America has adopted as its own the Eden myth, which has provided the mythology of the American dream. This New Garden of America, consequently, has been a masculine garden because of its dependence on the myth of the Fall. Implied in the American dream is the idea of a garden without Eve, or at least without Eve's sin, traditionally associated with sexuality. Our canonical literature has reflected these attitudes of devaluing feminine power or making it a negative force: The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, and The Sound and the Fury. To recreate the Garden myth, Americans have had to reimagine Eve as the idealized virgin, earth mother and life-giver, or as Adam's loyal helpmeet, the silent figurehead. But Eve resists her new roles: Hester Prynne embellishes her scarlet letter and does not leave Boston; the feminine forces in Moby-Dick defeat the monomaniacal masculinity of Ahab; Miss Watson, the Widow Douglas, and Aunt Sally's threat of civilization chase Huck off to the territory despite the beckoning of the feminine river; Daisy retreats unscathed into her "white palace" after Gatsby's death; and Caddy tours Europe on the arm of a Nazi officer long after Quentin's suicide, Benjy's betrayal, and Jason's condemnation. Each of these male writers--Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner--deals with the American dream differently; however, in each case the dream fails because Eve will not go away, refusing to be the Other, the scapegoat, or the muse to man's dreams. These works all deal in some way with the notion of the masculine American dream of perfection in the Garden at the expense of a fully realized feminine presence. This failure of the American dream accounts for the decidedly tragic tone of these culturally significant American novels.

《寵兒》（Beloved, 1987）是美國作家童妮‧摩里森（Toni Morrison）的第五本小說。如同她的前四本小說，《寵兒》關注的主題是黑人族群生活在美國所面臨的困境，探討非裔美國人如何在種族歧視的壓迫下求生存。與前四本小說不同的是，《寵兒》所敘述的故事發生在奴隸制度廢除之際，是摩里森第一次直接處理黑人在奴隸制度中遭受虐待的歷史事實。《寵兒》的主角是一群被解放的黑奴，摩里森藉著他們對過去的回憶來訴說奴隸制度對黑人族群所造成的集體創傷。受創的角色活在有關創傷的回憶中。他們不願去回想痛苦的過去，卻又被揮之不去的創傷記憶所纏繞。他們試著彼此扶持，並企圖走出受創的陰霾，找尋一個新的生活。 《寵兒》的故事以女主角柴特（Sethe）弒嬰的秘密為中心，加上其他黑奴的創傷記憶編織而成。既然小說本身是一個有關創傷的故事，批評家對《寵兒》的研究也就常涉及小說中的記憶、創傷與敘事風格。不過這些有關記憶、創傷與敘事的討論總是以種族或性別等議題為出發點，很少批評家純粹分析記憶、創傷與敘事在《寵兒》中的互動關係。有別於以往的研究，本論文試著以「創傷敘述」（trauma narrative）為主軸，採用佛洛伊德（Sigmund Freud）與赫曼（Judith Herman）的創傷理論來分析《寵兒》中記憶、創傷與敘事如何互相影響。首先，本論文探討創傷如何影響記憶的形成與敘事，以及創傷記憶為何是「一個不可說的故事」（an unspeakable story）。其次，本論文將創傷敘述的特色與《寵兒》中複雜難解的敘事風格相比較，討論摩里森如何運用創傷敘述的特色來再現小說中主角們難以啟齒的創傷記憶。最後，本論文討論創傷敘述與創傷治療（trauma healing）之間的關係，說明創傷敘述如何成為創傷治療過程中不可或缺的一環。 / Beloved (1987) is Toni Morrison’s fifth novel. Like her first four novels, Beloved centers on the social injustice which the black people are confronted with in their lives, depicting how African Americans struggle to survive under the oppression of racism. What renders Beloved different is its subject—the history of slavery, which was never dealt with in Morrison’s novels. The main characters in Beloved are ex-slaves who have undergone the atrocities of slavery. By recounting the characters’ experiences, the novel represents the horrors of slavery and the atrocities traumatizing the black people. In their post-traumatic lives, the characters are trapped in their traumatic memory. Although they show reluctance to recall the painful past, the traumatized characters are haunted by their indelible memories. However, the story is not completely tragic since, in the end, the characters are not defeated by their trauma. They endeavor to support each other, trying to rid themselves of traumatic memory and to rebuild a new life. The story of Beloved, which revolves around Sethe’s secret of infanticide, is constructed from the characters’ traumatic memory. Since the story is closely related to trauma, most critics explore Beloved in terms of memory, trauma, and its narrative style. However, critics often discuss only one or two topics of the above three. There are some critics analyzing the interrelation of memory, trauma and narrative in Beloved but their discussions are often the portions pertaining to the more extensive explorations based on the topic of history, race, or gender. Differing from these critical approaches, the present thesis adopts the concept of trauma narrative, using Sigmund Freud and Judith Herman’s trauma theories to analyze the interplay of trauma, memory, and narrative in Beloved. Firstly, the thesis discusses how the traumatic event affects the formation and narration of memory. The discussion also demonstrates why the traumatic memory is “an unspeakable story.” Secondly, the thesis compares the characteristics of trauma narrative with the intricate narrative of Beloved. The discussion centers on how Morrison adopts the characteristic of trauma narrative to represent a story of trauma. Lastly, the thesis explores the interrelation between trauma narrative and trauma healing. The discussion intends to clarify how trauma narrative becomes a prerequisite for trauma healing.

No description available.

No description available.

Permission from the author to digitize this work is pending. Please contact the ICS library if you would like to view this work.

This thesis explores Herman Melville’s relationship to sceptical philosophy. By reading Melville’s fictions of the 1840s and 1850s alongside the writings of Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, I seek to show that they manifest by turns expression, rebuttal, and mitigated acceptance of philosophical doubt. Melville was an attentive reader of philosophical texts, and he refers specifically to concepts such as Berkeleyan immaterialism and the Kantian “noumenon”. But Melville does not simply dramatise pre-existing theories; rather, in works such as Mardi, Moby-Dick, and Pierre he enacts sceptical and anti-sceptical ideas through his literary strategies, demonstrating their relevance in particular regions of human experience. In so doing he makes a substantive contribution to a philosophical discourse that has often been criticised – by commentators including Samuel Johnson and Jonathan Swift – for its tendency to abstraction. Melville’s interest in scepticism might be read as part of a wider cultural response to a period of unprecedented social and political change in antebellum America, and with this in mind I compare and contrast his work with that of Dickinson, Douglass, Emerson, and Thoreau. But in many respects Melville’s distinctive and original treatment of scepticism sets him apart from his contemporaries, and in order to fully make sense of it one must range more widely through the canons of philosophy and literature. His exploration of the ethical consequences of doubt in The Piazza Tales, for example, can be seen to anticipate with remarkable precision the theories of twentieth-century thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas and Stanley Cavell. I work chronologically though selected prose from the period 1849-1857, paying close attention to the textual effects and philosophical allusions in each work. In so doing I hope to offer fresh ways of looking at Melville’s handling of literary form and the wider shape of his career. I conclude with reflections on how Melville’s normative emphasis on the acknowledgement of epistemological limitation might inform the practice of literary criticism.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Univ., Diss.--Mannheim, 2002. / Literaturverz. S. 295 - 304.