Despite the growing research about depersonalization, depersonalization continues to be a neglected phenomenon that is easily pathologized, simplistically reduced, commonly misdiagnosed, and ...misunderstood. Using a hermeneutic and heuristic approach, this thesis shows depersonalization a new curiosity that this writer feels has not yet been shown. Through a phenomenological, depth psychological, and imaginal lens, this thesis explores the duality of lightness and heaviness, imagination, and soul as related to depersonalization. A fictional account of depersonalization is given to deepen insight into the topic. Lastly, this thesis connects depersonalization to the idea of the unbearable lightness of being and explores how this framework has wide implications and possible contributions to psychotherapy.
Janáček's fascination with the intonation of speech started at an early age, and it accompanied him throughout his life. The study outlines elements of speech found in Janáček's two piano works: the ...piano sonata "1. X. 1905" and the piano cycle In the Mists" based on comparing and drawing parallels between his speech melody snippets that he collected during his lifetime with a number of motifs and techniques he employed in those studied works. This parallelizing process also relies on Janáček's written articles,interviews and essays, as well as on research conducted on his operas and vocal works. Their importance lies in the examples of how Janáček would constitute his chosen melodies, articulations and rhythms, and in their application of compositional devices which enhance the dramatic qualities of the work in respect to the psychological attributes of each character. This study may serve as a supplemental guide to the interpreter's understanding of the unique nature of these piano works.
This dissertation offers an analysis of the recurring trope of female masochism in Central European literary postmodernism. It investigates five foundational novels, from both sides of the Iron ...Curtain, written between 1961 and 1986: Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher, Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams and Repetition, and Stanisław Lem’s Solaris. The dissertation argues that these texts deploy representations of female masochism in order to frame the relationship between culture and subject-building, against the background of the region’s borderland status within the cognitive map created by the Cold War. Despite the fact that masochism as a concept hails from Central European, and despite the popularity of masochistic tropes in Central European postmodernism (1960 and 1980), the theoretical debate on masochism rarely focuses on this literary geography. The dissertation offers two explanations for this critical lacuna: the invisibility of female masochism within the theoretical debate on masochism; and the difficulty of defining Cold War Central Europe due to its semiperipheral position.
Philosophical hermeneutics has much to offer the high school English teacher, for it fundamentally reorients our understanding of what it means to interpret – or teach (with) – literature. When we ...adopt a hermeneutic stance, we begin to see literature as a formative space. It is in this space, I contend, that we may begin to reorient attitudes towards what and why we read. The following research, therefore, is my attempt to come to know the hermeneutic tradition, and the manner in which its principles and practices have been taken up by scholars in the various fields of literary cognitivism, arts-based pedagogy, and curriculum studies. In this way, I endeavor to better understand the manner in which we think about teaching literature in schools. Ultimately, I examine what a hermeneutic ethos looks like within the context of a literature classroom and how it might inform a coherent approach to teaching (with) literature.
Cette thèse de doctorat étudie la mémoire dans la poésie québécoise de la fin du XXe siècle, en particulier dans les oeuvres de Nicole Brossard, Michel Beaulieu, Pierre Nepveu, Hélène Dorion, Élise ...Turcotte et Rachel Leclerc. Nous postulons qu’une configuration particulière de la mémoire apparaît dans la poésie québécoise entre 1970 et 2000. Cette hypothèse détermine une double approche du texte poétique : nous entrecroisons une approche historienne et une approche analytique de la poésie québécoise de la fin du XXe siècle pour mettre au jour les poétiques mémorielles structurant ce corpus. Nous montrons que ces poétiques marquent un changement de paradigme dans l’histoire de la poésie québécoise, laquelle s’est longtemps appuyée sur la mémoire nationale. Notre étude permet en outre de relativiser l’une des divisions canoniques de l’histoire de la poésie québécoise, qui établit un net partage entre la poésie des années 1980 et celle des décennies précédentes en vertu de ce qu’elle nomme l’« intimisme ». Nous montrons que la poésie québécoise des années 1970 à 2000 présente une unité particulière, qui tient à la conscience d’une fracture temporelle. Celle-ci ouvre la voie à l’émergence d’une diversité de poétiques mémorielles, dont nous analysons les principales articulations chez Hélène Dorion, Élise Turcotte et Rachel Leclerc. Cette thèse est divisée en cinq chapitres. Le premier, d’ordre théorique et historique, circonscrit l’objet « mémoire » et définit dans quelle perspective celui-ci est appréhendé dans notre corpus. Ce chapitre retrace également les principales scansions du « texte historique de la mémoire » (Ricoeur) tel qu’il se donne à lire dans la poésie québécoise entre la deuxième moitié du XIXe siècle et la fin des années 1960. Par l’analyse des recueils Le centre blanc de Nicole Brossard (1970), Variables de Michel Beaulieu (1973) et Voies rapides de Pierre Nepveu (1971), le deuxième chapitre montre qu’une crise mémorielle se manifeste dans la poésie québécoise au tournant des années 1970. Les trois chapitres suivants analysent la configuration de la mémoire dans trois oeuvres poétiques importantes, celles d’Hélène Dorion, d’Élise Turcotte et de Rachel Leclerc.
Le Québec a été moins touché que le reste du monde par la Première et la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Considérant ces conflits comme européens plutôt qu'internationaux, les Canadiens français n'ont en ...général pas senti qu'ils se devaient d'y participer. Le contexte historique révèle que la distance géographique entre le Québec et l'Europe ainsi que l'éloignement identitaire en regard des pays qui s'y affrontent peuvent expliquer ce sentiment. Les études sur la thématique guerrière dans les romans québécois montrent cependant que les conflits mondiaux ne sont pas sans incidence dans la trame fictionnelle des récits où ils trouvent place, même si cette place en est une d'arrière-fond. C'est cette action d'arrière-plan que ce mémoire a pour objectif d'analyser en proposant de montrer que l'objet de conscience que constitue la guerre pousse les personnages à s'interroger sur eux-mêmes et sur le monde qui est le leur et à mener des actions qui sont cohérentes avec leur nouvelle manière de penser ce monde. En étudiant Trente arpents de Ringuet (1938), Bonheur d'occasion de Gabrielle Roy (1945), Les Plouffe de Roger Lemelin (1948), La Guerre, yes sir! de Roch Carrier (1968) et L'Emmitouflé de Louis Caron (1977) ainsi qu'en empruntant les définitions d' « aventure » et d' « idylle » qu'Isabelle Daunais donne à lire dans son essai « Le roman sans aventure », nous mettons ainsi à l'épreuve l'hypothèse que la guerre, bien qu'elle demeure le plus souvent une trame d'arrière-plan, représente pour le protagoniste sinon une forme d'aventure, du moins la représentation d'une aventure à partir de laquelle il lui est possible d'imaginer ce qui le dépasse et peut le transformer.
As a famous contemporary writer, Murakami Haruki has a wide-reaching influence throughout the world, especially in East Asia. In my thesis, I intend to analyze his novels and short stories from 1979 ...to 2014. In doing so, I will reveal why Murakami Haruki is so popular in Asia, particularly China. This analysis will demonstrate that East Asian public culture has been undergoing changes during the past 20 years. I will analyze four of Murakami’s works: Wild Sheep Chase (1982), Norwegian Wood (1987), to The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1995), and finishing with Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki And His Year Of Pilgrimage (2013). Though the evolution of his works, Murakami makes it clear that Japanese society has been under transformation since World War II. After the end of the war, this society changed from a capitalist to cosmopolitan one. I will also discuss how his novels are associated with China, as well as his works’ adaptation in China and among Chinese readers. Since becoming famous, Murakami’s work has been highly criticized. These criticisms has come primarily from Komori Yōichi, Fujii Shozo, Kuroko Kazuo and Kato Norihiro. By discussing these critics, I want to reveal the true meaning for Murakami to be a writer and why I consider him as a serious literature writer under the cover of pop culture.
Minor literature is literatures of the minoritarian, not simply that produced by (cultural, ethnic, racial, gender-expressive, sexual, ability, age) minorities. Further Toward Minor Literatures ...operates from this decisive distinction to trace the contours and potentialities of one minoritarian literature, the contemporary transgender novel in the US and Canada. This study is premised in part on putting the fiction itself on a plane with theoretical and critical sources, creating a dialogue that does not privilege one discourse over the other. Minor literature is self-theorizing, perhaps even authotheoretical, in its expressing and fulfilling the mobile orientations of its minoritarian communities. This study does not attempt to build out the machinery of minor literature as explanatory or canonizing, but rather to test affinities between seemingly disparate literary works, as well as instigate the novel’s late-stage capacity as a minor form.The spark for this study was touched off by Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975). In this slim volume, the philosopher and the psychoanalyst introduce the characteristics and faculty of a minor literature, each playing a central role in Further Toward a Minor Literature: deterritorialization, political ubiquity, and collective value. However, one oddity of Deleuze and Guattari’s work is the singularity of its literary object, the corpus (and life) of a Czech writer who never completed a novel and published only a handful of (admittedly massively influential) stories in his truncated lifetime. If a theory of minor literature is to become a machine as dynamic and multifarious as the actual fiction it concerns, it ought to exercise its capacity to communitarian expression, rather than uphold the uniqueness of any one writer as representative. The introduction of Further Toward a Minor Literature is thus a quick succession of arguments: why this corner of Deleuze and Guattari’s expansive body of thought, why the novel as a form, what literary genres mean for this minor literature, what a trans-specific literary theory would or would not do, and how more recent formulations of autofiction and autotheory might apply to minor literature.Part I of Further Toward a Minor Literature proceeds to unpack each of the three concepts within the category of minor literature, but does so in terms of resistance and self-determination, rather than simply as unique aesthetic conditions. As such, the terms of this minor literature are defined in contradistinction to those embodied by the figure of the Master, the normativizing conglomerate of the social who operates through various phobic public spheres, enacting his dictates and strictures on all, but most pronouncedly minoritized, subjects. This study presents various means of remapping through the minoritarian, surveying the Master’s territories and the boundaries of the phobic public spheres, and considering strategies for carving out space for minoritarian selfrepresentations. This latter concept, borrowed in part from sociologist and filmmaker Nicola Mai, acknowledges the ways in which outward and inward representations fold into the self for minoritarian subjects, particularly in light of the excess of definition and censure from phobic publics. Minoritarian deterritorialization, then, is first presented through the example of Jose Esteban Muñoz’s disidentification, and the ways in which this minor literature thematizes disidentifying as both expression of selfrepresentation and naming the objects of resistance. Muñoz considered Jack Halberstam’s Female Masculinity as just such a disidentifying project, and it is presented here in terms of its applicability to long-form fiction. Patricia Hill Collins’ recent work on epistemic resistance is also read as an instance of deterritorializing knowledge production, using institutional logics against their own systemic exclusion and erasure of minoritarian subjects. The politics of this minor literature is largely read as gestural; the content of the novels is by and large not political in any overt sense, though the form and expression certainly are, when read through a minor literary lens. Finally, the communitarian value and revolutionary potential inherent in minor literature is considered specifically against how minoritarian subjects in these novels theorize solidarity and persistence.The applicative half of the study takes the components of minor literature and proposes three regions ripe for deterritorialization in trans minor literature. Part II considers time and history, observing the ways in which the novel’s durative capacities and responsibilities are largely frustrated by the minor literature at hand. The Master’s presumptions of development, linearity, and causality are mocked, subverted, or wholesale discarded by a collection of novels that is not prepossessed of its characters’ incremental growth. Similarly, Part III uses minor literature to challenge majoritarian assumptions regarding identity formation and the construction of passing. Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophies of becoming are measured against Paul B. Preciado’s, culminating with theorizing minoritarian misreading, authenticity, masking, and (mis)recognition. Having demonstrated a range of experiments with and provocations of two of the grand engines of The Western Novel—time and identity—Further Towards Minor Literatures turns in Part IV to a seemingly narrower focus: labor, as read through sex work. These highly gendered, criminalized trades bring together and concretize some of the threads of Parts II and III, as minoritarian characters participate in and muse about the sex trades in manners quotidian or extreme, depending on who’s asking.Further Toward Minor Literatures concludes not with its own grand, deterritorializing gesture, but with a final case study: Torrey Peters’ almost shockingly successful Detransition, Baby. Though Peters is represented by other novellas in this study, her most recent novel is easily the bestselling work of long-form fiction by and about a trans person in the English literary tradition. Future prospects for minor literature are necessarily steeped in minoritarian horizons, dreaming and enacting futures unthinkable within the borders of the Master’s maps. Each of the novels in this study, as well as the vast majority of its critical sources, is in some way reflective of better worlds, ones not governed by heteronormativity, white supremacy, misogyny, and top-down class politics. Minor literature is a disidentificatory machine, but one that equally (mis)recognizes the territories in and against which it is written, constituting alternative vernaculars for encountering a willfully alienating world. Further Toward Minor Literatures is as such an aperture on alternative reading and critical practices, a counterdiscourse which challenges both the apologetics of neoliberal representation ethics and assumptive, positivistic epistemology.
This study addresses the following question through a new, interdisciplinary approach to fantastic fiction that draws connections between urgent contemporary issues, critical theory, and contemporary ...fantastic novels written in French: How might the supernatural, which by definition departs from the real, paradoxically shed light on some of the most pressing, real concerns faced by contemporary societies? In response, it explores the fantastic modalities used by four French authors – Marie Darrieussecq, Milan Kundera, Marie NDiaye, and Antoine Volodine – to grant an innovative understanding of certain pressing issues: the environmental crisis, totalitarianism, racism, and community formation. It argues that by blurring boundaries and promoting ambiguity over rational understanding, our four authors at once complicate conceptual categories, including binaries such as human/nonhuman, black/white, French/foreign, partisan/dissident, inclusion/exclusion, and individual/community, as well as ethical distinctions between what is just and unjust, and shift the focus to the experiential and affective dimensions of these issues.Moreover, this study recognizes and responds to the rift dividing current French scholarship on the literary fantastic. Traditionally, the fantastic was considered by Tzvetan Todorov to be a nineteenth-century genre that provokes intellectual hesitation in the reader, who is unable to decide between a rational and a supernatural explanation of events. Charles Grivel and Denis Mellier recently reoriented the critical landscape by focusing on visualization in works stretching across the past two centuries that overtly represent supernatural events. This project nuances this hermeneutical gap by considering novels that display a strong intellectual dimension in their exploration of pressing contemporary concerns, yet do so through directly-represented fantastic events. It argues that in the novels discussed here, the fantastic is used, not to represent events that are themselves uncertain, but to destabilize conceptual categories in a way that encourages us to think with and feel with those that are excluded.
