Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 277-284). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (M.S. in Engineering)--University of Florida, Summer 1996. / "Summer 1996." Description based on title screen as viewed on February 8, 2010. DTIC Identifier(s): Public Works, Privatization. Includes bibliographical references (p. 56-57). Also available in print.

Th9ese--Paris. / Includes bibliographical references.

In the 1980s, Thea Astley asserted that she had "to write as a male" to acquire literary acceptance in the 1950s and 1960s. In making this statement, Astley outlined what it meant to write as a male and to write as a female. The increasing critical use of these statements as an explanation for the subject matter and the style of Astley's fiction, however, ignores the gendered reception of her work, generates misconceptions regarding her early novels, undervalues the continuity of her feminist critique of what she calls the "genital loading" of Australian culture, and negates her attack on genres, narratives, and plots which constrain women. Using the theoretical work of Raymond Williams, Kaja Silverman, and Rita Felski, this thesis proposes that Astley be read not in terms of "masculine" or "feminine" writing, but in terms of her political commitment to feminism. To contextualize Astley's comment, Chapter One emphasizes the masculine bias of the literary debates in. the 1950s. Chapter Two argues that the "misfit paradigm" used to read Astley's fiction obscures the feminist and class themes of her work. To counteract the view that Astley's early fiction concentrates on male characters, Chapter Three focuses on Astley's representation in The Slow Natives (1965) of wife and prostitute, and on Astley's critique of the mutually reinforcing genres to which they belong: romance and antiromance. Chapters Four, Five, and Six examine, respectively, A Descant for Gossips (1960), An Item From the Late News (1981), and Reaching Tin River (1990). This chronological sequence establishes the consistency of her feminist critique of Australian society. It also accentuates the theme of masculinity in crisis and foregrounds the way in which critics have gendered Astley's work as feminine. These chapters consider the relation between melodrama and masculinity in A Descant for Gossips, the connection between Astley's use of the female "I" and the appearance of the transvestite in An Item From the Late News, and the political implications of the womb as a metaphor, for escape in Reaching Tin River.

No description available.

Paul Celan (1920-1970), the Jewish poet of German descent, lived through the greatest catastrophe of European Jewry of the modern age. He survived, as his parents and innumerable others did not, and dedicated his writing, his voice, to the reality he had witnessed. It would be a mistake, however, to think of him solely as a "Jewish" poet, a term he considered anti-Semitic (see Christina Ivanovic's '''All poets are Jews:' Paul Celan's Reading of Marina Tsvetaeva"). Celan wrote of the world as such; a world that was able to reorganize itself towards the annihilation of countless human beings. In its midst, he questioned how one could live, how brotherhood could still be possible, and how a God could possibly appear in such a place. This thesis follows his questioning and pursues, along with him, the course of poetry and poetic language through the appearance of atrocity.

No description available.

No description available.

This thesis proposes that Sartre's plays are predominantly life-affirming, and their violence can be explained in terms of their central theme: conflict between life and death. Extensive reference is made throughout to Sartre's non-dramatic writings. This theme occurs on the literal and metaphorical planes: characters struggle for life, commit violent acts, and emerge 'existentially alive', or 'existentially dead'. Sartre's theories of life and death are summarised, and three examples of existential death considered. The theme is then analysed in each play under the headings 'Myth and Situation', 'Act and Agent'. Bariona's colonised people eventually escape from existential death, having contemplated martyrdom, when Bariona is influenced by the life-enhancing philosophy of Balthazar, and the experience of the Nativity. Argos, also, is suffused with death: 'Philèbe''s need to 'feel' his existence impels him to act definitively, punishing the regicides, and coming to existential life in his true identity as Oreste. In Huis clos, Sartre explores the deadness of lives led in moral cowardice, and the implicit message is, ironically, life-affirming. Morts sans sépulture propounds an argument for life which prevails, despite the hollow victory of the 'miliciens'. La Putain illustrates a triumph for the mortifying force of essentialist ethics. A seemingly comparable triumph of death in Les Mains sales is, in fact, a defeat for Hugo and an implicit victory for the life-advocate, Hoederer. Goetz exemplifies existential life perfectly, reaching it via every kind of moribund moral idealism. Kean burlesques Oreste's experience, escaping his vacuity through metaphorical suicide, and individualistically asserting his right to life. Nekrassov's hero parodies Goetz's odyssey, finally opting for life in the imaginary realm. Les Séquestrés depicts the triumph of death as man is crushed by the march of History. Les Troyennes, however, still advocates hope. Why did Sartre quit the theatre? Did the 'hero', through whom life is affirmed, become impossible?

This thesis examines the poetics of Odysseas Elytis, which, it is argued, emerged from his intense theoretical work on poetry in the period between 1944 and 1960, and was crystallized in the poems he published from 1960 to 1995. Elytis' poetics is examined in this thesis through the exploration of his ideas on the status and function of poetry, on the role of the poet, and on poetic writing; it is also examined through the exploration of the poetry in which these ideas are put into practice. It is argued in this thesis that Elytis' poetics emerged from his effort to provide his poetry with a concrete theoretical basis, an endeavour he deliberately undertook in the 1940s and 1950s; the evolution of his thought coincided chronologically with the period broadly between 1944 and 1960, that is, the period during which he wrote poems but did not proceed to publish any book of poetry. Elytis' thought reached a point of external stabilization before 1960, since in the poetry he published that year his ideas are systematically put into practice. With the publication of these poems, his poetics entered the dynamic phase of crystallization, which prevails throughout his poetic writing from 1960 to 1995, and constitutes a process during the course of which he explored the internal perspectives opened up by the theoretical frame he set for himself in the years 1944-1960. This thesis explores Elytis' theoretical endeavour and his poetic practice, and examines both the emergence of his ideas in the period between 1944 and 1960 and the crystallization of these ideas in the poetry he published from 1960 to 1995.