This essay examines the role of repetition in the two novels Älskaren (The Lover) by Marguerite Duras and Den amerikanska flickan (The American Girl) by Monika Fagerholm, through a thematic and comparative reading. The study mainly uses Bruce F. Kawin’s analysis of repetition in literature and language as well as it refers to Cathy Jellenik and her analysis of rewriting in the works of Duras. The study also takes into Julia Kristeva’s idea of Duras as a writer lacking of catharsis. Furthermore, the essay analyses both novels by applying Sigmund Freud’s term “repetition compulsion”. The essay shows how Fagerholm and Duras both use permissive writing, which means that the authors boldly write clichéd replications in their texts. Both writers practice what Kristeva calls “an aesthetics of awkwardness”. Aswell, the authors both question whether a story at all is able to be told: they work with what Jellenik calls “an aesthetics of doubt”, but in different ways. Moreover, by using the work of Kawin, the essay shows how the authors have different ways of handling time. The study shows indications of repetition compulsion in the characters and also exemplifies instances of what Kristeva calls “reduplication”. Through this a fragmentary and Nietzschean perspective of the self is displayed in the novels. The study review how Duras can be said to be a writer lacking of catharsis, while Fagerholm on the other hand liberates one of her protagonists from repetition compulsion by allowing the character to undergo a catharsis. Finally, the essay conclusion points out that Duras and Fagerholm are postmodern writers who know how to challenge the concept of truth. Even if they are different writers in many aspects, they both use repetition as a method to express something unspeakable. They can be said to write also by an aesthetics of search for the truth; a search for an origin tale which they both argue as biased and is therefore impossible to capture.

Abstract In this Research paper and through my Studio practice, I search for what binds me and separates me from my children. I investigate abjection theories through Julia Kristeva and Georges Bataille and focus on a particular form I call the maternal abject. This occurs at the time an infant separates from its mother, acquires language and maps its own body. I am proposing that the mapping of the body is the point at which an individual perceives social structures and learns about prohibitions and taboos, hence the abject. I also investigate the relationship between the maternal abject and the artistic process through the writings of Kristeva. Abjection is illustrated through the works of Mona Hatoum, Fiona Hall, Hieronymus Bosch, and Paul Quinn. The maternal abject is illustrated through the works of Mary Kelly, Cindy Sherman, Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois. A possible reading of the maternal abject is given through the works of Gregory Crewdson, Joel-Peter Witkin and Francis Bacon. The studio work is in two parts. The first part is a series of layered photomedia images. The layers consist of a naked female body, which has been merged with Renaissance like Madonna and Child images. Texture, such as stones and spikes, is embedded to signify the fragility and strength of the body. Children are also present and are merged with the adult female body. All images are cradled in a darkened atmosphere in order to draw the viewer inside the images. The second part is a bassinet, which has been drilled and pierced by thousands of pearl-headed steel pins. This piece signifies the dichotomy of the motherhood experience, which on the one hand is rewarding and fulfilling and on the other an abject and isolating experience of no apparent economic value. The two parts interact so that the bassinet piece with its threatening exterior acts as an aggressor towards the photomedia images.

xi, 182 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / This dissertation develops an interpretation of Martin Heidegger's philosophical project in On the Way to Language and some of his earlier works that pave the way for this text and offers criticism of Heidegger's project in light of this interpretation. On the Way to Language stands apart from most twentieth century philosophy in arguing that, although human beings are within language in one sense, our relationship to language is nevertheless an estranged one. Heidegger often describes this condition as "lacking the word for the word." Because we are constantly speaking, we rarely if ever stop to wonder about the nature of language itself. Heidegger calls this our "entanglement" within language, a concept rooted in Being and Time 's exposition of the human being's thrownness. Read in terms of language, thrownness describes how we inherit concepts and find ourselves entangled in words prior to our reflection upon them. Heidegger presents what motivates us to bring the word to word in two ways. First, this need is rooted in the human being's fundamental structure of thrownness. Second, the need makes itself manifest through translation. My reading expands upon these two explanations of how we come to experience this entanglement, arguing that everyday communication regularly offers such experiences and demands that we modify, therefore temporarily distancing ourselves from, given language inheritances. The dissertation employs three other theorists, Roman Jakobson, Judith Butler, and Julia Kristeva, to flesh out how this need naturally arises in ordinary language development. Though he underestimates the extent to which everyday communicative situations require ongoing transformations of ordinary language, Heidegger nevertheless considers social encounters to be an important vehicle for language transformation. In this way, the goal of bringing our thrownness into language to word is not to disentangle ourselves from social relations, as some commentators have suggested. The last chapter shows how Paul Celan's poetics, in its inheritance of Heidegger's project, expands upon the role of social relations in language entanglement. / Committee in charge: Scott Pratt, Co-Chairperson, Philosophy; John Lysaker, Co-Chairperson, Philosophy; Beata Stawarska, Member, Philosophy; Peter Warnek, Member, Philosophy; Jeffrey Librett, Outside Member, German and Scandinavian

This thesis interrogates the ways in which the body-centred practices of women film artists embrace the materiality of direct animation in order to foreground gendered, subjective positions. Through the researcher's own creative practice, it investigates how this mode of film-making, in which the artist works through physical engagement with the film materials and the material processes of film-making, might be understood as feminine and/or feminist. Direct animation foregrounds touch as the primary sense. Its practices are process-based and highly experimental, because images are made through the agency of the body operating within restrictive parameters, making results difficult to predict or control with precision. For these reasons, direct animation has not been embraced by mainstream, narrative-focused, studio-based models of production, unlike other forms of two and three dimensional animation. It has remained a specialist area for the individual artist and auteur, and, to date, there is a paucity of commentary about direct animation practices, and what exists has been dominated by male voices. In order to develop ideas about the ways in which women represent themselves in an expanded film-making praxis that is focused on the body and materiality of process, this PhD inquiry, encompassing a body of films with written contextualisation, is situated in the context of the direct animation practices of three artists (Caroline Leaf, Annabel Nicolson, and Margaret Tait); and informed by conceptual frameworks provided by Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous. This thesis proposes, via interaction between these three axes of research, that women film artists, operating independently, are able to create a female imaginary that represents women and is recognised by them, by constructing positions of practice outside the dominant symbolic modes of patriarchy, which evolve through the maternal body and the materialities of the feminine.

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Sylvia Plath’s poetry continues to receive considerable attention from a variety of groups and has been the target for such diverse critical approaches as Feminism, Ecocriticism, and Marxism, to name but a few. My paper focuses on a less investigated area of her poems: Space, and more specifically uncanny space in her later poetry. Here, I take a closer look at seven of her poems using as my preferred methods deconstruction and psychoanalytical theory.

This study employs psychoanalytical theories to explore how the conscious, unconscious, and subconscious workings of the mind, combined with a search for identity, are presented and dealt with in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987). It is done through a close reading and in-depth textual analysis of thematic concerns raised in the work. Previous research has primarily relied on some specific aspects of psychoanalytic theory and applied it to Beloved. The theoretical framework provides a rationale for this paper to research two events in particular that highlight the mother-daughter relationships between Sethe and her Ma’am and between Sethe and her daughter Beloved. These relationships are consequently analyzed by employing psychoanalytical concepts offered by Freud, Lacan and Kristeva. By utilizing psychoanalytical criticism, the characters’ conscious and unconscious motives and feelings are revealed and explained, as well as the meanings and the undercurrents that lie underneath the text’s consciousness. The results suggest that Sethe murdered her daughter Beloved to keep her from becoming a slave and enduring the dreadful and traumatic consequences of slavery, which was similar to what Sethe went through when she was abandoned by her Ma'am. Sethe’s childhood psychological principles and trauma shaped her identity as a mother as she witnessed her mother abandoning her at a young age by being tortured and killed. The events around Sethe’s mother’s death and the fact that Sethe never identifies her mother’s dead body, scar Sethe for life and instill in Sethe a sense of “lack” and an abnormal feeling of maternal love where she is ready to kill her children to save them from the horror of slavery.

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This dissertation explores the intimate relationship between irony and romantic subjectivity, by drawing on feminist psychoanalytical theory, via an examination of the shiftings of irony, and humor, in the works of the Swedish romanticist P. D. A. Atterbom (1790–1855). It looks at the critical role played by irony in the formation of Romantic subjectivity, and explores irony’s potential to undermine dualistically gendered notions of subject-object relations. For Atterbom, irony is an aesthetic concept closely related to drama, informed not only by German Romantic-ironic theorists such as Friedrich Schlegel and Jean Paul, but also by the works of Shakespeare, Ludwig Tieck, and E. T. A. Hoffmann. The thesis follows the shiftings of Romantic irony in Atterbom’s major literary texts: the cycle of poems Blommorna [The Flowers] (1811), where the Ovidian transformations are used metafictively to play with the relation between poet, poem, and reader; and the literary satire Rimmarbandet [The Rhyme Band] (1810), which, inspired by Tieck’s Der Gestiefelte Kater (1797), uses the metafictive theatre-in-the-theatre motif, as well as carnivalesque and grotesque motifs to expose contrived theatricality and homosocial misogyny in the prevailing culture. The dynamic between the satirist’s subject and the attacked object is a polarized power struggle, where revolt is followed by submission. In this respect, Romantic satire is here conservative. In the fairy tale play Lycksalighetens ö [Island of Felicity] (1824–27), tragedy’s irony is a dialectic between the ideal and the real that strives to create both inner and outer renewal. The play reaches out metafictively to the reader and turns her/him into the poet of a new version of the fairy tale. The reading/writing process inscribed in the work thus becomes a form of renewal and liberation from grief, and old, patriarchal gender roles. Finally, the humorous, unfinished idyll Fågel Blå [Blue Bird] (1814, 1818, 1858) is a work in many pieces, a fragment, a sketch and a non finito that together stages a restorative creative process, where the reader is asked to take part in joining together the scattered parts of Blue Bird itself. To conclude, irony is a feature of Romanticism, which makes the Romantic, literary subject relational and dialogical, open to its Other, and herein lies a form of ethics and an escape from a conventional, patriarchal notion of the self. I discuss this with Julia Kristeva’s theories on how subjectivity changes when it becomes poetic and Jessica Benjamin’s Winnicott-influenced theory of how play can offer a way out from patriarchy’s strict gender roles. The shiftings of irony in Atterbom’s work show a development from the satirical subject, where an aggressive form of self-assertion conceals a lack of individuality – via tragedy’s painstaking efforts to integrate repressed aspects of the self – to the idyll’s more harmonious subject, who has the capacity to laugh at him/herself and see both the grotesque in the holy, and the holy in the grotesque.