Novel: Fragments of a Former Moon The novel Fragments of a Former Moon (FFM) invokes the paradoxical earlier death of the still-living protagonist. The unmarried German woman is told that her skeletal remains have been discovered in Israel, thirty-eight years since her body was interred in 1967. This absurd premise raises issues of representing death in contemporary culture; death's destabilising effect on the individual's textual representation; post-Enlightenment dissolution of the modern rational self; and problems of mimetic post- Holocaust representation. Using W G Sebald's fiction as a point of departure, FFM's photographic illustrations connote modes of textual representation that disrupt the autobiographical self, invoking mortality and its a-temporal (representational) displacement. As with Sebald's recurring references to the Holocaust, FFM depicts a psychologically unstable protagonist seeking to recover repressed memories of an absent past. Research dissertation: Metonymy &Trauma: Re-presenting Death in the Literature of W. G. Sebald. The dissertation centres on the effect of metonymy in the rhetoric of textually-constructed identity and its contemporary representation in the face of death. I concentrate on the effect of Holocaust trauma on representation and memory, relating trauma theory to the metonymy of W G Sebald's fiction, and situating representations of the traumatised self within the institution of modern bureaucracy. Using Ronald Schleifer's theory of metonymy I explore the rhetorical process by which Sebald seeks to depict the unrepresentable within Holocaust history, arguing that Sebald's correlation of text with image evokes problems of Holocaust discourse because it re-presents the past while recognising inadequacies within conventional narrative. Photography's function as an indexical trace of the past grounds my account of Sebald's use of imagery in questioning conventional forms of representation. I argue that Sebald construes the institutionalised constitution of the modern self through civic architecture, emphasising the metonymical associations of contemporary Western life and death. I maintain ultimately that the ethically displaced modern self typifies a culture capable of committing - and simultaneously repressing the representation - of technologised mass genocide: Sebald's texts critique modern society by apprehending modes of intersubjective memory and narrative responsibility through acknowledgement of the arbitrary, indexical capacity of metonymical representation.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2002. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 218-225). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

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"Seine Liebe zum Leben war vehement und jedem Zweife1 entzogen. Aber in dies von ihm geliebte Leben war der Tod eingeschlossen, der ihm, nach Hofmannsthals Wort, 'ein großer Gott der Seele' gewesen ist und den fruchtbaren, ja den verjüngenden Mächten der Erdtiefe verwandt" (MG 115 - Werner Bergengruen zum Tode von Bruno Goetz). Werner Bergengruen starb am 4. September 1964 - vierzehn Tage vor seinem zweiundsiebzigsten Geburtstag. Er hinterließ ein fast unübersehbar reiches Vferk, das von den ersten se1bstandig publizierten Werken des Jahres 1923 - zwei Bänden Erzählungen und einem Roman - bis in die Gegenwart reicht. [...]

This question usually arises out of Derridean deconstruction: what is the relationship between writing and death? This dissertation, however, explores Jacques Derrida's evocation of the living-dead for purposes of theorizing what might be thought of as Derrida's "poetics of the crypt." The first section, "The First Partition: Without the Door," proposes the term "cryptomimesis" to describe how, in Derrida's writing, (the) "crypt" functions as the model, method and theory of a formal poetics based upon the fantasy of incorporation. Cryptomimesis is a writing practice that leads one to understand language and writing in spatial terms of the crypt-a contradictory topography of inside/outside. Such writing also produces a radical psychological model of the individual and collective "self" configured in terms of phantoms, haunting and (refused) mourning. This dissertation also argues that Derrida's poetics of the crypt exist in a certain relationship of correspondence with the Gothic and examines how Derrida's writing intersects or "folds" into that genre, taking as a premise that each is already inhabited, even haunted, by the other. Sections such as "'Darling,' It Said": Making a Contract With the Dead," and "The Question of theTomb," develop this notion of "correspondence" by examining a set of texts written by two American Gothic writers. The discussion posits that the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King give insight into Derrida's preoccupation with inheritance and legacy while illuminating his concern, in terms of writing, with the uncanny institution of architecture. This dissertation attempts to theorize Derrida's writing practice in spatial terms by drawing upon Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok's theory of the phantom and the crypt. It demonstrates how cryptomimesis involves the production of an uncanny imaginary space by playing with thetic referentiality. Final sections, "An Art of Chicanery" and "Inscribing the Wholly Other: No Fixed Address," develop the notion that to suspend the thetic relation is to confound (classical) distinctions between subject and object or "self" and "other." Above all, this dissertation attempts to demonstrate how, in Derrida's work, cryptomimesis is about writing the other and how such writing, predicated upon revenance and haunting, problematizes notions of the "subject," "autobiography," and "transference" and, therefore, problematizes textuality itself.

Although rejecting Christian dogma, George Eliot retained, throughout her life, a strong sympathy for the humanitarian aspects of Christianity, which finds expression in her humane and moral philosophy, and especially in the value she attaches to right conduct. The treatment of death in her novels is governed both by this humanitarian emphasis and by her conviction of unalterable cause and effect in the universe. Given the interrelationship between individuals in society, the awesome reality of this law of consequences, demonstrating the ramifications of human error, makes it incumbent on man to avoid selfish choices. A study of the death episodes in Eliot's novels provides a comprehensive way of understanding and appreciating the operation of these concepts, in their moral and artistic aspects.

Integrating a thematic perspective and textual analysis into the method, this Master's thesis proposes to study the theme and images of death in Madame Bovary. This essay analyses the representation of death, the relationships with the survivors and the links with the main character. It demonstrates the egoistic perception of death among the survivors and explains the thematic advancement in chapter VIII of the third part of the novel. The peripheral elements of death, such as the character Lestiboudois, the cemetery, the taboos and the generally accepted ideas, are studied in the first chapter. The second is devoted to Emma Bovary's romantic conception of death, through an analysis of artistic influences and inspirations, romantic mysticism, and complacency with regards to the idea of death. I will be studying the causes of her suicide, her desire to die, her distress experienced in love, her financial bankruptcy and her emotional and physical disequilibrium in the third chapter, which ends with the study of the thematic "spiral" in chapter VIII of the third section: the race, God, time, love, nature, anguish, emotional and physical disequilibrium and death, without neglecting the various interpretations of the Blind Man's ditty. In the fourth chapter, I study the mourning, suffering and social conventions, the influence from beyond the grave upon the survivors, the grave, the memories and immortality. Finally, the last chapter, so as to integrate the various notions explained in the preceding chapters, analyses the consequences of each death in the novel upon the survivors and their reactions.

This thesis analyses the figure of the mythicized women as an attempt to escape the threat of time and death that is typical in Gautier's fictional narratives. In "La Cafetiere", "Omphale", "Le Pied de momie", "La Morte amoureuse" and "Arria Marcella", the feminine characters belong to both earthly and heavenly opposite realities. This study is based on several works such as Gilbert Durand's Structures anthropologiques de l'imaginaire, Georges Poulet's Etudes sur le temps humain and Mircea Eliade's Aspects du mythe. In the creation work part, nostalgia is introduced through characters that are overwhelmed by the death or the disappearance of a loved one.

This thesis examines the development of the novel in the eighteenth century in relation to changing attitudes to death, and looks at how far shifting notions of the moral purpose of the novel and subsequent changes in its treatment of deathbed scenes, murders, duels, suicides and speculations about heaven and hell reflect changing beliefs and the modification of strict Christian ideals to accommodate or combat new feelings and philosophies. In establishing this background, the thesis draws upon popular devotional literature, sermons, minor novelists (such as Sarah Fielding and Henry Mackenzie), periodicals, plays, poetry, biography, paintings and funeral iconography. Each chapter attempts to establish the typicality and individuality of a particular author in relation to the period in which he was writing. My starting-point is Richardson, who uses the novel to question both old and new attitudes, paving the way for the novel's predominantly emotional approach to mortality. Fielding's comic novels provide a striking contrast to this, whilst also revealing a concern for emotional comfort which is at once typical of the period and highly individual. Sterne is seen as questioning not only the ways in which we evade and find consolation for our mortality but also our self-indulgent response to death in fiction. The last two chapters deal with the closing decades of the century, when hopes and fears roused by revolutionary ferment led to fresh uncertainties concerning death and the afterlife. In Ann Radcliffe's sentimental-Gothic novels, religious uncertainty is exploited as a source of sublime terror, while the English Jacobins, Godwin, Holcroft and Bage, attempt to modify the conventions of death in the novel in order to communicate a wholly secular philosophy in which Clarissa's hope of heaven is replaced by the hope of man's perfectibility on earth.