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Re: (Writing) Desire In "Fragments D'Un Discours Amoureux" By Roland Barthes And "La Carte Postale" By Jacques Derrida., Laura Elizabeth Volpe

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation examines the way in which Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida rework the psychoanalytical constructions of desire through what can be referred to, short of a better word, as play or gaming. Play takes many forms in these two texts; etymological play and structural play are two of the more prominent manifestations of this gaming. In an effort to analyze and at the same time emulate this play and its use by these two authors, I introduce the idea of the dreidel which functions as a device which objectifies the discourse of desire. It also serves as a physical …

The Transcendental Element In The Absent Presence., Maggie Burnaman Martin

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

"The Transcendental Element in the Absent Presence" analyzes the absent presence, the rhetorical and literary states of being there in the mind of the perceiving individual, though not there physically. It seeks to answer: What does the term "absent presence" mean? Is there a difference between rhetorical and literary absent presences? If so, how is each manifest through the reading process? And, what sustains these absent presences? Evidenced through selected works of Plato, Aristotle, New Testament writers, Sidney, Shakespeare, and Dickinson, the study argues for the intellectually, spiritually, or aesthetically transcendent quality of the absent presence. Any encounter between reader, …

Henry James And The Process Of Autobiography., Paul S. Nielsen

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

James's autobiographies differ from most by dramatizing so extensively the process of recovery and reanimation of memory, the act that signifies autobiographical activity. They therefore reveal a great deal about the generic nature of autobiographical recollection. James's Major Phase, from 1900 to his death in 1916, was chiefly and gloriously autobiographical in purpose and crowns his career with an autobiographical production of astonishing variety, extent, and creativity. The proto-autobiographical material includes biography of a culture (William Wetmore Story and His Friends), travel memoir and cultural analysis (The American Scene), and recapitulation and intimate disclosure of his creative life (the Prefaces …

The Politics Of Decolonization: Race, Power, And Ideology In Contemporary American Drama., Byung-Eon Jung

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation traces the politics of decolonization dramatized in selected plays from the contemporary American playwrights: African Americans (Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Adrienne Kennedy, and August Wilson), white Americans (Arthur Kopit and David Rabe), and a Chinese American (David Hwang). Through the application of cultural theory to an analysis of dramatic texts, I demonstrate how the plays enact the struggle for decolonization on social, political, and cultural levels. In keeping with the interactions of race, power, and ideology, the plays deconstruct the white cultural formulations of racial minorities. I explore the ways in which the playwrights reclaim the authority of …

Race And The Fragmented Self In Twentieth-Century American Literature., Jerold Malcolm Martin

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Beginning with a definition of "race" as a system of discourse about human difference sustained by its symbolic articulations, I approach "race" as analogous to the social disciplines that Foucault describes as constructing the modern subject. Bringing together certain speculations of Lacan, Fanon, and Morrison, I suggest that this racial discipline facilitates a racial "mirror stage" through which "blackness" and "whiteness" are projected as distinct and unified conceptions of identity. My readings of representative texts examine how such racial identity patterns are both seductive as resolutions of self-discord and destructive in tension with the multiple, interpersonal, and historical determinations of …

Attraction Vs. Repulsion: The Narrative Ambivalence Of Gender In Byron's "Don Juan"., Melinda A. Piontek

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Previous studies of gender in Byron's Don Juan, such as those by Susan Wolfson and Louis Crompton, have concentrated primarily on identifying gender ambivalence and attributing that ambivalence to factors outside the text, such as Byron's ambivalence toward his personal homoeroticism as well as to the social attitudes of Regency England toward questions of gender ambiguity. In this dissertation, I propose to turn the critical gaze back to the text in order to go beyond identifying gender ambivalence to track how that ambivalence works within Don Juan. In order to bring into focus the serial and episodic nature of Byron's …

Oral Noetic And The Communicative Rubric In "Beowulf"., Paul David Muller

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Theoretically, this treatise is a study at the nexus of two fields: oral tradition and the philosophy of language. In application, it is a "reading" of the Anglo-Saxon epic narrative of Beowulf. It proceeds from the hypothesis that in its present, performative moment, the oral traditional narrative instantiates a moment of communicative meaning evincing characteristics of oral, thus speakerly, and thus intention-vitalized meaning, as defined by linguistic philosophers Austin, Grice, Searle, Schiffer, Strawson, and others. In the light of this theoretical perspective, the oral noetic and thus the communicative moment of the Beowulf poem is sought in its most dynamic …

The Presence Of James Joyce In The Poetry And Prose Of A M Klein, Harold Heft

Digitized Theses

This thesis examines the details of A. M. Klein's interest in James Joyce, as well as Joyce's effect on Klein's major works. Klein's fascination with Joyce's literary innovations is apparent in almost every aspect of his literary career, and there is evidence to suggest that Klein's involvement with Joyce's writing spans almost his entire career as a writer. Klein's attraction to Joyce's writing stimulated his artistic development, and his attempts to write critical essays on Joyce's novel Ulysses ultimately drew him away from his creative writing.;In Chapter 1, the available information on Klein's involvement in Joyce studies is presented in …

Becoming Visionary: Reading And Living In The Existential Mode, Michael Anthony Reardon

Doctoral Dissertations

This study identifies, defines and analyzes a sub-genre of modern Anglo-American fiction distinguished by the presence of "visionary" characters, who possess the ability to see acutely into the contingency and anguish of the human condition in this world rather than--as with the popular conception of "visionary"--our potentialities in another. Their experience of vision flows from an "existential moment," a type of epiphany which discloses the essential Nothingness that exists beneath the systems, structures, attitudes and assumptions through which we attempt to order our daily lives. Most importantly, the visionary's heightened consciousness leads to an existence defined by individual choice, responsibility …

Murderous Historian: Henry Adams, Modernity, And The Problem Of Subjectivity. (Volumes I And Ii)., Martha Moseley Regalis

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This study traces Henry Adams's evolution from an enlightenment historian to a prescient postmodern theorist, and explores how he came to regard his own intellectual history as paradigmatic of the arc of subjectivity in the West from the Middle Ages to Nietzsche and Bergson. Adams was a self-conscious philosophical nominalist, and he believed that his radical doubts about the capacity of language for embodying meaning had their origin in medieval nominalism. Adams found the seeds of modernity and the problem of subjectivity which were the focus of his own musings on the nature of the self and history in Abelard …

Imagining Workers: The Working-Class Presence In Late Nineteenth-Century American Literature. (Volumes I And Ii)., William Lynn Watson

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation examines how late nineteenth-century American realist and naturalist narratives defuse the working-class drive for class self-determination and political power. The texts examined are Rebecca Harding Davis's "Life in the Iron Mills" (1861), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Silent Partner (1871), Henry James's The Princess Casamassima (1886), William Dean Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) and Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900). Each work is examined in the context of a specific proletarian insurgency that was taking place at roughly the same time, and sometimes the same place, in which the author was writing. Each text bears the impress of …

Law, Literature, And The Humanities: Panel Discussion, James Boyd White, Nancy L. Cook, Judy M. Cornett, Clark D. Cunningham, Thomas D. Eisele, L. H. Larue, David Ray Papke

Other Publications

This panel discussion took place on April 21, 1994, as part of the University of Cincinnati College of Law's 1994 Robert S. Marx Lecture presented by Professor James Boyd White: The Authority of Law and Philosophy in Plato's Crito.

The Thousand Appliances: Virginia Woolf And The Tools Of Visual Literacy., Janice M. Stein

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

The texts of Virginia Stephen Woolf are rife with references to writers' tools, which she referred to in her diary as "the thousand appliances one needs for writing even a sentence." This dissertation examines the exact nature of Woolf's "need" for the tools of her craft and their influence upon her thought and art. Pens, and by association, ink and the writer's hands, were the center of all her authorial experiences and provided the literal link between the idea of art and its fruition as a work of art. The graphic shapes of words and paralinguistic devices such as punctuation …

Effects Of Otitis Media On Language Development In Native Populations: A Review Of The Literature, Monica Malmgren

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

From the time a fetus reaches about 20 weeks gestational age, its auditory system is functioning. Before we are ever born, we are exposed to sounds within our environment. With birth, we begin to interact with, experiment with, and learn to interpret the sounds around us. Before learning to speak, we are bombarded by the sounds of our language. An infant's head is known to perk up at the sound of a voice, a sudden noise, music... all the sounds of the environment, which is evidence that children are aware of the sounds around them before they are ever able …

Wise Economies: Storytelling, Narrative Authority, And Brevity In The American Short Story, 1819-1980., Kirk Lee Curnutt

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This study proposes a new way of measuring brevity in the American short story. Since Edgar Allan Poe's definition of the tale, literary criticism has looked to various structural features within the text to define the elements that distinguish the short story from other prose genres like the novel. I argue that brevity is an essential feature of storytelling and suggest that its perception is molded and shaped by several historical factors. The phrase "wise economy" offers two ways of thinking about the conciseness of the form: it evokes a history of rhetorical economy central to the formation of a …

Woven Words: A Semiology Of Clothing In Medieval Texts., Fernando Luis Figueroa

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Much criticism in medieval studies has focused on Chrisitan allegory and its dissemination through Middle English poetry. Using recent insights into the nature of allegory in its medieval context, this study offers a new means of understanding allegory as it appears in the work of Chaucer and the Pearl-poet. Which ideas of figurality actually informed the works of these poets? The investigation into the influence of medieval "textuality" on Chaucer and the Pearl-poet has overlooked the image of the "veil" in the Middle Ages. This study asserts that instead of being a "flat" image, the veil provides us with a …

Windows To Critical Thinking: Perspectives On Pedagogy In Henry James's "The Bostonians", Carson Mccullers's "The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter", And Frederick Douglass's "Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave"., James Thomas Mullane

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Many times teachers restrict students to viewing literature through a single "preferred" window or from a rather small set of tiny windows, thus hindering their ability to think critically and make choices for themselves. It is my contention that our pedagogy should facilitate a "school of windows" in which students are offered many different vantage points from which to "see" literature--an environment which, instead of monologically conditioning them to accept content without criticism or question, dialogically allows them their own place and importance in active discourse. This study delineates the power that literature has to enable students to acquire these …

The Effect Of Reading And Discussing Literature With Strong Women Characters On Sixth Grade Students’ Sex Stereotype And Occupational Attitudes, Leslie Caspi Edd

Dissertations

There is considerable evidence that children develop stereotyped attitudes early in life and that these attitudes affect their futures. Many researchers agree that children's attitudes can be influenced by what they read and some studies have shown that attitudes can be changed by exposure to selected literature. This study focused on a group of sixth grade children reading selected short stories and novels with female main characters. Literature discussion groups and written journals were used to facilitate response. The clays was racially and socioeconomically mixed as a result of busing through the Voluntary Ethnic Enrollment and Magnet Programs. The class …

Decolonizing The Text: Glissantian Readings In Caribbean And African-American Literatures., Debra Lynn Anderson

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation proposes to derive a critical reading from the writings of the Martinican poet, novelist, and theorist, Edouard Glissant. This reading would most directly involve, but not limit itself to, literatures written by black writers from the Caribbean and the United States. As critics such as Christopher Miller and Anthony Appiah suggest, these literatures have become the ground upon which colonization is symbolically re-enacted. Criticism colonizes these literatures by its textual appropriation, its imposition of Western critical models, and by bringing its own assumptions to the text. The critically acclaimed prefaces of Jean-Paul Sartre ("Orphee noire") and Andre Breton …

Contact Phase: Forms Of Postmodernism. (Volumes I And Ii)., Michael Owen Crumb

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation examines variant mimetic strategies as the basis for a major dialectic within postmodern culture. The method applies and sometimes extends largely accepted theoretical statements on literary form. This synthesis provides an accessible, if at times complex, schema for organizing types, genres, and postmodern products based on image production and forms of spatial/temporal discourse. An investigation of several theorists and artists grounds a theory of literary and cinematic expressionism as the basis for postmodern culture, with particular emphasis given to the interpenetration of literary and cinematic styles in the twentieth century. An aesthetic dialectic emerges in the movement toward …

Modernity And War In The Poetry Of T. S. Eliot., Patricia Anne Gabilondo

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Although most readers of T. S. Eliot have agreed that the European experience of world war and the resultant political and cultural dislocations provided an important context and source of imagery for much of his work, what has not been recognized is Eliot's use of figures of war to represent the intimate yet antagonistic relations between the poet's writing of modernity and the text that is history. Beginning with a tropological analysis of Eliot's "A Note on War Poetry," relative to both the genre of war poetry and aesthetic modernity, this study examines the figural interpenetration of war and literary …

"Mademoiselle De Maupin": A Close Reading And Study Of The Process Of Subjectivity In Theophile Gautier's Early Nineteenth Century Novel., Rebecca Lucille Tebeau

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation proposes a close reading of Theophile Gautiers's Mademoiselle de Maupin. The purpose of this reading is to explore subjectivity by first assuming that it is a process, enacted by the protagonist's explorations of their own identities, but not an object contained in their elaborations. This view of subjectivity implies both the representational strategies of the protagonists, as well as the narrative strategies of the text. Since Mademoiselle de Maupin's narrative structure is so inconsistent and self-conscious, the explorations of self within the text draw attention to both the fiction of identity and the "identity" of fiction as a …

On Her Mouth You Kiss Your Own: Lesbian Conversations In Exile, 1924-1936, Luita Deane Spangler

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the work of four American lesbian expatriate novelists living and writing in Paris in the years between the two World Wars. Altogether six novels are discussed: The Uncertain Feast (1924), The Happy Failure (1925), and This Way Up (1927) by Solita Solano; The Cubical City (1925) by Janet Flanner; The One Who Is Legion (1930) by Natalie Clifford Barney; and Nightwood (1936) by Djuna Barnes.

Guided by recent conjectures on the significance of sexuality and gender development proposed by such feminist theorists as Luce Irigaray and Monique Wittig, this dissertation explores these six novels for evidence of …

Nodal Humor In Comic Narrative: A Semantic Analysis Of Two Stories By Twain And Wodehouse, Christopher Holcomb

Faculty Publications

This paper shows that a semantic theory of humor offers, despite assertions to the contrary, an adequate description of how particular instances of humor are linked to the narrative in which they appear. After Victor Raskin's script-based semantic theory of humor is summarized, and adopted as the starting point of the analysis in this paper, the humor in two short stories is described in terms of their semantic properties. In this paper, humor is said to reside not simply in jokes but in joke-like constructions, for which the term "nodal points of humor" is used. These nodes can be identified …

Silence (And Its Voluble Partner), Andrew Taylor

Research outputs pre 2011

Silence may traditionally have been golden, but how is it valued today? Can it survive the impact of a technology which can, and does, bring the apparently irresistible seductions of noise to the remotest parts of the world, and which invades the most reclusive aspects of our lives? And what place has silence in a culture such as ours which classifies it as "unproductive"?

But what is silence anyway?

Professor Taylor considers two ways in which, from the Romantic period onward, silence has been conceived. One tradition equates silence with Truth itself; the other considers it the condition which enables …

Postmodernist Writings, Realist Readings: Peter Carey's Bliss And The Tax Inspector, Antonio Jose Dos Santos Simoes Da Silva

Theses : Honours

No abstract provided.

Representative Men, Shaun O'Connell

New England Journal of Public Policy

"Representativeness" is the theme of Shaun O'Connell's essay, "Representative Men." Reviewing six books, one about an actual man and five about fictional men, O'Connell sees them as attempts to define "representative men" of the 1980s, "an era," he observes, "when the worst were full of passionate intensities, particularly among men." Each antiheroic man in these books, he concludes, was "selfish, domineering, dangerous to women, and deceitful, yet each man was also committed to a system of values and ideas that made him an interesting case history — values which, in some instances, redeemed his failings."

As usual, O'Connell, in his …

Carlyle And The Economics Of Terror: A Study Of Revisionary Gothicism In "The French Revolution", Mary Desaulniers

Digitized Theses

Carlyle's The French Revolution occupies a distinctive place in literary history; its obscure and resistant style, its unrelenting use of Gothic overtones and its deliberate cultivation of equivocalness are part of a linguistic economy that challenges the currency of the sign. Reduced in function to an exchange value, the current sign participates in an arbitrary discourse which Carlyle overcomes with the motivating dynamics of German Transcendental Philosophy. To this end, paper money is exposed as an act of misrepresentation; its validity substantiated by arbitrary and conventional agreement, paper money remains a "wagered" word, a "contractual "sign or general equivalent. In …

Touch Monkeys: Nonsense Strategies For Reading Twentieth-Century Poetry, Marion M. Parsons

Digitized Theses

Literary nonsense is often relegated to the nursery. I suggest that much can be gained from considering the genre of nonsense (called "Nonsense" herein) and linguistic "nonsense" as challenges to sense which do not result in a continual deferral of stable meaning. Such a view of Nonsense facilitates the reading of avant-garde and experimental poetry.;Chapter one provides a taxonomy of Nonsense criticism, and attempts to sort out the various, often conflicting, critical "definitions" of literary nonsense. Chapter two adapts and extends Julia Kristeva's theory of poetic language to make possible a substantially different reading of nonsense language, and provides sample …

Voices Of The Self In Daniel Defoe's Fiction: An Alternative Marxist Approach., Zaixin Zhang

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

The alternative Marxist approach to literary criticism in the present study consists of three "vocal" modes of interpretation: the public voice, the private voice, and the homeless voice of the self. The public voice represents authorial visions of the ideological real projected by dominant ideology that covers up the "objective" real, while the private voice corresponds to the authorial conscious or unconscious insertion into radical ideology that turns the "objective" real into the ideological real. However, the homeless voice of the self obliterates any ties with history and authorial ideology. A personification of the Marxist "particular interest" of the self, …