-même, le texte. En ce sens, écriture et lecture sont """! imbriquées, comme deux faces d’une même réalité, dans cette quête d’un sacré qui se produit chez Cioran dans un espace d’exception, en dehors des institutions. À partir de l’exemplarité de l’œuvre cioranienne, cette thèse propose une réflexion qui porte sur la littérature comme mode d’inscription des vestiges du sacré ainsi que comme manifestation et moyen d’une quête d’un sacré débarrassé des balises institutionnelles, et qui tente de mettre en lumière le type de savoir propre à la littérature sous l’angle précis de la dramatisation littéraire dans le contexte particulier de cette quête. / The secularization process characteristic of 20th century Western thought has wrought profound change in our modern view of the sacred. Indeed, The disintegration of traditional representations of the sacred has left a mainly existential and spiritual void where, previously, certain contents of these representations allowed one to find a personal space in relation to, and within, the Universal – in other words, to find one’s place in the world and its organizing institutions – and to invest such a space with shared, accepted and understood meaning. However, this decaying process is not without producing a residual which literature can gather: vestiges of a sacred in transformation – a sacred which also remains the object of a search. Cioran’s writing is exemplary in this respect. Not only is it a depository for the remains of the sacred, it is also the tool or the medium, the striving path of its pursuit. His torn writing, ridden with existential angst and profound doubt, bears witness to a refusal – presented as an inability – to subscribe to outdated traditional representations of the sacred. Neither completely philosophical nor literary, thereby generally considered unclassifiable by scholars, Cioran’s oeuvre brings attention to the importance of literature as a modality of the mind. Cioran’s oeuvre brings to light literature’s role within thought as a space where a search for a sacred that lies beyond its traditional framework might manifest itself, but also as a means of undertaking a freer, more personal, search for the sacred. Literature thus becomes as much a receptacle as a means of a wholly existential quest that is neither represented nor confessed, but acted out. The “I” found throughout Cioran’s works is not the “I” of a confession, but the “I” of a narrative, which is not to say it is the “I” of the author. It is precisely in the gap created by dramatization that arises the paradox inherent to the particular knowledge literature conveys: the personal, incarnate, particular character of this knowledge becomes the vehicle for a universal experience which has the power or potential of harboring the reader’s personal experience as he performs – or acts out, #! as it were – the text for himself. In this sense, reading and writing are intertwined – are two sides of a single reality – in this quest for a sacred that comes forth, in Cioran’s thought, in this space of exception, outside of institutions. Taking as its starting point the exemplarity of Cioran’s oeuvre in these respects, this thesis proposes a reflection on literature as a mode of inscription of what remains of the sacred, as well as a manifestation and a means of a yearning or a quest for the sacred unhindered by institutional boundaries. It aims thereby to shed light on the type of knowledge peculiar to literature by taking into account the literary dramatization that takes place in the context of this search.

Les différents commentateurs de Lovecraft se sont au fil du XXe siècle jusqu’à nos jours entendus sur un point : l’originalité de son oeuvre. Impossible à cataloguer dans un genre littéraire précis, offrant de multiples couches d’interprétation, celle-ci fut analysée à la fois sous l’angle psychanalytique et sous l’angle philosophique et scientifique. Cependant, la dimension purement esthétique semble, peut-être par négligence, avoir été oubliée. Notre mémoire propose une investigation de l’esthétique dans l’oeuvre de Lovecraft. Notre hypothèse de recherche repose sur les analogies évidentes et pourtant peu approfondies par la critique entre l’esthétique de celle-ci et l’esthétique cosmogonique de l’Antiquité. Dans un premier temps, nous situerons l’œuvre dans son contexte littéraire, c’est-à-dire que nous nous pencherons sur les rapports évidents qu’elle entretient avec des auteurs tels que J.R.R. Tolkien et Arthur Conan Doyle et sur les différences moins évidentes qui la distinguent d’autres d’auteurs tels que H.G. Wells et William Hope Hodgson. Ensuite, nous mettrons en perspective les différences qui la séparent logiquement de la cosmogonie hébraïque et de la tradition théologique et philosophique qu’elle inaugure, entre autres, tel qu’elle se cristallise dans La Divine Comédie de Dante. Finalement, nous démontrerons à partir d’une comparaison serrée de motifs analogues, présents dans la longue nouvelle de Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness et dans le poème d’Hésiode, La Théogonie, le parallèle révélateur entre leurs esthétiques respectives; leurs esthétiques qui découlent de paradigmes du réel historiquement et essentiellement distincts, mais non pas opposés ou contradictoires. / Throughout the 20th century and until now, the different Lovecraft commentators have agreed on one point: the originality of his oeuvre. Impossible to pigeonhole in a specific literary genre, and open to many layers of interpretation, it has been analysed both from a psychoanalytic angle and from a philosophical and scientific angle. However, the purely aesthetic dimension seems to have been forgotten, possibly through negligence. This dissertation proposes an investigation of the aesthetic aspect of Lovecraft’s oeuvre. Our research hypothesis rests on the obvious, yet rarely elaborated upon by critics, analogies between it and the cosmogonical aesthetics in Antiquity. First, we shall position Lovecraft’s work within its literary context, e.g. by establishing its evident connection to such authors as J.R.R. Tolkien and Arthur Conan Doyle, but also by underlining the subtler differences that distinguish it from other writers such as H.G. Wells and William Hope Hodgson. Then, we will put into perspective the elements that logically separate it from Hebrew cosmogony and from the theological and philosophical tradition it inaugurates, as crystallized in Dante’s Divine Comedy, notably. Finally, we intend to demonstrate, based on a close comparison of similar motifs present in Lovecraft’s novella, At the Mountains of Madness and in Hesiod’s poem, Theogony, a revelatory parallel between their respective aesthetics; aesthetics that spring from historically and essentially distinct paradigms of reality, but which are not opposed or contradictory.

Enoncée notamment dans ses Notes et contre-notes, l’idée de Ionesco de donner de la matérialité à l’absence, à l’invisible, se retrouve dans la plupart de ses créations théâtrales. Pourtant, il ne s’agit pas d’une innovation technique pour soutenir le théâtre de l’absurde, dans le sens strict, mais d’une procédure qui se nourrit de l’irrationnel de l’existence humaine. Ainsi, les troubles identitaires sont la conséquence du gouffre dans lequel s’enfonce irréversiblement le personnage hanté par la mort. Dans un univers où il ne trouve plus de repères pour établir sa position, autrement dit son identité, il y a un déficit de présence. Non seulement le personnage hanté se manifeste comme présence absente, mais aussi la mort personnifiée qui transcende l’univers de sa proie. Victime et bourreau, jamais réconciliables, deviennent conscients de leur présence réciproque et leur rencontre ne se produit que pour accomplir l’acte d’agression. / In his book « Notes et contre-notes », Ionesco announces his project to give substance to absence, to the invisible, which is portrayed in most of his theatrical creations. For the playwright this is not a matter of creating new techniques to sustain the theater of the absurd, but rather a procedure that exposes the irrational side of human existence. The characters’ identities troubles are thus presented as a result as their being haunted by death – a haunting similar to sinking or falling into a deep chasm. In a universe in which the character has no clues for establishing his position or for articulating his identity, there is an absence or lack of presence. The haunted character manifests himself as a paradoxical lack of presence or a personification of death. Victim and aggressor become conscious of one another and their meeting will serve solely to accomplish the act of aggression.

Rédigés de manière non linéaire, "Monsieur Teste" (1946) de Paul Valéry et "Palomar" (1983) d’Italo Calvino posent les limites de l’intellection pure et les possibilités du texte littéraire à rendre compte d’une conscience, celle des sujets – Teste et Palomar – , comme les témoins réfléchis des phénomènes de l’univers. Bien qu’issus d’époques et de mouvements littéraires différents (poésie moderne française de l’entre-deux guerre chez Valéry, le néoréalisme italien chez Calvino) les deux auteurs parviennent néanmoins à une écriture comparable, qui valorise l’éclatement formel des catégories romanesques conventionnelles (intrigue, espace, temps, personnage) vers un nouveau réalisme, plus libre et moins contraignant. Que ce soit par le récit composites "Monsieur Teste" où Valéry met en scène Teste, un homme taciturne et solitaire vivant de l’intérieur, ou encore "Palomar" dont le protagoniste décide, un beau jour, d’arpenter du regard la moindre parcelle de l’univers, un élément demeure constant : le fragment, comme manière d’appréhender et de comprendre le monde et, par ricochet, de se saisir soir-même. L’analyse des incidences littéraires du fragment nous permettra d’interroger et de mettre en lumière, en les comparant, l’écriture fragmentaire de "Monsieur Teste" et "Palomar" comme la création d’une structure textuelle, mais aussi comme une forme donnant vie à un contenu : la pensée prenant conscience de ses actes. / Written in non-linear fashion, Paul Valery’s "Monsieur Teste" (1946) and Italo Calvino’s "Palomar" (1983) establish limits for pure intellection and modern literatures possibility to account for subjective consciousness – that is, for Teste and Palomar – as thinking witness to phenomena of the universe. Althought stemming from different literary movement (for Valery, modern poetry of the inter-war period and, for Calvino, Italian Neorealism), both writers produce a similar form of writing that valorises the formal explosion of conventional categories (plot, spacetime, character) and points toward a new realism, freer and less restrictive. Whether it is in the composite narrative of "Monsieur Teste" representing Teste, a taciturn and solitary man with an inner life, or that of "Palomar" who suddenly decides to visually inventory the smallest parcels of the universe, one element remains constant : the fragment as a way of seizing and understanding the world and, indirectly, one self. Analyzing the fragment’s literary effects will allow us to reflect on and demonstrate by way of comparison, how the fragmentary writes of "Monsieur Teste" and "Palomar" create a textual structure as well of a form giving life to a content : thought becoming aware of its actions.