This thesis gathers four American fiction writers from the group labelled as blank fiction writers during the 1980s - Lynne Tillman, Kathy Acker, Joel Rose and Catherine Texier - to suggest that their work does more than represent the flat, stunned prose attributed to blank fiction. Rather, their simple, streetwise yet often lyrical language is politically engaged, debating profound questions about the nature of identity, both of the indi vidual and of the text. The writing, while superficially transparent, is illusory, reflecting the belief that meaning is contextual: this has wide-reaching implications for textuality since the borders of meaning and of the text are contested. While the differences in form and style of these writers are evident, their focus upon the links between language, memory and identity within particular historico-cultural contexts show that they all have interests in the politics of language. The characterisation and narratives of their texts are infused with a degree of self-reflexivity that demonstrates a recognition of their own instability and their contingency upon contexts beyond as well as within the textual borders. By focusing upon the limitations of language to discuss or express identity and memory in concrete terms, these writers ask philosophical and political questions that arguably stand apart from the amoral prose of other writers of blank fiction such as Brett Easton Ellis and Dennis Cooper. Their texts address issues of identity regarding gender, sexuality, race, class, ethnicity and poverty while emphasizing that they cannot be divorced from purely philosophical questions about the nature of being and its relationship to language. Yet these writers move beyond postmodern debates about textuali ty to explore the limits of fiction within the wider cultural contexts of writing at the end of the twentieth century.

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Sixteenth-century England witnessed both unprecedented generic experimentation in the recording of spectacle and a shift in strategies of sovereign representation and subject formation: it is the central objective of this dissertation to argue for the reciprocal implication of these two phenomena. Henry VII, Henry VIII, and Elizabeth I used performance to legitimate their authority. Aristocratic and civic identities, in turn, were modelled on sovereign identity, which was disseminated through narratives in civic entries, tournaments, public progresses, and courtly pageantry. This dissertation investigates the relationship between ritualized social dramas (a marriage, birth, and coronation) and the mechanisms behind the recording and dissemination of these performances in courtly and civic texts in England from 1501 to 1559. Focussing on The Receyt of the Ladie Kateryne (London 1501), The Great Tournament Roll of Westminster (Westminster 1511), and The Quenes Maiesties Passage (London 1559), this project attempts to understand the role performance texts played in developing conceptions of social identity. Specifically, this dissertation seeks to demonstrate that a number of new hybrid genres emerged in Tudor England to record ritualized social dramas. I argue that each of the texts under scrutiny stands out as a unique record of performance as their authors use unprecedented narrative strategies to invest their accounts with “liveness,” situating the reader as a “spectator” of the sovereign within a performative context. An important objective of these hybrid genres was to control the audience/reader’s response to the symbology of performance. Each monarch attempted to influence social and political identities through courtly performance; however, the challenges of governing differed among reigns. While Henry VII struggled against charges of illegitimacy, Henry VIII had to consolidate the loyalties of his nobles, and Elizabeth I came to the throne amidst religious turmoil and anxieties about female rule. Strategies for the performance and recording of sovereign authority shifted, therefore, to account for the changes in England’s political structure. By examining how performance is textualized in these new genres, I attempt to expose the tensions animating the relationships among the monarch, his/her nobility, and the civic authorities. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2009-02-25 22:42:18.684

Review of Selene Scarsi . Translating Women in Early Modern England: Gender in the Elizabethan Versions of Boiardo, Ariosto and Tasso. Anglo-Italian Renaissance Studies Series. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2010. x + 207 pp. index. bibl. $99.95. ISBN: 978–0–7546–6620–2.

I intend to showcase Suzan-Lori Parks's repetitious, supplemental virtuosity, which is a testament to the fluid, indeterminate condition of her concepts. I seek to demonstrate that in textualizing the quality of absence in the written dialogue, Parks's The America Play becomes uniquely deconstructive. For indeed, through the absent "presence" of an historically mythified president and a gravedigger's skewed identity, the play becomes a stage for splinters of historicized, differentiating, repeating signifiers that supplement, even as they redefine, their referential signified. Performing deconstructive thinking, Parks's textuality is accommodated by a content through which she calls attention to the structures of metaphysics in our discourse, stressing our inability to erase them, and our need to question them through continual self-reflexive thinking. I hope to show that Parks's genius is apparent in her unique mastery of language. This kind of mastery is revealed through her drama's connection to conceptual possibilities, which are hypostatize, staged through the materiality of her drama's textual configuration. In consciously imbuing her pages with representational temporal spaces akin to Derrida's différance, Parks shows how the supplemental perpetuity of metaphysical signification phenomenally attests to the conceptual, idealized absence it supplements. I speak here of idealization that underlies the structural signified, always already a supplemented absent, which carries metaphoric trappings of phenomenological substance in a form of the signifier, returning through a morphemic ideality in the assuredness of its infinite return. I read Park's intent in The America Play as inherently deconstructive because Parks dramatizes the enigma of the trace; that is, the enigma of its impossible, yet, relentless repetition. In examining the trace and its historical "genesis" through the Idea in the Kantian sense, I will show how Parks's Rep & Rev, repetitions and revision, textually performs its impossible repetition, which is always metaphysical. In self-reflexively showing the impossibility of metaphysical presences, Parks establishes a need for a persistent practice of deconstructive interrogation, questioning self-assured, metaphysical, dogmatic thinking.

For my MA thesis I propose to examine a series of novels that combine motifs of the body with structural and linguistic experimentation that parallels the state of the bodies within the text. Using Tsitsi Dangarembga's 1988 "bodybildungsroman" Nervous Conditions, Sherley Anne Williams' 1986 neo -slave narrative Dessa Rose, Samuel Beckett's 1938 existential novel Murphy, Vikram Seth's 1986 poetic novel Golden Gate, and Vladimir Nabokov's 1962 poetic novel Pale Fire, I will argue that these texts portray the body as a readable space of culture, a legible site of conflict or creation. I contend that these novels depict the body as either open or contained: osmotically interacting with and creatively responding to its environment, or recursively closed, interacting cancerously only with itself. In addition, using the words of the respective author when available, I will examine the form around the human form-the osmotic openness or recursiveness of the text itself: its structure, genre, and handling of language, as well as the author's deliberate unsettling of reader expectation and conscious cultivation of physical response from the audience.

Masters of Art / The writing of history in postapartheid South Africa constitutes a crisis for the discipline of history as, I argue, it requires the discipline to confront its role in contributing towards the constitution of the condition of possibility of the discourse of apartheid. Stated differently, the relationship between the discipline of history and nationalist or identity politics, a relationship that is characterized by history performing the role of alibi, is highlighted as problematic within the question of the postapartheid. It is in this context that I want to broach the concept of the historical playas an antidisciplinary object that works to unsettle the discipline of history and thereby its role as alibi. Such an engagement with the historical play would, I argue, enable a progressive politics of the sort that Michel Foucault calls for. In his essay 'History, Discourse and Discontinuity' (1972) which he wrote in response to a question posed to him of the possibility of resistance within the corpus of his work, Foucault argues that a progressive politics would be one that takes into account a discourse's conditions of possibility - one that limits the claims of discourses on life through defining their grammars, as it were." While this current study does not seek to, and also does not claim to, subject the discourse of history to such a critique (I am not proposing to investigate the emergence of the discipline), Foucault's understanding of a progressive politics is especially significant to it. Particularly, rather than reading for the grammar of history - this has been done by others such as (but not limited to) Gayatri Spivak, Hayden White and Friederich Nietzsche and will be discussed later - this dissertation starts from the position that the discipline of history played (and plays) a fundamental role in establishing the conditions of possibility of the discourse of apartheid." This is not to argue that apartheid can be reduced to an outworking of nationalist history (apartheid as a discursive field).

Orientador: Álvaro Luiz Hattnher / Banca: Alckmar Luiz dos Santos / Banca: Maria Heloisa Martins Dias / Banca: Susanna Busato / Resumo: Não disponível. / Abstract: Not available. / Doutor

Made available in DSpace on 2016-03-15T19:45:12Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Cassilda Nunes Dutra da Silva.pdf: 1084878 bytes, checksum: 7bb5a268108b8ea1c8bacbfaedf804ff (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-02-25 / Much has been said and written about the difficulty presented by the students in the production of texts with coherence and cohesion, i.e. textuality. The corpus analyzed in this study was composed of ENEM essays, an examination that assesses the skills and abilities of students graduating from basic education. It was searched, therefore, to identify the problems in the productions of texts by students who, theoretically, are ready to attend university. The theoretical research and analysis of the corpus support the hypothesis that the lack of knowledge of basic rules of syntax of the language influences considerably the cohesion and coherence, essential factors to the textuality. It is possible, therefore, to consider the syntax as the hub of textuality. Given the difficulties identified in the corpus analysis, we attempted to present some teaching strategies that can equip the student to acquire the ability to communicate through written texts. / Muito se tem falado e escrito sobre a dificuldade apresentada pelos alunos na produção de textos com coesão e coerência, ou seja, com textualidade. Levantou-se, então a hipótese de que o não conhecimento das regras básicas da sintaxe da língua influencia, consideravelmente, a produção de textos coesos e coerentes. O corpus analisado nesta pesquisa foi composto por redações do ENEM, exame que avalia as habilidades e competências de alunos concluintes da educação básica. Buscou-se, portanto, identificar os problemas presentes nas produções de textos de alunos e refletir sobre a prática no ensino de língua portuguesa. A pesquisa teórica e a análise do corpus comprovaram a hipótese levantada. É possível, pois, considerar a sintaxe como o eixo da textualidade. Diante das dificuldades identificadas na análise do corpus, buscou-se apresentar algumas estratégias de ensino que podem instrumentalizar o aluno a adquirir a capacidade comunicativa por meio de textos escritos.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-03-15T19:46:35Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Maria Camila Bedin.pdf: 911565 bytes, checksum: 0c5820d5b19ac32ae8df287e9be763e2 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-12-10 / Fundo Mackenzie de Pesquisa / The corpus of the present dissertation contains the lyrics of the following songs, written by Chico Buarque de Hollanda Roda-Viva (1967), Apesar de Você (1970), Quando o Carnaval Chegar and Bom Conselho, both from 1972 all produced during the military dictatorship in Brazil and considered as text/discourse that conveys many underlying meanings, which will be revealed by the analyses presented. In order to do that, and to facilitate the comprehension of such meanings, we have followed a schematic sequence in the elaboration of this investigation. We start by briefly presenting the paths traveled by Textual Linguistics, from its origins in Europe in the 60 s, until this day, in order to get to the notions of text and discourse. Such notions will first lead us to textuality and the seven factors which emerge in the linguistic field cohesion; coherence; intentionality; acceptability; informativity; situationality; intertextuality. For the purposes of this work, we will focus on intentionality, acceptability and situationality specifically. After that, we will resort to Discourse Analysis to develop the concepts of subject, ideology, presupposition, subtext and silences, which complement our study. And finally, through linguisticdiscursive analyses, we propose one possible reading, among the many there are, of the lyrics of the songs chosen, which reveal an individual who is disgruntled with the political situation of Brazil and who, despite censorship, managed to convey his message through his samba-duplex" Double Samba). / Constituem o corpus dessa dissertação as letras de músicas de Chico Buarque de Hollanda Roda-Viva (1967), Apesar de Você (1970), Quando o Carnaval Chegar e Bom Conselho, ambas de 1972 produzidas na época da ditadura militar no Brasil e consideradas um texto/discurso que traz muitos sentidos subjacentes, os quais serão revelados nas posteriores análises. Para tanto, seguimos uma seqüência esquemática de elaboração desta investigação, a fim de facilitar a leitura desses sentidos. Iniciamos apresentando de forma sucinta os caminhos percorridos pela Lingüística Textual desde seu surgimento, na década de 60 na Europa, até os dias de hoje, para chegarmos às noções de texto e discurso. Essas noções nos conduzem, primeiramente, à textualidade e seus sete fatores que emergem no campo lingüístico a coesão, a coerência, a intencionalidade, a aceitabilidade, a informatividade, a situacionalidade e a intertextualidade dos quais nos valeremos da intencionalidade, da aceitabilidade e da situacionalidade, especificamente. Na seqüência, recorremos à Análise do Discurso para desenvolver os conceitos de sujeito, ideologia, pressupostos, subentendidos e silêncios, que complementam nosso estudo. Ao final, nas análises lingüístico-discursivas, propusemos uma leitura possível dentre as muitas existentes das letras de músicas selecionadas, as quais revelam um sujeito inconformado com a situação política do Brasil mas que, apesar da censura, não deixa de dar o seu recado através de seu samba-duplex .