This thesis contributes to the fields of digital technology, consciousness studies and cultural theory by reassessing the relation of the contemporary subject to physical and digital worlds. By moving beyond the materiality of these worlds, this investigation will position the subject as a cyborg: a series of relations within consciousness that defines the reality and psychological construction of the subject across and through physical and digital perspectives. The functions of consciousness are set out as Existence, Meaning, Virtual, and Real, and their shifting relations defined in terms of physical and digital modes of consciousness. Using Slavoj Žižek's conception of parallax, applied ontologically to digital technology, and introducing a new framework for analysing consciousness as a series of relations between functions, the void of subjectivity is defined as the gap between physical and digital worlds. Within this framework the work of Gilles Deleuze and the philosophy of quantum physics are employed to negotiate a disruption of conventional reality with the Virtuality of thought and matter respectively, towards the conception of the subject as an engaged spectator. These methodological tools are developed to analyse cultural phenomena that highlight and challenge our consciousness of the relation between physical and digital worlds. Online and gallery-based digital art interventions, avatar-mediated spaces, computer games and representations of digital technology and culture in literature are examined in order to assess specific relations between functions, drawing the discussion towards the antagonism between Virtuality and Reality within the construction of the cyborg subject. Through these analyses, a critical position is established through which the contemporary subject is able to achieve the rupture of a minimal distance towards its own parallax position to confront the void of subjectivity between Virtual and Real functions of consciousness and between physical and digital modes of cyborg reality.

One key debate in the critical reception of Shakespearean late romance concerns how best to approach the functionality of the dramatised worlds that constitute it. What I call ‘containment’ readings of late romance argue that the alternative realities explored in the plays – realities of miraculous revivals, pastoral escapes and divine interventions, – serve to affirm the inevitable return of extant power structures. Utopian readings dispute this, making the case that the political and existential destructurations exposed in these plays point toward a new orientation for the dramatic subjects they produce. With the aim of contributing to the debate between containment and utopian readings, I explore in this thesis how late romance produces its subjects. I interrogate the plays’ structures with the help of the anthropological model of the limen, which is shown to be a useful category through which to educe the meaningfulness of certain ritual sequences. The limen’s three phases – separation; limen; aggregation – are employed to make sense of the transitions that subjects undergo in the four plays studied: Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. To study the liminality of these plays is, I argue, to study how dramatic subjects are produced therein, guided by the fact that their language shares properties with ritual discourse. When studying this discourse the focus falls on that class of language which impinges most lastingly on subjects: performatives. How performatives function in late romance will show us how real the changes induced in liminal subjects are. I examine the four plays in turn and find that their performative language produces subjects in a limen-consistent fashion. Aristocratic subjects are first of all estranged from those discursive practices that nourish their identity; their subjectivities are then glued back together in the ritualised, emblematising language of the limen. The conclusion I draw from my interrogation of the liminal patterns uncovered is that the functionality of late romance is broadly consistent with containment readings; I claim to have extended such readings, however, in showing that Shakespeare’s dramatisation of the state’s return to power usefully exposes its logic and symbolic grammar.

Whole document restricted, see Access Instructions file below for details of how to access the print copy. / Torrent of Portyngale is a late medieval romance, preserved in a single manuscript, MS Chetham’s 8009. It is a complex mix of romance themes: adventure, loss and restoration, family and social status, piety and hypocrisy, woven around the love between Torrent, the orphaned son of a Portuguese earl, and Desonell, heir to the throne of Portugal. Cohesion to so wide a range of thematic material comes from the author’s careful elucidation of the religious and moral significance of the text’s events. While popular literature with a didactic purpose is not uncommon in medieval literature and elsewhere in romance (cf. Sir Amadace), modern criticism has failed to fully appreciate the purposeful combination of the two in Torrent of Portyngale. Torrent is perhaps the most critically neglected member of the Middle English verse romances. This is, in part, due to the state of the text, which suffers from extensive scribal corruption. The first modern edition, by James Halliwell (1842), was also careless and did little to create a good impression. The poem’s most recent editor, Eric Adam (1887), appreciated the shortcomings of Halliwell’s work and sought to restore Torrent. He incorporated evidence from fragmentary early prints of the text and drew on the fruits of nineteenth–century romance scholarship. Despite his good editorial intentions, however, it is now clear that he also made errors and editorial decisions that have coloured the way in which Torrent has been viewed since. The substantial body of twentieth and twenty–first century scholarship on Middle English romance and medieval studies in general has diminished the value of Adam’s edition to the point where it may be regarded as obsolete and a new edition long overdue. This fresh edition of Torrent has been prepared from microfilm of the manuscript. It re–examines the text’s phonology, morphology, syntax, dialect and vocabulary, to indentify and evaluate overlooked clues to help answer such fundamental questions as its date (scholars have dated it from the mid– fourteenth century to the first half of the fifteenth century) and provenance (it has been mapped from East Anglia to South Lancashire). Both the unflattering reputation that Torrent of Portyngale has gathered in modern times and the long–held notion that it is lacking in originality are challenged by the thorough re–examination of the state of the text, its scribes and their practices and evaluating them against prior and current romance scholarship. This new analysis provides a window through which Torrent can be viewed and valued as a product of its time, allowing it to be judged more accurately against its contemporaries and offering many new insights into a text that was clearly once popular.

Thesis (MA)--University of Stellenbosch, 2006. / Bibliography. Also available via the Internet.

Originally presented as the author's thesis--Universität Osnabrück, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references.

published_or_final_version / Comparative Literature / Master / Master of Philosophy

Drawing on recent thinking in critical and cultural theory, this thesis examines the representation of commodity culture in a selected body of nineteenth and twentieth century fiction. In so doing, it explains how the commodity, as capitalism's representational agent, created and sustained a culture of its own in the nineteenth century, and how that culture, still with us today, has persisted and evolved over the course of the twentieth century. It follows the commodity and the cultural forms it generates through their historical development. And it considers how fiction, from realism through modernism and into postmodernism, accommodates and responds both to the commodity's increasingly loud cultural presence and to its colonization of the social imagination and its desires. The study begins by examining responses to the rise of commodity culture in Victorian social novels before moving on to explore how key issues raised in nineteenth century writing resurface and are reshaped in first early modernist and then postmodernist fiction. The chapters focus, in turn, on Gaskell and the casualties of industrialism, carnivals of consumption in Thackeray, Trollope's 'material girl,' decay in Conrad, and shopping with DeLillo. Together, they argue that the task of assessing commodity culture's impact on identity and agency represents a dominant concern in literary production from the mid-nineteenth century onwards; and that both the commodity and the consumer world through which it circulates find ambivalent expression in the narratives that represent them. Finally, and as its title suggests, the thesis finds that the commodity figures throughout the fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a living object of consumer fetish that excites desire yet strangely denies satisfaction.

The primary aim of this thesis Me he korokoro kōmako [‘With the throat of a bellbird’] is to demonstrate the existence of a distinctive Māori aesthetic in Māori literature written in English. Its introductory section, of three chapters, investigates the ways in which mainstream critical discourse in various ways appropriates Māori literature to its own Western-derived models of meaning and values, and proposes instead a definition of a Māori aesthetic grounded in the principle of whakapapa, whose whole cultural components for Māori literature include distinctive textual functions for myth, orality, acts of naming, other aspects of language, and symbolism. The concept of whakapapa also provides the organizing principle and methodology of the central chapters of the thesis, which are divided into two Parts – each of six chapters. These are framed by a Prologue and Epilogue, whose subject is the profound cultural symbolism of the waka in the work of a founding figure for Māori writing in English, Jacqueline Sturm, and in Star Waka, by a major later writer in English, Robert Sullivan. Part One devotes three chapters each to the adult fiction of one female writer, Patricia Grace (Potiki and Baby No-Eyes), and one male writer, Witi Ihimaera (The Matriarch). Part Two, following the principle of whakapapa, devotes six chapters to Māori literature for children. Its primary text is the major anthology of such writing – Te Ara O Te Hau: The Path of the Wind, Volume 4 of Te Ao Mārama, edited by Witi Ihimaera, with Haare Williams, Irihapeti Ramsden and D.S. Long. It grounds its reading of the volume’s many texts (literary and visual, in Māori and in English) in the many distinctive cultural behaviours and meanings attached to the figure of Māui. Each of the authors and texts has been chosen in order to study and exemplify a particular aspect of the Māori aesthetic defined in the Introduction, through close readings which draw strongly on the work of major Māori social historians, authors of iwi histories and genealogies, and interpreters of cultural meanings attaching to the natural worlds, and recent work on literary stylistics by Geoffrey Leech and others. It also draws on conversations with numerous Māori informants, including some of the authors discussed. The readings are designed to reveal the rich, culturally contextualised knowledges which Māori readers bring to the texts, and which their authors share and invoke through their deployment of the values and practices of whakapapa. While such representations and explorations of self offer new interpretive possibilities for Pākehā readers, they are also part of a global movement in which indigenous peoples engage in the politics of decolonisation from a position of strength, the stance of self-knowledge. E kore e hekeheke he kākano rangatira Our ancestors will never die for they live on in each of us. / Whole document restricted, but available by request, use the feedback form to request access.

Whole document restricted, see Access Instructions file below for details of how to access the print copy. / Torrent of Portyngale is a late medieval romance, preserved in a single manuscript, MS Chetham’s 8009. It is a complex mix of romance themes: adventure, loss and restoration, family and social status, piety and hypocrisy, woven around the love between Torrent, the orphaned son of a Portuguese earl, and Desonell, heir to the throne of Portugal. Cohesion to so wide a range of thematic material comes from the author’s careful elucidation of the religious and moral significance of the text’s events. While popular literature with a didactic purpose is not uncommon in medieval literature and elsewhere in romance (cf. Sir Amadace), modern criticism has failed to fully appreciate the purposeful combination of the two in Torrent of Portyngale. Torrent is perhaps the most critically neglected member of the Middle English verse romances. This is, in part, due to the state of the text, which suffers from extensive scribal corruption. The first modern edition, by James Halliwell (1842), was also careless and did little to create a good impression. The poem’s most recent editor, Eric Adam (1887), appreciated the shortcomings of Halliwell’s work and sought to restore Torrent. He incorporated evidence from fragmentary early prints of the text and drew on the fruits of nineteenth–century romance scholarship. Despite his good editorial intentions, however, it is now clear that he also made errors and editorial decisions that have coloured the way in which Torrent has been viewed since. The substantial body of twentieth and twenty–first century scholarship on Middle English romance and medieval studies in general has diminished the value of Adam’s edition to the point where it may be regarded as obsolete and a new edition long overdue. This fresh edition of Torrent has been prepared from microfilm of the manuscript. It re–examines the text’s phonology, morphology, syntax, dialect and vocabulary, to indentify and evaluate overlooked clues to help answer such fundamental questions as its date (scholars have dated it from the mid– fourteenth century to the first half of the fifteenth century) and provenance (it has been mapped from East Anglia to South Lancashire). Both the unflattering reputation that Torrent of Portyngale has gathered in modern times and the long–held notion that it is lacking in originality are challenged by the thorough re–examination of the state of the text, its scribes and their practices and evaluating them against prior and current romance scholarship. This new analysis provides a window through which Torrent can be viewed and valued as a product of its time, allowing it to be judged more accurately against its contemporaries and offering many new insights into a text that was clearly once popular.

In the thirties and forties politics and public themes bore in upon writers influencing what they wrote about, the forms they chose and their conception of their function in society. It is a period in which writers sought to make literature serve the larger political end and often artistic merit is a function of the success the writer had in accommodating in his work the demands of outside pressures. It is always difficult to detach a period of history from the longer continuum but there is, nevertheless, a case to be made for viewing the years from about 1930 to around 1950 as a relatively homogeneous unit in New Zealand's literary history, distinct in important respects from what came before and from what followed. The new generation of writers in England in the thirties, particularly Auden and the group around him influenced young New Zealand writers both technically and in the attitudes they adopted to the relationship between the artist and society. The prevailing left-wing ethos emphasised the political and public responsibilities of the writer. Retreat into private, esoteric, literary modes was seen as an abdication of these responsibilities. The major themes of this period in New Zealand writing were social realism and nationalism; the literary products of the pressures exerted by political and economic forces. For the young writers the political awareness and sense of social commitment generated by the depression, together with the crusade to inhabit the land imaginatively, provided a sense of literary direction. These writers and their contemporaries accepted responsibility in both these areas seeing themselves as crusaders for social justice and creators of the imaginative understanding necessary to achieve a sense of belonging to this country. Such an understanding would be reached not through seeing it as offspring of England, nor as a picturesque, innocent new society; but by exploring it honestly and creating the terms and vocabulary for describing it. This study documents the careers of John Mulgan, Frank Sargeson, R.A.K. Mason, A.R.D. Fairburn and Allen Curnow in the period, roughly, 1930 to 1950, and looks at the ways each responded to the public demands they perceived were placed upon them. In their different ways these writers went about the business of changing New Zealand society, broadening its understanding of itself, creating an atmosphere conducive to artistic and literary development. Despite the fact that the degree of success in accommodating these demands varies considerably from writer to writer, the literary output of the period as a whole generated the confidence and energy that were a prerequisite to the development of an indigenous literature. During this period there developed an acceptance, albeit highly critical, of New Zealand and a feeling that the tradition which had been established in the thirties and forties could be extended by succeeding generations of artists and writers.