Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Delaware, 2006. / Principal faculty advisor: Susan Goodman & Carl Dawson, Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references.

Submitted by Marlene Santos (marlene.bc.ufg@gmail.com) on 2014-12-11T18:34:17Z No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Samuel Cavalcante da Silva - 2013.pdf: 843507 bytes, checksum: bc0e3a6cd6bb7dd60060dec62662f7f7 (MD5) license_rdf: 23148 bytes, checksum: 9da0b6dfac957114c6a7714714b86306 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Jaqueline Silva (jtas29@gmail.com) on 2014-12-11T18:56:14Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Samuel Cavalcante da Silva - 2013.pdf: 843507 bytes, checksum: bc0e3a6cd6bb7dd60060dec62662f7f7 (MD5) license_rdf: 23148 bytes, checksum: 9da0b6dfac957114c6a7714714b86306 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-11T18:56:14Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 Dissertação - Samuel Cavalcante da Silva - 2013.pdf: 843507 bytes, checksum: bc0e3a6cd6bb7dd60060dec62662f7f7 (MD5) license_rdf: 23148 bytes, checksum: 9da0b6dfac957114c6a7714714b86306 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-07-26 / Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Goiás - FAPEG / This research aims to analyze the discursive effects of identity processes, observed in Brilliant parents, fascinating teachers, from Augusto Cury, one of the representative authors of selfhelp literature in Brazil. We used as theoretical and methodological devices French Discourse Analysis postulates, from Michel Pecheux´s and Michel Foucault´s contributions. Specifically we focus in this research, the notions of speech, subject and production conditions from Pêcheux and of subject/power, power/knowledge, ways of subjectivity and disciplinary practices from Michel Foucault. As a methodological approach we propose the description of statements based on the proposal for the development of Foucault's archaeological method. With the theoretical-methodological support we´ve analyzed the book in order to identify the identity processes proposal of the teacher subject. We observed a discourse that takes place in certain production conditions. The enunciator subject determines the places occupied in the process of dialogue which are: the place of an enunciator who holds a scientific knowledgepsychological, that aims, through a disciplinary and pastoral power, to establish truth regimes on the subject/reader/teacher, and the reader subject, a place determined by the enunciator, as the subject of the lack, one that is lost and need guidance to act promptly in your profession. It is proposed to the teachers subjects certain disciplines that constitute ways of subjectivity, which aims to get the discursive subject in a discursive mash, in order to make it docile and useful. For this, the enunciator establishes interdiscursive relationships with the following discourses: scientific, religious, and with official discourses on education as Parameters National Curriculum (PNC), this interdiscursivity shown produce senses since an identification with what is being said as true until the intimidation, punishment for mistakes. We´ve noted that the proposal of constitution of the teacher subject in this self-help discursivity is of an individual, homogenized subject, that will revolutionize education, a kind of sweet superhero. It is a discoursivity which imposes certain disciplines and does not respect the singularities. / Propomos pelo presente trabalho analisar os efeitos discursivos de construção identitária, observados no livro Pais brilhantes, professores fascinantes, de Augusto Cury, um dos autores representativos da literatura de autoajuda no Brasil. Utilizamos como base teóricometodológica desta pesquisa os postulados da Análise do Discurso francesa, a partir das contribuições de Michel Pêcheux e Michel Foucault. Mais especificamente centramo-nos, nesta pesquisa, nas noções de discurso, sujeito e condições de produção a partir de Michel Pêcheux e sobre sujeito/poder, saber/poder, modos de subjetivação e práticas disciplinares a partir de Michel Foucault. Como caminho metodológico propomos a descrição dos enunciados baseada na proposta de Foucault para o desenvolvimento do método arqueológico. Com o suporte teórico-metodológico analisamos a obra buscando identificar a proposta de constituição identitária do sujeito professor. Observamos um discurso que se realiza em certas condições de produção. O sujeito enunciador determina os lugares ocupados no processo de interlocução a saber: o de enunciador detentor de um saber científico-psicológico, que pretende, por meio de um poder disciplinar e pastoral estabelecer regimes de verdade sobre o sujeito/leitor/professor, e o sujeito leitor, lugar determinado pelo enunciador, como sujeito da falta, aquele que está perdido e precisa de orientação para atuar com presteza em sua profissão. É proposto aos sujeitos professores determinadas disciplinas que configuram modos de subjetivação, que pretendem prender o sujeito em uma malha discursiva, com objetivo de torná-lo dócil e útil. Para isso o enunciador estabelece relações interdiscursivas com os seguintes discursos: científico, religioso, e com os discursos oficiais sobre a educação como os PCNs, essa interdiscursividade mostrada produz sentidos que vão desde uma identificação com o que se está dizendo como verdadeiro até a intimidação, a punição por erros cometidos. Observamos que a proposta de constituição do sujeito professor nesse discurso de autoajuda é de um sujeito individualizado, homogeneizado, que irá revolucionar a educação, uma espécie de super-herói doce. É um discurso que impõe certas disciplinas e não respeita as singularidades.

Through narrations presenting juxtaposition of conditions and ambivalence of conclusions, writers in the Hawthornian tradition compel the reader to interpret for himself the destiny of the creative protagonist. In these works the creative self is often threatened with psychical annihilation by its internal conflicts between pragmatic needs and aesthetic goals, social responsibility and professional dedication, idealistic pursuits and materialistic desires. Works in this tradition show creativity evolving from conflicting forces within the creative self. Female characters in the novels function as the creative imagination, leading the self towards creative consummation, sometimes bearing the creation itself, and always suggesting mythical figures associated with creativity. Male characters represent either the withdrawn, sensitive, idealistic ego, or the active, materialistic will. Confrontation between these internal forces produces the apocalyptic revelation enabling the self to transcend its condition by renewing contact with the creative source, the unconscious psyche. For these writers the unconscious has roots in myth, legend, dreams, and memory and is opposed to sterile conditions producing fragmentation of the creative self. In the Hawthornian tradition, the American Revolution separated the self from existence in the timeless universal givens and propelled it into assuming the determination of history. Bereft of traditional guidance and belief and burdened by moral responsibility, the creative self in this tradition is driven inward, continually seeking balance between its internal conflicts of idealism and materialism and finding the only means to immortality through the creative work itself.

This project seeks to make a contribution to contemporary theories of affect by putting the work of theorists Brian Massumi, Sara Ahmed, Jane Bennett, and Donovan Schaefer in conversation with the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. At the same time, it relies on these theorists’ conceptualizations of embodied affect to explore the role of the body in Bakhtin’s understanding of selfhood and freedom. In particular, I show how Bakhtin’s incorporation of aesthetics into processes of self-creation and relationality adds to scholarship on interpersonal affective dynamics; sociocultural economies of affect; ethically potent experiences of wonder and generous behaviors; and religious impulses. Further, I demonstrate that the principles of dialogism and polyphony can be conveyed through cinematic means, and argue that Bakhtin’s concept of carnival can inform analyses of sensory impact of cinema, revealing its potential to challenge politics and ideologies on an embodied and affective plane. Finally, I argue that Bakhtinian polyphony is the aesthetic modality proper to cultivation and manifestation of ethics of generosity, whereby sensations of awe, wonder, and curiosity stimulate attentive and open-minded engagement with the world.

This study is an interpretive analysis of Zimbabwean political auto/biographical narratives in contexts of changing culture, race, ethnicity and gender identity images of the self and nation. I used eclectic theories of postcolonialism to explore the fractured nature of both the processes of identity construction and narration, and the contradictions inherent in identity categories of nation and self. The problem of using autobiographical memory to recall the momentous events that formed the contradictory identities of self and nation in the creative imagination of the lives of Ian Smith, Maurice Nyagumbo, Abel Muzorewa, Joshua Nkomo, Doris Lessing, Fay Chung, Judith Garfield Todd, Tendai Westerhof and Lutanga Shaba have been highlighted. The study concluded that there are narrative and ideological disjunctures between experiencing life and narrating those experiences to create approximations of coherent identities of individual selves and those of the nation. The study argued that each of the stories analyzed in this study contributed a version of the multiple Zimbabwean narratives that no one story could ever tell without being contested by others. Thus the study explores how white Rhodesian auto/biographies depend on the imperial repertoire to construct varying, even contradicting, images of white identities and the Rhodesian nation, which are also contested by black nationalist life narratives. The narratives by women writers, both white and black, introduced further instabilities to the male authored narratives by moving beyond the conventional understanding of what is ‘political’ in political auto/biographies. The HIV and AIDS narratives by black women thrust into the public sphere personalized versions of self so that the political consequence of their inclusion was not only to image Zimbabwe as a diseased society, but one desperately in need of political solutions to confront the different pathologies inherited from colonialism and which also have continued in the post-independence period. / English Studies / (D. Litt. et Phil. (English))

Jorge Semprún’s work is the fruit of an incarceration in the concentration camp of Buchenwald as a resistance fighter and his expulsion from the Partido Comunista Español in 1964. Due to these biographical circumstances, many critical literary studies to date limit the discussion of his works to the autobiographical and the realm of Holocaust studies. Together with the texts that do not fit adequately into this categories, his self-identification as a Spanish exile has up to now been neglected. The present thesis aims to provide a more global view of his oeuvre by extending the literary analyses to texts that have deserved little critical attention. In order to achieve this, it investigates the role played by memory and self-representation in a variety of works by Semprún. Aspects connected to memory such as exile and nostalgia, the Holocaust, the interplay between memory and writing, politics and collective memory, postmemory and identity are examined by means of a detailed analysis of the selected works and are discussed thematically. Differences in genre are discarded for the discussion and interconnections between the various narratives are highlighted. With the help of memory and trauma theories, we come to the conclusion that memory is the overarching principle of Semprún’s writing and that he invests it with an aesthetic and ethical value which is interpreted as the justification for his devotion to writing.

This dissertation explores how contemporary, small-press, speculative fiction deviates from other genres in depicting the processes of consciousness in narrative. I study how the confluence of contemporary cognitive theory and experimental, small-press, speculative fiction has produced a new narrative mode, one wherein literature portrays not the product of consciousness but its process instead. Unlike authors who worked previously in the stream-of-consciousness or interior monologue modes, writers in this new narrative mode (which this dissertation refers to as "the little weird") use the techniques of recursion, narratological anachrony, and Ulric Neisser's "ecological self" to avoid the constraints of textual linearity that have historically prevented other literary modes from accurately portraying the operations of "self." Extrapolating from Mieke Bal's seminal theory of narratology; Tzvetan Todorov's theory of the fantastic; Daniel C. Dennett's theories of consciousness; and the works of Darko Suvin, Robert Scholes, Jean Baudrillard, and others, I create a new mode not for classifying categories of speculative fiction, but for re-envisioning those already in use. This study, which concentrates on the work of progressive, small-press, speculative writers such as Kelly Link, Forrest Aguirre, George Saunders, Jeffrey Ford, China Miéville, and many others, explores new ideas about narrative "coherence" from the points of view of self as they are presented today by cognitive, narratological, psychological, sociological, and semiotic theories.

The dissertation traces the trope of the incomplete character in four twentieth-century cosmopolitan novels that reflect European colonialism in a global context. I argue that, by creating characters sharply aware of the insufficiency of the Self and thus constantly seeking the constitutive participation of the Other, the four authors E. M. Forster, Samuel Beckett, J. M. Coetzee, and Congwen Shen all dramatize the incomplete character as an agent of postcolonial resistance to Western humanism that, tending to enforce the divide between the Self and the Other, provided the epistemological basis for the emergence of European colonialism. For example, Fielding's good-willed aspiration to forge cross-cultural friendship in A Passage to India; Murphy's dogged search for recognition of his Irish identity in Murphy; Susan's unfailing compassion to restore Friday's lost speech in Foe; and Changshun Teng, the Chinese orange-grower's warm-hearted generosity toward his customers in Long River--all these textual occasions dramatize the incomplete character's anxiety over the Other's rejection that will impair the fullness of his or her being, rendering it solitary and empty. I relate this anxiety to the theory of "posthumanism" advanced by such thinkers as Marx, Bakhtin, Sartre, and Lacan; in their texts the humanist view of the individual as an autonomous constitution has undergone a transformation marked by the emphasis on locating selfhood not in the insular and static Self but in the mutable middle space connecting the Self and the Other.

Post-apartheid writing has been characterized by an ardent search for a voice that truly depicts the painful apartheid past. The establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) promoted a confessional mode of writing as a means to obtaining healing, hence reconstitution. Such a paradigm shift in writing necessitated imagined characters to re-invent and re-align themselves with the new post-apartheid dispensation if they were to remain relevant to South African readership. Reinvention of characters is made possible through several means and various organs of reconstitution such as history, narration, possession of one’s landscape and a disavowal of belonging as depicted in The Native Commissioner. This study seeks to examine the process of self-constitution undergone by the co-protagonist and surrogate narrator, Sam Jameson, following his failure to function as an individual and father in post-apartheid South Africa. To this end, a close reading of the novel is done, to better understand the context of Sam’s trauma. The study traces the self-reconstitutive process of Sam from the moment he decides to re-visit his father’s past, to the moment when he finds release from the trauma. I argue that an investigation of his father’s life, as well as his, ultimately gives him agency over his own. Sam’s identity shifts from his childhood past, in which apartheid exerts primary influence, to that of an adult who lives in the post-apartheid moment, having come to terms with his past. Telling his story, to him becomes an act of re-creation and self-invention and the means by which he formulates his own identity. At the end of the story, it is a totally liberated individual that the reader witnesses. / English Studies / M.A. (English)

This thesis examines two works (My Journey to Lhasa and Magic and Mystery in Tibet) by Alexandra David-Neel. These works subvert the self/other dichotomies both necessary to and critiqued by postcolonial theory. Central to this study is an examination of a claim by His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama that David-Neel creates an "authentic" picture of Tibet. In order to do this the first chapter establishes a working definition of authenticity based on both Western philosophy and Vajrayana Buddhism. This project argues that the advanced meditation techniques practiced by Alexandra David-Neel allow her to access a transcendent self that is able to overcome the self/other dichotomy. It also discusses the ways in which abjection and limit experiences enhance this breakdown. Finally, this thesis examines the roles that gender and a near absence of female Tibetan voice play in complicating the problems of self, subjectivity, and authenticity within these texts. / by Robert William Jones II. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2010. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2010. Mode of access: World Wide Web.