En jämförande analys av Hjalmar Söderbergs Doktor Glas och Edgar Allan Poes "Det skvallrande hjärtat", ur ett psykoanalytiskt och strukturalistiskt perspektiv. Båda verken utgår ifrån en huvudkaraktär och ett mord som de begår. Jag har valt att, utifrån ett strukturalistiskt perspektiv, försöka tillämpa detektivstrukturen och se hur författarna förhåller sig till den. Jämför även huvudkaraktärernas beteende före, under och efter morden ur ett psykoanalytiskt perspektiv för att kolla på skillnader och likheter.

This paper will argue that there are similarities between “The Raven”, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, “Ligeia” and “Berenice” in their treatment of the common motifs of isolation and melancholy, and, furthermore, that their protagonists are similar due to their relation to these two motifs. The paper will also argue that the usage of the motif of isolation is a strategic way for the author to emphasise the Gothic horror. In order to support my argument, I will, firstly, provide an outline of how melancholy, isolation and the Gothic were understood in the nineteenth century. Secondly, I will demonstrate ways in which the works are similar. By comparing the characters’ personalities and behaviour to each other, I will illustrate how melancholy and isolation are represented in similar ways in the works of this study. Thirdly, I will show how the motif of isolation reinforces the Gothic.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2002. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 246-250). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

This dissertation considers the early career of Boston-based, African American artist Allan Rohan Crite (1910-2007) and situates his central artistic Goal--to present uplifting images of middle class black Bostonians--within the ideological framework of the New Negro Movement of the 1920s-1940s. In each of the chapters, I consider one of the four bodies of work Crite produced simultaneously during his early career--painted portraits, neighborhood street scenes and church interiors and brush and ink illustrations of African American spirituals. I focus on these subjects in order to explore Crite’s desire to portray the middle class status of his family and community and to redefine the spirituals in terms of his own middle-class sensibility. I describe Crite’s visualization of his black middle class Episcopal and Bostonian identity in these works as performances or enactments created through a series of repeated gestures of “respectable” appearance and behavior. My analysis also considers the artist’s motivations to preserve, in the physical form of his artworks, the black middle class values and way of life in Boston that he feared was in danger of being lost and forgotten. Rooted in the Community is also a revisionist account, for it seeks to revise the notion of an African American artistic “rootedness” to mean an artist rooted in his own immediate community rather than in a search for his cultural roots in the African past or within the rural folk culture of the American south. This study challenges a bias within the discourse on racial identity in art that privileges a notion of racial authenticity, or an essentialized conception of black identity centered upon the “folk,” or working and lower class African Americans. I also challenge the negative assessment of the black middle class as a group devoid of interest in the black community and propose that early twentieth century definitions of black middle class identity embodied in the notions of the “talented tenth” and the “race” man or woman best define Crite’s sense of himself as a black artist, for he felt a responsibility towards the black community and was not alienated from it. / text

Edgar Allan Poe has long been considered one of the great writers in Gothic literature. His works, as he himself suggested in his essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” are intended to strike a unique balance between mainstream appeal and higher literary craft. In many ways, my goals as a composer are similar, not just in mitigating this often tenuous dynamic, but also in tapping into powerful emotional states. Poe is a master at creating moods, for instantly drawing the reader into his dynamic worlds. Many of his works spend a significant amount of time, sometimes paragraph upon paragraph as in the opening to The Fall of the House of Usher, simply detailing his specific vision of the story’s tenor. In this piece, I was interested in musically depicting the imagery, which Poe so eloquently writes. I have chosen three of Poe’s short stories: The Black Cat, The Pit and the Pendulum, and The Fall of the House of Usher. In each movement, I deliberately avoid any programmatic connection to the story, that is to say specific events in the music do not coincide with any actual depiction of an event within the intended story. Rather this piece examines and details the specific tone of each story. Midnight Drearies: Three Moods on Edgar Allan Poe was written for Dan Welcher and the University of Texas New Music Ensemble. / text

No description available.

Transcending the boundaries of literature, the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Stanislaw Lem contribute to a dialogue between literary, philosophical, and scientific cultures. A critical approach to these writers that ignores the epistemic dimension in their works opens itself to the charge of misunderstanding their artistic goals and aspirations. In my dissertation I thus define, justify, and conduct an interdisciplinary study of Poe and Lem's works. / My project is underwritten by the epistemological assumption that literary works, and notably works of fiction, can make a contribution to knowledge that can be assessed in terms of interdisciplinary criteria. In the first chapter, where I discuss literature and knowledge within the interdisciplinary context, I examine various epistemological arguments in light of my central assertion. Next I examine the concepts involved in the discussion of literary works. Following the pragmatic re-orientation in literary and philosophical aesthetics, many fundamental concepts we take for granted--artworks, fictions, and texts among them--require exact re-examination and definition. Consequently, in Chapters Two and Three I review and refine the recent theories concerning the nature of works of art, the specificity of literary fictions, and the problem of literary interpretations. / My subsequent discussion of Poe and Lem is built on the theoretical base of (literary) epistemology and analytical aesthetics. I study Poe and Lem's literary fictions and theoretical essays, and the contributions they make to various fields of inquiry. In the process I critique, and sometimes refine, the explicit and implicit hypotheses articulated in their works. Specifically In Chapters Four and Five I discuss strategic and game theoretic models in the interpretation of fiction, including the concepts of communication and rationality. In Chapter Six, completing the epistemological circle inaugurated in Chapter One, I discuss the epistemological and cosmological theories proposed in Poe's "Eureka".

En berättarteknisk studie av "Ligeia", "The Tell-Tale Heart" samt "The Fall of the House of Usher". Studien fokuseras till kunskap respektive destruktivitet och dess funktion i de skilda novellerna. Genom att se till de berättartekniska aspekterna skapas en ny ingång till förståelsen för novellerna och en ny grund för en kompletterande motivanalys. De tre novellernas narrativa framställning och strukturella uppbyggnad skiljer sig men delar vissa gemensamma grepp vilket möjliggör för vidgad förståelse av novellerna.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Tulsa, 1989. / Bibliography: leaves 283-300.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.