Latin erotic poetry is an important genre recording surviving examples of male friendship. This report argues that a specific group of poems involving the poet and his powerful friend should be identified and studied separately as a sub-genre. Drawing examples largely from Horace, Catullus and Propertius, I argue that homosocial erotic poetry exploits the same repertoire of generic conventions as erotic poetry, but reshapes some of them for different functions. To articulate the erotic emphasis and the generic concern of this report, Eve Sedgwick’s notion of “homosocial desire” (1985) is introduced. The concept of homosociality is useful in revealing how male desire in our sub-genre has an erotic tinge and functions to foster the social bond of male friendship, but precludes the homoerotic possibility. Chapter One introduces the important terms and methodology chosen for this study, while Chapters Two to Four define and describe three distinctive features of the sub-genre. Chapter Two is devoted to showing that sermo amatorius, the “love speech” often featured in romantic relationships, can be assimilable to the structure of male homosocial relations. Chapters Three and Four examine how the sub-genre reshapes the recusatio and the topos of wealth to negotiate the tension of desire between the poets and their powerful friends. Ultimately, this report argues that male homosocial desire motivates the sub-generic conventions and thereby the seemingly disparate poems constitute a coherent sub-generic classification. / text

This thesis examines the relationship between the fiction of James Joyce and the theological practices outlined by Ignatius of Loyola. By deliberately foregoing claims of direct or simple influence, the thesis illustrates the way in which Loyola's concepts of belief, irony, discernment, and indifference illuminate the operations of the Joycean text. These operations in both Loyola and Joyce are themselves best explicated through the use of Kleinian psychoanalytic theory. Klein and her followers analyze dynamics of belief, representation, and meaning as products of frustration. Loyola and Joyce both force the reader into symmetrical situations of frustration, and Kleinian analysis helps us see how Joyce uses his texts as a kind of exercise for the reader-an exercise of productive frustration, disappointment, and loss. I trace the way this loss can turn reading into a reparative act, one that moves through the Kleinian 'paranoid-schizoid' position into a more productive, contingent, depressive position. I thus address Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick's proposal for reparative reading. By examining both Loyola's and Joyce's engagement with (and invitations into) frustrating, paranoid reading, I show how this engagement might become reparative. The thesis begins with an analysis of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises, finding there a specific structure of 'earnest irony.' It continues with a close reading of 'The Dead,' discerning how this structure operates in the Joycean text at the levels of both content and narration. It then takes up Kleinian theory directly to see precisely what paranoid reading-of the kind both Joyce and Loyola demand-accomplishes, and what its failure achieves. Its final two chapters consider A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where it finds the narrative apparatus forcing the reader into a particular form of productive frustration, and Ulysses, which requires the greatest form of 'earnest irony' from the reader.