Th.--Lettres--Aarhus Universitet, 1958. / Bibliogr. p. 185-190. Index.

Although Rainer Maria Rilke is one of the most widely-read poets in the world and there are mountains of secondary literature on his poetry, his prose works are not given nearly so much attention. The present study is a reading of several of those works, with particular attention given to the role that the senses and creative labor play there. I begin with his "Ur-geräusch" essay (1919), in which Rilke reveals a fascination with the phonograph and a certain jealousy of its abilities. The phonograph provides a model for creative labor, as well as clues about Rilke's thinking on the relationship between this process of creation and the senses. There is an original synesthetic moment when, as a child in his science classroom, Rilke sees the phonograph translating the vibrations received by the horn and carving them into the wax and in turn hears his and the voices of his classmates played back through that horn. This moment in which the senses are blurred together perplexes him and he is left to make sense of this experience for years afterward. With the Geschichten vom lieben Gott (1900), the question turns to the relationship between creative labor and creation as such. The primordiality that was revealed in the sound produced by the phonograph is the subconscious for Rilke, which is our connection to the divine. Although we have been severed from that divine source, we are able to produce it through certain circumstances, viz. through our intersubjective interactions, especially storytelling. We also cultivate it through labor, if we are able to do it: we are stuck in the "Seventh Day," unable to work for the most part, which is the particular plight of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910). He undergoes the necessary transformation to do labor, a certain deconstruction of the self, but is unable to complete the circuit by expressing this change through his works. Auguste Rodin (1903), Rilke's monograph on the sculptor, shows us the ideal artist: able to dig up the tremendous energies of the subconscious and to channel them into great works.

No description available.

Habilitationsschrift--Philosophische Fakultät I--Universität Zürich.

Th. Ph. D.--Comparative literature--Cambridge, Mass.--Harvard university, 1959.

Thèse--Lettres--Helsinki, 1992.

Thesis (Ph. D.)-- Florida State University, 2006. / Advisor: Mark Winegardner, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of English. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Jan. 2, 2007). Document formatted into pages; contains iv, 174 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

The thesis proposes that the figurative and extensive use of the ‘mask'—persona, masquerade, disguise, impersonation—provides a crucial literary device for the development and liberation of the expressive potential of Katherine Mansfield and Eileen Chang (1920-1995). Chapter 1, ‘Introduction', elucidates the relationship between mask and language with respect to the writings of Mansfield and Chang by revising John Keats's idea of ‘the chameleon poet', Robert Browning's conception of dramatic monologue, Oscar Wilde's insights into truth and masks, and Ezra Pound's adoptions of ‘personae' in his poetry. The affinities between Mansfield and Chang will be explored by looking at their critical writing as well as criticism on them, revealing their shared awareness of the masks of a person in daily life as well as in fiction and drama. Chapter 2, ‘Katherine Mansfield's Art of Changing Masks', explores how Mansfield's characters switch between three types of masks—speech and the non-verbal, gender, animality—to respond to changes in their situations. Particularly important for this exploration are Joan Rivi re's ‘Womanliness as Masquerade', Michael Goldman's theory of masks in acting, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of ‘becoming-animal'. Chapter 3, ‘Prosopopoeia: Katherine Mansfield's “special prose” ', considers Mansfield's attempt ‘to bring the dead to life again' in what she calls ‘special prose' as a ‘prosopopoeia', or in Cynthia Chase' phrase, ‘giving a face to a name'. In this chapter I will also trace how Mansfield's work was first translated into Chinese in 1923 by the Chinese poet, Zhimo Xu (1897-1931), which made her one of the most widely-read foreign writers in the Chinese-speaking world. More importantly, I suggest that Xu's use of quotations from Keats and other nineteenth-century poets in portraying Mansfield in his memoir calls our attention to her decisive and still insufficiently examined relationship to poetry. Chapter 4, ‘ “Hiding behind a foreign language”: Eileen Chang's Self-Translation and Masquerade', examines Chang's penchant for translating her fiction and essays from Chinese into English or vice versa. Taking a cue from Pound's view of translations as ‘elaborate masks' and Deleuze's idea of the writer being a ‘foreigner' in their own language, I examine some of the ways in which that the mask of a foreigner / foreign language enables Chang, a bilingual fiction writer and essayist, to gain the emotional and spatial distance from which to reflect on Chinese culture and her personal life. Being inspired by Mansfield and Chang's courage to get away from the notion of writing as self-expression and Dionysus' gift of crossing boundaries through the assistance of the mask, the creative component of the thesis, Chapter 5, consists of 4 short stories. I conclude the thesis with a poem entitled ‘Gifts (for Katherine Mansfield)' and a quick fiction called ‘The Functions of Theory', considering theory and literary terms as a variety of make-up that I apply to the face of my thesis. While critical chapters contain embedded fiction, the creative component demonstrates and tests how the interior space behind the mask allows me to liberate my creative energy. In these stories, I attempt to cross the boundaries between male and female, Chinese and non-Chinese, human and animal, creative and critical writing.

Texte remanié de: Diss.--Berlin--Humboldt-Universität, 2001. / Bibliogr. p. 317-338. Notes bibliogr.

A critical analysis of several approaches to prose, and an attempt to construct a theory of prose as art, on which a language of prose criticism might be based. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)