Do words mirror reality? This question has been at the core of several linguistic disputes for decades. Several scholars have investigated the relationship between the signifier and the signified, and different literary theories suggest different approaches. This study is a close reading analysis of Paul Auster’s City of Glass, a novel that has been the subject of several scholarly studies relating to the role of language. This study aims to analyse the role of signification in the novel seen from a post-structuralist perspective in order to show how Auster problematizes language. Several explicit remarks on language are made from various characters in the novel, each expressing and conveying different language views. Nevertheless, a post-structural view on language wins favour as post-structural ideas and concepts are seen in the narrative language and the constructive level of the text. The analysis shows that Auster uses a post-structural view on language to illustrate the instability of signification in language. Auster problematizes the stability of language in order to illustrate the tentativeness of truth and ambiguity of reality. The language view of the narrator is used to illustrate the mimetic view that language is able to accurately record reality. The mimetic view on language is problematized by using the notebook as a symbol for the relationship between the signifier and the signified. The arbitrariness of language is illustrated through the means of the notebook in order to problematize truth. Auster uses the character of the protagonist Daniel Quinn to illustrate the belief in an essential truth within literature. This view is then problematized by using arbitrariness in the structural level of the text in order to illustrate the relativity of truth. The character of Stillman Sr is used to illustrate the belief of man being able to control language. However, the search for a divine language turns out to be a gnostic and meaningless quest since no cosmic solutions are achieved. The failure of Stillman´s quest is used to argue for the predominance of language over man. Language determines how people perceive truth. The perception of truth and reality is dependent on language. Since language is arbitrary, there is no truth which consists outside of language.

As literary modernism was emerging in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of its most important figures and precursors began to talk about their own writing as a kind of starvation. My doctoral thesis considers the reasons for and development of this previously little-explored trope, arguing that hunger becomes a focal point for modernism’s complex relationship to aesthetic autonomy. I identify a specific tradition of writers, beginning in the nineteenth century with proto-modernists such as Melville and Rimbaud, flourishing in the pivotal figures of Knut Hamsun, Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett, and expiring with modernist-influenced contemporary writers such as Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee. Although these writers are avid readers and devoted disciples of one another, mine is the first study to read them alongside one another as a coherent literary tradition. Reading them in this way, I am able to trace the development of the ‘art of hunger’ as a locus for a crisis in aesthetic autonomy that spans the twentieth century. I develop this line of argument in two phases. In the first, I trace the emergence of an art of hunger out of modernist engagements with philosophical aesthetics and its notions of aesthetic autonomy. Readings of the “art of hunger” in Herman Melville, Arthur Rimbaud, Knut Hamsun, Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett’s post-war work reveal that starvation carries autonomy to an extreme and hyper-literal endpoint, revealing both its desirability as an aesthetic ideal and the impossibility of art’s complete autonomy from the body, the market or the social dimensions of language. In the second phase, I consider how this trope has animated later twentieth-century engagements with modernism. For authors writing in the aftermath of modernism, hunger provides a way of considering new complications to aesthetic autonomy in the light of both their debt to modernism and their specific historical circumstances. In this light, I consider three different extensions of the modernist art of hunger: its absorption into high formalism in Beckett’s late prose; its collapse in the face of an emerging concern with the social in Paul Auster; and its transformation into an ethical aesthetics of food taboos, restriction and asceticism in J. M. Coetzee.

Entre autobiographie et fiction, le terme " autofiction ", inventé par Serge Doubrovsky, est un " genre " qui s'est surtout épanoui à la fin du XIXe siècle avec " la transposition en fiction des fragments d'une expérience " (Hubier), devenue de plus en plus populaire au fil du temps. La recherche entreprise dans cette thèse porte sur la forme contemporaine de ce mélange entre autobiographie et fiction que l'on trouve chez Paul Auster. Le corpus principal est composé de ses romans dits de la " maturité ", publiés entre 1991 et 2008 : Leviathan, The Book of Illusions, Oracle Night, The Brooklyn Follies, Travels in the Scriptorium et Man in the Dark. C'est ainsi la question de l'évolution de l'autofiction mais également de la métafiction chez cet auteur qui est examinée dans cette thèse. Divisé en trois parties, ce travail porte dans un premier temps sur les repères spatiotemporels dans les romans de Paul Auster avant de se concentrer sur les éléments métafictionnels présents dans les romans du corpus. Dans la première partie, une distinction est faite entre deux espaces : l'espace intérieur et l'espace extérieur et la façon dont ces deux espaces cohabitent. Dans une deuxième partie, la thèse s'intéresse aux repères temporels, qu'ils soient d'ordre mémoriel ou en rapport direct avec la structure du récit. La thèse examine le rôle que jouent certains repères empruntés à l'Histoire contemporaine dans l'histoire personnelle des personnages, en observant qu'ils occupent une place toujours plus importante au fur et à mesure que l'oeuvre austérienne progresse, en particulier à partir des attentats du onze septembre. Enfin, c'est la mise en scène de l'écriture chez Paul Auster et la façon dont elle alimente l'autofiction en mettant l'accent sur l'identité d'écrivain de notre auteur qui est traitée : l'emploi du langage, l'évolution des supports d'écriture chez les personnages, la description de la méthodologie du travail de l'écrivain mais également l'intratextualité qui met en avant le lien entre tous ses romans.

Definitions of celebrity authorship and material textuality at the turn of the twenty-first century have predominantly emphasised the implicitly negative aspects of contemporary developments in the literary marketplace. Particularly prominent are arguments that the practice of authorship has become subject to homogenisation by the matrix of celebrity in which successful writers are now expected to function; and, further, that the changing nature of texts themselves and the ways in which they are marketed is eroding the implicitly superior position traditionally held by literature in the cultural marketplace. This thesis views such readings as pessimistic, and offers an alternative, seeking to formulate a new critical approach to literary value in the contemporary sphere which would appreciate notions of celebrity, populism, and digital mediation as integral and productive aspects of how literary value is formed today. Through in-depth focus on the cases of a number of unconventional contemporary American authors whose work demonstrates differing, innovative approaches to the process of authorship, this thesis exposes the ways in which contemporary, atypically ‘literary’ instances of writing can and do work within and develop beyond traditional conceptualisations of authorship and literary value. Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney, largely critically considered prototypical ‘celebrity’ authors, are in the first chapter reconsidered as writers whose understanding of their position within the literary marketplace affords them a self-conscious, critical perspective on the notion of celebrity in their work and public personae. The productively self-conscious author-figure is reconsidered in the second chapter, which reads the individual and joint works of author Paul Auster and visual artist Sophie Calle as foregrounding the process of creative collaboration as uniquely illuminating and transformative within the contemporary literary sphere. The notion of dual authorship is revisited and reconceptualised in the third chapter, which considers JT LeRoy and the practice of hoax authorship, outlining how this process forces the reformulation of literary value, particularly in a contemporary setting in which authors are accountable for their work in newer, more visible ways. The final chapter expands these previously-introduced themes to consider bloggers-turned-authors, particularly Tucker Max and Julie Powell, and the impact of the merging of old and new textualities on both the orientation of the figure of the writer and the way in which value is attached to his texts by readers. Ultimately, the unconventional nature of these examples is shown to belie the universality of the representations of value they enact, contributing to a full and salient account of how literary value is determined at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

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In this dissertation I argue that invisible characters, as they appear in Paul Auster’s novels, serve a very specific function within the interpretative framework of a text and that they should be considered to play a functional role, in order to arrive at a more holistic interpretation of the text and a more accurate analysis of said texts. I argue that Auster knowingly includes these characters in his novels as part of his narrative technique, in order for them to serve specific functions and to contribute to the structure of postmodern fiction. I make use of a contextualized close reading of five of Auster’s novels and attempt a hermeneutic interpretation of these novels to arrive at a hermeneutic circle when combining these novels into an integrated whole, individual, work of fiction. Certain parallels can be drawn between Auster’s various novels and these parallels contribute to the various motifs and themes found throughout his work. The importance of space in Auster’s novels is also highlighted with emphasis on liminality which serves as an instigator for transgression to occur between different fictive worlds. / Thesis (MA (English))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2013.

In this dissertation I argue that invisible characters, as they appear in Paul Auster’s novels, serve a very specific function within the interpretative framework of a text and that they should be considered to play a functional role, in order to arrive at a more holistic interpretation of the text and a more accurate analysis of said texts. I argue that Auster knowingly includes these characters in his novels as part of his narrative technique, in order for them to serve specific functions and to contribute to the structure of postmodern fiction. I make use of a contextualized close reading of five of Auster’s novels and attempt a hermeneutic interpretation of these novels to arrive at a hermeneutic circle when combining these novels into an integrated whole, individual, work of fiction. Certain parallels can be drawn between Auster’s various novels and these parallels contribute to the various motifs and themes found throughout his work. The importance of space in Auster’s novels is also highlighted with emphasis on liminality which serves as an instigator for transgression to occur between different fictive worlds. / Thesis (MA (English))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2013.