Einsteinian relativity forever altered our understanding of the metaphysics of time. This study considers how this scientific theory affects the formulation of time in postmodern narratives as a necessary step toward understanding the relationship between empirical science and literary art. Two novels by Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan and Slaughterhouse-Five, exemplify this synthesis. Close readings of these texts reveal an underlying temporal scheme deeply informed by relativity. Furthermore, this study explores how relativity manifests in these texts in light of the block universe concept, Gèodelian universes, and strange loop phenomena. Vonnegut's treatment of free will is also discussed. All of these considerations emphasize Vonnegut's role as a member of the Third Culture, an author who consciously bridges C.P. Snow's two cultures. / by Francis C. Altomare IV. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2010. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2010. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

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This dissertation situates literary modernism in the context of a nascent form of globalization. Before it could be fully acknowledged global encroachment was, by virtue of its novelty, repeatedly experienced as a kind of shattering or disintegration. Through an examination of three modernist novels, I argue that a general modernist preoccupation with space both expresses and occludes anxieties over a globe which suddenly seemed to be too small and too undifferentiated. Building upon recent critical work that has begun to historicize modernist understandings of space, I address the as yet under-appreciated ways in which globalism and its discontents informed all of the locales that modernist fictions variously inhabited. For Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, the responses to global change were as diverse as the spaces through which they were inflected. / I begin by identifying a modernist predilection for spatial metaphors. This rhetorical touchstone has, from New Criticism onward, been so sedimented within critical responses to the era that modernism's interest in global space has itself frequently been diminished. In my readings of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Joyce's Ulysses, and Woolf's To the Lighthouse, I argue that the signs of globalization are ubiquitous across modernism. As Conrad repeats and contests New Imperialist constructions of Africa as a vanishing space, that continent becomes the stage for his anxieties over a newly diminished globe. For Joyce, Dublin's conflicted status as both provincial capital and colonial metropolis makes that city the perfect site in which to worry over those recent world-wide developments. Finally, I argue that for Woolf, it is the domestic space which serves best to register and resist the ominous signs of global incursion. In conclusion, I suggest that modernism's anticipatory attention to globalization makes the putative break between that earlier era and postmodernity---itself often predicated upon spatial compression---all the more difficult to maintain.

Thesis (Ph. D) -- University of Western Sydney, Nepean, 1999. / "An enquiry into the relationship between place and space, and the writiing life, with reference to journals and poetry written by Diane Fahey, and to works by Eavan Boland, Annie Dillard, and May Sarton" -- p. ii. Thesis submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, School of Communication and Media Studies, University of Western Sydney, Nepean. Bibliography : p. 259-264.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Western Ontario, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 112-115).

Thesis (M.A.)--Florida State University, 2004. / Advisor: Dr. Carrie Sandahl, Florida State University, School of Theatre. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed May 20, 2005). Includes bibliographical references.

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

Student Number : 7805464 - MA dissertation - School of SLLS - Faculty of Arts / This dissertation interrogates Anne Landsman’s The Devil’s Chimney. The novel is narrated by the poor-white alcoholic, Connie, who imagines a story about Beatrice, an English colonist living on a farm in the Little Karoo. Connie, who is a product of the apartheid era, interweaves her own story with that of Beatrice’s and, in this way, comes to terms with her own memories, her abusive husband and the new South Africa. Connie deploys the genre of magical realism to create a defamiliarised farm setting for Beatrice’s narrative. She thus challenges the stereotypes associated with the traditional plaasroman and its patriarchal codes. These codes are also subverted in Connie’s representation of Beatrice, who contests her identity as the authoritative Englishwoman, as constructed by colonial discourse. In addition, Beatrice’s black domestic, Nomsa, is given voice and agency: facilities denied to her counterparts in colonial and apartheid fiction. Nomsa’s relationship with Beatrice is also characterised by subversion as it blurs the boundaries between colonised and coloniser. In this regard, the text demands a postcolonial reading. Connie, in narrating Beatrice’s and Nomsa’s stories, reinvents their invisible lives and, by doing so, is able to rewrite herself. In this, she tentatively envisions a future for herself and also potentially ‘narrates’ the nation, thus contributing to the new national literature. The nation is inscribed in the Cango caves, whose spaces witness the seminal episodes in Beatrice’s narrative. In these events, the caves ‘write’ the female body and women’s sexuality and the text thus calls for an engagement with feminism. The caves also inscribe South African history, the Western literary canon, the imagination and Landsman’s own voice. Hence, the caves assume the characteristics of a palimpsest. This, together with the metafictive elements of the novel, invites an encounter with postmodernism.

The non-fiction introduction to The Wyvern’s Tale: A Thought Experiment in Bakhtinian Dual Chronotope Occupation documents the evolution of the novel, The Wyvern’s Tale, from the ideas that inspired it to its current incarnation as a full-length novel intended for an adult audience. It comprises an explanation of the novel’s main concept, Bakhtinian dual chronotope occupation, as well as an idea-focused account of the creative-writing process. Detailed in the introduction’s theoretical premise is the relationship between Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of chronotope and the carnivalesque and the ideal of the divided union in Chalcedonian Christology. This relationship revolves around the state of existing in two time-spaces at once. The novel, The Wyvern’s Tale, explores this dual existence imaginatively using the setting of parallel worlds – the every-day world and a fictional world called Wyvern – as well as a protagonist, who functions in the fictional world as a Christ-figure. Particular thematic emphasis is placed on differing perceptions of truth and reality, and on the transformative power of costumes. The novel’s outcome, dependent on the reader’s decision as to whether dual chronotope occupation is possible or impossible, is respectively either hopeful or tragic. It attempts to reflect the outcome of the life and death of Christ depending on whether his co-existence as God and man was real or imagined.

Orientador: Marcos Aparecido Lopes / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-26T03:34:58Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Roque_MauraVoltarelli_M.pdf: 1840200 bytes, checksum: 6b7c506e1fe78869236b908ac33c4565 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014 / Resumo: Esta dissertação de mestrado realiza um estudo da obra da poeta contemporânea brasileira Dora Ferreira da Silva, buscando compreender alguns de seus procedimentos poéticos fundamentais a partir da análise crítica de sua obra. Dentre esses procedimentos está a realização de um "diálogo com o invisível" por meio do qual a poeta chama e afirma imagens míticas, de um tempo outro, afirmando-as no presente contra a sua desaparição. Neste sentido, sua poética realiza a sobrevivência dessas imagens que voltam e se fazem novamente possíveis no presente, esse tempo de carência, ausente de deuses. Na realização de tal diálogo com o invisível, buscamos também mostrar a constituição do que pensamos ser um lugar fundamental na construção de sua poética: o espaço do entrelugar, essa zona de indefinição, situada em um intervalo, onde a poeta, em um duplo movimento, se situa entre potências opostas, como mito e logos, sombra e luz, morte e vida, que coexistem em sua obra poética, deixando que ela se mostre em sua materialidade, na artesanal operação sobre as palavras, e não se deixe ver, ou não se deixe dizer totalmente, em sua proximidade com o mito. Nesse entrelugar que faz dela, antes de tudo, moderna, a poesia de Dora Ferreira da Silva confunde e indetermina e, como diria Vilém Flusser, fascina, como tudo que ainda não foi descoberto / Abstract: This dissertation realizes a study of the work of contemporary Brazilian poet Dora Ferreira da Silva, trying to understand some of their basic poetic procedures from critical analysis of her work. Among these procedures is the realization of a "dialogue with the invisible" through which the poet calls and affirms the mythical images of another time, stating them at the present against their disappearance. In this sense, her poetic realizes the survival of these images, they come back and become again possible in our time, this time of poverty and penury, absent from the gods. In the realization of the dialogue with the invisible, we also try to show the constitution of what we think is a fundamental place in the construction of her poetry: the space of the between-place, this area of uncertainty, situated in a interlude, where the poet, in a double movement, is between opposing powers such as myth and logos, shadow and light, death and life, that coexist in her poetic work, letting it show in its materiality, artisan operation on the words, and do not get to see, or do not be mean totally, in its proximity to the myth . In this between-place, that makes it, above all, modern, the Dora Ferreira da Silva's poetry confounds and indeterminate and, like say Vilém Flusser, fascinates, as all that has not yet been discovered / Mestrado / Teoria e Critica Literaria / Mestra em Teoria e História Literária