No description available.

Abstract not available

Thesis (doctoral)--Université de Paris IV, 1977. / Includes bibliographical references (v. 2, p. 1097-1116) and index.

published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Philosophy

No description available.

Critics of the English novel, arguing that it is underpinned by liberalism, frequently claim that the crisis of realism disclosed in the work of many contemporary writers derives from a concomitant crisis of liberalism. Liberalism's dissolution is thus seen to prefigure the death of the novel. This dissertation contends that realism cannot be equated with liberalism and that the contemporary crisis of representation signals a broader crisis of metanarratives. / Focussing on selected novels of five post-war English novelists--B. S. Johnson, Doris Lessing, John Berger, Iris Murdoch, and Angus Wilson--I argue that their different responses to the crisis of representation show that it is not a crisis of liberalism alone. Johnson rejects realism for epistemological reasons; Lessing and Berger question it on political grounds; Murdoch and Wilson combine its strengths with a self-reflexive awareness of its weaknesses. I suggest that Murdoch's and Wilson's novels, which argue that fiction does not reflect reality but endows it with meaning and which are at once representational and metafictional, offer the most fruitful ways of acknowledging the crisis of representation while refusing to be paralyzed by it.

No description available.

This dissertation offers the first comprehensive examination of realism in English-Canadian fiction of the early twentieth century. It argues for the existence of a "modern-realist" movement that is Canada's unique and unacknowledged contribution to the collection of international movements that makes up literary modernism. This argument involves a detailed analysis of the aesthetics, aims, preoccupations, and techniques of the modern realists, a reexamination of the oeuvres of the movement's most prominent writers, and a critical reevaluation of the "modernity" of Canada's three most significant realist sub-genres—prairie realism, urban realism, and social realism. This study also provides a literary-historical overview of the movement as a whole, which begins with the inauguration of the Canadian Bookman in 1919, and concludes with the emergence of a contemporary Canadian fiction in the 1950s. The conclusions arrived at in this work are based upon a reading of dozens of novels and works of short fiction, many of them unpublished and/or critically neglected and forgotten. The findings in this study are also based on original research into archival materials from seven institutions across Canada.

This thesis sets out to examine social realism in Alex La Guma's longer fiction by using Georg Lukacs's Marxist theory as a point of departure. Tracing the development in La Guma's novels in terms of a shift from critical realism to gestures towards socialist realism I argue that this shift is informed by Lenin's "spontaneity/consciousness dialectic" in terms of which workers begin by engaging in spontaneous actions before they are ultimately guided by a developed political consciousness. I am quite aware that linking La Guma's work to socialist realism might raise some eyebrows in some circles but I am nonetheless quite emphatic about the fact that socialist realism in La Guma's fiction is not in any way tantamount to the Stalin-Zhdanovite version of what Lukacs calls "illustrative literature". Rejecting Lukacs's conception that socialist realism is a prerogative of writers in the socialist countries, I argue that gestures towards socialist realism made in La Guma's last novels are rooted in South African social reality. One of the claims being made in this study is that La Guma's novels render visible his attempt to create a South African proletarian literature. For this reason I make a case for Russian precedents of La Guma's writing by attempting to identify some intertextual connection between La Guma's novels and Gorky's work. Where realism is concerned I argue that although La Guma seems to draw extensively on Maxim Gorky in redefining his aesthetics of realism, Lukacs's theory of realism is useful in contextualising his fiction. The first chapter is largely biographical, examining La Guma's father's influence in shaping his political ideology and his literary tastes. Chapter two focuses on La Guma's aesthetics of realism. In chapter three I examine La Guma's journalism as having provided him with the subjects of his fiction and argue that there is a carry-over in terms of La Guma's style from journalism to fiction. Accordingly, I provide evidence of this carry-over in the next chapter on A Walk in the Night in which I argue that while La Guma's style is naturalist the novel is critical realist in perspective. Chapter five contextualizes the shift from And A Threefold Cord, to The Stone • Country as providing evidence of La Guma's use of "the spontaneity/consciousness dialectic". In chapter six I read In the Fog of the Seasons' End in relation to Gorky's Mother as its intertext in terms of its gestures towards socialist realism as seen for example in its "positive heroes", Beukes and Tekwane. There are further elements of socialist realism in Time of the Butcherbird which are nevertheless brought into question by some ideological contradictions within the text this is the central thrust of my argument in chapter seven. I conclude this study with a brief discussion of La Guma's craftsmanship. / Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1998.

In this dissertation, I investigate American specular narrative which displays a significant level of visual empiricism and examine the implications of the eyewitness perspective such narrative assumes. Based on the epistemological assumption that "to see is to know," specular narrative imagines an empirical access (via visual processes of the gaze) to a knowable reality, and uses the figure of the eyewitness (by way of narration, focalization, and narrative technique) to render a supposedly transparent relation between narrative and reality. This study draws upon theories of narrative, realism, subjectivity, and the gaze to explore this narrative eyewitness, tracking how the impulse to construct an authentic American identity, which materializes during American colonization, influences early American discourse and recurs as a specular realism in later American narrative. I examine how the illusion of the eyewitness sustains Realist ideology in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century narrative (William Dean Howells' A Hazard of New Fortunes, Henry James' The Spoils ofPoynton, and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth); how new spatial and temporal paradigms created by automotive technology affect the eyewitness (and a particular vision of America) in the American road book, specifically Theodore Dreiser's A Hoosier Holiday, and how the specular fetishism of the nonfiction novel, particularly Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, problematizes narrative objectivity and sutures the reader into the narrative as eyewitness / Department of English