This essay focuses on the character of Lily Briscoe in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. From a gender perspective it discusses Lily's striving to exceed her socially constructed position as a woman by attempting to be an artist. At the beginning of the twentieth century women were supposed to be housewives rather than artists. This ideology of femininity held women back from achieving anything outside the home, and forced women to attempt to escape their femininity in order to pursue their dreams. This essay discusses Lily's efforts to escape her femininity by attempting to transcend her body and by striving to achieve an androgynous mind.

Explores the difference between the two versions of Virginia Woolfs short story about Nurse Lugton.

Virginia Woolf wrote both prose and poetry, both fiction and non-fiction: she was both a creative writer and a politically conscious reporter. She left a wealth of beautifully crafted observations and comments that continue to be immensely quotable and influential. Feminist critics today use Woolf's vocabulary to continue the feminist conversation which she entered early in her life and consistently influenced as long as she lived and wrote. My purpose in this essay is to identify some of the ways in which feminists strategically use references to Virginia Woolf and A Room of One's Own to empower their own perspective or to develop legitimacy for their own knowledge and discourse. / Graduation date: 1992

At the beginning of the twentieth century, men occupied a contested and transitional space in British society. The effects of the women's movement, the Great War, and industrialization changed their life at home, at work, and at their places of recreation. This dissertation examines how the British male writers E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, and George Orwell depict this "crisis of masculinity" and its effect on the male population. I argue that one of the ways the writers convey their understanding of the changing gender codes and the ways in which men were attempting to manage the adjustments to their daily lives is through the description and purpose that they attach to masculine spaces. These three threshold writers occupy an important place in the canon of British modern literature. They all are a part of a masculine literary tradition that privileges male bonding and additionally rituals that seek to reinforce and carry on the patriarchal narrative of men to distinguish between homosocial male bonding and patriarchal privilege (which is heterosexually based). While Forster demonstrates the gender tension between men and women in the exclusive masculine spaces of the text, Lawrence characterizes masculine private space as a site for healing and revitalization for men after the war, and Orwell describes underground male spaces as sites where men can prove their masculinity by enduring intense suffering from pain that is inflicted by the work that they perform. In each chapter, I demonstrate that understanding masculine spaces provides a more complete understanding of each writer's masculine paradigm in literature and to some extent gives us a new way of thinking about the author and his own gender insecurities. Whether it is the swimming hole or the automobile, the smoking room or the dining room, the battlefield war trench or the coal mine, the domestic and public spaces of male life are under siege in the modern era, according to Forster, Lawrence, and Orwell. In order to preserve and sustain the rites and traditions that are upheld in those settings, the writers remind readers about the genealogy of men that reinforces the necessity of male space in hopes of preserving it for future generations.

ABSTRACT This thesis is focused on Foucauldian analysis of power, madness, and sexuality in Virginia Woolf¡¦s Mrs. Dalloway. Michel Foucault¡¦s assertion of power aims to explicate the positivity of exercises of power and power-knowledge nexus. Foucault¡¦s study of madness and of the history of sexuality manifests the power confrontation between reason and madness, heterosexuality and homosexuality. In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf also presents these two power confrontations through the stories of the two main characters, Septimus Warren Smith and Clarissa Dalloway. Woolf, in this novel, not only explores the power relationships between human beings and the social systems but also demonstrates the two main characters¡¦ different solutions toward the power conflicts. The Introduction begins with an overview of the theoretical frame of Foucauldian power and an explanation of the connection between Foucauldian approach and Mrs. Dalloway. In Chapter One, I discuss the cause of Septimus¡¦s madness and the power conflict between Septimus and the doctors, i.e. the power confrontation between reason and madness. In Foucauldian term, the power confrontation between reason and madness signifies the power relation between taboo and transgression. Only through incessant movements of transgression, can the limit of taboo be sensed and emancipated. Chapter Two chiefly deals with the same-sex love between Clarissa and Sally. Their choice of marriage displays the power of the norm of heterosexuality. In this chapter, I, further, present Woolf¡¦s feminist point of view toward women¡¦s subordinate position in the marriage. In Chapter Three, I mainly describe the similarities between Septimus and Clarissa and their different resolutions toward power struggles. Both of them have the homosexual inclination; however, in the moral and sexual norm of heterosexuality, they have a sense of alienation from the circumstance they live in. This sense of alienation generates their feelings of being between the two poles of life and death. They both deeply realize the power of the social norms and try to solve their impasse between life and death in the power struggles. Septimus¡¦s suicide symbolizes his resistance against the power of reason and his attempt of ending the power conflicts; on the other hand, Clarissa¡¦s choice of continuing her life conveys a message of hope of survival to counterbalance the power confrontations. In Conclusion, I reiterate the research of Mrs. Dalloway with the synthesis of Woolf¡¦s and Foucault¡¦s point of view toward power, madness, and sexuality. Both Woolf and Foucault lead readers to understand that ¡§norms¡¨ are socially and culturally constructed, and they endeavor to inspire readers to liberate those so-called norms.

This dissertation analyzes concepts of the writing self in works about writing by professional creative writers (writers, poets, and essayists). Through a rhetorical analysis of these texts, I observe that writers view the writing self as a complex structure that is fully conscious as a rhetorical agent, an embodied self that interacts with the world and actively chooses linguistic representations of that experience, and maintains a concept of self that is subject to influences which the writers do not fully understand (such as inspiration and insight). The discourse used by writers to describe their writing processes challenges recent critiques of expressionism and the model of social construction that pervades contemporary composition scholarship. Chapter II examines Virginia Woolf's use of the central metaphor for invention in A Room of One's Own, a river, which sharply calls into question a unified view of the self which is central to critiques of expressivism by composition scholars. Woolf's concept of invention requires a negation of the self and harmony with nature (widely conceived as the entire world, including texts). Chapter III, an analysis of two writing memoirs by contemporary professional creative writers, Annie Dillard's The Writing Life and Donald Hall's Life Work, finds that Dillard and Hall use metaphors that establish freedom (rhetorical agency) and bodily presence as primary characteristics of their writing processes. Chapter IV, an analysis of two collections of essays about writing by professional creative writers, argues that the writers' use of metaphors of inspiration and instrumental metaphors creates a concept of the writing self that maintains a sense of writerly control (rhetorical agency) alternating with a sense of a diminished control; ultimately, the two concepts coexist in the minds of the writers. Chapter V proposes that the rhetorical situation of the contemporary composition classroom affects students' creativity adversely. The chapter also suggests further analyses of writing memoirs can provide new ways of understanding writing processes (as opposed to one writing process model) and therefore contribute substantially to composition scholarship and pedagogy.

Zugl.: Paderborn, Univ., Diss., 2008

Thesis (Ph. D.)--York University, 2000. Graduate Programme in English. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 372-387). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNQ67899.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 55-56).

The central issue in the works of Danish philosopher and religious thinker Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) takes the form of a question: "What does it mean to become a Christian?" However, Kierkegaard's ideas exerted influence well beyond Christian circles and have been important to many notable philosophical and literary figures, some of whom chose not to concern themselves primarily with this question (Sartre, Camus, Heidegger, Buber), and some of whom did choose to concern themselves primarily with this question (Tillich, Bonhoeffer, Berdyaev, Marcel). Even though Kierkegaard died in relative obscurity, thanks to posthumous translation of his works into German and to those translations then being embraced by thinkers as diverse as the atheist Sartre and the Hasidic rabbi Martin Buber, Kierkegaard's writings evolved into a great shaping force in twentieth century philosophy, theology, and literature. Extending slightly Kierkegaard's influence, the present study draws upon his concept of irony as indirect communication and upon his concept of the three spheres of existence to engage in close readings of four masterpieces of literature: The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, Mrs. Dalloway, and Ulysses. The four close readings then become a point-of-departure for considering how Kierkegaard's concept of irony---more specifically, its three spheres of existence--might apply to the world of present-day scholarship and pedagogy. The close readings of the four novels thus serve to establish the context for the final chapter, which considers how Kierkegaard's concept of the three spheres of existence might apply to a broader understanding of scholarship and pedagogy. In addition to offering literary analysis (conventional close readings) of the four novels, the present study also serves as a primer to the theology of Kierkegaard in that the close readings of the novels illustrate various aspects of what Kierkegaard believed to be the three spheres of existence. The study also forwards the action of scholarship and pedagogy by inviting the reader to consider how the three spheres of existence might apply to contemporary scholarship and pedagogy.