Shirley Jackson’s House Trilogy: Domestic Gothic and Postwar Architectural Culture traite de la série de romans gothiques écrits par Shirley Jackson entre 1957 et 1962, de The Sundial à The Haunting of Hill House en passant par We Have Always Lived in the Castle. L’ouvrage situe son rapport au style gothique domestique dans le contexte du discours contemporain sur l’architecture et les formes de l’après-guerre. En particulier, cette étude fait valoir que sa trilogie « House » est une véritable intervention dans l’histoire de l’architecture et le discours domestique, Shirley Jackson utilisant une poétique gothique de l’espace pour évoquer la répétition spectrale des structures de pouvoir et de l’imaginaire idéologique liés à l’architecture. Grâce à son symbolisme architectural approfondi, elle explore la maison américaine et ses racines à travers les mythes et croyances les plus tenaces et les plus discordants du pays, suggérant que la maison elle-même, à la fois structure physique et symbole structurel, est un « fantôme » sociologique qui hante le projet domestique américain. L’auteure nous rappelle que l’architecture et la culture domestiques ne sont jamais neutres et que, bien plus qu’on ne l’a reconnu, sa fiction met en lumière les caractéristiques particulières des formes, des mouvements, des guerres de style et des discours architecturaux ayant activement contribué aux structures culturelles des genres, des classes et des races en Amérique. La carrière de Shirley Jackson, qui s’inscrit dans les deux décennies suivant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, coïncide avec le plus grand boom immobilier de l’histoire américaine, ainsi qu’avec l’une des périodes les plus expérimentales et les plus fébriles de l’architecture américaine. Pourtant, malgré les belles promesses et visions utopiques de cette époque, son architecture et sa culture domestique ont plutôt eu tendance à reproduire les structures de pouvoir oppressives du passé, qu’il s’agisse des normes de genre étouffantes de la maison familiale des années 1950 ou de la ségrégation dans les banlieues. Les maisons de madame Jackson se veulent des allégories gothiques de ce milieu et de sa structure temporelle « fantomatique », marquées par la routine et les revirements angoissants. Chacune des maisons de sa trilogie témoigne de ce que l’on pourrait appeler une « historicité hybride », évoluant à la fois vers le passé et vers l’avenir à travers l’architecture et le discours domestique américains. Dans les manoirs des années glorieuses et les constructions gothiques victoriennes de ses romans, l’auteure satirise l’architecture d’après-guerre et son futur nostalgique, suggérant que les maisons du présent restent hantées par les fantômes du passé. Contrairement à l’architecture de son époque, qui prétendait avoir banni ces fantômes, Shirley Jackson ne cherche pas à échapper aussi facilement aux spectres de l’histoire américaine et de l’assujettissement qui s’y rattache. Plutôt, elle entreprend de les affronter. Pour ce faire, elle pénètre dans la « maison hantée » de l’architecture et de la domesticité américaine : elle l’explore, l’examine, l’interroge et, finalement, la brûle, la met en pièces et la reconstruit. / Shirley Jackson’s House Trilogy: Domestic Gothic and Postwar Architectural Culture considers Shirley Jackson’s suite of gothic novels written between 1957 and 1962, from The Sundial to The Haunting of Hill House to We Have Always Lived in the Castle. It places her treatment of the Domestic Gothic alongside the actual architecture and design discourse of her postwar moment. In particular, it argues that her House Trilogy constitutes an intervention within architectural history and domestic discourse, with Jackson using a gothic poetics of space to suggest the spectral repetition of architecture’s structures of power and ideological imaginary. Through her extensive architectural symbolism, she probes the American house and its roots within the country’s most abiding myths and divisive beliefs, suggesting that the house itself, as both a physical structure and structuring symbol, is a sociological “ghost” that haunts the American domestic project. Jackson reminds us that domestic architecture and culture are never neutral and that, much more so than has been acknowledged, her fiction excavates the specific design features, movements, style wars, and architectural discourses which actively participated in the cultural constructions of gender, class, and race in America. Her writing career — from her first major publication in 1943 to her untimely death in 1965 — coincides with the largest housing boom in American history, as well as one of the most experimental and anxious periods in American architecture. And yet despite the era’s broad promises and utopian visions, its architecture and domestic culture tended to reproduce the oppressive power structures of the past, from the stifling gender norms of the 1950s family home to the segregated suburb. Jackson’s houses are gothic allegories of this milieu and its “ghostly” time structure of uncanny repetition and return. Each of the houses in her trilogy exhibits what might be called a “hybrid historicity,” gesturing at once backwards and forwards through American architecture and domestic discourse. Inside the Gilded Age mansions and Victorian Gothic piles of her novels, Jackson satirizes postwar architecture and its nostalgic futures, suggesting how the houses of the present remain haunted by the ghosts of the past. Unlike the architecture of her time, which claimed to have banished these ghosts, Jackson does not seek to escape the spectres of American history and subjecthood so easily. Instead, she endeavours to face them. In order to do so, she enters the “haunted house” of American architecture and domesticity itself — exploring it, examining it, interrogating it, and, eventually, burning it down, tearing it apart, and remaking it.

This dissertation presents a holistic framework for approaching fantastic school stories: that is, narratives which feature the protagonist’s education in magic. This three-part framework attends to the ways in which the fantastic school story subgenre draws upon the characteristics and possibilities of the school story genre, fantastic literature, and representations of education – in which a hidden curriculum is always inherently present – to create unique opportunities for representing and foregrounding issues and structures within educational institutions and the relationship between education and power. Employing this lens allows for a more nuanced and complex consideration of the impact of fantastic elements in these narratives, examining the ways in which such elements exaggerate, embody, or enforce underlying ideologies and norms and offer encouragement to readers to interrogate these aspects of the text and the mundane educational experiences they encounter. This framework is then used to analyse representative texts in the subgenre and explicate the hidden curriculum of each: ideologies of immutable gender and identity in Jane Yolen’s Wizard’s Hall; the use of testing as a gatekeeping measure to reinforce Pureblood supremacy in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series; the prerequisite of economic capital to access education, undermining the myth of post-secondary studies as social mobility, in Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles; the violence of imperial educational institutions in Lev Grossman’s Magicians trilogy; and the vocational habitus of witchcraft, including gendered divisions and expectations of personal sacrifice, on the Discworld in Terry Pratchett’s “Tiffany Aching” quintet. This framework and these illustrative analyses, by explicating the structures underlying the protagonists’ education and the ways in which they are thereby limited, participate in the projects of developing an emancipatory approach to children’s literature and in consciousness-raising regarding hidden curricula in education. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Texts in the fantastic school story subgenre – that is, narratives about a young person learning how to use magic, often at a school – are a valuable opportunity to explore the relationship between power and education. Here, I present a three-part approach for reading these texts which looks at how these narratives combine elements of the school story genre, fantasy literature, and representations of education to create a unique format. This unique format makes it easier for readers to see underlying structures and issues in education by making familiar elements feel unfamiliar through the addition of magic. I then use this three-part approach to analyse fantastic school stories by Lev Grossman, Terry Pratchett, Patrick Rothfuss, J.K. Rowling, and Jane Yolen. Reading the texts through this lens brings forward issues related to education like gate-keeping, socioeconomic status, imperialism, and gendered norms and divisions.

The year 2014 will mark the centennial of the outbreak of World War I in August 1914. This historic anniversary will likely provoke several discussions from all fields in the humanities concerning the Great War's significance on contemporary culture through history, visual art, and in the case of this essay: literature. In light of this event, any serious discussion among scholars should undeniably begin with how the war continues to be represented today through a thorough, contemporary analysis of its many key literary texts. This essay will examine, in this regard, how past and contemporary discourses in literary theory-primarily concerned with how an individual combatant subject attempts to construct and understand their own traumatic experiences through poetic and literary discourse-can continue to incite discussion on why literature of the Great War and its influential role in defining how it has come to be understood in our cultural memory remains relevant even today. Under the guiding influence of Paul Fussell's classic The Great War and Modern Memory, I will discuss how three important works-a poetry collection, a memoir, and a modern work of historical fiction-all contribute to how the war has become represented as a tragic rupture in history that reversed the idea of human progress and left an entire generation disillusioned in its aftermath, regardless of the historical veracity of this legacy. The texts I will be examining include: select poems of Wilfred Owen, Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves, and Regeneration by Pat Barker. In addition to this, I will conclude with an analysis of how a contemporary reading of these texts can contribute to a larger discussion of the crisis of historicity in our current post-modern cultural landscape.

瑪格麗特‧愛特伍的《瘋狂亞當三部曲》描繪了當代讀者所熟悉的世界: 一個受新自由主義浪潮席捲的社會。當政府權力被龐大財團架空，自由國家的民主核心價值早已崩解。 本篇論文的論點延伸自Chris Vials 的文章，並試圖以新自由主義統治論述來解釋小說中民主與極權融為一體的情況。第一章解釋新經濟思維使個人與社會產生疏離，以統治極端分化的社會階層。第二章則闡述小說中的國家已陷入例外狀態，法律受到懸置，而圍牆的設立強化了排除生命的機制並且產生 “裸命”。在最後的章節將探討上帝的園丁會 “生命-形式” 的革命以及《瘋狂亞當》的主角澤伯所展現的 “無身份” 抵抗的可能性。 如同書中角色，身處於當代的讀者正受到這股 “未來的浪潮” 推進向前卻同時又受到過去的夢靨所困。世界大戰、猶太人集中營不只是已過去的歷史事實，他們以不同形式再現且縈繞不去。如何撿拾過去的傷痛與錯誤，承接死去之人的意志正是我們必須肩負的責任。 / In Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, the author imagines a near future that is too familiar for the reader who live in the contemporary period, a neoliberal society. Through the depiction of a hollowed-out nation replaced by a giant consortium, she lays bare a truth that democracy is going to collapse. Based on Chris Vials’ article, “Margaret Atwood’s Dystopic Fiction and the Contradictions of Neoliberal Freedom,” this thesis furthers to elaborate the integration of democratic regime and totalitarianism by discourse of neoliberal governance: the neoliberal rationality alienates individuals, uniting the divided social stratifications. In the second part, I suggest that the nation falls into an anarchy since it has already entered into a state of exception, which gives rise to “bare life.” The exclusion mechanism is represented by the construction of “the Walls.” The third chapter aims to discuss the possibility of resisting the new form of sovereign power in practice of the God’s Gardeners about how to live “form-of-life” and politics of “(non)-identity” deployed by Zeb, the protagonist of MaddAddam. Like the characters, we stand in the intersection of the “Wave of future” and the recurring nightmare in the past. Global wars and concentration camp are not only historical facts but recurring events. It is our responsibility to recall the memory, remember the pain, and inherit the will of the dead.

In this dissertation I argue that invisible characters, as they appear in Paul Auster’s novels, serve a very specific function within the interpretative framework of a text and that they should be considered to play a functional role, in order to arrive at a more holistic interpretation of the text and a more accurate analysis of said texts. I argue that Auster knowingly includes these characters in his novels as part of his narrative technique, in order for them to serve specific functions and to contribute to the structure of postmodern fiction. I make use of a contextualized close reading of five of Auster’s novels and attempt a hermeneutic interpretation of these novels to arrive at a hermeneutic circle when combining these novels into an integrated whole, individual, work of fiction. Certain parallels can be drawn between Auster’s various novels and these parallels contribute to the various motifs and themes found throughout his work. The importance of space in Auster’s novels is also highlighted with emphasis on liminality which serves as an instigator for transgression to occur between different fictive worlds. / Thesis (MA (English))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2013.

In this dissertation I argue that invisible characters, as they appear in Paul Auster’s novels, serve a very specific function within the interpretative framework of a text and that they should be considered to play a functional role, in order to arrive at a more holistic interpretation of the text and a more accurate analysis of said texts. I argue that Auster knowingly includes these characters in his novels as part of his narrative technique, in order for them to serve specific functions and to contribute to the structure of postmodern fiction. I make use of a contextualized close reading of five of Auster’s novels and attempt a hermeneutic interpretation of these novels to arrive at a hermeneutic circle when combining these novels into an integrated whole, individual, work of fiction. Certain parallels can be drawn between Auster’s various novels and these parallels contribute to the various motifs and themes found throughout his work. The importance of space in Auster’s novels is also highlighted with emphasis on liminality which serves as an instigator for transgression to occur between different fictive worlds. / Thesis (MA (English))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2013.

The focus of fighting tyranny and the justifications of the consecutive wars in fantasy literature for children and young adults play a noteworthy role in the intertwinement of literature and its educational potential. This genre is filled with numerous images of violence, in particular different scenarios of war and its justifications. In the books war constitutes the final battle between good and evil, and thus manifests the protagonists’ ultimate moral decisions between these two forces. The following books constitute the corpus: C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56), Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising Sequence (1965-77), Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (1995-2000), J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997-2007), Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle (2002-11), Amanda Hemingway’s Sangreal Trilogy (2005-07), and P. C. Cast and Kristin Cast’s House of Night novels (2007-2014). Although not all the books feature wars, all display justifications for war and the imperative to fight tyranny. Located within an intersection of diverse critical theories, my thesis engages literary texts in order to reflect on their capacity to negotiate, challenge, subvert, and perpetuate values and power structures. Motif analysis forms the centre of this analysis. I deploy a varied approach to literary analysis, relying upon literary and cultural theories (especially theories of ideology) to understand the realizations of the different motifs. Through issues of character construction, (political) authority, religion, and the construction of difference, the reader learns much about the culture and values of the respective world. Furthermore, this analysis invites the reader to find parallels between the fabricated world and the real world, and thus transfer what s/he has learned from the texts his/her own world. Engaging in such a reading ensures the drawing of direct connections between the reality constructed in the books on the one hand, and politics, the construction of difference, religion, and just war theory in the reader’s world on the other. The content analysis leads to broader cultural messages, which comprise assumptions about gender, power, ethnicity, religion, and morality. This methodology emphasizes the relevance as well as the complexity of the books and their educative potential, and facilitates the analysis of the books as tools for the defence and perpetuation of Western values and culture.

En nous appuyant sur un corpus composé de Silo de Hugh Howey, de la série Divergent de Veronica Roth et finalement de la série The 100 de Morgan Kass, nous analyserons la reconstruction d’une société après l’impact d’un cataclysme ayant de nombreuses conséquences : la chute d’un monde tel que connu jusqu’alors, l’isolation, la perte de structures et la décimation de la majorité de la population. Les œuvres choisies mettent en scène des sociétés déjà reconstruites, où l’apocalypse s’est produite il y a plusieurs générations. Les choix de sociétés mises en place devient alors significatif d’une volonté de mettre de l’avant un certain type de réorganisation postérieure au cataclysme. Nous nous intéresserons donc à cette reconstruction en observant d’abord les éléments qui indiquent ce qu’était la vie sur Terre avant l’apocalypse ; l’apparence et l’état de la Terre avant la catastrophe, mais aussi le type de sociétés établies dans ce monde futuriste. Nous analyserons également le choix des catastrophes en nous questionnant sur les causes et les impacts des cataclysmes choisis (attaque nucléaire, arme biologique, bombardements, etc.). Par la suite, nous nous attarderons à l’instauration et au fonctionnement des sociétés établies dans les différents domaines (politique, économique, judiciaire). Dans notre dernier chapitre, nous nous questionnerons sur les sources de conflits qui viennent troubler le statu quo traduit par l’immobilisme de la société, notamment en ce qui a trait aux événements entourant l’apocalypse (par exemple, les causes du cataclysme sont souvent gardées sous silence par les dirigeants). Finalement, nous interpréterons les thèmes récurrents que partagent les œuvres du corpus.

No description available.

Thesis (PhD)--Macquarie University, Division of Humanities, Department of English, 2007. / Bibliography: p. 239-289. / Introduction -- Fantastic metamorphosis as childhood 'otherness' -- The metamorphic growth of wings : deviant development and adolescent hybridity -- Tenors of maturation: developing powers and changing identities -- Changing representations of werewolves: ideologies of racial and ethnic otherness -- The desire for transcendence: jouissance in selkie narratives -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Appendix: "The great Silkie of Sule Skerry": three versions. / My central thesis is that fantastic motifs work on a metaphorical level to encapsulate and express ideologies that have frequently been naturalised as 'truths'. I develop a theory of motif metaphors in order to examine the ideologies generated by the fantastic motif of metamorphosis in a range of contemporary children's and young adult fantasy texts. Although fantastic metamorphosis is an exceptionally prevalent and powerful motif in children's and young adult fantasy literature, symbolising important ideas about change and otherness in relation to childhood, adolescence, and maturation, and conveying important ideologies about the world in which we live, it has been little analysed in children's literature criticism. The detailed analyses of particular metamorphosis motif metaphors in this study expand and refine our academic understanding of the metamorphosis figure and consequently provide insight into the underlying principles and particular forms of a variety of significant ideologies. / By examining several principal metamorphosis motif metaphors I investigate how a number of specific cultural beliefs are constructed and represented in contemporary children's and young adult fantasy literature. I particularly focus upon metamorphosis as a metaphor for childhood otherness; adolescent hybridity and deviant development; maturation as a process of self-change and physical empowerment; racial and ethnic difference and otherness; and desire and jouissance. I apply a range of pertinent cultural theories to explore these motif metaphors fully, drawing on the interpretive frameworks most appropriate to the concepts under consideration. I thus employ general psychoanalytic theories of embodiment, development, language, subjectivity, projection, and abjection; poststructuralist, social constructionist, and sociological theories; and wide-ranging literary theories, philosophical theories, gender and feminist theories, race and ethnicity theories, developmental theories, and theories of fantasy and animality. The use of such theories allows for incisive explorations of the explicit and implicit ideologies metaphorically conveyed by the motif of metamorphosis in different fantasy texts. / In this study, I present a number of specific analyses that enhance our knowledge of the motif of fantastic metamorphosis and of significant cultural ideologies. In doing so, I provide a model for a new and precise approach to the analysis of fantasy literature. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / [12], 294 p