Dissertation--Berlin--Freie Universität, 1994. / Bibliogr., filmogr. p. 245-315.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Alabama at Birmingham, 2009. / Title from PDF title page (viewed Jan. 21, 2010). Additional advisors: Cathleen Cummings, Heather McPherson, Mindy Nancarrow. Includes bibliographical references (p. 66-71).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 600-624).

Children's literature often does not hold the same weight in the studies of a culture as its big brother, the novel. However, as children's literature is written by adults, to convey information which is important for a child to learn in order to be a functioning member of that society, it can be analyzed in the same way novels are, to provide insight into the broad sweeping issues that concerned the adults of that era. Nineteenth-century British children's literature in particular reveals the deep-seated preoccupation the British Empire had with its eastern colonies, and shows how England's relationship to those colonies, particularly India, changed throughout the period. Beginning with the writing of Christina Rossetti's The Goblin Market in 1859, touching upon the Alice stories of Lewis Carroll in 1865 and 1871, and finishing with Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden published in 1911, I show how these three works of children's fiction mirror the changing attitudes of Britain in regard to her eastern colonies. The orientalism found in these stories is a nuanced orientalism that reflects the pressures of the moment and the changing tide of public opinion.

This thesis presents an interweaving of the discourse surrounding Colin McCahon and Ralph Hotere, the philosophy of art, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. In so doing, a Lacanian understanding of subjectivity, painting, discourse, and their interrelationships is elaborated in order to generate some new perspectives on, specifically, the work of McCahon and Hotere, and related writing and testimony, and more generally, the practice of art history and art criticism in Aotearoa/New Zealand. In the first place, this project explains, develops, and applies a Lacanian model of subjectivity/meaning-making understood in terms of the figuring of desire. This formula models expressions of subjectivity/meaning-making in terms of the reciprocity obtaining between the agent-like, metaphoric precipitation and automatist, metonymic perpetuation of symptomatic formations or points de capiton in discourses of desire. Secondly, this study analyses the discourse comprising paintings by McCahon and Hotere, and related writing, from the perspective of two points de capiton – the key features of which are gathered under the rubrics ‘McCahon’s doubt’ and ‘Hotere’s reticence’. The thesis demonstrates that these two formations enliven the possibility of interpreting McCahon discourse and Hotere discourse, respectively, in terms of repeated and contradictory characterisations of McCahon as a visionary and a doubter, and of Hotere as eloquent and reticent. Furthermore, the thesis shows how, by virtue of their fixation on the symptomatic formations ‘McCahon’s doubt’ and ‘Hotere’s reticence’, respectively, McCahon and Hotere discourses bear witness to radically contingent affirmations of, or leaps of faith in, praxes of contradiction, thereby sustaining fantasies of the revelation of the reality and truth of the being and meaning of art subjects and art objects. The impossibility of objectively realising these fantasies testifies to the status of subjective desire as that which seeks only its own perpetuation or that finds fulfilment in endlessly missing its aim and, by the same token, in Lacanian terms, underscores the (structural and ethical) necessity of subjectively being in and as traversing fantasy.

This essay examines the love affair between the two main characters of Rut Hillarp’s novel Sindhia. It draws attention to the schism between the Surrealist version of love as an extatic-religious fusion of the sexes – that in a way marks the relationship – and the yet remarkable coolness between the two lovers. With the theories of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, I will show how the man and the woman project their unrealistic individual fantasies on each other, thus rendering impossible the Surrealist Meeting, with its road to an absolute reality. The Surrealist "l’amour fou", I will argue, is trapped in the ritualized "l’amor interruptus"; a lacanian term for a certain kind of love that wishes to conceal the fact that desire will never find its object. It does so by pretending that the object would be found if only love had been consummated (thus the reason love is never consummated, since, as Lacan puts it, the object, or the Thing, is never to be found). I will, in brief, argue that the love affair depicted in the novel in different ways tries to deal with the “lack-of-being” that marks the subject according to Lacan; the absolute distance to the desirable Thing.

Failed Feminism?: Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel Tehanu The purpose of this essay is to show that Ursula K. LeGuin’s fantasy novel Tehanu instead of breaking away from traditional gender roles maintains them, despite the novel’s promises of change. I begin by showing the places where the possibilities of change are indicated, and then I use feminist criticism to show that there is no change in the gender roles. I have examined the gender roles in Tehanu, by taking a closer look at the characters and the roles they have in the plot. Numerous critics claim that this novel is Le Guin’s attempt to revise her earlier, more traditional fantasy novels in the Earthsea trilogy, and that Tehanu works as a feminist reaction to the Earthsea trilogy. However, even though Le Guin makes the traditional patriarchal gender roles apparent to the unaware reader, the protagonists have internalised the patriarchal values of their society when the novel closes, which may be fairly disappointing to the reader who brings feminist awareness to the reading of novel. The women are depicted as caregivers, and the men are portrayed as the decision-makers. The gender roles are as traditional as they can be with Ged as the man who is capable to read the wizard’s books, with Tehanu who stays with her family and does not leave with the dragons, and with Tenar as the woman who takes care of the household.

John Corigliano's Etude Fantasy (1976) is a significant and challenging addition to the late twentieth century piano repertoire. A large-scale work, it occupies a particularly important place in the composer's output of music for piano. The remarkable variety of genres, styles, forms, and techniques in Corigliano's oeuvre as a whole is also evident in his piano music. This profusion of sources and its application to the Etude Fantasy are explored in the introduction, which is a general discussion o f the composer's background and aesthetic stance. The intriguing title of the Etude Fantasy implies the coexistence of two genres and raises the issue of the role of each genre in the thematic and structural organization o f the work. It is this issue which is the principal subject of inquiry in the thesis. Chapter I examines the historical background o f the etude genre, discussing similarities between the pianistic techniques employed in Corigliano's work and those found in specific historical instances of the etude genre over two centuries. Chapter II focuses on the historical background of the fantasia genre, emphasizing contrasting characters, textures, and keys as the main indicators o f a free form, and at the same time drawing attention to thematic transformation as a device of structural unification. Chapter III concentrates on elements that produce structural and formal coherence in John Corigliano's Etude Fantasy. These elements are motivic, intervalic, melodic, and harmonic in nature.

This study examines six texts o f the 12[sup th] and 13[sup th] centuries for the fantastic mode. It first refutes the critical assertion that the fantastic could not exist in medieval literature, but also establishes that most of the casually denominated "fantastic" is not. For the genuine fantastic, both in general and in its medieval appearances, questions of reality are at most peripheral. Rather the fantastic mode encodes itself in the narrative structure, creating ambiguity and openness. The structural approach frees the discussion o f the fantastic from theories predicated upon issues of thematics, reality-based analysis, and didactic categorizations o f supernatural objects. The first two chapters synthesize those elements from modern works of fantastic theory, (re)deflning the fantastic based upon a semiotic approach. The introduction concentrates on the need to reexamine the corpus of critical works addressing the fantastic. Chapter 1 summarizes the theoretical discussion in order to adjust the definition of "fantastic" as a critical term according to a more pre-Renaissance view of reality. Chapter 2 proposes the parallel worlds model as a structural model for the identification of the fantastic mode in texts where the supernatural is evident, with an emphasis on fantastic space as an intermediary locale between worlds. The last four chapters apply the parallel worlds model to a selected corpus of six narratives. While the structures of these texts vary in length, the fantastic is consistently manifested in a pattern that alternates between the real world, fantastic space and the otherworld. The open-ended structure of five narratives indicates that journeys to the otherworld are rarely accomplished with a high degree of completion, and therefore the narrative program remains incomplete. The conclusion is a defense of the fantastic within medieval French literature, concentrating on how the supernatural creates /otherness/, fantastic space and openness in the narrative program. The fantastic as a powerful but elusive force within Old French romance narratives often shifts to the merveilleioc in the end. The parallel worlds model, when used in conjunction with other theories for identifying the fantastic, is a structural method that emphasizes openness as a characteristic of the fantastic within medieval romance narratives.

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