Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of English Language and Literature, December 2003. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Inaug.-diss.--Tübingen. / Lebenslauf. "Literaturverzeichnie": p. 81-84.

Thesis (M.A.)--Lehigh University, 2009. / Adviser: Scott P. Gordon.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

This thesis contends that, in the process of publication of the diaries of Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, their husbands, Leonard Woolf and Ted Hughes, employed editorial strategies that created false portraits of the authors. Each of these men tantalized readers with the possibility of reading the 'truth' of these women's lives, but they edited their texts in ways that would minimize readers' understanding of Plath and Woolf while maximizing the benefits they would collect as heirs of the authors' literary estates. These examples are typical of a larger pattern in which women's private writings are edited by family and/or friends of the author in an effort to gain control of the author's public personae.

These studies trace the development of a mid-twentieth century romanticism, a Neo-Romanticism distinct from both an earlier High Romanticism and a later Postmodernism. The focus is on six twentieth century writers, all but one American: D. H. Lawrence (English), Paul Bowles, Robert Lowell, John Ashbery, William Stafford, and Tim O'Brien. Neoromantics seek to relandscape the derealized self by venturing outward; venturing outward they both empty and refurbish the self. By pursuing a new self or taking an extreme course--that is, the long way home--they come to an unexpected conclusion: they discover the illusion of liberty, of democracy, of self-agency, and thus the great truth of old orders, deeper than tradition.

Superfluous Absence examines how writers of fictional narratives imagine readers that might read their texts and use these imagined readers--and the voices they represent--as leavening agents for the fictions they produce. In this theory, writers do not appeal to these readers except as they function as language and its desire to be decoded--as they function as language's desire for itself. Ultimately, the texts of fiction reach real-life readers and Superfluous Absence traces how authors struggle with the leavening agent of the reader's voice when the reader's voice becomes an actual social presence in an actual historical moment. This struggle consists of writers trying to preserve a non-space, and readers try to turn this non-space into praxis and presence. In Superfluous Absence I trace this struggle in James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, Samuel Beckett's trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable and Stephen King's Misery . I also explore what happens to this reading desire when it is translated into a visual format, as is so often the case in the twentieth-century when literature is adapted into film. The test case is Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, an appropriate choice as it is a movie that tries to eradicate the linguistic in favor of the purely visual. Finally, this project is not just an objective charting of the various locations and non-locations of the writer's voice in twentieth-century fiction and film, but is also a very subjective attempt on the part of this writer to understand the presence or non-presence of his authorial voice in acts of fiction. Therefore, the author of this dissertation frequently writes autobiographically and frequently turns his critical voice into the voice of fictional narration.

This dissertation examines the history of conversation in eighteenth-century England by looking at normative sites of discourse, beginning with the comedies of the Restoration stage, moving on to the coffeehouses, the polite drawing rooms, and ending with an examination of the Bluestocking circle. Of particular interest is the role of women as conversation moves along a trajectory from the eloquence of the Renaissance period to a more rational style associated with the emerging middle class, to the polite conversation that allowed women a place in discourse. Early in the period, women were expected to remain silent--and thus chaste--when in company, but as the century progressed and it became clear that women's public roles were expanding, the mode of public discourse shifted, from eloquence to politeness. At the same time, the normative sites of discourse shifted as well, from the coffeehouse, in which the man aware of his civic duty engaged in rational debates on subjects of public import, to the more private drawing rooms, sites presided over by women and made polite by their presence. The conversation, as well, became less concerned with public issues such as politics and literary criticism and more taken up with the display of good manners.

Cinematic adaptations of "classic" novels have long been viewed by filmmakers and critics as vehicles for understanding the art, mind, and even the personality of the original author. By examining the film and TV adaptations of Thomas Hardy's novels and by analyzing critics' opinions on the "fidelity" of these films to Hardy, we can see that this author is popularly perceived to be a pastoralist, classical tragedian, gloomy pessimist, and ardent social critic. Though there is considerable truth in these images, they do not convey all of who Hardy was and what his novels convey. Moreover, these perceptions of Hardy actually have their roots in the earliest reviews of his novels, and they have been largely reinforced by the decades of criticism that followed. But Hardy's novels actually resist simple classifications: they are multi-generic and are constantly involved in the process of deploying and questioning the language that is used by the characters and by the readers to construct a sense of reality. Since Hardy's novels are continually interrogating language and genres, they border on being self-destructive and incoherent. The function of some literary criticism of Hardy has often been to make his novels coherent and easy to understand, and to a large extent literary critics have created their own "versions" of the novels that have often become accepted by general culture. In chapters on the individual novels, this study isolates the critical histories of Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure; critically reads the novels to determine both how they give rise to and challenge popular and critical assumptions; and utilizes Barthean-derived theories on intertextuality and film adaptation to consider how filmmakers have intercepted not only Hardy's plots, but the critical interpretations of his novels, to replicate and codify on the screen familiar images of Hardy. The film and TV versions of Hardy's novels are both reflections of how these works traditionally have been read and perceived, and reflectors on how Hardy's novels continue to be read.

One of the primary objectives of the realist novel has been to imitate the linguistic processes that assert and maintain the idea of a coherent identity. In Working Mother: The Birth of the Subject in the Novel, I present a developmental view of the birth of the subject as articulated by some of the architects of the novel. In an examination of James and Henry Austen's Loiterer, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Henry James' Washington Square, I locate and analyze narrative sites that mirror, presage, and/or encourage the production of readerly subjectivity across the body of a female or feminized figure, usually a mother. I employ a psychoanalytic and semiotic point of view to demonstrate the mother's role in narrative subject formation via the process of "suture." Margaret Homans, Christine Boheemen, and others have argued that the novel--and indeed all of Western culture--depends upon the repression of the mother. In Homan's useful formulation "the mother's absence is what makes possible and makes necessary the central projects of our culture." Active subjugation, incorporation, and disavowal of the maternal--ejecting the mother from the story, separating her from the protagonist, and from the reader--enable subjects to be produced in the novel form. Aggressivity as well as narcissism, disavowal as well as incorporation, help to jettison the originary feminine from the novel, leaving an absent space in which the subject can enunciate.