http://hdl.handle.net/2104/4502 2013-05-25T04:54:11Z 2013-05-25T04:54:11Z Ziehe, Mary E. http://hdl.handle.net/2104/8606 2013-05-15T19:04:48Z 2013-05-15T00:00:00Z

"Alone in the front" : isolation and community in the hero's life in Beowulf. Ziehe, Mary E. 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.

2013-05-15T00:00:00Z Werner, Karen Svendsen. http://hdl.handle.net/2104/8603 2013-05-15T19:02:02Z 2013-05-15T00:00:00Z

Art and artistry in Katherine Anne Porter : iconographic figures and festive patterns. Werner, Karen Svendsen. 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.

2013-05-15T00:00:00Z Thomas Horton, Margy. http://hdl.handle.net/2104/8598 2013-05-15T18:55:02Z 2013-05-15T00:00:00Z

Melville's unfolding selves : identity formation in Mardi, Moby-Dick, and Pierre. Thomas Horton, Margy. Mardi, Moby-Dick, and Pierre share striking parallels in form and content: each is narrated by an introspective yet adventurous narrator who encounters various triggers for his development, including authorities, mysterious people and phenomena, and evidence of the social contracts binding society together. All three novels juxtapose conflicting ideologies and culminate in an ambiguous integration of the narrator-protagonist into the larger world. Throughout the narration process, the narrator gradually progresses toward knowledge of self and world by learning from mistakes and altering behavior. These narrative characteristics are not drawn wholly from Melville’s imagination and experience, but rather typify a European genre, the Bildungsroman, that Melville read closely around 1850. Before now, scholars have assumed or argued that Bildungsromane did not exist in America as early as the mid-nineteenth century, with some scholars even denying that Bildungsromane can be written in an American context. However, this study shows that Melville wrote three novels that draw upon the conventions of that genre while revising them to depict a uniquely American process of identity formation, one in which no stable authority figure defined the path to maturity. Like America herself, the American Bildungsroman protagonist had to develop a means of self-invention. Melville’s major revision to the Bildungsroman is in his modification of the “portrait self” motif. In the European Bildungsromane Melville read, the portrait self is a text or image presented to the protagonist by an authority figure with the intent of showing the protagonist either who he is or who he should strive to be. The portrait self crystallizes the pedagogy designed by the protagonist’s father or guardian and is intended to motivate and focus the young man’s efforts toward positive change. In Melville’s American Bildungsromane, the narrator-protagonist constructs his own portrait self: in Mardi, he constructs a dream self (Taji); in Moby-Dick, a remembered self (young Ishmael on the Pequod); and in Pierre, a fictional self (the character Pierre). As each narrator imagines and describes his portrait self’s formation, he himself is formed. The protagonists strive increasingly toward independent self-invention but find themselves still entangled in their cultural inheritance. Melville’s conception of identity formation challenges the still-current view that humans are capable of absolute self-invention; paradoxically, it also enables today’s readers to see that, however environmental, social, or political factors may work against one’s cultivation, resources for constructing one’s own pedagogy are always available.

2013-05-15T00:00:00Z Smith, Rachel S. (Rachel Scotten) http://hdl.handle.net/2104/8596 2013-05-15T18:53:04Z 2013-05-15T00:00:00Z

Medicine and medical authority in three nineteenth-century novels. Smith, Rachel S. (Rachel Scotten) Three popular novels that span the nineteenth century—Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie—join then-contemporary conversations about medical reform. The novels explore the ethical ambiguities inherent in medical practice in the nineteenth century and question the nature of medical authority. In general, all three novels share a distrust of established medicine. In Hope Leslie, traditional, European medicine is denigrated and shown to be less efficacious than Native American medicine. This novel can be considered to be an argument for a national (American) medical system. In The Moonstone, the medical community’s indiscriminate use of opium is criticized. Ubiquitous opium-based preparations, like laudanum, are treated as ethically ambiguous and potentially dangerous. In Stoker’s Dracula, a “metaphysician” who treats both the body and soul is the most effective medical authority when dealing with nineteenth-century ailments that stubbornly retain moral associations.

2013-05-15T00:00:00Z