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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2001. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 212-234). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

My aim for That Dark Remembered Day was to create a work of fiction with a strong sense of the literary, one whose themes of violence, landscape and survivor guilt shone a light on the human condition, specifically the effects of post-war trauma on one family. The novel’s structure would be crucial in achieving its emotional heft, as each of the central characters is allocated at least one section, the reader experiencing events from disparate and increasingly illuminating perspectives. Fragmenting the book’s chronology (both throughout, but particularly in Part 3) by employing a technique of temporal blurring, helped to recreate a sense of disorientation in the reader, a key symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder. And despite an at times lyrical style, readability was important to me, in that I wanted the novel to retain its pace as a psychological thriller, albeit one where the reader is told what happens at the outset, the remainder of the book tasked with explaining how and why. Crucial to this thesis is the relationship I developed with my appointed editor, specifically how conflict emerged and was for the most part resolved during revision of the work. Significantly, I argue that these negotiations, together with my exploration of the author/editor relationship, contributed to my development as an author, and to the realisation of the novel. Research was conducted into the Falklands conflict by studying first-hand accounts of those who served, allowing me to blur fact with fiction, a process that delivered its own ethical challenges.

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This study analyses and presents the formal qualities of the novels of Erich Maria Remarque. The aim is to show that these works cannot justifiably be classified as lowbrow literature or Trivialliteratur, a negative criticism which has adhered to Remarque’s name since he wrote Im Westen nichts Neues in 1929. As a result, Remarque has rarely been the subject of scholarly interest; his name is, in fact, seldom found even in general works on modern German literature. The relatively few studies which have been carried out on Remarque and his oeuvre mostly express surprise about this author’s continued exclusion from academic discourse, but although these studies voice their disagreement with the labelling of Remarque as an author of Trivialliteratur, no serious attempts have, thus far, been made to create an argument against this tag. By analysing Remarque’s narrative strategies in depth, this study seeks to establish such an argument. Particular attention will be paid to the narrative perspective, although other aspects of form – structural and textural – will be incorporated in the examination. Due to the interdependence which exists amongst not only the individual formal elements, but also between the form as a whole and the novels’ contents, the strategies Remarque employs will be considered in the context of the novels in their entirety. The analysis will furthermore form the basis for the consideration as to whether Remarque’s narrative techniques remain comparatively unvarying throughout the novels – does the author adhere to an Erfolgsrezept? – or whether they reflect some degree of development. Although Remarque experimented with several literary genres in addition to the novel – short stories, poems, plays and film scripts – this study essentially focuses on the major novels which comprise what may be termed his Hauptwerk. It was on the basis of this part of his oeuvre that Remarque gained fame, but subsequently also the part that instigated the accusation of triviality. When evaluating the validity of the widespread condemnation of Remarque’s authorial abilities, it is thus of limited relevance to examine relatively unknown aspects of his oeuvre. Such material is therefore largely excluded, although it is used for comparative purposes where appropriate. For the sake of general clarification, but also in order to identify signs of development, the novels are analysed chronologically. The range of works on the topic of literary interpretation and assessment is extensive. This study, although acknowledging also other approaches, especially favours the comprehensive and logical method proposed by Boa and Reid’s in Critical Strategies. The opening chapter of this study offers a brief outline of Remarque’s life and oeuvre. It thus serves as an introduction to the author and his work. The chapter proceeds to explore different definitions of the term Trivialliteratur, but also considers the various factors which led to this widespread and persisting classification of Remarque. This chapter furthermore considers the relatively few studies which can be found on Remarque, and stresses especially those relating to his narrative strategies. Their limited number testifies to the level of neglect in this area and which Remarque’s work in its entirety has continued to be subjected to. The six chapters comprising the main body of the study each analyse one or two of Remarque’s major novels. Aside from the point-of-view, they examine the author’s most striking utilization of other narrative tools in relation to the individual novels. These tools, of course, vary in accordance with the themes and messages of the books. Throughout the study, the narrative strategies are considered against the reception of Remarque’s novels which, in addition to comparisons to the work of other authors, serve to place Remarque in the context of his literary contemporaries and the time at which he wrote his novels.

This study proposes an approach to a solution for the problem of the perceived ‚separatedness‛ of language from reality which employs the rhetorical concept of ethos, the doctrinal concept of the Chalcedonian definition of the nature of the incarnated Christ, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of ‚answerability.‛ As an alternative to theories of reading and interpretation based on the arbitrariness of linguistic meaning, radical skepticism, and the death of the author, the approach defined in this study emphasizes affirmation of the centrality of the human person and the necessity of close, loving attention as the grounds of both aesthetic vision and ethical action. Developing three exemplary readings of novelized epics including Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, David Jones’s In Parenthesis, and Chenjerai Hove’s Bones, the study demonstrates how loving, careful attention to ethos—the definition of which is expanded to include relationships between language and character in literary works, genres, characters, authors, and teachers—is the prerequisite for answerability in literary relationships. Whether one is primarily interested in authors, characters, genres, canon, readers, or critical reception, attention to ethos illuminates the ways in which responses to literary works are conditioned by and analogous to responses to persons. The complex and irreducible relationships between the ‚word‛ and the ‚person‛ require an individual answerability for which there is no alibi. Ultimately, the ‚word‛ and the ‚world‛ are united in the answerable person, whether that person is an author, a character, a reader, a critic or a teacher.

Female characters and references to femininity throughout American war literature disrupt discursive and biological divisions of the masculine and feminine. In examining gender and war literature over the twentieth century, I propose an alternative genealogy of American war literature in which narratives since the end of the nineteenth century initiate two related patterns of gender representation that Vietnam War literature dramatically expands: they critique aggression, camaraderie, and heroism, rejecting these traditional sites of masculinity through desertion narratives, and they harness sentimentality, domesticity, motherhood, and penetration, embracing these traditional sites of femininity in ways that disrupt gender norms. By examining these sites of cross-gender identification through psychoanalytic, rhetorical, and feminist methods, I argue that narratives by Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Kurt Vonnegut, Tim O'Brien, Stephen Wright, and Larry Heinemann reveal the power of contemporary redefinitions of gender by absorbing feminist discourse into the performance of masculinity.

This study proposes an approach to a solution for the problem of the perceived ‚separatedness‛ of language from reality which employs the rhetorical concept of ethos, the doctrinal concept of the Chalcedonian definition of the nature of the incarnated Christ, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of ‚answerability.‛ As an alternative to theories of reading and interpretation based on the arbitrariness of linguistic meaning, radical skepticism, and the death of the author, the approach defined in this study emphasizes affirmation of the centrality of the human person and the necessity of close, loving attention as the grounds of both aesthetic vision and ethical action. Developing three exemplary readings of novelized epics including Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, David Jones’s In Parenthesis, and Chenjerai Hove’s Bones, the study demonstrates how loving, careful attention to ethos—the definition of which is expanded to include relationships between language and character in literary works, genres, characters, authors, and teachers—is the prerequisite for answerability in literary relationships. Whether one is primarily interested in authors, characters, genres, canon, readers, or critical reception, attention to ethos illuminates the ways in which responses to literary works are conditioned by and analogous to responses to persons. The complex and irreducible relationships between the ‚word‛ and the ‚person‛ require an individual answerability for which there is no alibi. Ultimately, the ‚word‛ and the ‚world‛ are united in the answerable person, whether that person is an author, a character, a reader, a critic or a teacher.