Theses/Dissertations - English Language and Literature
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Browsing Theses/Dissertations - English Language and Literature by Author "Baylor University. Dept. of English."
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Item "Alone in the front" : isolation and community in the hero's life in Beowulf.(2013-05-15) Ziehe, Mary E.; Marsh, Jeannette K.; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.This project seeks to clarify the paradox suggested by 'ana on orde' (“alone in the front”) and to show how it plays out on both the narratorial and verbal levels of Beowulf. Ultimately, I suggest reading Beowulf using the two sides of this paradox (held in tension with each other) as an interpretive lens. My approach focuses on linguistic and literary analysis of the words 'ana' and 'ord.' I first provide background material on topics of Beowulf scholarship relating to my analysis. Then, I trace the uses of 'ana' and 'ord' in Beowulf’s “pre-battle speeches.” Third, I analyze their use throughout Beowulf. Finally, I look at how they and their cognates are used in the poetry of Old English, Old Saxon, and Old High German in order to see how the Beowulf poet uses the phrase ana on orde in comparison to other literature in his larger literary and cultural milieu.Item American modernism's fading flowers of friendship.(2013-09-24) Beck, Zachary.; Ferretter, Luke, 1970-; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.I examine friendships between major characters in modernist novels written by four American writers: Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway. My examination will reveal that the friendships they portray largely fail due to a symptom of modernism, namely that people cannot agree upon the purpose of a human being’s existence. If the purpose for human life, and therefore the criteria by which to judge whether a human life is lived well, are uncertain, then people cannot selflessly assist one another to live life well; this assistance lies at the heart of my definition of friendship, which I have adopted from Aristotle. The depiction of friendship by these four novelists indicate the immense difficulty of individuals living in the culture of modernism to look past themselves and help those closest to them progress toward a fulfilling, meaningful way of life. My concern with friendship in modernist novels is cultural and philosophical. I approach the novels as artifacts of the modernist culture in which they were created to see how these writers artistically perceive friendship. This emphasis implies that broad, philosophical trends infiltrated the communities of which these writers were members and affected their perceptions of friendship, both in their personal lives and in their art; my focus for this project happens to be the latter, rather than the former. I then want to compare the writers’ modernist-steeped view to a philosophical notion of friendship that was understood in Western thought for two thousand years but that until recently was almost completely forgotten—Aristotle’s conception of friendship and its role in a flourishing, communal life. Through this comparison, I will show that the cultural forces of modernism prompted these authors to create both enfeebled friendships and, on occasion, hopeful ideals of friendship that one might pursue against the alienating forces of modern life. The goal of my study is to reveal that the modernist period is a rich source for understanding the dynamics of and human need for friendship.Item Analogy, causation, and beauty in the works of Lucy Hutchinson.(2008-10-14T18:44:51Z) Getz, Evan Jay.; Donnelly, Phillip J. (Phillip Johnathan), 1969-; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.Lucy Hutchinson's translation of the ancient epic De Rerum Natura is remarkable in light of her firm commitments to Calvinist theology and the doctrine of Providence. David Norbrook and Jonathan Goldberg offer strikingly different explanations for the translation exercise. For instance, Norbrook argues that Hutchinson translates Lucretius in order that she might learn from the false images in Lucretius and make better ones in such works as Order and Disorder (Norbrook, “Margaret” 191). In contrast, Goldberg argues for compatibility between Lucretian atomism and Hutchinson’s Christianity, seeing no contradiction or tension (Goldberg 286). I argue that neither critic accounts for the aesthetics of beauty in Hutchinson's poetry; both critics instead attribute an aesthetics of the sublime to Hutchinson. In making this argument, I show that Hutchinson's theory of causation has much in common with Reformed Scholasticism, whereby she is able to restore a metaphysics of formal and final cause. Hutchinson also revives the doctrine of the analogy of being, or analogia entis, in order to show that the formal cause of creation is visible as God's glory. After a discussion of her metaphysics and ontology, I then show that Hutchinson's poetry reflects a theological aesthetics of beauty and not the aesthetics of the sublime. In the fourth chapter, I compare the typological accounts of Abraham found in Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan and Hutchinson's Order and Disorder with a view to virtue as the proper basis of authority. I conclude that the virtues of Hutchinson's Abraham invite individual participation in a way which is prevented by Hobbes. In my final chapter, I show that Hutchinson writes a hagiographical account of her husband in the Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson.Item The Anglo-Catholic quality of Christina Rossetti's apocalyptic vision in The Face of the Deep.(2006-07-30T23:24:33Z) Armond, Andrew D.; Wood, Ralph C.; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.Critical scholarship on Christina Rossetti's The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse, where it exists at all, tends to interpret the work as an individualistic and subversive foray into biblical interpretation. However, this dissertation argues that Rossetti's apocalyptic vision in The Face of the Deep is formed by the interpretive presuppositions of the Anglo-Catholic movement, which sought to reinvigorate the interpretation of Scripture with the traditional exegetical methods of patristic and medieval scholars. The central concern of this dissertation is thus to identify particular ways in which Rossetti's The Face of the Deep relies on an identifiable ecclesiastical interpretive tradition and to tease out the implications of Rossetti's use of these traditions for her work both as a budding theologian and as an established poet. Chapter two demonstrates that Rossetti's ostensibly individualistic and pietistic tendencies toward the personal appropriation of the Scriptures are governed less by a Romantic notion of the individual reader of Scripture than by presuppositions with which medieval monks and scholars approached Scriptural study. Chapter three examines Rossetti's anagogical interpretation in The Face of the Deep, particularly the ways in which Rossetti’s mature view of patience draws on patristic and medieval understandings of the temporal relationship of the Christian to God. Chapter four notes carefully Rossetti's use of the Anglo-Catholic doctrine of Reserve, as promulgated by Isaac Williams in Tracts 80 and 89, in The Face of the Deep. I look first at the manifestation of the doctrine in Rossetti's prose, especially as it relates to both her own self-abnegation and her exhortation to her readers to avoid "evil knowledge," and secondly at the doctrine as it helps explain the stylistic oscillation of poetry and prose in the commentary. In chapter five, finally, I examine several of Rossetti’s early poems, including "Symbols," "The Convent Threshold," "Goblin Market," and "The Prince's Progress," to explore the ways in which The Face of the Deep serves as a kind of "grammar," a symbolic and theological vocabulary, by which all of Rossetti's poetry can be interpreted.Item Art and artistry in Katherine Anne Porter : iconographic figures and festive patterns.(2013-05-15) Werner, Karen Svendsen.; Fulton, Joe B., 1962-; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.Exploring how art influences the works of Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980), this study examines the way Porter’s fictional narrative patterns adapt and arrange images from paintings, folk art, and prints. In her structural response to artistic issues prevalent during the Modernist Period, Porter runs her literary versions of iconographic figures through festive patterns to depict the changes individuals experience when significant cultural shifts envelop them. Besides employing grotesque images to portray suffering, Porter evokes the life-death-rebirth cycle of festive patterns, also called folk carnival humor by Mikhail Bakhtin, to convey hope for people and the continuation of their culture during times of turmoil. Medieval, renaissance, and modernist artwork provides Porter with images and structural approaches. Reflecting the traits of typology and the subjects of medieval iconography, Porter’s characters function by fulfilling past figures such as Eve and by anticipating literary figures in the future. As part of the development of her literary figures in Noon Wine, Porter blends influences from the Agrarians with her appreciation of renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel to emphasize the relationship between her characters and the landscape. Porter’s associations with modernist Mexican artists and her knowledge of the successors to Hans Holbein’s Dance of Death shape her interpretation of the arts and her portrayal of death in stories such as “María Concepción.” Through Mexican anthropologist Manuel Gamio, Porter develops an understanding of Franz Boas’s theories, which contribute to her sense of folk culture, foster within her a sense of the chronological connectedness of time, and lead her to treat artwork as archeological artifacts. These multi-layered dimensions of Porter’s images also reflect her interest in the allusive modernist paintings of Henri Matisse and the literary theory of T.S. Eliot. Her engagement with modernist debates over the merits of the city appears in “The Cracked Looking-Glass,” a story positing Porter’s agrarian challenge to James Joyce’s urban-centered approach to art and writing.Item Augustinian Auden : the influence of Augustine of Hippo on W. H. Auden.(2008-10-28T16:35:00Z) Schuler, Stephen J.; Russell, Richard Rankin.; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.It is widely acknowledged that W. H. Auden became a Christian in about 1940, but relatively little critical attention has been paid to Auden’s theology, much less to the particular theological sources of Auden’s faith. Auden read widely in theology, and one of his earliest and most important theological influences on his poetry and prose is Saint Augustine of Hippo. This dissertation explains the Augustinian origin of several crucial but often misunderstood features of Auden’s work. They are, briefly, the nature of evil as privation of good; the affirmation of all existence, and especially the physical world and the human body, as intrinsically good; the difficult aspiration to the fusion of Eros and agape in the concept of Christian charity; and the status of poetry as subject to both aesthetic and moral criteria. Auden had already been attracted to similar ideas in Lawrence, Blake, Freud, and Marx, but those thinkers’ common insistence on the importance of physical existence took on new significance with Auden’s acceptance of the Incarnation as an historical reality. For both Auden and Augustine, the Incarnation was proof that the physical world is redeemable. Auden recognized that if neither the physical world nor the human body are intrinsically evil, then the physical desires of the body, such as Eros, the self-interested survival instinct, cannot in themselves be intrinsically evil. The conflict between Eros and agape, or altruistic love, is not a Manichean struggle of darkness against light, but a struggle for appropriate placement in a hierarchy of values, and Auden derived several ideas about Christian charity from Augustine. Augustine’s influence was largely conscious on Auden’s part, though it was often indirect as well. Auden absorbed important Augustinian ideas through modern sources such as Charles Williams, Charles Norris Cochrane, and Denis de Rougemont, although he was himself an observant and incisive reader of Augustine’s major works, especially the Confessions. This dissertation demonstrates that the works and ideas of Augustine are a deep and significant influence on Auden’s prose and poetry, and especially on his long poems.Item Beneath the surface: psychological perception in Jane Austen's narration.(2008-06-10T20:02:20Z) Werley, Erin D.; Vitanza, Dianna M.; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.This thesis argues that Jane Austen’s novels are more psychologically sophisticated than they have been given credit for and that the psychological depth of her heroines is revealed by Austen’s unique narration. First, I examine episodes in which the characters exhibit behavior that evinces psychological realism. As a basis of comparison, I juxtapose Erik Erikson’s theories of psychosocial developmental stages as evidence of Austen’s intuitive understanding of human behavior. Next, I examine the narratological means by which Austen reveals her characters’ psychological realism. I investigate Austen’s use of subjective phrases and pragmatic signals to reveal the narrator’s presence and her employment of free indirect discourse to reveal her heroines’ psyches.Item Between reality and mystery: food as fact and symbol in plays by Ibsen and Churchill.(2006) Pocock, Stephanie J.; Russell, Richard Rankin.; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.In Henrik Ibsen's and Caryl Churchill's plays, food is both fact and symbol, a reminder of both the shared physicality of the actors and spectators and of an equally powerful human desire for symbolic significance. This thesis examines the depictions of both facets of human consumption in Ibsen's A Doll House and The Wild Duck and Churchill's Light Shining in Buckinghamshire. By emphasizing the physical hunger and subsequent fulfillment of their characters, the playwrights draw audience and actors together in a community based on the recognition of shared human needs and experiences. Simultaneously, by exploring the variety of symbolic understandings that give those experiences meaning, they create unpredictability, individuality, and creativity. Through this balance, Ibsen and Churchill demonstrate the potential of theatre to construct a site where communities of actors and spectators can continually re-examine the dynamic space between reality and mystery.Item Between two worlds and between the lines : a reading of the supernatural in James Hogg's fiction.(2010-10-08T16:29:02Z) Tober, Naomi.; Barcus, James E., 1938-; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.I examine James Hogg's portrayal of the supernatural in The Shepherd's Calendar, The Three Perils of Man, The Three Perils of Woman, and The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. To do so, I use terminology from Charles Taylor's A Secular Age to explain how Hogg negotiates between the enchanted world of Ettrick Forest and the disenchanted world of Enlightenment Edinburgh. Because Hogg is between these two worlds and presents a porous receptivity of the supernatural to a buffered, Enlightenment audience, the sub-texts and complex narrative layers are particularly revelatory of Hogg's messages. In his fiction, Hogg often undermines the attempts of implied Enlightenment readers to explain away, categorize, or moralize the presence of the supernatural. Instead, he emphasizes the importance of a permeating supernatural realm that is just as real as the material world but is finally unable to be systematized and controlled.Item Body and mind of violence : the early works of Bernard MacLaverty.(2012-11-29) Aspen, Sarah Beth.; Russell, Richard Rankin.; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.Bernard MacLaverty's often critically ignored early works embody and consider anti‐violence rhetoric not limited to the concurrent Troubles of his native province, as well as model a process of coming to terms with a community "ripping itself apart" (Benito de la Iglesia 200). The depiction of characters' bodies in his short story collection, Secrets (1977), through illness, contamination fears, and death, demonstrates the commonality among diverse, often opposing, characters. The latter half of this chapter is concerned with bereavement theory as it appears in A Time to Dance (1982), a model of MacLaverty's own processing of the bodily effects of violence and his beginning to imagine means to reconciliation. Finally, analysis of his first novel, Lamb (1980), illuminates the role of one’s creation of self‐narrative in maintaining a moral compass or encouraging evil acts, a dangerous habit the author sees as analogous to Northern Ireland's Troubles and similar situations of violence.Item "Books with more in them" : reading and imagination in the novels of George Eliot.(2012-08-08) Assink, Jessica L.; Vitanza, Dianna M.; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.This thesis examines the connections between reading and the imagination in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda. The ideal imagination, for Eliot, is both sympathetic and reality-infused, which is a result of her continuous attention to sympathy and realism in her fiction and nonfiction. Although Eliot’s characters struggle to implement this ideal imagination, they learn, through their reading and their experiences, how to use their imaginations to connect with others and to live with an awareness of their circumstances. Through the lives of Maggie Tulliver, Dorothea Brooke, and Daniel Deronda, Eliot encourages reading as a way to extend experience and imagination as a tool to make well-informed, conscientious decisions.Item Charles Dickens’s Bleak house: Benthamite jurisprudence and the law, or what the law is and what the law ought to be.(2008-06-09T14:12:23Z) Welch, Brenda Jean.; Losey, Jay Brian.; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.Dickens’s foggy world of the nineteenth-century Chancery Court is famous, and infamous, for keeping its litigants in a constant and never-ending state of legal confusion, costs, and “conglomeration” (Bleak House 1873 I: 1: 15, 13), and many readers remember Dickens’s indictment of the Law: “The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself” (III: 39: 153). Not surprisingly, then, Bleak House was popular with its audiences, layperson and legalist alike, for the attack it made on the great social institution called Law, and, also not surprisingly, interest in Bleak House remains. We find in Bleak House several intriguing areas of the Law, three of which I specifically address in this dissertation because they still resonate: marital relationships, parent-child relationships, and legal advocacy and professionalism. In this study, I analyze Bleak House in the context of the then-existing Laws that governed marriage, parenthood, and the legal profession and also analyze the novel and the Law in light of the legal philosophy of Jeremy Bentham. My study is similar to Anita L. Allen’s analysis of Jane Eyre (“The Jurisprudence of Jane Eyre”) in which she says, “Lawyers can contribute to the study of literature by illuminating the legal philosophy, that is, the jurisprudence, in works of literary fiction” (180). I agree with Allen’s belief that “Scholars who extract and elaborate the jurisprudential dimension of literature have something important to add to scholarly efforts to understand works of fiction, their authors, and their authors’ intellectual milieus” (181-82). When considering Bentham’s philosophy, we need to know and understand the Laws that operate in Bleak House in order to appreciate Dickens’s efforts to expose and censure the Law. The laws governing marriage, parenting, and the legal profession involve legal fictions that I argue Dickens rightfully uses to demonstrate his concern for a legal system that is tempered by Equity, unlike Bentham’s concern for a legal system that can do without separate Equity jurisdiction, which can more fully provide people with a sense of justice that dispenses with the wastefulness and wantonness of inequity.Item Chesterton and his interlocutors: dialogical style and ethical debate on eugenics.(2007-12-04T19:58:59Z) Shipley, Don M.; Wood, Ralph C.; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.Before Nazi Germany’s eugenic practices had been completely exposed and denounced, G. K. Chesterton, a British writer best known for his fiction and Roman Catholic apologetics, published Eugenics and Other Evils in 1922. Therein he fiercely opposed eugenics and state sponsored eugenic practices; but his was not an isolated text offered in monologic argument to some vague social menace. In fact, Chesterton never wrote monologically but always in an intrinsically dialogical manner. As this dissertation attempts to demonstrate, this dialogical style, epitomized in the eugenics debate, energized Chesterton’s fiction, most notably his novel The Man Who Was Thursday and serves as a way of reading all of Chesterton, his fiction and non-fiction alike. This dissertation will attempt to demonstrate the historical and dialogical context of that conflict, explicate the exact arguments of both Inge and Chesterton, provide commentary on the dialogical style inherent in Chesterton’s literary works specifically The Man Who Was Thursday, The Ball and the Cross, and The Napoleon of Notting Hill, and Manalive and demonstrate both the prophetic nature and the literary excellence of Chesterton’s dialogical discourse. The importance of this dissertation is, at least, three-fold: first, to recover the historical context of Chesterton’s writings concerning eugenics, particularly his Eugenics and Other Evils, by returning him to conversation with his sparring partner on the subject, Dean Inge; secondly, to explicate Chesterton’s argument against eugenics by showing its relationship to Chesterton’s other writing, more particularly to those texts which are intrinsically dialogical. Nothing to date has been written concerning Chesterton’s dialogical style, and only a handful of articles attempt to explicate Chesterton’s position against eugenics. It is my hope that the explication of Chesterton’s dialogical style will serve as a new way of reading all of Chesterton’s works. The dissertation is important furthermore because it will attempt to uncover an important theological development in Christian ethical practice, even as it will also offer an example about how such monumentally important moral questions might be engaged dialogically rather than polemically and thus monologically. Obviously the work of the Russian literary philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin will figure prominently in this effort.Item A collaborative work of art in action: the 1979 American Book of Common Prayer, Rite II.(2006-11-22T19:31:23Z) Nobles, Heidi Gabrielle.; Barcus, James E., 1938-; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.In his book, Art in Action, Nicholas Wolterstorff argues that a work of art can only truly be understood within the context of its action. This paper presents the Eucharistic Rite II of the 1979 American Book of Common Prayer as a work of complex and aesthetically engaging literary art. Yet while Rite II offers plenty of aesthetic appeal, the text's greater significance comes from its liturgical identity as fundamentally active: Rite II refuses to stand solely as an object of aesthetic contemplation; rather, it demands that its readers respond to it in action, and it participates in its work alongside its readers. The key to Rite II's action lies in the collaboration between the text and its readers, for the two parties come together to perform work beyond themselves: they join in prayer to bring themselves and the world into communion with God through adoration, intercession and personal transformation.Item Cormac McCarthy's heroes : narrative perspective and morality in the novels of Cormac McCarthy.(2008-10-14T16:44:57Z) Cooper, Lydia R.; Fulton, Joe B., 1962-; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.Critics writing on Cormac McCarthy often note the striking paucity of revelations of interior thought in his novels. James Bowers, for instance, claims that few modern writers reject “the Joycean tradition of interiority” as comprehensively as does McCarthy, while Jay Ellis notes “the absence of regular psychologizing” (Bowers 14, Ellis 5). These critics associate the moral bleakness and prevailing mood of despair in the novels with a stylistic absence of revelations of characters’ thoughts, a style consistent with many American naturalist writers. Although McCarthy limits revelations of interior thought, however, he does not eliminate them entirely. The distant, omniscient third-person narrative style typical of McCarthy’s works at times shifts into the limited third person voice, revealing the perspective of a particular character. At times, third-person narration even moves into first-person narration. This striking shift into the close third or first-person point of view most often reveals the thoughts of characters who exhibit moral awareness and ethical behavior. When the narrative shifts to the perspective of immoral characters, that shift draws attention to that immoral character’s humanity, simulating an empathetic response that encourages readers to recognize their shared humanity with even the most despicable representatives of the human race. Shifts in point of view are thus consistently associated with morality, revealing characters’ yearning for community, valuation of life, or commitment to justice and compassion. To date, no one has systematically explored narrative perspective and its connection to morality in McCarthy’s novels. The worldview of McCarthy’s novels is notoriously difficult to identify, since his novels and plays, when placed in conversation with each other, dialogically pit arguments for the self-destructive nature of humankind against arguments for a rather mystical divine providence. This dissertation will explore McCarthy’s range of narrative techniques, focusing on the early Appalachian novels, The Border Trilogy, and The Road, whose styles are representative of the whole corpus, in order to demonstrate how McCarthy privileges ethical behavior and moral attitudes. Revelations of the internal ethical struggles of moral men like John Grady Cole in The Border Trilogy or the father in The Road illuminate their imperfect heroism.Item Debating nature : revising pastoral in Hawthorne's America.(2012-08-08) Petersheim, Steven A.; Fulton, Joe B., 1962-; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.In 1849, Ralph Waldo Emerson gave Nathaniel Hawthorne a presentation copy of his second edition of the famous essay Nature. Hawthorne’s three American romances composed over the next three years – The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1851), and The Blithedale Romance (1852) – employ some of the same terminology Emerson uses in his essay. More importantly, Hawthorne’s romances offer differing ways of reimagining the kind of “original relation with the universe” that Emerson advocates while at the same time critiquing Emerson’s blithe comments about unmediated relations between humans, nature, and the divine. Hawthorne shares with Emerson a conviction that nature and spirit are somehow related, but he registers his disagreement with Emerson by incorporating into his romances diverse ways of understanding nature – Puritan allegory, Gothic romance, Native American views of land ownership, and Renaissance pastoral, in addition to Transcendentalist idealism. Thus, the Transcendentalist view of nature functions, for Hawthorne, as one of a variety of ways of knowing nature rather than being the one “true” way, as Emerson imples. In his investigation of nature, Hawthorne turns from Emerson’s Transcendentalist claims to Renaissance pastoral as the most adequate way of understanding the relations between humans, nature, and the divine. Yet Hawthorne revises the pastoral as well by bringing together diverse views of nature to comprise a syncretic view of nature that he finds closer to the truth than any one of these views by itself. In Renaissance pastoral, the primary approach he adopts even as he revises it, Hawthorne finds a form that breaks down the apparent dichotomies between art and nature, nature and humans, nature and the divine, and humans and the divine so as to indicate that such dichotomies are founded upon a misconstrual of the human condition. By adopting Renaissance pastoral as a critique of more strictly American views of Nature, Hawthorne suggests that older literary forms may yet hold wisdom for the contemporary world – even if those older forms must be modified to respond to a new situation.Item E-textuality, e-medieval, e-Malory : the rebirth of Le morte d'Arthur on the web.(2008-10-14T15:06:13Z) Brown, Karen Grace.; Hanks, Dorrel Thomas.; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.Until recently, traditional textual criticism has been unable to account for the rich historical and literary contexts surrounding medieval textual culture, especially the culture of Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d'Arthur. Finally, though, electronic resources provide the means for reconstructing these contexts. This study focuses on showing how the application of the postmodern theories of Derrida, Bakhtin, and Foucault allow modern scholars to understand these older textual contexts in new ways. Furthermore, this study demonstrates how the use of these theories in conjunction with a social-text editing model effectively reconstructs these same contexts. Finally, in this study I show how I am currently applying these theories and models to an online transcription of the Winchester manuscript of the Morte Darthur in order to enrich the current context available for electronic research.Item Education and cultural memory in American fiction post-Brown v. Board : Ernest Gaines, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Eudora Welty.(2011-05-12T15:15:40Z) Akins, Adrienne V.; Ford, Sarah Gilbreath, 1968-; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.This dissertation examines a number of historical novels composed and published during a time period when questions pertaining to education, equal opportunity, and expanding national memory were central to American consciousness. In the novels on which this study focuses, the centrality of education as a theme is reflected in the high proportion of classroom scenes and the large number of teachers who are key characters. The importance of education in Welty’s Losing Battles (1970), Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), and Silko’s Ceremony (1977) has not been thoroughly explored in the existing criticism. While the general theme of memory has been discussed at length for all three of these authors, there has been little consideration of the relationship between memory and education. Works by Gaines, Silko, and Welty have noteworthy similarities in their approaches to the topic of memory and its connection with education: the most prominent is an emphasis on what might be termed a collective, dialogical approach to the process of learning and the preservation of cultural memory. The divergent cultural, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds that Gaines, Silko, and Welty bring to questions of education and cultural memory must be stressed, but the convergences in their imaginative treatments of these questions are also worthy of examination. My study considers the significance of these convergences and differences within the context of the historical development of American education during the crucial decades that followed the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling. I also explore how Gaines, Silko, and Welty depict and critique curriculum and methods in the particular fields of social studies education, science education, and English language arts education, respectively. By putting the works of three diverse authors with distinctive concerns in conversation with each other, this study will also allow dialogical interaction and questioning to occur in the telling of the story of American education and memory in the crucial post-Brown era.Item Ekphrasis and ethics in the poetry of W.B. Yeats and Eavan Boland.(2010-10-08T16:28:27Z) Smith, Bethany J.; Russell, Richard Rankin.; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.This study argues that W.B. Yeats is an important poetic precursor for Eavan Boland, and particularly for her sophisticated engagement with the age-old subgenre of ekphrasis, in which a poem responds to a work of visual art. I explore how both poets explode the boundaries of poetic form and ekphrastic tradition to re-imagine ekphrasis not as an abstract rivalry between modes of representation, but rather as an ethical encounter between the poet and the work of visual art. The openness and fluidity of such encounters for Yeats and Boland affirm the dignity of individuality and re-frame ekphrasis as a mode capable of the aesthetic and ethical creativity necessary to respond to the political and social exigencies of twenty-first century Ireland. For both poets, the aesthetic and ethical possibilities that arise on the boundary of voice and vision parallel the transformative potential of other threshold spaces between public and private life, the city and the country, Ireland and Britain, and even life and death. Despite Boland's outright rejection of Yeats's ideas about a unified Irish nation and cultural tradition, she continues his poetic legacy of exploiting the liminal potential of ekphrasis to re-imagine Ireland as a community bound by common loss rather than by common suffering and injustice. Ekphrasis is a response to suffering, but the work of both poets argues implicitly that a poem does not itself heal the actual wounds of body, mind, or spirit; rather, it mediates the healing process by keeping questions open, resisting the violence of closure. Boland's ekphrasis develops distinctly from Yeats's as it responds to concerns unique to her place as a woman poet, engages the dynamic of empathy between a speaker and a work of art, and explores intensively the relationship between individual and communitas. This study ends by affirming ekphrasis, in its potential for re-imagining aesthetic forms and ethical relationships, as a viable mode for the future of Irish poetry.Item The end of the journey : the rhetoric of conclusions in Old English poetry.(2013-09-24) Hanchey, Ginger.; Marsh, Jeannette K.; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.For much of the twentieth century critics of Old English poetry dismissed it as aesthetically sub-par, especially complaining about its formulaic and repetitive nature. In the last thirty years or so Old English scholars have recovered its reputation by reading it from within its own oral-derived context; because Old English poetry originates from an oral tradition rather than a written one, we must begin our understanding of it with an understanding of its oral-traditional roots. Formulaic or repeated structures often designate rich and complex meaning for an audience attuned to its traditions. In this spirit, my dissertation looks at an oft-repeated theme—the idea of heaven as a homeland—and examines the ways in which this oral-derived feature works structurally to convey different kinds of meaning. In a surprisingly high number of poems, for example, it appears right at the end. As I argue, its structural placement there signals to an audience that the poem is coming to a close and additionally works as a metaphor for the act of poetic creation itself—the poem is a kind of journey that ends with a sense of stability. The structural and metapoetic functions of the motif are developed extensively in sections one and two of this work. Section one examines the various ways that the motif works as a structural marker at the beginning or end of a speech act or at the beginning or end of a manuscript section division. It also accounts for the motif’s relationship to a newly identified type-scene. Section two explores Anglo-Saxon conceptions of verbal art and particularly the cultural metaphor of verbal art as a kind of journey. By understanding how traditional texts make meaning we come much closer to reading them at the most sophisticated levels possible.