No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Thesis advisor: Michael C. Martin / One way in which these ideas and influences are presented to humanity is through literature. By illustrating the processes and insights of the characters in search of the answers to these ultimate questions, novels can successfully portray the philosophical moment of clarity. Two novels in which the reader gains an insight into this moment of clarity are Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Each of these novels provides a different lens, focus and conclusion in the search for what is important in life and how humanity should view the world. Both authors use literature, specifically character experiences of moments of clarity, in order to portray a philosophy to the reader. Through the medium of literature, the reader is able to emotionally engage and become invested in the outcome of the characters and conclusion of the authors. This engagement of the reader creates a unique connection which fosters the ability for the reader to identify elements of the philosophical application in his or her own life which is absent through traditional philosophical texts. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2007. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

Thesis advisor: Marjorie Howes / Thesis advisor: Andrew Von Hendy / Literary Evasions of the English Nation in the 20th Century Nicholas Parker - Prof. Marjorie Howes and Prof. Andrew Von Hendy. ABSTRACT This dissertation seeks to engage with some of the complex means by which English subjects in the twentieth century envisage their relationship with the concept of nation, and with their own nation in particular. These are deeply ambivalent relationships, which present simultaneously seemingly contradictory and irreconcilable characteristics. In some ways the nation seems hegemonic and repressively conditioning to many English writers over the last hundred years. It is also deeply embedded in our ways of conceiving of ourselves, and is an irresistibly enticing means of understanding the world around us. It pushes individuals towards resistance and yet strongly resists evasion. At times the nation enables the establishment of identity in opposition to other ideological forces; at other moments, it becomes the problematic ideological structure in itself. These and other dichotomies will be examined in the course of this study. In chapter one I consider examples of writing between the wars, and comparable ways in which two authors render the subjectivity of the English individual as an untenable balancing act between living inside and outside the nation's literal and metaphorical territory. Woolf and the little known C.E. Montague narrate their changing engagement with England during and between the World Wars. Wartime is a moment of profound reification of the nation, where failure to fully commit to support it is potentially punishable by death. Both Mrs. Dalloway and Montague's Rough Justice narrate, in their differing ways, just such a death. Both authors share a developing sense of the frailty and decrepitude of England in the period, but both also develop a clear model for the recasting, rather than the casting out, of England into more enduring and politically palatable terms. In the second chapter I turn to the nation as it attempts to reproduce itself abroad. In the 1930s colonial English abroad are rendered in a state of dislocation from their home nation by Orwell and Mary O'Malley. They are cast as "ambassadors" for the English nation, proxies who are expected to prove themselves the most respectable of exemplars for their home. However, in the course of Burmese Days and O'Malley's Peking Picnic these central characters prove unqualified to maintain the impossible ideals of the nation they are expected to represent. They are instead aliens, in relation to both their home nation and their new "home" abroad. Chapter three ranges from the 1930s to 1960s, and to English regional narratives in which characters actively attempt to evade their nationality. The conceptual center of the chapter is the Angry Young Men movement of the 1950s, quintessentially represented by Alan Sillitoe and Keith Waterhouse. Beyond manifesting a rebelliousness towards the English nation in general, these two writers outline characters who employ a technique of fantasizing other lives as an attempt to liberate themselves from the pressures of an English nation with which they cannot, or will not, align themselves. They daydream visions of empowerment, glory and power. In so doing they momentarily disrupt the direct influence of the nation over them. Phyllis Bentley, a Northern English writer from an earlier decade, renders in her novel Environment a comparable desire to break from the influence of the English nation by dint of daydreaming another, independent existence. The relatively obscure Arthur Wise, writing in the late 1960s, enacts this fantasy in the most extreme terms in his 1968 novel The Day the Queen Flew to Scotland for the Grouse Shooting, a text that depicts the dream of bloody revolution and complete fragmentation of England, North and South. In my final chapter I turn to writing from later in the century, in which ambivalence about national affiliation leads to an extreme skepticism towards the nation as a concept in general, and to all other ideological constructs along with it. William Golding and Ian McEwan, in their novels Free Fall and Black Dogs, create willfully nihilistic characters that fear all hegemonic forces and struggle to gain and retain independence from investment in nation. Neither of these central protagonists can remain dislocated from allegiances for long however - the need for alignment with some form of collective construct outside themselves (like nation, personal love, theological values, etcetera) is overwhelming. I conclude, on the basis of the work of these ten writers, that the English nation is in a deeply unstable position, its authority, and even its substantive existence, challenged in a variety of ways both from without and from within. Its external opponents, both in rival nation-states and sub-national ideological movements (a number of which are violently threatening) are largely manifest. Perhaps more dangerous still, for England's continued endurance, are the threats which these writers suggest can come from national `insiders,' who resist, evade, question, even attack, the nation from which they purportedly emerge. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

No description available.

In this thesis I examine relationships between recollections of loss and the narrating of memory in works of Modernist author, Virginia Woolf. Woolfs position within discussions of early twentieth-century responses to trauma has long been the subject of debate, and her focus on alienation, death, and the detrimental influence of the larger, patriarchal sphere is crucial to critical analyses of her works. I argue that Woolfs depiction of memory is a more sophisticated one than has been previously recognized. In her fictional delineations of death and destruction, as well as in her theoretical musings on the process of remembering, Woolf conceives of a local communal sphere that is more conducive to the experience of individuated responses to loss, rather than the public sphere where notions of national identity, appropriate expressions of bereavement, and performed masculinity facilitate a continuous cycle that both produces and perpetuates such violence. These ideas are further complicated through Woolfs depiction of a different means of ordering the larger collective, one that can only be conceived through spontaneous moments of unity and connection.<p> My argument situates Woolfs position both contextually and theoretically, with reference to her own essays addressing recollection, along with contemporary discussions of the process of narrating memory and moments of trauma. It is organised in terms of the chronological publication of her novels, with the chapters moving from Jacobs Room to Mrs Dalloway, followed by The Waves, and ending with her final work of fiction, Between the Acts. Within this framework I delineate a progression in Woolfs own theories that marks her growing interest in, and working through of, unexpected loss, as well as a response that permits individuated expressions of mourning and temporary moments of connection. I end with a brief discussion of her suggested responses to such devastation, concluding that her conceptualisation of a dynamic, remembering community is a means by which she can challenge the homogeneity of the patriarchal status quo, as well as emphasising the importance of not only the articulation of trauma, but also the listening to and legitimising of such discourses.

In Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own the narrator clearly expresses her rage and resentment exposing the absence and exclusion of women through history and she also focuses on the unfair position of women in her contemporary society. The narrator encourages women to emancipate themselves and to be aware of the idiosyncratic nature of society that restricts them to the private sphere. The aim of this paper is to offer a different interpretation of A Room of One’s Own and demonstrate how Woolf excludes contemporary working-class women from partaking in her feminist message. In order to demonstrate the exclusion of working-class women three major perspectives have been integrated throughout the text: readings of A Room of One’s Own, a historical aspect including classism, and the significance of Woolf’s biographical background. My analysis highlights Woolf’s unintentional class bias, her ladylike manner, and the centrality of financial independence in A Room of One’s Own and displays how these features entail the exclusion of working-class women. The conclusion demonstrates that the amalgamation of the three perspectives mentioned above provides a nuanced and critical reading of A Room of One’s Own.

In this thesis I examine relationships between recollections of loss and the narrating of memory in works of Modernist author, Virginia Woolf. Woolfs position within discussions of early twentieth-century responses to trauma has long been the subject of debate, and her focus on alienation, death, and the detrimental influence of the larger, patriarchal sphere is crucial to critical analyses of her works. I argue that Woolfs depiction of memory is a more sophisticated one than has been previously recognized. In her fictional delineations of death and destruction, as well as in her theoretical musings on the process of remembering, Woolf conceives of a local communal sphere that is more conducive to the experience of individuated responses to loss, rather than the public sphere where notions of national identity, appropriate expressions of bereavement, and performed masculinity facilitate a continuous cycle that both produces and perpetuates such violence. These ideas are further complicated through Woolfs depiction of a different means of ordering the larger collective, one that can only be conceived through spontaneous moments of unity and connection.<p> My argument situates Woolfs position both contextually and theoretically, with reference to her own essays addressing recollection, along with contemporary discussions of the process of narrating memory and moments of trauma. It is organised in terms of the chronological publication of her novels, with the chapters moving from Jacobs Room to Mrs Dalloway, followed by The Waves, and ending with her final work of fiction, Between the Acts. Within this framework I delineate a progression in Woolfs own theories that marks her growing interest in, and working through of, unexpected loss, as well as a response that permits individuated expressions of mourning and temporary moments of connection. I end with a brief discussion of her suggested responses to such devastation, concluding that her conceptualisation of a dynamic, remembering community is a means by which she can challenge the homogeneity of the patriarchal status quo, as well as emphasising the importance of not only the articulation of trauma, but also the listening to and legitimising of such discourses.

No description available.