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Original novel detailing the fall of a Mid-Western mall and its effects on the local population, including a critical preface.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 600-624).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 249-256).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF file (viewed May 29, 2007). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 264-272).

Novel Incest: Negotiating Narrative Paradox, investigates how representations of incest disrupt not only family relationships but narrative conventions as well. The conventions governing a narrative's structural movement from beginning to end are upset in ways that often mimic the destruction of family lineage that incest causes. Each narrative instance of incest marks reconsideration not only of Western kinship systems and, more recently, the discourse of bourgeois family structures, but also of specific aspects of the rhetoric of fiction. This history of family and narrative disruption is sketched in my analysis of such seemingly disparate texts as Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders; Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier; John Barth's novels and non-fiction, including The End of the Road, The Floating Opera, The Sot-Weed Factor, Giles Goat-Boy, Lost in the Funhouse, The Friday Book, Further Fridays, LETTERS, Sabbatical, The Tidewater Tales, The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, and Once Upon a Time ; David Lynch's films, including The Alphabet, The Grandmother, Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Dune, Blue Velvet, and Wild at Heart, and the pornographic film series Taboo I--XVIII . My analysis focuses on author- and reader-centered interpretations and includes both formal and thematic analysis. Psychoanalytic and deconstructive reading strategies are employed to investigate the intersections formed between narrative, rhetoric, and desire. The common thread connecting these texts is their unraveling of conventions in order to restructure the possibilities for narrative fiction.

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Roman Ingarden utilizes the phenomenological method in his description of the essential features or strata of "the" literary work of art. The two books, The Literary Work of Art and The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, taken together, constitute a full description of the acts of consciousness in the apprehension of literary works. / However, certain confusions arise concerning the notions of polyphonic harmony, aesthetic value qualities and metaphysical qualities in his description of literary works. It is not clear how they work together with the essential strata to found a literary work of art. And as related concerns, the number of essential strata and Ingarden's basis for a concretization are never fully clarified. It is argued that those confusions are the superficial symptoms of an internal methodological problem. Ingarden begins his analysis with the literary work considered as an abstract entity and not as a particular object of a reading consciousness. Following Husserl's phenomenology of perception, it appears that Ingarden makes an apparent error when he begins his analysis in the phenomenological mode of eidetic reduction. Because he has no object as such before him to reduce, it is claimed that his application of the phenomenological method is inverted. / An alternative to Ingarden's methodological procedure is presented when a "reading" or concretization of Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim is offered as an object for phenomenological reduction. The essential characteristics and their relations derived from the phenomenological reduction of this object are then compared with Ingarden's results. / The new structural relations which emerge in the reduction of a particular reading help to clarify the confusions found in Ingarden's analysis and demonstrate how the various newly described polyphonies found the presence of metaphysical qualities in literary works. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 46-01, Section: A, page: 0177. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1984.

In this work, linguistic script analysis is applied to Milton's Paradise Lost in relation to "Sonnet 19," Scott's Waverley isolated from other Waverley novels, Cooper's Satanstoe and Littlepage Manuscripts as a unit, Whitman's "Song of Myself" as a whole separate from Leaves of Grass, and Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man in relation to Simmel's conflict sociology. These works posit three scripted world-views. / Identity argues for divine sovereignty over all things which derive from a divine source. Separateness argues for co-dominion--the divine sovereign over the created world and a created sovereign with divine right--with power flowing linearly and hierarchically downward. In Individuated Sovereignty, individuals strive to perfect a fragmented world into a model world of things in and not in concert with the divine so that controversy occurs as individual and social limits to sovereign power are tested. Literature records commitment to a particular solution to the ongoing controversy. Script analysis shows that historical development, controversy over change, and traditional Western world-views are multiform. / Schutz identifies four worlds of typicality whose scripts are more-or-less formalized structures of the lived-world. To these is added the Alswelt. Each "world" has its histories pertaining to individual needs (economics) and to individual desires (domestics). Literature preserves the Alswelt record of their dynamic inter-relatedness. / Chapter I addresses the theory and method of analysis drawn from script theory based on Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Hegel's insights into history, and Schutz's worlds of typicality. The latter five essays outline the particular ideological commitment in the context of change and the resolution to controversy that is offered by Milton, Scott, Cooper, Whitman, and Johnson. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 50-08, Section: A, page: 2487. / Major Professor: Bruce Bickley. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1989.

The women in Doris Lessing's major novels attain plateaus of selfhood through their different experiences as surrogate mothers. At each plateau they reach an apex of sociopolitical, psychological and spiritual development. These plateaus are self-reliance, emotional fortitude, sagacious wisdom, spiritual awakening and restorative power, the highest level of selfhood. Reaching one plateau often generates the movement toward another, though each plateau is attained independently with no defined order or sequence of progression. Attaining plateaus of selfhood, however, is contingent upon breaking the pattern of what the novelist calls the "nightmare repetition." This term refers to the attitudes and code of behavior with which one patriarchal generation indoctrinates the next. It is only when a woman does not strive to evade the "nightmare repetition" that she fails to attain any plateau of selfhood. Any attempt by the woman to reproduce the patriarchal structure, according to her own perceptions, results in its distortion. Then, not only does the woman fail to attain plateaus of selfhood, but also the altered re-creation of the social order produces chaos and havoc for her own familial unit and for the culture as a whole. / This study examines six female protagonists who most distinctly illustrate the relationship between surrogate motherhood and the attainment of selfhood. Martha Quest in The Children of Violence series (1952-1969), Kate Brown in The Summer Before the Dark (1973), the unnamed narrator in The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), and Janna Somers in The Diaries of Jane Somers (1984) attain plateaus of selfhood through their different experiences as surrogate mothers. The major characters in Lessing's latest novels, Alice Mellings in The Good Terrorist (1985) and Harriet Lovatt in The Fifth Child (1988), however, fail to reach plateaus of selfhood, neither initiating a quest nor denouncing the "nightmare repetition." Consequently, they fail to undergo sociopolitical, psychological or spiritual development within the context of the works. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 50-06, Section: A, page: 1663. / Major Professor: Fred L. Standley. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1989.