Thesis (M.A.)--Lehigh University, 2009. / Adviser: Amardeep Singh.

Thesis (M.A.) - Carleton University, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p.75-77). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

<p> This study will focus on the role of the writer during the early years of the Soviet Union (1920&ndash;1935) through the example of the life and works of Mikhail Bulgakov. Bulgakov&rsquo;s literary career paralleled Josef Stalin&rsquo;s rise to supreme power over not only the Communist Party but the Soviet Union and its citizens. As Bulgakov struggled to publish and stage his works, the Soviet government under Stalin strengthened its resolve to utilize writers to educate the masses in the correct behaviors and values of good Soviet citizens. Each demonstrated his own leadership style: as Stalin evolved into a strong Authoritarian Leader, Bulgakov &lsquo;s survival depended upon his Adaptive Leadership skills. Stalin&rsquo;s greatest successes were during his lifetime; Bulgakov&rsquo;s followed his death as the Soviet Union declined and his works were published. Research questions include the role of the writer in his contemporary society and the writer&rsquo;s ability to influence his contemporary society through his own survival in an authoritarian society but the survival of his works for audiences in other times and places. Bulgakov could not compromise his artistic vision, Stalin, although he recognized and appreciated talent, could not compromise his ideological convictions. The result was a complex relationship between two prominent figures whose leadership styles as much as their differing viewpoints dictated the course of their actions.</p>

<p> My dissertation explores how sound informs the representation of cross-cultural interactions within early modern drama and travel writing. "Sounding" implies the process of producing music or noise, but it also suggests the attempt to make meaning of what one hears. "Otherness" in this study refers to a foreign presence outside of the listening body, as well as to an otherness that is already inherent within. Sounding otherness enacts a bi-directional exchange between a culturally different other and an embodied self; this exchange generates what I term the sonic uncanny, whereby the otherness interior to the self vibrates with sounds of otherness exterior to the body. The sonic uncanny describes how sounds that are perceived as foreign become familiar through the vibratory touch of the soundwave that attunes a body to its sonic environment or soundscape. Sounds of foreign Eastern and New World Indian otherness become part of English and European travelers; at the same time, these travelers sound their own otherness in Indian spaces. Sounding otherness occurs in the travel narratives of Jean de L&egrave;ry, Thomas Dallam, Thomas Coryate, and John Smith. Cultural otherness is also sounded by the English through their theatrical representations of New World and Oriental otherness in masques including <i>The Masque of Flowers,</i> and plays like Robert Greene's <i>Alphonsus,</i> respectively; Shakespeare's <i> The Tempest</i> combines elements of East and West into a new sound&mdash;"something rich and strange." These dramatic entertainments suggest that the theater, as much as a foreign land, can function as a sonic contact zone.</p>

<p> Le fran&ccedil;ais repr&eacute;sente une langue dominante au Qu&eacute;bec et aux Antilles. Cependant, il n'arrive pas toujours &agrave; exprimer les r&eacute;alit&eacute;s de ces peuples. Alors, pour rendre compte des valeurs ch&egrave;res aux populations locales, les auteurs qu&eacute;b&eacute;cois et antillais ont recours &agrave; l'int&eacute;gration du joual et du cr&eacute;ole dans leurs textes respectifs. Etant donn&eacute; que ces langues sont plus souvent utilis&eacute;es par les couches d&eacute;favoris&eacute;es, les milieux populaires offrent, du coup, un cadre id&eacute;al pour un tel proc&eacute;d&eacute;. Il s'agit, dans cette &eacute;tude, de proc&eacute;der par une analyse sociolinguistique, sociohistorique et socioculturelle du joual et du cr&eacute;ole, en partant des espaces choisis, en l'occurrence le Qu&eacute;bec et les Antilles. Lesdits espaces partagent des r&eacute;alit&eacute;s semblables quant &agrave; l'utilisation de la langue comme moyen de d&eacute;fense et de revendication culturelle et identitaire. En outre, &eacute;tant donn&eacute; que le joual et le cr&eacute;ole sont deux langues orales, il se pose la question de la transcription de l'oral &agrave; l'&eacute;crit, ses m&eacute;canismes et ses fondements. Entendu que les &eacute;crivains Qu&eacute;b&eacute;cois et Antillais ont un rapport &eacute;troit avec la langue, comment l'utilisent-ils pour affirmer leur identit&eacute; ? Devant les nombreux d&eacute;fis &agrave; relever, notamment la pr&eacute;servation du fran&ccedil;ais au Qu&eacute;bec et l'affirmation d'une identit&eacute; communautaire, ainsi que la cr&eacute;olisation des Antilles, les &eacute;crivains ont recours &agrave; des techniques particuli&egrave;res qu'il convient de d&eacute;couvrir, dans un contexte de diversit&eacute; et d'affirmation identitaire. Aujourd'hui, l'&eacute;volution des pratiques langagi&egrave;res am&egrave;ne les auteurs et leurs lecteurs &agrave; parler l'anglais et le cr&eacute;ole car d&eacute;sormais, la mixit&eacute; des langues est un facteur &agrave; consid&eacute;rer dans l'affirmation de l'identit&eacute; des Qu&eacute;b&eacute;cois et des Antillais.</p>

<p> <i>Condolences to All of You</i> assembles various poems whose creation spans the period between late 2011 and late 2014, with the vast majority formed during the latter half of that time. Included are conceptual poems of a visual or ideological nature, narrative poems exploring adolescence and ecology, and lyrical examinations of the crisis of mortality in the twenty-first century. Many of these darkly humorous poems obscure distinctions between elegy, eulogy, epitaph and celebration, while pleading for the imagination's affirmation in a human era of purported existential certainty. The essay preceding the poems debates their roles and merits among the flailing despair of twentieth century literary criticism, and puts forth a guide to formal and content-driven motives for the mechanics of the poems themselves. </p>

<p> The labyrinth is a powerful image, turning up throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in modernist, high modernist, postmodern, experimental, and digital fictions. Some authors taking up the image of the labyrinth in the latter half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first consider it more than a mere metaphor or a setting before which plots and characters unfold; it offers instead a poetics, a way to discover, explore, and conquer labyrinths constructed of the experiences of everyday life&mdash;the city, the home, the library, the computer, the mind, even the book itself. Throughout this thesis I examine a small selection of their fictions&mdash;Michael Ayrton's <i>The Maze Maker</i>, Alain Robbe-Grillet's <i>In the Labyrinth</i>, Mark Z. Danielewski's <i>House of Leaves</i>, Umberto Eco's <i>The Name of the Rose</i>, Shelley Jackson's <i> Patchwork Girl</i>, Steve Tomasula's <i>TOC</i>, and selections by Jorge Luis Borges and Ovid&mdash;each of whom deploys the labyrinth simultaneously in the diegesis and discourse of their texts in order to discover the shifting boundaries of the page and narrative form. Non-sequential narrative techniques in the spatial, formal, linguistic, and typological structures of these fictions implicitly propose the labyrinth as a model for the unique complexities of writing and reading in the modern world, one that in fact demonstrates the very labyrinth that it describes.</p>

<p> The prevalence of alcoholic writers in 20^th-century American literature reached what has been called epidemic proportions. Many of these writers wrote autobiographical accounts of their alcoholism through alter egos in their literary works. Of these, perhaps none is as extensive and detailed as Charles Bukowski's persona Henry Chinaski. This thesis is a case study of Chinaski's alcoholism through five of Bukowski's autobiographical novels. In it, I explore the complexities of Chinaski's alcoholism and make the claim that social alienation is a driving force for the onset and the intensity of his alcohol addiction. The novels span Chinaski's life from youth to old age, and factors such as childhood abuse and labor conditions in the post-Depression era work to alienate him. Through close, contextual reading of Bukowski's novels aided with sociological and medical scholarship on addiction, the relationship between alienation and alcoholism is explored.</p>

<p> This dissertation examines strange literary phenomena I call "unfinishable novels," or novels whose very structure and/or worldview would seem to prohibit the possibility of their own "successful" conclusion. Famous examples include Laurence Sterne's <i>Tristram Shandy</i>, Franz Kafka's <i>The Trial</i>, and Robert Musil's <i>The Man Without Qualities</i>. Focusing on a canonical and historically diverse selection of Euro-American texts and authors ranging from Rabelais to Thomas Pynchon, my project not only contributes to the critical literature on my primary texts by examining and contextualizing their "unfinishability," but also suggests a new historiography of the novel by focusing less on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries--the zenith of the novel's cultural and political importance, but also a period dominated by linear plotlines--and more on periods (early modern and twentieth century) in which the status of endings was far more uncertain, thus tracing something like a "backstage history" of the genre. </p><p> To develop a theoretical-historical framework in which to read these texts, both on their own terms and in the context of the history of the novel, my dissertation puts into practice a "prosaics of unfinishability," a critical methodology that privileges prose and the novel and attempts to be less weighed down by what I call "the poetic prejudice," i.e. the assumption that all literary texts worthy of the name should form organically unified totalities. This prejudice has historically dominated the discourses surrounding unfinished works, which, when they are acknowledged at all, are traditionally described in terms of an author's "failure" to achieve perfection. </p><p> The dissertation is divided into three section ("The Modern Novel," "The Modernist Novel," and "The Postmodern Novel,"), preceded by an Introduction that uses Pessoa's unfinishable <i>Book of Disquiet</i> to articulate a theory of both unfinished works and unfinishable novels, which I define as "novels that can only be completed as unfinished works." The Introduction offers a critique of the traditional poetics of the unfinished work and its corollary rhetoric of failure before describing my own "prosaic" methodology and outlining my project.</p>

<p> Many consider David Foster Wallace&rsquo;s <i>Infinite Jest</i>, an overtly <i>masculine</i> novel, in that most of it centers on or around male characters. Though one may locate powerful, influential, and even relatable female characters, it&rsquo;s difficult to pair them with a positive image or representation of the feminine. I argue that this lack of a positive representation is due to the novel&rsquo;s primary symbol and plot device, the deadly <i>Entertainment</i>. Using Luce Irigaray&rsquo;s <i> Sp&eacute;culum de l&rsquo;autre femme</i> (&lsquo;Speculum of the Other Woman,&rsquo; 1974) as a model, I examine <i>The Entertainment</i> as the key tool and target of my feminist critique. This ultimately sheds light on a fundamental &ldquo;blind-spot&rdquo; within <i>Infinite Jest </i>, as well as many scholarly readings of it.</p>