Dans le cadre de la littérature européenne, il existe un lien important entre la femme et la mer qui a au centre une polarité essentielle : femme créatrice ou monstre marin. Cette dualité d’image féminine transcende les limites géographiques et linguistiques pour s’insérer dans le corpus littéraire de la France, l’Italie et ’Espagne. Les mythes Gréco-romains mettent en vedette les éléments du vaisseau, l’orage, la mer turbulente, le naufrage. Une thématique riche entoure les éléments marins présentés dans les mythes et est au fondement des métaphores créées par les auteurs de la Renaissance. L’image du navire balayé par la mer est au centre d’une image d’orage féminin qui se présente dans Il Canzionière de Pétrarque, Les Amours de Ronsard et Cants d’amor d’Ausias March. Le bateau est symbole du poète et la mer turbulente son amour envahissant. Les poètes modèlent cette métaphore grâce à des éléments communs. Les attributs qui ont une parure de beauté chez la femme se métamorphosent en agent nocif qui s’assimile à l’image du navire, tel que les cheveux d’or. Il faut aussi remarquer là où une fissure existe entre la tradition et l’innovation, les nuances au niveau des images et des métaphores où s’ouvre une nouvelle voie littéraire.

<p> This dissertation explores the nature of the anthropological writings of Georg Forster (1754-94), the German world-traveler (who accompanied Captain Cook on his second voyage in the South-Seas 1772-75), cultural-historian and translator in the late eighteenth century, showing how his anthropology proposes an "ironic" or "sentimental" (in the Schillerian sense) mode of narration. Although many others at the time were exploring what it is to be human, my dissertation argues that Forster's anthropology concerned itself primarily with what it means to <i>write</i> about humanity when one supplements the empirical-rational method of observation with an emphasis on "self-reflexive" and "ironic" (&agrave; la Hayden White) modes of writing anthropology, or the story of humanity. This study therefore focuses on those writings gathered around three salient concepts in his anthropological understanding, to which he returns frequently: observation, narration, and translation, presented in three chapters. The thesis not only undertakes close readings of Forster's texts centering on observation, narration, and translation but, crucially, places them within the historical context of late eighteenth century aesthetic and anthropological discourses in Germany. This study ultimately underscores the manner in which Forster's concepts of "sentimental" &ndash; i.e. self-reflexive, ironic, and striving towards the goal of perfectibility &ndash; observation and narration allow him to accept the fragmentary, exploratory, and temporary nature of knowledge about humanity. At the same time, his "aesthetic" &ndash; sentient and open to testing &ndash; translation allows him to engage and educate his readers' tolerance towards a provisional, composite and temporal truth in anthropology. In highlighting the self-reflexive as well as an open-to-testing attitude of Forster's anthropology, this dissertation underscores the mutual interaction between eighteenth century aesthetic and anthropological modes of thought.</p>

<p> In December 1911, the public exhibition of Kandinsky's Komposition V shattered the world of Western illusionism as audiences knew and understood it - or so the traditional tale goes. Yet the relative abruptness with which abstraction supposedly shocks the art world not only presents a misleading impression; it in effect creates a great riddle. If the Western art world spent centuries organized under a unifying goal of perfecting imitation, why would it now so suddenly turn its back on its institutional underpinnings by challenging, negating, or exploding the principles it had worked so hard to develop? This project responds by rejecting the presuppositions of the riddle and arguing against the traditional narrative, claiming instead that the invention of abstract art in the 1910s was neither abrupt nor unprecedented, but was already being described, theorized, or created in the 19^th century, only in literature rather than painting. Through close reading and literary analysis, I present three moments in the German literary canon in which abstract art is imagined or becomes theoretically possible: Heinrich von Kleist's Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft (1810), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's poem "Howards Ehrenged&auml;chtnis" (1821), and Gottfried Keller's Der gr&uuml;ne Heinrich (1855, 1879). Composing these moments are three different authors who write at three different decades, speak through three different genres, and conceive three different modes of abstraction, none of which contemporaneously achieved painted form. Connecting these moments is the following argument: each constitutes an example of the invention of abstract art in a 19^th-century literary text prior to the visual actualization of abstract art in the early 20^th century. With such images in circulation well before 1911, this study features the crucial role of literature in foregrounding the cultural developments essential for abstract artworks to "speak for themselves" in the medium of painting by establishing certain preconditions involving need, spectatorship, and the self-awareness of the artist. Thus by conceptualizing abstract images in their writing, these three 19^th-century German authors also produce necessary components of the theoretical grounding required for the 20^th-century birth of abstract art.</p>

<p> This dissertation examines strange literary phenomena I call "unfinishable novels," or novels whose very structure and/or worldview would seem to prohibit the possibility of their own "successful" conclusion. Famous examples include Laurence Sterne's <i>Tristram Shandy</i>, Franz Kafka's <i>The Trial</i>, and Robert Musil's <i>The Man Without Qualities</i>. Focusing on a canonical and historically diverse selection of Euro-American texts and authors ranging from Rabelais to Thomas Pynchon, my project not only contributes to the critical literature on my primary texts by examining and contextualizing their "unfinishability," but also suggests a new historiography of the novel by focusing less on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries--the zenith of the novel's cultural and political importance, but also a period dominated by linear plotlines--and more on periods (early modern and twentieth century) in which the status of endings was far more uncertain, thus tracing something like a "backstage history" of the genre. </p><p> To develop a theoretical-historical framework in which to read these texts, both on their own terms and in the context of the history of the novel, my dissertation puts into practice a "prosaics of unfinishability," a critical methodology that privileges prose and the novel and attempts to be less weighed down by what I call "the poetic prejudice," i.e. the assumption that all literary texts worthy of the name should form organically unified totalities. This prejudice has historically dominated the discourses surrounding unfinished works, which, when they are acknowledged at all, are traditionally described in terms of an author's "failure" to achieve perfection. </p><p> The dissertation is divided into three section ("The Modern Novel," "The Modernist Novel," and "The Postmodern Novel,"), preceded by an Introduction that uses Pessoa's unfinishable <i>Book of Disquiet</i> to articulate a theory of both unfinished works and unfinishable novels, which I define as "novels that can only be completed as unfinished works." The Introduction offers a critique of the traditional poetics of the unfinished work and its corollary rhetoric of failure before describing my own "prosaic" methodology and outlining my project.</p>

Dans le cadre de la littérature européenne, il existe un lien important entre la femme et la mer qui a au centre une polarité essentielle : femme créatrice ou monstre marin. Cette dualité d’image féminine transcende les limites géographiques et linguistiques pour s’insérer dans le corpus littéraire de la France, l’Italie et ’Espagne. Les mythes Gréco-romains mettent en vedette les éléments du vaisseau, l’orage, la mer turbulente, le naufrage. Une thématique riche entoure les éléments marins présentés dans les mythes et est au fondement des métaphores créées par les auteurs de la Renaissance. L’image du navire balayé par la mer est au centre d’une image d’orage féminin qui se présente dans Il Canzionière de Pétrarque, Les Amours de Ronsard et Cants d’amor d’Ausias March. Le bateau est symbole du poète et la mer turbulente son amour envahissant. Les poètes modèlent cette métaphore grâce à des éléments communs. Les attributs qui ont une parure de beauté chez la femme se métamorphosent en agent nocif qui s’assimile à l’image du navire, tel que les cheveux d’or. Il faut aussi remarquer là où une fissure existe entre la tradition et l’innovation, les nuances au niveau des images et des métaphores où s’ouvre une nouvelle voie littéraire.

Issued also as Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago. / Half-title. On cover: University of Nevada bulletin. vol. IV, no. 4, vol. V, no. 5.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of English and the Dept. of Comparative Literature, 2005. / Advisers: Andrew H. Miller; Oscar Kenshur.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Depts. of Comparative Literature and English, 2007. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Nov. 11, 2008). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-07, Section: A, page: 2932. Advisers: Herbert J. Marks; Judith H. Anderson.

Thesis (M.A.)--Liberty University, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.

Inaug.-diss.-Halle. / Lebenslauf.