The social sciences have developed robust bodies of scholarship on expertise and professionalism, yet literary analyses of the two remain comparatively sparse. I address this gap in Boundaries of Knowledge by examining recent Anglophone fiction and showing that expertise and professionalism are central concerns of contemporary authors, both as subject matter in fiction and in their public identities. I argue that the novelists studied use and abuse expertise and professionalism: they critique professions as participant observers, and also borrow the mantle of expert credibility to bolster their own cultural capital while documenting the pitfalls of expertise in their fiction. My first chapter shows how acquired technical knowledge and professionalism are the central concerns of Ian McEwan’s Saturday. In the novel, Henry Perowne’s professionalism is the site from which various ethical and political debates radiate. Perowne—depicted as a rather heroic expert in comparison to the other novels studied in the dissertation—is disturbed by a total outsider in the form of Baxter, a man with no prospects or future, professional or otherwise. McEwan aligns himself more closely with Perowne: in part through extensive research for Saturday, he has developed a reputation as a public figure who straddles the “two cultures” of the sciences and humanities, a reputation that exists in a synergistic relationship with his particular brand of realist fiction, which emphasizes hard work and professional credibility. Next, I demonstrate how Zadie Smith’s On Beauty reveals a deep suspicion of academia, which in the novel serves to cut disciplinary experts off both from the world outside campus and from an appreciation of the subjects they study. Smith’s academic professionals are well-intentioned but unable to look beyond field-specific boundaries to appreciate their objects of study (and unintentionally harm outsiders along the way). Larger issues such as race are always present but at the margins of the interpersonal drama that plays out between the novel’s numerous characters. I read Smith herself as reluctantly accepting academic life, teaching at New York University while maintaining a qualified distance from American academia in articles and interviews. Chapters one and two are broadly about the advantages and drawbacks of expert knowledge, respectively. In my third chapter, Abdulrazak Gurnah offers the most circumspect view of experts yet with a fear of a “summarizing” expert or colonizer of knowledge that is only resolved by the arrival of a more authentic Zanzibari expert. In an analysis of Gurnah’s By the Sea, I show how professional networks--the United Kingdom’s immigration and refugee system, the colonial education system in Zanzibar, and the professoriate--raise questions about who is entitled to and capable of narrating people’s lives. These questions dovetail both with the novel’s shifting narrative form and with the concerns of Gurnah’s own work as a scholar of literature. Beginning with McEwan and ending with Gurnah, Boundaries of Knowledge travels from the most socially and economically secure, elite experts to those left behind by contemporary professionalism. My title reflects this troubled landscape of expert knowledge and professionalism: who knows what, the benefits and drawbacks of the accompanying cultural capital, and the barriers between various fields, sets of knowledge, and finally people.

The Restoration Era, 1660-1688, has long borne a reputation as an exceptionally debauched period of English history. That reputation is however a caricature, amplified from a handful of recognizable features. That rhetoric of debauchery originates in the Restoration’s own discourse, constructed as a language for opposing the rising French-style absolutism of the late Stuart kings, Charles II and James II. When Charles II was restored in 1660, enthusiastic panegyrists returned to the official aesthetics of his father Charles I, who had formulated power as abundance through pastoral, mythological, and utopian art. Oppositional satirists in the Restoration subverted that language of cornucopian abundance to represent Charles II and his court as instead excessive, diseased, and predatory. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688-9, Williamite satirists and secret historians continued to wield these themes against the exiled Jacobites. Gradually, the political facets of Stuart excess dulled, but the caricature of the debauched Restoration survived in eighteenth-century state poem collections and historiography. The authors most emphasized in this study are John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, and Andrew Marvell. Works by John Milton, John Dryden, Edmund Waller, King Charles I, and Gilbert Burnet also receive sustained attention.

The thesis consists of two parts. The first, practical part presents a translation of short stories The Portobello Road (1956), The Curtain Blown by the Breeze (1961) and The Young Man Who Discovered the Secret of Life (2000) by the Scottish writer Muriel Spark. The texts represent various periods of Spark's writing career and offer a complex insight into her style and its various shades. The translation is succeeded by a study focusing on the life and work of Muriel Spark and mainly on an analysis of the key translation issues encountered in the process of translation. The key problems include the translation of Spark's specific literary language, the rendering of natural speech and the idiolects of the characters, the translation of names and other culture-specific facts. The theoretical part devoted to the translation analysis stresses the link between various translation theories and the work of a translator.

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Life writing has traditionally been organized into two main subfields: autobiographical writing, focused on the self, and biographical writing, focused on one or more other human beings. Yet, many contemporary texts from different linguistic and cultural contexts defy or complicate such a clear-cut distinction. The present dissertation investigates a group of such texts, which I have called “bifocal narratives.” With this term, I indicate works that, as in an ellipse, hinge upon two foci at once – an autobiographical narrator and a biographical other – and take shape around the relation between these two poles. The dissertation offers both a historical interpretation and a morphology of this form. It does so by comparing three literary contexts (Italian literature, French literature, and Anglophone literature of the North Atlantic) and combining theoretical argumentation, panoramic analyses of a vast corpus, and close readings of individual works. Drawing on bifocal narratives’ amphibious nature as both literary and documentary writings, in the Introduction, I propose to interpret the bifocal form through a twofold lens: as part of a growing interest in the intersubjective formation of identity and the self/other relationship in life writing and life writing criticism; and as a mise en abyme of trends and tensions at work in contemporary literature more at large. In the latter respect, I view bifocal narratives as embodying both a heightened interest in individuality and a tangible difficulty among writers in speaking as characters different from themselves. I link both aspects to a crisis of traditional humanistic ideologies and the mandate of intellectuals in European and North American cultures. In the first chapter, I offer a panoramic view of bifocal narratives by delineating their main manifestations and highlighting some of their defining traits (for example, a strong heuristic tension or a tendency to structure the self/other relationship in polarized terms). In the following three chapters, I focus on three main subgroups of bifocal narratives: hyper-narrative bifocal works, bifocal texts between poetry and prose, and essayistic bifocal narratives. These three clusters of texts allow me to investigate some crucial aspects of the bifocal form, which are particularly evident in these various subsets: the role of narration in shaping a sense of the self, and a serious use of intertextuality; a complex vision of the speaking “I” that complicates a clear-cut division between fiction and nonfiction, an original use of textual blanks, and a deep literary work on both language and documents; and the complication of the auto/biographical model via the alternative paradigm offered by (literary) portraiture, as well as a multilayered approach towards the (post)modern literary and critical traditions. In doing so, I also provide extensive close readings of five main works: Via Gemito (2000) by Domenico Starnone and Limonov (2011) by Emmanuel Carrère; Jane: A Murder (2005) by Maggie Nelson; and Out of Sheer Rage (1997) by Geoff Dyer and Qualcosa di scritto (2012) by Emanuele Trevi. Besides illuminating various aspects of bifocal narratives, these readings also aim to offer original interpretations of these works.

本篇碩士論文的寫作目的在於用系統化的方法來分析距今六百二十多年前傑福瑞．喬塞的«眾鳥之會»一詩中對於自然的這個概念的三種不同層面的透視觀點 本詩在文本的分類上屬於夢幻愛情詩 乃是詩人藉著夢境來傳達愛情的神秘和象徵的意涵 本文中所謂自然的觀點就是指人類如何理解及認知這個外在自然的世界 身為自然的一份子 人類觀察了外界環境並企圖要了解這個世界 這樣的認知包含了神話 傳奇 及古典時期的學術研究 在文學的世界中 詩人在文本中創造了一個奇幻的世界 由奇異的時空 充滿想像力的動植物的再現 以及富有愛與性的原始力量的自然神祇 這是人文主義式的世界架構 而其世界的中心乃是人類 而不是遙不可及的上帝 詩中人感受並享受著自然的美好 同時 他也察覺到自己和這個世界的存在 透過他的觀察 在文本中投射出一個他對於一個系統化層級分明的理想世界 在西洋中古時期的文學之中 對於自然的理解和感受的表達的確是個相對稀有的一個現像 所以本詩值得我們更深入的檢視與研究 本篇論文分為五大部份 第一章是序言 簡述作者生平 文本背景 歷代學者的研究心得 和本論文研究的主旨 第二章討論夢境中時間與空間的結構 分析夢境文學中常見的時間跳躍的現像 和對於中古花園的空間設計 第三章討論花園中的植物圈和動物圈 喬塞安置了許多種的動植物在花園中 這些草木鳥獸反映了中古時期的自然史和許多被他所引用的文獻 這些動植物都被賦與象徵性的意義 在第四章中 分析在黃銅神殿裡外的羅馬神祇 一有七個不同的神出現 直接或間接地提到 他們有愛與性的影響力 而性與愛使得自然中的生物得以生生不息 第五章是結論 整篇論文以 “自然之愛” 和 “愛的天性” 作結 / The objective of this thesis is to analyze the three perspectives of nature in this poem. By definition, “perspective” means the way that objects appear smaller when they are further away and the way parallel lines appear to meet each other at a point in the distance. It, in the level of thought, means a particular way of considering something. In other words, it means a point of view. The perspective of nature is the way how human beings perceive the natural world. Human beings, as members of the whole nature, observe the environment and try to understand the world. Ancient people did not rely on science entirely; they used their cognition and imagination to form their knowledge of the world. It is mixed with mythology, folklore, legend, and classical academics. In literature, the writers create a world, which is full of nature deities, imaginative animals and plants in the fantastic space and time. This is a humanistic way to recognize the world whose center is man, not an abstract and remote God. In this poem, the persona perceives and enjoys nature. He senses the existence of himself and nature. Through his senses, he projects a model of the world by setting nature deities, plants and animals in the methodized nature. It is rather a comparatively rare phenomenon in mediaeval literature. Even the persona of mediaeval literature is surrounded by nature, the writers are never or seldom aware of this fact. The writers and readers of mediaeval literature do not seem to care about much the beauty and pleasure of nature. The thesis is divided into five parts. Chapter One is the introduction. Chapter Two discusses the structure of time and space. It will convey the concept of time and the design of the garden in the dream vision. Chapter Three discusses Flora and Fauna in the garden. Chaucer settles many kinds of plants and animals in the garden according to his knowledge from many sources. The plants and animals have symbolic meanings. The data shows us the cognition of nature people in the Middle Ages had. Chapter Four analyzes the Roman deities outside and inside the brass temple. There are seven gods and goddess of fertility in the background of the dream vision. All of them share the attributes of love and sex. They are divinized drives of live and the origin of the nature. Chapter Five is the conclusion.

This thesis discusses the comic discourse in Laurence Sterne's novel The life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. It shows the way in which the theories of the comic of Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud are applied in this novel. In Tristram Shandy, the principles of the comic of Bergson and Freud do not function in their usual manner; they are fulfilled by the structure and the process of narration. The comic in this novel is also enhanced by the fact that aspects of narration that are usually static and unchanging throughout a novel (such as the nature of the narrator) gained dynamism in Tristram Shandy. This dynamism offers a space for the structural comic to origin. The comic of Tristram Shandy also draws from the principle of association. This novel inspired later theories of humour and the comic in general.