Thesis (Ph. D.)--University OF MICHIGAN.

Thesis (M.A.)--Lehigh University, 2009. / Adviser: Rosemary J. Mundhenk.

Thesis (M.A.)--Lehigh University, 2009. / Adviser: Beth Dolan.

In picaresque fiction, subversive humor is related to genre, thematic unity, narrator/protagonists' points of view, and it illustrates fictionalized reality that is linked to contemporaneous culture and society. In this dissertation, I employ theories on humor---superiority, incongruity, release, and entropic---to study humorous episodes in Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), Guzman de Alfarache (1599, 1604) and El buscon (1626). Chapter one provides an overview of theories on humor, beginning with Plato and Aristotle and including modern theorists such as Victor Raskin, Marvin Koller and Patrick O'Neill. The superiority theory begins with Plato and Aristotle and acquires popularity in the seventeenth century with the philosophers Thomas Hobbes and Rene Descartes. The incongruity theory, which treats playful humor, originates in the eighteenth century with philosophers such as Francis Hutcheson, James Beattie and Emmanuel Kant. This theory is also associated with black humor that combines violent extremes of horror and humor and causes people to become both horrified and amused. The release theory, which emanates from Freud's ideas on psychoanalysis relates to an individual's release of forbidden thoughts, inhibitions and anxieties. O'Neill's entropic humor theory, which is related to satire, irony and parody, erodes truths and certainty and exposes the disruption of ordered systems. Henri Bergson's study of laughter functions as a social corrective while Mikhail Bakhtin's view of carnivalesque laughter signifies the symbolic destruction of authority and official culture. Chapter two studies the entropic narrator in Lazarillo de Tormes and the ways in which humor reflects a breakdown of traditional perceptions of reality, the crumbling of ordered systems and the erosion of truth and certainty related to sixteenth-century Spain. Chapter three analyzes four types of humor in Guzman de Alfarache that deal with social and moral dishonesty, horror and humor and literary vengeance. Chapter four treats grotesque black humor in the Buscon that relates to death, gallows humor (galgenhumour), cannibalism and the mutilation of a human corpse (reductio ad absurdum). Subversive humor in picaresque fiction conceptualizes reality that is linked to thematic unity, points of view and the poetics of culture and environment of Spanish society during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

<p> This dissertation examines the Possibilities for creating social change through literary criticism by focusing on three American critics: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Frank Lentricchia, and Edward Said. All three wrote Politically minded literary criticism during the 1980's and 1990's, decades that witnessed a broad-ranging attempt to roll back the change and turbulence associated with the 1960's. With regard to criticism, this attempt amounted to a challenge to literary theory, which was a radical way of thinking that crystallized in the 60's and early 70's and often carried revolutionary social hopes with it. As I suggest in the introduction, we are currently living in a moment in which the radical hopes fostered by literary theory co-exist uneasily with the counterrevolutionary movements of the 80's: the hopes and impulses still exist, but they have no adequate social outlets. Looking back to the 80's, I hope, will help clarify our moment, and Possibly Provide some resources for contemporary criticism. </p><p> My goal in each chapter is twofold: first, to understand the critic on his terms, second, to Put the criticism in dialogue with another body of literary or critical work in order to suggest its broader ramifications. With Henry Louis Gates, Jr., I argue that his effort to move African American literature and criticism into the mainstream of American literary study led him to maintain a view of race as an essence. Comparing his critical work with Hortense Spillers' Proves this Point, but also suggests that a more radical view of race remains in Gates' work. Frank Lentricchia tried to base a Political Program on the intimate experience of Pleasure that he felt when reading Poetry. Putting Philip Roth in conversation with Lentricchia reveals the impossibility of Lentricchia's Program, but also a different and more socially Productive Path for Lentricchia's interest in Pleasure. Edward Said tried to create spaces in his criticism where antagonism could be overcome. Reading Bharati Mukherjee's novel <u>Jasmine</u> (1989) next to Said suggests how useful Said's model can be, but also reminds us that Said only suggested, rather than applied, this model in his work.</p>

Using the concepts of Being as described by Calvino and the evaluation of Velasquez's painting Las Meninas in Foucault's, The Order of Things, a series of analytic exercises is initiated. Calvino speaks about Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility and Multiplicity; Foucault addresses the shortcomings of language. Interpreting the concepts inherent in these agenda, a methodology for re-seeing the spaces of a Salon and a Studio is proscribed. The results of these exercises provides a program for the construction of a vestibule: reconstructing the space of Las Meninas. This reveals the fundamental truth behind Calvino's writings: the vestibule serves as a tool for examining an environment. No one tool can embody the principles of Calvino; but only in the process of creating or viewing can the methodology for discovery be determined. Ultimately, the purest form of the vestibule lies in the phenomenal, the experiential and the language of the individual's imagination.

El presente trabajo es una investigacion de los elementos arabes en Reivindicacion del Conde don Julian de Juan Goytisolo, tomando como punto de partida la perspectiva critica de Americo Castro y Edward Said. El objeto principal es exponer los mitos nacionales espanoles y la perpetuacion de ciertas ideas estereotipadas con respecto al mundo oriental, para plantear el proceso de destruccion/construccion simbolica goytisoliana. La lucha contra el despotismo y la xenofobia nacional se hace indispensable en el proyecto de la liberacion intelectual y creativa de Espana. A traves de la destruccion de un lenguaje literario decadente y la aniquilacion de una moralidad reprimida y corrupta, el autor inicia su mision que aspira a la regeneracion y purificacion de la conciencia nacional. El resultado es una novela mudejar, o sea hibrida y renovadora.

In The Music of Time, Anthony Powell examines the tension between the internal reality of memory and the external social world in which the self is defined. The twelve volumes are presented as the fictional memoirs of Nicholas Jenkins; Powell's interest is in depicting voluntary memory and the stories we tell to explain who we are. Since Nick is both character and narrator, two philosophies of time are developed. On the one hand, internalized time is depicted; the memories Nick the narrator records are present simultaneously in his mind, and thus Nick remembers the past in terms of the future. But Nick the character functions in external, sequential time. Representing both internal and external concepts of time demands stylistic innovations; the effort is that the work's style is distinguished by its maintenance of chronology and accommodation of interruptions. Furthermore, since he functions as both narrator and protagonist, Nick must be defined socially. The voices of other characters are heard, and a bridge is thus formed between Nick's internal world, his memories, and an external, objective world; and the pleasure of shared experience, the basic impulse for narration, is reaffirmed. Finally, what makes narrative possible is order, seeing patterns in experience, and it is through the agency of memory that we detect patterns in external reality. Patterns are found to be at once imposed by the mind to order information and revealed in experience. These patterns are found on three levels: in language, plot, and characterization. But that patterns are discernible in experience does not mean that Powell is depicting a deterministic world; his characters seem to act as free agents, and the final cause of any episode in a pattern is indeterminable. Those causes that are discerned are those which fit the future effect. There is thus throughout The Music of Time a dynamic quality to Nick's narration: a stress between the power of the past to determine the future and the power of the future to determine the past; and it is through the depiction of individual memory and the patterns of social life that this tension is realized.

The fiction of Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf is situated, as are the writers themselves, in the late-Victorian middle-class ideology of individualism, defining the self as autonomous and self-determining and positioning women with domesticity, defining them as relational and self-denying. Although their representations of women and strategies of point of view indicate construction within these dominant discourses, their narratives also refute, sometimes inadvertently, these same discourses. Richardson's fiction suggests an image of identity rooted in individualism, in notions of an autonomous, unified individuality, associated in her culture with the masculine, whereas Woolf's suggests a basis in individualism's denial of an autonomous, unified feminine identity. The fiction of both assumes a transcendental self, a notion key to individualism, in the image of a "true" self that avoids situation within material and social circumstances. This image appears in Richardson's fiction in the perception of an untouched self and in Woolf's, in the perception of a dispersed self. In their representations of women, both also rely on notions of feminine identity that reiterate the cultural definitions of gender. In Pilgrimage, Richardson's central character, Miriam imagines her self as autonomous, essential, and transcendental. This notion also appears to govern the narrative focused through Miriam's perspective and related through a voice sometimes indistinguishable from hers. But the narrative provides a dual perspective on Miriam that refutes the notions of individualism grounding it and her imagined self. In contrast to Richardson's, Woolf's female characters, in particular in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, are not unified, autonomous individuals, but instead are fragmented and dispersed, and in their dispersal, they recapitulate both relational, self-denying femininity and transcendental individuality. Woolf's narrative techniques also seem to valorize the culturally constructed feminine by incorporating multiple perspectives and voices. However, Woolf's narrative strategy, like Richardson's, exposes the ideology that grounds it by granting the female narrators an authority ordinarily denied women and by exposing the failure of the relational ego to create a community of characters.

This dissertation is an examination of the complex problem of narrative voice in three novels of E. M. Forster. Much of the recent critical commentary on Forster's narrative voice either discusses narrative voice as an extension of character, or discusses narrative voice as a biographical and psychological extension of Forster. Despite these approaches to Forster's narrative voice, Forster's narrative voice continues to "irritate" us, as it did Lionel Trilling in 1944, in its "refusal to be great." I examine Forster's narrative voice as an autonomous element disconnected from the trappings of characterological, biographical and psychological criticism. I discuss how the narrative voice develops a moral and philosophical view that begins with a pessimism about the possibility of human relationships in Where Angels Fear To Tread, continues with a fantasy of perfectly unified relationships in A Room With A View, and culminates in A Passage To India in which the narrative voice promises unity and continuance through an implied acceptance of metaphysical and metaphorical assumptions. The protagonists in the three novels that I discuss all have an experience which they cannot define in words. The characters' inability to define experience parallels the narrative voice's detachment from the reader, and it also foreshadows the narrative voice's ultimate refusal to provide a definition, or an interpretation of itself. The characters' inability to define experience makes them appear to be characters who are limited, or "flat" stereotypes; and in all three cases, the protagonist requires another figure to act as an intermediary between it and the totalizing experience of "the other." This intermediary figure provides character with a circumlocutory interpretation of experience; and it therefore evokes the characters' simultaneous desire and inability to describe the subject of its experience. This circumlocutory figure becomes a figure that exposes and exists within the implied space between character and narrative voice, and the narrative voice and the reader. When the narrative voice describes a character's use of a circumlocutory figure, it points to both the character's, and its own elision.