This dissertation exposes responses to national trauma in literature and film from France in the twenty-five years following the 1940-1944 German Occupation, and from China in the twenty years following the 1989 Tiananmen Square Incident. My study is unique in that it focuses on French and Chinese authors who lived through the two traumatic periods, but whose work does not present a conventional version of bearing witness. Instead of locating expressions of national trauma in narratives describing historical traumatic events, I detect three aesthetic concerns or symptoms--melancholy, ambivalence, and exhaustion, which can be read as the traces of traumas that seem to evade direct identification. I argue that trauma may make its presence known by an absence of reference to its source. Emerging during post-traumatic periods--the Trente glorieuses in France (from 1945 to 1973) and the Post-New Era in China (from 1990 to the present)--my dissertation argues that novels by Marguerite Duras and Wang Anyi, novellas by Samuel Beckett and Ge Fei, and films by Jean-Luc Godard and Jia Zhangke reveal a tension between present national circumstances and ghosts from the past. These two post-traumatic national moments in France and China share the state projects and dominant discourses of economic growth, consumption, individualism, and nationalism, which I claim aided in the repression of troubled recent histories. The works of fiction and film I discuss in this dissertation, marked by melancholy, ambivalence, and exhaustion, offer counter-discourses in that they fail to partake in the project of national "progress," instead exposing irresolution with respect to overcoming history. In these works, furthermore, I contend that such historical (re)negotiations prompt aesthetic innovations, allowing for a redefinition of the causes and cases of early postmodernism.

This dissertation charts an intellectual history of collaborations centered on the beginning of socio-critical discourse on photography. I study the critically misread oeuvre of photographer and sociologist Gisèle Freund to reconfigure a transatlantic map of concrete personal, literary, and critical connections during the 1930s and ’40s. In examining Freund’s oeuvre, I suggest a crucial intervention on the notion of aura — Walter Benjamin’s trademark for understanding the dialectics of the original and its reproduction. I advance a reading in support of aura that challenges the canonical “The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility” (1940) of Benjamin. The continuous coexistence of the terms aura, market, and photography is present in Freund – author of iconic photo-portraits of writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, André Malraux, Jorge Luis Borges or Benjamin. It contests the reduction of the original’s aura and its reproduction to mutually exclusive terms. My counter-reading in fact recovers the prior and wider aura integral to Benjamin’s “Little History of Photography” (1931). It is this cardinal yet neglected piece that inaugurated together with Freund’s La Photographie en France au dix-neuvième siècle (1936) the critical discourse on photography. Walter Benjamin’s presence is dynamically ingrained in Freund’s oeuvre. In addition to their friendship, two additional friends inform Freund’s career. Freund’s mentors were the leading cultural agents in Paris and Buenos Aires: Adrienne Monnier, the legendary French publisher of Joyce’s Ulysses, and Victoria Ocampo, the founding director of Sur, one of the key literary journals in Latin America. The network of cooperative interactions here deployed is conjugated under the critical metaphor Freund-schaft. Coined on Freund’s name, the term draws equally on the meaning of friendship and the creative making contained in the suffix –schaft (derived from the German schaffen, “to make”, “to create”, “to accomplish”). The framework hinges on the tension between history and theory. Freund-schaft brings to light omissions, conjunctions, and the debates that make up the larger structure of feelings, and makes particulars inextricable from a life-woven net.

This dissertation explores how literary writers from across Western and Central Europe--namely Germany, Italy, Britain and France--invoked Europe's legacy of empire and colonialism in their attempt to come to terms with the specter of fascism. It argues that empire became the site upon which a wide range of writers built their critiques, sometimes overt and other times subvert, against a rising tide of fascist ideology in the 1930s and 1940s. What results is a condemningly critical--and in the case of writers publishing within fascist regimes, outright subversive--reading of fascism. Fascist racial ideology, hyper-militarism, economic policy, absolutist rule and expansionist policies are recurring targets of censure among these writers. By placing empire and fascism into dialogue, their writings not only proffered a powerful critique of fascism but also set into motion a critical rethinking of the project of empire. Uncomfortable affinities between a purportedly benevolent European overseas colonialism and the horrors committed by fascist powers within continental Europe challenged conventional wisdom about the colonial mission civilisatrice at the same time as they offered the raw material for a sustained critique of fascism. From a methodological perspective, this dissertation is concerned with literature as a historically and culturally situated product. While its primary objects of focus are literary texts, it draws on both cultural and political history, as well as, where relevant, knowledge of the author's life in order to better illuminate these works. The dissertation examines a range of texts--literary, historical, biographical, personal, critical--and makes use of close, analytical reading. The primary writers it treats are Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Joyce Cary, Gerhart Hauptmann, Marguerite Yourcenar, Hermann Broch, Dino Buzzati and Ennio Flaiano.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Toronto, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Vanderbilt University, 1937. / "Private edition, distributed by the joint university libraries, Nashville, Tennessee." Includes bibliographical references (2 leaves at end).

<p> Pratt&rsquo;s contact zone theory draws researchers&rsquo; attention to the initiative and creativity of local cultures in colonized areas. Such features make Pratt&rsquo;s theory productive in dealing with cultural issues in modern China. Heretofore, people in the process of cultural contact, for instance, Westernized Chinese in concessions, have not been discussed in detail. The concession is a contact zone. The history of the concession in modern China started in the 1840s and ended in the 1940s. The concession is a particular social space for Chinese and Western cultures to meet; in which Western colonizers and Chinese local citizens have direct cultural contact. As products of the contact zone, many Westernized Chinese in concessions actually have dual cultural status. They are both a part of the local culture and a part of the foreign culture. Their unique cultural status is worthy of further analysis. &ldquo;Fake foreign devil&rdquo; is a title local Chinese used to describe their Westernized fellows in concessions, suggesting a contradictory attitude the local Chinese held towards these foreignized fellows in the contact zone. The Chinese local community admitted the cultural heterogeneity of those Westernized Chinese, which is the reason those people had been called &ldquo;foreign.&rdquo; Meanwhile, their Chinese cultural identity had never been denied, hence the necessity of the &ldquo;fake&rdquo; prefix. &ldquo;Devil&rdquo; implies the unpleasant relations between these two groups of people. This thesis will use the concept of fake foreign devils as examples to analyze the reaction of local cultural communities when faced with cultural products associated with a bicultural identity from the contact zone. Textual analysis will be the main method utilized. An important result of the cultural contact between Western and Chinese cultures, the Westernized Chinese in concessions and their relative cultural experience will provide a valuable research case for post-colonial theory regarding the intercultural communication that occurred in modern China. </p><p>

<p> This thesis deals with the strategies in the works of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Pu Songling that are used to arrange the fantasy elements. It examines the basic settings of the environments and social backgrounds as presented in several works by Hoffmann and by Pu Songling. It also investigates and compares the various modes of presentation considering the adventures of the protagonists in these selected works by a German and by a Chinese author. It demonstrates that, although both authors tend to use fantasy elements as an important part in their narration each, they organize them differently. Hoffmann first puts his characters into a daily life background and then constantly brings fantasy events to them in order to arouse the feeling of amazement and to romanticize the world. Pu Songling uses elements of fantasy power to create a paradise that is like an idealized version of the human world. By juxtaposing the two authors, this thesis argues that both Hoffmann and Pu Songling play significant but also quite different roles in the transition process from traditional tales with fantasy elements to modern fantasy fictions in their own traditions. Hoffmann inherits but also makes some unique and remarkable innovations to the literary heritage of German Romanticism; Pu Songling modifies the usual pattern of <i>zhiguai</i> and <i> chuanqi</i> to achieve better art effect. Hoffmann&rsquo;s unique style of intertwining reality with fantasy has influenced many modern writers, including Herman Hesse. Pu Songling&rsquo;s creation of a secular paradise and the promotion of qing (a Chinese notion that represents emotion and love) may also be seen as the precursor for later works such as Dream of the Red Chamber.</p><p>

[No abstract available] / Education, Faculty of / Language and Literacy Education (LLED), Department of / Graduate

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.