Notre thèse retrace la jeunesse d’Élémir Bourges (1852-1925), de sa naissance à Manosque jusqu’à son départ pour Samois, en août 1886. Nous examinons l’enfance du romancier à Marseille, ses découvertes artistiques, ses premiers essais littéraires (influencés par le Parnasse et le naturalisme), les amitiés qu’il noua à Paris, à partir de 1874 (Bourget, Coppée, Bouchor, Richepin, Redon, Zola, Montesquiou, Margueritte, Lorrain, Primoli, Goncourt, Mirbeau, Banville, etc.), la genèse de Jacques d’Aubray, de La Haine de Joël Servais, d’Angélique Pitié, de Sous la hache, du Crépuscule des dieux, de L’Enfant qui revient, des Oiseaux s’envolent et les fleurs tombent, son activité de critique dramatique au Parlement, de chroniqueur au Gaulois, et de critique littéraire dans la Revue des chefs-d’œuvre, sa rencontre en 1878 avec Anna Braunerova, sa future femme, et avec l’artiste tchèque Zdenka Braunerova, la réception du Crépuscule des dieux (1884) et de Sous la hache (1885). Notre biographie s’appuie sur un nombre très important de documents inédits, issus de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, du fonds Buzzini-Bourges des Archives de l’État du Valais, des Archives littéraires de Prague, des Archives du Musée de la Bohême centrale à Roztoky et de collections privées. Elle est suivie d’une édition du manuscrit de Jacques d’Aubray, premier roman inédit de Bourges. / Our thesis recounts the youth of Elémir Bourges (1852-1925), from his birth in Manosque until his departure for Samois in August 1886. We examine the novelist’s childhood in Marseille, his artistic discoveries, his first literary projects (influenced by Parnassianism and Naturalism) and the friendships he formed in Paris from 1874 (with Bourget, Coppée, Bouchor, Richepin, Redon, Zola, Montesquiou, Margueritte, Lorrain, Primoli, Goncourt, Mirbeau, etc.), the genesis of Jacques d'Aubray, La Haine de Joël Servais, Angélique Pitié, Sous la hache, Le Crépuscule des dieux, L'Enfant qui revient, Les oiseaux s’envolent et les fleurs tombent, his dramatic criticism in Le Parlement, chronicles in Le Gaulois, literary critic in La Revue des chefs-d’œuvre, his meeting in 1878 with Anna Braunerova, his future wife, and with the Czech artist Zdenka Braunerova, the reception of Le Crépuscule des dieux (1884) and Sous la hache (1885). Our biography is based on a large number of unpublished documents from the National Library of France, the Buzzini-Bourges fund of the Archives of the State of Valais, the Literary Archives of the Museum of Czech Literature (Prague), the Archives of Museum of Central Bohemia in Roztoky and private collections. It includes an edition of the manuscript of Jacques d'Aubray, Bourges’s first novel.

This dissertation's purpose is to test the hypothesis that beliefs in the possibility of post-mortem survival can be rationally held within the context of the contemporary scientific and philosophical environment. In terms of criteria of rationality, a basic evidentialism is assumed, such that propositions which are sufficiently supported by the available evidence can be rationally held. With regard to the compatibility with contemporary science and philosophy, it follows as a further criterion that the relevant evidence must be satisfactorily anchored within the framework of these traditions. The relevant evidence concerns two levels. First, the basic level of the conceptual coherence of afterlife beliefs is addressed, so that the logical possibility of post-mortem survival can be established. Secondly, the viability of the metaphysics which are implied in the support of the logical possibility (i.e. the metaphysics needed to actualize post-mortem survival) is defended, establishing the metaphysical possibility of post-mortem survival. At this stage, reductive physicalism, which is the only position that effectively undermines post-mortem survival, is criticized, and the problem of interaction which burdens several of the survival-enabling ontologies is addressed. As for the criterion of scientific compatibility, it is further shown that contemporary physics are compatible with the survival-enabling metaphysics, and that contemporary physics can be argued to provide a moderate positive relevance with regard to these positions. The conclusion drawn is that belief in the possibility of post-mortem survival is not only rationally permissible within the framework of contemporary science and philosophy, but also rationally obligatory, i.e. that this possibility cannot rationally be denied with regard to the reviewed evidence.

The purpose of my thesis seeks to uncover the constructed nature of the Anglo-Saxon ethnicity within two works of fiction. My thesis utilizes London’s The Valley of the Moon (1913) and Norris’s McTeague (1899) because they were published in a similar era. Both authors lived and wrote in the Bay Area during the Progressive Era of American politics. Therefore, there is political, stylistic, and regional proximity. Although Anglo-Saxonism has always been present in the United States, the construction of race was changing in the 1900s. The Valley of the Moon and McTeague both contain intriguing (and antiquated) notions of whiteness that further exacerbate the class struggle in California. This thesis describes the convergence of Progressive politics, eugenics, and Marxism within a unique chapter of American history. Through an exploration of Anglo-Saxonism, this examination of racial classifications is an attempt to reveal the inner workings of oppression in America.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1874 essay "On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life" (HL) presents ideas on how the past ought to be appropriated and how history ought to be written. His 1887 book "On the Genealogy of Morality" (GM) presents an account of the historical development of European morality. Given that Nietzsche appropriates the past through writing in GM, the question arises: does GM put into practice Nietzsche’s earlier ideas from HL concerning how the past ought to be appropriated through the writing of history? I argue that GM does indeed apply some of Nietzsche’s key ideas from HL. In particular, GM remains consistent with HL insofar as it appropriates the past unhistorically, makes use of the monumental and critical modes of history, and appropriates the past in a way that encourages the flourishing of an elite kind of human being. However, Nietzsche’s manner of appropriating the past in GM also diverges from what he espouses in HL. Whereas in HL he emphasizes the usefulness and desirability of forgetting and distorting the past, in GM he exhibits a more notable concern with knowing the truth about the past. I show that this difference in approach is due to the significant change that Nietzsche’s epistemology underwent between the writing of HL and the writing of GM. This difference in approach notwithstanding, the great virtue of illuminating GM through the lens of HL is that it allows us to see more clearly how a lack of concern with truth and knowledge plays a positive role in Nietzsche’s writing of the past in GM. It also helps us to understand why he appropriates the past the way that he does in GM. Just as in HL Nietzsche thought that the past ought to be appropriated in a way that encourages the activity of genius, his writing of the history of European morality in GM is undertaken with the intent to encourage the occurrence and activity of a select kind of human being, a kind of human being that Nietzsche values above all else.

This thesis develops and refines a term used initially by Bill Buford to refer to works of contemporary realism. Dirty realism characterises a strain of realism first appearing in American and Canadian writing during the 1960s and increasing in prominence through the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s. The study focuses on the scholarship surrounding both the term and the works of particular authors, and applies the theories of Fredric Jameson and Michel de Certeau to develop a basic critical vocabulary for engaging the fiction and poetry of Charles Bukowski, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Mark Anthony Jarman, as well as other writers treated with less intensity, such as David Adams Richards, Helen Potrebenko, Al Purdy, and Bobbie Anne Mason. In particular, the dissertation attempts to develop a critical terminology through which to discuss dirty realist texts. The most prominent of such terms, the "hypocrisy aesthetic," refers to dirty realism's aesthetic of contradiction, discursive variance, and offsetting of theory against practice. The chapters of the dissertation deal with the emergence of the hypocrisy aesthetic through a study of literary genealogy, history, and theory. The second chapter, "Dirty Realism: Genealogy," traces the development of major currents in twentieth-century American realism, particularly naturalism. Arguing for dirty realism as a variant of naturalism, the chapter traces the transmission of ideas concerning dialectics, determinism, and commodity production from Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris, through James T. Farrell and John Steinbeck and ending with an extensive discussion of Charles Bukowski's Factotum. The third chapter, "Dirty Realism: History," addresses the impact of the Cold War on the development of dirty realism. Referring to major critics on the period, this section of the dissertation follows the development of hypocrisy as a form of discourse eventuated by Cold War contradictions, particularly between that of democratic freedoms proclaimed abroad and the atmosphere of suspicion and paranoia on the domestic scene (as—in the USA—in the HUAC hearings chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy). / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

“Human/Nature: American Literary Naturalism and the Anthropocene” examines works of fiction from the genre of American literary naturalism that sought to represent the emergence of the environmental crisis known today as the Anthropocene. Reading works by Jack London, Frank Norris, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Charles W. Chesnutt, I show how the genre’s well-known tropes of determinism, atavism, and super-individual scales of narration were used to create narratives across vast scales of space and time, spanning the entire planet as well as multi-epochal stretches of geologic time. This reading expands existing definitions of American literary naturalism through a combination of literary analysis, engagement with contemporary theory, and discussion of the historical context of proto-Anthropocenic theories of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Whereas most earlier understandings of naturalism have focused on human nature as it is determined by environmental conditions, I follow the inverse: the impact of collective human action on the physical environment. Previous definitions of naturalism have only told part of the story of determinism, making it impossible to recognize until now the genre’s unusual capacity to aesthetically capture humanity’s pervasive impact on the planet. Each of the dissertation’s four chapters focuses on a single author, a single aesthetic strategy, and a single problematic in Anthropocene discourse. My first chapter argues that Jack London’s late work (1906–1916) balanced his attempts to understand the human as a species with a growing interest in sustainable agriculture, resulting in a planetary theorization of environmental destruction through careless cultivation. But London’s human-centered environmental thinking ultimately served his well-known white supremacism, substantiating recent critiques that the Anthropocene’s universalism merely reproduces historical structures of wealth and power. Rather than the human per se, Frank Norris put his focus on finance capitalism in his classic 1901 novel The Octopus, embodying the hybrid human/natural force that he saw expanding over the face of the planet in the figure of the Wheat, a cultivated yet inhuman force that is as much machine as it is nature. I show how Norris turned Joseph LeConte’s proto-Anthropocenic theory of the Psychozoic era (1877) into a Capitalocene aesthetics, a contradictory sublimity in which individuals are both crushed by and feel themselves responsible for the new geologic force transforming the planet. While London and Norris focus on the destructive capacities of human agency, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 novel Herland takes a utopian approach, depicting a society of women with total control of their environment that anticipates conceptions of a “good Anthropocene.” Gilman built on the theories of sociologist and paleobotanist Lester Ward as well as her own experience in the domestic reform movement to imagine a garden world where the human inhabitants become totally integrated into the non-human background. Yet Gilman’s explicitly eugenic system flattens all heterogeneity of culture, wealth, and power into a homogenous collective. My final chapter builds on the critique of the Anthropocene’s universalism that runs through the preceding chapters by asking whether and how the Anthropocene can be approached with more nuance and less recourse to universals. I find an answer in the stories of Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman (1899) and the theory of the Plantationocene, which sees the sameness of the Anthropocene not as “natural” but as produced by overlapping forms of racial, economic, and biological oppression. Registering this production of homogeneity and its counterforces at once, Chesnutt models what I call Anthropocene heteroglossia, juxtaposing multiple dialects and narrative forms in stories set on a former plantation, depicting heterogeneous social ecologies as they conflict and coexist in markedly anthropogenic environments.

The thesis deals with history, methods and principles of narration in fine arts since the beginning of history to present days. The problems of stories in pictures are parted to two categories; the inner and outer plane of the story. Each of these narrative planes operate with different procedures. Between these procedures belong compositions, dynamics, rhythm, the usage of symbols, indexes and icons but also the amount of stylization and naturalism. Contemporaneous progressive artistic methods such as comics are the subject of analyses right next to the historical methods of sequential image narration. The thesis observes the methods of composing, working with time and use of the so called gutter as an integral part of the juxtaposed sequences. The analysis' findings are summarised in the personal author production and the didactic evaluation of certain narrative procedures.

The topic of this diploma thesis is the position of scientific realism presented in the framework of naturalized philosophy of science. The aim is to clarify this position and to show that if one denies realism, scientific practice does not make sense. For this purpose main focus is first devoted to the key parts (metaphysical realism, semantic realism, and epistemological realism) which constitute the scientific realism. Next, a detailed analysis of the arguments against and in favor of realism is offered, and concrete examples taken from the sciences are used to illustrate key points. Space is also devoted to the analysis of a physical theory of heat of the 18th and 19th centuries in connection with an antirealist argument directed at the history of science. Also, one of the few fully elaborated antirealist positions, constructive empiricism, is presented and critically evaluated. In a similar fashion, this thesis pays attention to a specific form of realism, called entity realism. Though the resulting image is a thoroughly realist position, this position strives to accurately capture the numerous nuances of the scientific practice, offering a fresh perspective on some of the traditional views.

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