My dissertation examines how memory proper and alternate memories function in contemporary fiction. Memory in the works of minority and women writers becomes a tool with which the fictions' narrators ...read the past, rewrite their heritage, and interject their perspectives into the cultural memory we often accept unchallenged. Chapter One is a general introduction that includes a brief overview of the art of memory since antiquity and a comparative discussion of the texts examined in the dissertation. Chapter Two discusses Funes's perceived "illogical" memory as compared to the narrator's selective and "logical" memory in Jorge Luis Borges's "Funes, the Memorious." Chapter Three analyzes Toni Morrison's Beloved and the rewriting of slavery fiction. Chapter Four is a comparative study of Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name and of my translation from the Greek of Marianna Aenou-Koutouzi's Zacharokalama (Sugarcane). Both Lorde and Koutouzi in their autobiographies re-member and reinvent their lives through their mothers. Chapter Five focuses on Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club and the scrutiny of the Chinese-American daughters' present life through the memories of their mothers. A selected bibliography of primary and secondary sources is included.
The thesis examines the phenomenon of the positive philosophy of exile in contemporary literature on the basis of Stefan Themerson's fiction. Themerson's positive attitude to exile and its ...antecedents--the Stoic ideal of "cosmopolis" and its eighteenth-century transformations--are compared to the views on expatriation expressed by another exiled writer, Witold Gombrowicz, to the moral philosophy of Bertrand Russell, and to the ideology of the twentieth-century avant-garde. Within emigre literature the works marked by the positive philosophy of exile are treated as a separate form to be distinguished from the works in which exile is only a theme. The positive philosopher of exile bases his optimism on scepticism and the recognition of the arbitrariness of human values. The thesis claims that, although far from being universally true and free from weaknesses, the positive philosophy of exile has a genuine claim to validity as an attempt to contribute to the process of bridging cultural differences without compromising cultural diversity.
In their use of a presumably authoritative, naturalistic dramatic language whose literal significance is consistently diffused by interpolations of metaphor, John Whiting, Harold Pinter and Sam ...Shepard share specific linguistic strategies that elicit an experience of menace in their respective audiences. These strategies consist of a narrative structure that sets up an expectation of a referential relationship between speech and action that is undermined by the representation of apparently illogical or inconsistent constructs within the narrative, the interjections of opaque, highly metaphoric language, and reversals of situation and relationships that result in the ambiguity or fragmentation of the identity and motivation of dramatic characters. In interaction, these strategies require the spectator to evaluate the credibility of the immediate mimetic discourse and to resolve the slippage between conceptual language and uttered speech. Heidegger discusses language as a process of objectification that reflects its potentially tyrannical power to displace not only meaning, but also the intrinsic Being of the object. In the theatre, we observe that tyranny in the "insidious substance" of theatre, or what Herbert Blau has referred to as fraudulent mimesis. The demand of Whiting, Pinter and Shepard on the evaluative spectator to extrapolate authentic discourse from within a masked language results in a crisis of anxiety, characterized by uncertainty and skepticism. Yet, few other playwrights so consistently privilege the spectator, in the sense that the experience of menace can be seen as a direct linguistic confrontation between playwright and spectator. In an analysis of selected plays, I identify techniques of dramatic language, which I have called strategies of menace, through which an audience experiences a crisis of anxiety. I examine the nature of linguistic menace in the intellectual and intuitive dynamic between playwright and spectator, with the actor/character as mediator. I consider strategies of menace to be those which simultaneously invoke and inform the 20th century theatre's preoccupation with indirect discourse, ambiguity and opacity of language and multivalent perceptions of reality and temporality; and I locate Whiting, Pinter, and Shepard in the tradition of modernism.
This study is principally concerned with the authorial persona in third person narration: Ernesto Sabato's Abaddon el exterminador, Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night, and John Barth's Letters. ...Also considered is a sampling of works in which the authorial persona is the principal first person narrator: Christopher Isherwood's Down There on a Visit, William Demby's The Catacombs, Mario Vargas Llosa's La t(')ia Julia y el escribidor, and Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Sabato uses his persona to investigate fiction from within by examining it from the same ontological level as that of his fictional characters and to illustrate his personal involvement in the fictions he creates. Mailer wishes to establish his persona as the kind of hero who will capture American hero fantasy so that he may make a statement of a higher transcendental truth arrived at by fictionally experiencing the March on the Pentagon. With his persona Barth searches for an authentic art form and for his authentic self among the previous fictional versions of himself. Isherwood's novel is not a vehicle of self-knowledge but a record of his search for identity until in Part Four he emerges as the prototype of a believable religious hero. Demby uses his persona to show how reality can be experienced on three planes: the historic, the everyday, and the fictional. Vargas Llosa contrasts his persona with the soap opera writer Camacho in order to show how the former developed into a writer by escaping crippling self-absorption and a stifling Peruvian society. Kundera uses his persona to explore his involvement in the Communist take over of Czechoslovakia while the other fictional characters expand the scope of the personal vision to make a statement about Western culture in general. By entering the world of fiction, all the personae test the relationship between art and life, challenge outmoded ideas about the barriers between fact and fiction, and affirm the value of the self and of the novel as an art form capable of expressing truth.
