This thesis seeks to suggest that prevailing critical approaches to Conrad's work serve to restrict interpretative possibilities rather than to free them. I argue that the segmenting methods of classical narratology have been carried over to Conradian criticism, but that these methods prove inadequate to the technical versatility of Conradian narrative. Furthermore, I suggest that these methods have sometimes been applied inflexibly, to the extent that some of Conrad's most technically original works have been condemned simply because they do not adhere to the narrative structures narratology privileges. I examine in detail Conrad's use, and critical responses to that use, of non-linear chronology, variable perspective, narrative levels, personalised narrators, fragmented narrative, binary thematics and the quintessentially Conradian technique delayed decoding. My illustrations are not drawn exclusively from Conrad's major works, but from wherever I find narrative originality. Consequently, as well as references to many of Conrad's minor works, there are extended discussions of focalisation in the short story 'The Partner', of narrative levels in 'The Tale', and of narrative multiplicity in The Nigger of the ·Narcissus~. My conclusion is that Conrad was a more technically inventive writer than has been recognised, and that that invention tends one way: away from the notion of a single truth hidden at the heart of a work, and towards an art recognising the limits of representation. Many of the techniques I discuss can be seen as provoking the reader to see differently: incommensurable presentations of the same events from different perspectives, multiple conflicting interpretations of characters, narrators whose unreliability is explicitly highlighted rather than implied, narrative mobility, covert plotting. I suggest that in addition to asking his readers to see differently, Conrad, in his most successful works, actually requires us to be otherwise as we read.

In The Stranger, a novel by Albert Camus, and in “Funes the Memorious,” a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, the homodiegetic narrators have a significant effect on the referential aspect of their personal experiences. Chronologically these remembered experiences are positioned before the moment when they are narrated. The act of remembering is thus a form of subsequent narration. In both texts, memory is a project rather than an object because it is recounted and not found. In the sense that it is told, memory is necessarily a creative act and thus not faultless because the story of an experience is not the experience itself. The memories in The Stranger and in “Funes the Memorious” are not reconstituted but narrated. The peculiarity of the two texts lies in the fact that the narrators take an external position when describing their own past, emphasizing the imperfect aspect of the narrators’ memory. With a narratological approach to the texts and a Sartrean interpretation of memory, I study the effects of focalization on the act of remembering. By explaining the relationship between focalization, memory and the narratee, I show that the act of remembering is not a repetition of past events or experiences but rather an inventive process that occurs always in the present. I argue that external focalization is a more authentic way to tell the story of a past experience because it emphasizes the fact that memory is always in the process of being made and therefore uncertain and incomplete even to the individual remembering.

<p>Throughout history women have been the object of oppression by patriarchal society. Men have had more privileges than women and although women in earlier days have tried to resist they have been the object and not the subject. The Madonna/Whore complex is still present in many ways as there are restrictions of how women are entitled to behave according to patriarchal society. However involves a third factor; the intellectual or the universal woman who faces nearly the same problem as courtesans and prostitutes did in earlier days in order to obtain a lifelong partner. This study will shed light on the dilemma that a great deal of women encounter when struggling with love and relationships. I have analysed four short stories from Margaret Atwood´s Wilderness tips; Wilderness Tips, Hairball, True Trash and The Bog Man. The women in these novels experience subordination in their relationship to men either as a Madonna, whore or intellectual.</p><p> To come to this conclusion I have examined the short stories from different perspectives in terms of which role they each portray, how they reveal their implications in the narrative and how projective identification empowers women in relationships.</p><p>Keywords: Madonna/ whore complex, patriarchal society, narratology, voice, projective identification</p>

Throughout history women have been the object of oppression by patriarchal society. Men have had more privileges than women and although women in earlier days have tried to resist they have been the object and not the subject. The Madonna/Whore complex is still present in many ways as there are restrictions of how women are entitled to behave according to patriarchal society. However involves a third factor; the intellectual or the universal woman who faces nearly the same problem as courtesans and prostitutes did in earlier days in order to obtain a lifelong partner. This study will shed light on the dilemma that a great deal of women encounter when struggling with love and relationships. I have analysed four short stories from Margaret Atwood´s Wilderness tips; Wilderness Tips, Hairball, True Trash and The Bog Man. The women in these novels experience subordination in their relationship to men either as a Madonna, whore or intellectual. To come to this conclusion I have examined the short stories from different perspectives in terms of which role they each portray, how they reveal their implications in the narrative and how projective identification empowers women in relationships. Keywords: Madonna/ whore complex, patriarchal society, narratology, voice, projective identification

This dissertation investigates two of W.G. Sebald’s novels, "Die Ausgewanderten" and "Austerlitz" as examples of a unique kind of Holocaust fiction by a non-Jewish German author. Sebald’s fiction represents a radically different German depiction of the Holocaust and its effects on Jewish victims, as it deconstructs critical discourse and debates about the Holocaust in Germany, establishing an ethical approach to Jewish suffering and the idea of coming to terms with the Nazi past in the German context. Through the narrative structure, ambiguity and the language of the German narrators, what I term its language of uncertainty, Sebald’s fiction avoids appropriating the Jewish voice as well as identifying with Jewish Holocaust victims and survivors, while giving voice to the underrepresented Jewish perspective in contemporary German literature. In addition, this dissertation examines competing discourses on representation, victimization and memory in regard to the Nazi past and views Sebald’s work as a critical response to these discussions. Indeed, Sebald’s fiction moves the discussion beyond the trope of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (“mastery of the past”), which has for so long dominated discussion of the Holocaust in Germany, towards a reconsideration of the victims, whose voice has been marginalized in the focus on the non-Jewish German handling of the Nazi past. / text

The sudden and popular rise of comic book during the last decade has seen many new readers, filmgoers, and television watchers attempt to navigate the world of comics amid a staggering influx of content produced by both Marvel and DC Comics. This process of navigation is, of course, not without precedence: a similar phenomenon occurred during the 1980s in which new readers turned to the genre as superhero comics began to saturate the cultural consciousness after a long period of absence. And, just as was the case during that time, such a navigation can prove difficult as a veritable network of information—much of which is contradictory—vies for attention. How does one navigate a medium to which comic books, graphic novels, movies, television shows, and other supplementary forms all contribute? Such a task has, in the past, proven to be near insurmountable. DC Comics is no stranger to this predicament: during the second boom of superhero comics, it sought to untangle the canonical mess made by decades of overlapping history to the groundbreaking limited series Crisis on Infinite Earths, released to streamline its then collection of stories by essentially nullifying its previous canon and starting from scratch. But in its attempt to further impose order on their sprawling body of work, the monolithic comic books company also further solidified a perception of comics as a conservative and retrogressive medium. This thesis will explore Crisis on Infinite Earths as a means of revealing its status as a lens through which the traditionalist nature of comics can be understood. By examining Crisis through three crucial lenses—narrative, historical, and economic—I will argue that the text ostensibly designed to push past the canonical maze erected by its predecessors had the unintended consequence of actually rooting it further in its own history. / Master of Arts / This thesis examines DC Comics’ landmark Crisis on Infinite Earths series to better understand the comics as a both a discrete text and a piece of a larger narrative, historical, and bureaucratic canon. By examining Crisis as a narrative, historical, and economic product, I hope to shed light on how the text, while progressive in its desire to reshape DC’s canon, ultimately proved to be counterproductive.

This paper argues that narrative techniques in Absalom, Absalom! demonstrate Faulkners anticipation of postmodern thought and style. Similar techniques in Christopher Nolans film Memento serve to highlight how both writer and director confound the notion of master narrative by disrupting chronology and raising questions about the reliability of the narrators in each work. Nolan orders all events of the film in reverse while threading chronologically ordered events throughout to tell the story of Lennys murder investigation. Faulkner likewise uses "dischronology," such as flashbacks to tell the story of Thomas Sutpen. Both Faulkner and Nolan provide key information through questionable narrators at strategic times to manipulate reader's/viewer's thoughts and opinions about specific characters. Nolan and Faulkner use several narrators, none of whom witnessed all events, to tell the stories of each work. A close examination of these similar narrative techniques creates a parallel between two otherwise unrelated works. More importantly, such an examination shows that although Faulkner was a modernist writer, his work Absalom, Absalom! anticipated a postmodern era. To provide additional support for the argument that Absalom, Absalom! anticipates a postmodernist understanding of Narrativity, this paper will offer a perspective that incorporates ideas of postmodern thought and narratological studies from Seymour Chatman, Gerald Prince, and Julia Kristeva. It will also draw from ideas of such Faulknerian scholars as Donald Kartiganer, Michael Millgate, and David Minter. Against the backdrop such scholarship provides a comparison of the narrative techniques of Absalom, Absalom! and Memento enhances the postmodernist understanding of historical "truth" as necessarily partial, fragmented, and subjective.

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Thesis advisor: Elizabeth Rhodes / Historically, the narrative frame tale boasts a long and varied trajectory that originated in ancient India and includes texts such as the Panchatantra and the Arabian Nights. Eventually, many Eastern fables and the frame-tale structure that accompanied them entered the Western literary tradition through the cultural bridge that was medieval Spain. Considering the frame tale’s popularity in medieval texts, especially in fourteenth century Italian novella collections, it is curious to observe a decline in its use during the early-modern period in Europe. This study examines how the traditional framed novella collection dissolves into more fluid narrative forms. Novel, more structurally subtle types of framing devices, including the character-as-frame and the place-as-frame, maintain several consistent narratological functions with their historical counterparts. The frame tale’s form may have changed, but its function remains. The first chapter of this dissertation focuses on Boccaccio’s Decameron as the model for how a traditional frame tale functions. Four narratological framing functions – the aesthetic, the perspectivist, the metaleptic frame break, and the self-reflexive – work in concert to organize the text and engage readers in actively interpreting it. The remaining three chapters examine three exemplary moments in literary history when authors redesign and deploy the narrative frame: Lazarillo de Tormes, Part I of Don Quijote, and Cien años de soledad. These texts each create a paradigm shift by utilizing a well-known, well-established formal device in innovative ways. This dissertation argues that by understanding these works in a new light as framed texts, and by exposing the consistent functions at work within them, readers can better understand both the world of the text and the world outside it. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Romance Languages and Literatures.

The works in the field of general narratology that have been written since the first introduction of the concept by Genette in 1972 demonstrate a great dynamic in the development of this concept. Unfortunately, the refinements of Genette’s theory often suffer from inconsistency of definitions and remain heuristic, which does not allow the dissemination of the achievements to other types of texts (for example, Old Testament narratives). In the field of biblical narratology the concept of focalization (especially its recent development) was largely overlooked, and the attempts to study the Old Testament narratives in relation to the notion of focalization are generally not accompanied by careful examination of the subject. The purpose of the present research is the consideration of the narratological concept of focalization with regard to the Book of Ruth. To this end, the research examines if recent narrative theories suggest a universal methodology of exploring focalization that can be equally applicable to any narrative texts (including Old Testament narratives) and what are the specifics of applying this methodology to the Old Testament narratives? To answer the question above, the research considers Wolf Schmid’s ideal genetic model of narrative constitution and Valeri Tjupa’s theory of eventfulness and narrative world pictures as universal models for studying focalization. With some modifications and refinements these ideas are transformed into a methodology of studying focalization in the Old Testament narratives. The application of the method to the Book of Ruth shows that on the level of selection of narrative information, the narrator selects sixteen episodes that constitute four narratological events that became the basis of the plot. Then, on the level of composition by the means of reported speech and the play of horizons, those episodes and events were placed in a certain order. Finally, on the level of presentation, these events were presented mainly in the scope of internal focalization, which as demonstrated in the work correlates with the use of the qatal form of the Hebrew verb. Since Schmid’s ideal genetic model of narrative constitution claims to be universal, the method of studying focalization can be equally applied to other Old Testament narratives. Tjupa’s theory of eventfulness and narrative world pictures can help to emphasize narratological events and to blueprint the thread of the narrative and logic of selectivity for those Old Testament narratives that do not have clear division into episodes and events. A subject of special interest is the question if the hypothesis about correlation between constructions with the qatal form of the Hebrew verb and internal focalization remains true to other Old Testament narratives.