"I Know Who I Am: Self-constitution and the Unreliable Narrator"

Thesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2016-06

Zwischen Inszenierter Wirklichkeit und realem Traum : Rolle und Problematik des Erzählers in den phantastischen Prosawerken von Leo Perutz und Alexander Lernet-Holenia

Souvent laissée pour contre par les théoriciens, longtemps associée à la littérature populaire, la littérature fantastique a su depuis se tailler une place parmi les grands genres de la littérature. Depuis le milieu du XXe siècle, les chercheurs et le public découvrent ou redécouvrent un genre qui a toujours fait parti du paysage littéraire. Une œuvre majeure contribuera à la redécouverte scientifique du genre : Écrite en 1970 l’œuvre de Tzvetan Todorov Introduction à la littérature fantastique donne tant au néophyte qu’au chercheur un ouvrage qui trouve encore des échos aujourd’hui. Sa définition du fantastique, son approche du rôle du narrateur et du lecteur sont une référence, un point de départ et surtout un incontournable pour ceux et celles qui désirent comprendre et apprendre le fantastique. Dans ce mémoire, nous nous concentrerons particulièrement sur le rôle et la problématique du narrateur dans l’œuvre de deux représentants majeurs de la littérature fantastique de langue allemande du début du XXe siècle : Leo Perutz (1882-1957) et Alexander Lernet-Holenia (1897-1976). Le narrateur semble jouer un rôle prédominant dans la littérature fantastique. En effet, par son discours souvent présenté au « je », il semble créer une dynamique très particulière : il manipule son propre discours, il agit sur le lecteur en étant narrateur et personnage dans le récit, il crée une tension entre les différentes couches narratives par son état instable. Bref, il semble contribuer à l’apparition du fantastique dans le texte et également provoquer une certaine hésitation chez le lecteur. Le texte joue également un rôle : Leo Perutz produit un modèle de texte qui semble marquer aussi son collègue Alexander Lernet-Holenia. La structure presque mathématique des textes de Perutz rappelle que le fantastique peut jouer même à l’intérieur de paramètres rigides avec l’ordre et le chaos, les frontières entre le réel et le rêve. Nous étudierons des œuvres de Leo Perutz et d’Alexander Lernet-Holenia qui ont été publiées entre 1915 et 1937. Les théories qui serviront à appuyer mon travail sont tirées entre autre des études de Tzvetan Todorov et Uwe Durst sur la littérature fantastique et de Gérard Genette sur le narrateur.

Machado de Assis e a crítica às avessas

During the time he collaborated with the cartoon magazine Semana Ilustrada [Illustrated Week] (1860-1876), Machado de Assis, under the pen name of Dr. Semana, was the author of a number of chronicles in which a different kind of criticism, called “reverse criticism” by Raimundo Magalhães Júnior, emerged. This criticism consisted in flattering texts that were terrible from the literary viewpoint. Based on the theoretical formulations of Beth Brait and Linda Hutcheon regarding irony, the article aims to analyze some examples of this kind of criticism that arises in Semana Ilustrada, in which it is possible to identify the first signs of Machado’s unreliable narrator.

La sombra de los libros sobre la ciudad. Espacialización del relato y confiabilidad del narrador en Borges

La espacialización del sujeto, uno de los procedimientos en que se sustenta la poesía de Borges de los veinte, es retomado en sus primeros relatos: el "yo" poético se transforma en un narrador-yo que se proyecta sobre la ciudad de Buenos Aires. La sucesión de imágenes estáticas de la poesía es reemplazada en el relato por un movimiento de exploración del espacio, que funda una tradición en la historia de la representación de la ciudad en la cultura argentina. Los narradores de estos cuentos de los años cuarenta a la vez ponen en escena una ficción de identidad con el autor y se presentan como poco confiables; los textos explicitan una serie de enfrentamientos entre narrador y lector, típicos del relato policial, mediante los cuales la literatura de Borges escenifica la función que atribuye a la ficción.

La sombra de los libros sobre la ciudad. Espacialización del relato y confiabilidad del narrador en Borges

La espacialización del sujeto, uno de los procedimientos en que se sustenta la poesía de Borges de los veinte, es retomado en sus primeros relatos: el "yo" poético se transforma en un narrador-yo que se proyecta sobre la ciudad de Buenos Aires. La sucesión de imágenes estáticas de la poesía es reemplazada en el relato por un movimiento de exploración del espacio, que funda una tradición en la historia de la representación de la ciudad en la cultura argentina. Los narradores de estos cuentos de los años cuarenta a la vez ponen en escena una ficción de identidad con el autor y se presentan como poco confiables; los textos explicitan una serie de enfrentamientos entre narrador y lector, típicos del relato policial, mediante los cuales la literatura de Borges escenifica la función que atribuye a la ficción.

La sombra de los libros sobre la ciudad. Espacialización del relato y confiabilidad del narrador en Borges

La espacialización del sujeto, uno de los procedimientos en que se sustenta la poesía de Borges de los veinte, es retomado en sus primeros relatos: el "yo" poético se transforma en un narrador-yo que se proyecta sobre la ciudad de Buenos Aires. La sucesión de imágenes estáticas de la poesía es reemplazada en el relato por un movimiento de exploración del espacio, que funda una tradición en la historia de la representación de la ciudad en la cultura argentina. Los narradores de estos cuentos de los años cuarenta a la vez ponen en escena una ficción de identidad con el autor y se presentan como poco confiables; los textos explicitan una serie de enfrentamientos entre narrador y lector, típicos del relato policial, mediante los cuales la literatura de Borges escenifica la función que atribuye a la ficción.

"She Was Not Even Normal": Unreliable Narratives of Female Insanity in Jane Eyre, Rebecca, and Wide Sargasso Sea

In my thesis, I interrogate narrative reliability related to depictions of female insanity in Jane Eyre, Rebecca, and Wide Sargasso Sea. By subjecting the trustworthiness of her storytelling to criticism, especially as regards the concealed madwoman, Bertha Mason, Jane's narration is revealed as unstable, offering problematic insight into a character long considered unflinchingly honest. In du Maurier's later literary adaptation of Jane Eyre, Bertha's parallel character, the eponymous Rebecca, comes to the fore, while the novel's unnamed narrator remains in the shadows, and bases much of her storytelling upon hearsay, rather than the "autobiography" of Jane Eyre. The most transparent narrative voice, however, is Antoinette, the main character of Wide Sargasso Sea, the 1966 prequel to Jane Eyre. Despite her madness, Antoinette's narration makes no attempt at dissemblance, speaking forthrightly about her marriage and experience, proving a truthful narrator and openly rejecting the marginal status the earlier narrators try desperately to hide.

Improving the performance of positive selection inference by filtering unreliable alignment regions.

Errors in the inferred multiple sequence alignment may lead to false prediction of positive selection. Recently, methods for detecting unreliable alignment regions were developed and were shown to accurately identify incorrectly aligned regions. While removing unreliable alignment regions is expected to increase the accuracy of positive selection inference, such filtering may also significantly decrease the power of the test, as positively selected regions are fast evolving, and those same regions are often those that are difficult to align. Here, we used realistic simulations that mimic sequence evolution of HIV-1 genes to test the hypothesis that the performance of positive selection inference using codon models can be improved by removing unreliable alignment regions. Our study shows that the benefit of removing unreliable regions exceeds the loss of power due to the removal of some of the true positively selected sites.

Tree-based message diffusion for managing replicated data in unreliable and resource-constrained peer-to-peer environment

Abstract This thesis proposes a set of adaptive broadcast solutions and an adaptive data replication solution to support the deployment of P2P applications. P2P applications are an emerging type of distributed applications that are running on top of P2P networks. Typical P2P applications are video streaming, file sharing, etc. While interesting because they are fully distributed, P2P applications suffer from several deployment problems, due to the nature of the environment on which they perform. Indeed, defining an application on top of a P2P network often means defining an application where peers contribute resources in exchange for their ability to use the P2P application. For example, in P2P file sharing application, while the user is downloading some file, the P2P application is in parallel serving that file to other users. Such peers could have limited hardware resources, e.g., CPU, bandwidth and memory or the end-user could decide to limit the resources it dedicates to the P2P application a priori. In addition, a P2P network is typically emerged into an unreliable environment, where communication links and processes are subject to message losses and crashes, respectively. To support P2P applications, this thesis proposes a set of services that address some underlying constraints related to the nature of P2P networks. The proposed services include a set of adaptive broadcast solutions and an adaptive data replication solution that can be used as the basis of several P2P applications. Our data replication solution permits to increase availability and to reduce the communication overhead. The broadcast solutions aim, at providing a communication substrate encapsulating one of the key communication paradigms used by P2P applications: broadcast. Our broadcast solutions typically aim at offering reliability and scalability to some upper layer, be it an end-to-end P2P application or another system-level layer, such as a data replication layer. Our contributions are organized in a protocol stack made of three layers. In each layer, we propose a set of adaptive protocols that address specific constraints imposed by the environment. Each protocol is evaluated through a set of simulations. The adaptiveness aspect of our solutions relies on the fact that they take into account the constraints of the underlying system in a proactive manner. To model these constraints, we define an environment approximation algorithm allowing us to obtain an approximated view about the system or part of it. This approximated view includes the topology and the components reliability expressed in probabilistic terms. To adapt to the underlying system constraints, the proposed broadcast solutions route messages through tree overlays permitting to maximize the broadcast reliability. Here, the broadcast reliability is expressed as a function of the selected paths reliability and of the use of available resources. These resources are modeled in terms of quotas of messages translating the receiving and sending capacities at each node. To allow a deployment in a large-scale system, we take into account the available memory at processes by limiting the view they have to maintain about the system. Using this partial view, we propose three scalable broadcast algorithms, which are based on a propagation overlay that tends to the global tree overlay and adapts to some constraints of the underlying system. At a higher level, this thesis also proposes a data replication solution that is adaptive both in terms of replica placement and in terms of request routing. At the routing level, this solution takes the unreliability of the environment into account, in order to maximize reliable delivery of requests. At the replica placement level, the dynamically changing origin and frequency of read/write requests are analyzed, in order to define a set of replica that minimizes communication cost.

Women from the point of view of the Bukowskian narrator: the representation of the feminine universe in Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness

Pós-graduação em Letras - IBILCE

Materiali utilizzati a lezione nel corso di Teoria della letteratura (LS) "Homo narrator: Per una teoria del sapere narrativo"

I materiali forniti sono specificamente rivolti agli studenti che abbiano frequentato il corso, come integrazione e supporto agli appunti presi durante le lezioni.