As one of the three central characters in Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Peter Walsh plays a complicated and significant role in both the arc of the narrative and in the characterization of the others in the novel. One of his most significant functions is to illuminate the precarious mental practice of internally correcting his failures to mitigate feelings of social inferiority. His character serves as a commentary on the processes of inner life and the compensation that can result from obsessive self-fashioning. In this essay, I aim to prove how, within Woolf's narrative, Walsh retreats to the realm of inner life, reimagining himself and those around him to correct his shortcomings and the failures of his past.

This thesis focuses on the play-space as a realm of impossible desire in the novels Hopscotch and Lolita. Play-space, which I borrow from Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens, is a space within which play can erect its own epistemological system that regulates the game and the players. These novels are concerned with the free play of language which subverts a stable discourse about how desire operates within the play-space of the novels. To this end, I will employ the Derridean sense of free-play (writing) that is decidedly the result of the loss of the "center" of structure that historically served to orient and limit the "play of the structure." Thus, free play destabilizes the discourse of desire in its use of various ludic linguistic elements, like the word game, in addition to how these novels play with genre and the form of the novel. Both novels are fundamentally concerned with how the written word constructs a puzzle-like world in which each of the narrators direct their own subjectivities towards objects of desire which they cannot ultimately possess. These objects (Lolita and La Maga) are themselves constructed by the playful language of the solipsistic narrators whose desire, finding no object to which to attach itself, turns in on itself and drives them mad. In these novels, the quest for lost lovers becomes a more important game than the actual act of sexual congress. The ecstasy of desire is not in sexual consummation but the pursuit of the infinite puzzle, the cryptic code of desire, that Humbert and Oliveira follow through the American (waste)land and the Franco-Argentine intellectual scene, respectively. By exploring the play-space as a realm of the free play of language, we are aided in our reading of these difficult postmodern texts as deconstructions of stable narratives of desire.

This project looks at ways in which the individual comes into contact with history. By looking at the Katyń Massacre, we can see how violence and history can be viewed from aesthetic perspectives. This allows us to take part in the conversations concerned with genocide in other ways than from ethical and sympathetic perspectives. By examining the Katyń through an aesthetic lens, the individual can approach violence in new and unique ways. This research highlights for us a new way of approaching history and violence while simultaneously offering a way for the individual to have a new voice in history. The poetry that follows the research offers a way for us to aestheticize violence and use language to approach it in a way that is simultaneously cruel and beautiful.

This dissertation explores how American Indian literature and the legacy of the Red Power movement are linked in the literary representations of what I call "Indigenous Cosmopolitics." This occurs by way of oral tradition's role in the movement's Pan-Indigenous consciousness and rhetoric. By appealing to communal values and ideals such as solidarity and resistance, homeland, and land-based sovereignty, Red Power activist-writers of 1960s and 1970s mobilized oral tradition to challenge the US-Indigenous colonial relationship, speak for Native communities, and decolonize Native consciousness. The introductory chapter points to Pan-Indigenous practices that constructed a positive identity for the alienated and disempowered experience of Native Americans since Relocation. Chapter one examines the Red Power newspapers and newsletters ABC: Americans Before Columbus, The Warpath, and Alcatraz Newsletter among others. These periodicals served as venues for many Natives to publish their poems in collaborating with the politics of the Red Power movement. Among the poems considered is Miguel Hernandez's "ALCATRAZ," which supports the Native resistance and journey towards sovereignty during the Island's occupation. Chapters two and three explore the use of oral tradition in the journalism of Simon Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo), who was then working within the collaborative contexts of the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) and ABC: Americans Before Columbus, which represents the Indigenous cosmos and appeal to Indigenous peoples' cosmopolitical alliance and resistance throughout the hemisphere and across the world. The final chapter turns to the work of two poets, Joy Harjo (Muskogee Creek), Wendy Rose (Hopi/Miwok), and a singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie (Cree), showing their appropriation of storytelling modes and topics from within the inclusive functions of oral tradition - storyweaving, employing persona, and performing folk music. Harjo, Rose and Sainte-Marie push on the boundaries of the movement's rhetoric as they promote solidarity between colonized women in and beyond the US. The Red Power movement's cosmopolitics remains persistent and influential in Native nationalism, which stands as the master expression of the decolonizing process. The flexibility of oral tradition operates as a common ground for reciprocal, transformational, and inclusive interactions between tribal
ational identity and Pan-Indigenous identity, developing Native nationhood's interactions with the world.

This dissertation addresses the representation of women in the poetry of the Irish poet Thomas Kinsella. Using a variety of theoretical approaches, including historical criticism, French feminist theory and Jungian psychoanalytical theory, I argue that although women are an integral part of Kinsella's ongoing aesthetic project of self-interrogation, their role in his poetry is deeply problematic from a feminist perspective. For purposes of my discussion I have divided my analysis into three categories of female representation: the realistically based figure of the poet's wife Eleanor, often referred to as the Beloved; female archetypes and anima as formulated by the psychologist C.G. Jung; and the poetic trope of the feminized Muse. My contention is that while the underlying effect of the early love and marriage poems is to constrain the female subject by reinforcing stereotypical gender positions, Kinsella's aesthetic representation of this relationship undergoes a transformation as his poetry matures. With regard to Kinsella's mid-career work from the 1970s and the 1980s I argue that the poet's aesthetic integration of Jungian archetypes into his poetry of psychic exploration fundamentally influences his representation of women, whether real or archetypal. These works represent a substantial advance in the complexity of Kinsella's poetry; however, the imaginative power of these poems is ultimately undermined by the very ideas that inspire them - Jungian archetypal thought - since women are represented exclusively as facilitators and symbols on this male-centered journey of self-discovery. Further complicating the gender dynamics in Kinsella's poetry is the presence of the female Muse. This figure, which becomes of increasing importance to the poet, transforms from an aestheticized image of the Beloved, to a sinister snake-like apparition, and finally into a disembodied voice that is a projection of the poet and his alter-ego. Ultimately, Kinsella's Muse is an aesthetic construction, the site of inquiry into the difficulties inherent in the creative process, and a metaphor for the creative process itself. Through his innovative deployment of the trope of the Muse, Kinsella continues to advance the aesthetics of contemporary Irish poetry.

This project examines C.L.R. James, V.S. Naipaul, and George Lamming's appropriation of the European Bildungsroman, a novel depicting the maturation of the hero prompted by his harmonious dialectical relationship with the social realm (Bildung). I contend that James, Naipaul, and Lamming use the Bildungsroman genre to critique colonialism's effects on its subjects, particularly its male subjects who attend colonial schools that present them with disconcerting curricula and gender ideologies that hinder their intellectual and social development. Disingenuously cloaked in paternalistic rhetoric promising the advancement of "uncivilized" peoples, colonialism, these novels show, actually impedes the development of its subjects. Central to these writers' critiques is the use of houses, space, and land. Although place functions differently in Minty Alley, A House for Mr. Biswas, and In the Castle of My Skin, the novels under consideration here, the corresponding relationship between a mature, autonomous self and a home of one's own is made evident in each. Tragically, the men in these novels are never able to find communities in which they cease to feel out of place, nor are they ever able to find secure domestic spaces. Because the discourse of home so closely parallels the discourse of Bildung, I contend that the protagonists' inability to find stable housing suggests the inaccessibility of Bildung in a colonized space. Further, I assert that this literal homelessness is symbolic of the educated male's cultural exile; he is unable to find a location where he can live in dialectical harmony with any community, which is the ideal aim of Bildung. Leaving the Caribbean proves to be the colonized male's only strategy for pursuing Bildung; thus, these novels suggest that while Bildung is impossible in the Caribbean, it is not impossible for the Caribbean subject.