This dissertation studies the Gauche divine, a progressive upper class elite from Barcelona during the 1960's, and its reflection in five novels by leading contemporary Spanish authors. The Gauche divine performed their ideological agenda through a cosmopolitan, ironic stance defying the Franco regime and its traditional morality. Moreover, these intellectuals and professionals---architects, publishers, movie directors, designers, writers, poets---connected to the newest trends in critical thinking, arts and literature in Europe and updated Spanish culture. On the other hand, this intellectual group offered an alternative discourse to orthodox Marxism. In order to frame this intelligentsia in its historical and social context, we review the concept of the committed intellectual, according to the texts of Antonio Gramsci and Jean-Paul Sartre. However, in the 1960's---with arising counter-cultural movements, along with the sexual revolution---the committed intellectual becomes spectacular, in a cultural milieu ruled by mass media. Since their cultural production in literature and visual arts shows a narcissistic attitude, the Gauche divine cannot only be considered spectacular, but specular as well. Once the group dissapeared, their narcissism turned into a self indulgent nostalgia, as we can see in the remarkable number of their autobiographies up to date. However, we can find a critical counterpart in fiction by authors in the margins of the group. Our analysis of Ultimas tardes con Teresa (1966), by Juan Marse, and Los alegres muchachos de Atzavara (1987), by Manuel Vazquez Montalban focuses on the frustrated relationship between the committed intellectual and the Southern immigrant in Catalonia or charnego, whose body is seen as a political and a sexual fetish. Therefore, we propose a poscolonial approach to the representation of the charnego, as a racialized character. Luis Goytisolo's Recuento (1973) illustrates the process of political commitment of the middle-upper class intellectual in Franco's Spain, from ideological conversion to disenchantment. Through Michel Foucault's discourse analysis, we discuss the position of the critical intellectual within the Communist Party. Finally, we explore historical memory, nostalgia and the conflict between ethics and aesthetics in Felix de Azua's Historia de un idiota contada por el mismo (1986) and Momentos decisivos (2000).

This thesis studies five pieces of Spanish postmodern literature, written by the Spanish author Lourdes Ortiz between 1982 and 2001: two historical novels (Urraca and La liberta), two short stories ("Eva" and "Salome", included in the collection Los motivos de Circe), and a play (Aguiles y Pentesilea ). Departing from the notion "intertextuality" and playing with the concepts of "History" and "Truth", these works establish a dialogue with fundamental canonical texts such as the Old and New Testaments, Platonism, Stoicism, and Greco-Roman Mythology. Based on a "metaphysics of essence", Occidental patriarchy has always counted on some extra-textual entity (i.e. God, the Law) that possesses the power of creation, that is, the Word. This misogynist ideology also believes in words' inherent masculine sexuality/textuality, therefore subjugating "feminine" constructs to an insignificant position under the presupposed "masculine" hegemony. This duality has served to maintain a symbolic order that makes a radical distinction between body/soul, "Other"/"I", a distinction which also refers to the opposition between passive women and active men. In these alienating circumstances, Ortiz's works use an ancient figure and tradition labeled as heresy by hegemonic voices: the myth of the androgyne, whose two components are considered equivalents. It is worth noting that despite all violent attempts to suppress this "undesirable counter-narrative", the encounter and transcendence of opposites embodied in this symbol recurs through History in texts such as the Hebrew myth of Lilith, the first chapter of Genesis, the discourse of Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium, and the alchemical notion of the "Purified Androgyne". Confronting orthodox and ex-centric discourses, the works by Lourdes Ortiz reveal, sometimes ironically, some subtle strategies hegemonic discourses employ to appear as a self-sufficient construction. In order to demystify logocentric Master Narratives and vindicate the anti-essentialist nature of the word, the fictions analyzed empower traditionally silenced female voices (Eva, Salome, Acte, Urraca, Pentesilea). These biblical, historical, and mythological women are considered by Ortiz as doers of their own deeds, women that fight to activate their right to negotiate significant and signifying places within the web of texts all individuals are embedded in.

Chapters I through III of this thesis seek to advance the study of apocalyptic form, themes, and imagery in fiction, and more specifically British literature from the twentieth century, by demonstrating that critics of the period have tended to apply an exclusively secular concept of literary apocalypse informed by a deep skepticism about the scriptural tradition whence it comes. Chapter I establishes both the significant value of and oversight in critical discourse on this topic, including an analysis of major works on the subject (Kermode and Frye). Chapter II examines the character of Revelation as both sacred scripture and literary object, and posits a model of secularization that accounts for the cumulative assumptions made by what I have termed "critical modernism" about literary apocalypse, showing that this model delimits critical uses of apocalypse to ethical apocalypse, principally in the guise of eschatological anxiety, and discourages the study of texts that involve scriptural apocalypse in other ways. Chapter III identifies and defines prophecy and revelation as companion dimensions to eschatology, and suggests ways of analyzing apocalyptic elements that will help focus and thus enhance the critical use of apocalyptic language. The thesis argues that prophecy and revelation are overlooked as apocalyptic elements chiefly because they occur in a "second stream" of texts that considers the spiritual dimensions of scriptural apocalypse as vital to the uses of apocalypse in the literature of the British twentieth century as the eschatological dimension is known to be. The second part of the thesis (chapters IV--VI) addresses the absence in critical treatments of apocalypse of the texts in this second stream, and the concomitant absence of scholarship on them, by analyzing the uses of eschatology-as-hope in Wyndham Lewis' Blast and Tarr, the representation of prophetic vocation in Aldous Huxley's Antic Hay and Time Must Have a Stop, and the ontos of revelation in William Golding's Pincher Martin, The Spire, and Darkness Visible.

Notre thèse porte sur la "métapoésie" chez trois poètes majeurs du XXe siècle: Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), Rene Char (1907-1988) et Yves Bonnefoy (1923). Nous entendons par le terme "metapoesie" tout poeme (qu'il soit en vers ou en prose; qu'il s'agisse de calligramme, de métagramme ou d'aphorisme) qui porte sur la poésie dans la poésie meme. Ce néologisme est un dérivé de "métatexte", "un texte qui parle lui-même d'un texte" (Henri Benac et Brigitte Reaute). Notre choix d'analyser l'oeuvre de Guillaume Apollinaire se fonde sur deux critères: il est le premier à faire entrer la poésie française de plain-pied dans le XXe siècle; il est aussi l'un des premiers à écrire ce que nous considérons comme des métapoemes. Dans le cas de René Char, disons, à la suite de Maurice Blanchot, que sa poésie "est révélation de la poésie, poésie de la poésie [...], poème de l'essence du poème". Des lors, son oeuvre, dans la perspective métapoétique, s'est imposée d'emblée à nous. Enfin, faisant de la poésie une quête de la présence, les poèmes d'Yves Bonnefoy deviennent également une quête de la poésie. Comme le notait Jean-Marie Gleize, "si le mot "poésie" est synonyme de "vrai lieu", d'accession ou de retour à la présence authentique [...], alors poésie est synonyme de recherche de la poésie". Au XXe siècle, la poésie a tendu de plus en plus vers une conscience aigue de sa propre existence qu'elle révèle à l'intérieur d'elle-meme. Dans cette perspective, il n'est pas exagéré de dire que le XXe siècle est, en poésie française, résolument métapoétique.

This PhD thesis, participating in the burgeoning interest in Mailer's prolific achievement in his mature years, examines three ironies attending his career: that his leftist, antiwar writer has recently been described as a literary imperialist and as a proponent of a fascistic aesthetic, that he has been the target of feminists and gender theorists despite the fact that his writings reveal his longstanding engagement with the psychology of gender, and that he is commonly regarded as a Manichean writer, even though some defining components of this near-ancient recasting of Zoroastrianism hardly apply to his religious/existential ideas. Chapter One, a study of Mailer's neglected Egypt novel, offers a Jungian-archetypal reading of Ancient Evenings (1983) while examining allegations that Mailer's brand of masculinity, labeled "rogue" (Faludi, 1999) and "imperialist (Savran 1998), evinces the "frontier psychology" (Olster 1989) that is synonymous with the fascistic attitudes attributed to him by feminists in the 1970s (Millet, 1971; Fetterley, 1978). Chapter Two, arguing that Tough Guys Don't Dance (1984) represents Mailer's subtle response to these allegations, claims that the novel gestures exoterically to the hard-boiled tradition---its title and main characters invoke David Madden's Tough Guys Writers of the Thirties (1968)---and esoterically to Reich's and Adorno's ideas about socio-biological constructions of gender. Mailer's achievement in Tough Guys resides in the ways in which he restores to the genre of mystery fiction the psychological elements that are usually lacking in its subgenre, the hard-boiled tradition of detective writing. Chapter Three treats The Gospel According to the Son (1997) as a "gnostic" narrative in which the narrator, in reconciling his Judaic and pagan inheritances, achieves a synthesis between Platonic and Aristotelian principles, embodies the reasons that Mailer referred to himself as a "left-medievalist." This synthesis, implicit in the novel's many dualisms, in Satan's dramatic role and in the fact that Mailer incorporates an esoteric passage deriving from The Gospel of Mary, qualifies the critic's tendency to label the prodigal and iconoclastic Mailer as Manichean---a commonplace in Mailer studies since the 1950s. As I argue in this chapter, Mailer's Gospel , if only because it participates in current debates about the meaning of the term "Gnosticism," warrants greater critical attention.

La notion de catharsis est, depuis la renaissance de la tragédie au XVIe siècle, au centre du discours sur l'effet du théâtre. Élaboree dans l'Antiquité par les sophistes grecs, elle a été intégrée dans la théorie dramaturgique par Aristote qui, dans la Poétique , en fait l'axe fondamental de la tragédie. La notion de catharsis, en mettant en lumière la figure du spectateur, engage une théorie de la réception au théâtre: à ce titre, elle a permis à la dramaturgie émergente des XVIe et XVIIe siècles de justifier l'existence et la pratique d'un genre fondé sur la mise en scène du mal et de la violence, en lui attribuant une vertu purificatrice ou purgative. Par ailleurs, la notion de catharsis, en délimitant et en définissant les paramètres de l'expérience tragique, est à l'origine de la réflexion esthétique et poétique qui amènera progressivement la dramaturgie du XVIIe siècle à se libérer des normes morales et philosophiques du théâtre humaniste. Or, cette évolution théorique et dramaturgique se donne d'abord à lire dans le texte des tragédies, suivant le principe que l'écriture dramatique, à travers les procédés de la rhétorique théâtrale, informe et détermine les modalités de la réception par le spectateur, et fixé par le fait même les bases du processus de la catharsis . Le développement de la dramaturgie baroque, et l'émergence de la métathéâtralité qui en illustre et diffuse les principes théoriques, constitue l'étape clé de la reconfiguration de la représentation tragique au XVIIe siècle, suivant une interprétation de la fonction du théâtre qui la distingue définitivement de la poétique aristotélicienne et de ses fondements philosophiques. L'abandon de la catharsis par les théoriciens du Classicisme constitue l'étape ultime d'une évolution qui a permis, d'une part, d'établir le spectateur comme figure centrale du théâtre, et qui a favorisé, d'autre part, la création d'une forme anti-cathartique de tragédie, entièrement vouée à la satisfaction des attentes spectaculaires du public, et fondée sur l'excitation de passions que le spectacle ne prétend plus purifier.

"Criticism by Genre: The Menippean Tradition in British Dystopian Fiction" investigates the origins of distinctive features of the English dystopian novel in the ancient and longstanding tradition of Menippean satire. The study traces this influence in the two novels that are must influential on the twentieth-century dystopian tradition in England: Butler's Erewhon and Huxley's Brave New World. Starting with a critical survey of the main concepts and terms that animate contemporary approaches to dystopian fiction, the study identifies a lacuna in the present understanding of the nature and function of this genre: no one has yet appreciated its descent from Menippean satire. Recognizing the debt Erewhon and Brave New World owe to the tradition of Menippean satire and to the work of its famous practitioners--Lucian, Thomas More, Voltaire, Diderot, and Swift--the study reassesses the attitudes toward human nature and the human condition that are developed in these novels, especially as these attitudes emerge through the voice of a fallible narrator. Identifying an ironic structure within these novels that prevents identification of the narrator's point of view with that of the author--an ironic structure almost universally ignored in the critical literature on these novels--the study modifies prevailing definitions of the dystopian genre as a whole and corrects prevailing misunderstandings of Butler and Huxley, providing new interpretations of their structural use of irony on the one hand, and of their attitudes toward human nature and the human condition on the other. The study also explores the critically neglected affinities between Erewhon and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Diderot's Supplement to Bougainville's "Voyage" and Brave New World, arguing that the polemics that Butler and Huxley maintain with the work of their famous predecessors allows us to recognize some distinctly dystopian aspects of their novels.

This dissertation explores the previously overlooked connections between the fiction of Flannery O'Connor and the writings of the apophatic (or "negative") theological tradition. By arguing for a greater relevance between O'Connor's stylistic negativity and her religious imagination than has been recognized, this study challenges the critical assumption that thematic approaches alone adequately explain the theological import of O'Connor's narratives. Accordingly, I read O'Connor's so-called negative style as part of a cultural rethinking of modernity that recalls the poetic-theological strategies of apophasis (negation) and its aesthetic of "unknowing." O'Connor's fiction, I argue, exploits the modernist crisis of meaning in order to underscore the transcendent dimension of experience, which most often admits something incongruous, even contradictory. Like apophatic writers, O'Connor uses tropes of darkness, emptiness, and silence to renew a sensitivity to transcendence; she relates the absence and unknowability that follows from the "death of God" ethos to the absence and unknowability of a "hidden" divinity that surpasses the furthest reach of comprehension. In doing so, she challenges the hierarchical and gendered meanings of tropes like darkness and light, presence and absence that have long dominated Western culture. Thus, my thinking toward the poetics of apophatic theology offers a method for approaching the fundamental aporia of theology in specifically literary terms. It also queries an opposing line of theoretical interest in apophatic discourse that valorizes its negative language forms as a dimension of postmodern antifoundationalism but ignores its vital interest in the constitutive power of language. I conclude that O'Connor anticipates the role of negativity and operations of the negative in the revaluation of the Western intellectual tradition that defines postmodernity, but by paradoxically exploring premodern modes of speaking and knowing.

Burning Down the Grief Motel is a collection of poems that combines explorations of a central speaker's personal grief, his transition into fatherhood, and his negotiations with identity in relation to landscape, folklore, local history, and issues of class. As a whole, the collection seeks to explore the different contexts in which traditional modes of masculinity become self-destructive in ways that disrupt those contexts and the people who must live within their boundaries. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2015. / March 18, 2015. / literature, Poetry, Southern / Includes bibliographical references. / James Kimbrell, Professor Directing Dissertation; Juan Carlos Galeano, University Representative; Erin Belieu, Committee Member; Susan Ward, Committee Member.

acase@tulane.edu