This dissertation explores how a solitary writer becomes a social writer, entering into the industrial and community relations of mass publishing. A significant part of this transformation is managed through writing organizations which mediate between the corporate world and individual writers. Despite being one of the most prolific and commercially successful book-markets in a time when both publishing and reading are perceived to be under threat, romance fiction, because of its gendered and classed status, is often neglected by the academy and patronized in the media. Researched through observation of the largest romance writers groups in Canada, which I call City Romance Writers, this dissertation explores how writers’ associations help shape would-be writers into players in the professional market, negotiating the boundaries between professional and amateur, local and global, creative and market-driven. It explores how romance writers organize to manage risk and uncertainty in the publishing industry and how they make claims to legitimacy and authority in the public sphere. Finally, it examines how structures of gender, race and class shape the communities romance writers form and the claims they make. I argue that romance writers’ discourses and practices surrounding writing and publication are a revealing terrain for the exploration of contemporary issues of media production, flexible labour, gender and community. In part because of the particular characteristics of romance writing itself, these themes are also underpinned by the constant presence of love, as a discourse, an activity and a story. While revealing the importance of affective discourses of passion and love in mobilizing writers to embrace their own flexibility, this dissertation also argues that writers’ affective relationship with their writing is not fully contained by capitalism.

This dissertation explores how a solitary writer becomes a social writer, entering into the industrial and community relations of mass publishing. A significant part of this transformation is managed through writing organizations which mediate between the corporate world and individual writers. Despite being one of the most prolific and commercially successful book-markets in a time when both publishing and reading are perceived to be under threat, romance fiction, because of its gendered and classed status, is often neglected by the academy and patronized in the media. Researched through observation of the largest romance writers groups in Canada, which I call City Romance Writers, this dissertation explores how writers’ associations help shape would-be writers into players in the professional market, negotiating the boundaries between professional and amateur, local and global, creative and market-driven. It explores how romance writers organize to manage risk and uncertainty in the publishing industry and how they make claims to legitimacy and authority in the public sphere. Finally, it examines how structures of gender, race and class shape the communities romance writers form and the claims they make. I argue that romance writers’ discourses and practices surrounding writing and publication are a revealing terrain for the exploration of contemporary issues of media production, flexible labour, gender and community. In part because of the particular characteristics of romance writing itself, these themes are also underpinned by the constant presence of love, as a discourse, an activity and a story. While revealing the importance of affective discourses of passion and love in mobilizing writers to embrace their own flexibility, this dissertation also argues that writers’ affective relationship with their writing is not fully contained by capitalism.

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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / Until recently little attention has been paid to Latin American women writers and even less to those of them who are Jewish. This dissertation is an attempt to remedy that situation through the study of four contemporary Argentine Jewish women writers. My introduction explores theoretical issues relating to the specificity of both Jewish and women's writing. Chapter One considers the work of Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972). Although a Jew by birth, she shows very little overt Jewish influence in her work because she did not acknowledge her heritage. However, her background appears obliquely throughout her writing, for example, in many biblical references. Pizarnik's perspective on women is equally elusive, but nonetheless can be traced in her treatment of love and loss. Ana Maria Shua (1951- ), whose writing is the subject of the second chapter, is openly Jewish and unavowedly feminist. I study those aspects of her work that can be considered Jewish, such as her interest in the immigrant experience and her recounting of traditional Jewish folk tales. Although Shua does not admit to being a feminist, her books portray female dominance over men, particularly in El marido argentino promedio. Chapter Three centers on the writings of Manuela Fingueret (1945- ). Traditional customs, the Yiddish language and biblical references appear in her fiction and poetry. She depicts her female characters as strong and independent. Her poetry contains an element of eroticism, which she presents from a distinctively feminine perspective. The final chapter studies the work of Alicia Steimberg (1933- ). Steimberg's characters indicate contradictory feelings about being Jewish. Steimberg, like Shua, deals with the Jewish immigrant experience; she focuses on women, many of whom work outside the home. Steimberg's treatment of eroticism is idiosyncratically straightforward in its emphases. The dissertation's epilogue summarizes its conclusions and points the way for additional work to be done on Latin-American Jewish women writers. / 2031-01-01

À l’aube du XXIe siècle, le style-Minuit s’offre d’abord comme une construction critique. En effet, depuis les années 1950 et le mouvement du Nouveau Roman, aussi appelé école de Minuit, les récits publiés aux Éditions de Minuit sont perçus irréductiblement par l’histoire littéraire comme des productions homogènes. Ainsi, les écrivains "impassibles" ou "minimalistes" puis "ludiques" auraient succédé aux Nouveaux Romanciers et, jusque dans les années 1990, le mythique éditeur, Jérôme Lindon, aurait découvert trois écoles stylistiques. Les critiques littéraires contribuent également à perpétuer dans la presse l’idée d’un style-Minuit. Entre 1999 et 2009, les journalistes représentent, dans un discours métaphorique et métonymique qui joue sans cesse d’un glissement sémantique sur la lexie polysémique "style", le style-Minuit en tant qu’objet sociocritique stéréotypique. Mais, si l’on entend par style ce qui fait événement dans la langue, peut-on encore faire l’hypothèse selon laquelle il existe un style-Minuit ? Passée au crible d’une étude à la fois synchronique et diachronique, la langue littéraire des écrivains Minuit nés entre 1964 et 1973 (Éric Chevillard, Éric Laurrent, Laurent Mauvignier, Marie NDiaye et Tanguy Viel) révèle un méta-patron discursif composé de traits de style supra-individuels. Ainsi, une analyse approfondie de la ponctuation, la syntaxe et l’énonciation permet de dégager non seulement la singularité langagière de chaque écrivain mais aussi les convergences de pratiques stylistiques qui définissent bien un style collectif Minuit. / In the early twenty-first century, the “style-Minuit” can be first approached as a critical construction. Indeed, since the fifties literary movement called the Nouveau Roman (the New Novel), also known as the Minuit School, books published by Editions de Minuit have been received by the literary world as homogeneous productions. Thus, the “impassive” or “minimalist” writers, then the “ludic” ones would have followed the Nouveaux Romanciers and upto the nineties, the mythical publisher, Jérôme Lindon, would have discovered three stylistic schools. Literary critics also contribute to perpetuate the idea of a style-Minuit in the media and between 1999 and 2009 journalists have depicted the Minuit-style as a stereotypical socio-critical object through a metaphorical and metonymical discourse playing constantly with several meanings of the word “style”. However, if we restrict the meaning of style to what makes “an event in language”, can we still pretend there would be a “style-Minuit”? Examining on both a diachronic and a synchronic level the literary language of a generation of writers all born between 1964 and 1973 (Éric Chevillard, Éric Laurrent, Laurent Mauvignier, Marie NDiaye et Tanguy Viel) reveals a common pattern composed by similar stylistic figures. Therefore a deep analysis of punctuation, syntax and discourse makes it possible to highlight first the linguistic uniqueness of each writer but also the convergences of some stylistic practices which properly delimit the collective “style- Minuit”.

The Writers’ Union of Canada was founded in November of 1973 “to unite Canadian writers for the advancement of their common interests.” Drawing on extensive archival collections – from both the Writers’ Union and its member authors – this dissertation offers the first critical history of the organization and its work, from pre-founding to the early 1990s, arguing that the Writers’ Union has fundamentally influenced Canadian literature, as an industry, as a community, and as a field of study. I begin by tracing the contextual history of the organization’s founding, interrogating how union organizing, celebrity, and friendship underpin the organization’s work. Chapter One discusses the Writers’ Union’s programs, reforms, and interventions aimed at ‘fostering’ writing in Canada as I argue that the Union was instrumental in building a fiscal-cultural futurity for CanLit. In Chapter Two, I consider the role that women played in this important work, as I highlight the labour of female Union members and the all-female administrative staff, who maintained and supported the organization’s work through its first twenty years. In Chapter Three I draw attention to the stories of, perspectives of, and experiences of BIPOC authors in relation to the Writers’ Union. While the Writers’ Union’s involvement in race relations is often positioned as having ‘begun’ with the Writing Thru Race conference in 1994, this chapter uses the archives to reveal a much longer trajectory of racialized conflict within and around the organization, providing important context for the very controversial and public battles about appropriation and race that would explode in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Throughout this work, I look to see how institutional narratives are deployed and upheld, and to what ends; how successful advocacy work is often effaced and forgotten; how institutional structures function; and how their boundaries and intentions are challenged and developed over time. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / The Writers’ Union of Canada was founded in November of 1973 “to unite Canadian writers for the advancement of their common interests.” Drawing on extensive archival collections – from both the Writers’ Union and its member authors – this dissertation offers the first critical history of the organization and its work, from pre-founding to the early 1990s. I argue that the Writers’ Union has fundamentally influenced Canadian literature – as an industry, as a community, and as a field of study – as I consider how unionism, literary celebrity, and friendship underpinned the organization’s work. This dissertation recuperates and comments on the important volunteer labour of Writers’ Union members in the service of literary labour, gender equity, and racial equity over the organization’s first twenty years.

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The overall aim of the thesis is to explore and analyse graffiti in a translocal context, by asking questions about the actors' view on activity, meaning and interaction. The study has been located to a physical place, Jönköping, where actors with different interest perform graffiti-related activity. The study is based on qualitative data where participant observation and interviews form the two main methods. The study also utilizes other materials, such as newspaper articles and municipal documents. Central for the theoretical orientation is that empirical data has been collected that is first-hand information on how the actors themselves find meaning in graffiti. This implies a constructivist perspective on knowledge where meaning shifts depending on whose perspective is analysed. Theoretically, the study also is linked to Becker and his arguments that research in deviance must take notice of the interaction between actors who are perceived to deviate and those actors who respond to the deviant group. The actors consist of two main groups; graffiti writers and interveners. Graffiti writers mainly consist of young men who describe themselves as belonging to a global graffiti culture. The word “interveners” has bee selected as a generic name for actors who are involved in graffiti issues due to professional duties. Similar to the graffiti writers' interveners find the meaning in graffiti by actively select information from an “outside”, which corresponds with their professional commitment. The analysis links different approaches to perspectives of combating crime, confirming art and caring for the young men's socialisation. From those different understandings, three parallel patterns of interaction are observed. Interaction developed around graffiti as a crime has elements of a battle situation. From the graffiti writers' perspective, this fight is important when designing the local scene as an integral part of a global graffiti context. At the same time there are disadvantages managing an enemy. On a personal level, individual graffiti writers have to make an estimate how graffiti writing will affect life in the long term. Interaction developed around graffiti as an art form unites graffiti writers and interveners in an ideological consensus where graffiti can be seen as an art form that adds creative qualities to urban space. One significant difference is that the graffiti writers find the local arena as an important place. This local orientation is not necessary when actors from a cultural sector put attention on graffiti. Youth workers way of caring for graffiti writers follows a tradition of social work. This approach focuses the graffiti writers themselves and how to redirect them to accepted forms of artistic expression. The youth workers have good potential to make contact, but it seems difficult to establish long-term relations because graffiti writers themselves do not find it necessary to formalize graffiti as a scheduled activity. A conclusion made is that there is something locked up about graffiti issues because actors see graffiti from their "own" perspective, and at the same time they remain critical of alternative approaches. Somewhat contradictory to an interaction structured around distinctive perceptions, the study shows that actors express uncertainty about what they are doing. Such critical self-reflections seem to be perceived as personal objections and are not shared with others. This, together with the fact that interest in graffiti comes and goes in waves, adds ambivalence to the conflictual field of graffiti. The thesis ends with a hypothetical discussion of how the conflict level could change if graffiti would be met with a differentiated policy.

The purpose of this thesis is to show that an indigenous, emotional, and poetic lyricism is found in the novels of Jose Maria Arguedas, which distinguishes and separates Arguedas from the Hispanic indigenous classical writers.