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This paper deals with the novel Jazz, written by African-American writer Toni Morrison. The paper argues that the novel deconstructs itself. Also, it illustrates how the jazz music in the novel works as a deconstructing force on the characters and the narrative form. The essay begins with a chapter about deconstructive theory.  Next, there is a brief summary of jazz music – its history and features. Then, there is an analysis which focuses on how jazz music affects the characters. Last, the narrative form is investigated, for instance in terms of the narrator’s tendency to shift between various points of view. / Uppsatsen påbörjades vid Halmstad Högskola med Cecilia Björkén Nyberg som handledare, men slutfördes vid Växjö Universitet. Magisterexamen är sedan uttagen vid Högskolan i Halmstad.

We read a novel one sentence at a time. The first scale of attention for even the longest novel is the play of forces within the thousands of individual sentences. This project aims to rescale the analysis of novelistic form, elucidating this play of forces: how do they shape attention, and how do structures of attention give rise to aesthetic experience? We recognize the importance of form in music and architecture in part because there is no referential content to distract us. When it comes to the realist novel, however, its rich referential field easily obscures the dynamics of experience created by form. This study seeks to elucidate those dynamics. Chapter One analyzes Austen’s long interval of tension. Austen’s capacious sentence stretches attention over an entire descriptive event, producing drama and crises even when events in the fictional world are characterized by equilibrium and serenity. With the syntax of the sentence unresolved, attention cannot rest. An achieved description thus has perceptual corollaries in temporal commitment, and in attention that is divided between the immediate claims of elaboration and the prospect of closure. In Dickens, microstructures of just one to three sentences elicit the sudden apercu. Like metaphor, the apercu emerges through our recognition of a meaningful relationship between actions, facts, and utterances. Dickens presents only the raw materials of discovery (say, by juxtaposing a character’s mutually contradictory statements), leaving to us the second-order activity of recognition (her disingenuousness). Chapter Three examines how Hardy employs linguistic analogues to represent the essential structure of perceptual experience. Chapter Four, on late James, shows how shifts in attention on two scales produce two distinct experiences. Shifts to the periphery of a scene act as a temporal ballast, adding weight to the perceived dimensions of the passage. Shifts within the sentence elicit intense perceptual involvement, even when that absorption exceeds what is warranted by the semantic plane. The essence of the novel’s referenced world can be preserved in memory, but linguistic form resists memory; it is immediate and ephemeral. During the act of reading, it is one of the novel’s greatest pleasures.

This thesis consists of a close reading of the representation of the Spanish Civil War in selected novels of Juan Marse (1933-) and Claude Simon (1913-). It explores how this representation, ultimately, reveals the traces of their different intellectual contexts. The initial comparison questions whether Marse's representation of the Spanish revolution in Barcelona implies, like Simon's account, a negative representation of the concept of political engagement and a similar historical pessimism. It goes on to discuss how this negative view is shaped by the writers' respective historical contexts and aesthetics. Secondly, since, to varying degrees, the novels studied make the reader critically aware of processes of narrativisation and representation, and of issues of narrative reliability and authority, the thesis explores the extent to which their representations of the Civil War are 'anti-realist'. In order to do so, it initially locates the question of 'realism' or 'anti-realism' in the texts within a wider theoretical framework: that of the critique of realism within poststructuralist French theory after Barthes. The latter debate over referentiality in literary realism also underpins ongoing critical debates over the status of history as a text. This thesis, thirdly, considers whether both writers' representations of the Civil War and of historical processes suggest a particular attitude towards the writing of history, namely whether and to what extent Simon's and Marse's representations of the war problematize the relationship between their historical referent - the events of the war and/or its aftermath - and its narration and interpretation. In particular, it asks whether Marse's texts involve the kind of rejection of progressive historical 'meta-narratives' which is implicit and explicit in Simon's representation of the Civil War, but also whether Simon's texts do, in fact, not simply undermine this model of historical causality but posit an alternative, anti-progressive historical telos.

Syftet med denna uppsats är att analysera hur genus uttrycks och skapas genom fyra populära barnböcker. Böckernas karaktärer analyseras från ett genusperspektiv. En central utgångspunkt är teorin om hur män och kvinnor hålls isär genom att tilldelas olika karaktärsdrag och hur denna uppdelning skapar genus. Uppsatsen analyserar även de fyra böckernas berättelseform, huruvida denna är uttryckt på ett maskulint eller feminint sätt. Risken med dessa stereotypa karaktärsdrag för män och kvinnor är att barnen kan bli påverkade av dem, vilket tvingar in dem i specifika genuspositioner. Detta kan hindra dem från att utveckla sina egna unika identiteter. Uppsatsens metod är en kvalitativ textanalys. Analyserna och resultaten visar att stereotypa genus uttrycks och återskapas genom böckernas olika karaktärer. Vissa karaktärer problematiserar dessa stereotypa genus genom att visa upp såväl feminina som maskulina drag. Min tes är att dessa uttryck av både maskulina och feminina drag är den ultimata problematiseringen av stereotypa genus. De fyra böckerna följer även en liknande berättelseform, där samtliga berättas på ett maskulint sätt genom att vara väldigt strukturerade och tydliga med delar som början, mitt och slut. / The aim of this paper is to analyze how gender is expressed and created through four popular fictive children's books. The characters in the books are analyzed from a gender perspective. A central point of departure is the theory about how males and females are separated by being given different characteristics and how this distinction creates gender. The paper also analyzes the narrative form of the different books, whether this form is expressed in a masculine or feminine matter. The risk with such stereotype characteristics for male and female characters is that children might be influenced by them, forcing them into certain gender positions, which might prevent them from forming their own unique identity. The method for the paper is a qualitative text analysis. The analyzes and results show that stereotype gender is expressed and reproduced through the different characters in the books. Some characters problematize these stereotype genders by showing both feminine as well as masculine characteristics. My thesis is that this expression of both masculine and feminine characteristics is the ultimate problematization of stereotype gender. The four books also contain similar narrative forms where they are all told in a masculine way by being very structured and explicit through parts such as beginning, middle and ending.

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The literary utopia is often accused of being an outmoded genre, a graveyard for failed social movements. However, utopian literature is a surprisingly resilient genre, evolving from the static, descriptive anatomies of the Renaissance utopias to the novelized utopian romances of the late nineteenth century and the self-reflexive critical utopias of the 1970s. The literary utopia adapts to the needs of the moment: what form(s) best represent the fears and desires of our current historical period? In this dissertation I perform a close reading of three exemplary texts: John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968), Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home (1985), and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004). While I address topics specific to each text, my main focus is on the texts’ depictions of utopia and their spatialized narrative forms. In Stand on Zanzibar Brunner locates the utopian impulse in three registers—the political/bureaucratic, the technical/scientific, and the human(e)—and explores how their interplay constitutes the utopian space. In Always Coming Home Le Guin renovates the classical literary utopia, problematizing its uncritical advocacy of the “Judaeo-Christian-Rationalist-West” but preserving much of the older utopia’s form. In Cloud Atlas the networked narrative structure reflects and enables the heterogeneous, non-hierarchical, and processual utopian communities depicted in the novel. In these science fictional works the spatialized techniques of juxtaposition, discontinuity, and collage —commonly associated with a loss of historical depth and difference—are used to create utopian spaces founded on contingency and human choice. I contend that science fiction is a historical genre, one that is invested in representing societies as contingent historical totalities. Science fiction’s generic tendencies modify the context that a spatialized narrative form functions in, and in changing the context changes its effects. By utilizing a spatialized narrative form to embody a contingent practice, Brunner, Le Guin, and Mitchell cast the future—and the present—as historical, as something that can be acted upon and changed: they have provided us with strategies for envisioning better futures and, potentially, for mobilizing our visions of the future for positive change in the present.

Architecture is a dilemma of transforming complex desires into compelling forms. It stands to reason, then, that to better understand the desires of a user might produce a more compelling form. This is an investigation into the process of design, wherein narratives are constructed as a productive tool for innovation. These narratives are the synthesis of both the desires of the client and the discriminations of the designer. Eschewing the conception of the architect as a mystic, this thesis begins with an investigation into how we represent complex Architectural ideas to a client. It begins a process, or framework, through which a project can be conceived. It both demands that the client shed preconceived, and potentially erroneous, associations between desires and design, to get to a more pure understanding of the needs of a client. The hope is that by rendering Architectural intention less opaque, we might come to a better understanding of the desires of a client, and thus create a new way of practicing; wherein neither client nor architect rely on a pre-defined set of formal solutions for a constantly evolving problem. The single-family home is the programmatic basis for this investigation. Few other programs illicit as robust and divergent desires than the home. It's not that architecture is in the pursuit of creating narratives. But rather, it's that the process of design is one wherein the creation of a compelling narrative has the potential to produce innovative work. And important to the construction of that narrative is the productive engagement of the client.

This thesis is a feminist reading of the work of Henry Handel Richardson (1870-1946), which considers her four major novels: Maurice Guest (1908), The Getting of Wisdom (1910), The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1930), and The Young Cosima (1939). It proposes that Richardson foregrounds the work of gender ideology in her novels, and that her work is also conscious about its own fictional procedures. This thesis argues that Richardson consciously examines the ideological aspect of narrative modes, such as naturalism, the Bildungsroman, and popular romance. Moreover, it illustrates her attempts to invent narrative strategies which subvert the conventional assumptions about gender inherent in those forms. ???Gender Ideology and Narrative Form??? draws on recent theoretical approaches to narrative, ideology, subjectivity, and dialogism, to argue that Richardson makes the ideological shaping of her stories most visible through manipulations of genre, plot, narrative voice, and point of view. Aspects of ideology examined include the Victorian and late-Victorian equation of masculinity with public rationality, mind, public achievement, and genius: and, on the other hand, the association of femininity with the body, passion, and private or domestic spaces. The thesis also considers some of the values and assumptions about gender implicit in nineteenth-century scientific thinking. Henry Handel Richardson has been viewed as a conservative writer, in both aesthetic and political terms. By contrast, I suggest that she resists the moral and representational codes of the realist or naturalist form, and that her uncompromising oppositional strategy achieves a number of radical results. It exposes and criticises the masculinist bias of certain representational methods; it offers new ways of representing female experience; and it insists that the private sphere must be treated also as a political space in which crucial power relationships are at work. My approach to Henry Handel Richardson???s fiction opens new ways to see her work as the product of a distinctive feminist consciousness.

This thesis is a feminist reading of the work of Henry Handel Richardson (1870-1946), which considers her four major novels: Maurice Guest (1908), The Getting of Wisdom (1910), The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1930), and The Young Cosima (1939). It proposes that Richardson foregrounds the work of gender ideology in her novels, and that her work is also conscious about its own fictional procedures. This thesis argues that Richardson consciously examines the ideological aspect of narrative modes, such as naturalism, the Bildungsroman, and popular romance. Moreover, it illustrates her attempts to invent narrative strategies which subvert the conventional assumptions about gender inherent in those forms. ???Gender Ideology and Narrative Form??? draws on recent theoretical approaches to narrative, ideology, subjectivity, and dialogism, to argue that Richardson makes the ideological shaping of her stories most visible through manipulations of genre, plot, narrative voice, and point of view. Aspects of ideology examined include the Victorian and late-Victorian equation of masculinity with public rationality, mind, public achievement, and genius: and, on the other hand, the association of femininity with the body, passion, and private or domestic spaces. The thesis also considers some of the values and assumptions about gender implicit in nineteenth-century scientific thinking. Henry Handel Richardson has been viewed as a conservative writer, in both aesthetic and political terms. By contrast, I suggest that she resists the moral and representational codes of the realist or naturalist form, and that her uncompromising oppositional strategy achieves a number of radical results. It exposes and criticises the masculinist bias of certain representational methods; it offers new ways of representing female experience; and it insists that the private sphere must be treated also as a political space in which crucial power relationships are at work. My approach to Henry Handel Richardson???s fiction opens new ways to see her work as the product of a distinctive feminist consciousness.