This study explores the relationship between female identity formation within patriarchal society and women's literary discourse. The 'Introduction' serves to highlight Lou Andreas-Salomé's and Anaïs Nin's acute awareness of the tradional conflict between the role of artist and the role of woman. With both writers, their efforts to come to terms with their own creative powers involve tentative questions about the function of writing itself, which they both experience as a vital need. Part One of the study, therefore, addresses itself to reflecting the role of language as a basic means of socialization, which produces genderized subjects. This is related to the power of language to enable the construction of identity. Patriarchal culture produces woman as man's complementary Other. Questions of female identity and desire thus gain particular importance for the writer who strives to constitute her identity as autonomous subject. The first two chapters of Part Two focus on the problems that confront the women who, within the process of writing assume creative powers that are traditionally conceived as male prerogatives. The internalized image of woman as mother operates as a powerful impediment to creative self-assertion. An equally fundamental obstacle in the writer's quest for literary authority are the problematic links each writer establishes between a masculinized creator God, paternal authority and cultural discourse. Transcending their culturally induced duality between woman and creator Lou Andreas-Salomé and Anaïs Nin develop opposed literary strategies. Yet both resort to non-threatening female stereotypes that are able to accommodate their anxiety of authorship. Chapters III and IV revolve around the experience of writing itself in terms of a re-construction of inherited meanings and the woman's problem of creating her own meanings. Chapter V concentrates on the gaps that structure either writer's discourse and contribute to making it impossible to establish the woman as subject of desire. Chapter VI explores the ways in which internalized concepts of femininity work to limit the freedom of the imagination, reduce the field of vision and result in projecting transgressive female desires in disguised or displaced form. The 'Conclusion' stresses the inadequacy of existing controversial attitudes to both writers and highlights significant differences between the fiction of Lou Andreas-Salomé and Anaïs Nin.

This thesis examines the contributions of politically engaged writers to the West German peace movement in the final stages of the Cold War. The intensified arms race and related confrontations in the late 1970s and early 1980s were met with a similarly intensified reaction from peace movements in West Germany and beyond, supported by a variety of groups and individuals, including engaged writers. My thesis poses the question of how concepts of political, positional, and moral obligation defined and justified these writers’ public engagement in this period, and furthermore examines what distinct contributions these figures made to the wider West German peace movement based on these obligations. This analysis uses primary materials relating to a range of forms of writers’ engagement in this period, and explores both explicit and implicit forms of obligation supporting the roles and positions taken on by these figures. These include engaged writers’ direct contributions to protest actions, debates concerning the peace movement in the context of writers’ conferences, organisational involvement under the aegis of the Verband deutscher Schriftsteller, and literary engagement through poetry. Although not arguing that engaged writers singlehandedly led or defined peace protests in this period, my thesis demonstrates that these figures played a number of key contributory roles alongside the many other groups and individuals who made up the broader peace movement. These contributions were made with the support of engaged writers’ particular status and expertise, along with more general factors including their shared position as citizens alongside other protesters, with varied forms of obligation playing a key role in defining and justifying these forms of engagement.

This thesis presents a comparative analysis of Hartmann von Aue’s \(Gregorius\), Kafka’s \( Die\) \(Verwandlung\) and Thomas Mann’s \(Der\) \(Erwählte\), focusing on their uses of biblical motifs. Connected by pervasive themes of guilt and atonement, each text also relies similarly in its expression of these ideas on the use of images which are familiar from the biblical context, and thus suggest archetypal instances of sin and redemption as points of comparison for the protagonist’s fate. In this way all three texts create a manifest sense of helpless affliction by guilt by implementing echoes of the fate of Adam, both in the relationships of their characters, and in structures of recurring loss, decline and expulsion. Each narrative, moreover, also suggests allusions to the opposing figure of Christ through concurrent echoes of the Passion in its imagery of degradation and exile, and, to varying degrees, through the introduction of complementary images of restoration and rehabilitation drawing on patterns of resurrection. The texts diverge, however, in the way in which they relate these fields of imagery, as the correlation of Fall and redemption which is symbolically affirmed in Hartmann’s narrative, and echoed in Mann’s, is disrupted by Kafka’s introduction of a tragic conclusion.

The thesis explores important similarities and differences between responses to bourgeois society in Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (1924) and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). It examines these texts’ presentations of the shifting morality of bourgeois culture, the prevailing sense of paralysis and fragmentation at the beginning of the twentieth century, and compares the authors’ use of allusions to myth, and their explorations of concepts of time. However, by considering the ambivalent responses to bourgeois society as they are presented within these texts, and a selection of Mann and Eliot’s other creative and critical works, the thesis also highlights significant differences in the authors’ responses to bourgeois society, which are indicative of the broader divergent traditions in which they positioned themselves. Eliot subscribes to a tradition based upon the framework of the Christian faith, and the classical literary canon, with an ‘impersonal’ approach to artistic creation. By contrast, Mann places the German ‘burgher’ at the core of the tradition to which he subscribes, emphasising personality, and favouring a humanistic approach, which values the individual’s capacity for ethical judgement based on reason. This framework demonstrates that the thematic similarities and common allusions in Mann and Eliot’s creative works are underscored by radically different authorial approaches and belief systems.

acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

I use Heidegger's critique of Rilke's solution to the technological objectification of nature to help determine whether Heidegger's own view of nature hinders his attempt to overcome subject-object dualism. For both Heidegger and Rilke, in order to change our relationship to natural entities we must do more than redefine our conception of nature. The subject-object dynamic must be transformed by reconfiguring the relation between entities, humans, and being Heidegger follows a list of key words through Rilke's poetry: 'relation,' 'venture,' 'departure,' 'open,' 'life,' 'earth,' 'nature,' and 'angel.' I use these same words to explicate Heidegger's own understanding of the relation between humans and entities during his turn away from the anthropocentrism of Being and Time. I primarily focus on the role given to natural entities in the new configuration of being set forth in the Beitrage zur Philosophie, the major, but unpublished, project of this transitional period I argue that Heidegger's understanding of nature, earth, and technology in the Beitrage prevents him from decentering the human subject as the privileged site of being. Heidegger attempts to decenter Dasein by critiquing the effectiveness of human action, but he does not allow for the possibility that natural entities can exert an ontological or ethical pull on us. Heidegger maintains an ontological division between nature and humans, which results in an unbridgeable gap between subject and object, and in an essentially Dasein-centered world In the concluding chapter I sketch out a way in which Heidegger's desire for a non-Dasein-centered understanding of being can be reconciled with his sometimes justified fears of naturalism, by reevaluating his understanding of history (Geschichte). History is not to be understood as a 'sending of Being' (Geschick) whose recipient is Da-sein, but as a 'gathering layering' (Ge-schichte ). This understanding of history makes room for a natural dimension to Being, and no longer requires that the historical be defined in opposition to the natural / acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

Cold Counsels and Hot Tempers: The Development of the Germanic Amazon in Old Norse Literature will trace how the evolution of the powerful woman in literature shaped the development of female characters in the classical Icelandic family sagas and the Fornaldarsögur, or later sagas of ancient times. The thesis will focus on the conception and representation of the proverb köld eru kvenna ráð cold are the counsels of women specifically tracing the function of women in feud structures and folk motifs that involve assault and acts of revenge. In the early Germanic sources, women are direct participants in violence; they train themselves in warfare, take up weapons, begin feuds, avoid unwanted marriages and hold kingdoms through force of arms. In later Norse literature, women rely on verbal persuasion to force men into action; they use goading, seduction, and insult to engage men in violence. Cold Counsels and Hot Tempers will examine these changes in womens roles and investigate the different methods women use to access power.

Cold Counsels and Hot Tempers: The Development of the Germanic Amazon in Old Norse Literature will trace how the evolution of the powerful woman in literature shaped the development of female characters in the classical Icelandic family sagas and the Fornaldarsögur, or later sagas of ancient times. The thesis will focus on the conception and representation of the proverb köld eru kvenna ráð cold are the counsels of women specifically tracing the function of women in feud structures and folk motifs that involve assault and acts of revenge. In the early Germanic sources, women are direct participants in violence; they train themselves in warfare, take up weapons, begin feuds, avoid unwanted marriages and hold kingdoms through force of arms. In later Norse literature, women rely on verbal persuasion to force men into action; they use goading, seduction, and insult to engage men in violence. Cold Counsels and Hot Tempers will examine these changes in womens roles and investigate the different methods women use to access power.