This dissertation analyzes post-structuralist theses concerning the literary work's potential for political critique and impact. By placing contemporary claims as to the inevitably oppressive or ineffectual character of the literary work next to the texts and reception of novels by John Dos Passos, James T. Farrell and Richard Wright, I examine whether such claims can account for the political achievements of actual literary works. Locating in Dos Passos's U.S.A., Farrell's Studs Lonigan and Wright's Native Son instances of an effective oppositional literature, I argue against the post-structuralist position and for a reconsideration of the Sartrean assertion of the "negative," and thus potentially critical and oppositional, agency of writers and readers, and thus, too, of the literary work. In using a particular case study as a corrective both for recent theory and for the excesses of Sartre's own arguments for "committed" writing, "Crisis and Dissent" contributes both to on-going critiques of post-structuralism and to recent re-evaluations of Sartre's own literary theory.

The South African years (1925-1966) of Alex la Guma is examined in this thesis. While La Guma's father was an important role model, most critics have overlooked his mother's contribution to his literary and political development. Throughout the thesis the same point is made about Blanche, La Guma's wife, who supported him in many ways. The researcher describes La Guma's infancy, childhood and adolescence, his father's political profile, how notions of race and writing, coloured identity and family and political experiences created the conditions that enabled him to become a story teller and political activist ...

Thesis--Freie Universität Berlin, 1974. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 1-69 (3d set)).

Thesis--Freie Universität Berlin, 1974. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 1-69 (3d set)).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Florida, 2005. / Title from title page of source document. Document formatted into pages; contains 105 pages. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references.

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This thesis provides a detailed socio-political and literary analysis of &quot / A walk in the night : seven stories from the streets of Cape Town&quot / . It investigated and systematically compared each short story to the novella or compared the short stories with each other and showed their thematic and formal similarities and differences.

Orientador: José Carlos Barreiro / Banca: Jean Marcel Carvalho França / Banca: Helio Rebello Cardoso Junior / Resumo: No Brasil do século XIX, ao processo de emancipação política seguiu-se um processo de construção de uma memória nacional particular, visando legitimar o novo regime que se estabeleceu. O palco onde se desenvolverão essas questões será a literatura que, por meio do romantismo, seria capaz de expressar a especificidade do Brasil enquanto nação. O índio, associado à natureza, aparece então como um dos principais motivos literários, já que era visto como elemento capaz de expressar a especificidade brasileira. Nesse processo, política e literatura se unem de forma indissociável. Pensando a coerência interna da obra de José de Alencar, nossa proposta é analisar a maneira pela qual ele constrói seus conceitos de literatura e de nacionalidade e de que maneira esses conceitos articulam questões culturais e questões de poder, tendo como base a representação que o autor constrói a respeito do índio em dois romances: O Guarani (1857) e Iracema (1865) / Abstract: In Brazil at the nineteenth century, the political emancipation process followed by a construction of a particular national memory process to legitimize the new regime that was established. The stage where these issues will be develop the literature, through Romanticism, would be able to express the main Brazil's characteristics as a nation. The Indian, associated with the nature, appears as a major literary subjects, as it was seen as an element with conditions of expressing the Brazilian specificity. In this construction process, politics and literature come together, in an inseparable way. Thinking about the internal logic of José de Alencar's work, our goal is to analyze the way in which the author builds his literature concepts and nationality and how these concepts articulate cultural issues and issues of power, based on the representation that the author builds about the Indian in two fictional narrative: the Guarani (1857) and Iracema (1865) / Mestre

This dissertation traces the emergence of a State-sponsored revolutionary culture in Mexico during the late 1920s and early 1930s through an eminently literary corpus of works. The analysis opens by highlighting the role played by literature in the formation of a politically and culturally homogeneous national identity in the years that followed the Revolution. An identity that was politically construed by the nationalist discourse of the Revolution, socially imagined as rural and peasant, and culturally characterized by machismo, secularism, and political unawareness. In this way, the dissertation argues that the consolidation of a national identity and political hegemony in those terms entailed the removal of marginal subjectivities and spaces: like the urban space of Mexico City and its inhabitants, the villista revolutionaries, the Cristero rebels and communist militants from the body politic because those subjectivities problematized the horizontality of Mexican identity, a process I call the Excisions from the National. In order to problematize these Excisions, I examine the representation of some of those marginal subjectivities and antagonistic identitary positions namely those found in key works of urban revolutionary, Villista, Cristero, and communist literatures. The dissertation traces how these subjectivities challenged revolutionary culture’s narrative of identity and of the nation itself and them moves on to construe what I call the Sutures of the National, a term I have coined to designate the manner in which these marginal subjectivities were later reincorporated to the body politic of the nation in a neutralized way once the revolutionary regime had stabilized during the 1940s and 50s. My analysis concludes by examining how the process of re-incorporating these subjectivities into the symbolic order of national identity led to certain unintended paradoxical binarisms of Mexican culture.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 185-196). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.