This thesis deals with violence in the language of Timothy Findley's work: both the language of narration and the language of dialogue between the characters. In the thesis, I will examine the way language is violated for the purpose of re-assembling it into a more competent vehicle for communication. Bakhtin's theory of dialogics and Robert Kroetsch's theory of violent silence will be examined with regard to Findley's consistent focus on the way language must be violated to render it useful, and why any character of Findley's who refuses to violate language and chooses instead to submit to silence, is destroyed. According to Findley, the only means of validating existence and literature is to dispel silence with dialogue. I will prove that Timothy Findley treats violence as a positive and necessary precursor to any sort of creativity, asserting again and again through his texts that nothing can be constructed until something is first torn down.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--York University, 1997. Graduate Programme in English. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 445-460). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNQ22910.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--York University, 1999. Graduate Programme in English. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 277-287). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNQ43449.

My study is an investigation of the discourse of madness in Timothy Findley's fiction, where madness is defined as a discursive element that is both structural and thematic. The work encompasses Findley's short stories, novels, a work of non-fiction, and personal archival material. I argue that what has been called a diverse body of work (Hunter) is, in fact, solidly cohesive in its use of the discourse of madness that systematically subverts patterns of authority. My purpose is to reveal a discursive structure that both supports and subverts narrative coherence, locating its degree of disruption within a psychodynamic exchange. / My theoretical model situates the reader as the recipient of and participant in the initiating text's psychodynamic discourse, and so implicates the reader in the subversion of authority. The study amalgamates psychocriticism and reader response theory to demonstrate that Findley's writing actively engages the reader in a visceral exchange that I liken to that encountered within the psychoanalytic interview (Bollas). With the addition of the psychoanalytic component, my research moves substantially beyond the position taken by Wolfgang Iser on reader response and by Norman Holland, both of whom acknowledge the value of psychocriticism but maintain a dualistic (reader/text) model. While Iser and Holland assign the status of co-production of the text to the activity of reading, both neglect to address specific production value to the activity of writing which, in effect, leaves the reader as lone producer. / By introducing the "idiom" of the author my theoretical model becomes triadic so that my reading can move beyond the simple oscillation between text and reader to engage the author in a way that amplifies important questions of status raised by the psychodynamic model, such as: "Who is reading whom?" "Who is the analyst and who the analysand? Who is maintaining or manipulating authority?" These, in turn, raise further questions regarding subject/object relations and the ways in which transference-countertransference between selves and others, subjects and objects, conscious and unconscious states take place. In addressing these questions in terms of the triadic process of reading, which re-instates the initiating author, the value and originality of this study becomes apparent in its investigation of biographical material to literary production.

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Zugl.: Köln, Univ., Diss., 2004

Teilw. zugl.: Köln, Universiẗat, Diss., 2004.

In order to explore the range of indirect metafiction as presented in three exemplary novels, this dissertation begins by examining how the assumptions of "realism" on the one hand and "postmodernism" on the other relate to the paradigmatic triad of story-teller, story, and audience. From this context emerges the view that the range of metafiction is determined by how it reveals the processes and nature of fiction according to a spectrum of mediation: that of the writer between his "raw materials" and the text, that of the text between writer and reader, and that of the reader between the text and his interpretation. Indirect metafiction (or "pretend realism") mediates between realism and postmodernism, revealing without breaking the illusions of realism. Each of the next three chapters, after initially placing the key novel within the context of the author's work as a whole, discusses in detail a novel whose metafictional focus is on one of the three mediations. Accordingly, Chapter II focusses on Randolph Stow's The Girl Green as Elderflower (1980) and on the way it reveals the mediation of the author by presenting a writer's fiction as a synthesis of his personal and literary experiences. Chapter III notes how M. K. Joseph's A Soldier's Tale (1976) reflects the mediation of the reader by depicting a writer's interpretation and literary redaction of an oral tale. And Chapter IV shows how Timothy Findley's Famous Last Words (1981) demonstrates the mediation of the text by presenting a writer whose text "crystallizes" the illusions of fiction, then undercuts and exposes them. The analyses of the key texts employ both postmodern and traditional critical approaches, demonstrating them to be complementary; by noting the interpenetration of metafictional and traditional import and significance, the analyses also highlight the mediary nature of indirect metafiction. The fifth chapter draws theoretical conclusions from ideas in the practical chapters: from metafictional revelations through the paradigm of mediation comes an "anatomy" of fiction, delineating its elements; from a sense of how the mind "structures" experience through "fictional" representations of both "reality" and fictional texts comes a "physiology," a sense of how fiction works through language. This discussion leads to definitions of realistic, unrealistic, and self-conscious fiction, and of metafiction, both direct and indirect; the dissertation concludes by remarking on the inter-relations of language, "fiction," and "reality." / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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