Inaug.-Diss., Erlangen. / "Literaturverzeichnis": p. 67-69.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 1936. / Bibliography: p. 100-102.

<p>Novels with love as a theme often deal with a passionate or forbidden love. In 1925 William Somerset Maugham wrote a different version of the typical love story we have read so many times. It tells a story about a married couple who never really shares the same love for each other. Maugham mentions that he was inspired by Dante when he wrote The Painted Veil. Indeed, he uses different sources of inspirations, such as poems from Shelley and Goldsmith. The aim of this essay is to investigate what these intertextual references bring to the novel and what their functions are. The method I use is looking at the different references used by Maugham and stating their purpose and significance to the novel. The result of my investigation illustrates how the use of Shelley’s theme of veiling signifies hiding, as well as not wanting to see the truth, while Goldsmith’s poem shows the true relationship between the married couple and how corrupted society is. Maugham also lets Dante’s Purgatorio demonstrate how Kitty, the wife, gets the chance to change her life for the better.</p>

This thesis discusses the oriental fiction of W. Somerset Maugham in the light of current theoretical models introduced by postcolonial and gender studies. Immensely popular from their time of publication to the present, Maugham's novels and short stories set in Asia and the South Pacific exhibit a consummate recycling of colonialist tropes. Through their manipulation of racial, gender, and geographical binarisms, Maugham's texts produce a fantasy of a seemingly stable British male subjectivity based upon emotional and somatic continence, rationality, and specularity. The status of the British male subject is tested and confirmed by his activity in the colonies. Maugham's situation of writing as a homosexual man, however, results in affiliations which cut across the binary oppositions which structure Maugham's texts, destabilising the integrity of the subject they strive so assiduously to create. Commencing with Maugham's novel The Moon and Sixpence, and his short story collection The Trembling of a Leaf, both of which are set in the South Pacific, the thesis moves to a discussion of Maugham's Chinese travelogue, On a Chinese Screen, and his Hong Kong novel, The Painted Veil. Further chapters explore the Malayan short stories, and Maugham's novel set in the then Dutch East Indies, The Narrow Corner. A final chapter discusses Maugham's novel of India, The Razor's Edge. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Maugham does not even attempt a liberal critique of British Imperialism. Writing and narration are, for him, processes closely identified with codes of imperial manliness. Maugham's putatively objective narrators, and the public "Maugham persona" which the writer carefully cultivated, display a strong investment in the British male subjectivity outlined above. Yet Maugham's texts also endlessly discover writing as a play of signification, of decoration, of qualities that he explicitly associates in other texts with homosexuality. If Maugham's texts do not critique the formation of colonial subjects they do, to a critical reader, make the rhetoric necessary to create such subjects peculiarly visible.

This thesis discusses the oriental fiction of W. Somerset Maugham in the light of current theoretical models introduced by postcolonial and gender studies. Immensely popular from their time of publication to the present, Maugham's novels and short stories set in Asia and the South Pacific exhibit a consummate recycling of colonialist tropes. Through their manipulation of racial, gender, and geographical binarisms, Maugham's texts produce a fantasy of a seemingly stable British male subjectivity based upon emotional and somatic continence, rationality, and specularity. The status of the British male subject is tested and confirmed by his activity in the colonies. Maugham's situation of writing as a homosexual man, however, results in affiliations which cut across the binary oppositions which structure Maugham's texts, destabilising the integrity of the subject they strive so assiduously to create. Commencing with Maugham's novel The Moon and Sixpence, and his short story collection The Trembling of a Leaf, both of which are set in the South Pacific, the thesis moves to a discussion of Maugham's Chinese travelogue, On a Chinese Screen, and his Hong Kong novel, The Painted Veil. Further chapters explore the Malayan short stories, and Maugham's novel set in the then Dutch East Indies, The Narrow Corner. A final chapter discusses Maugham's novel of India, The Razor's Edge. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Maugham does not even attempt a liberal critique of British Imperialism. Writing and narration are, for him, processes closely identified with codes of imperial manliness. Maugham's putatively objective narrators, and the public "Maugham persona" which the writer carefully cultivated, display a strong investment in the British male subjectivity outlined above. Yet Maugham's texts also endlessly discover writing as a play of signification, of decoration, of qualities that he explicitly associates in other texts with homosexuality. If Maugham's texts do not critique the formation of colonial subjects they do, to a critical reader, make the rhetoric necessary to create such subjects peculiarly visible. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Dans un contexte où les épidémies font encore rage, l'homme ressent la nécessité de renouveler sa vision du monde. Le futur n'étant désormais plus envisageable, le présent se dote d'un nouveau réalisme: il se transforme selon les désirs et prend un nouveau sens. Dans son essai sur l'œuvre de François Rabelais, Mikhaïl Bakhtine insinue que les réjouissances succèdent toujours à des périodes de grandes tensions ou de grands bouleversements dans l'histoire de l'homme ou de la nature. Ses observations portent sur la société du Moyen Âge et de la Renaissance, mais s'appliquent aussi aux différentes époques qui composent l'histoire de l'humanité. Si l'on associe le carnaval au Moyen Âge, les images et les symboles qui en découlent se retrouvent dans divers créations et événements artistiques et culturels. Par exemple, le grotesque est souvent utilisé à des fins caricaturales pour tourner à la dérision une situation; le carnaval de Rio, moment de libération des tensions, se pratique encore chaque année; et l'on retrouve son système de codes et de symboles dans la littérature. Le carnaval se développe alors comme un langage ou un moyen d'expression, que Bakhtine nomme « carnavalesque », qui pallie le quotidien insupportable. Comment s'organise alors ce nouvel état d'existence? Quelle en est sa portée? Et comment se manifeste-t-il? Dans ce mémoire, les romans de deux auteurs qui appartiennent à deux continents différents sont analysés sous l'angle du carnavalesque. Il s'agit de La passe dangereuse de William Somerset Maugham et de L'amour aux temps du choléra de Gabriel Garda Marquez. Les deux livres portent sur une épidémie de choléra et les personnages principaux remanient leur univers en fonction de leurs désirs. Un bref détour sur l'histoire du choléra et ses effets sur l'imaginaire est essentiel. Par la suite, trois approches théoriques sur le carnavalesque sont considérées, celles de Mikhaïl Bakhtine, d'André Belleau et de David K. Danow. Les principes du masque, en tant que symbole du carnaval, de seconde vie et du rabaissement propre au grotesque sont observés dans les livres. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : William Somerset Maugham, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Réalisme grotesque, Rabaissement, Carnavalesque, Choléra, Épidémie, Mikhaïl Bakhtine, Masque.

This study analyzes the expression of Maugham's ironic vision in his short stories set in the South Seas and Southeast Asia. Through point of view, setting, character, and plot, Maugham explores the dialectic of expectation outcome, hope-disappointment, and illusion-reality. In the exotic short stories, not only do Maugham's characters confront this dialectic, but readers do as well. Using irony as a heuristic, Maugham prods his readers into rethinking unexamined assumptions about human nature and about the often disillusioning repercussions of clinging to ideals or having unrealistic expectations of life.The narrative voice in Maugham's stories, whether that of the omniscient or the dramatized first-person narrator, draws attention to the discrepancy between the ideal and the actual, using irony to highlight characterization as people are shown to be something other than they might be or what they are. Further, the narrators also establish a context for irony by inviting readers to share their insights on characters and conflicts, thereby emphasizing their distance from the characters who speak and act in ignorance of the actual state of affairs.Relying upon the conventions of realism, which assumes that man may find his destiny shaped by his responses to an environment, and using that environment to achieve artistic ends, Maugham demonstrates that setting generates irony as it precipitates tension, conflict, and sudden revelations of character. In other instances, the irony grows from Maugham's explorations of his characters' expectations of the exotic settings, suggesting that the tropical paradises are places of nightmares, as well as dreams.The volatile combination of setting and character often erupts in shocking plot reversals that have become the hallmark of Maugham's narrative techniques. The ironies of plot surface as characters and the first-person narrators confront realities that have been hidden or that have been denied. In many cases, the characters and the narrators have allowed their ideals or expectations to mislead them or cloud their judgment. Other plot ironies occur with the frame stories, as the narrators connect the fictive world of the story to the factual world of the reader, thus juxtaposing the ironic dialectic of reality and fiction.Throughout the exotic short stories, the designs of Maugham's narrative technique suggest that irony effectively expresses his philosophic stance on the ambiguity of human motives and the futility of idealism. / Department of English

Novels with love as a theme often deal with a passionate or forbidden love. In 1925 William Somerset Maugham wrote a different version of the typical love story we have read so many times. It tells a story about a married couple who never really shares the same love for each other. Maugham mentions that he was inspired by Dante when he wrote The Painted Veil. Indeed, he uses different sources of inspirations, such as poems from Shelley and Goldsmith. The aim of this essay is to investigate what these intertextual references bring to the novel and what their functions are. The method I use is looking at the different references used by Maugham and stating their purpose and significance to the novel. The result of my investigation illustrates how the use of Shelley’s theme of veiling signifies hiding, as well as not wanting to see the truth, while Goldsmith’s poem shows the true relationship between the married couple and how corrupted society is. Maugham also lets Dante’s Purgatorio demonstrate how Kitty, the wife, gets the chance to change her life for the better.