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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--Catholic University of America. / Bibliography: p. 145-157.

Thesis--Catholic University of America. / Bibliography: p. 145-157.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Nebraska, 1925. / Without thesis note. Bibliography: p. 135-138.

Thesis (MA)--University of Stellenbosch, 2005. / Bibliography. Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

M.A. (Afrikaans) / In this study the place of the death poem as genre and particularly its incidence in Afrikaans is traced. Because the corpus of poems about death is so comprehensive, a distinction is made between two significant categories: death poetry in general and death poetry with specific regard to the death of a beloved, especially with reference to a close relative. For the purpose of this study the latter is dealt with. It is established that the death poem referring to the death of a close relative has in almost every known literature been responsible not only for some of the most touching poems, but also for some of the best. In certain Iiteratures particular conventions in connection with . the death poem have crystallized. In others the theme of death has found unrestrained expression. A comparative study and an assessment of value are the two most important methods that were used in this study to ascertain the place of the death poem in literature. The death poem can be classified under several categories, each of which has contributed to a greater or lesser degree to the genre of the death poem. The category of the beloved deceased, especially the beloved close relative is emphasized in this particular study. Most poets have contributed to the corpus of the death poem, but Totius, Elisabeth Eybers, D.J. Opperman and T.T. Cloete, each representing one of the great literary eras in Afrikaans, have contributed the best death poems. It appears from the comparative study that there has been a qualitative improvement in this genre.

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. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate