https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/70410 2026-04-04T19:12:33Z 2026-04-04T19:12:33Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/101842 2022-09-27T07:44:11Z 2002-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: The novels of D.H. Lawrence : a Freudian reading Abstract: Using Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalytic theories, in order to uncover the relationship between literature and the unconscious, this thesis argues for a special affinity between Lawrence's novels and psychoanalysis. I argue that psychoanalysis - by which I mean the Freudian line as continued and developed by Jacques Lacan- shares enough ground with Lawrence's fiction to be of theoretical relevance, especially in areas related to its initial "shibboleth - password" Oedipus Complex, as well as its insistence upon the great importance of the Other in the reciprocal development of subjectivity and cognition. The primary objective of my reading is to evaluate aspects unique in D.H. Lawrence's novels when viewed from the Freudian perspective, rather than to nail down direct and derivative use of Freud's work-the focus is on Lawrence's transformative and dynamic way of adapting Freudian thought in his novels. In the introduction of this thesis, I have tried to outline the general precepts of Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis in the first instance, and then place the particular discussion of the Oedipus complex, dream interpretation, and the unconscious within a framework which can be brought to bear on the analysis of Lawrence's narrative. I have given specific attention to Freud's linguistic terminology which has since become known as "the language of the unconscious", and to Lacan's intense preoccupation with language. Such an investigation will help recuperate aspects in Lawrence' s work that have been hitherto passed over, (his theory of the unconscious) by bringing out ways in which the Lawrencian doctrine anticipates or, at least, paves the way for the claims of psychoanalysis. In order to bring into play insights into the unconscious, I devote considerable space to Lawrence's major novels: Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley 's Lover - each in a separate chapter. Because the unconscious veils itself in metaphor and metonymy, in these chapters, I strive to unveil the disguises of tropical language in order to generate manifest meaning from latent content. By arguing that Freud's theories of condensation and displacement in dreams, match Lacan' s use of metaphor and metonymy in language, I attempt to demonstrate that despite Lawrence's abhorrence of Freud, the unifying theme between Lawrence's fiction and psychoanalysis is that the unconscious (because it is structured like a language) is the voice of the (m)Other disguised in figurative language. Description: PH.D.ENGLISH

2002-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/101454 2024-10-31T09:57:09Z 1996-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: A thematic-semiotic comparison of five 'Wuthering Heights' film adaptations Abstract: This dissertation seeks to redress the balance in favour of Wuthering Heights film adaptations by considering their reviewers' unsupported accusation of infidelity in terms of the films' relative success in recreating Bronte's major themes in predominantly visual images. Each of the four chapters is a detailed thematic study, based on close observation of corresponding film sequences juxtaposed to the novel's equivalents. The first chapter assesses the Linden-Barret thematic concept of film adaptation by analyzing Bronte's religious theme and her theme of human depravity in the respective light of the Cohen paradox of deconstructive fidelity and the Battestin-Armour dyad of analogical autonomy. The first chapter establishes also a semiotic methodology of thematic companson by analyzing Bronte's bird-theme through the application of Metz's metonymic/metaphoric taxonomy of connoted signification. The second and third chapters analyze respectively whether Wuthering Heights film adaptations succeed in unveiling visual analogies on the Metzian connotative level for (a) Bronte's landscape characterization and the frost/fire paradoxism infusing her central love-theme and (b) the equally crucial theme of 'fantastic hesitation' underlying Bronte's interplay of homodiegetic narrations. The fourth chapter dissects in Metzian semiotic terms the musical scores and sound-effects codes of Wuthering Heights film adaptations to determine whether they succeed in echoing thematically the novel's essential 'wuthering'. The conclusion examines the prospects of Wuthering Heights on screen by assessing (a) some filmically undeveloped aspects of key Brontean avian incidents and (b) Bronte' s implied incest motif which is usually ignored in filmic recreations of the Catherine-Heathcliff relationship. For the purpose of this exercise, the film versions of Wuthering Heights directed by William Wyler, Luis Bufiuel, Robert Fuest, Yoshishige Yoshida and Peter Kosminsky have been chosen as sources for comparative analyses. What such analyses reveal is that, while the Wuthering Heights films directed by Bufiuel, Yoshida and Kosminsky are more consistently analogous thematically to Bronte' s text than their Wyler and Fuest equivalents, even the latter have their enviable moments of undoubted Brontean significance. Description: PH.D.ENGLISH

1996-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/101363 2022-09-06T06:01:27Z 2001-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: 'In paradise alone' : textual strategies of occurrence in Andrew Marvell Abstract: Andrew Marvell' s reputation as an elusive poet is investigated in this thesis from a predominantly textual viewpoint. Marvell's elusiveness is traced to an underlying structure which is perceptible in the recurrent instances of dissatisfaction that instruct his work. The main forms this underlying structure inhabits in Miscellaneous Poems are the soul's terrestrial dissatisfaction at its loss of divine communion, and the lover's frustrated desire at the lack of communion with his beloved. This permeating structure is considered in the thesis as an 'unpresentable' in resisting unproblematic representation in Marvell' s texts. The thesis suggests that what provokes Marvell' s elusiveness is his problematic adoption of received conventions (mostly pastoral) in a way that alludes to an unpresentable (hence underlying) structure in the strategic failure to represent the same. Marvell's elusiveness is thus viewed as informed by the allusive mode which his revaluation of textual devices adopts. In following the dynamics of a loss of an originating contact with the divine and a longing for reunion with that original state, the structure that instructs Marvell' s unpresentable is termed 'Eden'. Marvell's version of Eden is located in a primordial stage that predates Adam's desire for a mate; it is hence a solitary and fulfilling Eden in which the human is physically and spiritually at one with God, the environment, and the self. The thesis locates Marvell' s underlying structure of Eden in the neoplatonic and hermetic discourses available in the seventeenth century. Accordingly, Marvell's poems are analysed from this perspective. The term 'textual strategies of occurrence' is applied to mark Marvell's experimentation with textual devices that strategically allude to the structure of Eden in his work. Jean-Francois Lyotard's postmodern notion of occurrence is adapted to mark Marvell's reworking of pre-formulated rules. It is also applied to mark the occurrence of an event, the Fall in Eden, after which nothing could be the same again. The thesis's adaptation of Lyotard's concept of the unpresentable that is alluded to in works that belong to an aesthetics of the sublime, is informed by Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic narrative of the human being's process of signification. The principal aims which this thesis addresses are, thus, (i) the identification of an underlying structure in Miscellaneous Poems in an analysis of Marvell's strategic handling of textual devices; (ii) the implications for a study of seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry; and (iii) the adaptation of Lyotard for a critical practice. Description: PH.D.ENGLISH

2001-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/101134 2024-09-18T05:34:44Z 2010-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: 'Blast of harmony' : simultaneity of linguistic opposites in the poetry of William Wordsworth Abstract: F. W. Bateson, a renowned Wordsworth critic, once wrote that Wordsworth's 'conflict between his past and his present emotional life provided ... the tension that seems to be the prerequisite of all great poetry' (Wordsworth: A Re-Interpretation, p.163). This thesis seeks to explore such moments of tension not in relation to the poet's emotional life but in terms of what I call the 'simultaneity of linguistic opposites.' By linguistic opposites I understand the two conflicting views of representation, namely the logocentric metaphysics of presence and the deconstructive poetics of absence. Whereas a poetics of presence concentrates primarily on the power of unification between man and nature, deconstruction maintains that in so far as language is a radically unstable construct there can never be poetry which embodies an external truth or which refers to a unified whole. Romantic representation does not reside in the valorisation or domination of one extreme over the other but in the co-existence of the two extremes. The surface logocentric text contains a subtext which opposes it and which questions the structuring power of language. However, the subtext does not invalidate or substitute the text, as deconstruction believes, but exists parallel to it by working counter to it. Both text and subtext, which have logocentric and deconstructive capabilities respectively, exist on the same level and none of them gains supremacy over the other. In this respect my reading of Wordsworth does not seek to adhere to one of these representational extremities but considers these opposites as operating simultaneously, the simultaneity of which creates a second presence, (or what the poet, in Book XIII of the 1805 version of The Prelude, calls an 'under-presence' 1.72), a Coleridgean 'hertium alquid' which is necessarily the result of the tension between these two opposites. This resulting presence is neither an embodiment of Truth nor a manifestation of absence but a tension which partakes of two opposing natures, a border between ontological opposition. In the 'Introduction' I develop the general concept of simultaneity of linguistic opposites with particular references to Coleridge whilst seeking to establish continuity with modem and post-modem philosophy especially with Heidegger and Derrida. This is followed (chapter one) by an implementation and a development o this concept in the light of Wordsworth's consideration of the incarnative capability of language and in his qualification of the language of epitaphs as the highest form of poetry. The language of epitaphs and Wordsworth's 'epitaphic mode' are interpreted as instances of such a tension, characterised by the presentation of a language of presence which, in being epitaphic, manages to ground its presence on death and absence. Chapter two discusses other variations that simultaneity assumes by considering Wordsworth's notion of tranquillity, tautology and linguistic stasis as moments indicative of such a linguistic tension. My readings of The Ruined Cottage and 'The Thom' in this chapter seek to develop the notion of presence in Wordsworth by locating the power of simultaneity within presence to the extent that presence is not simply a process of making present but a manifestation of a tension between absence and presence. The notion of death and the simultaneity of death and life that the epitaph depicts are further explored in chapter three which deals with the Lucy poems where, through the simultaneity of linguistic opposites, the language of these poems seems to breach the limits of metaphor and goes beyond the line of demarcation which distinguishes metaphor, the comparison of one thing to another, from metamorphosis, an actual becoming of the thing described. The language of the Lucy poems is placed in the very tension generated between these representational extremities. The last two chapters are devoted to Wordsworth's autobiographical poem The Prelude. Chapter four deals with the opposing signifying aspects of autobiography as a process of making the past occur in the present whilst, simultaneously, marking the past as already lost in the present. In order to accommodate such an opposition The Prelude employs a discourse characterised by a language of self-dividedness which locates meaning in the very impediments encountered on the way towards a full and logocentric representation of the self in writing. In this manner the final chapter (chapter five) seeks to explore moments where The Prelude simultaneously places and displaces structure and logocentrism by employing a 'both/ neither' linguistic formulation where presence is placed at the very moment that it is displaced. This (dis)placement is the manifestation of a tension within Wordsworth's language of representation, a language which manages to create a supreme form of presence which is neither confined to mimetic literal representation nor to simply figurative meaning but is a result of a tension generated by the simultaneity of its linguistic opposites. Description: PH.D.

2010-01-01T00:00:00Z