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The dissertation provides a comparative analysis of the critical reception of Christa Wolf's early works in the FRG and the GDR. The first chapter documents the emergence of Wolf as advocate of a humanist socialism. It also places her works in the general context of GDR literary history and the critical response to GDR literature in West Germany. Chapters two through five contrast interpretations of each work in the changing political climates in both Germanies and draw general conclusions about Wolf's reception. Despite opposing ideological points of view, East and West German critics recognize Moskauer Novelle or Der geteilte Himmel almost exclusively as sociological documents. While GDR critics praise both texts as representative examples of the literary and societal progress in their country, West German critics respond to Wolf's prose mainly to prove the flaws of socialist realism and socialism in the GDR. Nachdenken uber Christa T. denotes a turning-point for Wolf's own literary production and for the reception of her work in the FRG and the GDR. In her early texts Wolf had assumed an accordance of her own political goals and really existing socialism in the GDR. Nachdenken, however, clearly identifies Wolf as a utopian marxist. Furthermore, she no longer uses her protagonist to represent her ideological convictions, but reveals her own understanding of socialist prose in the accompanying essay "Lesen und Schreiben." My study shows that Wolf's utopian understanding of Marxism as well as the separation of ideology and prose in Nachdenken had a lasting effect on the reception of her work. Because GDR critics avoided a confrontation with ideas that challenged the political structure of their state, they could not provide adequate interpretations of Nachdenken and later texts. Its utopian dimension as well as its lack of didacticism encouraged Western critics to adapt Wolf's prose to their own societal context, and they often failed to acknowledge the Marxist basis of Wolf's writing. The reaction to Unter den Linden and later texts shows that the international stature Wolf had gained with Nachdenken enabled her to become an influential critic of Stalinist socialism and Western civilization.

The metafictional novel is a novel that draws attention to its own form or construction and systematically flaunts its own condition of artifice, and by so doing poses questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. In other words, the metafictional novel is such that--explicitly or implicitly, and making use of a variety of strategies and techniques--deliberately exposes the fictiveness and artifice of the literary creation. As a tendency, the metafictional novel has been part of the history of literature since the very beginnings of the novelistic genre with the publication of Cervantes' Don Quijote de la Mancha. In the present Dissertation five Spanish novels belonging to four different periods of Spanish Literature have been selected: Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quijote de la Mancha, Benito Perez Galdos' El amigo Manso, Miguel de Unamuno's Niebla, and Gonzalo Torrente Ballester's Fragmentos de Apocalipsis and La Isla de los Jacintos Cortados. The first chapter is an introduction which refers to the most relevant theories as well as individual contributions to the study of metafiction, establishing the theoretical foundation for the individual and comparative analysis of each of the selected novels studied in the following chapters. These analyses identify the main characteristics of metafiction: its anti-realism, self-consciousness, self-referentiality or self-critical reflexion, the literary theorization within the novel, its playful nature, and the particular importance given to the role of the reader. Departing from the initial question regarding the emergence of a tendency from within the novelistic genre that includes, as part of the novel itself, the preoccupation about the essence of literature, the conclusion is that metafiction can be considered an answer to the "mystery" of literary creation and, therefore, to the interaction between reality and fiction, life and art. On the other hand, all the metafictional novels analyzed here claim, in one way or another, in a lesser or greater degree, a wide and dynamic conception of the novelistic genre and the freedom of creation and imagination.

Mário Henrique Leiria is mostly known for his short stories--- Contos do gin tonic and Novos contos do gin---published in the 1970's upon his return to Portugal from a "self-exile" in Brazil that lasted nine years. Little is known of his work composed earlier than 1973. Only some of his poems and drawings were published in anthologies of the Portuguese surrealist movement, together with other short stories. One can say "little is known" of his work in light of the considerable corpus on which the present study is based: poems, plays and short stories, but mostly poems written between 1938 and 1972. It is of utmost importance to mention that the poetic side of this author remains practically unknown to the general public. The objectives of the present dissertation are to bring to light and analyze the dated manuscripts found in the author's archives at the National Library in Lisbon. Due to the fact that Leiria contributed to the surrealist movement in Portugal, and that his surrealist period is his most prolific and aesthetically the most important in his career, this study will be divided into three parts, each of them accounting for one of the poet's three phases, with special emphasis on the second phase: "Leiria's pre-Surrealism", "Leiria's Surrealism", and "Leiria's post-Surrealism". The analysis of the poems comprising each of these phases will demonstrate that the author may be viewed as one of the representatives of literary modernity in Portugal or, more specifically, of the Portuguese vanguard.

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This paper explores mythical and imaginary representations of America by Boris Vian and examines the personal and social context in which they were nurtured and produced. The purpose is to contribute to an understanding of the extent and nature of the transmission of cultural values and myths between the US and France in the period between 1930 and 1955, roughly corresponding to the most productive years of Vian's life. The central texts in this discussion are those in which the American influence is most strongly present: Vian's reviews of the jazz press, written for Jazz Hot over a period of 10 years, and his four pseudo-translations of American romans noirs published under the name Vernon Sullivan, especially J'irai cracher sur vos tombes. Background discussions include Vian's childhood in the Thirties, French opinion and the U.S., the importance of American expatriates and cultural imports like the New American Novel, cinema, black American writings, American influences in other mid-century French writing, and the war-time zazou movement. The evaluation of Vian's jazz criticism involves comparisons using critical texts from Vian's French and American contemporaries as well as new critical appreciations of recorded performances which would have influenced Vian. The readings of the Sullivan novels are accomplished through a comparative look at the hardboiled American school, specifically Raymond Chandler and James Cain, both writers explicitly acknowledged by Vian to have been major influences. The paper closes with an examination of the importance of myth in evaluating both the Vian production and its American antecedents.

<p> <i>Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli </i> by Ronald Firbank and <i>Between the Acts</i> by Virginia Woolf both liberate the text from the expected form to engage emotional awareness and instigate reform of societal standards. Employing Mikhail Bakhtin&rsquo;s theories of the carnivalesque and grotesque realism as a means to create this perspective is unconventional; nevertheless, Firbank, predominantly misunderstood, and Woolf, more regarded but largely misinterpreted, both address sexuality and religion to parody what they believe to be the retrogression of civilization by narrating christenings, pageants, and other forms of carnival. Both novels forefront nonconformity, and the conspicuous influence of debasement is identified as a form of salient renewal. Christopher Ames, Melba-Cuddy Keane, and Alice Fox have already expressed remarkable insight into Woolf; unfortunately not a single scholar has approached Firbank&rsquo;s text in this manner, and this essay discusses the value of both authors in the aspect of Bakhtin&rsquo;s theories.</p>

<p>Ce travail porte sur les écritures périphériques françaises après les années 1990. Centré sur des oeuvres de Philippe Vasset, de Jean Rolin, d'Antoine Volodine, et de Yamina Benguigui, du côté du documentaire, il se propose de faire de la figuration de la précarité l'un des enjeux fondamentaux des écritures périphériques actuelles.</p> / Dissertation

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