This thesis has three central areas of preoccupation, each of which is made up of two elements whose interaction is explored: l)repetition and ambivalence; 2)psychoanalytic and literary discourse; 3)parents and children. Ambivalence is examined as a concept proposed by psychoanlysis, and as a force vitally at work within the writing and reading processes. Repetition is viewed as both productive of and produced by ambivalence, and is seen to sustain writing fiction in particular. Literary and psychoanalytic discourse are viewed as mutually unexcluxive ways of finding form for powerful need or desire. The thesis establishes that the overlap between the two modes of writing is considerable, and with special attention paid to the reader, proceeds to draw the fine line which divides the two. Parents and children are seen as defining themselves in relation, and particularly in opposition to each other. Attention is paid to parents (real or imagined) who have sought to repress or even kill their children; and along with this, attention is paid to the sophistication required for the simplest utterance, and equally the primitive aspects of highly developed or articulate speech. The thesis invariably proceeds, however, from specific examples, and starts with consideration of work by Franz Kafka. A text by the psychoanalyst Serge Leclaire and the 'oeuvre' of Maud Mannoni are subsequently the focus. The thesis then moves to consider Marcel Proust's novel A la recherche du temps perdu, and works by Samuel Beckett. Drawing its method from its matter, the thesis attempts to demonstrate and reveal the broad metaphoric scope and power of language. It shows how metaphor depends on significant difference, or otherness; and, by concentrating on the relational aspects of the speaking/listening and writing/reading processes, it shows how we all depend for our survival on such otherness as language -- and especially narrative -- offers.

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published_or_final_version / English / Master / Master of Arts

This thesis sees the literature about 'Mau Mau' as an ideal site for the examination of certain socially significant modes of interaction between 'nonfictional' discourses ('history', autobiography, 'social psychology' etc.) and fictional discourses (both 'serious' and 'popular'). It seeks to demonstrate some of the ways in which realist fiction'can be made to 'render visible' its constitutive invisible: i.e. to reveal the historical determinations of the particular configuration of (non-literary) ideological discourses which it 'works' to produce the representatlonalillusion. Part I consists of an Introduction which outlines the theory of ideology and the literary-critical theory informing the analYSis of the fiction. This is followed by an account of 'Mau Mau' as a historical phenomenon which examines available data relating to the 'causes' of the revolt, 'Mau Mau's' relationship to Kenya African Nationalism, the conduct of the campaign by both sides, and the social composition of the movement, and concludes with an account of various historical interpretations of 'Mau'Mau'. Part 11 consists of three chapters: the fi'rst attempts to. construct a general model of Kenyan colonial settler ideology (defined as a special variant of fascism); the second situates the colonial novels about 'Mau Mau' by Ruark, Huxley, Harding, Kaye, Sheraton, Stoneham and Thomas in relation to 'public' and 'pseudo-academic' articulations of this ideology; the third discusses a further group of novels -- by Cornish, Fazakerley, Target and Reid -- produced . in closer relationship with the dominant liberal ideology of the metropolis but all informed, to a greater or lesser extent, by the colonial mythology of 'Mau Mau'. Part III opens with a discussion of the social, political and economic factors determining the possible terrain of a 'new' dominant ideology appropriate to the neo-colonial conditions of post-Independence Kenya. There follows a chapter on novAls by Mwangi, Mangua and Wachira which are shown to have been produced within that dominant ideology and to have been significant attempts to give it 'concrete' fictional development. The final chapter examines the changing image of 'Mau Mau' in the fiction of Ngugi wa Thiong'o, focusing particular attention on A Grain of Wheat, which is seen as a 'crisis' text produced at a moment of transition between mutually exclusive problematics, and thus as an ideal site for an examination of.the 'dialectically productive' relationship between fiction and ideology.

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The dissertation seeks to take account of the implications of Jacques Derrida's deconstructive philosophy for literary theory and criticism through analysis of the work of non-deconstructionists theorists and critics. In particular, the dissertation deals with the attempt by much traditional Anglo-American literary theory to articulate what might be called a lq'logic of criticism' - an attempt evident in the use made by this theory of oppositions such as intrinsic/extrinsic, structural/genetic, essential/contingent, and so on. The attempt is considered with respect to three concerns of modern literary theory: organic form, authorial intention and the question of value. On the first issue, it is argued that the organicist's construal of the relation of form and content in poetry is analogous to Husserl's construal of the relation of signifier and signified in speech, and that Derrida's deconstruction of Husserl's privileging of voice provides the model for the deconstruction of organicism. In the case of intention, it is argued that modern criticism and theory has characteristically relied on a notion of the literary work as saturated by a fully conscious intention, a reliance which marks a succumbing to what Derrida calls 'the structural lure of consciousness'. Concerning the question of value, the target is the attempt to defend value by locating it as the ground, the centre, the telos or origin of the phenomenon to be accounted for. The dissertation concludes by broaching the question of the nature of a properly deconstructive literary criticism. It is argued that so-called deconstructionist criticism involves a neutralization of deconstruction, a defect which Derrida avoids in his own literary criticism.

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No description available.

No description available.