This dissertation analyzes how twentieth- and early twenty-first- century novelists respond to the English landscape through their presentation of narrative and their experiments with novelistic form. Opening with a discussion of the English planning movement, "Narrative Topography" reveals how shifting perceptions of the structure of English space affect the content and form of the contemporary novel. The first chapter investigates literary responses to the English landscape between the World Wars, a period characterized by rapid suburban growth. It reveals how Virginia Woolf, in Mrs. Dalloway and Between the Acts, reconsiders which narrative choices might be appropriate for mobilizing and critiquing arguments about the relationship between city, country, and suburb. The following chapters focus on responses to the English landscape during the present era. The second chapter argues that W. G. Sebald, in The Rings of Saturn, constructs rural Norfolk and Suffolk as containing landscapes of horror--spaces riddled with sinkholes that lead his narrator to think about near and distant acts of violence. As Sebald intimates that this forms a porous "landscape" in its own right, he draws attention to the fallibility of representation and the erosion of cultural memory. The third chapter focuses on Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, a novel in which a cloned human being uses descriptions of landscape to express and, more often, to suppress the physical and emotional pain associated with her position in society. By emphasizing his narrator's proclivity towards euphemism and pastiche, Ishiguro intimates that, in an era of mechanical and genetic reproduction, reliance on perspectives formed in past and imagined futures can be quite deadly. The fourth chapter analyzes Ian McEwan's post 9/11 novel, Saturday--a reworking of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. In reading these two novels side-by-side, it reveals how London, its suburbs, and the English countryside might be imagined differently in the contemporary consciousness. Together these chapters investigate why novelistic treatments of the English landscape might interest contemporary readers who live outside England (and/or read these works in translation), especially during an era in which the English landscape has ceased to function as the real or metaphorical center of empire.

當代英國作家伊恩麥克尤恩的《贖罪》是部揉雜獨特告白形式的小說。小說直到最終章才清楚指出，這不僅是伊恩麥克尤恩描述主角白昂妮贖罪的小說，更是書中主角白昂妮身為一位作家的告白及贖罪手段。游移在虛假與真實的邊界，此書的核心問題在於，小說家的寫作能否彌補現實生活犯下的過錯？而身為讀者的我們，又該如何解讀小說與告白的轉變？ 本文分成四個章節。第一章介紹《贖罪》的相關評論及理論架構。第二章先闡述巴赫汀的對話和複調理論，再剖析小說中的前三部份如何具體呈現這兩種特質，突顯白昂妮藉由多重敘述觀點，瓦解幼年時自我中心傾向並開啟與他者的對話。第三章聚焦於小說架構的告白轉折。長久以來，告白被視為一種賦予解放和完整自我的力量，傅柯則提出現代社會下的告白演變為自我規訓的機制。以傅柯的觀點來解讀小說結尾，白昂妮的告白在自我解放與治癒的表層下，其實隱含了快感和權力的螺旋結構，對真實及作者身份的延宕意味著她身為小說家權力的回歸。 / Ian McEwan's Atonement is a novel experimentally weaved with a peculiar confessional form. Not until the last part of the novel are readers informed the framed narrative structure: this is not merely McEwan's novel which depicts the heroine Briony's atonement, but more importantly, the grown-up novelist Briony's own confession crafted as a novel to make amends. This complicates our reading in retrospect as the ending reveals the central dilemma: how to judge the novelist's privilege to use confession to atone for the fault made in real life. This thesis consists of four chapters. The first chapter introduces the criticisms of Atonement, followed by my theoretical frameworks adopted to read this novel. The second chapter begins with the explications of Bakhtin's theory of dialogism and polyphony. By integrating these two concepts to scrutinize the first three parts of the novel, I attempt to analyze how Briony's self-reflexive writing and utilizations of multiple points of view expose her childhood monologic mentality and demonstrate her broadening of the self-other understandings. The third chapter discusses the ambivalent confessional twist in relation to the previous story Briony has mesmerized readers to believe. While the confession has been historically considered as a means of self-liberation, Foucault brings out another aspect that the institutionalization of the confession has turned itself into a mechanism of self-discipline. The novel eventually strikes the final note on the double impetus of Briony's narrative that her confession offers a consolation to suture with the past but meanwhile, upon close inspection, the overtones of her restoration of power as a novelist and the spirals of pleasure and power still lurk behind.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-04-09T12:28:31Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2013-12-06Bitstream added on 2015-04-09T12:47:15Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 000813552.pdf: 739470 bytes, checksum: f90972154db6506c70d11994483c0613 (MD5) / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / Este estudo é, em essência, uma reflexão sobre o romance Reparação, de Ian McEwan, e tem como objetivo verificar a possibilidade dessa obra se constituir como veículo de preenchimento da falta humana. Dessa maneira, num primeiro momento, o trabalho explana a trajetória artística do autor com a intenção de ressaltar Reparação como síntese das propostas estéticas de Ian McEwan. Na sequência, a partir de considerações teóricas, busca identificar uma possível leitura desse romance como elo entre a experiência artística e a realidade, focalizando o entrelaçamento das estratégias discursivas e da dimensão metalinguística que problematiza a questão da verdade ficcional. A seguir, a pesquisa procura investigar as intertextualidades que atestam a temática da reparação e as formas pelas quais elas estruturam a proposta principal defendida na obra. Por fim, o trabalho pretende averiguar o pensamento crítico que o autor imprime em seu texto sobre as questões do Homem no mundo para levantar de que modo as vozes sociais estão assimiladas na obra em foco, e como o romance procura condensar a experiência existencial e histórica para transformá-las em escrita. Assim, o trabalho se propõe afirmar que a produção de sentidos para o mundo atual constitui-se num dos elementos vitais na construção ficcional de McEwan / The nucleus of this study is a reflection concerning the novel Atonement, by Ian McEwan, with the objective of verifying the possibility that this novel constitutes a vehicle for the reparation of human error. As such at first, this study sets out to give an account of the artistic trajectory of the author, with the intention of highlighting Atonement as a synthesis of Ian McEwan’s aesthetic proposals. Next, based on theoretical considerations, the study seeks to identify a possible view of this novel as a link between artistic experience and reality; focusing on the interweaving of discursive strategies and the metalinguistic dimension which discusses the issue of fictional truth. The research goes on to investigate those intertextualities, which attesting to this theme of reparation, and the ways in which they structure the main proposal in the novel. Finally, the research investigates the critical thinking, of the author in the novel concerning issues of man’s place in the world in order to discuss the manner in which social voices are assimilated into the work in focus; and how the novel attempts to condense existential and historical experience so as to transform these into the written word. Thus, the study proposes that the production of meaning for the contemporary world is one of the vital elements in McEwan’s fictional construction

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The aim of this study is to study the construction of literary values. I have been looking at how literature awarded with sponsored literary prizes has been reviewed in four major English and American newspapers. I have been studying the reception of literature by Ian McEwan, Hilary Mantel, Colm Tóibín and Zadie Smith between 2000 and 2012. The prizes in focus are the Man Booker Prize, the Orange prize for fiction and the Costa Awards. There seems to be an increasing number of articles related to each author after they have been awarded a prize, however with little change in the content of the reviews. The non critical articles seems to move towards a more personal angle. I have also found that critics tend to position the authors’ works in comparision to canonised authorships rather than discussing the literature as awarded.

This thesis explores the notion of perversity in literature, specifically with regard to representations of taboo and abjection in Iain Banks‟ The Wasp Factory, Ian McEwan‟s The Cement Garden, and Irvine Welsh‟s Marabou Stork Nightmares. Julia Kristeva‟s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, as well as her notion of revolt, constitute the central theoretical framework for my analysis. However, I also draw upon the concepts of monstrosity, grotesqueness and the uncanny in order to explicate the affect of abject fiction on the reader. I posit, then, that to engage with literary works that confront one with perversity, abjection and taboo entails exposing oneself to an ambiguous or liminal space in which culturally established values are both disrupted and affirmed. The subversive and revolutionary potential of the aforementioned novels is discussed with reference to the notion of the perverted Bildungsroman since, in their respective transgressions of taboos, the narrators of these novels disrupt social order, and their narratives end on a note of indeterminacy or the absolute finality of death, rather than self-actualisation. Moreover, in exposing the binaries of sex and gender as arbitrary and fluctuating, these narrators‟ perverse sexual and gender performativities gesture towards alternative modes of being (beyond social sanction), and invoke Kristeva‟s notion of individual revolt as a „condition necessary for the life of the mind and society‟.

La figure du couple machiavélique, présente chez Shakespeare, Laclos, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Henry James, James M. Cain, entre autres, est étudiée selon une triple approche. La première approche, d'inspiration structurale, vise à dégager les éléments constitutifs de la figure et son scénario permanent. L’analyse conduite sur la base de cette approche confirme l'existence de deux matrices, l'une fondée sur le couple Macbeth, l'autre sur le couple de libertins des Liaisons dangereuses. La seconde approche, qui relève d'une démarche herméneutique, met en évidence le substrat biblique de la figure du couple machiavélique dans sa version shakespearienne, qui serait une réécriture du récit de la Chute de la Genèse. La version laclosienne du couple machiavélique serait pour sa part le marqueur de la dégradation des relations amoureuses dans leur conception post-courtoise. Enfin, la troisième approche est esthétique: elle vise à étudier la construction de la figure, son effet sur le lecteur, et sa valeur ajoutée par rapport à la figure canonique du Méchant. Elle s'attache aussi à définir l'esthétique du mal associée à la figure du couple machiavélique. / The figure of the Machiavellian couple, which appears in Shakespeare, Laclos, Barbey d’Aurevilly, Henry James, James M. Cain, among others, is studied through a three-fold approach. The first one is a structural one and aims at identifying the basic elements of the figure and its scenario. This approach confirms the existence of two matrix, one based on the couple of Macbeth and the other on the pair of libertines of Laclos’ novel Les Liaisons dangereuses. The second approach is interpretative and underlines the biblical basis of the figure of the Machiavellian couple in its Shakespearean version, which is a rewriting of the Fall of Adam and Eve while the couple of Laclos signals the deterioration of romantic relationships in a courtly meaning. The third approach deals with aesthetics and aims at studying the forms and poetics of the figure and its effect on the reader as well as its added value in relation to the “Canon figure” of the Villain. This third approach deals also with the aesthetics of Evil linked to the figure of the Machiavellian couple.

This dissertation focuses on the return and revitalization of traditional Christian themes in contemporary postmodern novels. It offers an examination of how these themes materialize in novels written by writers who are not explicitly religious, or in novels which do not have an overtly religious focus. Some contemporary novels generate a privileged space in which the return of the religious can take place. The sacred is back, not just as a re-enchantment, but manifests itself in fundamentally new and productive ways (Ward, 2001:xv). The first matter under consideration is the fact that the co-existence of belief and unbelief is apparent in all the novels under discussion. As such, the reader as active participant in the novel is bound to be affected by these mutually inter-dependent and inextricably inter-connected sides of a coin. The themes of providence, sacrifice and the miraculous become evident in John Irving‟s A prayer for Owen Meany while the themes of sin, guilt and redemption feature in Ian McEwan‟s Atonement. Secondly, the study compares two novels that deal with the same supernatural phenomena, namely visions, faith healing and stigmata. Jodi Picoult is a non-believer and is the author of Keeping Faith, while Ron Hansen is a devout Catholic who wrote Mariëtte in ecstasy. These works, on the one hand, create a space for supernatural phenomena even though fiction cannot prove the reality of their existence. Postmodern people seem to have a definite longing for the miraculous and these novels seem to satisfy that yearning. On the other hand, both novels portray disbelief in the miraculous while subtly allowing room for characters or readers in a liminal space between belief and disbelief. The theories of Jean François Lyotard and specifically his notion of “incredulity towards metanarratives” provide a framework to explore this matter. Lyotard proposes “petit recits” or many small stories instead of the grand narratives. He contends that there is no objective knowledge and that narrative and scientific knowledge are subject to legitimization. The Christian story therefore needs no scientific basis as justification, which means that it is being newly considered after the mistrust created during the Enlightenment period. Gianteresio Vattimo‟s ideas on the role of religion in contemporary life and the possible convergences of postmodernity and the Christian faith also come into play. He advocates weak thought as opposed to strong thought and sees caritas (charity or neighbourly love) as essential. This concept of weak thought allows for plurality and tolerance. Vattimo sees Christ‟s kenosis (self-emptying) as essentially linked to a secularization in which humankind needs to retrace the path to the original Biblical message of love. Emphasis is on a non-doctrinal, anti-dogmatic spirituality and this manifests in the novels discussed. This study employs diverse reader-response theories to gauge the reaction of the reader to texts containing Biblical themes and supernatural phenomena. Stanley Fish‟s interpretive communities and Wolfgang Iser‟s implied reader are helpful and Michael Edwards‟s pattern of sin, the fall and redemption is of particular interest to this dissertation. Edwards believes that most novels, whether written by religious or non-religious writers, follow this pattern. Readers find themselves either on the side of the believing or unbelieving camp in the novels discussed. However, many readers may hover in the liminal space between belief and unbelief. Interpretation depends on many factors that constitute the world view of the reader, hence the plurality of interpretations. / MA (English), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2014

This dissertation focuses on the return and revitalization of traditional Christian themes in contemporary postmodern novels. It offers an examination of how these themes materialize in novels written by writers who are not explicitly religious, or in novels which do not have an overtly religious focus. Some contemporary novels generate a privileged space in which the return of the religious can take place. The sacred is back, not just as a re-enchantment, but manifests itself in fundamentally new and productive ways (Ward, 2001:xv). The first matter under consideration is the fact that the co-existence of belief and unbelief is apparent in all the novels under discussion. As such, the reader as active participant in the novel is bound to be affected by these mutually inter-dependent and inextricably inter-connected sides of a coin. The themes of providence, sacrifice and the miraculous become evident in John Irving‟s A prayer for Owen Meany while the themes of sin, guilt and redemption feature in Ian McEwan‟s Atonement. Secondly, the study compares two novels that deal with the same supernatural phenomena, namely visions, faith healing and stigmata. Jodi Picoult is a non-believer and is the author of Keeping Faith, while Ron Hansen is a devout Catholic who wrote Mariëtte in ecstasy. These works, on the one hand, create a space for supernatural phenomena even though fiction cannot prove the reality of their existence. Postmodern people seem to have a definite longing for the miraculous and these novels seem to satisfy that yearning. On the other hand, both novels portray disbelief in the miraculous while subtly allowing room for characters or readers in a liminal space between belief and disbelief. The theories of Jean François Lyotard and specifically his notion of “incredulity towards metanarratives” provide a framework to explore this matter. Lyotard proposes “petit recits” or many small stories instead of the grand narratives. He contends that there is no objective knowledge and that narrative and scientific knowledge are subject to legitimization. The Christian story therefore needs no scientific basis as justification, which means that it is being newly considered after the mistrust created during the Enlightenment period. Gianteresio Vattimo‟s ideas on the role of religion in contemporary life and the possible convergences of postmodernity and the Christian faith also come into play. He advocates weak thought as opposed to strong thought and sees caritas (charity or neighbourly love) as essential. This concept of weak thought allows for plurality and tolerance. Vattimo sees Christ‟s kenosis (self-emptying) as essentially linked to a secularization in which humankind needs to retrace the path to the original Biblical message of love. Emphasis is on a non-doctrinal, anti-dogmatic spirituality and this manifests in the novels discussed. This study employs diverse reader-response theories to gauge the reaction of the reader to texts containing Biblical themes and supernatural phenomena. Stanley Fish‟s interpretive communities and Wolfgang Iser‟s implied reader are helpful and Michael Edwards‟s pattern of sin, the fall and redemption is of particular interest to this dissertation. Edwards believes that most novels, whether written by religious or non-religious writers, follow this pattern. Readers find themselves either on the side of the believing or unbelieving camp in the novels discussed. However, many readers may hover in the liminal space between belief and unbelief. Interpretation depends on many factors that constitute the world view of the reader, hence the plurality of interpretations. / MA (English), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2014

This thesis provides a theory of exceptional sex through close readings of contemporary novels by male British and American writers. I take as my overriding methodological approach Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the state of exception, which is a juridico-political state in which the law has been suspended and the difference between rule and transgression is indistinguishable. Within this state, the spatiotemporal markers inside and outside also become indeterminable, making it impossible to tell whether one is inside or outside time and space. Using this framework, I work through narratives of sexual interaction – On Chesil Beach, Gertrude and Claudius, Sabbath’s Theater, and The Act of Love – to conceptualise categories of sexual exceptionality. My study is not a survey, and the texts have been chosen as they focus on different sexual behaviours, thereby opening up a variety of sexual exceptionalities. I concentrate on male writers and narratives of heterosexual sex as most work on sex, time and space is comprised of feminist readings of literature by women and queer work on gay, lesbian or trans writers and narratives. However, in the Coda I expand my argument by turning to Emma Donoghue’s Room, which, as the protagonist has been trapped for the first five years of his life, provides a tabula rasa’s perspective of exceptionality. Through my analysis of exceptionality, I provide spatiotemporal readings of the hymen, incest, adultery, sexual listening and the arranged affair. I also conceptualise textual exceptionalities – the incestuous prequel, auricular reading and the positionality of the narrator, the reader and literary characters. Exceptional sex challenges the assumption in recent queer theory that to be out of time is ‘queer’ and to be in time is ‘straight’. Furthermore, exceptionality complicates the concepts of perversion and transgression as the norm and its transgression become indistinct in the state of exception. In contrast, exceptionality offers a new, more determinate way to analyse narratives of sex.