Numerous studies have pointed to the historiographic and metafictional aspects of Ian McEwan’s and Graham Swift’s fiction, although few have examined the connections between McEwan and Swift. This study develops from that work by proposing that McEwan’s and Swift’s fictions explore similar themes, beyond those of just history and metafiction. By situating McEwan and Swift as postmodern writers who are strikingly intertextual, in the sense initially coined by Julia Kristeva, this study will show that both authors are deeply concerned with the violence of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and the role that violence has played in the failure of metanarratives, as well as the resulting terror subjects face as they seek replacements for the personal authenticity, legitimacy, and meaning once provided by totalizing metanarratives. This study also illustrates that McEwan and Swift recognize the persistence of the metanarrative of science, as well as the psychic violence inherent in trying to replace metanarratives with received literary traditions. By developing on these ideas, this thesis argues that McEwan and Swift are actively engaged not only in exploring the anxiety subjects face as they realize there is nothing left upon which they can base their personal legitimacy, but also that the authors are suggesting there is no easy replacement for the lost, albeit fictitious, authenticity once situated in metanarratives and received genres. Finally, this paper will demonstrate that while these two contemporary novelists significantly problematize narrative and narrative frameworks, McEwan and Swift ultimately convey only one sure method to cope with the mourning and terror of the postmodern condition: continue writing.

Numerous studies have pointed to the historiographic and metafictional aspects of Ian McEwan’s and Graham Swift’s fiction, although few have examined the connections between McEwan and Swift. This study develops from that work by proposing that McEwan’s and Swift’s fictions explore similar themes, beyond those of just history and metafiction. By situating McEwan and Swift as postmodern writers who are strikingly intertextual, in the sense initially coined by Julia Kristeva, this study will show that both authors are deeply concerned with the violence of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and the role that violence has played in the failure of metanarratives, as well as the resulting terror subjects face as they seek replacements for the personal authenticity, legitimacy, and meaning once provided by totalizing metanarratives. This study also illustrates that McEwan and Swift recognize the persistence of the metanarrative of science, as well as the psychic violence inherent in trying to replace metanarratives with received literary traditions. By developing on these ideas, this thesis argues that McEwan and Swift are actively engaged not only in exploring the anxiety subjects face as they realize there is nothing left upon which they can base their personal legitimacy, but also that the authors are suggesting there is no easy replacement for the lost, albeit fictitious, authenticity once situated in metanarratives and received genres. Finally, this paper will demonstrate that while these two contemporary novelists significantly problematize narrative and narrative frameworks, McEwan and Swift ultimately convey only one sure method to cope with the mourning and terror of the postmodern condition: continue writing.

Culturally shared beliefs about societies and humanity play a prominent part in world events, from beliefs about the histories and destinies of nations to beliefs about the appropriate relationship between humanity and the natural world. Many of these beliefs are "metanarratives," simplified representations of past and future societal trends, which often have narrative elements, such as goals, dramatic features, a sense of suspense for group members, and affective judgments about the passage of events over time. In this exploratory study, lifelong residents of the United States (N = 299 undergraduate students and 88 members of a web sample of older adults) indicated their degree of agreement with 73 metanarrative statements. Factor analysis of the students' personal belief scores for the 73 metanarratives revealed a pattern of clustering into six factors, indicating that people tend to believe in families of metanarratives. The six factors were Traditional Religion, American Secular Values, International Cooperation, Eco-Romanticism, Anti-Government Cynicism, and Rational Progress. The web sample largely replicated this structure, but with only four factors. The factors were highly correlated with political party affiliation and other psychosocial and demographic variables, including religiousness, Saucier "isms" factors, and MFQ moral foundations. Participants were also asked about the extent to which some of their strongest beliefs were reflected in their personal activities: career choice, leisure time, spending money, voting, joining groups, reading and viewing, and discussion. The 73 metanarratives were coded for several narrative features: evaluative schema (such as Progress or Looming Catastrophe), presence of standard story elements (context, problem, outcome), presence of goals, and presence of references to cognitively exceptional elements (circumstances beyond the ordinary), such as the sacred, transcendental, unique, or extreme. For both samples, metanarratives with an evaluative schema indicating two possible paths were more motivating than those with only one outcome (e.g., stability or a cycle of recurring ups-and-downs). Further, those with goals were more motivating than those without, and for the web sample, those with cognitively exceptional elements were more motivating than those without. Further study of metanarratives should help to better illuminate the factors leading to individuals' decisions to participate in their larger societies.

Numerous studies have pointed to the historiographic and metafictional aspects of Ian McEwan’s and Graham Swift’s fiction, although few have examined the connections between McEwan and Swift. This study develops from that work by proposing that McEwan’s and Swift’s fictions explore similar themes, beyond those of just history and metafiction. By situating McEwan and Swift as postmodern writers who are strikingly intertextual, in the sense initially coined by Julia Kristeva, this study will show that both authors are deeply concerned with the violence of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and the role that violence has played in the failure of metanarratives, as well as the resulting terror subjects face as they seek replacements for the personal authenticity, legitimacy, and meaning once provided by totalizing metanarratives. This study also illustrates that McEwan and Swift recognize the persistence of the metanarrative of science, as well as the psychic violence inherent in trying to replace metanarratives with received literary traditions. By developing on these ideas, this thesis argues that McEwan and Swift are actively engaged not only in exploring the anxiety subjects face as they realize there is nothing left upon which they can base their personal legitimacy, but also that the authors are suggesting there is no easy replacement for the lost, albeit fictitious, authenticity once situated in metanarratives and received genres. Finally, this paper will demonstrate that while these two contemporary novelists significantly problematize narrative and narrative frameworks, McEwan and Swift ultimately convey only one sure method to cope with the mourning and terror of the postmodern condition: continue writing. / Graduate Studies, College of (Okanagan) / Graduate

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:27:27Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2009-05-28Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T20:16:51Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 nascimento_jpc_me_ia.pdf: 2213686 bytes, checksum: eb26aeb40885b6d66423313764243eb0 (MD5) / Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP) / Em 1979, Jean-Fraçois Lyotard publica A Condição Pós-Moderna: Relatório Sobre o Saber sob a encomenda do Conselho da Universidades do estado de Québec. Tal publicação influenciou grande parte do debate sobre pós-modernismo em diversas áreas da pesquisa acadêmica em Humanidades. Tendo em vista tal influência, o presente trabalho tem por objetivo a observação desta influência de A Condição Pós-Moderna sobre as abordagens do pósmoderno em música realizadas posteriormente a década de 1980. Para tal tarefa, será utilizada a noção lyotardiana de pós-moderno como incredulidade nas metanarrativas de legitimação do saber. Esta influência será observada perante importantes textos relativos ao pós-moderno musical e na maneira como algumas obras da música clássica de concerto realizada na década de 1990 e 2000 se relacionam com tal incredulidade. / In 1979, Jean-Fraçois Lyotard published The Postmodern Condition: Report on Knowing made to order by the Council of Universities of the Provincial Government of Québec. Such publication influenced significant part of the debate on postmodernism in different areas of the humanity academical research. In view of such influence, the present work has for objective the comment of this influence of The Postmodern Condition on the approaches of the postmodern in music carried through after the decade of 1980. For such task, the lyotardian notion of postmodern will be used as incredulity toward metanarratives of legitimation of knowing. This influence will be observed in important writings concerned to the musical postmodern and in the way as some works of the concert classical music composed in the decades of 1990 and 2000 relate with such incredulity.

Orientador: Lia Vera Tomás / Banca: Alberto Tsuyoshi Ikeda / Banca: Paulo de Tarso Salles / Resumo: Em 1979, Jean-Fraçois Lyotard publica A Condição Pós-Moderna: Relatório Sobre o Saber sob a encomenda do Conselho da Universidades do estado de Québec. Tal publicação influenciou grande parte do debate sobre pós-modernismo em diversas áreas da pesquisa acadêmica em Humanidades. Tendo em vista tal influência, o presente trabalho tem por objetivo a observação desta influência de A Condição Pós-Moderna sobre as abordagens do pósmoderno em música realizadas posteriormente a década de 1980. Para tal tarefa, será utilizada a noção lyotardiana de pós-moderno como incredulidade nas metanarrativas de legitimação do saber. Esta influência será observada perante importantes textos relativos ao pós-moderno musical e na maneira como algumas obras da música clássica de concerto realizada na década de 1990 e 2000 se relacionam com tal incredulidade. / Abstract: In 1979, Jean-Fraçois Lyotard published The Postmodern Condition: Report on Knowing made to order by the Council of Universities of the Provincial Government of Québec. Such publication influenced significant part of the debate on postmodernism in different areas of the humanity academical research. In view of such influence, the present work has for objective the comment of this influence of The Postmodern Condition on the approaches of the postmodern in music carried through after the decade of 1980. For such task, the lyotardian notion of postmodern will be used as incredulity toward metanarratives of legitimation of knowing. This influence will be observed in important writings concerned to the musical postmodern and in the way as some works of the concert classical music composed in the decades of 1990 and 2000 relate with such incredulity. / Mestre

Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy has received substantial critical attention inthe fields of ecocriticism, the ethics of bioengineering, and feminist theory. However, the vast majority of this criticism has focussed on Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, the first two books in the trilogy. By displacing human narrators in MaddAddam, the third and final book, Atwood re-contextualises the entire trilogy asno longer being a meticulously researched speculative fiction, and instead a type of fable, along the lines of Jean-François Lyotard’s “A Postmodern Fable.” Through this shift, Atwood asserts the need to replace the perception of a progression of metanarratives in contemporary cultural thought with concurrent, transitory micronarratives. This thesis is divided into three main sections, each examining the different communities which Atwood depicts. The first section uses the work of Zygmunt Bauman and Jean-François Lyotard on the state of knowledge in the postmodern habitat to explore how Atwood presents a fracture between scientific and narrative knowledge, which the Compounds in her novels propagate to impose a hierarchy over their citizenship. The second section moves to a more character focussed perspective, using Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s development of ‘homosocial’ triangles, it examines how the character Crake internalises the enforced societal hierarchy between scientific and narrative knowledge, and uses these non-sexual terms to perform a sexual triangle containing himself and other characters. The final section explores the shift of perspective in the third novel, and how the displacement of humanity as the centre of the narrative exposes the unsustainable position of appealing to metanarratives of progression. Through this analysis, Atwood can be seen to be exposing the fallacy that new knowledge usurps old knowledge, and that all contexts of understanding exist simultaneously, appearing, disappearing, and reappearing where they have interpretive utility.

This dissertation seeks to contribute to recent scholarship by demonstrating that an African-American utopian tradition persists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, particularly in the works of African-American women writers. If liberation remains a fundamental theme in African-American literature – a definitive stance espoused by W. E. B. Du Bois and a host of other prominent African-American scholars, but also upheld by this dissertation – then such a consistently recurring goal has only been marginally completed, at best, in the United States. Despite proclamations of a universally attainable American Dream, African Americans remain disenfranchised by prison, education, and court systems as well as other integral institutions found within the United States.With this dilemma in mind and given the potentially subversive power of literature, this dissertation argues that the African-American utopian tradition in particular functions as a useful critical lens through which one can examine the often-elusive goal of revolutionary change. This lens raises the pertinent questions that one must answer in order to strive towards one’s utopia, and also exposes the systemic and thus conventional parameters latent in the too-familiar antithetical dystopias about which so many African-American narratives admonish their audiences to confront or, if they are lucky enough, avoid altogether. By focusing on a thematic continuum represented by the utopian small towns found in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (1988), Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998), and Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1997), this dissertation encapsulates a utopian tradition that inscribes race, gender, and sexuality, onto the African-American literary tradition. / English

The mission over the last few decades, especially of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, has focused on “confessionalism”. In this specific sense of mission growth—numeric growth— has been a priority, and, unfortunately, not caring for “broken” people. The emphasis has been placed on the age-old proclamation of the “truth”, at the expense of social involvement, as it seems that “truth” transcends the needs of people, even of Christians. This has led to the restricting of the scope of pastoral care, and has limited it to an “applied theology”, where the Old Testament and New Testament studies have dictated its structure and methodology. Within Adventism its view and use of Scripture has dominated its ministry, indicating a number of different methods and approaches. These differences in both the conservative and the liberal orientations only represent their own possibilities. These approaches are the result of a basic understanding of Scripture as a body of divine teachings that needs to be accepted, believed, and obeyed. Consequently, this perception has moved the focus away from caring to the “so-called” correct doctrine of “truth” and proclamation. Postmodernism, however, is challenging the assumptions of modernism and is now confronting us with the understanding that there is no “objective truth”, and that there cannot be a completely detached observer. We observe reality, experience and Scripture not objectively, but rather discern them through the eyes of our own context, experience and history. The thesis, therefore, postulates as useful, just and proper that we experience reality in a narrative fashion within a secular postmodern world. It is through stories that we grasp and appreciate the important factors in our lives. Consequently, a narrative approach is appraised as being a more meaningful tool in approaching Scripture and pastoral care. Narratives are like rituals, they preserve the memory of past events in a way that they still have power for us in the present. As Jesus is a servant of everybody His narratives are transposed and they become accounts of our involvement in the lives of our fellow “sufferers”. / Practical Theology / D. Th. (Practical Theology)

The mission over the last few decades, especially of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, has focused on “confessionalism”. In this specific sense of mission growth—numeric growth— has been a priority, and, unfortunately, not caring for “broken” people. The emphasis has been placed on the age-old proclamation of the “truth”, at the expense of social involvement, as it seems that “truth” transcends the needs of people, even of Christians. This has led to the restricting of the scope of pastoral care, and has limited it to an “applied theology”, where the Old Testament and New Testament studies have dictated its structure and methodology. Within Adventism its view and use of Scripture has dominated its ministry, indicating a number of different methods and approaches. These differences in both the conservative and the liberal orientations only represent their own possibilities. These approaches are the result of a basic understanding of Scripture as a body of divine teachings that needs to be accepted, believed, and obeyed. Consequently, this perception has moved the focus away from caring to the “so-called” correct doctrine of “truth” and proclamation. Postmodernism, however, is challenging the assumptions of modernism and is now confronting us with the understanding that there is no “objective truth”, and that there cannot be a completely detached observer. We observe reality, experience and Scripture not objectively, but rather discern them through the eyes of our own context, experience and history. The thesis, therefore, postulates as useful, just and proper that we experience reality in a narrative fashion within a secular postmodern world. It is through stories that we grasp and appreciate the important factors in our lives. Consequently, a narrative approach is appraised as being a more meaningful tool in approaching Scripture and pastoral care. Narratives are like rituals, they preserve the memory of past events in a way that they still have power for us in the present. As Jesus is a servant of everybody His narratives are transposed and they become accounts of our involvement in the lives of our fellow “sufferers”. / Philosophy, Practical and Systematic Theology / D. Th. (Practical Theology)