Literature

Both research and lived experience indicate that intangible things such as myths and absences may acquire agency, becoming Latourian actants and causing changes in people’s thoughts, beliefs, and actions. This dissertation focuses on myths and absences located in Spain’s 20th century—specifically Francoist-generated political myths, the absences of those disappeared by the Franco regime, and the literary myths created by authors of historical fiction set during the Spanish Civil War, the resulting dictatorship, and the Transition to Democracy. The argument is made that these three actants— political myth, absence, and literary myth—have acted and interacted in the following sequence: the political myths put forth by the Francoists and presented as facts led to the complicity of many of the Spanish people in the extermination of those considered dangerous or undesirable to the regime; once released into the popular imagination, the political myths gained agency, spurring the bigoted beliefs and persecutory actions that led to the absences of the maligned people. The presence of these tragic absences in the lives of their surviving loved ones then gained agency, indelibly marking the survivors and causing grief, anger, and bewilderment as well as fear, humiliation, silence, and transgenerational trauma. The absences also caused the desire among contemporary writers of historical fiction, some of them descendants of the disappeared who grew up under the cloud of fear and silence perpetuated by those disappearances, to write alternate histories pointing out the absurdities and atrocities connected to the earlier political myths and the resulting absences of undesirables. These literary myths thus acquired their own agency, changing the thoughts, beliefs, and actions of readers who were able to finally see through the truths and tragedies that lay hidden for so long behind the hostile myths. In these chapters, eight historical fictions—five novels, two plays, one film—and one non-fiction account, described by its author as “a novel without fiction”—are analyzed for evidence of the presence and the agency of political myth, absence, and literary myth.

Letter from Roman Books, Inc. with summary notes regarding a 31 page (approx. 5,000 words) letter by Jack London addressed to Mr. Orlando J. Smith wherein Mr. London critiques the author's work titled "Eternalism".

In 1967, Russell Hoban’s first novel, The Mouse and His Child was published and reviewed as a children’s book, despite the fact that the author considered it not to be directed towards a child audience. Since that time, it has been generally analyzed and evaluated as a work of children’s literature (specifically) and not as literature in the general sense. Because the book deals with adult subjects and concepts it has not fared well with those who have measured its success solely on the basis of its being classified as a children’s book. This thesis hopes to liberate the work from this classification by carefully analyzing the concepts which underpin its action, specifically its ontological speculations, its personification of the fall from grace and the felix culpa, the relationship of the protagonists to their complex antagonist Manny Rat, and, finally, in the symbol of “the last visible dog” which represents the infinite and what lies beyond the self (which, in fact, is actually the self). This thesis also examines how Hoban continued working with these themes and concepts in the novels he wrote after publishing The Mouse and His Child.