This thesis posits post-humanism as a philosophy that engages directly with the problem of anthropocentrism and is concerned primarily with the metaphysics of subjectivity. It studies five literary texts (James Joyce's Ulysses, Virginia Woolf's Flush, Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, Brigid Brophy's Hackenfeller's Ape and J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons) that challenge the humanistic or classical subject through critical engagement with what this subject traditionally saw as its antithesis - the animal. These texts contest various fixed assumptions about animality and disrupt the status-quo of the human. Breaking with the tradition that treats animals exclusively as a metaphor for the human, they attempt to see and understand animality outside the framework of anthropocentric suppositions. This project aims to describe the strategies these texts employ to conceptualize animality as well as the methods they apply to delineate its subversive potential and to disrupt the human- animal binary. Its theoretical framework combines the work of thinkers belonging to the new but thriving field of Animal Studies with the ideas of Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. It is this project's great ambition to contribute towards the development of new post- humanist ethics defined by its...

The aim of the thesis is to analyse Virginia Woolf's novels and non-fiction in light of several recent trends in feminism and gender theory relevant to her work. The thesis considers Woolf's label of a feminist writer from a contemporary perspective. It examines a variety of ways in which her writing poses a challenge to patriarchal values regarding the treatment and representation of women. Woolf's position regarding gender issues, women and feminism is not monolithic or unified which must be accounted for. At points, some of her stances can be seen as problematic from a present-day feminist perspective. At the same time, in her work she raises concerns which have been relevant for and expanded by proponents of contemporary feminism and gender theory. The thesis focuses on three areas regarding gender awareness and representation in Woolf's work. They are her narrative style, the sociopolitical context of her work and the questioning of gender categories. Woolf's narrative style and strategies are viewed in light of écriture féminine as conceptualised by Hélène Cixous. Through her manner of writing Woolf aimed to disrupt established ways of narrating women's experience. Her concept of the woman's sentence can be seen as foreshadowing écriture féminine. Apart from her style, Woolf's development as a...

Proposing the concept of mimetic uncertainty, this project aims to provide a critical inquiry into the correspondence of unreliable narration and realism. Building on Springett (2013) and Olsen (2003), a distinction between narratorial unreliability and uncertainty is proposed to denote whether a narrator explicitly signals an awareness of their fallible narration. I thereafter indicate how narratorial uncertainty, on the one hand, can serve to evoke a “reality effect” (Barthes 1989) on a receptive aesthetic level; and on the other hand, can provide a form of historicity (Jameson 1985) and discursive realism (Auerbach 2003) on an expressive historical axis. Through this tripartite framework, realism is contextualised within the discourse of unreliable narration, as well as the specific debate which surrounds uncertainty and fallibility. The textual analysis focuses on three separate works—Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague year (1722), Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), and finally, Tao Lin’s Taipei (2013)—with the twofold aim of (1) providing a model for approaching uncertain narration and (2) applying a historically contingent realist reading. I argue that in all three novels, emphasis on how readers may respond to uncertain narration provides insight into socio-historical and discursive points of friction surrounding their authors. The overarching ambition of this study is to provide a more substantial and historicized understanding of the stylistic devices of contemporary authorship, while more broadly signifying the unexpected critical acuity of mimetic approaches as well as the challenges and demands which metamodernist literature approaches.

This essay applies a critical lens to Mrs. Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf. The aim of this essay is to investigate if and how Mrs. Dalloway can be utilized for students to practice critical consciousness in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom. In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf criticizes her own contemporary society by deliberately writing about the obnoxious social class system in London during the inter-war period. This deliberate social critique is analyzed by both looking into the author’s background and the historical time period the novel was written. The Marxist literary critic, Terry Eagleton argues that in order to fully understand literature, you must compare both the author and the author’s contemporary society to the novel itself. By analyzing these aspects, it is possible to understand any piece of literature from any given historical time period. Moreover, this essay desires to ascertain if canonical literature is relevant when teaching students about social class and inclusiveness. Furthermore, this essay argues that having a Marxist perspective can help students become critically conscious of both their environment and society. Also, it examines if the combination of Marxist theory together with critical pedagogy can create an educational situation that is equally fair for all students, regarding their socioeconomic status. The results of this essay concluded that applying either Marxist theory or critical literacy pedagogy to literature, could make students become more critically conscious about their environment, which could help to replicate the teaching philosophies of critical pedagogy by Paulo Freire.

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Literary realism, that is, texts that seek to represent the actual in literature while achieving a sense of verisimilitude, have historically been analyzed and defined by a number of critics. These critics have, with differing approaches, attempted to make comprehensible what it is that constitutes the realist text. In their process of doing so, many have dismantled this specific category of text and isolated its distinguishing components. This study has sought to challenge and elaborate on three of the most influential, scholarly voices that have articulated such ideas about the realist text: Ian Watt, Eric Auerbach and Roland Barthes. The purpose has been to add to this field of knowledge by increasing our understanding of what it is that constitutes literary realism. This has been done by analyzing three realist works that have been previously examined by these critics, and then, by studying two further realist works, more recent in time. These works are, in the order that they have been approached and analyzed: Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (Published in 1722), Gustave Flaubert’s A Simple Heart (Published in 1877), Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (Published in 1925), Melina Marchetta’s Jellicoe Road (Published in 2006) and Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (Published in 2022). As a result, the study has found that technology is a recurring textual element that functions as a coherence-making narrative device in these realist texts, and as a consequence, has laid bare a blind spot in these above-mentioned critics’ definitions of literary realism. Thus, the study suggests that technology should be understood as a distinguishing element in the literary text. The selection of works has, in turn, allowed for the study to both compare and contrast these texts, and to trace the effect that the technological development in the reality preceding the literary text can be said to have on these texts themselves. Here, the study has found that new technologies in the reality preceding the text often occur as new coherence-making textual devices in these literary works, and thus, that the technological development in the actual affects the realist text itself.

<p>Following from such theorists as Sara Ahmed, Lee Edelman and Heather Love, this thesis seeks to address current scholarship on queerness and temporality that conceptualizes queer subjects as complicating traditional notions of linear time, reproduction, and progress. Mobilizing theories of temporal disruption and disorientation, including backwardness and the queer moment, this thesis explores the association between such disruptions and a persistent impulse to reckon with and reconstruct what I refer to as “the fugitive dead,” understood here both as past events and as the ghostly figures of the dead and effaced. Such disruptions can, this project posits, foster queerly generative affinities between seemingly separate categories (e.g. between the present and the past or between the living and the dead), thereby providing alternatives and challenges to normative temporal trajectories.</p> <p>My analysis considers literary representations of such temporal disruptions, drawing on Virginia Woolf’s <em>Mrs. Dalloway</em>, Michael Cunningham’s <em>The Hours</em>, and Alison Bechdel’s <em>Fun Home</em> to explore their treatments of temporal linearity, queer moments, affinity and connection, as well as haunting and spectrality. Furthermore, this thesis also addresses the capacity of literary texts to <em>enact </em>temporal disruption in the form of the revisioning project, which can be figured as the literary attempt to encounter the fugitive dead. Ultimately, this thesis explores the literary and intertextual dimensions of this complex approach to queer temporality, advocating for the generative possibilities of an attentiveness to the continued presence of the past and an engagement with the figures of the lost and disappeared.</p> / Master of English

Châteaux intérieurs, du théâtre de la mémoire aux espaces imaginaires est une thèse composée de trois films, d’une installation vidéo et de deux scénarios. Ces travaux reposent sur des interrogations liées au lieu et à sa mémoire. Des mnémotechniques rhétoriques de l’antiquité aux usages du flashback dans le montage cinématographique, cette recherche traverse les champs de la photographie, des arts plastiques, de la littérature et du cinéma afin d’inventer ses propres usages plastiques de concepts philo- sophiques. Chaque projet développe sa façon propre d’aborder le sujet de la représentation d’un espace fantasmé, imaginé; façons liées au « genre » des propositions, à la place laissée au spectateur et, au cœur même des films, à la multiplicité des subjectivités des personnages. Ainsi, le film Demeure convoque saint Augustin et l’art de la mémoire tandis que Sirènes joue des effets de montage et de réminiscences. Les Passages secrets lie lieux réels et espaces fictionnels par l’installation in situ dans le village de Binic. La déambulation est alors une autre manière de rejouer le trajet discursif de la méthode des loci. Le scénario Sans Perceval, adapté des Vagues de Virginia Woolf, singularise quant à lui une multiplicité de points de vue sur un même temps partagé dans un lieu unique. D’une autre manière, Les Atomes joue avec la figure de la baleine comme lieu symbolique sur lequel achoppent et divergent les imaginaires. Enfin, en utilisant l’idée d’espace intérieur dans la fiction même, le projet des Châteaux intérieurs propose une voie d’actualisation d’anciennes propositions philosophiques et théologiques, autour d’une variation moderne du personnage de sainte Thérèse d’Avila. Ce dernier scénario agrège ainsi plusieurs concepts fréquemment évoqués, repris, mentionnés dans la topique chrétienne, ici distordus, transformés et utilisés dans la fiction même. / The thesis Mind Palaces, from Memory Theatre to Imaginary Spaces is composed of three films, one video installation and two scripts. These works focus on questions of places and their memory. From ancient rhetorical mnemonics to the use of flashbacks in film editing, this study covers the fields of photography, fine arts, literature and film, in order to come up with its own artistic interpretation of philosophical concepts. Each project develops its own way of broaching the representation of a dreamt-up, imagined space; be it relating to the "genre" of proposals, to the role given to the audience, or, at the very heart of the films, to the multi- plicity of subjectivities of the characters. Thus, the film Remains evokes Saint Augustine and the art of memory, whilst Mermaids plays with various editing and reminiscence effects. Secret Passages links real places and fictional spaces through the in situ installation in the village of Binic, and the act of wandering therefore beco- mes another way of replaying the discursive journey in the method of loci. As for the Without Percival script, based on Virginia Woolf's The Waves, it differentiates between multiple points of view on a given moment shared in a single place. In a different way, Atoms plays with the whale as a symbolic place against which imaginations wash up and diverge. Finally, by using the idea of an interior space within the fic- tion itself, the Mind Palaces project provides a way of updating ancient philosophical and theological theories, based on a modern variation of Saint Teresa of Ávila. This last script combines a number of concepts that are frequently alluded to, revisited and mentioned in Christianity, and are here distorted, transformed and used in the fiction itself.

Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka synen på författarroll, skrivande och genus i Virginia Woolfs ”Professions for Women” och Karolina Ramqvists Det är natten. Författaren och den som skriver utifrån följande frågeställningar: Vilka hinder för författarskap gestaltas? Vilka er­farenhet­er av kvinnligt författarskap förmedlas? Vilka likheter och skillnader finns i Woolfs och Ramqvists perspektiv? Teorin hämtas från genusvetenskapliga perspektiv, hos främst Simone de Beauvoir och Yvonne Hirdman, samt litteratursociologiska perspektiv från Johan Svedjedal. Undersökningen utförs genom komparativ metod samt närläsning och knyter an till bland andra Anne E. Fernalds och Sue Roes forskning om Woolfs ”Professions for Women”, samt bidrar till ny forskning om Karolina Ramqvists författarskap som är relativt outforskat inom litteraturvetenskap. Virginia Woolf anser att författaryrket utgör ett friare alternativ för kvinnor än andra yrken, och ser sin väg till detta arbete som enkel. Hon uttrycker också att hennes val att skriva inte inneburit några problem för omgivningen och att hon inte hindrats av ekonomiska omständighet­er. Ramqvist berättar att hon inte trodde att hon det var möjligt för henne att bli författare i egenskap av kvinna och att skrivandet utgör ett problem för hennes relationer. Hade hon haft högre ekonomisk status menar Ramqvist att hon inte nödvändigtvis hade arbetat som författare. Hon kommenterar Woolfs ”Professions for Women” och menar att Virginia Woolf kunde bli författare just för att hon hade ekonomiskt kapital. Woolf lyfter inre omständigheter och genusrelaterade attityder som centrala problem­ för kvinnliga författare medan Ramqvist redogör för yttre omständigheter, som främst är samman- kopplade med omgivningens och offentlighetens förväntningar och krav. Woolf kan sägas göra större anspråk på att hennes erfarenheter ska anses vara en kollektiv erfaren­het hos kvinnliga författare, medan Ramqvist främst diskuterar utifrån ett eget perspektiv. Ramqvist uttrycker exempelvis också en distans mellan sin egen uppfattning om moderskapets påverkan på för­fattarskap jämfört med sina kvinnliga författarkollegor. Woolf diskuterar inte moderskap i sin text men tar sin utgångspunkt i ”ängeln i huset”, som ska förstås som ett ideal och en attityd där kvinnan är insmickrande och uppoffrande mot sin om­givning, samt framstående inom hem och familjeliv. Ramqvist kommenterar Woolfs begrepp och anser det vara Woolfs egen upp­fattning om kvinnoideal. Hon diskuterar inte sina egna omständigheter utifrån ”ängeln i huset”, men det är möjligt att tolka exempelvis hennes yttrande om att göra sig otillgänglig för mäns behov som en del av vad Woolf kallar att döda ängeln i huset: enligt Woolf alla kvinnliga författares uppgift.

“Resonant Texts” draws from literary criticism, history, biography, media theory, and the history of technology to examine representations of sound and acts of listening in modern experimental fiction and drama. I argue that sound recording technology, invented in the late 19th century, equipped 20th century authors including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ralph Ellison, and Samuel Beckett with new resources for depicting human consciousness and experience. The works in my study feature what I call “close listening,” a technique initially made possible by the phonograph, which forced listeners to focus exclusively on what they heard without the presence of an accompanying image. My study examines the literary modernists’ acute attention to the auditory in their goal to accurately represent the reality of the subjective, perceiving self in increasingly urban, technologically advanced environments.