This dissertation attempts to develop a counter—memory, a cognitive strategy that provides an alternative to the most prevalent mode of political action by members of minority or subaltern groups: identity politics. It begins with Teresa de Lauretis’ semiotics of subjectivity, which posits the human subject as a shifting series of positions or habits formed through semiotic and cognitive “mapping” of, and being “mapped” by, its environment. De Lauretis maintains that the subject can transform social reality through an “inventive” mode of mapping. The first chapter of this study is a semiotic analysis of the memory system at work in Nicole Brossard’s Picture Theory. It argues that Brossard’s use of holographic technology is an invention that attempts to alter women’s maps of social reality. Quantum physicist David Bohm has also employed the hologram as a theoretical model. By merging Brossard’s holographic memory with Bohm’s theory of a “holomovement,” this study develops an epistemological strategy that alters not only the map of reality, but also the dominant representational mode of cognitive mapping. This enquiry then moves on to other novels written in Canada which have a strong political impetus based on gender, nationality, ethnicity, race and/or class: Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, Marlene Nourbese Philip’s Looking for Livingstone, Beatrice Culleton’s In Search of April Raintree and Régine Robin’s La Ouébécoite. Through textual analysis, it attempts to establish that although these novels make no mention of holography, each of them employs a memory system that inscribes itself holographically. That holographic memory provides an alternative political strategy to the “identity politics” at work in each of these texts. Each text, in turn, like a fragment of a hologram, adds another structural and political dimension to the hologram. The processual structure of the holographic theory provides a ground for alliances between different political agendas while resisting closure. As an epistemological strategy, it promises to alter both the method and the ground of knowledge.

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In the course of its history, Prague has been the site of many significant cultural confrontations and conversations. From the medieval chronicle of Cosmas to the work of contemporary writers, the city has taken shape in literature as a multivalent space where identities are constructed and questioned. The evolution of Prague's literary significance has taken place in an intercultural context: both Czech-speaking and German-speaking writers have engaged with the city and its past, and their texts have interacted with each other. The city has played a central part in many collective narratives in which myth, history and literature intertwine. Looking at contemporary prose fiction written in both Czech and German, this thesis explores continuities and contrasts in the literary roles played by Prague. It analyses two German-speaking emigrant authors, Libuše Moníková (1945-1998) and Jan Faktor (1951- ), viewing them alongside three Czech writers, Jáchym Topol (1962- ), Daniela Hodrová (1946- ), and Michal Ajvaz (1949- ). Through close readings of eight texts, the thesis approaches the imagined city from four angles. It discusses how contemporary authors portray the search for meaning in the city by imagining Prague as two contrasting realms (the 'real' city and the 'other' city), how the discontinuities of the city are reflected by the fragmentation of the authorial stance, how these authors assemble new Prague myths from the vestiges of older topoi, and how they confront the contradictory urges to uphold the boundaries of the city and to transgress them. In post-1989 Prague, authors explore the unstable spaces between continuity and discontinuity, constructing an authorial ethos in these areas of tension.

M.A. (French) / This thesis investigates the collective literary Project entitled Rwanda: écrire par devoir de mémoire, written by nine Francophone, African intellectuals in response to the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda. Six of them are fictional novels or travel diaries by non- Rwandans, based on the stories and adaptations of the stories of survivors. There is one poetry anthology and two texts by Rwandans: a survivor’s testimony and an essay by a Tutsi who was in exile during the genocide. A comparison of the literary strategies, used by the authors to respond both individually and collectively to the difficulty of writing the ‘inexpressible’, forms the basis of this analysis. It explores trauma theory and its application to literature and fiction, focusing on how signs of traumatic memory are made visible in the texts. Based on Ricoeur’s notion of triple mimesis, it considers the interaction between victim, writer/text and reader/listener which re-establishes the communication interrupted by the trauma of genocide. The thesis considers the initiation, aims and challenges of the Project. It provides an overview of the origins and consequences of the genocide as observed by the writers. A literary analysis of each of the nine texts separately allows the reader to appreciate the variety of approaches: collective/individual; witness-survivor/indirect witness; fact/fiction, and the blending of these opposites. A synthesis of the recurring motifs, lieux de mémoire and emblematic characters foregrounds tensions that emerge in the postgenocide society between memory and forgetting, identity and alterity, survivors and exiles, forgiveness and justice, survival and the death experience. These elements create an intertextual, fictional world that is nevertheless anchored in the reality of genocide, a polyphonic narrative which contributes to a deeper understanding of the collective horror of the genocide.

This dissertation attempts to develop a counter—memory, a cognitive strategy that provides an alternative to the most prevalent mode of political action by members of minority or subaltern groups: identity politics. It begins with Teresa de Lauretis’ semiotics of subjectivity, which posits the human subject as a shifting series of positions or habits formed through semiotic and cognitive “mapping” of, and being “mapped” by, its environment. De Lauretis maintains that the subject can transform social reality through an “inventive” mode of mapping. The first chapter of this study is a semiotic analysis of the memory system at work in Nicole Brossard’s Picture Theory. It argues that Brossard’s use of holographic technology is an invention that attempts to alter women’s maps of social reality. Quantum physicist David Bohm has also employed the hologram as a theoretical model. By merging Brossard’s holographic memory with Bohm’s theory of a “holomovement,” this study develops an epistemological strategy that alters not only the map of reality, but also the dominant representational mode of cognitive mapping. This enquiry then moves on to other novels written in Canada which have a strong political impetus based on gender, nationality, ethnicity, race and/or class: Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, Marlene Nourbese Philip’s Looking for Livingstone, Beatrice Culleton’s In Search of April Raintree and Régine Robin’s La Ouébécoite. Through textual analysis, it attempts to establish that although these novels make no mention of holography, each of them employs a memory system that inscribes itself holographically. That holographic memory provides an alternative political strategy to the “identity politics” at work in each of these texts. Each text, in turn, like a fragment of a hologram, adds another structural and political dimension to the hologram. The processual structure of the holographic theory provides a ground for alliances between different political agendas while resisting closure. As an epistemological strategy, it promises to alter both the method and the ground of knowledge. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This research provides an analytical reading of four contemporary novels, in a transcultural study of magical realism and dreams. Two of the novels, Ben Okri's The Famished Road and its sequel Songs of Enchantment, examine dreams through magical realism in postcolonial African literature. The third novel, Toni Morrison's Beloved, is used to depict the use of memory within an African-American magical realist novel. And the fourth narrative is Irvine Welsh's Marabou Stork Nightmares, which focuses on the use of hallucination within what can be seen as a magical realist mode. The analysis of these novels examines certain aspects of magical realism, including the use of the subconscious, focusing primarily on dream, memory and hallucination. In examining this topic, I aim to suggest that the use of the subconscious, within this literature, allows the writer to comment on a particular society. As can be seen in previous studies of magical realism, the writer is able to express his or her dissatisfaction with society by destabilising conventionally accepted truths. A writer can therefore convey a sense that the surface of a particular culture or society is a facade, disguising certain hidden truths, which require a more in depth examination, in order to more fully understand the workings behind that society. The subconscious works to reveal these hidden realities, and is therefore a mode of resistance in that it allows the writers an avenue through which to express their dissatisfaction with their particular society. This is achieved through the exploring and deconstruction of certain boundaries within the novels which, along with several other factors, essentially concords the magical realism inherent in these texts. It is additionally enhanced through the use of the device of the subconscious, which allows the writers to transgress borders, and further explore their particular cultures. Through the use of novels from various contemporary societies, I hope to establish the fact that the subconscious, and therefore magical realism, is a transcultural technique, in that it traverses a multitude of cultures, without being specific to any one in particular. While the use of dreams requires a culture specific interpretation, the use of the subconscious in this literature can be seen as a global technique of expressing dissatisfaction within these societies. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2005.

Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of Spanish and Portguese, 2004. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 66-71).

Orientador: Francisco Foot Hardman / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-21T22:23:06Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 RodriguezAlmonacid_CarmenCecilia_M.pdf: 632920 bytes, checksum: 7591e143884074b28374a551d9fe53bb (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012 / Resumo: Que pode aportar um conjunto de obras para a elaboração de uma memória? A literatura procura no passado, indaga nele querendo resgatar, desde uma perspectiva da memória histórica e da experiência individual, as formas de estabelecer um território que ajude a preservá-la. Assim, a memória é forjada e protegida ao fluir pelas páginas que a literatura cria, enriquecendo e transformando a realidade social e cultural na qual emerge. A proposta deste estudo se centra na reflexão da relação entre a memória e a história - os vínculos entre a memória coletiva e a memória individual - e o problema da narrativa dessa memória nas obras do escritor chileno Roberto Bolaño. Assim sendo, nosso trabalho objetiva especificamente traçar um percurso pelas profundezas da memória e do esquecimento, da barbárie e da injustiça na análise das obras Estrella distante, (1996), Nocturno de Chile (1996) e Amuleto (1999), as quais cumprem um papel chave no trabalho de consolidação de uma memória, pois nelas se reconhece sua proposta estética no campo literário latinoamericano relativo à como narrar o passado traumático da sociedade chilena durante a ditadura militar de quase duas décadas. Há nessas três histórias elementos que são essenciais para expor o questionamento que a escrita de Roberto Bolaño realiza perante a violência do Estado, na medida em que sua narrativa apresenta uma severa crítica política na recuperação do passado, desde a matança de Tlatelolco às torturas do Chile de Pinochet / Abstract: What can a set of written works influence the elaboration of a memory? Literature searches the past, questions it to rescue, from a historical memory perspective and individual experience, forms to establish a ground, which helps to preserve it. Thus, memory is forged and protected when it flows through the pages that literature creates, enriches and transforms to easily insert in social and cultural reality from where it emerges. The proposal of this study focuses on the reflection of the relationship between history and memory, the links between collective memory and individual memory, and the problems related to the narrative of this memory in the works of Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. This way, our task aims specifically to trace a way through the depths of memory and oblivion, the barbarian and evil in the analysis of the works Estrella distante (1996), Nocturno de Chile (1996) and Amuleto (1999), which play a key role in the consolidation of a memory, because in those books one is able to recognize his esthetical proposal in the Latin American literature field when he narrates the traumatic past of a society during the military dictatorship that lasted for almost two decades. There are in those three stories, elements that are essential to expose the questioning that the written works of Roberto Bolaño realizes before the violence of the State, in that his narrative presents a severe political criticism in the recovery of the past, from the killing of Tlatelolco to the torture in Chile during the Pinochet years / Mestrado / Historia e Historiografia Literaria / Mestra em Teoria e História Literária

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The ‘loss of self’ trope is a pervasive shorthand for the prototypical process of Alzheimer's disease (AD) in the popular imagination. Turned into an effect of disease, the disappearance of the self accommodates a biomedical story of progressive deterioration and the further medicalization of AD, a process which has been storied as an organic pathology affecting the brain or, more recently, a matter of genetic calamity. This biomedical discourse of AD provides a generic framework for the disease and is reproduced in its illness narratives. The disappearance of self is a mythic element in AD narratives; it necessarily assumes the existence of a singular and coherent entity which, from the outside, can be counted as both belonging to and representing an individual person. The loss of self, as the rhetorical locus of AD narrative, limits the privatization of the experience and reinscribes cultural storylines---storylines about what it means to be a human person. The loss of self as it occurs in AD narratives functions most effectively in reasserting the presence of the human self, in contrast to an anonymous, inhuman nonself; as AD discourse details a loss of self, it necessarily follows that the thing which is lost (the self) always already existed. The private, narrative self of individual experience thus functions as proxy to a collective human identity predicated upon exceptionalism: an escape from nature and the conditions of the corporeal environment.

The study provides a theoretical account for the representation of apartheid in South African fiction. Narrative strategies employed in the post-apartheid novels The innocence of roast chicken (Richards, 1996), The smell of apples (Behr, 1996), All we have left unsaid (Case, 2006) and Thirteen cents (Duiker, 2011) reveal that depictions of the past contribute to narrative structure and the production of meaning. Genettean temporal relations, namely narrative order, duration and frequency are a systematic method to analyse the selected novels, since it enables a contrast between the narrative past as the histoire, and the narrative present as the récit. Retrospective events are constructed as memories, thereby are complemented by Bergson’s psychological and philosophical theory in the analysis and interpretation of the dualistic interaction between the apartheid and post-apartheid temporal centres adopted within the novels. The representation of apartheid may be seen as sub-themes and time as configurations of temporal zones. / Afrikaans & Theory of Literature / M.A. (Theory of Literature)