Browsing by Subject "Literary theory"
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Item Ego Vox Clamantis in Deserto: the lyricization of human authority in 13th-Century French dits(2014-12) Grant, Adam TylerIn this work, I consider a theoretical foundation based on the treatment of literary auctores in the 13th-century latinate literary culture as a useful tool in discerning the development of lyrical self-expression in contemporary Old French dits. I first approach the surviving corpus of works attributed to the writer Rutebeuf in order to determine how scribal treatment of this vernacular author interacted with erudite Latinate literary theory. Critically, how did scribes manipulate the space in which Rutebeuf existed as a writer? How are the varied forms of transmission - from large swaths of unified sections to the inclusion of one single dit within a manuscript of a few hundred folia - to be understood within the framework of an active literary culture? I argue that the lively manipulation and appropriation of Rutbeuf's works within various textual and thematic environments attest to a wider discursive reception of the author as a true source of experiential knowledge. Moreover, the self-portrayal that Rutebeuf effected through the construction of his persona is further proof that the vernacular writer himself was a part of this evolving discursive process. In order to justify the claim that this reception was allowed by a wider re-evaluation of the function of vernacular writers, I apply the same approach with a near contemporary of Rutebeuf, Adam de la Halle. As melodic composition and oral performativity risk eroding the existence of the lyrical writer within the work, how did Adam operate within his formative literary sphere as an author? What was the nature of the connection between the writer and his work that communicated ownership over sense and interpretation by the creator of the text? The game of monophony and polyphony in mediating the voices that constitute a work is equally as critical - how did Adam reflect himself from the chansons onto his jeux?Item Modernism's Critique du Coeur: the Novelist as Critic, 1885-1925(2013-05) Pistelli, JohnModernism's Critique du Coeur: The Novelist as Critic, 1885-1925 provides a new account of the modernist novel's famous inward turn toward subjectivity and language. This turn makes the novel of modernism not politically quietist, as prior scholars have assumed, but rather a unique resource for the robust criticism of ideologies that manifest themselves in language and consciousness. My thesis on the critical power of modernist novels promises to renew the theory that aesthetic autonomy is the keynote of modernist innovation. In this, I join the current re-examination of literary aesthetics' potential to do more than serve as an ideological pretext for vested social interests, as post-structuralist and Marxist theory had argued. I claim instead that the aesthetic has the potential to make its adherents critical and self-critical subjects of modernity. In two theoretical chapters, I survey the theory of the novel as it has addressed two primary issues: the cognitive power of novels to encapsulate a society's self-conception and the affective power of novels to move their readers toward social reform. In chapters that treat the writings of Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, I show how the modernist novel, by withholding obvious political referents and inhabiting the subjectivity of a central character, forces its readers into the position of textual critics. My approach to the texts of modernism is also meta-critical, examining not only their works but the body of criticism their works have generated in support of my argument that modernist fiction calls for its own critique. These theoretical and critical approaches allow me finally to make a literary-historical argument: by emphasizing aesthetic autonomy as the modernist novel's mode of radical critique, I am able to identify the under-analyzed novels of British Aestheticism's founders, Pater and Wilde, as the key Anglo novels of the late Victorian period. Their fictions of Aestheticism inaugurated the novelistic project of modernism.