Thesis--Université de Paris III. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 787-801).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Stockholm, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 299-307) and indexes.

Orientador: Antônio Donozeti Pires / Banca: Márcia Valéria Zamboni Gobbi / Banca: Tânia Pellegrini / Resumo: Nossa pesquisa de mestrado procura apontar as relações entre a literatura e o seu condicionamento social em À sombra do cipreste (1999) e A coleira no pescoço (2006), livros de contos de Menalton Braff, autor brasileiro contemporâneo. A análise de orientação sociológica surgiu porque os contos de Menalton, ao mesmo tempo em que proporcionam uma leitura de cunho intimista pelas crises das personagens, linguagem poética, fluxo de consciência, emprego da técnica impressionista e expressionista, entre outros aspectos, integram em sua estrutura as formas com que as relações sociais, valores e orientações ideológicas interferem nas personagens e contribuem para a economia do texto. Para mostrar as imbricações entre texto e contexto, recorremos ao método analítico de Antonio Candido, a crítica sociológica, baseado nas obras Literatura e Sociedade (1965) e Formação da literatura brasileira (1997). Além disso, nosso embasamento teórico está centrado em outros autores que dialogam, direta ou indiretamente, com a crítica sociológica de Candido, como João Alexandre Barbosa, (A leitura do intervalo. Ensaios de crítica, 1990, e Alguma crítica, 2002), René Wellek e Austin Warren, (Teoria da literatura, 1965), Luiz Costa Lima (Teoria da literatura em suas fontes, 2002) e Octavio Paz, (O arco e a lira, 1982). Propusemos uma divisão do corpus em quatro frentes temáticas, Morte/Memória, Relações familiares, Abandono/Solidão e Embate social como método que auxiliasse a leitura dos contos analisados (treze no total). Essa divisão, contudo, buscou apontar o tema sobressalente em cada conto e não propor uma leitura estanque das temáticas, uma vez que, de modo geral, cada narrativa transita entre os quatro grupos. Para essa divisão utilizamos Tomachevski ("Temática", 1973) e o Dicionário de termos literários, de Massaud Moisés, 1974... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: Our research tries to indicate the relationship between literature and society in the short stories of À sombra do cipreste (1999) and A coleira no pescoço (2006) by Menalton Braff, contemporary Brazilian author. The sociological reading arose because Menalton's short stories, while providing an intimate reading because of the characters' crises, poetic language, stream of consciousness, use of impressionist and expressionist technique in writing, among others characteristics, also make implicit the ways in which social relations, values and ideological orientations interfere with the characters and contribute to the economy of the text. To show the connections between text and context, we've used the analytical method of Antonio Candido, the sociological critic, based on the books Literatura e sociedade (1965) and Formação da literature brasileira (1997). Our theoretical framework also focuses on other authors that interact, directly or indirectly, with Candido's sociological critic, as João Alexandre Barbosa (A leitura do intervalo. Ensaios de crítica, 1990, e Alguma crítica, 2002), René Wellek and Austin Warren, (Teoria da literatura, 1965), Luiz Costa Lima (Teoria da literatura em suas fontes, 2002) and Octavio Paz, (O arco e a lira, 1982). We have also proposed a division of the corpus into four thematic fronts, Death/Memory, Family Relationship, Abandonment/Loneliness and Social strike, as method which would help the reading of the short stories (thirteen in total). This division, however, sought to point the main theme in each story, but did not propose a reading of each theme tight, because each narrative moves among the four groups. To accomplish this division we've used Tomachevski ("Temática", 1973) and the Dicionário de termos literários, by Massaud Moisés, 1974. From these theoretical assumptions, we sought to ascertain which social... (Complete abstract click electronic access below) / Mestre

'1603. The Wonderfull Yeare: Literary Responses to the Accession of James I' argues that when James VI of Scotland was proclaimed James I of England on 24 March 1603, the printed verse pamphlets that greeted his accession presented him as a figure of hope and promise for the Englishmen now subject to his rule. However, they also demonstrate hitherto unrecognized concerns that James might also be a figure of threat to the very national strength, Protestant progress, and moral, cultural, and political renaissance for which he was being touted as harbinger and champion. The poems therefore transform an insecure and undetermined figure into a symbol that represents (and enables) promise and hope. PART ONE explores how the poetry seeks to address the uncertainty and fragility, both social and political, that arose from popular fears about the accession; and to dissuade dissenters (and make secure and unassailable the throne, and thereby the state of England), through celebration of the new monarch. Perceived legal, political, and dynastic concerns were exacerbated by concrete difficulties when James was proclaimed King of England, and so he was more than fifty miles from the English border (only reaching London for the first time in early May); his absence was further prolonged by plague; this plague also deferred the immediate sanction of public festivities that should have accompanied his July coronation. An English Jacobean icon was configured in literature to accommodate and address these threats and hazards, neutralizing fears surrounding the idea of the accession with confidence in the idea of the king it brings. In the texts that respond to James's accession we observe his appropriation as a figure of hope and promise. PART 2 looks to more personal hopes and fears, albeit within the national context. It considers how the poets engage with the King's own established iconography and intentions, publicly available to view within his own writing - and especially poetry. The image that is already established there has the potential either to obstruct or to enable national and personal causes and ambitions (whether political, religious, or cultural). The poetry therefore develops strategies to negotiate with and so appropriate the King's own self-fashioning.

Even though there has been no lack of scholarly attention to Chinese epistolary texts as a source of information, discussions of the functions and practices of letter writing in imperial China are very limited. This thesis deals with how elites in Song dynasty (960-1279) China exchanged personal and political information by writing and sending letters to each other, and how the genre of letters functioned in its various forms throughout the socially transformative and culturally active period. Through contextualizing epistolary material - such as letters in manuscript and print form, letter collections, and epistolary manuals, as well as sources in other genres that describe letter writing practices - I explore the multifaceted uses of letter writing for literati officials. The study provides a systematic view of the functions of Song letter writing in political, social, and cultural realms by investigating its complex practices. Using letters in several sub-genres by important literati figures such as Mi Fu, Li Gang, and Sun Di, it illustrates the main aspects of letter writing, including format, rhetoric, topical content, and handwriting. In view of the roles played by letters exchanged among Song scholars, this research on literati correspondence provides a window on how interpersonal relationships were conducted by written exchanges during that period. It also sheds light on how epistolary culture was transformed by the literati community during one of the key periods of Chinese civilization. These insights will contribute to the research of Chinese literati culture and related fields, such as the social history of middle period China, and will also be useful for comparing China's epistolary culture with the world's other letter writing traditions.

This thesis is a study of representations of disability in a selection of Anglophone Indian literature written between 1981 and 2006. In this thesis, I argue that, in fiction by Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Indra Sinha, and Firdaus Kanga, disability often takes on positive symbolic value as it represents the potential for the postcolonial polis to survive and thrive, but that the ultimate death or medical normalisation of disabled characters in many of these narratives is tied to a loss of political optimism. While these texts in many instances disturb norms surrounding able-bodiedness and disability, they often ultimately narrate a pessimistic conformity to scripts of normalization, and in so doing, map the unjust triumph of a prescriptive national or international politics onto a prescriptive politics of the body. As disability is eliminated, so is the potential for resistance to latent colonial or hegemonic forms. On the other hand, those fictions that narrate a sustainable disabled presence suggest the potential for the community or nation to emerge from oppressive social structures unscathed. I focus on applying literary disability scholarship to Indian novels which demand scrutiny through a disability studies lens, given their dependence upon the disabled body as a metaphoric object and the continuities in their disability representation and the representation of history. While the focus of my work is upon the nuances of disability representation as it is used to parallel the rise (and sometimes fall) of political optimism in these examples of Anglophone Indian literature, I also read toward an understanding of how the postcolonial perspective of these fictions may inflect and complicate disability representations, and investigate Western notions of normalcy as they are represented as intruding upon this literature and as disciplining the body in these texts. This disciplining is further explored through an ancillary reading of how medical apparatus and infrastructure, such as hospitals, ambulances, and especially doctors, are represented in this group of novels, as it is often in conjunction with the medical establishment that disabled characters are subjected to (neo) colonial violence. In the first chapter, which takes the form of a critical introduction, I discuss the terms of my argument within the development of disability studies, and position myself within the debates and concerns of literary disability studies in particular. I consider the antecedents and development of what is now called the cultural model of disability, and discuss how literary disability scholarship, which began its development with a focus on Western texts and contexts, has begun to extend its range of inquiry to become global in scope. I consider examples of the interplay of contemporary Indian history with biopolitical ideals and the paradigm of normalcy as it has been articulated by Lennard Davis and his intellectual predecessors including Canguillheim and Foucault. In the second chapter, which is entitled "The Medical and the Monstrous: Disability in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Shame, and The Moor's Last Sigh," I consider how the disabled body is created as an object of competition in an ideological agon between a violent, globalized modernity and a sometimes-idealized fictive past. While Rushdie often represents the disabled body in a very simplified and rather bigoted register, he also to some extent engages with the more complex potentialities of disability to represent the failure of the state. The normalizing perpetration of a Westernized medical apparatus against disabled people becomes the proof and of political disintegration and the dissolution of hope for the emergent nation, whether in Rushdie's fictional version of India or Pakistan. In the third chapter, "Disability and the Realization of Metaphor in Rohinton Mistry's Such a Long Journey and A Fine Balance," I consider Rohinton Mistry's disability representations in relation to his engagement with the tradition of European realism. While Mistry attempts to re-locate the normal type articulated by the European novel, and subverts the conventions of European fiction even as he employs them, he still depends upon a largely uncontested tradition of disability representation. While he re-locates the norm in many demographic respects, he does not fully manage to rescue disability from an ancillary and symbolic role in the fiction. Mistry uses disabled characters symbolically to imagine political upheaval from a disadvantaged and sometimes from a subaltern position, creating in disabled characters their symbolic correlates. In my fourth chapter, "Collective Disability and the Dis-located Norm in Indra Sinha's Animal's People," I consider the ways in which this novel effaces paradigms of normalcy by imagining an environment in which disability is the unifying commonality of community life. While Mistry and Rushdie ultimately write disability as narrative anomaly in the ways described by Mitchell and Snyder, Sinha inverts the paradigm of the anomalous body in his fictional representation of the Bhopal disaster. The failure of the Indian state to protect its citizenry results in collective disability identification, while those able-bodied individuals who might be treated as normal in another fiction become suspicious outsiders. In my fifth chapter, "Unaccommodating Fictions: Disability, Authorship, and the Politics of Failure in Firdaus Kanga's Trying to Grow," I consider the ways in which gay, disabled, Parsi writer Firdaus Kanga represents failure and dependency as character weakness. Kanga validates neoliberal competition by re-imagining the potential for economic and social attainment as properties of mind at the exclusion of the body, and, in so doing, inaugurates an adaption of paradigms of normalcy. Kanga's imaginary valorises the economically competitive individual, but simply removes the constraint of bodily normalcy from this ideal marketable man. For Kanga, economic freedom from parental, societal, or governmental intervention is edifying, as masculinity is achieved through uninhibited competition. In my conclusion, "Good Doctors and Bad Doctors in Rushdie, Mistry, Sinha, and Kanga," I consider the representation of the clinic and of physicians in addition to the representation of disabled people in the novels included in this thesis. Doctors and medical apparatus become symbolic correlates for different political impositions and political strategies, often representing the abuses and failures of government or of public policy. I will frame my discussion within Foucault's concept of the clinic, and will consider the ways in which traditional and Western medicine take on symbolic meaning in these fictions of India.

Orientador: Gilberto Figueiredo Martins / Banca: Solange Ramos de Andrade / Banca: Luiz Roberto Velloso Cairo / Resumo: Autor de um vasto conjunto de obras literárias, José Lins do Rego apresenta em seus romances um estilo espontâneo, natural, e uma linguagem poética com fortes traços da oralidade. É o caso, por exemplo, de Menino de engenho, livro de estreia, publicado em 1932, em que o narrador autodiegético reúne suas recordações de infância, regida pelo signo da perda, e retrata a situação histórico-social da região nordestina dos tempos do patriarcado em decadência. Tendo isso em vista, este trabalho tem como principal objetivo desenvolver um estudo sobre a representação da infância no contexto da família patriarcal no Brasil e verificar em que medida o elemento social presente como tema desempenha papel fundamental na constituição da estrutura narrativa, ou seja, analisar como forma e conteúdo complementam-se ao longo da trama / Abstract: Author of a wide range of literary texts, José Lins do Rego presents in his novels a spontaneous, natural style, and a poetic language with strong signs of orality. It can be verified, for example, in Menino de engenho, debut book, published in 1932, in which the autodiegetic narrator joins his childhood memories, determined by the sign of loss, and depicts the historical and social situation in the Northeastern region during the period when the patriarchal family was in decline. Therefore, this dissertation objectives to develop a study about the representation of childhood in the context of the patriarchal family in Brazil and to verify how the social element has an important role in the constitution of the narrative structure, in other words, analyzing how literary form and content are different aspects that complement each other along the story / Mestre

L'image du port mal famé est un thème reconnu dans la culture contemporaine. Elle se construit autour des bouges des quais, des marins en bordée et des prostituées. Ils déterminent la représentation des bas-fonds portuaires, continuité des lieux de misère, du vice et du crime. Espaces spécifiques des villes, leur image est construite par la littérature et la presse, au milieu du XIXe siècle. L'héritage de vision négative des ports, les récits de flibuste, la défiance envers les marins construisent leur représentation. Les bas-fonds de l'Ouest de la France s'inscrivent dans un univers plus large : celui des marins déviants, des quartiers mal famés des villes mais aussi d'une province arriérée et dangereuse. Dans le premier XIXe siècle, les mauvais lieux du rivage en cumulent les caractéristiques. Dans les années 1880, le port, révélé par la bordée, focalise l'attention des romanciers. En parallèle, la misère et l'insécurité constituent des thèmes privilégiés pour la presse, les observateurs sociaux et les autorités. Les figures de l'homme de mer, des prostituées, des soldats, des miséreux et des criminels jouent un rôle central de fascination et de condamnation. Cet univers revendique ses codes. La disparition des bas-fonds est annoncée dès l'entre-deux-guerres. L'effacement des mystères de la mer laisse place à la nostalgie des observateurs de la vie maritime. Leur mémoire perdure alors après la Seconde Guerre mondiale. / The image of ill-reputed harbour is a common pattern in modern culture. It's built on harbour's slum, sailor's bender, prostitutes and docks, that define the representation of this area. This image echoes other places of misery, vice and crimes. The representation of those harbour's slums, that occupy specific neighborhoods in cities, are created by writers and journalists in mid-19th century. This image is also the legacy of negative vision of port, of buccaneering's stories and sailor's distrust. The harbour's slum is part of a broader universe : sailors with deviant behaviour, ill-reputed neighborhood, backward and dangerous province. During the first part of the 19th century, some places of the coastline have rough reputation but in the 1880's, the novelists, who discover sailor's bender, focus on ports. At the same time, journalists, social commentators and authorities focus on misery and insecurity. Seafarers, who claim his belongings to the slums, prostitutes, soldiers, the poor and criminals play a central role in the fascination and the condemnation of the harbour's slum. During the inter war period, the harbour's slum is seen as dying out. As the mystery vanishes, the nostalgia begins, that lasts after World War II.

Focusing on the works of Christopher Marlowe (1564-93), this thesis explores the complex engagement of popular drama with the political and religious writing of the Elizabethan fin de siècle. It focuses on the five plays by Marlowe that feature royal protagonists: 1-2 Tamburlaine (1587), Dido, Queen of Carthage (1588), Edward II (1592), and The Massacre at Paris (1593). By interpreting each play in its immediate political context, it shows that Marlowe did not deal with monarchy in the abstract but responded to current affairs - from the incursions of the Ottoman Empire to the threat of the Spanish Armada, from the conspiracy claims of Catholic polemic to the debate surrounding England's involvement in continental warfare. The introduction situates the thesis in the critical and historiographical context relating to Marlowe and to the relationship between literature and politics in the early modern period; it provides the justification for reading Marlowe's plays as topical statements. Chapter One looks at 1-2 Tamburlaine in the light of contemporary attitudes to the Ottoman-Safavid War. Chapter Two shows that Dido, Queen of Carthage adapted the stories and tropes of polemic to reflect fears of Catholic conspiracy and Spanish invasion. Chapter Three reads Edward II as a creative response to the print war of 1591-2, which centred on the moral character of the queen's closest counsellors. Chapter Four proposes that Marlowe's final play, The Massacre at Paris, employed arguments drawn from Reason of State to influence decisions at the 1593 Parliament. The thesis concludes by suggesting that despite Marlowe's reputation as a radical overreacher, his drama displays considerable sympathy for the monarchs who must rule precariously and without the option of private happiness.

My thesis analyses the oeuvre of the American writer Mary McCarthy (1912-1989), with the focus on the figure of the outsider looking in. McCarthy uses outsider figures in her texts as prisms through which distinctive historical moments as well as problems of gender, race and religion are studied against the backdrop of the changing climate of the American 'red' 1930s, the anxious '50s, and the late '60s torn by the Vietnam war. Examples of McCarthy's recurring protagonists are the New York Bohemian girl of the '30s in the predominantly male world marred by the Great Depression, the Jewish character stereotyped as the Other by the poorly hidden anti-Semitism of the American society of the early 1940s, and the orphan child exposed to adult cruelty, who finds her only solace in the Catholic religion. Their position of being outsiders who live in a society not their own by birthright, is shown to be crucial for their acquisition and knowledge of truth, and links insight to marginality, which is reinforced by McCarthy's technique of ironically detached observation, the 'cold eye' of her prose. McCarthy herself appears as an outsider character throughout her writing, both as the historical figure and as the protagonist of her autobiographies. Her self-image, shaped by her orphaned childhood and her youth as a Bohemian girl among leftist intellectuals, is subject to conflicting impulses of confession and concealment. McCarthy's wide use of autobiographical details in her fiction and elements of fiction in her autobiographies led most critics to study her work from a chiefly biographical point of view. My own approach to Mary McCarthy's writing takes their findings into consideration, and includes the analysis of the historical, political, and social contexts of McCarthy's texts, as well as the intertextual dialogue with a few select writings by McCarthy's contemporaries such as Philip Roth and Sylvia Plath.