Thèse de doctorat : Anglais : Rennes 2 : 2008. / Bibliogr. f. 421-455. Index des noms.

This thesis has examined some women writers of the 1950s in an attempt to discover if there could be a "women" school of writers as definable as the Black, Jewish or Southern schools which gained recognition during that ten-year period. During the 1950s American literature became fragmented as various minorities began to search into personal histories in order to discover human identities within the framework of race, religion or geography. It was the contention of this paper that women were involved in much the same type of identity search, that through their own literature they were searching out a human identity' within, but not confined to, their sexual role in society.The cliche of the decade is that this was a placid time in feminist history, a time when women docilely sacrificed education and personal talents to return to the in a search for their homes as wives and mothers. However, a study of the works of Sylvia Plath, Carson McCullers, May Sarton and Elizabeth Janeway shows a group of women in active rebellion against the sexual stereotyping so prevalent in the 1950s. Through art these women were rejecting traditional concepts of a "woman's place," and instead were exploring their own talents, strengths and potentials human identity.This thesis has sought to combine a study of the cultural influences operating on society of the 1950s with the literature being written by women during this period in order to more fully understand the female attitude toward herself and her role. This study indicates that the active rebellion of the women's liberation movement a decade later arose from the search for identity found in much literature by women of the 1950s.

This thesis is the first study using contemporary spatial theory, including cultural geography and its precursors, to examine and compare representations of space in the poetry of three mid-twentieth century American poets: Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton. Because of the autobiographical content often foregrounded in their work, these poets have been labelled Confessional. Previous criticism has focused primarily on the ways in which they narrate (or draw on) their personal lives, treating accompanying descriptions of their surroundings primarily as backdrops. However, these poets frequently manifest their affective states by using the pathetic fallacy within structures of metaphor that form a textual mapping of the physical space they describe. This mapping can be temporal as well as spatial; the specific spaces mapped in the poem s present are often linked to memories of earlier life or family. These spaces include psychiatric, general, and penal institutions, parks and gardens, nature (especially coastal settings), and the home (almost always a place of tension or conflict). Each poet addresses these broad types of space differently according to their evolving subjective relationship to them. These relationships are in turn strongly influenced by their social class and gender: for the two women, their experience of their own bodies as prescribed space, in relation to the restrictive and objectifying female role that was imposed on them, is critical. Also, critical in shaping the poets experience of space are post-World-War II socio-cultural and demographic changes in the United States, notably suburbanisation, consumerisation and the consolidation of a therapeutic culture . Interwoven with these influences are major political concerns of the period such as the Cold War with its accompanying surveillance and conformism and the threat of nuclear annihilation. In the work of all three poets, awareness of these modern fears fused with traditional Gothic motifs to permeate their descriptions of spaces with anxiety, bitterness, and even dread in a rejection of the synthetic optimism of the American Century and commercial culture. Other criticism has touched on many of these themes in relation to one or another of the poets, but this study, by way of the theme of space, offers comparison and synthesis that aims to shed new light on their work and its relation to the period during which they wrote.

This dissertation is concerned with Sylvia Plath's late works. Engaging with critical discussion of what constitutes the corpus of Ariel, I show that an appreciation of the editorial history reveals the beginning of a third book (the last poems), and opens up those difficult texts to fresh enquiry. Recent work in Plath studies has focused on visual art. Kathleen Connors and Sally Bayley's Eye Rhymes examines Plath’s own artwork in ‘an attempt to answer the question, How did Plath arrive at Ariel? (1) I contribute to that discussion, but also ask the questions, How did Plath leave Ariel behind and arrive at the even more remarkable last poems, and how did visual art enable those journeys? I argue that Ariel’s characteristically lucid style is informed by the dismantling of depth perspective in Post-Impressionist painting, and by the colour theory and pedagogy of the Bauhaus teachers. My work is underpinned by an appreciation of Plath’s unique cultural moment in mid-century East Coast America. I show how Plath’s knowledge of the theories, practice and iconic images of visual art, from the old masters to the Post-Impressionists, offered new possibilities for stylistic development. Working with archival materials including annotated works from Plath’s personal library and drafts of her poems, as well as published material, I examine the synthesis of visual and literary influences. Demonstrating specific textual relations between Plath and the work of Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats, as well as other poets, I show that Plath’s visual poetics combine influences from the modern poets with her New Critical training and with painting and sculpture. I offer new readings of rarely discussed poems, such as ‘Totem’, ‘The Munich Mannequins’ and ‘Child’, as well as fresh insights into the well known works, ‘Tulips’, ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’, ‘Fever 103º’, and ‘Edge’.

Following a close reading strategy, the research seeks to discover what the intratextual relations of each selected poem, three by Ingrid Jonker and three by Sylvia Plath, reveal. Flowing from the thematic overlaps that exist between the selected Jonker poems and Plath poems, it explores what similarities or differences in poetic form, the use of poetic devices and content, in other words intratextual relations, can be discovered via a comparison. Given that Jonker and Plath were contemporaries and shared biographical events, and after having considered and compared the intratextual relations of the selected poems, the research seeks to show what similarities or differences can be discovered in the exploration and comparison of the intertextual and extratextual relations of the selected poems. Thus, the thesis’ critical approach includes the close investigation of the structure of each of the selected poems, in order to discover its communication first, before delving into biographical, historical, social, political, and thematic approaches and interpretations. The research reveals that exercises of close reading, with a few exceptions, have not been the main focus in the discussion of either poet’s poetry. In other words, context has, for the most part, been favoured over text and over form. What the research reveals is that there are overlaps in the intratextual, intertextual, and extratextual relations of the selection of poems, but also differences. A comparison of intratextual relations reveals Plath’s formal training in comparison to Jonker’s largely informal training, for example, and that generally Plath was the more disciplined author of the two. The intertextual and extratextual relations of each poem (and how these relations compare) reveal and highlight that the selection of poems is a reflection or sampling of the poets’ ‘own’ voices. It also reveals the development of their maturity as writers and the development of themes across their poetry and collections of poems. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2014. / gm2014 / Afrikaans / unrestricted

Spanning forty years apart, the short story “Miss Sophia’s Diary” (1926) by Ding Ling and The Bell Jar (1963) by Sylvia Plath can speak to one another in revealing the position of women in a revolutionary new era. The two stories may be generationally and geographically distant, yet both hold a collective female consciousness in the context of the emerging modernist epoch. By examining these two pieces of literature in relation to one another, similar attitudes and stylistic trends emerge regarding the treatment of women. The common archetypes, for each respective time and country, imprinted onto women are at some points accepted but also rejected in these two female-focused stories. In disregarding many of the traits associated with the modern woman, Ling and Plath mold a unique feminine persona to capture the essence of what a true woman can and should be. Not only does the likeness of the works contribute in establishing a global feminist ideal, it is in the differences where cultural and generational attitudes can be investigated. What the pillar of feminism represented in early 1920s China differs significantly from 1950s United States of America. Though these differences can be signs of progression for woman’s rights, there are many of the same anxieties surrounding women that have lingered on for decades. This thesis will conduct a comparative study on how the “Miss Sophia’s Diary” and The Bell Jar posses the unique variations of the modern woman. Furthermore, with the use of a web-based corpus analysis program, this thesis sets out to probe selections from both works linguistically. Doing so will uphold a clearer image as to each texts’ word associations when discussing women and can further reveal how the construction of each female persona compares to one another. Overall, this thesis dismantles borders of both time and space to expose the true meaning behind the modern woman’s role in a largely demeaning and patriarchal world.

This dissertation is a collection of poems preceded by a critical preface. The preface considers emotional immediacy—or the idea of enacting in readers an emotional drama that appears genuine and simultaneous with the speaker's experience—and furthermore argues against the common criticism that accessibility means simplicity, ultimately reifying the importance of accessibility in contemporary poetry. The preface is divided into an introduction and three sections, each of which explores a different technique for creating immediacy, exemplified by Robert Lowell’s "Waking in the Blue,” Sylvia Plath's "Lady Lazarus,” and Louise Gluck's "Eros." The first section examines "Waking in the Blue,” and the poem's systematic inflation and deflation of persona as a means of revealing complexity a ambiguity. The second section engages in a close reading of "Lady Lazarus,” arguing that the poem's initially deliberately false erodes into sincerity, creating immediacy. The third section considers the continued importance of persona beyond confessionalism, and argues that in "Eros," it is the apparent lack of drama, and the focus on the cognitive process, that facilitates emotional immediacy.

This study takes as its focus Ted Hughes’s composition techniques throughout his career, arguing that his self-conscious experimentation with the processes by which he wrote affected the style and subject matter of his work. Hughes’s poetry has lent itself to a number of familiar critical approaches, focusing on his preoccupation with mythology, his interaction with the natural world and his creative partnership with his first wife, Sylvia Plath. Yet no study, until now, has looked systematically at his literary drafts and the extent to which Hughes’s method of composition radically altered during his writing career. Archive material at Emory University, accessible since 2000, and new archive materials held at the British Library and made available for study for the first time in 2010, have opened up possibilities for much greater depth of research into Hughes’s writing processes and the birth and evolution of individual poems. By engaging with these materials, my research complements new studies which are tackling under-examined areas of Hughes’s work, whilst contributing more broadly to an increased awareness of the central importance of archival work in the study of literature. Literary manuscript drafts have often been used to study writers whose writing methods consciously foreground the drafting process. Whilst Hughes has not previously been considered in this light, my original investigations into his archival materials reveal a poet for whom the nature of the compositional process was a central concern which defines and redefines his poetry across his career.

The Master's Thesis deals with the theme of coming-of-age in American literature. The aim of the theoretical part is to provide theoretical framework and the subsequent examination of common narrative strategies and themes characteristic of this specific genre. We will focus more closely on the three key themes of identity, sexuality and death. In the practical part of this thesis these main themes and their use will be examined in selected novels of American literature; Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and Jeffrey Eugenides The Virgin Suicides.

Mad Pursuits: Therapeutic Narration in Postwar American Fiction examines three mid-century American novels—J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963)—in relation to the rise and popularization of psychoanalytic theory in America. The study historicizes these landmark novels as representing and interrogating postwar America’s confidence in the therapeutic capacity of narrative to redress psychological problems. Drawing on key concepts from narrative theory and the multidisciplinary field of narrative and identity studies, I argue that these texts develop a multi-layered, formal problematization of therapeutic narration: the narrativization of the self through modes of interpretation based on character action and development. The study, thus, investigates how the texts both critique the purported effectiveness of being healed through narrative means, as well as how they problematize their society’s investment in this method. I propose that the novels ultimately explore submerged possibilities for realizing what I call fugitive selves by creating self-representations that negotiate and exceed the confines of the paradigmatic models of plot and character of the period. In Chapter One, I argue that the ego and pop psychological movements during the postwar era encouraged the American public to define and realize psychological health, success and happiness through narrativized means. I show in Chapter Two how careful differentiation between narrative levels of interpretation in The Bell Jar reveals the novel’s complication of the self created in narrative, with and against the socio-cultural scripts and therapeutic assumptions of the period. Chapter Three concentrates on The Catcher in the Rye’s various methods of de-composing the narrative identity of the subject created through developmental and therapeutic narration. In the final chapter, I read Invisible Man as a satire of postwar psychoanalytic theory and method specifically concerning racialized narrative identities, and as a reflection on a method of enduring psychological illness. The Conclusion brings together several argumentative strands running throughout the dissertation regarding what the novels contrastively reveal about the perils, and even the possibilities, inherent in the narrativizing of the self in early postwar America.