Thesis advisor: Marjorie Howes / Epistolary Modernism reads British and Irish writing of the 1920s through the 1950s with a focus on the way authors use fictional letters and verse epistles to communicate a renewed sense of literature as public speech, even as they saw privacy curtailed and surveillance increased. Letters enable late modernist writers to call attention to the way literature straddles the gap between private experience and public declaration. Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Graham Greene and Elizabeth Bowen all use letters to reveal a late modernist belief in literature as an exchange between an author and a reader -- a bridge between times and perspectives -- even as they trouble the possibility of any clear communication or meaning. The implied exchange in letters requires a sense of correspondence: a letter demands both interpretation and a reply. But a letter is always already too late. Epistolary Modernism reads letters as a stand-in for the literary period of late modernism itself, an epoch of writing characterized by a sense of coming too late to history and to literary tradition. The project considers fiction and poetry published in the 1920s through the 1950s in relation to historical and cultural events of the period, arguing that the sense of belatedness and temporal disjuncture letters create fundamentally links the structure and materiality of the text to the social and political concerns of its author. These writers composed literature attuned to historical events and the simultaneously occurring ordinary moment, leading to an increasingly interconnected, and socially-responsible art borne from the historical impasse of the thirties, the Second World War and its political legacy. Letters enable these writers to continue aesthetic experiments while simultaneously addressing politics, society, and the purpose of literature itself. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2007. / Full text release at OhioLINK's ETD Center delayed at author's request

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1994. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [335]-339).

AN ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION OF Lisa J. Raser, for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Speech Communication, presented on October 30th, 2013, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. TITLE: EPISTOLARY PEDAGOGY: COMMUNICATING CARE IN THE UNIVERSITY CLASSROOM MAJOR PROFESSOR: Dr. Suzanne M. Daughton While many scholars have affirmed the importance of communicating care in pedagogical settings (Noddings; Bubeck; Held; Ruddick; Monchinski; hooks; Palmer) there is a need for more scholarly discussion about what the communication of care between teachers and students looks like as a daily, tangible practice. Geneva Gay writes that educators "are hard-pressed to characterize [caring] in actual practice, to put a functional face on it that goes beyond feelings of empathy and emotional attachment" (48). In this dissertation, I examine letter writing in the classroom as one practice of communicating care between teachers and students. As a teacher who seeks to communicate care to my students, I am interested in what pedagogical care looks like, in action. Since I have employed my own "epistolary pedagogy" of writing letters to my students at the beginning of each semester, I want to know how my letter might communicate the giving of care and how the letters written by my students might communicate the receiving of care. Therefore, the data for this project consists of my letter that I wrote to my students at Southern Illinois University as well as a sample of thirty letters that I received back from my students in response to my letter. For analysis, I utilize a version of generic rhetorical criticism combined with a nonviolent communication lens as a method for revealing and understanding the communicative patterns that exist across this collection of letters. The textual evidence across the letters from my students suggests the rhetorical patterns of: self-disclosure, hopes and contributions, assessment, and connection with my letter. These patterns help me to understand ways that my students may be receiving my letter as care. This project explores how an epistolary pedagogy functions as care-in-action because it opens a space for communication between teacher and student, leads to feelings of comfort in the classroom, and provides an opportunity for teacher and students to build a continuing relationship.

Este trabalho reúne esforços para analisar aspectos da teoria literária de Jean-Jacques Rousseau a partir do romance La Nouvelle Héloïse, considerando suas inovações estéticas em face do período de então (século XVIII) e a relevância explicativa da obra no seio do pensamento do autor. Aos propósitos do trabalho, é fundamental entender a escolha do gênero epistolar a fim de facilitar o estreitamento da narrativa com a experiência do leitor, o que se combina com a crítica da representação e com o ideal rousseauniano da transparência, perfazendo o formato do romance que Rousseau, após severas críticas à literatura, transige em considerar necessário por oferecer um exemplo de virtude no amor a uma sociedade degenerada pela corrupção dos costumes. / This work combines forces to analyze aspects of Jean-Jacques Rousseaus Literary Theory at the novel La Nouvelle Héloïse in light of its aesthetic innovations towards that period (the 18th century) and the explicative relevance of the work to the core of the author\'s thoughts. With respect to the purpose of the work, it is important to understand the choice of the epistolary form in order to facilitate the alignment of the narrative with the experience of the reader, which is consonant with the critique of representation and with the Rousseaunian ideal of transparency, constituting the format of the novel that Rousseau, after severe criticisms of literature, came to consider necessary to offer an example of virtue through love to a society degenerated by the corruption of customs.

Magister Artium - MA / This thesis considers introspection and female consciousness in the novels Woman At Point Zero and Two Women In One by Nawal El Saadawi, an Egyptian writer and So Long A Letter and Scarlet Song by Mariama Bâ, a Senegalese writer. This study looks at how narrative technique impacts on questions of self and identity, subjective experience, coherence and transformation. The form of the novel is also highly significant because it shows the connection between form, individualism and consciousness of experience and this is important in understanding these questions of self and identity, subjective experience, coherence and transformation. It allows insight into the internal workings of the individual. The form of the novel is therefore particularly relevant because of the focus on the individual, subject and the consciousness of the individual. Pertinent to the discussion in this thesis is how narrative provides a creative space to enable the reflexive process and also how narrative contributes to the construction and understanding of the self and identity. The dynamic between narratology and novel form, on the one hand, the modes of confession and letter writing, on the other are considered both of which use first person narration.Confession as a genre of personal narrative enables the subject to move inward as part of the self reflection process which allows knowledge of the self. Letter writing a form of personal narrative plays an important role in the exploration of the self and identity.The novel in letter form forces the introspective process through the act of writing and the character reaches a realisation about events and experiences which have shaped her present consciousness. By contrast third person narration in Scarlet Song and Two Women In One foregrounds the social context which shapes the characters‟ sense of self and identity and worldview. The narrative which is rebellious and resistant in form,although quietly so, enables a “revolution” in the character‟s self- and world view.

Magister Artium - MA / In this thesis I focus on the ways I believe Jane Austen re-imagines the idea of the hero. In popular fiction of her time, such as Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753), what we had as a hero figure served as a male monitor, to guide and instruct the female heroine. The hero begins the novel fully formed, and therefore does not go through significant development through the course of the novel. In addition to Sir Charles Grandison, I read two popular novels of Austen’s time, Fanny Burney’s Cecilia and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda. An examination of Burney’s construction of Delvile and Edgeworth’s construction of Clarence Hervey allows me to engage with popular conceptions of the ideal hero of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Burney and Edgeworth deviate from these ideals in order to accommodate conventions of the new Realist novel. I argue that Austen reimagines her male protagonist so that hero and heroine are well-matched and discuss, similarly, how Burney and Edgeworth create heroes as a complement to their heroines. Austen’s re-imagining of her male protagonist forms part of her contribution to the genre of the Realist novel. Austen suggests the complexity of her hero through metaphors of setting. I discuss the ways in which the descriptions of Pemberley act as a metaphor for Darcy’s character, and explore Austen’s adaptations of the picturesque as metaphors to further plot and character development. I offer a comparative reading of Darcy and Pemberley with Mr Bennet and Longbourn as suggestive in understanding the significance of setting for the heroine’s changing perceptions of the character of the hero. I explore Austen’s use of free indirect discourse and the epistolary mode in conveying “psychological or moral conflict” in relation to Captain Wentworth in Persuasion and Mr Knightley in Emma, offering some comparison to Darcy. This lends itself to a discussion on the ways in which Austen’s heroes may be read as a critique of the teachings of Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son (1774). I conclude the thesis with a discussion of the ways in which Darcy has influenced the stereotype of the modern romance hero. Using two South African romance novels I suggest the ways in which the writers adapt conventions of writing heroes to cater for the new black South African middle class at which the novels are aimed. My reading of Jane Austen’s novels will highlight the significance of Austen’s work in contemporary writing, and will question present-day views that the writing of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries is not relevant to African literature.

No description available.

Although Chris Kraus's I Love Dick has been largely read as autofictional or autotheoretical, I argue that its formal characteristics and innovations can be better understood by looking at seventeenth- and eighteenth-century precedents in the amatory epistolary genre. By examining the formal constraints that belong to the epistolary medium Kraus employed—requirements such as the "I" of the writer, the "you" of the receiver, and a desire for exchange—I show how she deploys epistolary tropes such as the woman in love as natural writer of letters, and the assumed truthful nature of such letters. These epistolary affordances and the ways in which I Love Dick uses and in part revises them allow Kraus to blur the line between reality and fiction, but more importantly allow her to achieve an expansion of the "I" of the writer through what I call her stalking method of writing. It is precisely in the process of writing and in the concomitant minimizing and objectifying of the "you" of the receiver that the expansion of the "I" occurs. / Master of Arts / Chris Kraus's first novel I Love Dick was published by Semiotext(e)'s Native Agent series in 1997, but it was upon its second edition in 2006, and after a television adaptation by Jill Soloway in 2017, that the novel found a larger audience. Since then, critics have mainly discussed I Love Dick in relation to the genre of autotheory and autofiction, and called it the urtext for a certain kind of North American female writing that relies heavily on real, personal experiences that undergo varying degrees of fictionalization. While these are valuable interpretations, my research aims to correct an oversight in the current discourse around I Love Dick. By situating the novel within the tradition of love letter writing in the female voice, I show how I Love Dick employs and revises the affordances of the epistolary medium in general, and of the amatory epistolary genre in particular. Through a close analysis both of I Love Dick and of other lesser-known essays and interviews, as well as an analysis of Kraus's precedents, both in the Native Agent's series that she edited in the 1990s and in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century amatory epistolary fiction, I reveal paradoxes that ultimately make I Love Dick a complex and ambiguous novel that defies simple categorizations.

Thesis (M.A.)--Florida State University, 2004. / Advisor: Dr. Barry Faulk, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of English. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Jan. 18, 2005). Includes bibliographical references.