Mot bakgrund av att asexualitet på senare år formulerats som en möjlig sexuell identitet, orientering eller preferens är syftet med uppsatsen att teoretisera den asexuella positionen – här definierat som ”frånvaro av lust till sexuell praktik”. Detta görs genom en nära läsning av fyra texter som varit centrala inom feministisk och queer teoribildning, med intentionen att undersöka hur asexualitet positioneras i relation till dessa teorier. De teoretiska utgångspunkterna hämtas från feministiska och konstruktivistiska teorier om kön, sexualitet, makt och subjektstatus, främst Michel Foucault (1976)och Judith Butler (1990). Mina läsningar visar att i Gayle Rubins sexuella värdehierarki (1984) tilldelas positioner utifrån sexuellt aktörskap, och det är således sexuella subjekt som kan emanciperas. I Adrienne Rich’s text om obligatorisk heterosexualitet (1980) tillskrivs även den icke-sexuella kvinnan aktörskapet att undkomma tvångsheterosexualisering - Rich’s införande av ett lesbiskt kontinuum kan ses som en dekonstruktion av en sexuell kategori. I min läsning av Michael Warner (1993) frågar jag huruvida den queera metoden även kan användas till att ifrågasätta normer om att vara sexuell, och i min läsning av Butler (1990) diskuterar jag frånvaro av begär i relation till möjliga subjektspositioner inom ramen för en heterosexuell matris. I min slutdiskussion återknyter jag till Foucault, och problematiserar (a)sexualitet ur ett könsmaktsperspektiv. Jag avslutar med att problematisera den gränsdragning mellan sexuellt och icke-sexuellt vi alla ständigt avkrävs att göra.

With its focus on the relationship between dreamscape and death, this study examines the possibility of indirectly experiencing – through writing and dreaming – that which cannot be directly experienced, namely death. In considering this possibility, the thesis engages at length with Maurice Blanchot's argument that death, being irrevocably absent and therefore unknowable, is not open to presentation or representation. After explicating certain of this thinker's theories on the ambiguous nature of literary and oneiric representation, and on the forfeiture of subjective agency that occurs in the moments of writing and dreaming, the study turns to an examination of the manner in which such issues are dealt with in selected dreamscapes. With reference to David Malouf's An Imaginary Life, Alan Warner's These Demented Lands, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and Richard Linklater's Waking Life, the thesis explores the literary and cinematic representation of human attempts to define, resist, or control death through dreaming and writing about it. Ultimately, the study concludes that such attempts are necessarily inconclusive, and that it is only ever possible to represent death as a (mis)representation.

Mit dem Begriff Heteronormativität wird die Naturalisierung und Privilegierung von Heterosexualität und Zweigeschlechtlichkeit in Frage gestellt. Kritisiert werden nicht nur die auf Alltagswissen bezogene Annahme, es gäbe zwei gegensätzliche Geschlechter und diese seien sexuell aufeinander bezogen, sondern auch die mit Zweigeschlechtlichkeit und Heterosexualität einhergehenden Privilegierungen und Marginalisierungen. Der Begriff tauchte erstmalig 1991 in Michael Warners Aufsatz "Introduction: Fear of a Queer Planet" auf. Zentrale Bezugspunkte der Analysen von Heteronormativität stellen Foucaults Untersuchungen zum Zusammenhang von Sexualität und Macht sowie Butlers Theorie der Subjektkonstitution im Rahmen der heterosexuellen Matrix oder der heterosexuellen Hegemonie dar.

Thesis (MA (English))--University of Stellenbosch, 2008. / The notion that the post-colonial text stands in direct opposition to the canonical European text, and thus acts as a kind of counter-discourse, is generally accepted within post-colonial theory. In fact, this concept is so fashionable that Salman Rushdie’s assertion that ‘the Empire writes back to the Centre’ has been adopted as a maxim within the field of post-colonial studies, simultaneously a mission statement and a summative description of the entire field. In its role as a ‘response’ to a dominant European literary tradition, the post-colonial text is often regarded as resorting to a strategy of subversion through inversion, in essence, telling the ‘other side of the story’. The post-colonial text, then, seeks to address the ways in which the western literary tradition has marginalised, misrepresented and silenced its others by providing a platform for these dissenting voices. While such a view rightly points to the post-colonial text’s concern with alterity and oppression, it also points to the agonistic nature of the genre. That is, within post-colonial theory, the literature of Empire does not emerge as autonomous and self-determining, but is restricted to the role of counter-discourse, forever placed in direct opposition (or in response) to a unified dominant social order. Post-colonial theory’s continued classification of the literature of Empire as a reaction to a normative, dominant discourse against which all others must be weighed and found wanting serves to strengthen the binary order which polarises centre and periphery. This study is concerned with ‘rewritten’ post-colonial texts, such as J.M. Coetzee’s Foe, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Marina Warner’s Indigo, or, Mapping the Waters and Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest, and suggests that these revised texts exceed such narrow definition. Although often characterised by a concern with ‘political’ issues, the revised text surpasses the romantic notion of ‘speaking back’ by pointing to a more complex entanglement between post-colonial and canonical, self and other. These texts signal the collapse of binary order and the emergence of a new literary landscape in which there can be no dialogue between the clearly demarcated sites of Empire and Centre, but rather a global conversation that exceeds geographical location. It would seem as if the dependent texts in question resist offering mere pluralistic subversions of the logic of their pretexts. The desire to challenge the assumptions of a Eurocentric literary tradition is overshadowed by a distinct sense of disquiet or unease with the matrix text. This sense of unease is read as a response to an exaggerated iterability within the original text, which in turn stems from the matrix text’s inability to negotiate its own aporia. The aim of this study, then, is not to uncover the ways in which the post-colonial rewrite challenges the assumptions of its literary pretext, but rather to establish how certain elements of instability and subversion already present within the colonial pretext allows for such a return.

No description available.

Many of us believe that poetry, specifically activist and experimental poetry, is capable of intervening in our society, as though the right words will call people to action, give the voiceless a voice, and reorder the systems that perpetuate oppression, even if there are few examples of such instances. Nevertheless, my project looks at these very moments, when poetry alters the fabric of our real, to explore the ways these poetical interventions are, in effect, instances of what I have come to call “dissensual” poetry. Using Jacques Rancière’s concept of dissensus and the distribution of the sensible, my project investigates the ways in which dissensual poetry ruptures the distribution of the sensible—“our definite configurations of what is given as our real, as the object of our perceptions and the field of our interventions”—to look at the ways poetry actually does politics (Dissensus 156). I look at three different types of dissensual poetry: concrete poetry, sound poetry, and instapoetry. I argue that these poetic practices prompt a reordering of our society, of what is countable and unaccountable, and of how bodies, capacities, and systems operate. They allow for those whom Rancière calls the anonymous, and whom we might call the oppressed or marginalized, to become known. I argue that bpNichol’s, Judith Copithorne’s, and Steve McCaffery’s concrete poems; the Four Horsemen’s, Penn Kemp’s, and Christian Bök’s sound poems; and rupi kaur’s instapoems are examples of dissensual poetry.

My dissertation offers a new look at how women authors used popular genres to negotiate their economic, artistic, and sexual autonomy, as well as their national and imperial identities, in the context of the changes brought by modernity. As medical science and popular media attempted to delineate women’s sexual natures, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Winifred Holtby, Kate O’Brien, and Molly Keane created narratives which challenged not only psychoanalytic proscriptions about the need for sexual satisfaction, but traditional ideas about women’s inherent modesty. They absorbed, revised, and occasionally rejected outright the discourses of sexology in order to advocate a more diffuse sensuality; for these writers, adventure, travel, independence, creativity, and love between women provided satisfactions as rich as those ascribed to normative heterosexuality. I identify a history of queer sexuality in both Irish and English contexts, one which does not conform to emergent lesbian identity while still exceeding the limits of heteronormativity. / text

Mit dem Begriff Heteronormativität wird die Naturalisierung und Privilegierung von Heterosexualität und Zweigeschlechtlichkeit in Frage gestellt. Kritisiert werden nicht nur die auf Alltagswissen bezogene Annahme, es gäbe zwei gegensätzliche Geschlechter und diese seien sexuell aufeinander bezogen, sondern auch die mit Zweigeschlechtlichkeit und Heterosexualität einhergehenden Privilegierungen und Marginalisierungen. Der Begriff tauchte erstmalig 1991 in Michael Warners Aufsatz 'Introduction: Fear of a Queer Planet' auf. Zentrale Bezugspunkte der Analysen von Heteronormativität stellen Foucaults Untersuchungen zum Zusammenhang von Sexualität und Macht sowie Butlers Theorie der Subjektkonstitution im Rahmen der heterosexuellen Matrix oder der heterosexuellen Hegemonie dar.

No description available.

This thesis addresses critical conceptions of Scottish literary development in the twentieth-century which inscribe realism as both the authenticating tradition and necessary telos of modern Scottish writing. To this end I identify and explore a Scottish ‘counter-tradition’ of modern uncanny fiction. Drawing critical attention to techniques of modal disruption in the works of a number of post-1970s Scottish writers gives cause to reconsider that realist teleology while positing a range of other continuities and tensions across modern Scottish literary history. The thesis initially defines the critical context for the project, considering how realism has come to be regarded as a medium of national literary representation. I go on to explore techniques of modal disruption and uncanny in texts by five Scottish writers, contesting ways in which habitual recourse to the realist tradition has obscured important aspects of their work. Chapter One investigates Ali Smith’s reimagining of ‘the uncanny guest’. While this trope has been employed by earlier Scottish writers, Smith redesigns it as part of a wider interrogation of the hyperreal twenty-first-century. Chapter Two considers two texts by James Robertson, each of which, I argue, invokes uncanny techniques familiar to readers of James Hogg and Robert Louis Stevenson in a way intended specifically to suggest concepts of national continuity and literary inheritance. Chapter Three argues that James Kelman’s political stance necessitates modal disruption as a means of relating intimate individual experience. Re-envisaging Kelman as a writer of the uncanny makes his central assimilation into the teleology of Scottish realism untenable, complicating the way his work has been positioned in the Scottish canon. Chapter Four analyses A.L. Kennedy’s So I Am Glad, delineating a similarity in the processes of repetition which result in both uncanny effects and the phenomenon of tradition, leading to Kennedy’s identification of an uncanny dimension in the concept of national tradition itself. Chapter Five considers the work of Alan Warner, in which the uncanny appears as an unsettling sense of significance embedded within the banal everyday, reflecting an existentialism which reaches beyond the national. In this way, I argue that habitual recourse to an inscribed realist tradition tends to obscure the range, complexity and instability of the realist techniques employed by the writers at issue, demonstrating how national continuities can be productively accommodated within wider, pluralistic analytical approaches.