<p>A commonly held assumption among literary critics is that the motif of the European journey is exhausted in American literature in the post-World-War-II period. Challenging this view, the present study claims that the Old World journey narrative lives on, but in new guises, and that it continues to be a forum for the discussion of American national identity. Studying four novels about Americans traveling to Europe – William Styron’s Set This House on Fire (1960), Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America (1971), John A. Williams’s The Man Who Cried I Am (1967) and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973) – this thesis examines the ways in which the European journey is utilized for a questioning of “America.” Informed by the political debates of their time, which lead, for example, to the displacement of hegemonic ideologies such as nationalism, they share a critical stance vis-à-vis the conventional construction of national identity. They represent, however, different strands of the contemporary political counterculture; while the first two texts view national identity from the center of American society, addressing a moral and an ideological/intellectual critique, respectively, the last two represent marginal perspectives, that of the African American and feminist protest movements. The function of the European setting in the four novels is also scrutinized: in all of them the European setting provides the backdrop for a story that deals, almost exclusively, with American culture; it serves in a variety of ways, for example as a many-facetted stage, an experimental ground, or a zone of liberation. The Coda sketches recent developments in the 1980s and 1990s, finding the motif of initiation and the figure of the independent warm-hearted American girl to persist and the myth of American innocence to continue to be contested. </p>

A commonly held assumption among literary critics is that the motif of the European journey is exhausted in American literature in the post-World-War-II period. Challenging this view, the present study claims that the Old World journey narrative lives on, but in new guises, and that it continues to be a forum for the discussion of American national identity. Studying four novels about Americans traveling to Europe – William Styron’s Set This House on Fire (1960), Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America (1971), John A. Williams’s The Man Who Cried I Am (1967) and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973) – this thesis examines the ways in which the European journey is utilized for a questioning of “America.” Informed by the political debates of their time, which lead, for example, to the displacement of hegemonic ideologies such as nationalism, they share a critical stance vis-à-vis the conventional construction of national identity. They represent, however, different strands of the contemporary political counterculture; while the first two texts view national identity from the center of American society, addressing a moral and an ideological/intellectual critique, respectively, the last two represent marginal perspectives, that of the African American and feminist protest movements. The function of the European setting in the four novels is also scrutinized: in all of them the European setting provides the backdrop for a story that deals, almost exclusively, with American culture; it serves in a variety of ways, for example as a many-facetted stage, an experimental ground, or a zone of liberation. The Coda sketches recent developments in the 1980s and 1990s, finding the motif of initiation and the figure of the independent warm-hearted American girl to persist and the myth of American innocence to continue to be contested.

Submitted by Luciana Ferreira (lucgeral@gmail.com) on 2017-05-03T11:12:17Z No. of bitstreams: 2 Tese - Thiago Oliveira Santos - 2017.pdf: 1704337 bytes, checksum: 5239119ebfae88548d735ca15b9a10a0 (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Luciana Ferreira (lucgeral@gmail.com) on 2017-05-03T11:58:38Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 Tese - Thiago Oliveira Santos - 2017.pdf: 1704337 bytes, checksum: 5239119ebfae88548d735ca15b9a10a0 (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-05-03T11:58:38Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 Tese - Thiago Oliveira Santos - 2017.pdf: 1704337 bytes, checksum: 5239119ebfae88548d735ca15b9a10a0 (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-03-24 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / This doctoral dissertation is a comparative study of three main contemporary authors: Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy and Philip Roth, through the reading of three main novels written by them, respectively, Mason & Dixon; Blood Meridian and American Pastoral in this order here analyzed. The main objective of the research and its writing is an attempt to prove a historiographical connection as well as of themes and of style among these three novels, in their effort to reinterpret the American History in a strongly ironic way. This has been characterized by Harold Bloom (also in a ironical way, it seems) as “the style of our age”, among other reasons because the three writers as well as their three novels are focused on grasping different periods of the United States History and on deconstructing the main basis of American myths, even if through different and individualized narrative styles. The most important of these myths is the one that, since the Colonial Period, and based in the belief that being White, Protestant and of Anglo-Saxon origin would make the new man to be born in the New Continent a New Adam, and his nation, America, a new and exemplar Paradise on Earth. Mason & Dixon, Blood Meridian and American Pastoral show, each one in his own way, how this myth resulted in failure. In order to achieve this we have chosen three main myths as the basis for this research: The Myth of the American Eden (from the European imaginary Colonial Paradise); The Myth of the American Adam (from the concept of the new man, inhabitant of that Paradise; The Myth of the Manifest Destiny (the Messianic idea of a possible Universal Paradise). In order to achieve this, in the first chapter, dealing with Mason & Dixon, we will analyze the context of the Eighteenth Century and the beginning of the American Nation. In the second chapter, dealing with Blood Meridian, we will analyze the context of the Nineteenth Century, when the territorial expansion during the Great March to the West took place. In third and last chapter, dealing with American Pastoral, the context of the Twentieth Century, specifically the period from the end of World War II to the 1990s, that is, from the American Golden Age of prosperity to the economic and social crisis during and after the Vietnam War. Finally, we will try to analyze the logic of the irony shared by the three authors who, in their three novels, historically summarize the failure of the formation of the ideal nation based on its three main myths and its continual recurrence to different types of violence / Esta tese é uma leitura comparativa de três autores contemporâneos de destaque na ficção norte-americana: Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy e Philip Roth, a partir de três romances escritos por eles: Mason & Dixon; Blood Meridian e American Pastoral, respectivamente, nesta ordem aqui analisados. O objetivo principal da pesquisa e escrita da tese é uma tentativa de comprovar uma relação historiográfica mas também de temas e de estilo entre as três obras citadas, ao se empenharem em reinterpretar a História ame-ricana de modo fortemente irônico, que Harold Bloom (também ironicamente, parece) denominou como um exemplo do que seria the style of our age – o estilo de nossa época –, entre outras razões, por serem tanto os três escritores como seus três romances empe-nhados em abordar diferentes períodos da História dos Estados Unidos e a desconstruir as principais bases dos mitos americanos, mesmo se através de estilos narrativos indivi-duais díspares, principalmente aquele através do qual, desde a colonização e com base na crença de que ser branco, protestante e de origem anglo-saxônica tornaria o novo homem a nascer no novo continente, um novo Adão, e sua pátria, a América, um novo e exemplar Paraíso. Mason & Dixon, Blood Meridian e American Pastoral mostram, cada um a seu modo, como esse mito resultou em fracasso. Para tanto, baseamos nossa pesquisa em três mitos principais: 1. Mito do Éden americano (originado do imaginário europeu sobre o Paraíso colonial); 2. Mito do Adão americano (o conceito do homem novo, habitante do Paraíso); 3. Mito do Manifest Destiny (a ideia messiânica para um Paraíso universal). Para conseguir isso, no primeiro capítulo, abordaremos, em Mason & Dixon, o contexto do século XVIII e formação da nação americana; no segundo capítulo, em Blood Meridian, o contexto do século XIX, durante o qual a expansão do território americano durante a Campanha para o Oeste aconteceu; no terceiro e último capítulo, em American Pastoral, o contexto do século XX, especificamente do fim da Segunda Guerra Mundial até a década de 90, isto é, da era de ouro do desenvolvimento dos EUA até as crises políticas e econômicas durante e depois da Guerra do Vietnã. Por fim, pretendemos analisar a lógica da ironia comum aos três autores que, em seus três livros, historicamente resumem o fracasso da formação da nação ideal fundamentada em seus três mitos principais e por sua contínua recorrência a diferentes tipos de violência.

Rex Stout maintained his popular readership despite the often controversial and radical political content expressed in his detective fiction. His political ideals often made him many enemies. Stances such as his ardent opposition to censorship, racism, Nazism, Germany, Fascism, Communism, McCarthyism, and the unfettered FBI were potentially offensive to colleagues and readers from various political backgrounds. Yet Stout attempted to present radical messages via the content of his detective fiction with subtlety. As a literary traditionalist, he resisted using his fiction as a platform for an often extreme political agenda. Where political messages are apparent in his work, Stout employs various techniques to mute potentially offensive messages. First, his hugely successful bantering Archie Goodwin-Nero Wolfe detective duo—a combination of both the lippy American and the tidy, sanitary British detective schools—fosters exploration, contradiction, and conflict between political viewpoints. Archie often rejects or criticizes Wolfe's extreme political viewpoints. Second, Stout utilizes the contradictions between values that occur when the form of detective fiction counters his radical political messages. This suggests that the form of detective fiction (in this case the conventional patterns and attitudes reinforced by the genre) is as important as the content (in this case the muted political message or the lack of overt politics) in reinforcing or shaping political, economic, moral, and social viewpoints. An analysis of the novels The Black Mountain (1954) and The Doorbell Rang (1965) and the novellas "Not Quite Dead Enough" and "Booby Trap" (1944) from Stout's Nero Wolfe series demonstrates his use of detective fiction for both the expression of political viewpoints and the muting of those political messages.

This thesis seeks to understand how we read and understand the use of depictions of violence by examining its rhetorical presentation. Although the media gives us a mixed understanding of the way that experiencing violence secondarily (that is, through all types of media) affects us, scholarship in this area has proved clear connections between viewing/experiencing depictions of violence and raised levels of aggression. On the other hand, there is a clear difference between gratuitous depictions of violence and socially useful depictions of violence (i.e., the difference between a slasher movie and a holocaust movie) that that area of scholarship does not expressly take into account. I argue that the language of trauma studies has the ability to evaluate the impact of violent texts on audiences and that Kenneth Burke's Dramatistic Pentad has the ability the examine depictions of violence to uncover explicit and hidden ideologies that affect the presentation of the violence and, thus, our reception and interpretation of that violence. Working in conjunction, these two theories can help audience's understand depictions of violence on an ideological level and help them to assess the violence's potential traumatic impact on themselves and others within certain contexts. To demonstrate this theory of understanding violence, I make two short analyses of Native Son and The Lovely Bones and demonstrate an in-depth analysis of Fight Club and Blood Meridian in order to give an example of the type of reading I am advocating and its potential for understanding and interpreting depictions of violence in ways that uncover both social benefit and harm. In the end, I hope that this theory of reading violence might extend beyond the sample readings I have done and into other types of media, so that we can all understand the ways that violence is used rhetorically for social and political purposes and be able to both use it and interpret it responsibly.

L'objectif de ce mémoire consiste à comprendre la relative inaction des libéraux et démocrates de la Chambre des représentants devant les manœuvres des conservateurs anticommunistes faisant partie d'un mouvement dont Joseph McCarthy deviendra le symbole et un des acteurs importants au Sénat. L'auteur du mémoire s'explique mal cette faible implication et cherche à éclairer cet effacement devant les provocations et actions répressives des extrémistes de la chasse aux sorcières (1950-1954). Il en attribue la responsabilité au manque de courage des libéraux démocrates qui, durant cette période, ont fait glisser le fondement idéologique du libéralisme de gauche à droite, ainsi qu'à leur faiblesse politique. / Québec Université Laval, Bibliothèque 2014