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This study demonstrates that much of the Gothic novel's effect results from the form of the classical tragedy. Experimentation with that form as the basic structure of the novel begins with Horace Walpole, extending through Ann Radcliffe and Charles Maturin. Walpole, the innovator, uses the form--architectonic movements and particularized devices-to bring dramatic action back to a genre which was withering due to Richardson's epistolary structure. The plotting of The Castle of Otranto relies on tragic movement: exposition, complication, minor crisis, incitement of tragic force, climax, catastrophe. Also, to move action, Walpole uses peripeteia and anagnorisis more broadly than a dramatist. Because of his expanded use of the two devices, Walpole adds spectacle or the supernatural to crisis, climax, and catastrophe. Desiring to offset pathos, he creates fear--specifically terror, the fear of death.Ann Radcliffe uses Walpole's strategy in The Italian but modifies the tragic structure somewhat. Hers is a more expansive work than Otranto, and she emphasizes the ironies of her protagonist's decline. Equally important, she uses the true supernatural, she continues experimenting with minor character, and generalizing the use of peripeteia to increase ironic possibilities occurring between characters, characters and narrator, or book and audience. Because these ironies are so much like undercutting, The Italian seems more like a modern novel.Because Charles Robert Maturin was himself a dramatist, the architectonic technique of Melmoth the Wanderer is also tragic. Maturin uses the tragic form recursively, adding bewildering, ambiguous depth to the novel. The many tragedies are interlocked. Individually, each teaches about the human condition. As a whole, the tragedies are Melmoth's hell on earth, though his victims' fleshly tragedies never match his own hopeless spiritual tragedy. Structurally, Maturin uses periketeia and anagnorisis frequently, oftentimes mixing in spectacle and the supernatural. Other major contributions are Maturin's use of a temporally and spatially free protagonist and his emphasis of the fear of eternal damnation. Since that is Melmoth's final lot, the author withholds climax and catastrophe for the novel's end.Thus, the Gothic suggests itself as a source for the "dramatic novels" of later mainstream authors like George Eliot.

Focusing on Rachel Seiffert¡¦s The Dark Room, this thesis discusses three German protagonists¡¦ fictional representations in three different times and space, all coming from different family backgrounds and with different social understandings in relation to the Holocaust in the World War II. In my discussions on this trilogy, moreover, The Dark Room is believed to have demonstrated the notion of ¡§humanity¡¨ in the sense that vulnerability, perseverance, egoism, ignorance, guilt, sorrow, goodwill, evilness, light and darkness are all intertwined and coexisting as some kind of symbiosis, one blended into another. Meanwhile, The Dark Room offers a significant debate over guilt and punishment, especially with the incredibly heavy historical inheritance on those who are descendents of the perpetrators in World War II living in the contemporary times. What is at stake thus is an interpretation and reading of the Holocaust that allows more of a new and multi-dimensional perspective on this traumatic event in the 20th century. This call for fresh ideas and contemporary understandings of the Holocaust can be seen as answered in The Dark Room as this book has successfully provided a glimpse of an atypical account from the perpetrator side of the story. This fact validates The Dark Room as one of the important literary works in the contemporary times.

 The thesis deals with the concept of feminine sublimation among Chinese feminist writings and theory. Previous feminist readings of literary works of Chinese female writers tended to confuse the Freudian concept of sublimation with “aestheticized politics” and utopian desire. These feminist readings have concentrated on articulating an authentic subject beyond power relations. I would however, redefine the concept of feminine sublimation as a theoretical trope to articulate the possible emergence of female subjectivity within specific power relations. Although gender performativity has become a universally circulated concept to theorize the subversive depiction of female bodies in particular cultural contexts, I argue that any performative reiteration would not be adequately contextualized and historicized when its usage ignores issues of female subjectivity in terms of sublimation. Chapter one of the thesis begins with various feminist approaches to the relationship of sublimation and performativity. Chapter two re-reads a novel Song of Youth in the socialist era. The conventional conception of sublimation is re-examined contextually in a way that the consideration of gender performativity alone would not be able to do. Through reading a canonical work of the “nationalist feminist” writer Xiao Hong, chapter three delineates the relation between my redefined concept of feminine sublimation and the possibility of political coalition, and explains how this relation provides a totally different understanding of performative reiteration. I would finally redefines the fundamental relationship between feminist subjectivity and performative politics. / published_or_final_version / Comparative Literature / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Philosophy

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La Fille de Christophe Colomb (Paris: Gallirnard, 1969) is a novel written by Rejean Ducharme in rhyming verse resembling an epic poem In this thesis, it will be shown that the form of the novel serves to emphasize the contestation of History evident in the novel's content. While this novel is certainly unusual in Ducharme's work it fits into the ambiant literary discourse of Quebec in the 1960's, where the theories of decolonisation influenced writers and critics alike. In particular, History was seen to be imposed on Quebec from the outside; Quebec must necessarily reject this History and begin to make its own. This underlying assumption for the analysis proposed in this thesis will be demonstrated in Chapter One through reflections by Ducharme's contemporaries, existing criticism of La Fille de' Christophe Colomb, and by current theories of postcolonial writing. In Chapter Two, the epic form of the novel will be studied in detail. On the surface, the author appears to respect the "rules" of the genre, but a close reading of the text will show that this respect is only superficial, and that the rules are subverted to create tension between literary norms and Ducharme's writing. It is the narrative structure of the novel, however, that proves to be the most subversive deviation from the norms of the epic poem: although the majority of the novel is narrated in the third person, a substantial fragmentation of the narrative voice occurs which will be demonstrated in Chapter Three. The net impact of this fragmentation is to produce a conflict between the codes of the epic poem and the novel. At the end of the analysis of the relationship between literary form and contestation of History in La Fille de Christophe Colomb, it will be shown that the form, as an element separate from the content, conveys a problematic relationship between this text and History. The novel contributes to the contestation of History as practised in the literature of Quebec in the 1960's by subverting the literary code, thereby linking literary history to History as colonizing factors that are questioned in this novel.

This essay examines the interstices between geography and history in English Canadian poetry by analyzing the production of space through poetic imagery. It introduces two terms, "garrison temporality" and "geologic temporality," to demonstrate how poets created divisions in the Canadian landscape temporally, demarcating these divisions according to their understanding of the perceived spaces' historicity. In early Canadian poetry, poets tended to distinguish colonized spaces from uncolonized spaces by designating them as either historical or ahistorical. This was achieved, more specifically, by appropriating civil, or garrison, spaces into a narrative of English expansion which traced its historical lineage back to European antiquity. The space outside the garrison's perimeter was deemed to exist out of time, providing yet another justification for further colonization. Later generations of Canadian poets contested the ahistorical designations created by this narrative, as well as the division they draw between urban and non-urban spaces, by appealing to geologic time. Geologic temporality functions not so much as a viable explanatory model for the narration of history as it does a poetic device for contesting the centrality of Europe and of urban centers in assessing contemporary Canada's place in time. This essay traces the shift in attitudes towards time and space from Charles G.D. Roberts' "Tantramar Revisited" (1886) to Dale Zieroth's "Baptism" (1981).

<p> This thesis examines Japanese writer Saotome Katsumoto and his efforts to create a pacifist message in his 1991 film <i>Senso to Seishun</i> (War and Youth). The story presents multigenerational viewpoints on the Pacific War, and is significant for being the first film to depict the Great Tokyo Air Raid of March 9&ndash;10, 1945. I discuss how Saotome's use of fiction, metaphor, and autobiographical techniques assist the film in creating a pacifist narrative. The film's pacifist message continues to hold relevance today, as nationalist and conservative groups push strongly for revisions to Article 9 of the Japanese Peace Constitution in order to remilitarize the nation.</p>

Mosaique et memoire studies paradigms that contribute to the construction of identity in the writings of thirteen Tunisian women novelists writing in French: Emna Bel Haj Yahia, Aicha Chaibi, Annie Fitoussi, Behija Gaaloul, Annie Goldmann, Souad Guellouz, Jelila Hafsia, Souad Hedri, Turkia Labidi Ben Yahia, Alia Mabrouk, Nine Moati, Katia Rubenstein, and Fawzia Zouari. Drawing upon post-colonial and feminist perspectives, this thesis analyzes texts through their poetics and in linguistic, cultural and literary contexts. Novels by women offer an inside view of women's evolution through a variety of characters representing three generations, just as they explore alternate ways of entering modernity based upon harmonizing traditional values (cultural roots, family, faith, community solidarity, a Mediterranean warmth of spirit, thinking "in Arabesques") with 'modern' values such as sexual equality and individual freedom. / Multiple women's voices protest patriarchal and colonial or racist discourse, but also reveal spaces of happiness in women's lives. Jewish voices at times reinforce views by Muslim authors but at others present opposing viewpoints, deconstructing concepts such as 'Arab identity' and questioning nationalist claims to Islamic tolerance and multiculturalism. / In these French-language novels, images and metaphors, as well as expressions in dialectical Arabic, recall the rich cultural heritage underlying national consciousness, the memory and the mosaic which form both individual and national identities. The juxtaposition of Arabic and French suggests both the cross-fertilization of cultures and the impossibility of naming the inexpressible, just as it contributes to deconstructing identity through the medium of the novel.