This thesis considers the novels of Kurt Vonnegut, focusing on Cat’s Cradle (1963), Player Piano (1952), and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), through the literary theories of Mikhail Bakhtin. It concentrates on Bakhtin’s carnivalesque inversion from Rabelais and his World (1965), his theoretical perspectives on the text as a site of struggle from The Dialogic Imagination (1975), and the practical application of his theories with the novel as polyphonic from Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1963). The thesis concentrates on three main themes: religion, technology, and war. Chapter One will examine the theme of religion in Cat’s Cradle. It will consider how religion is presented in society and how fundamental opinion can become embedded in our social and cultural structures. It will further consider the cultural shift in belief from religion to science, juxtaposing the two ideals and highlighting the destructive forces of absolute belief and fundamental opinion. Chapter Two will concentrate on Player Piano, and how technology could have a detrimental effect on the progress of human civilisation. It considers how valuable technology is to the human experience, and what happens to civilisation if humans are forced to surrender everything that gives their lives meaning. Chapter Three will analyse Slaughterhouse-Five, looking closely at the representation of war, and its effects on the mental state of those that are forced to encounter it. It will engage with the ‘ideals’ of war presented in society juxtaposed with the experience of actually taking part in war. Vonnegut critiqued the American social, political and religious structures prevalent throughout his life. To Vonnegut, America had the possibility to become a blueprint for the rest of the world, a role model for the liberation and equality of all human beings, but it needed work.

This thesis comprises a fictional novel, Floating, and a critical essay. The essay explores the borderlines between autobiographical writing (including memoir) and fiction. Using autobiographical narrative, the essay explores the inspiration and influences for writing the novel, Floating. It considers authors’ attitudes to autobiography in fiction, drawing on the work of Jessie Kesson before examining the literary techniques used by three contemporary authors: Jeanette Winterson, Janice Galloway and Jackie Kay. It considers particular challenges of writing autobiographically including: narrative perspective, identity, truth and invention. The novel engages with themes arising in the essay, particularly those relating to the creation and assumption of identity through recounting memory.

This thesis examines the relation between philosophy, the poem and the subject in the mature philosophy of Alain Badiou. It investigates Badiou’s decisive contribution to these questions primarily by means of comparison, especially to Martin Heidegger, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Theodor Adorno, as well as by analysing Badiou’s readings of poems and prose by Paul Celan and Samuel Beckett respectively as sites of potential dialogue with his immediate predecessors. The thesis stresses the importance of French philosophy’s German heritage, emphasising not only Badiou’s radical departure from Heidegger and his legacy, but also the former’s wholesale rejection of philosophies that would, in the wake of twentieth-century violence and beyond, proclaim their own end or completion. The thesis argues Badiou’s innovative readings of Celan and Beckett to be crucial to understanding this endeavour: for Badiou, both writers use the poem to affirm novel conceptions of subjectivity capable of transcending the historical conditions of their presentation. The title quotation from Badiou’s The Century, ‘Yes, the century is an ashen sun’, anticipates both the affirmative nature of these subjective figures, and their presience, beyond the bounds of a twentieth-century ‘ashen sun’ pervaded by melancholy, for the ‘new suns’ of the twenty-first. The thesis is in four chapters. The first chapter unfolds the central concepts of Badiou’s departure from Heidegger using Paul Celan’s poems to focus the enquiry. It is guided by two of Badiou’s most condensed declarations about the poem, that, firstly, ‘the modern poem harbours a central silence’, and secondly, that ‘Celan completes Heidegger’. The second chapter exposes the political implications of Heidegger’s writings on Friedrich Hölderlin and the role of the subject therein, offering at its close some thoughts about what Badiou calls, following Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, the poem’s ‘becoming-prose’. It concludes by drawing the poem and politics into relation by way of the philosophical category of the subject. The third chapter reads Badiou’s concept of ‘anabasis’ against Heidegger’s ‘homecoming’ in order to think the possibility of a collective political subject’s formation in the wake of Auschwitz. The final chapter examines the imbrication of the Two of love and the ‘latent poem’ in Badiou’s reading of Samuel Beckett’s late prose, contrasting this ‘affirmative’ reading of Beckett to Theodor Adorno’s earlier emphases on negation. Following its investigations of subjectivity, poem and prose throughout, the thesis concludes by returning to the title quotation in order to unfold the particular relations between subject, affirmation and negation Badiou’s philosophy enacts, and to offer further routes forward for research regarding Badiou’s philosophy and aesthetic figuration.