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The present thesis is a reading of Saul Bellow's Dangling Man, The Victim, and Seize the Day in terms of Michael White's and David Epston's notion of 'narrative therapy.' Saul Bellow's subtlety in his portrayals of the modern man's struggle against problems is present throughout all his novels. The existence of problems as dominators of the mind has become an integral part of his fiction. Bellow's prose implies a long-lasting tradition of story-telling to express events from distinguished perspectives. Each protagonist attempts to tell stories about his lived experiences using different ways of expression, including writing a journal, remembering past events, ruminating on fixed and unexamined narratives, and writing letters. Joseph, Leventhal, and Wilhelm are victims of dominant stories constructed socially, culturally, and economically. Thin descriptions force them to dangle and wonder about 'the truth.' Different difficulties give them the postmodern realization that specific versions of events cannot become more privileged than others. One of the study's primary concerns is to examine the role of others and society in shaping dominant stories since the stories are constitutive. Re-membering conversations in narrative therapy seek to thicken the thin description with the aid of one's club of life in finding unique outcomes. Although the protagonists fail to end their dissociation from relatives and society, they show their intentions in doing so. The study analyzes different depictions of American society, whether as a war-worn atmosphere, a repudiator of Jews, or a reckoning place for unsuccessful men. The role of prevailing culture as a controlling factor that affects people's perception of problems is common in the three novels despite the distinguished demonstrations of society in different eras. Joseph, Leventhal, and Wilhelm utilize therapeutic techniques like naming the problem, tracing the history of it, evaluating its effects, finding unique outcomes, and re-authoring to deconstruct totalizing stories. Bellow writes about men seemingly at the rope's end and their remaining hope to recover from past mistakes. Although some troubles are left unsolved during the deconstructing process, the protagonists arrange their problems based on their importance and externalize all of them.

The present dissertation explores a selection of Canadian post-apocalyptic novels, within the context of the country's societal dynamics, multiculturalism, and identity. Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven (2014), Cherie Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves (2017), Larissa Lai's The Tiger Flu (2018), Catherine Hernandez's Crosshairs (2020), and Doreen Vanderstoop's Watershed (2020) are examined within the overarching theme of societal instability, offering insights into the representation of the Canadian collective unconscious and the anxieties it reflects. In terms of theoretical perspectives of Fredric Jameson, with emphasis on the political unconscious, and also Carl Gustav Jung's concept of the collective unconscious, this study delves into the motives behind the recurrent themes of post-apocalypse and the potential collapse of Canadian society in these novels. Jameson's influential work The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981) is a pivotal reference in this investigation, challenging the notion of literary creation isolated from the political context. In fact, his belief that any work of art can be analyzed within its socio-economic determinants informs the foundation of this study. By examining the interplay between the novels' narratives and the Canadian collective unconscious, this study sheds light on the authors' motivations for writing post-apocalyptic narratives. Post-apocalyptic fiction serves as a rich subgenre for the exploration of societal collapse and human survival. Through the detailed analysis of the chosen novels, this thesis investigates the diverse dystopian traditions represented, including ecological collapse, pandemic, technological upheaval, and oppressive regimes. Each novel contributes to the discussion by offering unique perspectives on the potential future of Canadian society. Canada's vast geographical expanse, the survival of indigenous cultures, and its open immigration policy contribute to its multicultural identity. The bicultural nature of the country, often celebrated as a mosaic of identities, is examined within the narrative context of these novels. However, this research challenges the prevailing narrative by asserting that cultural differences and policies have influenced the Canadian collective unconscious, fostering insecurity and an imagined dystopian future. In conclusion, synthesizing literary analysis with Jameson's theoretical perspectives and Jung's notion of the collective unconscious provides a robust framework to interpret the multifaceted layers of Canadian post-apocalyptic literature. The exploration of societal instability, fears, and the anticipation of dystopia in these novels contributes to a deeper understanding of contemporary Canadian identity, fostering critical discussions on the impact of policies, cultural dynamics, and the collective psyche of a nation undergoing a profound transformation. Keywords: Fredric Jameson, the political unconscious, Carl Gustav Jung, the collective unconscious, Station Eleven (2014), The Marrow Thieves (2017), The Tiger Flu (2018), Crosshairs (2020), Watershed (2020), the Canadian collective unconscious, anxiety, social insecurity multiculturalism.

Joyce Carol Oates has written several short stories on the concept of pain and body. She has pictured human body in all its different forms and circumstances. She reveals pain as it truly is within the course of events in her stories. Pain has become an inseparable element of her stories. How can body be separated from pain when there are always pains to affect the body irredeemably? Diseases, injuries, operations and voluntarily modifications are among the reasons that cause pain in different forms such as acute or chronic, neuropathic, visceral, somatic and nociceptive pains. Human bodies, although treated differently as male or female, black or white, healthy or diseased and strong or weak, are all subjects to pain in the same way. The differences in bodies range from injured and tormented bodies, diseased bodies, gendered bodies and reproducing bodies to modified and deformed bodies. This study aims to find to what extent Oates has been successful in representing bodies and pains, to what extent her approach to pain overlaps the scientific approach and what possible therapeutic effects are presented in her fictional world. She has provided evidence for each type of pain she introduces, and this study has gone into the details of the stories to highlight the evidence and adjust it with the reality and the scientific theories of pain. For this study Oates’s collections of short stories in different periods of time have been used in order to have a glance at her work during the different eras of her work and not just a specific time or collection. The collections studied in this research are: I Am No One You Know (2005), Dear Husband (2010), Sourland (2010), The Corn Maiden (2011), Black Dahlia and White Rose (2012), Lovely, Dark, Deep (2014), and High Crime Area (2014), Night Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense (2018).

The present thesis attempts to study Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and The Blind Assassin in terms of their mythological intertexts and aims to demonstrate that Atwood's objective for using these myths is to illustrate the state of contemporary woman. In these novels, Atwood has referred to various patriarchal myths such as the myth of Philomela and the myth of the Sirens and mythological archetypes such as the Great Mother. The main issue is to investigate Atwood’s objective of referring to these myths and to clarify in what manners she uses these myths to accomplish her objective which is depicting the state of the contemporary woman. Through the powerful tool of mythology, Atwood attempts to demonstrate that women’s position in our time is highly similar to these ancient myths and that even after several centuries, they still bear great resemblance to our contemporary world. Nonetheless, we must consider that there are several other myths that Atwood refers to which are not mentioned because of the subject of the thesis. One of Atwood’s most significant messages in these novels, is that these myths are a tool through which we are able to better observe our contemporary world and as a result, have a more obvious perception of it. In examining these novels, the theories of Erich Neumann who was a prominent Jungian psychiatrist and mythologist who studied the Jungian archetype of the Great Mother in his book entitled The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (1955) and furthermore, the theories of Helen Cixous in his significant work entitled The Laugh of the Medusa (1975), have been used. Thus, in the first step, the two novels are examined according to the theories of Neumann and Cixous, and in the next step, the resemblance that these myths bear to the state of women in the contemporary world is discussed. Thus, it is suggested that through these mythological intertexts, Atwood attempts to depict the identity and position of women in the contemporary world and additionally, the manners in which Atwood has used the language of mythology to represent the incongruities in our contemporary world, specifically that of women.

The present thesis endeavors to address the issues of privileging men over women, the return of the ghosts, and influence of media on people’s decisions in the selected novels by Lisa Unger in the light of the theories of Jacques Derrida. In the Blood (2014) and Crazy Love You (2015) are the selected novels that will be discussed in this thesis. The problem of privileging the male over the female is studied based on Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance; the return of the ghosts is investigated according to his theory of supplement; and undecidability examines the influence of media on people’s decisions. Also, this thesis approaches the previous academic studies on the novels that form the material of this research and tries to shed light on the ignored parts of the two novels in the previous studies. A problem is the right choice of critical concepts in comparison to the previous works. As an instance it is explained why logocentrism or mosaic of quotations are not suitable concepts to read the two novels critically. Another problem is the issue of Lane’s sex changes; the present researcher has rejected the previous arguments about the two sex changes and has come up with a new idea. To sum up, not only has this thesis fixed the previous studies’ mistakes, but also it has come up with new ideas about the ignored details of the two novels that have not been considered before.

The present study seeks to pursue the philosophy of active nihilism in Seamus Heaney’s collections of poetry. The main items of active nihilism, which will be explored in the collections, are empty space, nothingness, ontological nihilism, nihilistic phenomenology, religious nihilism, and the historical consideration of nihilism. The investigated collections are Seeing Things (1991), The Spirit Level (1996), Electric Light (2001), District and Circle (2006) and Human Chain (2010). Active nihilism, by accepting no meanings and values as predetermined principles, strives to discover innovative connotations in previous origins and sources. Selected collections of Heaney in this thesis convey examples of absences that will present the fertile presences. Active nihilism, in opposition to radical traditional nihilism, struggles to open possible paths and potentialities for religions to exist safely. In this sort of nihilism, life is, correspondingly, out of imposed meanings, as well as filled with effective individual values. Nothingness, as an item of active nihilism, in Heaney’s poetry, creates meaningful spaces to obtain new meanings. History, one of the critical elements, breeds personal interpretations based upon particular generations. Phenomenology aids active nihilism to specialize every cultural or religious code to a specific phenomenon. Thus, no determined or infallible constitution of belief and credence may be existent. Seamus Heaney, by passing national and religious predispositions, in the last years of his life, cross the threshold of universality of active nihilism.

In the past decades in South Africa, there have been attempts by contemporary South African authors to re-read and re-write their identity. As a dominant contemporary South African novelist, André Brink uses similar themes to redefine South Afrikaner's national identity. As a South African writer, throughout his works, Brink considers historical facts as fundamental elements for creating a narrative form in which the Afrikaners could distinguish from the dominant power during apartheid. In his post-apartheid writings, the author concentrates on a democratic society where the Afrikaners have become marginalized. In the narrative that transferred from history, there exists an undeniable gap, and Brink uses the memories of specific South Afrikaners' characters to fill this gap. However, this research will make an effort to investigate the linkage between memory, narrative, and identity in André Brink's Rumors of Rain (1978), The Rights of Desire (2000), and Before I Forget (2004). The study demonstrates the processes of events in which the characters challenge their identity crisis during the apartheid and post-apartheid era, but its main focus is on their narrative of the past upon which they experience therapeutic effects. Since these characters lack an identity, they became depressed—therefore, by deconstructing their past memories, they could reconstitute a new identity. For analyzing the characters' psychological problems, this study draws on narrative therapy. It is an interdisciplinary approach in Medical Humanities concerned with mental health and pathological discourse. This approach concentrates on the modern power discourses to problematize social justice, the marginalized communities where people have subjugated to experience trauma under political apparatus. With its meaning and life-making features, narrative therapy privileges spoken or written language to deconstruct traumatic life experiences in an attempt to reconstitute a new identity. It views identity as a specific ideological framework constructed through dominant social order and memory as a socially and culturally constructed product and reflection of individual's inner self in the dialogical context. Both memory and identity in the roots are political. Such political elements play significant roles in refashioning Afrikanerdom in Brink's writings of apartheid and post-apartheid.

The present study seeks to investigate the significance of nutrition in the process of narrativization of identity in Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle and its effects upon the female character of the novel. Joan Foster, the protagonist of the novel, suffers from obesity from her early childhood and has to cope with several psychological consequences as she grows into an author and becomes an adult. Based on the findings of the British social critic Susie Orbach (1946) who discusses women's relation to food and obesity in her 1978 book, Fat is a Feminist Issue, Joan, like many of Orbach's study cases, seems to have built an uncertain relationship to food from the very early stages of her life which has in turn problematized the way she eats and has led her towards obesity. Living in a capitalist society in which the traces of sexism can also be found, food is both made accessible and labeled as unallowable for Joan as a woman and thus once she turns to food as a way of expressing her discontent with her surroundings and with the society she lives in, she gets fat and is forced into feeling guilty and giving up to the culture. Therefore, she loses lots of weight and turns into what the society has always asked her to look like, however her shattered identity would not recover and she manifests it in the novels and poems she writes as an author.

The present study is a reading of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed and “The Day before the Revolution” in terms of Tom Moylan’s notion of “critical utopia.” Through analysis of Le Guin’s treatment of Utopia in Hainish Cycle, the study raises several questions regarding the purpose of the author in creating Utopia and critical reading of socio-political American society. The aim of this study is to examine whether Le Guin’s novels, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, are examples of critical Utopias and what Le Guin’s wants to criticize in her societies. The results of the study show that Le Guin’s main project in her Hainish Cycle selected works has been to show that her utopian societies are critical utopias that criticize both her own society and the fictional ones which follow the Utopian tradition in Sci-Fi novels. As far as the study focuses on political systems in Gethen, Anarres and Urras, there are both Utopian and Dystopian zones in the novels that reveal at first the societies seem as a utopia, but they are under a kind of indirect authoritarian power which take their freedom. She also attempts to indicate that she is in search of communication and integrity of nations with each other.

The current research seeks to critically investigate Toni Morrison’s selected novels, with reference to Laclau and Mouffe’s discursive-analytical theory. More specifically, the present study aims at exploring the way black subjectivity, subject-positions of African Americans, and identity of textual characters are constituted within Morrison’s four novels, i.e. Jazz (1992), Love (2003), A Mercy (2008), and Home (2012). With this purpose in the view, the current thesis has opted theoretical framework of Laclau-Mouffe’s discourse analysis in order to apply it to abovementioned texts as sample selection. After analyzing textual data extracts, linguistic and non-linguistic acts through critical tools of Laclau and Mouffe and the novels unveil that there would be multiple discursive domains as the findings of the present research. In particular, identity of the characters-whether black or white could be partially affiliated with discursive domains. On a large scale, Afro American identity can be constructed in contestational contingency with simultaneity of plural and alternative discursive articulations in their political affiliations, effectively leading to the condition of overdetermination. The core possible conclusions drawn from the overdetermined character are as follow: none of discourses are able to claim the dominant or hegemonic position in discursive construction of African-American identity as a whole. Furthermore, the problem of overdetermination posits that hegemonic sides fail to close and suture all black subjects and characters into one discursive chain. Therefore, black identity has a split and unstable character. The overflowing process implemented by surplus of floating signifiers prevents full construction of black identity with a single hegemonic discourse, giving rise to the phases of de-totalization and dis-articulation. However, the impossibility of closure embedded in hegemonic discourses causes the emergence of empty signifiers.

The present research aims to keenly investigate the treatment of deformity in the novel Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides and the memoir Change Me into Zeus’s Daughter by Barbara Robinette Moss. Narrated by Calliope (Cal) Stephanides the protagonist, the novel Middlesex depicts the lives of Three generations of Stephanides family. Cal, born as a female (Calliope), is a 5-alfa-reductase hermaphrodite identifying as a male whose condition stems from the marriage of his grandparents who were siblings. 5-alfa-reductase deficiency is a condition which prevents male sexual organs to develop well before birth and during puberty; people with this deficiency are genetically male with one Y and one X chromosome in each cell. Because of not producing enough DHT hormone which has crucial role for male sexual development, the formation of external organs disrupts. Change Me into Zeus’s Daughter is an autobiographical work by Barbara Robinette Moss. Growing up in a poor rural family in Alabama with a charismatic and alcoholic father led to facial deformity of Barbara which was the result of malnutrition, loose of medical and dental care. This research seeks to study the representation of deformity in the selected works and by defining social and cultural meaning of deformity and illustrating different disability theory critics’ viewpoints, analyze the social and cultural obstacles that affect deformed people’s life.

The present research is an investigation of novels and memoirs written by the writers of the Iranian diaspora community in the United States. On the one hand, this research uses an Orientalist approach to argue that Iran and Iranians have always been viewed from a colonialist perspective which considers their culture, history, traditions, and even the country’s geographical location as inferior. Whereas such a Westernized approach considers Iranian identity as underdeveloped, inflexible, inferior, and profoundly influenced by superstition, it deems the other side of this dichotomy, i.e., Western identity, reliable, powerful, logical, and superior. Accordingly, this research seeks to evince how Iranian-American writers have endeavored to show their western readers the predicament of being Iranian-American through their narratives of disillusionment and alienation. On the other hand, this study also draws attention to the way the selected writers have used humor as a medium through which they can voice their concerns. Using Superiority, Incongruity, and Relief theories of humor to analyze such neglected aspects of these works as humor, politics, as well as the relationship between humor and double consciousness, this study will shed some light on certain aspects of the Iranian-American (Iranican) identity. The works selected for this research include Funny in Farsi and Laughing Without an Accent by Firoozeh Dumas, Sons and Other Flammable Objects by Porochista Khakpour, and The Iranican Dream by Siamack Baniameri. Moreover, this study will analyze the above-mentioned works in order to investigate the use of Iranican humor in the narratives of Iranian-American writers. The rhetoric of these works and the unique type of humor used in them help us understand the alienated identity and the double consciousness of an Iranican. They will also help us realize how humor is used as a rhetorical device to portray the hyphenated identity of these writers and their experiences of always living in between, i.e., as an immigrant caught between nostalgia for the homeland and assimilation in the host country, the United States.

The present thesis meticulously examines André Brink’s post-apartheid novels, Devil’s Valley and Imaginings of Sand, based on the premises of disability studies which is a sub category of medical humanities. Medical Humanities as a multidisciplinary field of research focuses on the connection between medicine and humanities and social sciences. One of its subcategories, which is the researcher’s primary focus, is Disabilities Studies in which deformity and disability is viewed as a social construct rather an ordinary physical flaw. Disability studies and literature illuminate how disability as an identity constructive factor will be presented in literature and will define the identities of literary characters. The Devil’s Valley and Imaginings of Sand capture issues of democratic South Africa. A new-born South Africa where blacks rule and Afrikaners have become a marginalized minority. These two novels are replete with deformed and abnormal characters who are symbolically presented to capture the oppressed and marginalized identity of Afrikaners in the new democratic South Africa. Disability studies view disability not as an exclusive phenomenon but as an issue which roots back to other discriminations like feminism, racism and ethnic discrimination.

The present study aims atclosely investigating Hubert Selby Jr.’s Requiem for a Dream and The Demon, based on Slavoj Žižek’s critique of violence, desire, and fantasy. In a sequence of influential books, Žižek formulates a new framework to look at the role of violence within modern society, approaching it in terms of Objective and Subjective violence, and to shed light on the unbearable enigma of the desire as a state of motivation or drive for seeking pleasure through his theory of fantasy. Žižek explores the critique of ideology and states that the experience of desire is established within sets of social conditions and ideologies, and the desire of the subject is necessarily shaped by ideologies bounded with the social codes, structures, and beliefs. Requiem for a Dream and The Demon, written by the significant twentieth-century writer, Hubert Selby, are complex and monumental works that highly depict the failings of modern society. This research seeks to study his achievements of Requiem for a Dream and The Demon, in the light of the Žižek theory of the shattered fantasy, violence, cruelty and the unfulfillment of desire to analyze how these concepts were represented in the novels.

This study is to investigate the treatment of deformity in the novels Handle with care by Jodi Picoult and Staying Fat for Sara Byrnes by Chris Crutcher. Handle with Care deals with the theme of a congenital disease called Osteogenesis Imperfecta (OI) and the problems a family is involved with by raising a kid named Willow with this defect. The disease has eight basic types with prenatal symptoms. Type III of OI that the protagonist is entangled with, is marked by lack of cologen formation that leads to a brittle bone with numerous breaks and fractures in the bones of the patient. Staying fat for Sara Byrnes deals with bullies, unlikely heroes, friendship, fear and coping with adversity. Two protagonists of the novel, Eric Calhoune and Sara Byrnes, are social outcasts due to excessive fatness and scars from childhood that develop a bond of friendship between the two protagonists. Medical humanities as an interdisciplinary field investigates the social, historical and cultural dimensions of medicine. It is interesting to note how authors ʻuseʼ disability to tell their stories. Deformity is understood in aesthetic terms as the opposite of beauty or a deviation from normal appearance. According to Foucault, since classical time, body is seen as object and target of power and there is a changing view to deformity from the time when a person with deformity was exhibited as a sheer freak show to the time doctors thought of healing strategies for deformity. While the stigma of deformity derives from the appearance of bodies, modern definitions of disability concern the functions of bodies and their relationship to their social and physical environment. The protagonists’ names in both novels indicate how metaphorically deformity can be viewed.

This study aims to reimagine J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man and The Childhood of Jesus in terms of cosmopolitan concepts of sympathy, shame and limits. In this regard, an eclectic theoretical approach in this qualitative library research is adopted. The explication of Coetzee’s distinct cosmopolitanism is approached in terms of emphasis on law and ethics in Coetzee’s philosophy of living and extra-textual effects of such philosophy on the reading process, author, and reader. As a narrative miniature of a global project, Coetzee’s novels promote a distinctive individualism which reveals the inadequacy of sympathy and shame as contributive to cosmopolitan philosophy of humanity. Not thoroughly attended to in previous critical approaches to Coetzee’s fiction is significance of the initial traumatic event in descent of the subject to the other’s stance and in facilitation of the project of feeling. The subject’s shame in the face of other’s impassivity, extra-textual denial of agency and authority, and ambivalent contribution of feeling to reason challenge the basic premises of cosmopolitanism. One may conclude that the two novels by Coetzee promote a faithbased association between the cosmopolitan subject and the other where the subject experiences otherness via difference. The outstanding expanse of Coetzee’s literary output suggests the need for further studies on problematics of subject-other association, stasis or evolution in such association and role of socio-politics of the imaginative hosting community in this essential transition.

This dissertation seeks to explore the narrative specialties of The Narrow Road to the Deep North by, the Australian author, Richard Flanagan for which he won the 2014 Man Booker prize. The novel is beyond an allusion to Basho's significant classical work written in the 17th century Japan. Basho's work is a haibun in the Japanese tradition which is a combination of verse, haikus, and prose. Basho's The Narrow road to the Deep North is a travel narrative that acts like a model for Flanagan to provide him with the chance of an artistic imitation of Basho's style. The pilgrimage-like journey of Basho becomes the personal life story of Dorrigo Evans who experiences a narrative of love and war in the 20th century. These opposing lines of narrative move forward in parallel, since the haikus intervening the narrative, set the scene for the events that they are not originally written for; still they are open to be placed in. The focalizers are different characters who are the perceivers of the incidents going on in the novel. These focalizers provide the opportunity of delivering an objective representation of the lines of the events by explicating various dimensions that help the reader have a holistic realization of the entire narrative. Along with the focalizers and the haikus, the road acts like the third element that aids the encounter of different people from different ethnic backgrounds. The dialogism is the occasion which strengthens the polyphonic nature of the novel. All these attempts in delivering an objective representation are to have the chance of the intrusion provided for the author.

The present research seeks to critically analyze Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies based on the literary historiographical theories of Hayden White. The long historical novels, Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012) are fictionalized accounts of Thomas Cromwell’s rise to power in the court of Henry VIII. This fictionalized account of the Tudor history reflects several ideas of the postmodern philosophy of history which are mostly proposed by Hayden White as an influential figure in the area of historiography and literary criticism. Hayden White is a prominent figure in the field of history. One of his significant works, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in the Nineteenth Century Europe 1973), is marked as the turning point in historical theory. Hayden White aestheticized historiography and regarded it as a linguistic construction which is not different from literature. The history of Tudors, and specifically of King Henry VIII, has been an interesting subject matter for most historian and novelists and it has been frequently investigated by them. Mantel deals with the historical facts impressively and tries to demonstrate facts and at the same time create a new version of the issues of the Tudor period. She tries to tell the readers that it is possible to have many different versions of the historical reality and this is something that postmodernists view on the relativity of reality. The novel provides corresponding peculiarities with the postmodern approach of historiography that is generated by Hayden White, since he believes that there could be different versions of historical facts and it is the choice of the historian or the writer of historical fiction how to interpret the reality and make his own version of it. In this research, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies as the two contemporary historical novels, will be investigated based on the theories of postmodern philosophy of history and literary historiography.

This dissertation seeks to illuminate Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy by taking Emmanuel Levinas’s ‘ethics’ into consideration and fosters debate on its key terms including the Other, subject, the face, trauma, and responsibility. Atwood’s trilogy consists of Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013) which have been thoroughly investigated to validate that both Atwood and Levinas demand to establish alternative forms to end a dystopian world. Atwood with an apocalypse and Levinas through ‘humanism of the other’ strive to establish a utopia filled with responsible subjects. The purpose of this dissertation is to explicate to what extent the characters in the novels are considered to be Levinasian responsible subjects and it is clarified that Levinasian subject is a responsible one whose self is split due to the presence of the Other. This state of subjectivity is traumatic since he/she becomes awake to respond to the Other’s call. The apocalyptic trauma parallels with a traumatic essence of subjectivity and traumatic childhood that contribute to the post-apocalyptic insomnia. This traumatic state of being awake stems from the Other’s face which is widely considered to be the most significant and perplexed issues of Levinas’s ethics. A command lies at the heart of the face that is ‘thou shall not kill’ the other. This dissertation presents a comprehensive account of Levinas’s concept of the Other in the various forms before and after apocalypse. It includes ‘intersubjective relations,’ ‘death and future as the other,’ the role of the ‘feminine alterity’ with regard to a new generation after apocalypse, ‘paternal and fraternal’ encounter of self and the other with reference to the characters’ childhood memories which propels the majority of the novels.

The present thesis attempts to read Firoozeh Dumas’ Funny in Farsi (2003) and Elizabeth Eslami’s Bone Worship (2010) in terms of Homi K. Bhabha’s concepts of hybridity, mimicry, and third space. In recent years, a number of Iranian immigrants have tried their hand at writing memoirs which are highly reflective of their hybrid identities. Immigrants carry with them a set of cultural customs to the new country where it has its own specific culture. These two different cultures constantly intervene the acts of immigrants and leave them with a hybrid identity. Meanwhile, immigrants have to adjust themselves to the host country and mimic the behavior codes of that country. As a result, they will always be living in an in-between space, namely third space, between these two spaces. In other words, they belong to neither the original nor the host country, but to both of them. In their memoirs, these Iranian immigrants describe their life experiences and the difficulties they are facing in the U.S. A considerable part of these memoirs is about Iran and the important aspects of Persian culture such as language, family, education, hospitality, and Nowruz. However, these writers usually use the English language as their medium, which means they have successfully assimilated into the American culture. Firoozeh Dumas’ Funny in Farsi (2003) and Elizabeth Eslami’sBone Worship (2010), the study reveals, abound with characters of different generations of Iranian immigrants who have been able not only to incorporate the American culture but also remain, in some ways, connected with their original Persian culture.

The present dissertation seeks to closely read and critically investigate Howard Barker's Scenes from an Execution, The Castle and Victory in terms of Hayden White's notions of history as narrative and emplotment. Critical assessments of Barker's plays make frequent mentions of his modern literary strategies and his active engagement with historical issues. His emphasis on the form of the plays devotes little attention to the history of the story on which each play is based, since he is interested in imagining history rather than reflecting it as it is. Thus, in the process of dramatizing the historical events of his plays, he invents some events or characters to create his own version of them. His aim is to emplot history via different modes of explanation such as tragedy, comedy, satire, epic, and irony. Barker brings his approach alongside those of postmodern philosophers such as Hayden White. White suggests that it is possible to have different versions of what happened through emplotment. Therefore, in this way, there is always the challenge and uncertainty for what has exactly happened when representing it by dramatic emplotment. White's view on historical representation is in line with Barker's ways of representing history in his historical plays. Barker is known for his theatre of Catastrophe in which the moment of beauty is the moment of collapse of moral certitudes. Barker's selected plays are considered as history plays. In each of them, historical events and historical characters are taken into account. He himself, by displaying scenes or dialogues rooted in the mind, leaves no place for one who proclaims clarity.

This dissertation endeavors to address the issue of liminality in the selected novels by the South African novelist, André Brink. The concept of liminality, here, is defined from the viewpoint of the British cultural anthropologist, Victor Witter Turner. Rumors of Rain (1978), An Act of Terror (1991) and The Rights of Desire (2000), are the three novels which will be exclusively examined in this dissertation. South Africa, as a multi-ethnic country comprising different ethnic groups such as blacks, whites, coloreds and Asians, is known as the Rainbow Nation. Brink's novels depict liminality as a significant factor in the lives of South African ethnicities during apartheid, the transition period, and the post-apartheid era. Although the dominant impression supposes the blacks to be in a more in-between situation, Brink reveals liminality in the lives of other ethnic groups as well. This study comes up with this conclusion that being a minority serves as a unifying factor that negates other differences and gathers different ethnicities in the communitas. Consequently, liminal beings are in communitas rather than a structured society. They are like guests in a carnival who are equally welcomed regardless of their respective significance. The holders of the carnival are the socio-political authorities who observe minorities as a whole rather than separable entities. The fixation of the beings in liminality has made it an integral component of South Africa. Regarding the lives of ethnicities, the transition of power does not change anything for the better.