Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2003. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 256-263). Also available on the Internet.

Although scholars have widely acknowledged the prevalence of religious reference in the work of Cormac McCarthy, no studies have yet paid any adequate attention to the most pervasive religious trope in all his works: the image of sacrament, and in particular, of eucharist. I contend that a thorough and appropriately informed study of sacrament in the work of Cormac McCarthy can uniquely illuminate his whole body of writing and I undertake that study in this dissertation. Two things are obvious in the work of Cormac McCarthy: that these novels attempt to establish some sort of moral system in light of metaphysical collapse, and that they are often adorned with sacramental imagery. My argument is that these two facts can and do intelligibly speak to one another, and that a particular theological understanding of sacrament demonstrates how. By reading McCarthy alongside postmodern accounts of action, identity, subjectivity, and narration, I show how he exploits Christian theology in order to locate the value of human acts and relations in a sacramentally immanent way. This is not to claim McCarthy for theology, but it is to assert that McCarthy generates an account of what goodness might look like in a death-ridden world through reference to the theological tradition of sacrament. I begin by addressing the scope and source of McCarthy’s violence. In Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men I read McCarthy as following Nietzsche in scorning an ascetic ideal that locates the value of life beyond life. The ideas of reason and fate in Nietzsche as they develop in Adorno and Arendt is then studied in these same novels. Arendtian ideas of action deeply influence my reading of Suttree next, and this lead into a study of storytelling in the three novels of the border trilogy which is again deeply indebted to Arendtian notions of narration. Last, I look to contemporary theology and The Road for examples of sacrament that can cohere these various themes under a single sign and establish the grounds for a postmodern morality.

There are several ways of utilizing the plurality of narrative instances in a novel; the "stereoscopic view", which presents an object through the lens of several perceptions, is one of these ways. This is the case of Des feuilles dans la bourrasque (La Hojarasca), Gabriel Garcia Marquez's first novel, which will be at the center of our reflection on multiple narratives. We will study the structure of the novel through the notion of "parallax", which implies the fragmentation of the object by the marginalization of each one its points of view. However, it is by revealing the "stereoscopic" character of the novel with multiple narratives that the apparent lack of cohesion of the text will be qualified. The study will conclude with the following question: Does the structure of a novel with multiple narratives raise an ethical concern? / Ecluses is a story in five tempos, composed of five chronologically isolated short stories, which are interconnected by a context of common events and characters. The narrative of each of these short stories is supported by a distinct character. Nevertheless, it is the sum of the characters' perceptions, due to the active participation of the reader who has the role of making the different points of view converse, that the story to takes shape and goes forward.

This essay focuses on the character Patrick Bateman in American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis and his unreliability as a narrator and compares it to the unreliable narration of the character Dexter Morgan in Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay. These characters' respective unreliability is analyzed from the perspective of six types of unreliability suggested by James Phelan and Mary Patricia Martin: misreporting, misreading, misregarding, underreporting, underreading and underregarding. The result of the analysis is that while Patrick shows proof of being an unreliable narrator with respect to each one of the six types except underreporting and underregarding, Dexter can be connected to three of them (misreading, underreading and underregarding). Even if this might seem like an insignificant difference, the amount and the clarity in the examples of unreliability adhering to Patrick suggests that he is a much more unreliable narrator than Dexter is. This result indicates that characters can be at opposing ends of a spectrum of unreliability, on which Patrick according to this analysis is placed at the highly unreliable end of the spectrum and Dexter somewhere at the low end. / Denna uppsats fokuserar på karaktären Patrick Bateman i American Psycho skriven av Bret Easton Ellis, med tanke på denna karaktärs opålitlighet som berättare. Detta jämförs med karaktären Dexter Morgan från Darkly Dreaming Dexter skriven av Jeff Lindsay och denna karaktärs opålitlighet som berättare. Detta opålitliga berättande analyseras utifrån en modell som består av sex kategorier vilka James Phelan och Mary Patricia Martin har formulerat. Dessa kategorier kallas: ”misreporting”, ”misreading”, ”misregarding”, ”underreporting”, ”underreading” och ”underregarding”. Resultatet av analysen visar på att Patricks berättande kan placeras in i fyra av dessa kategorier (”misreporting”, ”misreading”, ”misregarding” och ”underreading”). Detta i jämförelse med Dexters berättande som kan placeras in i tre av dem (”misreading”, ”underreading” och ”underregarding”). Även fast denna skillnad kan verka obetydlig är det ändå så att de exampel på opålitlighet som Patrick visar upp står att finna i fler och tydligare exempel än hos Dexter vilket innebär att Patrick kan ses som en mer opålitlig berättare än Dexter. Resultatet av analysen indikerar att olika karaktärers berättande kan återfinnas i olika ändar av ett opålitlighetsspektrum. På detta spektrum kan Patrick då placeras in som en mer opålitlig berättare än Dexter som hamnar i den mer pålitliga delen av spektrumet.

Why do people tell stories? Whether it be the oft repeated, endlessly varied fairy tales passed from one generation to the next, the carefully patterned and strictly worded epics of the ancients or tall-tales told around the kitchen table, people have been telling stories to themselves or others since the day someone uttered the first words ever heard on this planet. In the following essay story-telling is called narrativity and is discussed as a function of the desire to impose meaning on experience. The six stories of Drawing the Reader In are about story-telling and how people fail or succeed as story-tellers. Neither can be said to fully answer the question above, rather they elaborate on the possibilities of there being an answer.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 202-214). / Also available by subscription via World Wide Web / xvi, 214 leaves, bound 29 cm

Thesis (MPhysio)--University of South Australia, 1998

Thesis (MPhysio)--University of South Australia, 1998

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 2006. / Title from title page screen, viewed on February 4, 2008. Dissertation Committee: Roberta Seelinger Trites (chair), Karen Coats, C. Anita Tarr. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 258-267) and abstract. Also available in print.

Habilitation - Universität, Hamburg. / Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (p. [307]-327) and indexes.