Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Texas, May, 2007. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

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D.Litt. et Phil. / Marguerite Yourcenar was already famous as a writer of historical novels like Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951) and L’Œuvre au Noir (1968), when the first volume of her three-volume autobiography, Le Labyrinthe du Monde, appeared in 1974. Readers expecting to find out at last who Yourcenar really was, were to be disappointed for in Le Labyrinthe du Monde, the author meticulously explores her genealogy but gives very little direct information about herself. The first volume, Souvenirs pieux (1974), is devoted to the genealogy of the maternal branch of Yourcenar’s family. The second, Archives du Nord (1977), deals with her father’s genealogy and the final, unfinished volume, Quoi? L’Eternité, published in 1988 after the author’s death, should according to Yvon Bernier, to whom Yourcenar entrusted the care of her documents in her will, have dealt with her father’s death, with some of her earlier writings and with her own life up to the declaration of the Second World War. As it is, of the 624 pages occupied by Le Labyrinthe du Monde in the Gallimard edition of Yourcenar’s collected Essais et Mémoires, only 20 deal specifically with her early childhood. A further 30, recounting the life of her immediate family before and during the First World War, are interspersed with some information on her life between the ages of 11 and 15. The fact that the autobiographical subject’s own story is largely absent from this text, left students of Yourcenar’s work with the question whether Le Labyrinthe du Monde could still be considered an autobiography. Several articles were published on the subject, but only one detailed study by Simone Proust who explains the unconventional autobiographical form of Yourcenar’s text by linking it to the influence of Buddhism on the author’s thought. The present study pursues the hypothesis that although the author does not tell her own story in detail in a conventionally autobiographical form, she represents herself in several ways. This analysis is carried out in four phases. The first identifies the main theoretical issues regarding the question of self-representation in language which are the subject of an ongoing debate. Secondly, a detailed analysis of self-representation in the three volumes of Le Labyrinthe du Monde is undertaken. Thirdly, possible links between Yourcenar’s autobiography and the rest of her œuvre are explored. The last section is an attempt to situate Yourcenar’s special kind of self-representation within the broader context of some twentieth century trends of thought. The study arrives at the conclusion that although the story of the autobiographical subject is granted such limited space in Le Labyrinthe du Monde, self-representation does take place in an unconventional and oblique way. Marguerite Yourcenar reveals herself in the way she talks about other people, and the selfportrait that takes form in the text gives a privileged position to the artist at work. Le Labyrinthe du Monde in fact illustrates Yourcenar’s belief that her identity is to a large extent determined by her writerly activity, and reflected in the books she wrote.

This thesis examines the pervasive presence of the vulnerability of the human body in Charles Dickens’s writing. It demonstrates, through a collection and discussion of bodily references drawn from the range of Dickens’s novels, that the the body’s vulnerability is, in conjunction with the use of humour and the literalizing of metaphorical references to the body, a crucial and fundamental element of both Dickens’s distinctive style and of his enduring literary popularity. Chapter one provides evidence for the contention that a sense of physical vulnerability was particularly intense in the Victorian era and that Dickens shared this awareness as his social and humanitarian interests and activities illustrate. The following chapter focuses on Dickens’s more private concerns with the body, particularly upon his personal physical fears and experiences, the public attention given to his body as a result of fame, his continual denial of his own physical frailties, and the interplay between his body and his writing all of which provided impetus to his literature. Chapters three, four, and five examine consecutively the ways in which physical vulnerability—to damage, disease, and death, but most importantly to dismemberment— function in the novels. They do so on three broad levels: Character, Conversation, and Expression which depict in ascending order increasing bodily insecurity in Dickens’s texts. The Character level concerns the bodily forms and fates of Dickens’s characters. We see here that the more a player’s body is described the more vulnerable it will become, thus good-hearted heroes are virtually “bodiless” and suffer little physical pain while evil characters are described in great anatomical detail and come to bodily harm. Dickens metes out “bodily justice” on this level in that he ensures that characters who have transgressed the rules of good conduct in his fictional world are physically punished for their misdeeds and that bodily punishment is in direct proportion to the “crime” committed. On the Conversational level Dickens depicts extreme physical horrors by expressing these things humorously, by putting descriptions of them in mouths variously and interestingly accented, and, most significantly, by playing on the dual literal and metaphorical meanings of bodily references. Most of this anatomical dialogue is anecdotal and therefore unverifiable, hypothetical and therefore unlikely to happen, or professional, i.e., spoken by “bodily experts” such as doctors or undertakers, and therefore irrefutable. Here exaggeration and extremes attract readers who are simultaneously fascinated and repelled by what characters say of the body. Dickens’s methods of Expression reflect physical reality—all bodies are vulnerable to sudden damage just as Dickens can dismember a body suddenly either with the stroke of a pen or by delaying its complete description. We see that on this level the body is at it most vulnerable and is damaged by methods of expression rather than by narrative. Dickens here plays most intensively with the literalization of metaphor, linguistically insisting that if a head appears around a doorway we can no longer assume that a body will follow. The novels are filled with dictionally decapitated heads and severed limbs, but through the use of humour and by reanimating these members Dickens ensures that his style elicits not simply a reaction of horror in his readers but elicits a response to the grotesque—a strong instinctual attraction to his work which is rooted in the body, not in the intellect. This dissertation concludes that the body’s vulnerability is not only a continual presence in Dickens’s novels but is an under-examined yet fundamental element in what makes his writing style distinctive and what makes his work continually popular. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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English Studies / M.A. (English)

by Mi Jia-Yan. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 258-272). / Poems in Original Chinese. / Title Page --- p.i / Abstract --- p.ii / Acknowledgments --- p.iv / Editorial Note --- p.v / Table of Contents --- p.vi / Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter One --- "The Dialectic of Progressive Body: Self, Cosmos and New National Identity in Guo Moruo's The Goddesses" --- p.16 / Chapter I. --- Sources of Influence: Emergence of a Modern Body --- p.19 / Chapter II. --- The Instinctual Body as Creation of Progressive Self --- p.32 / Chapter III. --- The Metaphorical Body as Transfiguration of Cosmic Self --- p.50 / Chapter IV. --- The Passionate Body as Sacrifice for New National Identity --- p.61 / Summary --- p.71 / Notes --- p.73 / Chapter Two --- The Decadent Body: Toward a Negative Ethics of Mourningin Li Jinfa --- p.82 / Chapter I. --- Economy of Somatic Decadence --- p.87 / Chapter II. --- Aesthetics of Counter-Enlightenment --- p.100 / Chapter III. --- Narrative of Reflection: A Profane Illumination --- p.117 / Chapter IV. --- Toward a Negative Ethics of Mourning --- p.134 / Summary --- p.142 / Notes --- p.144 / Chapter Three --- The Narcissistic Body: Mnemonic Aura and Fragments of Modernity in Dai Wangshu --- p.148 / Chapter I. --- Modernity of Trivia and Fragments --- p.154 / Chapter II. --- The Memory Narrative: A New Syntax of Self-Reconstruction --- p.165 / Chapter III. --- The Tropics of Body Memory --- p.182 / Chapter IV. --- The Floral and the Feminine: Gift of the Senses --- p.191 / Chapter V. --- The Narcissistic Body: Toward an analytics of the Self --- p.221 / Summary --- p.231 / Notes --- p.233 / "Conclusion Modernity, Self-fashioning and the Will to Maturity" --- p.240 / Bibliography --- p.258 / Appendix --- p.273

by Amy Tak-Yee Lai. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [106]-114). / Abstract also in Chinese. / Chapter Chapter One --- "Narcissism, Approach and Theories" --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter Two --- The Artist and His Portrait: The Picture of Dorian Gray --- p.25 / Chapter Chapter Three --- The Stutterer and His Temple: The Temple of the Golden Pavilion --- p.49 / Chapter Chapter Four --- The Poet and His Garden: Ying'er --- p.70 / Chapter Chapter Five --- "Narcissism, Culture and Self" --- p.95 / Works Cited and Consulted --- p.106