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.

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

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‟.

This paper seeks to explore the dialogue between postmodern thought and Christian theology. The dialogue will be grounded in four postmodern novels: Toni Morrison's Beloved, Ian McEwan's Atonement, Jill Paton Walsh's Knowledge of Angels, and Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. In many Church circles, it has often been said that postmodernism, as it manifests itself in popular culture, is a threat to the Christian faith. However, I will be arguing that the opposite is the case, and that postmodernism has allowed for new ways of thinking about the self that has great resonance with certain theological conceptions of the self. It will be argued that the postmodern subject is one that seeks to make sense of 'the other' without risking the exploitation of the other, and that this lies very close to the theological concept of relationship, based on the idea of covenant. The self as responsible to an other and as a participant in community will be explored, from both the postmodern and theological perspectives. Before exploring issues of the self, this thesis will contextualize the dialogue by exploring postmodern conceptions of space and time. It will examine how ideas around space and time have been imagined throughout human history, thereby contextualizing the emergence of postmodern thinking. It will then show how this emergence of a postmodern space and time in fact creates new possibilities for the Christian faith to reexpress itself in ways that are more relevant to the 21st century. The concluding chapter of this thesis brings to light the longing within our postmodern reality for a place we can call home, a place where we can belong, and find healing. Such a place, such a homecoming, is offered to us in the spaces opened up to us by the dialogue between the Christian faith and postmodernity, and is found within a community of people who are learning that, as, postmodern philosopher Emmanuel Levinas states, "there is something more important than my life, and that is the life of the other" (in Beavers, 1996,16). / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2004.

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.