This thesis attempts to explain some essential aspects of the literature of Henry Miller by concentrating on an explication of three terms as they apply to Miller's novels. The thesis does not take a stance involving a certain critical "distance", that is, it does not deal with an evaluation of the success or failure of his vision, nor with the validity or invalidity of his world. This, I maintain, has been done to excess by most critics of Henry Miller. The thesis indicates in the opening chapter the major outlines of the literary tradition to which Miller belongs, specifically the American romantic-transcendentalist tradition. Further, though not specific reference is made to this tradition in subsequent chapters in describing the movement toward mysticism apparent in Miller's later novels. The main portion of the thesis details the significance of three major terms, apocalypse, creation, and process, as elements which encompass the overall development of Miller's literature. The thesis attempts to show that these terms indicate an unconscious development in the author of a mystical vision or insight where the works themselves serve as a working out of the author's growing understanding of his inner awakening. The final chapter accounts for Miller's later non-fiction as illustrative of his arrived position. Miller has reached a particular kind of "cosmic consciousness" and he regards his life as a parable of the progress of everyman from unconscious unification with all-things (childhood), through knowledge (manhood), to a new stage of conscious unification with the world (maturity). The period intervening between childhood and final spiritual insight is that detailed by his six major novels, which might generally be characterized as a trial by fire or a trip through the hell of the alienated modern world. This thesis, then, is an exposition of the development of the artist through his art. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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This study is an investigation of the autobiographical narratives of two authors, the Pole Marek Hlasko, and the American Henry Miller. Though they lived in different times and places Miller and Hlasko, share some remarkable features with respect to temperament, philosophies of writing, and modes of narrative output. In the chapters that follow I will examine both the biographical and the textual points of contact between these two men, concentrating on the problem of self-inscription in the autobiographical novels, and on the games played with identity that both men engaged in throughout their artistic careers, especially during their periods of exile. / The first section provides a recapitulation of relevant biographical data together with a summary of the social and historical contexts as these affect the personal ideology of each writer. I begin with an expose of some parallels in the biographies and the autobiographical narratives of the two men, and subsequently turn to a summary of the broader polemics of authorial representation in works written in the first person. Here the traditional notion of equating the author of an autobiographical novel with its subject will be rejected in favour of examining the network of relationships that exist among the writer, the writer's cultural "persona", and the textual voice. Following this theoretical framework, I explore each author's personal script of emigration, his sense of self-understanding and self-positioning in the world, and the strategies of self-construction and self-invention undertaken both in the narratives and in the public arena. My analysis of each author's most representative autobiographical works of the exile period will finally suggest the conclusion that while the autobiographical impulse supplied the form for virtually all of Hlasko's and Miller's writing, it is the experience of exile that furnished the content for successful narrative self-revelation.

Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciada en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa / The purpose of this work is to reveal as to what extent the sick body is a reflection of the sick city and how these two spheres overlap, sometimes melting and merging into one. In accordance to this point, the body is presented as constantly falling into this sickness, or into a sort of mechanization of the quotidian in the figure of the individual as a proper machine. The city goes through the very same processes and it is compared in numerous occasions to a body that collapses over itself; that stops making sense because it has lost its harmonic arrangement. Therefore, in the novel, it is a fact that modern society turns the body sick, transforming the urban subject into a receptacle that absorbs the city’s fluidity and, at the same time, the delirium and the sickness of the world. The narrator will not establish a particular destination, conveying his aimless condition, as an expatriate and as a modern individual surrounded by the chaotic city landscape. This figure of the body does not only provide a parallel with the structure of society, but also with its inner composition and processes. It is important to study the sick body in the context of the modern city, because its fluid display would reveal us relevant aspects about the conformation of the narrator’s subjectivity. This individual experience is constantly paralleled with that of the city through liquid images associated with sickness, the loss of authenticity and health. Therefore, I propose that individual experience as such does not exist anymore, in the sense that it melts under the dominant and chaotic fluxes displayed by the urban landscape.

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