The dedication of books to patron and friend; a chapter in literary history

Title in red and black.

Essays in literary interpretation,

Some aspects of modern literature -- Personality in literary work -- The significance of modern criticism -- The poetry of Dante, Gabriel Rossetti -- Robert Browning -- John Keats : poet and man -- Some modern readings from Dante -- A word about humour.

Attitudes to language in literary sources:beyond post-colonialism in nigerian literature

All societies display attitudes to (varieties of) languages that tell us about the relative status of the groups that are associated to them. One method to document these is the systematic study of public discourses, including literary production. How (varieties of) languages are used, mentioned and characterised in a literary work tells us about their social status, and any change in this status should therefore be followed by changes in judgements on languages. This is demonstrated by the present paper with reference to the language attitudes in Nigeria, on the basis of two iconic Nigerian novels 2004 Purple Hibiscus and in 1958 classic postcolonial Things Fall Apart, separated by nearly fifty years. Ibo as well as Pidgin, Nigerian and European Englishes are presented in Purple Hibiscus in nuanced complementary configurations. A strong axiological polarisation is by contrast offered in Things Fall Apart between Ibo speakers and Ibo interpreters who are presented as cruel and ridiculous traitors siding with the English colonising power whose language, curiously, is not commented upon. Showing how a replicable method applied to language judgements can document social organisation and change, these results validate the view that the Nigerian society and culture has moved beyond the historically situated postcolonialist movement to embrace a globalised paradigm. © 2010 Taylor & Francis.

The dynamics of movement: Toward a definition of a Latin American identity in contemporary fiction

Concha Meléndez opened up a venue for the discussion of a Latin American identity in works of literature when she implied that the great Latin American novel would gestate in the cities, the space where the typical Latin American would achieve an ideal state of consciousness and intellectual capabilities. ^ Her point of view mirrored nineteenth-century debate on a Latin American identity. Similar to her viewpoint, intellectuals of this period viewed the cities and their inhabitants of European extraction, as the ideal spaces and people on which an identity could be defined. However, the present state of urban and rural areas in Latin America demonstrates that there is no such clear-cut division of city and countryside or of their inhabitants. The dynamics of movement, from rural to urban areas, of people of diverse ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds, make it difficult to uphold descriptors of space, race, or culture, as sole descriptors of an identity. ^ A study of five twentieth-century novels from North and South America, La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962), Hasta no verte Jesús mío (1969), Los ríos profundos (1981), La casa de los espíritus (1982), and Los años con Laura Díaz (1999) reveal that the dynamism of movement, between countryside, and cities of peoples of distinct races and social backgrounds, hamper the definition of a collective identity in specific spaces. As characters move, they are constantly reconfiguring their identities and creating tensions and conflicts that intensify social, racial and economic divisions in society. This makes it difficult to ascribe permanent identity descriptors, much less define a collective identity. ^ However, as writers of fiction address the malaise in Latin American societies, they have unearthed descriptors such as history, economy, land, and movement that advance a collective definition of self in these societies. Additionally, female characters have been granted a new identity. The overwhelming evidence in this study points to ‘land’ as the prime factor in the identity dilemma and suggests that a definition will not be possible until the vast landless populace is granted a space they can call home. Only then, perhaps, will Meléndez novel surface. ^

Automata and men : the shift towards a human ideal in the fiction of Wyndham Lewis

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Transcultural satire in German fiction of Turkish migration: Self-deprecation, ethnic impersonation, intertexuality

My dissertation presents a study of satire in contemporary German Fiction of Turkish migration. Engaging with a body of works hitherto neglected in scholarship, I examine how satirical texts, films, and plays intervene critically in discourses on post-unification German national identity. Drawing on the seminal work of scholars such as Leslie Adelson, Tom Cheesman, B. Venkat Mani, Petra Fachinger, and Deniz Göktürk, my dissertation expands the scholarship of Turkish German Studies by linking a discussion of satire as a critical rhetoric to the question of how we talk about what it means to be German.

Chapter one offers a novel framework of the satirical vis-à-vis standard conceptions of satire and deconstructionist theories of reading. I understand satire as a form of rhetoric that creates moments of ambiguity by bringing together intersectional categories like gender, ethnicity, race, religion, in order to challenge the audience’s practices of interpreting cultural otherness. Chapter two examines the use of ethnic self-deprecation as one such strategy in Osman Engin’s short stories and his first novel, Kanaken-Ghandi through the lens of Bakhtinian polyphony and Judith Butler’s work on hate speech. Engin, I argue, employs ethnic selfdeprecation as a narrative strategy to straddle the line between deconstructing and re-affirming cultural stereotypes. Investigating the role of ethnic impersonation in Hussi Kutlucan’s film Ich Chef, Du Turnshuh, the third chapter turns to the question of ethnicity as a visual signifier for the negotiation of cultural inclusion and exclusion in post-1990 film. In dialogue with Katrin Sieg’s work on ethnic drag and Amy Robinson’s theory of passing, I show how the film challenges ethnically-coded narratives of Germanness. In the final chapter on Nurkan Erpulat and Jens Hillje’s play Verrücktes Blut, I discuss how intertextuality and adaptation (Hutcheon, Genette) of different story and character worlds are used to create moments of ambiguity and overdeterminacy in the play, in order to challenge the audience’s perception of what an inclusive German society might look like.

Automata and men : the shift towards a human ideal in the fiction of Wyndham Lewis

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

THE INTERTEXTUALITY OF OPERA IN THE FICTION OF NELIDA PIÑON

This article examines how Nélida Piñon builds a feminist reader in the novel A força do destino (1978). This work highlights the role of the contemporary writer to read the classics from the post-modern and feminist places. Post-modern because it decentralizes the structural elements of the text, feminist because it opposes to any kind of women oppression. In this novel, the narrator reconstructs the trajectory of the characters Alvaro and Leonora, homonym protagonists of the opera by Giuseppe Verdi, based on her devotion by them, because of this, it becomes a passionate and original reporting. The narrative of Piñon is built from a parodist and irreverent place that updates the plot of Verdi. This is a metanarrative in which the narrator dialogues with her characters and reader. In this case, the reference to the opera by Verdi is, actually, the exploration of artistic and cultural archives in accordance with the interests of the narrator. Methodologically, this paper is guided by the exploitation of intertextuality present in this work and in gender studies to enhance the speaking place of the writer as a real part of contemporary feminist culture.

The candidate : a novella and examination of Australian Gothic crime fiction

Australia is a land without haunted castles or subterranean corridors, without ancient graveyards or decaying monasteries, a land whose climate is rarely gloomy. Yet, the literary landscape is splattered with shades of the Gothic genre. This Gothic heritage is especially evident within elements of nineteenth century Australian sensation fiction. Australian crime fiction in the twentieth century, in keeping with this lineage, repeatedly employs elements of the Gothic, adapting and appropriating these conventions for literary effect. I believe that a ‘mélange’ of historical Gothic crime traditions could produce an exciting new mode of Gothic crime writing in the Australian context. As such, I have written a contemporary literary experiment in a Gothic crime ‘hybrid’ style: this novella forms my creative practice. The accompanying exegesis is a critical study of a selection of Australian literary works that exhibit the characteristics of both Gothic and crime genres. Through an analysis of these creative works, this study argues that the interlacing of Gothic traditions with crime writing conventions has been a noteworthy practice in Australian fiction during both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and these literary tropes are interwoven in the writing of ‘The Candidate’, a Gothic crime novella.

The artful life story : the oral history interview as fiction

This practice-led PhD project consists of two parts. The first is an exegesis documenting how a fiction writer can enter a dialogue with the oral history project in Australia. I identify two philosophical mandates of the oral history project in Australia that have shaped my creative practice: an emphasis on the analysis of the interviewee’s subjective experience as a means of understanding the past, and the desire to engage a wide audience in order to promote empathy towards the subject. The discussion around fiction in the oral history project is in its infancy. In order to deepen the debate, I draw on the more mature discussion in ethnographic fiction. I rely on literary theorists Steven Greenblatt, Dorrit Cohn and Gerard Genette to develop a clear understanding of the distinct narrative qualities of fiction, in order to explore how fiction can re-present and explore an interviewee’s subjective experience, and engage a wide readership. I document my own methodology for producing a work of fiction that is enriched by oral history methodology and theory, and responds to the mandates of the project. I demonstrate the means by which fiction and the oral history project can enter a dialogue in the truest sense of the word: a two-way conversation that enriches and augments practice in both fields. The second part of the PhD is a novel, set in Brisbane and based on oral history interviews and archival material I gathered over the course of the project. The novel centres on Brisbane artist Evelyn, who has been given an impossible task: a derelict old house is about to be demolished, and she must capture its history in a sculpture that will be built on the site. Evelyn struggles to come up with ideas and create the sculpture, realising that she has no way to discover who inhabited the house. What follows is a series of stories, each set in a different era in Brisbane’s history, which take the reader backwards through the house’s history. Hidden Objects is a novel about the impossibility of grasping the past and the powerful pull of storytelling. The novel is an experiment in a hybrid form and is accompanied by an appendix that identifies the historically accurate sources informing the fiction. The decisions about the aesthetics of the novel were a direct result of my engagement with the mandates of the oral history project in Australia. The novel was shortlisted in the 2012 Queensland Literary Awards, unpublished manuscript category.

Sink or Swim? : Revising Ophelia in contemporary young adult fiction

Shakespeare’s Hamlet has in recent years been used by a number of young adult novels to define and authorise representations of gendered adolescent subjectivity. In so doing, these novels attend not only to Shakespeare’s play but also to other adaptations of the play. For example, the long cultural history of Ophelia being used as a template for depicting adolescent femininity as risky or dangerous is as influential as the play itself in early twenty-first century novels. This paper reads such novels for the ways in which codes of gender and of genre circulate in adolescent fiction when linked explicitly with Shakespearean texts and traditions.