Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theological Aesthetics Applied to the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor confronts the grotesque beauty of Flannery O’Connor’s stories through Balthasar’s Christological ...aesthetics. Chapter one examines preliminary aesthetic themes for both Balthasar and O’Connor, followed by a brief survey of O’Connor criticism. Chapter two focuses on theological background, noting similar influences on Balthasar and O’Connor. I give a short history of neo-Thomism and its impact on O’Connor’s thought, then I trace her interest in la Nouvelle Théologie. The next section of the chapter goes over Balthasar’s relationship with Scholasticism and la Nouvelle Théologie, and finally his dialogue with Karl Barth on analogy. The chapter closes with a reading of O’Connor’s story “The Displaced Person” according to a Balthasarian Christological aesthetic. Chapter three deals with issues of authorship and character. It opens with O’Connor’s ideas about authorial intention and continues with Balthasar’s notion of divine authorship from the first volume of Theo-Drama, examining scenes from The Violent Bear it Away in light of Balthasar’s theology of vocation. A final section compares O’Connor’s grotesque characters, especially Hazel Motes from Wise Blood, with Balthasar’s “holy fools.” In Chapter four, I discuss Balthasar’s treatment of classical tragedy in its relation to plot. Balthasar considers the theological milieu of ancient drama is a precursor to Biblical revelation, and the tragic figure of the suppliant, especially in Sophocles’ plays, prefigures Christ. I examine O’Connor’s story “Parker’s Back” with regard to its re-enactment of a Christological plot. Chapter five considers the story “Judgment Day” in light of Balthasar’s theology of suffering. I then question the relationship between beauty and O’Connor’s vision, ending with a reading of the story “Revelation.” A sixth chapter concludes the dissertation with suggestions for the future of Balthasarian criticism and a final look at O’Connor’s vision of moral beauty. Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theological Aesthetics Applied to the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor adds Balthasar’s voice to the many theologians spoken of alongside her fiction. The study also represents another step toward the greater recognition of Balthasar’s interest for literary scholarship.
Most often, authors of fiction appear only in one place—the front cover. But postmodern contemporary authors such as Paul Auster, Milan Kundera, Italo Calvino, and Kurt Vonnegut have crossed the ...boundary of the front cover, and they have entered their works. In appearing in their texts, these authors are doing something innovative—something worth examining. In City of Glass, Paul Auster positions himself as a character; Italo Calvino, in If on a winter’s night a traveler, includes a narrator who constantly reminds us that Calvino wrote the work; in Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera takes the reader along on his excursion of writing the text; in Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut appears in the text as the author—teasing his characters and asserting his authority over them. These texts are examples of a growing trend in postmodern fiction—a trend of authors breaking and entering into a world in which French philosopher, Michel Foucault believes they do not belong: the world of fiction.
Duality is a principle belonging to human thought. It is a way of apprehending the world around us. Therefore, it occupies an important place in literary discourse. This duality, I tried at first to ...understand through the events in the novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Copy epistolary structure seemed to offer promising material analysis. In addition, the equivocal nature of this text which, while claiming to describe the behavior of licentious libertine Paris, drew up an unflattering portrait of this segment of the pre-revolutionary aristocracy confirmed the double standard on which rests the literary project of Choderlos de Laclos. Add to this the duplicity characteristic of libertines he directs, he places the antagonism between certain characters and the internal struggle among some of them, that engage reason and passion, reality and appearances. Then I've tried to use the outcome of the analysis of Liaisons Dangereuses to create a contemporary epistolary novel where duality plays a leading role. To the exchange of letters written on paper, I first substituted the exchange of electronic mail ; the company to the late Enlightenment, I substituted a resort environment in an age where concern for physical appearance has become for sorne people an end in itself, and to the love triangle formed the dramatic fate of the Vicomte de Valmont, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Présidente de Tourvel, I substituted a love triangle with an uncertain destiny around Alexandre Desmarais, Delphine Arsenault and Constance Lefebvre.
My dissertation, The Styles of Volition: Toward a Theory of the Novelistic Will, investigates the way in which the American novel inherits and reimagines the philosophical problem of the will. The ...authors I consider—Herman Melville, Patricia Highsmith, William Faulkner, and Toni Morrison—not only engage the question of the will on philosophical terms, but also hark back to a theological tradition in which the possibility of God’s grace at once leaves the individual at the mercy of an inscrutable force and encourages a vigilant tending to the world and oneself. These authors respond to this practical tension by imagining forms of social and aesthetic mediation that constrain the will without abandoning it to determinism. What emerges in all these works is an image of agency whereby novelistic characters are oriented within social and generic fields that put pressure on their autonomy yet—for this very reason—open up unexpected capacities for action. Beginning with the premise that the will is rooted in language’s capacity to stipulate or command, my project argues that the novel complicates this stipulatory function by means of volitional stylization—that is, by means of novelistic styles that reorganize imperatives and galvanize action. One significant consequence of this argument is that it throws new light on the problem of novelistic character. On my account, novelistic characters, affectively registering and practically negotiating a discrepancy between the is and the ought, are not representations of “real” human agents existing beyond the inflections of literary language. I argue instead that novelistic character can be viewed as a site of mediation between literary stylization and narratively structured action. Orienting themselves within transpersonal stylizations, characters tend to occupy spaces of generative social tension, rather than sites of solitary freedom on the one hand or ideological consensus on the other. Thus, the novel produces a sociality of the will, not at the level of represented content, but at that of form; stylization links character to the fraught vita activa of the modern world. Following a theoretical introduction, which situates my account in relation to canonical theorists of the novel, my first chapter filters Melville’s Moby-Dick through the early American theologian and philosopher, Jonathan Edwards, thereby reconsidering manner in which Melville poses the question of the will. While a majority of critics have either celebrated or impugned what they see as Captain Ahab’s strong-willed individualism, I argue that, through Ahab and his crew, Melville draws upon sermonic practice to dramatize a transpersonal will rooted in the theatrical mode of call and response. Will here is less a form of self-assertion than a socially mediated process of self-persuasion, which determines agential commitments and drives novelistic action. Like Moby-Dick, Patricia Highsmith’s fiction deploys novel form to rethink the theologico-philosophical problem of the will. But whereas Moby-Dick’s form of ongoing call and response engenders a will that operates continuously across a single action, Highsmith’s stylized impersonal narration both suspends and sets up potential leaps to action, sudden shifts in volitional actualization, akin to certain kinds of religious conversion. Drawing upon the conversion episode in Augustine’s Confessions, I argue that Highsmith’s antiheroes must endure what Augustine calls the “birth pangs of conversion” before making a leap to willed action. The problem of the will appears as the suspenseful problem of whether to commit to—or, alternatively, avert oneself from—a given course of action. Highsmith’s characters can only become agents by suspending their particular agential commitments, exposing themselves to the suspenseful temporalities opened up by modulating instantiations of the novelistic “stranger.” My third and final chapter juxtaposes Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Morrison’s Beloved to develop the concept of a Gothic will. By deploying the Gothic motif of possession, these novels give a profound temporal depth to the problem of the will. The Gothic will in these novels illustrates the manner in which the persistent forces from the past inhere within the individual, endowing haunted agents with new potentialities and constraints which implicate agency in strange forms of collectivity. Thus, this chapter maximally extends the question of the will to account for its imbrication in both familial and cultural histories.
As critics, Czesław Miłosz, Milan Kundera, and Joseph Brodsky sought to shape Western perceptions of their native literatures, the very traditions from which they had been excluded as Cold War ...exiles. This dissertation observes that a pervasive theme in their criticism is the way in which each respective literature (Polish, Czech, Russian) has coped with the disorientations of the modern era. Chapter 1 proposes that, for Czesław Miłosz, the particular historical problems confronting Poland in the middle of the twentieth century signify a broader civilizational problem confronting humanity in the modern era: having voluntarily surrendered his sovereignty to both Nature and History, man has made himself a slave to the necessity that appears to be at work in both. Chapter 2 claims that Milan Kundera’s central polemic aim—from his earliest essays in the Marxist literary press to his efforts on behalf of suppressed colleagues while in emigration—was always to rescue Czech literature from its own smallness; to prevent it from disappearing into provincialism and irrelevance in the broader European context, as writers inevitably wrestled with the political and cultural distractions of a century that offered little peace. Finally, Chapter 3 considers Joseph Brodsky’s assertion that literature’s purpose is “to save the next man, a new arrival, from falling into an old trap,” and it argues that we may regard his criticism as a history of how Russian writers have responded to that imperative.
Author: Godwin, Mary, L.. Ph.D. Institution: Purdue University Degree Received: May 2017 Title: “Literature,” Progress, and Monsters: What Is Electronic Literature? Major Professor: Dr. Arkady ...Plotnitsky Jacques Derrida famously asserts, “The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality” (Of Grammatology 5). When writing of the ‘future’ here, Derrida points to a way of thinking “beyond the closure of knowledge,” which is to say an absolute danger inasmuch as it betrays all that is by welcoming an unknown and as yet unthought is not. N. Katherine Hayles proclaims electronic literature the future of literature on the strength of its capacity to keep pace with a ‘new’ digital normality, to anchor a new structural center for 21st century literature and safeguard against an otherwise imposing and dangerous future for study in the humanities—a very different ‘danger’ than one to which Derrida alludes. The overarching purpose of this project is to engage the question, “What is electronic literature?” and while readily conceding the force of advancing technologies bring to bear broadly on the production, distribution, and consumption of literature, the thrust of the argument resists conflating “literature” with its medium or delivery technology. Chapter one reorients the question of electronic literature by focusing first on the more anterior question, “What is literature?”—remembering Derrida’s caution in pursuing any ontological delimitation and drawing on the work of Peggy Kamuf among others to assist in parsing a response. Chapter two considers what is essentially new in electronic literature and argues against Hayles’s accounting of media specificity as it underwrites new configurations of literarity. Chapter three attends the question of literarity in the form of ‘monsters’ and reads James Joyce’s Ulysses alongside The Unknown (Scott Rhetberg et al. 1999), asking if and in what ways linguistic practices marking Ulysses a definitive act of “literature” can be found at play in electronic literature as well.
Le volet critique de ce mémoire porte sur l’influence de l’ironie voltairienne telle qu’elle se manifeste dans Candide sur la poétique de Guy de Maupassant, et plus précisément dans le conte de ...jeunesse intitulé « Le Docteur Héraclius Gloss ». S’appuyant sur une conception binaire de l’ironie, qui oppose l’ironie corrective (cherchant à corriger le réel) à l’ironie littéraire (posant la question du langage), l’analyse permet de montrer que dans la première partie de son conte, Maupassant emprunte à Voltaire sa manière ludique de combiner les effets d’ironies corrective et littéraire pour se moquer de son personnage principal. La veine voltairienne est toutefois abandonnée dans la seconde partie du récit, au profit d’une écriture plus empathique, et conforme à la poétique réaliste dont il est l’héritier. Cette écriture se trouve maintenant marquée par une ironie uniquement littéraire qui révèle l’impossibilité intrinsèque de tout discours à énoncer le réel. Le volet création de ce mémoire, qui s’intitule Langues de bois, est un recueil de récits brefs aux formes diverses (monologue, dialogue, épistolaire, narration à la 3e personne) qui se divise en deux sections. La première section, intitulée « Assurément », explore le discours de personnages ayant une confiance presque aveugle en leur parole, confiance qui leur fait dire des choses dont ils ne sont pas toujours conscients, et qui révèle au lecteur une certaine ignorance (d’eux-mêmes et du monde). À l’inverse, la deuxième section s’intitule « Peut-être », et sonde la vie intérieure de personnages ayant une conscience aigüe de leur impuissance discursive, ainsi que leurs tentatives résignées à s’exprimer malgré tout. L’oscillation entre ton railleur et empathique que révèle l’étude des effets d’ironie dans l’oeuvre de Maupassant constitue le lien principal qui unit deux volets de ce mémoire. En plus de s’inscrire dans une problématique de l’énonciation, les deux sections du volet explorent le rapport affectif qu’entretient le lecteur avec les personnages qui lui sont présentés, et chaque section est ainsi consacrée à l’étude d’un ton particulier : la première le ton railleur et la seconde le ton empathique.
Ce mémoire a pour but d’étudier les différentes théories du kitsch et ses manifestations dans deux romans contemporains : La tache de Philip Roth et L’insoutenable légèreté de l’être de Milan ...Kundera. Pour ce faire, nous parcourrons les définitions du kitsch convoquées par les travaux majeurs en philosophie culturelle, sociologie et histoire de l’art, ainsi que certains essais littéraires qui s’intéressent à la question. Nous pourrons ensuite analyser le kitsch à partir de textes de fiction qui veulent en faire état, voire en faire la critique. En adoptant cet angle d’analyse thématique, nous verrons comment la fiction contemporaine dépeint le kitsch dans ses dimensions ontologique et sociale, dans des contextes liés au totalitarisme et au puritanisme. Statuant que ces conjonctures se rejoignent sous le signe du conformisme, nous analyserons l’influence du kitsch sur le comportement des masses, mais aussi sur des situations et des personnages particuliers représentés dans la fiction. Ce mémoire mettra en parallèle La tache de Philip Roth avec L’insoutenable légèreté de l’être de Milan Kundera, et proposera les multiples échos que ces romans se renvoient l’un à l’autre. L’étude donnera ainsi à voir un dialogue entre deux oeuvres, suggérant l’omniprésence du kitsch collectif et individuel, qui s’exprime autant à l’échelle historiographique que psychologique.
The Secret Hills is a literary thriller. Kelly Murdoch is crestfallen when her sister Mara fails to attend her documentary premiere. Kelly visits Mara's apartment and finds evidence that no one has ...been there for weeks. A random shooting occurs across town at the Milwaukee County Zoo. Seven people die. The zoo shooter, Ibrahim Rohani, had participated in one of Mara's PTSD studies. Kelly tracks down Rohani's friend Nick Miner, a fellow veteran who also participated in Mara's study. With Nick, Kelly drives to Colorado to confront Lorenzo Hills, an independently wealthy rancher who funded Mara's PTSD research. Despite (or perhaps because of) her suspicion that Mara had been romantically involved with Nick, Kelly sleeps with him. While on the road, Nick and Kelly evade an ambiguous agent they call The Patriot. Kelly and Nick search for Mara and Hills in Colorado. The Patriot reappears and abducts Kelly. Nick rescues Kelly and they flee into the mountains. While in pursuit, The Patriot's wheels are shot out and his truck goes over a cliff. Mara Murdoch appears. Mara takes Nick and Kelly to an abandoned mining settlement called High Fork. The inhabitants—including the secretive Hills—are misfits, but unusually bright, inventive, and observant. With Nick's help, Kelly learns that Mara's work with a genetically-modified parasite has activated the "nirvana centers" in the brains of the High Fork residents—but the parasite sometimes activates other parts of the brain, areas associated with rage, aggression, and violence. The first symptom is insomnia, and Nick hasn't slept for the past three nights... It's up to Kelly to save Nick, prevent Mara from distributing her genetically-modified parasite to every grocery store and municipal water supply in America, and heal the family that shattered when Kelly and Mara's father committed suicide more than twenty years ago.
This thesis examines the life and work of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) through the lens of the works he produced within and about his experiences of incarceration on charges of treason under Henry ...VIII of England (1509-1547). Through a close analysis of contemporary primary documents as well as Wyatt’s poetry, this thesis situates Wyatt’s experiences as a prisoner and writer within the historical context of the political crises of Henry VIII’s reign, exploring what Wyatt’s writing reveals about the changing conceptions of treason and the traumatic experience of imprisonment for a member of the political elite in Henrician England, while also considering how Wyatt’s writing gives rise to a new form of literary witness in the English literary tradition.
