To date, the Latin American essay remains little studied, certainly compared to other literary genres such as the novel, poetry and theater. This thesis examines prevailing theorists' conceptions of the essay and its historical development in Latin America. Employing the notions of cultural identity and difference, which have long been central to Latin American critical thought, this study distances the development of the essay in Latin America from Spanish colonial writings of the sixteenth century. In its place, this study proposes an innovative classification scheme that incorporates cultural codes as its main criteria in order to provide a more equitable treatment of essays from areas that have traditionally been marginalized in standard chronologically based classification schemes. Some of the paradigms used in this study to defend the integrity and specificity of the Latin American essay and culture are Inca Garcilaso de la Vega's affirmation of the values of the continent's indigenous pre-columbian heritage, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's discursive reinvention of South America, and Jose Marti's notion of hibridez—a cultural and racial complex mixture rooted in the region's history—as an affirmation of a continental Latin American cultural identity. This thesis demonstrates that since Latin American essays diverge thematically from colonialist discourse, studies of the origins of the Latin American essay do not have to perpetuate the colonialist legacy.

Chapter 1 considers Barclay's 'Ship of Fools' in relation to other folly literature in English, particularly Lydgate's 'Order of Fools', Skelton's 'Bowge of Courte', and 'Cocke Lorrel's Bote'. Motifs, allegories and the woodcuts of the text are discussed and some are included in an Illustrations section. Chapter 2 discusses Erasmian folly looking back to the Neoplatonic writings of Nicholas of Cusa, and to the debt Erasmian exegeses owe to Origen. Erasmus' own philosophical and theological views are examined, particularly as they are found in his 'Enchiridion', and in the influence of Thomas à Kempis' 'Imitation of Christ'. A close textual analysis of the 'Moriae Encomium' is undertaken in this light. Chapter 3 defines the lateral boundaries of folly, where it blends into madness. In the context of Renaissance psychology sixteenth century medical works are analysed, including Boorde's 'Breviary of Healthe', Barrough's 'Method of Physicke' and Elyot's 'Castel of Helth'. Blurring between madness and sin, the negative judgments on the mad as demon-possessed, and the biblical models from which such judgments largely arose give alternative perspectives on madness and its relation to folly. Chapters 4-6 look at three Shakespearean comedies showing the development of a primarily Erasmian view of folly. This moves from overt references in 'Love's Labour's Lost' to natural folly, the folly of love and theological folly, through carnivalesque aspects of folly and madness in 'Twelfth Night', to an embedded notion of folly which influences and affects the darker comedy of 'Measure for Measure'. Chapter 7 considers satires of Hall, Marston and Guilpin, and looks at Jonson's Humour plays in this context. 'Volpone' and 'Epicoene', and 'The Alchemist' and 'Bartholomew Fair' are discussed in pairs, showing the softening of Jonson's attitude to folly, and his increasing representation of Erasmian folly reaching its full expression in 'Bartholomew Fair'.

Traditionally in the field of aesthetics the genres of tragedy and comedy have been depicted in antithetical opposition to one another. Setting out from the hypothesis that antitheses are aspects of a deeper unity where one informs the construction of the other’s image this thesis questions the hierarchy of genre through a form of ludic postmodernism that interrogates aesthetics in the same way as comedy interrogates ethics and the law of genre. Tracing the chain of signification as laid out by Derrida between theatre as pharmakon and the thaumaturgical influence of the pharmakeus or dramatist, early modern comedy can be identified as re-enacting Renaissance versions of the rite of the pharmakos, where a scapegoat for the ills attendant upon society is chosen and exorcised. Recognisable pharmakoi are scapegoat figures such as Shakespeare’s Shylock, Malvolio, Falstaff and Parolles but the city comedies of this period also depict prostitutes and the unmarried as necessary comic sacrifices for the reordering of society. Throughout this thesis an attempt has been made to position Shakespeare’s comic drama in the specific historical location of early modern London by not only placing his plays in the company of his contemporaries but by forging a strong theoretical engagement with questions of law in relation to issues of genre. The connection Shakespearean comedy makes with the laws of early modern England is highly visible in The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure and The Taming of the Shrew and the laws which they scrutinise are peculiar to the regulation of gendered interaction, namely marital union and the power and authority imposed upon both men and women in patriarchal society. Thus, a pivotal section on marriage is required to pinion the argument that the libidinized economy of the early modern stage perpetuates the principle of an excluded middle, comic u-topia, or Derridean ‘non-place’, where implicit contradictions are made explicit. The conclusion that comic denouements are disappointing in their resolution of seemingly insurmountable dilemmas can therefore be reappraised as the outcome of a dialectical movement, where the possibility of alternatives is presented and assessed. Advancing Hegel’s theory that the whole of history is dialectic comedy can therefore be identified as the way in which a society sees itself, dramatically representing the hopes and fears of an entire community.

The Protestant community is articulated through liturgy, history, and drama. Liturgy teaches communal bonds and scripts their enactment, while narrative and dramatic depictions of the collective past appeal to the imagination of readers and viewers. Liturgy and literature are joined by the participation they invite, which engages parishioners, readers, and audiences with questions of affiliation and collectivity. Lack of attention to the ways Renaissance texts pondered over and produced bonds of commonality has sidetracked us from the communal nature of the period. We need to reevaluate such bonds to better understand how English culture imagined relationships between individual and community, and between people and institutions---including church and theatre. When orthodox writing is treated as doctrine and praxis, and not as a means for political indoctrination, we gain a different understanding of the potential for human relationships, one more generous and reciprocal than the model of coercion that has dominated literary studies. Such reciprocity is found in Church of England liturgy, and in the imaginative space of Foxe's Acts and Monuments, which seeks to forge the Protestant community through an ethics of reading. Imaginative space was also a public space, and Shakespeare's King John and Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris reflect upon religious affiliation in moments of war and atrocity; both plays represent very tangled lines of identification that do not endorse Catholic-Protestant factions but undo them. Religious writing and public theatre explored the precarious balance between community and individual, offering readers and audiences a vehicle for thinking about their own immediate lives and their sense of belonging.

Zugl.: Giessen, Univ., Diss., 2008

No description available.

This thesis attempts to examine the birth and development of the pox metaphor in sixteenth-century English literature. In researching this literary history of a disease---of syphilis' life as an early modem metaphor---I have attempted to contextualize the pox metaphor's development within the social and economic constructs that led to the early modern conflation of excessive consumption with poxy corruption. This conflation freed the metaphor from the confines of discussion on disease and allowed early modern authors the freedom to apply pockifed tropes to describe various social ills and abuses. Initially these pox metaphors were restricted to sexualized subject matter such as inconstant women, but through the rise of satire, the metaphor became a means of describing London as rampant, diseased and corrupt. Finally, Shakespeare was able to take the pox and apply it to the economic sickness that was affecting England by inscribing appetites with consuming pox-inspired qualities that were, in effect, a commentary on the uncontrolled rise of the capitalist state and the dangers of desire.

SILVA, Josenildo Ferreira Teófilo da. O humano e sua voz: um diálogo comparativo entre Mrs. Dalloway de Virginia Woolf e Rei Lear de William Shakespeare. 2017. 164f. – Dissertação (Mestrado) – Universidade Federal do Ceará, Programa de Pós-graduação em Letras, Fortaleza (CE), 2017. / Submitted by Gustavo Daher (gdaherufc@hotmail.com) on 2017-07-14T14:03:19Z No. of bitstreams: 1 2017_dis_jftsilva.pdf: 3983596 bytes, checksum: 729280155c60a0695ccd2943f4b0d967 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Márcia Araújo (marcia_m_bezerra@yahoo.com.br) on 2017-07-25T13:20:29Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 2017_dis_jftsilva.pdf: 3983596 bytes, checksum: 729280155c60a0695ccd2943f4b0d967 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-07-25T13:20:29Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 2017_dis_jftsilva.pdf: 3983596 bytes, checksum: 729280155c60a0695ccd2943f4b0d967 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017 / The present dissertation aims at discussing how the reading of the work of the poet and also dramatist William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) had influenced the literary project developed by the writer Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941), in order to establish a comparative dialogue between the novel Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925, and the tragedy King Lear, written by Shakespeare in 1605. We believe that by means of a critical process expressed in the reading Virginia Woolf did about the shakespearean text, the voice of the English bard dissolves into the poetic writing of the author and is assimilated and transformed by it, till the moment it becomes a single and distinct voice, namely, the woolfian voice. To support our analysis, we are based on some fundamental categories such as the concept of tradition discussed by the critic and also poet T. S. Eliot in his essay “Tradition and individual talent” (1968); of intertextuality presented by the professor Julia Kristeva (1974) based on the notions of polyphony and dialogism developed by Mikhail Bakhtin (2002); and the concepts of influence, (mis)reading and of human discussed by the American critic Harold Bloom in his books The anxiety of influence: a theory of poetry (1991) and Shakespeare: the invention of human (2000). With this in mind, we did our comparative analysis focusing on the two protagonists of Virginia Woolf’s novel, Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith, and their dialogue with the characters king Lear and his clown. This way, we intend to show how the shakespearean voice of these two characters are evoked and then transformed by the protagonists of the novel, constituting, therefore, a process of (mis)reading of the play studied. In this sense, we conclude that the shakespearean voice of Virginia Woolf is a voice that, at the same time, is conscious of the new necessities required by her present time and also of the importance of centuries of tradition expressed, mainly, by the legacy left by Shakespeare to English and universal literature. / A presente dissertação tem como objetivo discutir de que forma a leitura da obra do poeta e dramaturgo inglês, William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616), influenciou o projeto literário desenvolvido pela escritora Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941), buscando, principalmente, estabelecer um diálogo comparativo entre o romance Mrs. Dalloway, publicado em 1925, e a tragédia Rei Lear, escrita por Shakespeare em 1605. Acreditamos que através de um processo crítico expresso por meio da leitura que Virginia Woolf faz do texto shakespeariano, a voz do bardo inglês vai se dissolvendo dentro da escritura da autora e por ela vai sendo assimilada e transformada, ao ponto de se tornar uma voz única e distinta, a saber, a voz woolfiana. Para tanto, nos pautamos em algumas categorias fundamentais para o processo de análise, como o conceito de tradição, cunhado pelo crítico e também poeta T. S. Eliot, em seu texto “Tradição e talento individual” (1968); o de intertextualidade, apresentado pela professora Julia Kristeva (1974), com base nas teorias da polifonia e do dialogismo desenvolvidas por Mikhail Bakhtin (2002), além dos conceitos de influência, (des)leitura e de humano, discutidos pelo crítico norte-americano Harold Bloom, em seus livros A angústia de influência: uma teoria da poesia (1991) e Shakespeare: a invenção do humano (2000). Com isso em mente, traçamos nosso percurso comparativo a partir da análise dos dois personagens centrais do romance de Virginia Woolf, Clarissa Dalloway e Septimus Warren Smith, dialogando-os diretamente com as figuras de Lear e de seu bobo da corte. Assim, mostramos de que forma a voz shakespeariana desses personagens vão sendo evocadas e transformadas pelos dois protagonistas do romance, constituindo, desse modo, um processo de (des)leitura da peça em questão. É nesse sentido, portanto, que concluímos que a voz shakespeariana de Virginia Woolf é uma voz que, ao mesmo tempo, possui uma consciência das novas necessidades exigidas por seu tempo presente, mas que também traz consigo o peso de séculos de tradição, expressos principalmente pelo legado deixado por Shakespeare para a literatura inglesa e universal.

xi, 198 p. : ill. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / In early modern England the word "measure" had a number of different but related meanings, with clear connections between physical measurements and the measurement of the self (ethics), of poetry (prosody), of literary form (genre), and of capital (economics). In this dissertation I analyze forms of measure in early modern literary texts and argue that measure-making and measure-breaking are always fraught with anxiety because they entail ideological consequences for emerging national, ethical, and economic realities. Chapter I is an analysis of the fourth circle of Dante's Inferno . In this hell Dante portrays a nightmare of mis-measurement in which failure to value wealth properly not only threatens to infect one's ethical well-being but also contaminates language, poetry, and eventually the universe itself. These anxieties, I argue, are associated with a massive shift in conceptions of measurement in Europe in the late medieval period. Chapter II is an analysis of the lyric poems of Thomas Wyatt, who regularly describes his psychological position as "out of measure," by which he means intemperate or subject to excessive feeling. I investigate this self-indictment in terms of the long-standing critical contention that Wyatt's prosody is "out of measure," and I argue that formal and psychological expressions of measure are ultimately inseparable. In Chapter III I argue that in Book II of the Faerie Queene Edmund Spenser figures ethical progress as a course between vicious extremes, and anxieties about measure are thus expressed formally as a struggle between generic forms, in which measured control of the self and measured poetic composition are finally the same challenge Finally, in my reading of Troilus and Cressida I argue that Shakespeare portrays persons as commodities who are constantly aware of their own values and anxious about their "price." Measurement in this play thus constitutes a system of valuation in which persons attempt to manipulate their own value through mechanisms of comparison and through praise or dispraise, and the failure to measure properly evinces the same anxieties endemic to Dante's fourth circle, where it threatens to infect the whole world. / Committee in charge: George Rowe, Chairperson, English; Benjamin Saunders, Member, English; Lisa Freinkel, Member, English; Leah Middlebrook, Outside Member, Comparative Literature

ix, 203 p. : ill. / As critic Jonathan Gottschall notes, "The literary scholar's subject is ultimately the human mind - the mind that is the creator, subject, and auditor of literary works." The primary aim of this dissertation is to use modern cognitive science to better understand the early modern mind. I apply a framework rooted in cognitive science--the interdisciplinary study of how the human brain generates first-person consciousness and relates to external objects through that conscious framework--to reveal the role of consciousness and memory in subject formation and creative interpretation, as represented in period drama. Cognitive science enables us as scholars and critics to read literature of the period through a lens that reveals subjects in the process of being formed prior to the "self-fashioning" processes of enculturation and social discipline that have been so thoroughly diagnosed in criticism in recent decades. I begin with an overview of the field of cognitive literary theory, demonstrating that cognitive science has already begun to offer scholars of the period a vital framework for understanding literature as the result of unique minds grappling with uniquely historical problems, both biologically and socially. From there, I proceed to detailed explications of neuroscience-based theories of the relationship between the embodied brain, memory, and subject identity, via detailed close reading case studies. In the primary chapters, I focus on what I consider to be three primary elements of embodied subjectivity in drama of the period: basic identity reification through unique first-person memory (the Tudor interlude Jake Juggler ), more complex subject-object relationships leading to alterations in behavioral modes (Hamlet ), and finally, the blending of literary structures and social context in the interpretation of subject behavior (Middleton's A Trick to Catch the Old One ). / Committee in charge: Lisa Freinkel, Chairperson; George Rowe, Member; Ben Saunders, Member; Lara Bovilsky, Member; Ted Toadvine, Outside Member