x, 197 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / This dissertation investigates the cultural importance of the "monstrous Other" in postmodern literature, including novels from Sweden, Finland, and the United States. While the theoretical concept of "the Other" is in wide circulation in the humanities and social sciences, the concept has only recently been modified with the adjective "monstrous" to highlight a special case of the Other that plays an important role in the formation of human subjectivity. In order to better understand the representational legacy of the monstrous Other, I explore some of the principal venues in which it has appeared in western literature, philosophy, folklore, and politics. Using a Foucauldian archaeological approach in my literature survey allows me to trace the tradition of the monstrous Other in such sources as medieval bestiaries, the wild man motif in folklore and popular culture, and the medicalization of intersexual embodiment. In all cases, the monstrous Other is a complex phenomenon with broad implications for the politics of subjectivity and the future of social and political justice. Moreover, the monstrous Other poses significant challenges for the ongoing tenability of normative notions of the human, including such primary human traits as sexuality and a gendered, "natural" embodiment. Given the complexities of the monstrous Other and the ways in which it both upholds and intervenes in normative human identities, no single theoretical approach is adequate to the task of examining its functioning. Instead, the project calls for an approach that blends the methodologies of (post)psychoanalytic and queer theory while retaining a critical awareness of both the representational nature of subjectivity and its material effects. By employing both strains of theory, I am able to "read" the monstrous Other as both a necessary condition of subjectivity and a model of intersubjectivity that could provide an alternative to the positivism and binarism of normative subjectivity. The texts that I examine here reveal the ways in which postmodern reconfigurations of the monstrous Other challenge the (hetero)normativity of human subjectivity and its hierarchical forms of differentiation. My reading of these texts locates the possibilities for a hybridized, cyborgian existence beyond the outermost limits of positivistic, western subjectivity. / Committee in charge: Ellen Rees, Chairperson, German and Scandinavian; Daniel Wojcik, Member, English; Jenifer Presto, Member, Comparative Literature; Aletta Biersack, Outside Member, Anthropology

En commençant son étude critique sur Camus, Pierre de Boisdeffre,dans (Métamorphose de la littérature, Proust, Valéry, Cocteau, Anouilh, Camus, Sartre, Verviers, Marabout Université, 1974, p.309), fait le constat suivant:"l'Europe depuis Nietzsche, est à la recherche d'un cinquième Evangile. Qu'elle exalte les nourritures terrestres ou qu'elle communie à sa propre nausée, la littérature contemporaine n'a plus qu'une seule certitude: elle sait que Dieu est mort et s'efforce de le remplacer par l'Homme." En méditant la pensée de Camus à travers ses essais philosophiques, il semble que, même si dans un entretien sur la révolte, ce dernier déclare qu'"il n'est pas humaniste", la question du comment l'homme doit vivre avec ses semblables dans le monde et en société, est au centre de la réflexion philosophique camusienne. Car, l'époque de Camus fut celle où la vie humaine comme valeur et la dignité de l'être humain, furent soumises à une dure épreuve d'être respectées par chaque homme et en tout homme. D'où l'intérêt que l'oeuvre de Camus porte sur la question de la "vitalogie": L'homme peut-il vivre heureux sans le secours de Dieu? Oui ou non, l'homme, peut-il se tuer volontairement ou bien tuer les autres sans raison? L'homme peut-il détruire le monde qui le porte sans détruire sa propre vie? En effet, loin de voir dans la mort raisonnée et dans le suicide une valeur, Camus considère qu'ils sont plutôt un mal que les hommes doivent éviter et faire éviter les autres dans le "vivre-ensemble." C'est pour cette raison que la pensée philosophique chez Camus présente comme l'une des caractéristiques majeures, la "passion de vivre" de l'homme et pour l'homme, car la vie est, selon lui, une valeur cardinale qui doit être respectée en tout être humain dans la communauté qui voudrait être juste, paisible, libre, solidaire et unie. A cet effet, nous soutenons la thèse suivante: La pensée camusienne est une "vitalogie" paradoxale, c'est-à-dire qu'elle est debat philosophique sur la vie de l'être humain, en tant que valeur fondamentale, dans ses rapports avec Dieu, le monde et les autres. Par conséquent, une société dans laquelle les hommes sont habités par la passion de bien vivre et mieux vivre ensemble, il y a une exigence impérieuse pour eux de promouvoir et de crer les valeurs qui favorisent le respect de l'être humain et de sa vie. La vitaogie camuusienne est indissociable de la vision qu'on se fait sur l'homme ici et maintenant, en tenant compte des contradictions ou des antinomies du "oui" et du "non" de l'existence. Selon Camus, en effet, la mission principale de l'homme dans le monde est de vivre: "Oui, mais je n'aurai rien manqué de ce qui fait toute ma mission et c'est de vivre." (Carnets I.p.92). La pensée camusienne est donc une vitalogie. Mais comment l'homme doit-il vivre? Celui-ci, pense Camus, doit devenir "créateur" des valeurs de la justice, de la liberté, de la solidarité, de la paix, de l'amitié et de la fraternité entre les hommes et être courageux, pour assumer la responsabilité de sa vie et de son destin dans le monde, en évitant d'aliéner son esprit dans les illusions, dans quelque absolutisme qu'il soit ou dans un pessimisme tétanisant. Au total, l'homme doit prendre en main sa destinée, en vue de la "joie vivre", sans pour autant perdre de vue que celle-ci ne se sépare pas non plus du "désespoir de vivre." <p> / Doctorat en philosophie et lettres, Orientation philosophie / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Concentrating on six plays in the 1610s, this thesis explores the ways theatrical visual effects described as “strange” channel the period’s moral anxieties about rhetoric, technology, and scepticism. It contributes to debates in repertory studies, textual and material culture, intellectual history, theatre history, and to recent revisionist considerations of spectacle. I argue that “strange” spectacle has its roots in the materialisation of morality: the presentation of moral ideas not as abstract concepts but in physical things. The first part of my PhD is a detailed study of early modern moral philosophy, scepticism, and material and textual culture. The second part of my thesis concentrates on Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (1609-10) and The Tempest (1611), John Webster’s The White Devil (1612), and Thomas Heywood’s first three Age plays (1611-13). These spectacular plays are all written and performed within the years 1610-13, a period in which the changes, challenges, and developments in both stage technology and moral philosophy are at their peak. I set these plays in the context of the wider historical moment, showing that the idiosyncrasy of their “strange” stagecraft reflects the period’s interest in materialisation and its attendant moral anxieties. This thesis implicitly challenges some of the conclusions of repertory studies, which sometimes threatens to hierarchise early modern theatre companies by seeing repertories as indications of audience taste and making too strong a divide between, say, “elite” indoor and “citizen” outdoor playhouses. It is also aligned with recent revisionist considerations of spectacle, and I elide divisions in criticism between interest in original performance conditions, close textual analysis, or historical-contextual readings. I present “strangeness” as a model for appreciating the distinct aesthetic of these plays, by reading them as part of their cultural milieu and the material conditions of their original performance.

Ce projet de recherche explore l’univers narratif de trois auteurs mexicains : Armando Ramírez, Guillermo Fadanelli et Rocío Boliver. En apparence dissemblables entre eux, leurs œuvres partagent une qualité que je propose ici d’identifier de « cynique ». Le cynisme, en tant qu’approche théorique, ouvre des possibilités interprétatives pour les manifestations artistiques, culturelles et politiques dans lesquelles est évident une friction avec les systèmes de valeurs dominantes. À travers différents langages (le roman, le conte, le récit et la performance), l’univers discursif de ces auteurs exprime un malaise envers le monde, réfléchit sur les conflits existentiels du sujet social mexicain et s’approprie de l’écriture, du corps et de la sexualité comme matière de dénonciation pour exhiber les dispositifs politiques avec lesquels vont être façonnées les catégories sociales ainsi que les canons et normes qui vont régler les codes éthiques et esthétiques de l’environnement culturel. En même temps, dans ces productions, le corps et la sexualité émergent comme une irruption et déplacement des discours en amenant l’exercice plein du langage corporel et écrit au bout de l’abjection. Dans le cas d’Armando Ramírez, le caractère cynique se construit à partir de la violence du langage et de l’attaque sexuelle pour dénoncer, depuis la voix du secteur dominé, le conflit historique des classes sociales. En ce qui concerne Guillermo Fadanelli, le cynisme va s’exprimer à partir de la destruction des grands récits qui donnent un sens linéal à l’existence. L’auteur profane l’écriture, les genres littéraires, la famille, la figure maternelle et les tabous sexuels. De son côté, l’œuvre de Rocío Boliver devient cynique lorsqu’elle conteste l’absence d’une représentation positive de la sexualité et de la vieillesse féminine. Cet artiste fait appel à la non-identification avec la religion catholique et les mécanismes de capitalisation du corps. Toutes ces raisons nous permettent de situer ces trois auteurs dans une tradition cynique pas seulement occidentale, mais notamment mexicaine, car cette recherche reconnait aussi la présence historique du cynisme critique dans la production culturelle du pays et dans la construction des identités nationales. / The present investigation explores the narrative universe of three Mexican authors: Armando Ramírez, Guillermo Fadanelli and Rocío Boliver. Despite obvious differences, their works share characteristics that I propose to identify as “cynical”. In this dissertation, we use cynicism as a theoretical approach that makes possible new interpretations of artistic, cultural, and political expressions that have entered into conflict with dominant value systems. Through different narrative genres and idioms (novel, short story, literary essays and performance), these authors’ shared discursive universe expresses a discomfort with the world and reflects on the existential conflicts of the Mexican social subject. The authors appropriate writing, the body and sexuality as prime material for the denunciation of the political devices that configure social categories, as well as the canons and norms that regulate the cultural environment’s ethical and aesthetic codes. At the same time, by taking bodily and written languages to the extremes of abjection, the body and sexuality emerge in these productions as an irruption and displacement of official discourses. Armando Ramírez gives his novel a the cynical dimension by using the violence of language and sexual assault to denounce, with the voice of the subjugated, a long history of class conflict. In Guillermo Fadanelli, cynicism expresses itself through the destruction of universal discourses that give linear meaning to existence. Fadanelli profanes writing, literary genres, the family as a social institution, the maternal figure and sexual taboos. For her part, Rocío Boliver’s work becomes cynical when she questions the absence of a positive representation of female sexuality and old age. She resorts to disidentification with the Catholic religion and the mechanisms of capitalization of the body. This allows me to situate these three authors in the Western, and especially Mexican, cynical tradition, as this dissertation also recognizes the historical presence of critical cynicism in Mexico’s cultural production and in the construction of its national identities. / El presente proyecto de investigación explora el universo narrativo de tres autores mexicanos: Armando Ramírez, Guillermo Fadanelli y Rocío Boliver. Aparentemente disímiles entre sí, sus respectivas obras comparten un carácter que aquí proponemos identificar como cínico. El cinismo, como enfoque teórico, abre las posibilidades interpretativas de manifestaciones artísticas, culturales y políticas en las que se observa una fricción con los sistemas de valores dominantes. A través de distintos lenguajes (novela, cuento, ensayo y performance), el universo discursivo de estos tres autores expresa un malestar con el mundo, reflexiona sobre los conflictos existenciales del sujeto social mexicano y se apropia de la escritura, del cuerpo y de la sexualidad como material de denuncia. Con ello, exhibe los dispositivos políticos con los que son configuradas las categorías sociales, así como los cánones y normas que regulan los códigos éticos y estéticos del entorno cultural. Al mismo tiempo, el cuerpo y la sexualidad emergen en estas producciones como una irrupción y desplazamiento de los discursos al llevar a los extremos de la abyección el ejercicio pleno del lenguaje corporal y escrito. En el caso de Armando Ramírez, el carácter cínico se construye a partir de la violencia del lenguaje y del ataque sexual para denunciar, desde la voz del sector dominado, el histórico conflicto de clases sociales. En Guillermo Fadanelli el cinismo se expresa a partir de la destrucción de los grandes relatos que le dan un sentido lineal a la existencia. Este autor profana la escritura, los géneros literarios, la familia, la figura materna y los tabúes sexuales. Por su parte, la obra de Rocío Boliver se torna cínica cuando cuestiona la ausencia de una representación positiva de la sexualidad y de la vejez femenina, y recurre a la desidentificación con la religión católica y con los mecanismos de capitalización del cuerpo. Lo anteriormente dicho nos permite ubicar a estos tres autores en una tradición cínica no sólo occidental sino particularmente mexicana, ya que este ensayo también reconoce históricamente la presencia del cinismo crítico en la producción cultural del país y en la construcción de las identidades nacionales.

"The Theme of Isolation in Selected Short Fiction of Kate Chopin, Katherine Anne Porter, and Eudora Welty" examines certain prototypical natures of isolation as recurrent and underlying themes in selected short fiction of Chopin, Porter, and Welty. Despite the differing backgrounds of the three Southern women writers, and despite the variety of issues they treat, the theme of isolation permeates most of their short fiction. I categorize and analyze their short stories by the nature and the treatment of the varieties of isolation. The analysis and comparison of their short stories from this particular perspective enables readers to link the three writers and to acknowledge their artistic talent and grasp of human psychology and situations.

Makala haya yanashughulikia maswahli ya udhanaishi katika fasihi ya Kiswahili. Makala yanalinganisha riwaya mbili, Mgeni ya mwandishi wa Kifaransa anayeitwa Albert Camus na Kichwamachi ya mwandishi wa Kiwahili, Euphrase Kezilahabi, na kuonyesha jinsi riwaya hizo zinayofanana na zinavyotofautiana. Kwa vile Kichwamaji inafanana na Mgeni, ni sahihi humwita Kezilahabi mwandishi ya udhanaishi, lakini kuna tofauti nyingi pia baina ya riwaya hizo mbili. Tofauti moja ni kwamba Albert Camus anamtazama mtu peke yake na hali yake iliyotengwa kabisa na watu wengine, na Kezilahabi, licha ya mtu peke yake, anaizingatia jamii nzima na hali yake vilevile. Tofauti hii ni tokeo la sifa za communalism katika mawazo Kiafrika ya kimapokeo yanayotilia mkazo jamaa na jami, siyo mtu peke yake. / This article analyses and compares the the two writings Kichwamaji by Euphrase Kezilahabi and L´etranger by Albert Camus. Written in the tradition of existentialism, the two writings have many similarities but also differ in some important aspects. While Camus sees the individual just by itself, Kezilahabi also includes the whole family and is writing with it in the tradition of the african communalism.

This dissertation claims contributions on two fronts. First, it aims to contribute to the theory of reception with a practical model of reading postclassical texts that substantially engage ancient ones. In the second place, it contributes three individual readings of three important works of literature on which nothing has been written by anglophone classicists working on classical reception: José Watanabe’s Antígona, Christine Brooke-Rose’s Amalgamemnon, and Anne Carson’s Economy of the Unlost. This dissertation’s contribution to the theory of reception is the proposition of a practical schema of reading, which is a figure upon which the imagination can operate. Simply put, it posits a schema as the place where meaning is construed. The schema calls attention to the constructedness of meaning and to the act of construction and organizes different moments of “reception”: that of the postclassical text receiving the ancient one (which the schema imagines as a vertical line) and that of the scholar receiving that particular instance of reception, the “I” of interpretation, which is theorized as one of two axes of transcendence of the schema (the other one being the world of/to which the schema speaks and means). Furthermore, the schema puts the “where” of meaning in the relation of (at least) two texts, but the “of” of meaning belongs to the postclassical texts. The postclassical text receiving ancient text(s) is proposed as a complex work, simultaneously in relationship with texts from the past as well as other texts from other periods. The relations of the postclassical text with each of these texts are different and need to be differently traced or theorized. The relation with the ancient texts is properly textual and thus the primary way of tracing it in the schema is a vertical line that first and foremost pays attention to form, with the tools of structural analysis and philology. Then, the theorization of the vertical line is made thicker with the operation of concepts upon it. As each of these texts (the classical and the postclassical) mean in relation to webs of texts that are relevant to the vertical relation, the schema imagines an additional dimension to the vertical one: the horizontal. Each of the horizontal lines traced for both the classical and the postclassical texts are in one way or another “historicist” readings, they trace contexts for the texts, but the way that context is understood in the theorization of the horizontal dimension of the schema is plural and never saturated. While this horizontal aspect of meaning is understood as textual, the schema also imagines for it an axis of transcendence, the world on which writers write and in which the reader is situated. The first chapter’s primary goal is to provide a reading of José Watanabe’s Antígona using the schema to illuminate the ways in which this text makes meaning in relation to Sophocles’ Antigone and part of the body of texts that have come to form part of that name. This reading counters the predominant approach to this work (and to many a work in classical reception), which reads it allegorically, as a commentary on a particular moment in the history of Peru. That predominant way of reading not only ignores the vertical orientation of the text in relation to its avowed ancient source, it also limits itself to one way of tracing the horizontality of the postclassical text, construing “context” in the most immediate and literal sense. The chapter contributes a reading that opens up Antígona to much more than allegory, highlighting its powerful affective and aesthetic dimension, as well as its intersection with recent feminist readings of the Greek tragedy that turn towards the figure of Ismene and the politics of sisterhood. The second chapter sets itself to the analysis of the complex role that ancient texts play in Christine Brooke-Rose’s radically experimental novel Amalgamemnon. This novel has not been the focus of attention of any work by a classical scholar, and those scholars who have written about it in other fields have failed to analyze the importance that Herodotus’ Histories and Aeschylus’ Agamemnon play at both the structural and the thematic levels. Tracing the vertical line, the chapter shows how these two texts are essential to the novel’s writing and themes. In the horizontal dimension, the schema situates the novel’s engagement with those ancient sources in the context of contemporary feminist discourse, especially as it concerns the question of the possibility of a feminine discourse and an outside of the phallocentric system of signs. That intersection illuminates both how Brooke-Rose is reading the ancient sources as well as what are arguably some of the limitations of her writing in contrast to the ethical commitments of feminisms. Finally, the third chapter is a reading of Anne Carson’s Economy of the Unlost, a text that is perhaps better known than the texts treated in the previous two chapters, at least in the Anglophone world, but which has nonetheless been fairly disregarded in the scholarship. The chapter provides a rigorous analysis of the “work” of this text, of what it does and how it does it, as the scholarship on Carson’s work has failed to posit or satisfactorily respond to the important questions regarding what constitutes the undeniable originality of her writing. In this particular book, which combines academic and poetic discourses into a new form that partakes of both, Carson proposes a comparative mode of making meaning that cannot be captured with a structural analysis of inter- or -trans- textuality, as the previous two chapters construed the vertical dimension of the schema. Instead, the theory of metaphor developed by Paul Ricoeur provides the appropriate tool to imagine the vertical dimension of the schema and analyze Carson’s exercise in bringing an ancient and a modern author together. This particular construction of the schema brings into the terrain of classical reception the possibility of interpretating comparative works that do not fit nicely within the theoretical margins of this subfield of classical studies. Finally, the chapter provides the occasion to trace another aspect of the schema, its other axis of transcendence, which is the “I” of interpretation.

This project explores the intersection of literature and science from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century in the context of this shift in conceptions of space and time. Confronted with the rapid and immense expansion of space and time, eighteenth and nineteenth-century philosophers and authors sought to locate humans' relative position in the vast void. Furthermore, their attempts to spatially and temporally map the universe led to changes in perceptions of the relationship between the exterior world and the interior self. In this dissertation I focus on a few important textual monuments that serve as landmarks on this journey. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the intersection of literary and scientific texts transformed perceptions of space and time. These transformations then led to further advancements in the way scientific knowledge was articulated. Imagination became central to scientific writing at the same time it came to dominate literary writing. My project explores these intersecting influences among literature, astronomy, cosmology, and geology, on the perceptions of expanding space and time.

This dissertation examines Soviet and Polish science fiction from the 1960s to 1980s as a political genre that investigates power and society. The problem of alterity is central for this genre: it is ungovernable because it is incomprehensible. Science fiction of this kind explores the possibilities and impossibilities of living with the Other that can impact social organization dramatically and lethally while that Other cannot be impacted in return. Living peacefully with such alterity is the fundamental premise of pluralism as a principle of social organization, according to the conclusions of the study. The dissertation explores alterity in science fiction by Ivan Efremov (1908–1972), Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (1925–1991 and 1933–2012), Stanisław Lem (1921–2006), and Volodymyr Savchenko (1933–2005). My goal is to reveal in their works a transformative epistemological shift that had manifested itself through the tropes of alterity. Among these tropes the dissertation highlights aliens and alien civilizations, artificial intelligence, anisotropic universe, distant planets endowed with unique natural attributes, the more abstract unknown, and non-human elements running out-of-control within human species. I also examine specifically science-fictional notions such as the bull and progressor, which represent the intelligentsia’s relations with power and the masses. The analyzed literary worlds also represent their authors’ views of alternative societal organization, ruled by the powerful alterity such as a mega-computer or alien super-intelligence. Another important trope of alterity is based upon a simultaneous performance of contradictory competing logics that create an effect known as parallax: the reader may interpret the same characters and/or stories in multiple, mutually incompatible, ways. Beyond avoiding censorship, these tropes set the stage for the authors’ utopias, in which the Other appears as an impenetrable alterity that affects those who encounter it. For these writers, alterity serves as the tool for problematizing progress, as it was imagined after World War II by the majority of political elites under socialism and in the West. I suggest that their science fiction contributed, among many other factors, to the lexicon and the imaginary of a cohort of political dissidents and Communist Party functionaries alike who translated science-fictional themes into political science terms to shape Perestroika’s discourse. The dissertation, thus, establishes a historical connection between Soviet and Polish science fiction of the post-Stalin period and the ways in which democracy was discursively constructed in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and other former socialist nations.