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<p>This dissertation proposes a definition and methodology to analyze the literary canon: the canon is the set of producers and products that accumulate the greatest amount of literary capital granted by institutions of consecration. In this concept, two categories are fundamental: literary capital and institutions. Literary capital refers to objectivations of literary value: manifestations of the agreement on the importance of authors and their literary work (inclusions in reading lists, awards and prizes, mentions in literary histories, among others). Institutions are communities that participate in literary activity; they are governed by norms and exercise power over other agents.</p> <p>This theoretical framework allows for the examination of the canon formation in literary criticism, anthologies, and Wikipedia. The accumulation of capital explains the existence of three positions within the Peruvian literary field: consecrated, legitimized, and aspiring writers. Furthermore, trajectory of capital is a concept that elucidates the changes in literary value. An ascending or descending trajectory shows when a writer's prestige has increased or decreased over time. Institutions located inside or outside the literary field is the basis for positing the difference between prestige and popularity: both concepts have a similar functioning, but literary agents have little or no involvement in the latter.</p>

Word coding can be traced to the ancient Kemetic practice of steganography (referring to hiding place or hidden message). Unless the reader is aware of the meaning, the Coded Word can often appear as just art. Afrocentric scholarship however, also incorporates the idea of functionality. Aesthetics, throughout African history, and to this day, serve a purpose. The beautiful quilts sewn by enslaved Black women served dual functions, as bed coverings and as symbols of resistance and liberation. The decorative wrought-ironwork found on gates and doors throughout the United States serves as a Sankofic reminder and protector. The highly coded language in the aesthetics of the Black Power/Black Arts Movement, shifted paradigms. Though the practice of word coding remains an active part of contemporary Black culture, there is a disconnection between the action and the aim (or function); a direct result of the destructive efforts of colonization. Today’s racially charged and oftentimes dangerous climate calls for a reexamination of word coding as a liberatory tool. I created the theory of the Coded Word to analyze three novels by Black women who are unique in their forms of word coding, just as they are characteristically distinct in their forms of expression. The findings for the three novels have resulted in the first three entries into the Glossary of the Coded Word, a resource to be used by Black people in resistance to oppression and in the struggle for liberation of all Black people. / African American Studies

The current vast sociocultural shift from Modernism to PostModernism forms the backdrop to this study. Whenever paradigm shifts occur, the metaphors which depict human experience and identity also change. The mechanistic metaphors of Modernism are giving way to metaphors derived from art and literature, in particular narrative theory. Self, as one of the most pivotal notions in philosophy, literature, and psychology, should not be excluded from this process of reconceptualisation. As the point of intersection between the personal and the cultural, the notion of Self now needs to bereformulated to become more coherent with Post-Modernist ideas. Within this framework the Modernist notion of a Self which is unified, substantial, and stable across all contexts, is deconstructed in this study to reveal the linguistic and ideological codes and conventions which are used in its construction. It is proposed that the Self can be viewed as embedded in relationship with others and as inscribed by the prevailing cultural ideologies regarding personhood. As such the Self can be regarded as held together reflexively by narrative codes and conventions. These ideas are demonstrated in an analysis of two written self-narratives and applied to the conventions and practices in psychotherapy. / Psychology / D.Litt. et Phil. (Psychology)

The current vast sociocultural shift from Modernism to PostModernism forms the backdrop to this study. Whenever paradigm shifts occur, the metaphors which depict human experience and identity also change. The mechanistic metaphors of Modernism are giving way to metaphors derived from art and literature, in particular narrative theory. Self, as one of the most pivotal notions in philosophy, literature, and psychology, should not be excluded from this process of reconceptualisation. As the point of intersection between the personal and the cultural, the notion of Self now needs to bereformulated to become more coherent with Post-Modernist ideas. Within this framework the Modernist notion of a Self which is unified, substantial, and stable across all contexts, is deconstructed in this study to reveal the linguistic and ideological codes and conventions which are used in its construction. It is proposed that the Self can be viewed as embedded in relationship with others and as inscribed by the prevailing cultural ideologies regarding personhood. As such the Self can be regarded as held together reflexively by narrative codes and conventions. These ideas are demonstrated in an analysis of two written self-narratives and applied to the conventions and practices in psychotherapy. / Psychology / D.Litt. et Phil. (Psychology)

This thesis examines the creation of character in the work of Theodor Fontane. Although he is repeatedly praised as a great writer of human character, there is no comprehensive analysis of how Fontane's characters work. This thesis is intended to fill this surprising gap in Fontane research. Its analyses do not focus on the author-text interaction as many traditional critical approaches do, but instead look at what takes place between the text and the reader. The first section, entitled 'Character in Theory', has two chapters presenting my concept of literary character. It draws on the findings of cognitive studies, including formerly neglected aspects such as affective reading and empathy. The second section, 'Character in Practice', contains four chapters. Chapter three demonstrates how our emotions can contribute to our understanding and what role is played by empathy. Chapter four shows the active role readers are required to play when putting together information about characters in Fontane's polyphonous novels. Chapter five focuses on character speech, and chapter six asks to what extent Fontane's characters can be seen to develop. The third section, 'Character in Context', takes a less hermeneutic approach. Chapter seven asks what our expectations of Realist characters are and how these influence our reading of Fontane. Chapter eight examines how our access to these characters has changed compared to the author's contemporary readership. Chapter nine presents an excursus, looking at the author's development from renditions of 'real' people to fictional characters. The last section compares this author's creations to the tentatively Modernist characters of Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks. My findings show that Fontane's characters demand and support a more active reading than Realism is usually given credit for. They suggest that the concept of Realist characters as largely descriptive creations needs to be examined critically.

This thesis examines trans women's contemporary writing in relation to a theory of the excessive object, sublimity, transmisogyny and minor literature. In doing so, this text is influenced by Susan Stryker's work on monstrosity, abjection and transgender rage in the article “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage” (1994). The excessive object refers to a concept coined in this thesis to describe sublimity from another perspective than that of the tradition following from Immanuel Kant's A Critique of Judgment, building on feminist scholarship on the aesthetic of the sublime. Of particular relevance are critiques of the patriarchal dynamics of sublimity and the idea of the feminine sublime as it is explored with reference to literature by Barbara Freeman in The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women's Fiction (1995). Following from the feminist critique of sublimity, trans women's writing is explored as minor literature through a re-reading of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's work on Franz Kafka in Kafka. Toward a Minor Literature (1986), with attention to the importance that conditions of impossibility, marginality and unintelligibility holds for the political possibilities of minor literature. These readings form the basis for an analysis of four literary texts by two contemporary authors, Elena Rose, also known as little light, and Sybil Lamb, in addition to a deeper re-engagement with Stryker's work. In so doing, this thesis also touches on topics of power, erasure, trauma, self-sacrifice, appropriation and unrepresentability.

This thesis examines Frost’s conception of poetry as the labor of human value. It investigates how Frost consciously shaped his notions of “sound of sense” and metaphor, which he deemed fundamental elements of poetic labor, in contradistinction to the Modernist poetics of Eliot and Pound. The author closely examines a representative sample of Frost’s poetry and prose as critiques of Modernist poetic theory and its implications for what Frost deemed the essential human function of poetry. The thesis will interest scholars studying strains of English poetic thought that developed concurrently with and against Modernist poetic thought. More broadly, it will interest those who seek a serious and thoughtful challenge to Modernist literary trends that prevail even today.

Generative music creates indeterminate systems from which music can emerge. It provides a particularly instructive field for problems of ontology, semiotics, aesthetics, and ethics addressed in poststructuralist literary theory. I outline how repetition is the ultimate basis of musical intelligibility and of memory in general. The extension of these abstractions beyond tonal music to sound in general is afforded by the concrete iterability of audio recording media. Generative systems delineate a music that is repeatable in principle and in certain qualities, though not in specific forms; a music that produces emergent complexities from novel combinations, retaining the potential to surprise. I study how noise is prevailingly presented as complementary to intention, and how music that complicates intention entails discourses of noise and purity. I compare competing narratives for the role of noise in the development of Western music under classical, avant-garde, and experimental traditions. Music functions across these narratives as a proxy for negotiation of individual and collective values, how order is imposed. Expression affirms the metaphysics of presence by averring the socially unmediated interiority of the subject. Experimentalists are skeptical toward expression, yet frequently insist on the asemiotic self-sufficiency of music. Generative musicians extend this animism, imputing living intelligence behind sounds. I further examine discourses surrounding creation and interpretation in the arts and human sciences, in particular how listening is a manner of composition. Poiesthesis is a play of materials as well as signs, facilitated by recording in a recombinant practice distinct from the encodings of notation and the approximate repetitions of aural tradition. Generative music deals in entities that are neither composition nor instrument, and yet both. The music market and the aesthetic field alike struggle to control the valuation of desubstantiated texts of generative systems, producing a kind of agoraphobia. As play is decentered from authorial intent, so must critical evaluation be. I critique the pervasive yet tacit Western notion that human technoculture plays out on a continuum from Africa to robotics, ciphers for bodily essence and intellectual autism. This cultural projection turns out to resonate throughout the history of Western music’s regard of self and other.

By grounding my work in this series of four essays in literary theory, but telling stories to which almost anyone can relate I hope to begin making the connection between sometimes heady academics and everyday working-class Americans. Only when learners understand their circumstances and the need for education, can they begin to take control of what they learn and how they employ that knowledge.