D'Artagnan, Charles de Batz-de-Castelmore, Courtilz de Sandras, Alexandre Dumas, Intermédialité, Intermediality, Mouvance, Paul Zumthor, Mousquetaires, Musketeers, Mémoires, Littérature classique, Histoire du livre, Histoire de l'édition, Théorie de la réception et de la lecture, Memoirs, History of books, Reception theory, History of edition, and Literature - General / Littérature - Généralités (UMI : 0401)

Ce mémoire propose d’observer les limites de la fixité des textes dans le contexte littéraire moderne. L’ouvrage intitulé Mémoires de d’Artagnan, publié en 1700 par Courtilz de Sandras, permet de démontrer la mobilité des textes en se situant en marge de l’ordre actuel des représentations écrites. En effet, douze éditions de ce récit furent publiées, sans que le texte soit identique à l’original. Chacune de ces éditions propose un redécoupage et un remaniement différent du texte. Par l’observation des caractéristiques particulières du processus éditorial, ainsi que de l’empreinte du discours social sur cet acte d’édition, il deviendra possible de déterminer les processus d’influence entre les différents éléments du système. La thèse de cette recherche est que ce système, constitué de l’ensemble des médiums représentant le mousquetaire, constituerait une forme surdéterminante qui établit un rapport de réciprocité entre chacune des représentations artistiques du personnage et ce système qui s’élève en mythe culturel. Ce mémoire pose l’hypothèse d’un écart des Mémoires de d’Artagnan dans l’ordre actuel des représentations écrites. Leurs parcours s’inscrivent dans un paradigme plus proche de celui de la mouvance des écrits médiévaux que de la conception moderne de la littérature. Pour le démontrer, cette étude établira d’abord les caractéristiques de la publication initiale du texte de Courtilz qui ne présente pas en lui-même de particularité provoquant la mouvance du texte. Le récit est représentatif de l’époque, avec ses particularités, mais sans que sa construction soit révolutionnaire. La mouvance du texte s’amorce avec la publication des Trois Mousquetaires et l’importance culturelle acquise par le personnage qui en vient à surdéterminer le texte. Ensuite, la confrontation des différents médiums met en lumière l’influence d’un mythe en construction et l’élaboration progressive d’une tradition. Une perspective intermédiale permettra de combiner les relations entre tous ces médiums en les constituant en système. En mobilisant les outils méthodologiques de l’Histoire du livre, ainsi que les théories de la réception, de l’imprimé et de l’édition il sera possible d’établir un parallèle prudent avec le travail de Paul Zumthor sur la mouvance des textes médiévaux. L’objectif de ce mémoire n’est pas de démontrer la mobilité des Mémoires de d’Artagnan. Ce mouvement est déjà suffisamment évident par lui-même. Il s’agit plutôt de démontrer l’instabilité de tout ordre institué et l’absence de rupture franche dans l’évolution de l’ordre des livres, mais aussi d’ailleurs dans toute évolution. Dans toutes ruptures il sera possible de trouver une part de continuité. L’évolution ne s’accomplit jamais par la disparition de tous les fondements passés et les éléments du passé trouvent souvent des échos dans les révolutions du futur.
This memoir analyses the limits of textual fixity within a modern literary context. The Mémoires de d’Artagnan, published in 1700 by Courtilz de Sandras, demonstrates an example of textual mobility by being on the brink of the actual order of literary representation. Indeed, twelve editions of this tale have been published to this day without being identical to the original one, nor are these versions similar among each other. By observing the specific characteristics of its editorial course, as well as the links that correlate with the social discourse, it will be possible to determine the influential process between the different elements of this system. The thesis of this research is that this system, which is composed of all mediums representing the musketeers, constitutes an overdetermining form establishing a link of reciprocity between each artistic representation of the characters and a tradition that becomes a cultural myth. This study suggests that the Mémoires de d’Artagnan deviates from the actual order of the literary representations published. In fact, the editorial path positions itself closer to the paradigm of the medieval "mouvance" writings than from the modern conception of literature. To support this claim, this study will first establish the characteristics of the initial publication, the text of Courtilz, which does not contain elements that suggest textual mobility. This tale is representative of the era, with its own particularities, but its construction is not revolutionary. The modification of the text occurs after the release of Les Trois Mousquetaires and the cultural importance acquired by the characters, which in turn came to overdetermine the original text.Furthermore, the confrontation of the different mediums demonstrate the influence of the myth in construction and of the progressive elaboration of a tradition. An intermedial approach will allow us to combine the different relations these mediums undertake by placing them inside a system. By mobilizing the methodological tools of the history of books, as well as reception theory and history of edition, it will be possible to establish a careful parallel with Paul Zumthor’s work on the mediaeval "mouvance".The objective of this memoir is not to demonstrate the mobility of the Mémoires de d’Artagnan, this mobility is already clear in itself, therefore, the objective is to demonstrate the instability of any institutionalized order and the absence of a clear break in any evolution. Thus, evolution is never accomplished by the disappearance of all past foundations, elements of the past often find echo in future revolution.

Victor Hugo, L'Homme qui rit, saltimbanque, sociocritique, imaginaire social, littérature française, Mountebank, Sociocriticism, Social imagination and french literature, and Literature - General / Littérature - Généralités (UMI : 0401)

Malgré sa disparition progressive dans l’espace public, le saltimbanque, objet constant de méfiance et de mépris du côté des élites sociales, connaît un regain dans l’art et la littérature du XIXe siècle. Publié en 1869, L'Homme qui rit de Victor Hugo offre une représentation particulièrement élaborée de cette figure. Le roman déploie un encyclopédisme et une polyphonie qui permettent de situer l’art du saltimbanque dans l’ensemble des théâtralisations de la parole publique qu’il passe en revue. Les deux personnages principaux, des bateleurs du nom de Gwynplaine et d’Ursus, sont conduits à franchir des frontières sociales et culturelles habituellement étanches : ils évoluent entre autres dans les villes, sur les places, sur les routes, dans les tribunaux, dans les caves pénales, dans les auberges et dans les chambres parlementaires. L’étude sociocritique de leurs parcours met en lumière le dialogue que le roman hugolien entretient avec l’imaginaire social du Second Empire, tout particulièrement à l’égard des débats sur la misère, sur le sens du pouvoir et sur la valeur du théâtre qui le traversent.
Although the mountebanks as progressively disappeared from the public space, led by the constant mistrust and the aversion of the elite society, the subject knows a renewal of popularity in art and literature of the 19th century. Published in 1869, L'Homme qui rit written by Victor Hugo offers an especially elaborated representation of that figure. The book unfolds an encyclopaedism and an impressive polyphony that help to narrow the art of the mountebanks into the entirety of the theatricalisation of the public voice. The two main characters, both street performers named Gwynplaine and Ursus, are led to step over social and cultural frontiers that are normally hermetic: they evolve inter alia in the cities, on the places, the roads, through court houses, jails, inns and parliament chambers. The sociocritic study of those different paths clarifies the dialogue between the novel and the spirit of the second empire’s society, particularly with regard to the debates on misery, the meaning of the authority and the value of the theatre which cross it.

littérature française, Virginie Despentes, Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, féminisme, gender studies, queer studies, feminism, and Literature - General / Littérature - Généralités (UMI : 0401)

Ce mémoire s’attache à la question de la matérialité et de la théâtralité du corps genré, telle que posée par une lecture croisée entre un roman du XIXᵉ siècle et un autre de l’époque contemporaine. En effet, L’Ève future, d’Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam et Les Chiennes savantes de Virginie Despentes portent chacun une attention soutenue à la performance du genre féminin. En mettant en scène des personnages de séductrices qui conjuguent la performance de leur sexe à des métiers d’actrice ou de danseuse, les deux récits suggèrent un rapprochement entre la distance qu’implique la scène, le pouvoir de séduction, et la « réalité » du genre. Si le féminin est un théâtre, ainsi que l’arguent les personnages d’Edison et de Louise dans leur histoire respective; une mascarade selon la théorie Riviere; une catégorie politique selon Wittig; une performance dans l’analyse de Butler; ou une technologie chez Preciado; le genre existe-t-il encore à ce point? Peut-on dire que l’ironie, présente à la fois dans L’Ève future et dans Les Chiennes savantes, en jouant sur la tension entre un discours réel et un discours simulé, reconduit cette indécidabilité de la « réalité » du genre?
This thesis takes its roots in the question of the materiality and theatricality of the gendered body, as it can be understood by a cross-reading of a nineteenth century and a contemporary novel. L’Ève future, by Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and Les Chiennes savantes, by Virginie Despentes, are both putting an emphasis on the performance of the feminine gender. By staging characters of seductive women who combine their gendered performance with their work as actress and dancer, Les Chiennes savantes and L’Ève future are suggesting a link between the representation, the seductive power and the ‘reality’ of gender. If womanliness is a play, as Edison and Louise are alluding to in their respective stories; a masquerade according to Riviere; a political category as argued by Wittig; a performance for Butler; a technology for Preciado; does gender still exist that much? Can it be said that irony, which is found as a literary and philosophic device in both novels, by playing with the tension between the true and the fake in a discourse, is renewing the undecidability of the ‘reality’ of gender?

Printemps érable, Journal de Montréal, Student strike, Maple Spring, Grève étudiante de 2012, Sociocritique, Journalistic literature, Sociocriticism, Modern era, Imaginaire social, Presse québécoise contemporaine, Social imaginary, and Literature - General / Littérature - Généralités (UMI : 0401)

Le présent mémoire se penche sur la couverture de la grève étudiante québécoise de 2012, souvent appelée le Printemps érable, dans les pages du Journal de Montréal. Dans une approche sociocritique des textes (Claude Duchet, Edmond Cros, Régine Robin) et en mettant à l’épreuve le concept d’imaginaire social tel qu’il a été réélaboré par Pierre Popovic, nous nous demandons en quoi et comment ce média a pu favoriser les antagonismes entre les groupes sociaux en cause. En analysant la couverture journalistique, aussi bien les premières pages, les caricatures, les reportages, les chroniques que les lettres des lecteurs, et en étudiant la façon dont ce corpus interagit avec les dimensions iconique et poétique de l’imaginaire social, nous parvenons à dégager des effets de mise en récit, de poétisation et de fictionnalisation fort singuliers. Si notre hypothèse théorique est celle d’un lien dynamique entre le corpus et les représentations qui circulent dans l’imaginaire collectif, notre hypothèse herméneutique, elle, nous mène à explorer la manière dont ce quotidien montréalais a construit et diffusé des figures de substitution aux intervenants réels par lesquelles chacun pouvait peu ou prou se sentir interpellé : l’Automobiliste, le Contribuable, le Démocrate, le Commerçant, le Ti-Joe connaissant, l’Enfant roi, l’Artiste, le Bébé gâté, le Radical, l’Intimideur, le Gauchiste, le Terroriste. Regroupées en deux factions rivales, la « Rue » et la « Majorité silencieuse », ces figures substitutives ont participé à l’émergence d’un récit particulier des événements, celui d’un assaut hypocrite et pernicieux porté à la démocratie québécoise. Quand un journaliste titre « Party au centre-ville », que suggère-t-il sur les grévistes et comme récit de la manifestation? Que révèle le diptyque caricatural proposé par Marc Beaudet replongeant le lecteur tout droit en pleine crise d’Oka? Que vient faire dans cette histoire le dernier film de Christopher Nolan, Batman, The Dark Knight Rises? Voilà le genre de questions auxquelles ce mémoire apporte très concrètement des réponses.
This Master’s essay examines coverage of the 2012 Quebec student protests, often called the « Maple Spring », by the Journal de Montréal. Through a sociocritical approach (Claude Duchet, Edmond Cros, Régine Robin) and using the concept of social imaginary (Pierre Popovic), we ask why and how this publication could breed antagonism between the social groups in question. By dissecting the journalistic coverage (front pages, caricatures, articles, columns, readers’ opinions) and studying the interactions between this corpus and the iconic and poetic dimensions of the social imaginary, we come to identify singular storytelling effects, as well as poeticization and fictionalization effects. If our theoretical hypothesis is based on a dynamic link between the corpus and some active representations in the collective imaginary, our hermeneutic hypothesis leads us to explore the different ways in which the Montreal daily constructed and provided substitution figures for its actual speakers through which readers could more or less take position : the Driver, the Taxpayer, the Democrat, the Business Owner, the Know-It-All, the Spoiled Brat, the Over-Indulged Child, the Artist, the Radical, the Bully, the Lefty and the Terrorist. Grouped into two rival factions, the "Street" and the "Silent Majority", these substitution figures were all key players in the emergence of a certain reshaping of events suggesting a hypocritical and pernicious assault against Quebec democracy. When a journalist titles his text "Party downtown," what does he implies about strikers and the narrative of the event? What does the caricature diptych proposed by Marc Beaudet, bringing the reader right back in the middle of the Oka crisis, reveal? How is Christopher Nolan’s last film, Batman: The Dark Knight Rises relevant to the « Maple Spring »? These are some of the questions that this essay endeavour to answer in very concrete terms.

E11 America (General), E151 United States (General), PE English, PN Literature (General), and PS American literature

This thesis explores the fiction of American author Richard Yates to propose that his work provides an insistent questioning and alternative vision of postwar American culture. Such an approach is informed by a revisionist account of four distinct yet interconnected areas of postwar culture: the role of the non-heroic soldier stepping in and out of World War II; suburbanisation and fashioning of anti-suburban performance; demarcation of gender roles and unraveling of sexual conservatism in the 1950s; consideration of what constituted the normative within postwar discourse and representations of mental illness in Yates’ work. These four spheres of interest form the backbone to this study in its combined aim of reclaiming Yates’ fiction in line with a more progressive historical framework while shaping a new critical appreciation of his fiction. Such analysis will be primed by an opening discussion that illustrates how Yates’ fiction has frequently been ensconced in a limited interpretative lens: an approach, that I argue, has kept Yates on the periphery of the canon and ultimately resulted in the neglect of an author who provided a rich, progressive and historically significant dialogue of postwar American life. This PhD arrives at a point when Yatesian scholarship is finally gaining momentum after the cumulative impact of a comprehensive biography, a faithful film adaptation of his seminal text Revolutionary Road (1961), plus the recent re-issue of his catalogue of work. An assessment as to why he remained on the margins of success for the duration of his career is therefore of pressing interest in light of this recent critical and commercial recognition.

PB Modern European Languages and PN Literature (General)

This thesis examines the role of Scots language verse translation in the second-generation or post-war Scottish Renaissance. The translation of European poetry into Scots was of central importance to the first-generation Scottish Renaissance of the nineteen twenties and thirties. As Margery Palmer McCulloch has shown, the wider cultural climate of Anglo-American modernism was key to MacDiarmid’s conception of the interwar Scottish Renaissance. What was the effect on second-generation poet-translators as the modernist moment passed? Are the many translations undertaken by the younger poets who emerged in the course of the nineteen forties and fifties a faithful reflection of this cultural inheritance? To what extent are they indicative of a new set of priorities and international influences? The five principal translators discussed in this thesis are Douglas Young (1913-1973), Sydney Goodsir Smith (1915-1975), Robert Garioch (1909-1981), Tom Scott (1918-1995) and William J. Tait (1918-1992). Each is the subject of a chapter, in many cases providing the first or most extensive treatment of particular translations. While the pioneering work of John Corbett, Bill Findlay and J. Derrick McClure, among other scholars, has drawn attention to the long history of literary translation into Scots, this thesis is the first extended critical work to take the verse translations of the post-MacDiarmid makars as its subject. The nature and extent of MacDiarmid’s influence is considered throughout, as are the wider discourses around language and translation in twentieth-century Scottish poetry. Critical engagement with a number of key insights from theoretical translation studies helps to situate these writers’ work in its global context. This thesis also explores the ways in which the specific context of Scots translation allows scholars to complicate or expand upon theories of translation developed in other cultural situations (notably Lawrence Venuti’s writing on domestication and foreignisation). The five writers upon whom this thesis concentrates were all highly individual, occasionally idiosyncratic personalities. Young’s polyglot ingenuity finds a foil in Garioch’s sharp, humane wit. Goodsir Smith’s romantic ironising meets its match in Scott’s radical certainty of cause. Tait’s use of the Shetlandic tongue sets him apart. Nonetheless, despite the great variety of style, form and tone shown by each of these translators, this thesis demonstrates that there are meaningful links to be made between them and that they form a unified, coherent group in the wider landscape of twentieth-century Scottish poetry. On the linguistic level, each engaged to some extent in the composition of a ‘synthetic’ or ‘plastic’ language deriving partly from literary sources, partly from the spoken language around them. On a more fundamental level, each was committed to enriching this language through translation, within which a number of key areas of interest emerge. One of the most important of these key areas is Gaelic – especially the poetry of Sorley MacLean, which Young, Garioch and Goodsir Smith all translated into Scots. This is to some extent an act of solidarity on the part of these Scots poets, acknowledging a shared history of marginalisation as well as expressing shared hopes for the future. The same is true of Goodsir Smith’s translations from a number of Eastern European poets (and Edwin Morgan’s own versions, slightly later in the century). The translation of verse drama by poets is another key theme sustained throughout the thesis, with Garioch and Young attempting to fill what they perceived as a gap in the Scots tradition through translation from other languages (another aspect of these writers’ legacy continued by Morgan). Beyond this, all of the writers discussed in this thesis translated extensively from European poetries from Ancient Greece to twentieth-century France. Their reasons for doing so were various, but a certain cosmopolitan idealism figures highly among them. So too does a desire to see Scotland interact with other European nations, thus escaping the potentially narrowing influence of post-war British culture. This thesis addresses the legacy of these writers’ translations, which, it argues, continue to exercise a perceptible influence on the course of poetry in Scotland. This work constitutes a significant contribution to a much-needed wider critical re-assessment of this pivotal period in modern Scottish writing, offering a fresh perspective on the formal and linguistic merits of these poets’ verse translations. Drawing upon frequently obscure book, pamphlet and periodical sources, as well as unpublished manuscripts in the National Library of Scotland and the Shetland Archives, this thesis breaks new ground in its investigation of the role of Scots verse translation in the second-generation Scottish Renaissance.

PN Literature (General)

The work here seeks to revamp the way that we read, write and understand the postcolonial during an era in which the field's modishness has receded somewhat, but when its historic objectives remain. Broadly speaking, the thesis is an attempt to examine the ideas that, merged together, equate to the current geography of the postcolonial world. In the first section, I look to the production of value – and specifically, to the process of valuing cultural capital, which delivers to us an important logic: that the postcolonial world appears to us not as it really is, but how it has been written into being over time. The second section reflects upon the settler polities of Australia and South Africa, where I read the works of Archie Weller and Zakes Mda and posit the notion of an arc in their writing, a trajectory that over time sees the novel gradually recede from its engagement with the explicit discourses of colonialism and postcolonialism. Thereafter I turn to recent rise of non-fiction writing to prominence in India. Here the focus concerns the way that the Indian city has been written into the public imagination crudely, as an apparently reasonable synecdoche of all Indian life. I explore the way that the visible spectacle has come to stand at the zenith of representational forms, with the corollary that the written word has lost something of its authority. I introduce recent works of non-fiction that seek to respond to these simplified projections by literarily occupying small-scale Indian spaces: Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Suketu Mehta's Maximum City and Amit Chaudhuri's Calcutta: Two Years in the City. In the final section, I argue for revamped postcolonial reading strategies that are better able to reflect the concrete worlds that literary texts address. I encourage a wider and indiscriminate constellation of non-white British literatures, before offering individual readings of Monica Ali's Alentejo Blue and Kazuo Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World.

PN Literature (General), PQ Romance literatures, and PR English literature

This thesis compares contemporary anglophone and francophone rewritings of traditional fairy tales for adults. Examining material dating from the 1990s to the present, including novels, novellas, short stories, comics, televisual and filmic adaptations, this thesis argues that while the revisions studied share similar themes and have comparable aims, the methods for inducing wonder (where wonder is defined as the effect produced by the text rather than simply its magical contents) are diametrically opposed, and it is this opposition that characterises the difference between the two types of rewriting. While they all engage with the hybridity of the fairy-tale genre, the anglophone works studied tend to question traditional narratives by keeping the fantasy setting, while francophone works debunk the tales not only in relation to questions of content, but also aesthetics. Through theoretical, historical, and cultural contextualisation, along with close readings of the texts, this thesis aims to demonstrate the existence of this francophone/anglophone divide and to explain how and why the authors in each tradition tend to adopt such different views while rewriting similar material. This division is the guiding thread of the thesis and also functions as a springboard to explore other concepts such as genre hybridity, reader-response, and feminism. The thesis is divided into two parts; the first three chapters work as an in-depth literature review: after examining, in chapters one and two, the historical and contemporary cultural field in which these works were created, chapter three examines theories of fantasy and genre hybridity. The second part of the thesis consists of textual studies and comparisons between francophone and anglophone material and is built on three different approaches. The first (chapter four) looks at selected texts in relation to questions of form, studying the process of world building and world creation enacted when authors combine and rewrite several fairy tales in a single narrative world. The second (chapter five) is a thematic approach which investigates the interactions between femininity, the monstrous, and the wondrous in contemporary tales of animal brides. Finally, chapter six compares rewritings of the tale of ‘Bluebeard’ with a comparison hinged on the representation of the forbidden room and its contents: Bluebeard’s cabinet of wonder is one that he holds sacred, one where he sublimates his wives’ corpses, and it is the catalyst of wonder, terror, and awe. The three contextual chapters and the three text-based studies work towards tracing the tangible existence of the division postulated between francophone and anglophone texts, but also the similarities that exist between the two cultural fields and their roles in the renewal of the fairy-tale genre.

PN Literature (General) and PN0080 Criticism

This thesis explores how gender and sexuality are conceptualised in human spaceflight. The culture of outer space has received relatively little critical attention, and even less on the subjects of gender and sexuality. In this thesis I aim to expand upon this limited field and to investigate how the cultural dimensions of outer space can be used to productive critical ends. The history of gender in human spaceflight is a troubled one. For decades, women were systematically excluded from most spaceflight endeavours. I argue that in addition to this, more insidious forms of exclusion have continued despite increasing representation of women in the global astronaut corps. Representations of gender in space culture are drawn from a long history of traditional conceptualisation of masculine and feminine bodies, particularly in spatial theory. Additionally, using the particular spatiality of extra-terrestrial spaces, I argue that traditional notions of gendered bodies and spaces can be uniquely destabilised by human spaceflight experience. The gendering of outer space is often entangled with sexual culture in space discourse,as discussions of women in space are often conflated with discussions of sexuality, reproduction, and human futures in space. I analyse these ideological connections alongside feminist and queer theory to argue that while space culture is primarily heteronormative, it also holds great potential for destabilising narratives of heteronormativity. Discussions of the future, in particular, often revolve around heteronormative ideas of family and procreation, however the temporality of space culture is not as straightforward as these narratives would suggest. It is my contention that the critical potential of outer space both necessitates and facilitates a radical shift in understandings of spatiality and temporality. Ultimately, I argue that the extremity associated with extra-terrestrial exploration can inform broader theoretical discussions of gender, sexuality, cultural space, time and the future.

PN Literature (General)

With iconic characters like Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, and Iron Man representing the wider culture’s understanding of comics, popular perceptions of the medium are that comics are a male-centric medium focused on male experience and readers. As the medium and the dominant superhero genre has gained attention, focus and research has been placed on the medium and how these narratives deal with representation. With the perception and stereotypes of comic readers and comic narratives as predominantly male, the question of female representation, especially within the dominant superhero genre, is a topic that has garnered attention. In my thesis, I look at the history, sources, and perpetuation of gendered performances within superhero comics. By looking at the field of comics, the perceived dominant reading position, and the constrained meaning of texts, I show that the act of creating, reading, and talking about comics are parts of a logonomic system. This system functions to deliver an expected and constrained representation and meaning about female characters and female experience. In superhero comics, female characters are constrained to performances of the monster or angel. Through the way their powers, costumes, and identities are narratively constructed, female characters are forced to be either submissive and objectified angels who conform to patriarchal power structures, or dangerous and monstrous women who need to be punished and normalized. Superhero comics work to interpolate the perceived dominant reading position, deliver pleasure, assuages fear, and transmits an expected meaning of male/female relationships and performances.

PN Literature (General) and PN1993 Motion pictures

This thesis explores the youth film genre in Russia and Serbia since the 1990s. Youth film is not only an essential means of tracing changes in cultural perceptions about young people and their lives in the post-communist period, but I argue that the genre serves as a means of representing society as a whole. The youth film genre, as an overarching framework dictated by the age of a film’s protagonists, encompasses and adopts a wide variety of sub-genres. This flexibility in youth film allows for an innovative study of the position of one genre as part of a wider sphere of genre film-making in the post-communist period. In particular, I demonstrate that global genre theory can be used as a means to examine the different genre types that have appeared in the cinema of Russia and Serbia in the post-communist period. The film industries of both nations were required to undergo vast changes in the transition from communism to capitalism, making film genres and audience preferences more significant than before. The films I analyse in this thesis borrow extensively from Hollywood genre types, using deviations and national-cultural references to appeal to their domestic audiences. However, I also contend that genres were an important part of the film industries of the Soviet Union and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and that these genre histories must be considered. My close analyses of six youth films provide the communist and post-communist context for their genre usages, placing them within a wider canon of films from particular genres. This thesis contributes not only to the understanding of the youth film genre and the different ways in which these films are made, but also to knowledge of the use of genres in recent Russian and Serbian cinema as a whole. The chapters of this thesis examine how youth films and youth audiences have become increasingly important to post-communist film industries. I demonstrate that youth film allows directors not only to depict the trials and tribulations of growing up during the transition from communism, but how these youth films often reference the suffering of adults in this period. Young people are situated in a historical limbo, between the communist past and the capitalist future, and as such become a poignant metaphor for the wider experience of transition in these two nations.

PE English and PN Literature (General)

Oswald’s Book of Hours and Englaland (OBOH&E — Smokestack Books, 2013 & 2015 respectively) are distinctive works in the context of modern and contemporary English language poetry. Although there are affinities between OBOH&E and several modern and contemporary works, OBOH&E’s visionary engagement with concepts of England and English identity, their epic expression and novel post-pastoral dimension combine to make them unique. The works’ address to England and the English emerges from an ecologically committed, broadly socialist position informed by Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, Benedict Anderson’s concept of the nation as ‘imagined community’ and Patrick Kavanagh’s assertion of the primacy of the ‘parochial’, coalescing into a literary-political position defined by my coinage utopian yeoman-anarchism. The epic dimension of OBOH&E is demonstrated in an exposition based on the theoretical writings of Rudyard Kipling, Ezra Pound and M.M. Bakhtin. OBOH&E’s characteristic dialogical method — defined by the synchronic and synoptic temporal aspect of the works and their deployments of heteroglossia, polyphony and xenoglossia — leads to a characterisation of the books as novelistic ‘modern epics’. Finally, in an analysis informed by Terry Gifford’s influential taxonomy, OBOH&E is identified as a distinctive subgenre of the post-pastoral (another coinage) — the guerrillapastoral. The guerrilla-pastoral arises from the transgressive rural praxis of the author and is reflected and expressed via his personae, narrators and protagonists as they assert their rights in the land, in conflict with representatives of the power that seeks to restrict and deny them.

PN Literature (General) and PS American literature

The present study proposes that there is an intrinsic relationship between the contemporary American short story cycle and the myth and ideology of the United States. I argue that the contemporary form of the story cycle has become the genre of choice for certain authors whose work explicitly challenges the dominant ideological discourses of Euroamerica and its underpinning mythologies. The five authors and the texts I discuss are Tim O’Brien and The Things They Carried, Julia Alvarez and How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Gerald Vizenor and Landfill Meditation, Sherman Alexie and Ten Little Indians, and Thomas King and Green Grass, Running Water. In the thesis I address the interrelationship between ideology and mythology and this is the foundation for my examination of the way that these five disparate writers each uses the story cycle in his or her own distinctive way to challenge a dominant ideology and the mythology that underpins it.

DA Great Britain, PN Literature (General), and PR English literature

This thesis examines three key moments in the intersecting histories of Scotland, Ireland and England, and their impact on literature. Chapter one Robert Bruce and the Last King of Ireland: Writing the Irish Invasion, 1315- 1826‘, is split into two parts. Part one, Barbour‘s (other) Bruce‘ focuses on John Barbour‘s The Bruce (1375) and its depiction of the Bruce‘s Irish campaign (1315-1318). It first examines the invasion material from the perspective of the existing Irish and Scottish relationship and their opposition to English authority. It highlights possible political and ideological motivations behind Barbour‘s negative portrait of Edward Bruce - whom Barbour presents as the catalyst for the invasion and the source of its carnage and ultimate failure - and his partisan comparison between Edward and his brother Robert I. It also probes the socio-polticial and ideological background to the Bruce and its depiction of the Irish campaign, in addition to Edward and Robert. It peers behind some of the Bruce‘s most lauded themes such as chivalry, heroism, loyalty, and patriotism, and exposes its militaristic feudal ideology, its propaganda rich rhetoric, and its illusions of freedom‘. Part one concludes with an examination of two of the Irish section‘s most marginalised figures, the Irish and a laundry woman. Part two, Cultural Memories of the Bruce Invasion of Ireland, 1375-1826‘, examines the cultural memory of the Bruce invasion in three literary works from the Medieval, Early Modern and Romantic periods. The first, and by far the most significant memorialisation of the invasion is Barbour‘s Bruce, which is positioned for the first time within the tradition of ars memoriae (art of memory) and present-day cultural memory theories. The Bruce is evaluated as a site of memory and Barbour‘s methods are compared with Icelandic literature of the same period. The recall of the invasion in late sixteenth century Anglo-Irish literature is then considered, specifically Edmund Spenser‘s A View of the State of Ireland, which is viewed in the context of contemporary Ulster politics. The final text to be considered is William Hamilton Drummond‘s Bruce’s Invasion of Ireland (1826). It is argued that Drummond‘s poem offers an alternative Irish version of the invasion; a counter-memory that responds to nineteenth-century British politics, in addition to the controversy surrounding the publication of the Ossian fragments. Chapter two, The Scots in Ulster: Policies, Proposals and Projects, 1551-1575‘, examines the struggle between Irish and Scottish Gaels and the English for dominance in north Ulster, and its impact on England‘s wider colonial ideology, strategy, literature and life writing. Part one entitled Noisy neighbours, 1551-1567‘ covers the deputyships of Sir James Croft, Sir Thomas Radcliffe, and Sir Henry Sidney, and examines English colonial writing during a crucial period when the Scots provoked an increase in militarisation in the region. Part two Devices, Advices, and Descriptions, 1567-1575‘, deals with the relationship between the Scots and Turlough O‘Neill, the influence of the 5th Earl of Argyll, and the rise of Sorley Boy MacDonnell. It proposes that a renewed Gaelic alliance hindered England‘s conquest of Ireland and generated numerous plantation proposals and projects for Ulster. Many of which exhibit a blurring‘ between the documentary and the literary; while all attest to the considerable impact of the Gaelic Scots in both motivating and frustrating various projects for that province, the most prominent of which were undertaken by Sir Thomas Smith in 1571 and Walter Devereux, 1st Earl of Essex in 1573.

PN Literature (General)

This thesis is in two parts: a creative work of fiction and a critical reflection on writing from an identity of expatriation. The creative work, a novel entitled Running on Rooftops, revolves around a fictitious community of expatriates living and working in China. As a new college graduate, Anne Henry, the novel’s protagonist and narrator, decides to spend a year teaching English in China. Twelve years later, though still unsure of how to make sense of the chain of events and encounters that left her with an X-shaped scar on her knee, she nevertheless tells the story, revealing how “just a year” can be anything but. The critical reflection, entitled Writing on Rooftops, explores the nature of expatriation as it relates to identity and writing, specifically in how West-meets-East encounters and attitudes are depicted in literature. In it, I examine the challenges and benefits of writing from an identity and mindset of expatriation as illustrated in the works of Western writers who themselves experienced and wrote from viewpoints of expatriation, particularly those Western writers who wrote of expatriation in China and Southeast Asia. The primary question addressed is how expatriation influences perception and how those perceptions among Western foreigners in China and Southeast Asia have been and can be reflected in literature. In the end, I argue that expatriation can be a valuable viewpoint to write from, offering new ways of seeing and describing our world, ourselves and the connections between the two.

E11 America (General), E151 United States (General), and PN Literature (General)

This thesis represents the first extensive critical study of the relationship between Robert Burns and the early United States of America. Spanning literature, history and memory studies, the following chapters take an interdisciplinary approach towards investigating the methods by which Burns and his works rose to prominence and came to be of cultural and literary significance in America. Theoretically, these converging disciplines intersect through a transnational, Atlantic Studies perspective that shifts emphasis from Burns as the 'national poet of Scotland' onto the various socio-cultural connections that facilitated the spread of his work and reputation. In addition to Scottish literary studies, the thesis contributes to the broader fields of Transatlantic, Transnational and American Studies. Previous studies have suggested that Burns's popularity in the early United States might be attributed to his kinship with 'national' American ideals of freedom, egalitarianism and individual liberty. While some of the evidence supports this claim, this thesis argues that it also wrongly assumes a spatiotemporal unity for the nineteenth-century American nation. It concludes by suggesting that future critical studies of the poet must heed the multifarious complexities of 'national' paradigms, pointing the way to further work on the reception and influence of Burns in other 'global' or, indeed, transnational contexts.

PN Literature (General), PN0080 Criticism, PN0441 Literary History, PR English literature, and PS American literature

This thesis comprises three main components: firstly, close readings and critical analyses of four major poetical works by W.H. Auden—“The Watershed”, The Sea and the Mirror, “New Year Letter”, and “In Time of War”; secondly, ten semi-informal letters addressed to W.H. Auden; and thirdly, a serial poem consisting of short and long poems based on the speeches of the public figure, Barack Obama. The thesis proposes a creative writing discipline founded on the productive and intensive exchange between reading and writing poetry, and reflection through letter writing. The chapters of critical analysis argue the following: firstly, that through his idiosyncratic handling of syntax and voice in poems like “The Watershed”, Auden introduced a new element of the uncanny into English poetry; secondly, that in The Sea and the Mirror, Auden re-evaluated his poetics and altered his poetic voice in response to a new reading public; thirdly, that in the “New Year Letter,” Auden uses tone to expand the range of his poetic voice; and fourthly, that in the sonnet sequence “In Time of War”, Auden uses parable to combine lyric and narrative elements in order to universalise the Sino-Japanese War. Some of the issues raised in the chapters of critical analysis, such as poetic truth, poetic voice, the lyric subject, and parabolic writing, are elaborated on in the letters to W.H. Auden. Finally, the Serial Poem presents 74 short and long poems produced using appropriative writing procedures. The idea that runs through all parts of this thesis is that speech, voice, and parable are crucial elements in the poetic practice of W.H. Auden, and that close attention to these three elements through all stages of this project— critical reading and writing, letter writing, and creative writing—has contributed to the development of a rich and productive poetic writing practice.

PN Literature (General) and PR English literature

This PhD capping paper is an accompaniment to three published books of poetry: Blood/Sugar, White Coins and Everything Broken Up Dances. Blood/Sugar and White Coins (hereafter B/S and WC) were both published by Arc Publications in the UK, in November 2009 and April 2015. Everything Broken Up Dances (EBUD) by Tupelo Press in the US, in December 2015. I situate these books within a poetics of desire, exploring the idea of the self in my work and how this relates to the self as other, or desiring of the other. I also consider the possibilities of fragmentation in relation to form and utterance. Significantly—though among others—I examine key texts by Georg Hegel, Judith Butler, Maurice Blanchot, Edmond Jabès and Jacques Lacan and examine their various theories on desire and the function of the self to evaluate poems from each of my own books, as discussed.

B Philosophy (General), BH Aesthetics, PN Literature (General), PN0080 Criticism, PR English literature, and PT Germanic literature

This thesis examines the relation between philosophy, the poem and the subject in the mature philosophy of Alain Badiou. It investigates Badiou’s decisive contribution to these questions primarily by means of comparison, especially to Martin Heidegger, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Theodor Adorno, as well as by analysing Badiou’s readings of poems and prose by Paul Celan and Samuel Beckett respectively as sites of potential dialogue with his immediate predecessors. The thesis stresses the importance of French philosophy’s German heritage, emphasising not only Badiou’s radical departure from Heidegger and his legacy, but also the former’s wholesale rejection of philosophies that would, in the wake of twentieth-century violence and beyond, proclaim their own end or completion. The thesis argues Badiou’s innovative readings of Celan and Beckett to be crucial to understanding this endeavour: for Badiou, both writers use the poem to affirm novel conceptions of subjectivity capable of transcending the historical conditions of their presentation. The title quotation from Badiou’s The Century, ‘Yes, the century is an ashen sun’, anticipates both the affirmative nature of these subjective figures, and their presience, beyond the bounds of a twentieth-century ‘ashen sun’ pervaded by melancholy, for the ‘new suns’ of the twenty-first. The thesis is in four chapters. The first chapter unfolds the central concepts of Badiou’s departure from Heidegger using Paul Celan’s poems to focus the enquiry. It is guided by two of Badiou’s most condensed declarations about the poem, that, firstly, ‘the modern poem harbours a central silence’, and secondly, that ‘Celan completes Heidegger’. The second chapter exposes the political implications of Heidegger’s writings on Friedrich Hölderlin and the role of the subject therein, offering at its close some thoughts about what Badiou calls, following Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, the poem’s ‘becoming-prose’. It concludes by drawing the poem and politics into relation by way of the philosophical category of the subject. The third chapter reads Badiou’s concept of ‘anabasis’ against Heidegger’s ‘homecoming’ in order to think the possibility of a collective political subject’s formation in the wake of Auschwitz. The final chapter examines the imbrication of the Two of love and the ‘latent poem’ in Badiou’s reading of Samuel Beckett’s late prose, contrasting this ‘affirmative’ reading of Beckett to Theodor Adorno’s earlier emphases on negation. Following its investigations of subjectivity, poem and prose throughout, the thesis concludes by returning to the title quotation in order to unfold the particular relations between subject, affirmation and negation Badiou’s philosophy enacts, and to offer further routes forward for research regarding Badiou’s philosophy and aesthetic figuration.

PN Literature (General) and PN0080 Criticism

This thesis invites a re-examination of our understanding of the human and its relationship with the external world. To this end, it develops the paradigm of appendicology as a way of going beyond traditional conceptions of the human, nature and technology. Appendicology is a study of appendages and appendixes – bodily organs and parts that seem to be merely attached to the body proper and that appear peripheral, external or non-essential to the human form despite being internal or integral to it. At once internal and external, natural and alien to the body, the appendage and the appendix defy any absolute boundary between the inside and the outside, revealing the integral exteriority and natural foreignness of the human. This thesis engages with the contradictions and ambiguities posed by these organs of corporeal otherness to argue that the relationship between the human, technics and the natural world is one of becoming in which the human and the nonhuman, the natural and the artificial, the singular and the multiple are always necessarily implicated with and within one another. By engaging with a range of material sourced from literary, scientific, and theoretical works, including texts by Jacques Derrida, Bernard Stiegler, Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Charles Darwin, André Leroi-Gourhan, Lynn Margulis, Samuel Butler, Italo Calvino and Daniel H. Wilson, this thesis argues that the relationship between the human and technology, and that between the human and the natural world, must be considered alongside the multitudes of other relationships of becoming that constitute life. The central claim of this project is that an appendicology opens up ways of thinking that do not essentialize or privilege the human, or, for that matter, technology, nature or life, but that instead allow us to see each one in the other and to recognise how each is always already constituted through these others.