<p>The central thesis of <em>Bergsonian Metaphysical Undercurrents in Rorty’s Liberal Gradualism</em> is that those who take the greatest risks for social reformations are always motivated by the feeling of being part of something indefinitely greater than themselves and their own moral communities (however capacious these may be): progress just is this vague sense of indefinite movement, or becoming. In works such as <em>Matter and Memory, Creative Evolution,</em> and <em>The Two Sources of Morality and Religion</em>, Henri Bergson identified this sense of movement with time, the evolution of life, and the emotion of love respectively. Though he would probably laud Bergson’s insistence that philosophy should be partisan, Richard Rorty would be less hasty in making Bergson’s identifications, for Rorty thinks social progress is best served by gradual increases in our local sense of “us” effected by imaginary identification with others through literary exposures, not a mystical sense of oneness with all creation. Improvising on a Bergsonian note, I hold that one must already be an aspiring mystic, or moral hero, for one to get an expanded sense of “us” from reading literature. But such a lifestyle is incredibly difficult to maintain, requiring superhuman courage and moral reflection. It is only in the inspiring, active presence of a genuine moral hero that a readership will be able to make such efforts, and reliably take to literature the way Rorty would like in order to form his goal of a maximally capacious liberal utopia. Mystics act out of the metaphysical or religious conviction, whether real or imagined, that they are instruments of a great force of love. Rorty’s own utopian project would then be dependent on (and, perhaps, even an unknowing product of) these spiritual, metaphysical undercurrents of social progress.</p>

The works of Vladimir Nabokov have traditionally functioned in a way that challenges its reader to question existing notions of normality. In his works, Nabokov has frequently utilized representations of disability as a means to comment or critique the human condition. Throughout this project I intend to demonstrate how the narratives in both Lolita and Laughter in the Dark function as a normative force which embodies the cultural attitudes regarding disability. This is accomplished through the enforcement of a normative reading by the narrative. It is clear then that Nabakov is attempting to subvert literary conventions by using nontraditional narrators to demonstrate the relativity of normality. Throughout this project, I will be focusing on Nabakov’s use of narrator to distort the cultural line between disability and ability. Ultimately, the goal of this project is to demonstrate that current societal notions of normality and disability are outdated and arbitrary. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2013.

Cette thèse veut explorer l’idée de l’existence d’un roman de la non-linéarité, à travers un inventaire de la critique et l’analyse comparée de quatre ouvrages considérés comme appartenant à cette tradition (The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman, de Laurence Sterne ; Pale fire, de Vladimir Nabokov ; La vie mode d’emploi, de Georges Perec ; House of leaves, de Mark Z. Danielewski).Dans le premier chapitre, est postulée la thèse de deux traditions dans l’histoire du roman : la tradition du roman réaliste, et une tradition caractérisée par l’utilisation de formes non linéaires. L’analyse des études sur la tradition réflexive du roman, sur la théorie du chaos appliquée à la littérature, sur les marges textuelles, sur la lecture et sur l’intertextualité seront pris en compte pour soutenir cette thèse.Sur la base de ces questionnements, le deuxième chapitre esquisse une définition du roman de la nonlinéarité, qui comprend un répertoire des procédés et des thèmes communs à cette tradition, ainsi qu’une réflexion sur ses approches du monde et de l’identité humaine.Le troisième chapitre laisse la place à l’analyse des textes du corpus. Les quatre romans sont analysés chacun pour ses spécificités, et aussi dans la perspective de vérifier le postulat d’une tradition d’un roman de la non-linéarité. En s’appuyant sur de nombreux exemples extraits des romans pris en considération, l’analyse s’articule en huit sections : le problème du commencement ; l’intertextualité ; la complexité du récit de vie ; les questions de l’interruption, de la procrastination et de l’absence ; les approches dutemps ; les approches du langage ; le thème du jeu ; l’impossibilité de la fin. / This thesis aims to explore the idea of the existence of a novel of nonlinearity, through an inspection of the criticism and the comparative analysis of four works considered as belonging to this tradition (The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne; Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov; Life, a User’s Manual (La vie mode d’emploi), by Georges Perec; and House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski).The first chapter postulates the thesis of two traditions in the history of the novel: the tradition of the realist novel, and a tradition distinguished by the use of nonlinear forms. In order to support this thesis, I’ll take into account studies about the reflexive tradition of the novel, about chaos theory as applied to literature, about the margins of the text, about the reading experience, and about intertextuality.On the basis of this examination, the second chapter outlines a definition of the novel of nonlinearity, which includes a repertoire of the literary devices and themes common to this tradition, and a reflection about its perspectives upon the world and human identity.The third chapter is dedicated to the analyses of the texts included in the corpus. The four novels are analyzed for their distinctive features, and also in the aim of verifying the premise of the existence of a novel of nonlinearity. Drawing on numerous examples selected from the novels, these analyses are structured in eight sections: the problem of beginning; intertextuality; the complexity of life narratives; the issues of interruption, procrastination and absence; the approaches to time; the approaches to language; the theme of the game; and the impossibility of an ending.

SILVA, Jardas de Sousa. A transmutação da personagem Lolita de Nabokov da literatura para as telas. 2015. 93f. – Dissertação (Mestrado) – Universidade Federal do Ceará, Programa de Pós-graduação em Letras, Fortaleza (CE), 2015. / Submitted by Márcia Araújo (marcia_m_bezerra@yahoo.com.br) on 2015-06-08T11:06:55Z No. of bitstreams: 1 2015_dis_jssilva.pdf: 1951774 bytes, checksum: b9e030e75645a5793d4448ec4ab3ae15 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Márcia Araújo(marcia_m_bezerra@yahoo.com.br) on 2015-06-08T12:55:38Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 2015_dis_jssilva.pdf: 1951774 bytes, checksum: b9e030e75645a5793d4448ec4ab3ae15 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-06-08T12:55:38Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 2015_dis_jssilva.pdf: 1951774 bytes, checksum: b9e030e75645a5793d4448ec4ab3ae15 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015 / This dissertation analyzes the translation of Lolita character, by Vladimir Nabokov, to the eponymous film made in 1997, directed by Adrian Lyne. In the novel Lolita (1955), the man character is a 12 year-old girl whose life changed when she had started being stalked by Humbert Humbert, a grown-up and much more experienced man who soon becomes stepfather of hers. By facing this situation, Lolita is seen as a character who has some behavioral traits that give us an ideia of ambivalence about her presentation in the novel. Many of Lolita‟s attitudes can be interpreted either the result of a childish naivety or as kinds of games created by a cunning mind. In this study, we investigate, specifically, the strategies used by the director to transmute Lolita‟s ambiguities from the novel Lolita to the cinema. Our hypothesis is that the protagonist as a symbol of nymphet, that is, the seductive girl, was the most emphasized aspect in the film adaptation due to the inherent issues both related to the director‟s poetic and the types of Hollywood productions in the nineties. As theoretical background, we take the Even-Zohar‟s assumptions (1978), on the theory of polysystem, and the Toury‟s ones (1995), which refer to translation studies with emphasis on cultural factor, considering the influence of the target culture has on the translation process. We also work with the concept of rewriting by Lefevere (2007), which emphasizes the historical and cultural context of the translated texts. On the relationship between literature and film, we deal with the studies by Cattrysse (1992), Stam (2008) and Xavier (2003). Finally, we also rely on postulates by Candido (2007) and Gomes (2007), regarding to the construction of literary and filmic characters, and Lolita previous studies, such as those by Agueros (2005) and Lazarin (2010). The results pointed that the strategies to present the character Lolita on screen intensify the myth of the nymph, the femme fatale, which permeates its name from its first translations. Therefore, in the adaptation, Lolita can be interpreted as the anti-heroine of her own story while Humbert becomes the passionate hero. / A presente dissertação analisa a tradução da personagem Lolita, de Vladimir Nabokov, para o filme homônimo de 1997, dirigido por Adrian Lyne. No romance Lolita (1955), a protagonista é uma menina de 12 anos que tem sua vida transformada após ser alvo de uma paixão obsessiva por parte de Humbert Humbert, um homem adulto e bem mais experiente do que ela e que logo se torna seu padrasto. Diante de tal situação, a personagem apresenta alguns traços de comportamento que podem gerar certo grau de ambivalência quanto à composição de seu caráter na narrativa literária, as quais muitas de suas atitudes podem ser interpretadas tanto como fruto de uma ingenuidade infantil quanto como jogos de atributos sedutores de uma mente ardilosa. Nesta pesquisa, investigamos, especificamente, as estratégias do diretor na transmutação das ambiguidades da personagem Lolita do romance para o cinema. Partimos da hipótese de que a protagonista como símbolo da ninfeta, isto é, da garota sedutora, foi a faceta mais enfatizada na adaptação fílmica, devido às questões inerentes tanto à poética do diretor, quanto às produções hollywoodianas da década de noventa. Como fundamentação teórica, recorremos aos pressupostos de Even-Zohar (1978), sobre a teoria dos polissistemas, e àqueles de Toury (1995), que se referem aos estudos da tradução com ênfase no fator cultural, considerando a influência que a cultura de chegada exerce sobre o processo tradutório. Trabalhamos também com o conceito de reescritura de Lefevere (2007), que enfatiza o contexto histórico e cultural dos textos traduzidos. Sobre a relação entre literatura e cinema, empregamos os estudos de Cattrysse (1992), Stam (2008) e Xavier (2003). Por fim, baseamo-nos também nos postulados de Cândido (2007) e Gomes (2007), no que se refere à construção de personagens literárias e fílmicas, além de estudos prévios sobre Lolita, tais como aqueles de Agueros (2005) e Lazarin (2010). Os resultados mostraram que as estratégias utilizadas para apresentar a personagem Lolita nas telas intensificam o mito da ninfeta, da femme fatale, que permeia seu nome desde suas primeiras traduções. Por isso, na adaptação, Lolita pode ser interpretada como a anti-heróina de sua própria história enquanto Humbert se torna o herói apaixonado.

In this dissertation I examine Vladimir Nabokov’s and Gary Shteyngart’s use of family metaphors to manage intersecting Russian and American literary and cultural continuities. Both authors fashion their relationships to literary predecessors and common cultural narratives in terms of disrupted filial relationships, describing both an attachment to the conservative narratives of the nation and a desire to move beyond their rigid structure. I articulate this ambivalence as a productive state of transnational subjecthood that allows these authors to navigate apparently oppositional national identities. Central to this reorientation is a critique of the hierarchical schema of the national canon, which frames literary culture as a determinative series of authoritative relationships. By reimagining these relations as part of a branching network of co-constituting associations, we open the space for transnational subjects to move within and overlap these networks.

“Flesh Made Word” examines two seemingly incongruous Russian modernist writers to illuminate one remarkable species of aesthetic response to the violent pressures of Marxist ideology, especially as those pressures are manifest as sociolinguistic phenomena and practice. The unexpected pairing of Osip Mandel’shtam and Vladimir Nabokov is motivated by their shared debt to Henri Bergson’s materialist theories of embodied selfhood and subjectivity, language, and the metaphysics of art. Poetry, both writers insist, as it operates according to a non-linear logic of ever-open and expanding associations of sound and image, offers the only authentic grammar for a multifarious self that knows not the constructions of time, causality, and finality. This mode of self-expression, at once intimate and cryptic, clashes with the Marxist state’s effort to make the subject uniform and transparent—to “sentence” him to his prescribed collective identity in the bondage of speech, prose, and narrative, whose didactic agenda and linear momentum are encrypted with Marxism’s world-historical teleology. Mandel’shtam’s and Nabokov’s own texts, the study argues, operate primarily by poetic principles, and their literary practice in turn creatively anticipates theories of Bergson’s postmodernist heirs (Foucault, Barthes, Derrida), particularly as they draw bold political implications from Bergson’s theories to analyze the relationship of language, writing, and power. Barthes, for instance, claims that the “poetic” text—composed of a personal image-system, not a “structure of signifieds”—places the artist “outside the pact that binds the writer to society.” In exploring this conflict between manners of expression, the study offers innovative, cohesive readings of the writers’ most enigmatic and elusive works of poetic prose—Mandel’shtam’s The Egyptian Stamp and Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading. More specifically, it examines the ways the conflict is manifest on the bodies of the narrator-protagonists. These figures are effectively twice composed: once by the mortifying narration of the State, again as they are the subjects of their own revitalizing self-writing. The texts that the protagonists produce of themselves are figured as their very flesh transubstantiated, and as nothing other than the poetic works that we are reading. These metaphysical dimensions of the fiction make forceful statements about the power of the artistic act, and especially its potential to reclaim and restore the self in a gesture of political defiance. By establishing a distinct set of images, themes, and techniques shared by the authors, along with a conceptual framework in which to discuss them, this dissertation responds to a scholarly need, until now not substantively articulated, to place Mandel’shtam’s and Nabokov’s creative projects into dialogue. As much as it invites a parallel gaze, however, the study equally contributes daring new chapters to each author’s existing body of scholarship and opens fields of inquiry that demand continued critical attention.

納博可夫的《羅麗泰》游走於各文類之間，看似相反的詮釋卻得以並存，進而營造出一種不確定性美學。本論文旨在探討納博可夫的書寫策略以及文本中的各種不確定性。 第一章為概論，援引德希達的理論說明「不確定性」。第二章簡介後設小說的歷史與定義，檢視文本中後設與寫實元素的並存，並藉羅蘭巴特的理論說明可寫性的文本。此外，也以文中例證分析寫實元素以及《羅麗泰》既是童話故事也是諧擬童話故事。第三章進一步說明小說中種種二元對立並存的現象：道德性/不道德性；精神分析式閱讀/嘲諷精神分析；以及故事起源的不確定性。文中的反身性，作者現身以及雙重性俱使道德與不道德間的分野更模糊難辨。羅蘭巴特的文本歡愉恰與納博可夫視藝術為美學至喜的觀點吻合，而《羅麗泰》小說中的美學至喜也形成一種超越世俗定義的超道德。第四章分析《羅麗泰》跨越不同文類的特殊風格，而瀰漫書中的「不確定性美學」使其同時是(一)懺悔錄/諧擬懺悔錄；(二)偵探小說/諧擬偵探小說；(三)喜劇/悲劇；(四)羅曼史/諧擬羅曼史。第五章則是結論：《羅麗泰》小說中的不確定性美學開啟了嶄新的閱讀體驗，讀者得以游走於不同詮釋間，並在閱讀中創造文本的意義。 / Nabokov's Lolita is a text that oscillates around the border between genres. In a close reading of Lolita, readers frequently find a condition of undecidability. This thesis investigates Nabokov’s textual strategy of playing in the boundaries between many genres, and by extension between a series of binary oppositions; and also how the narrative style repeatedly produces moments where the reader could decide to interpret either one way or another way, leading readers continually into a kind of either/or, both/and, neither/nor interpretive dilemma—what I will call an aesthetics of undecidability. Chapter One is an overall introduction to the study, and I refer to Jacques Derrida’s idea of undecidability. In Chapter Two, I explore the binary opposition between metafiction/straightforward storytelling in Lolita. In addition to the history and naming of metafiction, I also analyze Catherine Belsey’s interrogative text and Roland Barthes’ readable (lisible)/writable (scriptible) text. As for the realistic elements of the novel, I dissect textual evidence in Lolita and the undecidability between fairy tale/parody of fairy tale. The coexistence of metafictional and realistic elements is also a part of the undecidability in the text. Chapter Three is about three distinct yet interrelated textual aspects of undecidability: morality versus immorality in Lolita, the undecidability between psychoanalytic reading versus parody of psychoanalysis, and the undecidability of the text’s originality versus its borrowing from a previous short story titled “Lolita” by Heinz von Lichberg. These three critical issues are further complicated by the reflexivity, authorial presence, and the doubleness in Lolita that make it even more difficult to see the text simply as moral or immoral. Taken together, the resulting complexity and sophistication of the aesthetic style enables an active reading experience or what Barthes’ called the “text of bliss”—which coincidently corresponds to Nabokov’s definition of true art as “aesthetic bliss,” and the bliss in Lolita makes it a text that contains a kind of morality. Chapter Four examines additional cases of undecidability between confession/parody of confession, detective story/parody of detective story, comic elements/tragic elements, and romance/parody of romance. Again these are distinct yet interrelated issues of ambiguity, but my purpose is to show that a style of undecidability pervades the novel in many ways. And Chapter Five is the conclusion of this thesis: the aesthetics of undecidability makes Lolita a text that resists a one-sided reading. I hope that my thesis might explain why different readers of Lolita have opposite readings.

In Lolita, Humbert is obsessed with the 12-year-old Lolita. It is a vulgar and disturbing story which raises questions about morality and ethics. With a sophisticated and elegant narrative, Humbert manages to draw attention to language rather than to his actions. Through fancy prose style Humbert covers up and hides his horrible actions. His verbal game serves to manipulate his readers to accept Humbert´s feelings and actions and sympathize with him.  Humbert´s narration is very persuasive and the reader is easily fooled to concentrate on what he says rather than what he does. In this essay deconstructive method is used to analyse Lolita. The study shows how binary oppositions are used in Lolita and what effect they have on the reader´s comprehension of the text. The study presents a number of incongruities in Humbert´s telling of the story and therefore the essay argues that Humbert cannot be trusted with the telling of his tale.

Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

No description available.