Ce travail de thèse a pour objectif d’étudier l’une des modalités particulières de la réception de l’œuvre de Brian Evenson : la réserve. A la lecture de l’œuvre de Brian Evenson, des béances apparaissent, signes d’un évidement d’une partie du texte antérieur au début du récit. Le lecteur fait alors l’expérience du manque. En quête d’un tout qui serait à reconstituer, ainsi que d’une unité rassurante et pourtant si illusoire, le lecteur entreprend de tenter de combler les creux du texte grâce à son imagination. Il produit des interprétations, mais celles-ci reposent sur des univers qui apparaissent comme déréférencés, et dont les points de repère s’effacent. Il fait ainsi une expérience de lecture de l’incertitude, tant les univers présentés par le texte sont instables, criblés d’anomalies linguistiques. Ses interprétations sont aussi source d’équivoque, mettant ainsi en échec de manière permanente toutes ses tentatives de résolution. Or, ces trébuchements successifs sont aussi facteurs de l’expression d’une prolifération interprétative qui fait retentir celle, diégétique et linguistique, qui est à l’origine des ambiguïtés du texte. Ainsi, l’échec des tentatives du lecteur de suppléer au manque donnent lieu à un deuxième temps de l’expérience de lecture, au sein de laquelle il est invité à faire résonner, dans la chambre d’écho que constituent l’œuvre, toutes les potentialités du texte. Le lecteur produit ainsi, au moyen de son imagination, une forme d’excès au texte qui vient suppléer, par substitution, celui qui ne s’écrit plus qu’en creux des espaces blancs. La prolifération langagière et le jaillissement perpétuel du sens que ce nouvel excès autorise assurent une expérience de lecture du foisonnement qui se superpose à celle, initiale, de la perte. / This dissertation focuses on one of the more singular modes of reception in Brian Evenson’s body of work: reticence. While reading Brian Evenson’s works, the reader is made aware of gaps, that seem to point to the existence of a missing part of the text, hollowed out from the narrative before it has even started. The reader then experiences a form of deficiency that he identifies in the text as coming from what is missing. As he tries to reconstruct the text and to make it whole once again, as illusory as that concept might be, the reader attemps to fills the gaps through the workings of his imagination. He then produces interpretations, but those rest on constructed worlds that see their rare landmarks being gradually erased. His reading experience is imbued with uncertainty, mainly because the worlds the stories are set in are unstable and populated with linguistic anomalies. Moreover, his interpretations generate more uncertainty, thus thwarting his attempts to resolve the ambiguities of the text permanently. However, while stumbling on the elusive meaning and the prevailing ambivalence, he discovers that the proliferation of his interpretations brings forth that of the narrative and linguistic proliferation at the root of the many ambiguities of the text. Thus, the failed attempts of the reader to fill the gaps in the text give way to a second reading experience, during which he must ensure that all the potential intepretations are summoned in the text. With the help of his imagination, the reader thus produces a form of textual excess that must substitute itself to the one that he can barely sense in the white spaces of the text. The proliferation of language and the perpetual surging of meaning that this new excess allows insure a reading experience of proliferation superimposed on top of the initial experience of loss.

Master of Arts / Department of English / Dean G. Hall / Salman Rushdie's 1999 novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet is ostensibly a rock 'n' roll novel, largely set in the 1960s, that traces the commercial rise of Indian rock star protagonists Vina Apsara and Ormus Cama. As their fame and wealth rise to global status and their stage show comes to entail a logistical complexity of military proportions, it becomes increasingly difficult to discern the couple's earlier countercultural ideals within their new established culture status. I argue that despite the change from countercultural to establishment-based values in the novel's protagonists, Rushdie does make a case in The Ground Beneath Her Feet for the possibility of countercultural efficacy against the commodifying culture of global capitalism (which I refer to as the "Frame"). His recipe for combating the exclusive hierarchies produced by the Frame is a combination of the non-totalizing politics of postmodernism and the subversive potential of uncommodified rock music. I pay close attention to establishing the historical templates--John Lennon of the Beatles and Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys--of the novel's protagonists in an effort to understand the sort of countercultural alternative Rushdie is proposing. I likewise focus on the novel's depiction of the Beach Boys' Smile album, which as a still commercially unreleased record, reinforces Rushdie's imperative in The Ground Beneath Her Feet for an uncommodifying counterculture and works in tandem with his portrayals of the artistic plights of several minor characters in the novel as well.

England experienced a resurgence of musical talent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries known as the "English Musical Renaissance." This rebirth spanned the years 1880 – 1945 and is credited to the work of Edward Elgar, Frederick Delius, Gustav Holst, and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Their break with Continental compositional models and the subsequent rediscovery of Tudor music and English folk song eventually created a "pastoral" musical style, heard as the authentically English musical voice. A strain of English musical Romanticism continued parallel to the Renaissance, however, represented by Granville Bantock, Joseph Holbrooke, Rutland Boughton, Arnold Bax, and Havergal Brian. These composers retained Continental, specifically Wagnerian, Romantic techniques, including chromatic harmony, leitmotifs, virtuosic use of enormous performing forces, and an emphasis on programmatic music. Their inspiration was drawn from exotic sources and Nature's mystical, dangerous, and beguiling qualities instead of any "pastoral" traits. Each wrote emotionally extravagant music at a time when such was considered foreign to the English character. This dissertation demonstrates the Wagnerian character of these “English Romantics” through examination of stylistic features in representative scores. Further, by presenting scores, criticism, and monographs, it affirms their sustained compositional presence through the twentieth century though English cultural tastes had turned from Germany to France, Russia, and the United States after the First World War. Finally, in challenging the standard narrative of British musical history this study broadens the concept of authentically English music to include a great deal more music “made in England.”

In her introduction to a special issue of the South Central Review on literary biography published in 2006, Linda Leavell writes, "Many would trace the disdain for literary biography—in both senses of the word “literary”—back through Roland Barthes’s “death of the author” to the New Critics’ division of text from context all the way to T. S. Eliot’s theory of impersonality. Critical theory of the past century has generally deemed an author’s life, personality, and intentions irrelevant to the text" (1). Leavell’s explanation of how critical theory of the twentieth century came to shape the current scholarly attitude towards literary biography establishes the genre’s status in an era of literary theory that is commonly characterized by the diminishment of the author as the source of meaning in a text, an era in which we remain. This characterization, however, overlooks the different ways that the theorists of the era displaced the author as the dominant figure in literary studies. This paper demonstrates how these different ways, despite whatever damage they might have done to the status of literary biography, actually benefit the study of the genre. Additionally, this paper argues that they not only comprise one side of Vladimir Nabokov’s contradictory views on his own authorship, which makes him an ideal subject for the study of authority over biographical representation, but also gave rise to new methodologies of literary biography, which are the methodologies of Nabokov’s biographers themselves. As a result, this paper concludes, “an author’s life, personality, and intentions” in turn have assumed new relevancy in literary studies. / text

Master of Music / Department of Music / Kurt Gartner / This is a report intended for musicians and scholars who seek to enhance their understanding of any number of the following compositions: Prelúdio No. 1 Mi Menor (E Minor), op. 11 by Ney Rosauro, Prelúdio No. 2 la maior (A minor) by Ney Rosauro, Rotation IV by Eric Sammut, Water Falls for a Desert by Greg Coffey, Strands of Time by Brian Blume, Surface Tension by Dave Hollinden, bitsmoke by Casey Farina. Each work has been analyzed examined in accordance with Jan LaRue’s Guidelines For Style Analysis. For some compositions including only relative-pitch instruments, analysis of harmony has been omitted. For all compositions, the author has added notable performance considerations, essential technical and interpretive considerations in accord with LaRue’s guidelines. Therefore, the approach taken in analytical categories of this document can be exhibited as Sound, Harmony, Melody, Rhythm, Growth, and Performance.

Because the first part of the twentieth century in Ireland was marked with nationalist milestones like the Easter Rising and the Anglo-Irish War, most accounts of modern Irish literature and culture are nation-centered. This dissertation offers a new understanding of modern Irish writing by placing national identity in conversation with global consciousness, a burgeoning concept in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, this project explores three aspects of globalism: the attachments to foreign countries that Irish writers form; the ways in which these attachments affect their relationships with Ireland; and their subsequent articulation of global consciousness based on these transnational experiences. The introduction provides a critical and historical context for the project by negotiating between the established discipline of Irish Studies and the emerging field of Irish Diaspora Studies. Each chapter then investigates an Irish writer whose work indicates a relationship between global and national consciousness. The Irish-Argentine writer William Bulfin and the evolution of his relationship with gauchos, as it is suggested in his Tales of the Pampas, forms the subject of the next chapter. The second chapter juxtaposes Helen Waddell's The Princess Splendour and Other Stories, which retells fairytales from the Middle and Far East as well as from Ireland, with Lady Gregory's and Douglas Hyde's nationalistic collections of Irish folklore. The third chapter investigates the connection between the feminist underpinnings of Kate O'Brien's novels with the transnational movements that frequently accompany them. The fourth chapter examines the cosmopolitan imperative of Brian Moore's Irish-American novels. Finally, in the epilogue I briefly suggest the ways in which contemporary Irish writing extends the projects begun by these earlier figures.

Konstanz, Universiẗat, Bachelorarb., 2007.

Thesis (Th. M.)--Calvin Theological Seminary, 2001. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 101-102).

Thesis (Th. M.)--Calvin Theological Seminary, 2001. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 101-102).

Thesis (Th. M.)--Calvin Theological Seminary, 2001. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 101-102).