在過去的二十年中，隨著1989 年的革命（以及之後突進的新自由主義經濟政策），信息和通信技術（ICT）的擴散，世界經歷了急劇變化。但高等教育，尤其是英文文學研究有没有根據這一時期的文化、經濟、社會和政治的情況來修正呢？本論文探討從現代主義美學和片面國家論述的小說（英文書寫的），過渡到一個文化和政治驅動並行的後現代形式，及反映一個日益全球化和全球意識的二十一世紀引人注目的問題。通過當代小說的新自由主義全球化的測試 ──或者也被稱為後現代的情况和晚期資本主義的文化邏輯──我們了解世界據稱走向非殖民化只不過掩飾另一種殖民方式，導致葛蘭西的霸權理論效果，使馬克思主義理論的社會力量轉變成促使不同階級的政治權力形式，取決於一個非常關鍵的因素- 共識。 / The world has experienced rapid changes in the last twenty years concomitant of the Revolutions of 1989 (and the subsequent onrush of neoliberal economic policies) and the proliferation of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), but has higher ed,and particularly, the study of English literature modified in accordance to the cultural, economic, social, and political circumstances of the period? This thesis explores the compelling question by illustrating the transition of contemporary literary fiction (written in English) from modernist aesthetics and one-sided national discourse into a culturally and politically driven postmodern form to parallel and reflect an increasingly global and globally aware 21st century. Through contemporary fiction’s examination of neoliberal globalization - or perhaps what is also known as the postmodern condition and cultural logic of late capitalism - we come to understand a return of colonization in a world allegedly moving towards decolonization. What results is the Gramscian theory of hegemony, which gives rise to a Marxist theory of the transformation of social forces into forms of political power adequate to different class projects that depends on a very crucial factor - consensus. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Tchan, Chrystal Ching. / "December 2012." / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2013. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 105-110). / Abstracts also in Chinese. / Abstract --- p.i / Table of Contents --- p.ii / Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter One: --- Nationalism and the Decline of Empire --- p.15 / Chapter Chapter Two: --- The Reflexive Resurgence of Local and National Formations in Hari Kunzru’s Transmission --- p.42 / Chapter Chapter Three: --- Technocapitalizing Spooks in William Gibson’s Spook Country --- p.66 / Conclusion --- p.103 / Bibliography --- p.105

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Nevada, Reno, 2005. / "August, 2005." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 217-227). Online version available on the World Wide Web. Library also has microfilm. Ann Arbor, Mich. : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [2005]. 1 microfilm reel ; 35 mm.

Thesis (M.A.) -- Georgia State University, 2007. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on 25 Apr., 2008). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Acadia University, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 103-106) and index. Also available on the Internet via the World Wide Web.

published_or_final_version / Literary and Cultural Studies / Master / Master of Arts

This comprehensive analysis of T. S. Eliot's literary-critical corpus provides both a long-overdue reassessment of the nature and extent of his commitment to notions of aesthetic autonomy, and an Eliotic critique of the hypostatization of art that characterizes both philosophical postmodernism and its literary-theoretical derivatives. / The broader context for these two primary objectives is the "ancient quarrel" between the poets and the philosophers and its various manifestations in the work of a number of prominent post- and anti-Enlightenment thinkers. Accordingly, I begin by highlighting several fundamental but much-neglected (or misunderstood) features of Eliot's critical canon that testify to his life-long preoccupation with this still resonant issue. Specifically, I demonstrate that there is a logical connection between his sustained opposition to those who seek in literature a substitute for religious faith or at least philosophic belief, his critique of various more or less sophisticated forms of generic confusion, and his robust defence of the integrity of different discursive forms, social practices, and disciplinary domains. In anticipation of my Eliotic critique of philosophical and literary-theoretical postmodernism, I then locate Eliot's account of these characteristic features of "the modern mind" within the context of Jurgen Habermas remarkably congenial The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. / In successive chapters, I next provide detailed analyses of Eliot's account of the discursive and functional integrity of art, literature, poetry, and criticism. By way of providing additional support for the concept of "integrity," and indicating its relevance to contemporary debates about the relationship between literature, criticism, and philosophy, I advert to the work of a number of other contemporary philosophers, John Searle, Goran Hermeren, Monroe Beardsley, Peter Lamarque, Paisley Livingston, and Richard Shusterman chief among them. I then demonstrate that Eliot's critique of the hypostatizing and levelling tendencies of many of his predecessors and contemporaries can itself legitimately be brought to bear on the similar practices of contemporary postmoderns such as Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty. / I conclude by suggesting that a return to Eliot's literary critical corpus is both timely and instructive, for it provides a much-needed corrective to some late twentieth-century trends in literary studies, and, in particular, to the influence of philosophical postmodernism upon it.

This study calls for a re-evaluation of contemporary regionalist literary theory. It argues that traditional models of the discourse have been too heavily influenced by nineteenth century realist aesthetics and political ideologies. Because most scholars continue to interpret regionalist texts according to a resolutely empirical reading of geography, literary regionalism has fallen out of touch with the new kinds of "unrealistic," generic landscapes that now dominate North American culture in the postindustrial era. Drawing heavily on recent work by postmodern geographers such as Edward Soja, David Harvey, Michael Dear and Derek Gregory, this project updates regionalist theory by "re-placing" the artificially stabilized reading of geography that dominated the nineteenth century with a more self-consciously spatialized reading of what Soja calls our contemporary "real-and-imagined" places. By grafting together traditional regionalism and postmodern spatial theory we improve on both contributing discourses. In a "postmodern-regionalist" literary criticism, traditional regionalism sheds its reputation for theoretical naivete, while the elusive abstractions of postmodern theory gain a real-world referent, and a specific geographical index. When we "read postmodernism regionally" - - when we aggressively interrogate where this kind of fiction comes from and the places it represents - - we realize that the canons of postmodern fiction in Canada and the United States have been influenced by two very different spatial epistemologies. Rather than being "determined" by their real geographies, Canadian and American postmodernism have been more directly influenced by two different readings of geography. Works by Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, and Don DeLillo demonstrate that American postmodernism often interprets social space according to what Henri Lefebvre calls the idealistic "the illusion of transparency," while texts by Canadian postmodernists such as Robert Kroetsch, Wayne Johnston and Guy Vanderhaeghe tend to fall under Lefebvre's more materialistic "illusion of opacity." The ambiguous figure of Douglas Coupland - - a Canadian writer most critics treat as an American - - puts the spatial conventions of postmodernism in both countries in sharp relief. In an American postmodernism, dominated by generic suburban settings, regions will almost always be seen as imaginary projections, while in a Canadian postmodernism, dominated by the Prairies, regions will almost always retain some sense of their material reality.

This thesis evaluates and re-evaluates the relationship between the works of Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Martin Amis through a detailed examination of their published works, and attempts to locate this relationship in the context of the central moral uncertainties of post-1945 British fiction. Most previous critical studies of these authors have tended to discuss the relationship between Kingsley Amis and Martin Amis in terms of an opposition between the father's realism and the son's postmodernism, and have debated Philip Larkin's influence upon Martin Amis only tangentially. Against this trend, this thesis argues that these three authors share a commitment to literature as a public, moral act, and, in particular, that their works share the intention of articulating a number of closely related secular 'human values' which map out a potential post-Christian morality in British society. The thesis also examines a common tension within their oeuvres inimical to such hopes - the fear that the possibilities of rational self-scrutiny and of becoming 'less deceived' have been discredited by the history of the twentieth century, and that this history instead evidences the dominance of irrational and self-destructive tendencies in the human. These fears, it is further claimed, are implicated in the works of all three authors in a tendency towards the construction of Edenic myths, deterministic simplifications, and despairing devaluations of the value of human life. Overall, this thesis makes the case for the significance of the common concerns of Martin Amis, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin's works in the context of contemporary literary studies: their efforts to create in art an unpretentiously 'public space' for the address of burning moral and existential issues, and their unresolved struggles with the question of what it might mean to live a good life in a society which no longer possesses religion as a common moral language.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Texas, Dec., 2007. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.