As Cultural Revolution ended in late 1970s, Chinese intellectuals were again in their quest for modernity by referencing western cultures. However, as soon as the “Reform and Opening” policy was ...promulgated, the Chinese cultural modernity failed to resurrect the zeitgeist of May Fourth era. At the same time, literature of critical realism was no longer popular after social movements in Hong Kong lost its momentum. Bafang Wenyi Congkan 八方文藝叢刊 (1979-1990) determined to create a nonpartisan magazine for Chinese writers on the Mainland and overseas. This thesis proposes that Bafang has reconsidered the cultural scene of China and overcame the Cold War ideology by addressing the notion of “Modern”. The case study of Bafang illustrates the perspective of Hong Kong intellectuals and looks for alternative routes to widen the scope of modern Chinese literature and arts. The thesis consists of six parts. The first part is the introduction, which situates the seeking of Chinese cultural modernity of Bafang in the historical and political background of China from late 1970s to early 1990s. The second part investigates how Chinese writers developed an unofficial literature model by integrating realism and modernism. The third part illustrates how Bafang referenced to Eastern European Literature and tried to propose social reform through Chinese Avant-garde Literature. The fourth part discusses the creative transformation of the Chinese “Wenren” (literati) tradition and how Hong Kong intellectuals adopted it in 1980s. The fifth part examines Chen Ying-zhen’s perspective of social intellectual history and its impact on Hong Kong literature. The sixth and last part concludes the importance of Bafang to Hong Kong Literature and Chinese Literature.
Countless narratives within the field of Comparative Literature express the wounds of trauma. Analyzing these texts, and unearthing their pain and message, captured my interest with a primary focus ...on women. The chronicler Svetlana Alexievich posits in the polyphonic book, The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II (2017), that “we are all captives of men’s notions and men’s sense of war. Women are silent” (14). She observed with a perspicacity that “women's war has its own colors, its own smells, it's own lighting, and its own range of feelings" (14).With the main focus of women’s experiences towards the latter part of the Second World War, I chose to analyze three literary works that share a commonality in their themes. This thesis deals with the intersection of the domains of narrative and traumatology as presented in the following texts that share autofiction features: The War: A Memoir by Marguerite Duras (1986); A Woman in Berlin (1954/2005), a diary by Anonymous; and The Reader (1995), a novel by Bernhard Schlink. These works are time-specific. They take place during the latter part of World War II and the decade after. A brief history of traumatology, its relationship to guilt and shame, and its respective ties to political/historical antecedents will introduce the work. Aspects of written narrative, such as text, characterization, and narration (level, voices, and speech representation), illustrate the complexities regarding traumatic memory (its processes and ambivalence, as well as the challenges it poses to fiction.The two female-authored works echo the experience of The Reader, although the novel is written from a male perspective, that of the narrator, Michael Berg. Whatever we learn about the other main character of the book, Hanna, we see through his lens. This study will focus on the analysis of the various manifestations of trauma embedded in these narratives. Portraits of the experience and pervasive effects of trauma, as discovered within the texts, are testimonies of anguish and survival that find in words a way to surface and be heard—and thus, potentially, to heal.
The following is an investigation into representations of temporal and spatial relations in literature and how they change the conception of the self. I compare literary discourses of time and space ...with those found in philosophical metaphysics and epistemology, most prominently Kant and Poincare. The thesis provides evidence for a relationship between scientific and philosophical epistemology and the way time, space, and self are expressed in fiction. I detail this relationship using the work of Borges, Proust, and host of other authors to emphasize that the use of epistemology in literature is not limited an isolate case concerning a few authors, but a general tendency within fiction.
Cette thèse de doctorat étudie les représentations de la mémoire chez trois auteurs contemporains, Patrick Modiano, Annie Ernaux et J.M.G. Le Clézio, pour mettre en valeur des esthétiques de la ...mémoire qui font de l’identité un enjeu éthique fondamental. Les œuvres étudiées, à forte teneur (auto)biographique, offrent des espaces autonomes ne camouflant pas leur capacité de médiation, y voyant plutôt une occasion d’interroger les limites d’un langage devant rendre compte d’une pluralité d’expériences. Le premier chapitre présente l’approche esth/éthique adoptée (empruntée à Paul Audi 2003, 2005), comme une façon privilégiée d’associer philosophie et littérature. Ce chapitre est l’occasion d’aborder les points théoriques et terminologiques sous-tendant les analyses littéraires subséquentes, par des précisions esthétiques et éthiques, une inscription phénoménologique, et l’interrogation de la mémoire culturelle. Le chapitre 2 analyse les questions d’ordre éthique soulevées par Dora Bruder (Modiano 1999 1997), dans la tension empathique aussi nécessaire qu’essentielle mise en valeur par le narrateur modianien, posture relevant de ce que je désigne comme le maldicible — paradoxe contraignant qui du seul fait de sa présence constitue une invitation à proposer des pistes de résolution. Le chapitre 3 étudie la transbiographie complexe composée dans Les années (Ernaux 2008a), laquelle repose sur des mécanismes formels de dépersonnalisation autant que sur des souvenirs intimes, cherchant ainsi à témoigner d’une expérience identitaire complexe marquée par son appartenance générationnelle. Le chapitre 4 se penche sur les liens unissant le roman Onitsha (Le Clézio 1991) et le récit L’Africain (Le Clézio 2004b) pour voir comment l’enfance comme seuil neutralisant d’expériences constitue à la fois un moment fondateur et une période orientée par le contexte social et familial. L’objectif général de la présente étude est donc de voir comment les représentations de la mémoire et du passage du temps constituent les voies d’un accès privilégié à la pensée du texte.
Crown Magazine and Crown Publishing were established by Mr. Ping Xintao in 1949 and 1965 respectively. To this day, Crown Culture Corporation remains a significant force in the publishing industry in ...Taiwan. Mr. Ping upheld clear publishing ideals to reach their target readers in education and entertainment. Furthermore, to maintain revenue he actively promoted popular literature, contributing greatly to not only Taiwanese literature but translated literature.This study focuses on three translations published by Crown Publishing during the period martial law in Taiwan; Lolita, The Color Purple, and Flowers in the Attic. All three novels share a commonality of explicit use of language and controversial themes. Although these three novels later became bestsellers, they were once banned in the United States and some European countries. Lolita describes the relationship between an underage girl and a middle-aged man with tendencies of pedophilia. Flowers in the Attic has themes of family taboo and incest. The Col
Authors often explore the details of identity and body politics through their writing. Czech author Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being deals heavily with the marginalized and ...oppressed body, considering how such bodies function, how they perceive themselves, how they are perceived by others, and how such bodies are, by nature, a defiance of an established hegemony. The novel considers the exiled body and how such exile can deliver freedom, cause further marginalization, or craft an ambivalent mixture of the two. The oppressed and marginalized body, as understood through literature, acts not just as a mirror of society but also as an avenue for navigating a subject as dense as identity and body politics.
In order to demonstrate the way his female characters rhetorically share agency with biological matter and inanimate objects within the social constructions of his novels, my thesis aims to reveal ...how the works of Milan Kundera can be explored through a posthumanist, feminist lens. Because several of the female characters are ontologically diminished to their female body by societal constructs, they are well aware that the body is not lacking rhetorical determination despite it being objectified due to gender binaries. Kundera’s female characters are able to surpass the social constructs more efficaciously than their male counterparts because they are more willing to gain autonomy by rejecting a Cartesian dualistic view of body/mind and distributing their rhetorical agency through bodily performance and inanimate material.
The Common Core State Standards prompted particularly vigorous debate and handwringing around the role (and future) of literature in the US secondary English classroom. The rise of the knowledge ...economy in secondary English, along with an increasing obsession with scientific measurement, resulted in the marginalization of literature, which has and continues to be instrumentalized to the myriad other aims of English teaching: to improve morality, cultivate a productive workforce and intelligent citizenry, perpetuate an elite class, and counteract social inequality. Put differently, literariness has little do with these justifications and so with literature’s place in the secondary English curriculum, though literature—for now—does. In this study I turn away from the familiar literature and towards the strange literariness in order to think about what the latter may offer secondary English teaching and scholarship. I understand literariness as a question of texts’ value, how they come to matter (and not) in persons’ lives. Each of the chapters in this study takes up literariness in order to think and write about English teaching in ways that embrace the aesthetic and relational potential of the work. The dissertation opens with an introduction to literariness, situating the project within broader conversations of English teaching and scholarship. The second chapter examines how literariness emerges through a close reading of a single text and my own experience with it as a teacher, student, reader and writer. I analyze the implications of this approach to a more ethical close reading – how it animates literariness in the context of a life – and advance literary resonance as a concept of value for English teachers and researchers. The next chapter moves beyond my experience to examine literariness in the lives of four practicing secondary English teachers. The text is comprised of a series of vignettes which literarily weave together interview data, participant-authored essays, and language drawn from fiction and poetry. I read across the four stories to considering literary possibilities that emerge for teaching life; the complicated intersections of teachers’ experiences as students, readers and writers; the political obligations of English teachers in the classroom, and the role literary writing can play in “singing” the lives of teachers and their students. The fourth chapter turns towards the writing of scholarship, considering the (un)literariness of English teaching research and in the process addressing two crucial questions: Literary for whom? By whom? As the story of the chapter’s writing unfolds, I reveal the problematics of a literary framing: how the frame may reflect less the literary value of scholars’ writing than my own particular positioning. The chapter concludes pointing to the limitations of a too-formalist literariness for achieving the varied goals of education researchers. The dissertation’s final chapter plays with the notion that the failures of English teaching and research create conditions by which we might envision and enact more beautiful, just, human and humane English teaching going forward. Reading across chapters and implicating them within major conversations in the field, I offer insights into how literariness helps educators and researchers position themselves usefully for the future unknown.
Much of the debates in this book revolves around Milan Kundera and his 1984 essay "The Tragedy of Central Europe." Kundera wrote his polemical text when the world was pregnant with imminent social ...and political change, yet that world was still far from realizing that we would enter the last decade of the twentieth century with the Soviet empire and its network of satellite states missing from the political map. Kundera was challenged by Joseph Brodsky and György Konrád for allegedly excluding Russia from the symbolic space of Europe, something the great author deeply believes he never did. To what extent was Kundera right in assuming that, if to exist means to be present in the eyes of those we love, then Central Europe does not exist anymore, just as Western Europe as we knew it has stopped existing? What were the mental, cultural, and intellectual realities that lay beneath or behind his beautiful and graceful metaphors? Are we justified in rehabilitating political optimism at the beginning of the twenty-first century? Are we able to reconcile the divided memories of Eastern or Central Europe and Western Europe regarding what happened to the world in 1968? And where is Central Europe now?.
This dissertation argues for the possibility of literature, and in particular the novel, as philosophy. It recognizes the distinction between the two but argues that the novel form, with its inherent ...play of language—its use of tropes, its polylogogical stance, punning, polysemy, catachreses, aporias, equivocations, etc. within a fluid daedalic narrative leads inevitably to an ironic stance, questioning the very ground on which we stand; that is, a visceral understanding of ever changing vocabularies in which no one sees his or her vocabulary as fixed or ontological but rather contextual, ironic and ever changing; one in which no one vocabulary holds a ‘true’ view of infinite vision; what Donna Haraway refers to as the “god trick,” the “conquering gaze from nowhere” (Haraway, “Situational Knowledges,” 581–590) and thus offers a more open-ended, de-ontological perspective than philosophy proper. The dissertation argues that fiction asks for the language to be deconstructed, re-made, re-contextualized, remaining fluid, slippery and vital. “Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. Its apparently solid ground is no rock,” says J. Hillis Miller. The dissertation first presents the theory behind and within the defense of the novel as philosophy. It sets the stage for the thesis by playing off of the dominant and at times dominating, modern linguistic theories, particularly deconstruction, and argues that literature has always been modern as far back as the ancient Greeks. By taking a de-constructive approach, language becomes more expansive and less able to be pinned down, thus negating the metaphysical pre-Nietzschean in favor of the modern. There are greater possibilities for uncovering the truths that are hidden in the language of the text. The dissertation moves from the linguistic to the narrative elements that make up the text of the novel. It argues that not only does the author slip away, negating himself in the fluid nature of the narrative, but that a monological text in the sense of coming from one mind is in itself an impossibility. There is rather “an implicit multiplying of the authorizing source of a story,” what J. Hillis Miller refers to as polylogology. Intentionality becomes secondary as language and narrative become predominant. The narrative becomes neither writer nor text but hybrid in which the actor/actant relationship to the agent/goal as described by Bruno Latour is in this dissertation conflated with the writer/text relationship as described by J. Hillis Miller to create a multi-contextual, ironic text. The dissertation argues that in fiction, Richard Rorty’s ironic stance is a kind of permanent parabasis. In narrative, it stands outside of itself, refers back to itself as in an allegorique de lui même, commenting on itself, questioning itself, always at odds with what it is saying, calling attention to its alterior meaning at all times. Never at home, constantly shifting its vocabularies, its contingent truths, through the paradigmatic associations embedded in its signs. The dissertation’s defense substantiates its theoretical claim regarding the value of literature in uncovering or discovering philosophy in the postmodern age by applying it in the completion of Ariachne’s Thread, an original novel that speaks directly to these issues, using them within the novel form itself. Thus, I will have a theory and a proof of that theory.
