This thesis, a "commented translation", is comprised of two main parts. The first part features the translation of two lyrical essays, "Noces a Tipasa" and "L'ete a Alger", from French Algerian writer Albert Camus' four-essay set entitled Noces. The second part consists of commentary: three chapters treat individual, but interrelated aspects of the source text that were particularly challenging to translation. The first chapter examines four thematic undercurrents that dominate Camus' writing; the second chapter analyzes the stylistic devices Camus favoured to highlight those undercurrents; the third chapter studies the Cagayous vernacular used in the essays. The concept that grew out of the translation and underlies the commentary is that context and style are inseparable in a literary text such as Noces; both must be clearly understood and adequately represented in translation for together they create the unique, complex and multi-dimensional meaning and message of the text.

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This dissertation proposes the castaway and the island experience as a parallel to the hero and the hero's journey as a metaphor for what C. G. Jung has called the individuation process. The island setting as a site for the spiritual, emotional, or psychological transformation of a character has remained a constant in Western literature from Homer to E. Annie Proulx. The typical island story involves a character in many, if not all, of the following: removal to a remote island; awakening to, and taking stock of, strange surroundings; initial setbacks followed by increasing adaptation; spiritual, emotional, or psychological growth due specifically to island experiences; a climactic event which challenges growing feelings of wholeness; and escape and return to the home society in a much-altered state. Drawing on over fifty fictional works, I trace the influence of the island on the castaway story in terms of six archetypes: wanderer, hermit, artist, magician, king, and hero. Jung refers to the influence on the psyche of certain places and situations when he says that "only in the region of danger (watery abyss, cavern, forest, island, castle, etc.) can one find the "treasure hard to attain" (jewel, virgin, life-potion, victory over death)" (Collected Works 12:438). But the specific workings of the archetypal place as agent of change receives less than full elaboration in Jung's work; Jung was concerned primarily with describing archetypal figures and their effect on individuation. This dissertation attempts to extend that concern by considering how the archetypal setting inspires human transformation. The conclusion I draw from examining the function of these six archetypes in island fiction is that they are given impetus by the island setting because of the island's remoteness from the castaway's home society and the island's isolation from all other societies. Jung notes that a particular kind of psychic energy flourishes in isolation resulting in "an animation of the psychic atmosphere, as a substitute for loss of contact with other people" (CW 12:57). The island--a kind of incubator--exerts a more active influence on a character's growth in island fiction than has hitherto been acknowledged.

This study engages the enigmatic formal strategies in works by W.G. Sebald, Javier Marías, and Aleksandar Hemon as signal writers in a genre that first emerges in 1980. Enigmatic realism addresses the problems and possibilities of figuration in the making of texts, including those in the veridical genres, and the question of how a text can provide continuity with past time. The texts in this genre, first-person metanarratives with photographic and other intertexts, render ambiguous the boundaries between author and narrator, past and present, fiction and nonfiction, literature and life. Predicated on the notion that existing modes and genres fall short of meeting the effort to reclaim, recover, and recount, enigmatic realist narratives are as much concerned with the problems and putative failures of writing as they are with nevertheless doing justice to the subject matter treated. These works find their anchor in a point of deep gravitas--themes of ethnic cleansing, dictatorship, trauma, and death and remembrance--and involve an ardent effort to learn about, appreciate, and know in some substantial way the lives recounted. At bottom is a movement of anti-nihilist sensibility in works that draw on such postmodern stylistic techniques as ambiguity, indeterminacy, generic eclecticism, and metatextual skepticism. Enigmatic realism thus operates counter to the dead ends attributed to postmodernism in art and culture, not by merely rejecting postmodernism out of hand but by directing the postmodern project away from cynical relativism or nihilism and instead toward humanistic and affirmative ends. At the same time, the formal apparatus of these texts--the marriage of a deliberately enigmatic aesthetic together with earnest veridical purpose--works to spur heightened reader engagement, a desire on the reader's part to likewise seek this understanding of past lives and events.

The Spanish Civil War, from 1936 until 1939, continues to inform not only the way Spaniards imagine themselves historically, but how they represent themselves contemporaneously, especially in creative works. The outcome of the war involved the installation of a fascist dictatorship led by Francisco Franco, one which extolled the virtues of Spanish tradition while violently suppressing resistant cultural voices. This suppression led to a lapse in cultural memory, one that compels Spanish authors to continue writing about this period and its aftermath. In this translation, a selection of four Spanish authors (Rafael Marín, Eduardo Vaquerizo, Javier Negrete, and Santiago Eximeno) from the collection Franco. An Alternative History re-imagine the outcome of the war, utilizing the genre of alternative history. More particularly, these stories are examples of uchronia, which are concerned specifically with alternative timelines of the world in which we live. As the title suggests, this collection seeks to reclaim control over the reign of Franco, and to re-situate it in such a way that any lingering cultural trauma regarding the war might be explored and understood. While these authors are not survivors of the war themselves, the contemporary publication of these stories demonstrates the continued importance of this event in the Spanish cultural imagination.

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The aim of Text and Reader is to find a critical approach that links a novel's form to its socio-cultural context, and to apply this approach to four contemporary novels by an English, an American, an Argentinian, and a Flemish novelist. The first chapter of Text and Reader sketches a communicative approach to the novel, and combines elements from reception aesthetics, speech act theory, and frame analysis. The basis of this communicative approach is the aesthetic response theory of Wolfgang Iser. Iser analyses a literary work of art as entering into a dialogue with its period norms via its repertoire--and specifically via its repertorial negations--and as guiding its reader's experiences through the effects it achieves by its use of narrative strategies--and specifically of strategical blanks. As Iser's definition of these blanks--discontinuity between narrative perspectives--and his description of how, in specific instances, these blanks guide the reader's experiences is rather vague it is suggested that speech act theory as applied to literature both by literary and linguistic theoreticians, and Erving Goffman's "frame analysis" might contribute toward refining Iser's notions. Specifically, it is argued that a reader has certain conventional speech act and frame expectation with regard to a novel, and that anything problematizing these expectations leads to Iser's "discontinuity" and hence functions as a blank. Separate chapters apply the approach sketched in the first chapter to John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Barth's Letters, Julio Cortazar's Libro de Manuel, and Louis Paul Boon's De Kapellekensbaan. The communicative approach enables us to reconstruct the communicative interchange taking place between the texts and their period readers and to determine how these readers are guided in their reading experience by the blanks that follow from the problematic aspects of each of these novels. The relationship the novels establish with their period audience combined with their repertoire give us insight into the dialectic each novel conducts with its society. The particular form of each novel--its repertoire and strategies combined and interrelated--is determined by the particular effects its author wants his work to achieve in the mind of his period readers: the form of The French Lieutenant's Woman, Letters, Libro de Manuel, and De Kappellekensbaan directly issues from the attitudes Fowles, Barth, Cortazar, and Boon want their readers to adopt vis-a-vis their society as a result of their reading experience. Although in Text and Reader applied exclusively to four contemporary novels, the communicative approach advocated in this study also offers the possibility of studying changes in repertoire and technique as they manifest themselves over longer periods of the genre's history as directly issuing from changes in the socio-cultural context because it investigates the particular form a novel takes as correlative to that novel's communicative function.

This is a study of the problem of "natural history" (as opposed to eschatological history) in Adorno's philosophy. Part I presents the emergence of natural history, since the Reformation, as it constituted the problems with which Adorno's philosophy, particularly his aesthetics, is concerned. In Chapter I, Luther is seen to have produced a solution to natural history, the internalization of transcendance that, ironically, potentiated natural history. The key inheritance of German thought from the age of Luther is summarized as the transformation of secunda natura, the Greek doctrine of the perfectability of nature, into second nature, the natural-historical phenomenon of the appearance of society as a model of an irrevocably fallen first nature. Chapters II through V present the attempts of Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Benjamin to solve the constellation of problems bequeathed by the Reformation. Each of these efforts involved a reappropriation of the Greek tradition. The success of each of these philosophies is measured by its ability to reconceive a secunda natura. The specification of the limits of each solution--the aporia of its conception of a secunda natura--is left in each chapter to Adorno. Part II is a collection of essays treating various aspects of the problem of natural history in Adorno's work in such a way that they, cumulatively more than hierarchically, present his solution to the problem of natural history. These essays, composing Chapters VI through IX, are built around Adorno's lecture of 1932, "The Idea of Natural-History." They document the origin of Adorno's concern with the problem in his earliest writings; the explicit emergence of the theme of natural history in his 1932 lecture; the relation of the problem of natural history to his style; his response to the historiography of natural history, i.e. historicism; and his conception of the possibility of a secunda natura through art and immanent criticism.