Habilitationsschrift-Freiburg, i. B. / Bibliography: p. 255-267.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1981. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (p. 292-303).

Habilitationsschrift-Freiburg, i. B. / Bibliography: p. 255-267.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1981. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 292-303).

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Allegory is not obsolete as Samuel Coleridge and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe have claimed. It is alive and well and has transformed from a restrictive concept to a concept that is flexible and can form to meet the needs of the author or reader. The most efficient way to evidence this is by making a case study of it with a suitable work that will allow us to perceive its plasticity. This essay uses J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings as a multi-perspective case study of the concept of allegory; the size and complexity of the narrative make it a suitable choice. My aim is to illustrate the plasticity of allegory as a concept and illuminate some of the possibilities and pitfalls of allegory and allegoresis. As to whether The Lord of the Rings can be treated as an allegory, it will be examined from three different perspectives: as a purely writerly process, a middle ground of writer and reader and as a purely readerly process. The Lord of the Rings will then be compared to a series of concepts of allegorical theory such as Plato’s classical “The Ring of Gyges”, William Langland’s classic The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman and contemporary allegories of racism and homoeroticism to demonstrate just how adaptable this concept is. The position of this essay is that the concept of allegory has changed over time since its conception and become more malleable. This poses certain dangers as allegory has become an all-round tool for anyone to do anything that has few limitations and has lost its early rigid form and now favours an almost anything goes approach.

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Thesis advisor: Richard Kearney / This dissertation presents a systematic reading of the four discourses Kierkegaard wrote on Matthew 6:24-34, which I am calling the Lily Discourses (“What We Learn from the Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air” (1847); “The Cares of the Pagans” (1848); “The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air” (1849); “Christ as Archi-Image” (1851)). Matthew instructs the reader to “consider the lilies,” and in reading this passage Kierkegaard presents the lilies as authoritative, rather than merely “figural” or “metaphoric”. The aim of this dissertation is to describe what Kierkegaard means by the authority of the lily and the bird. Since Kierkegaard engages with and in “figural” language in his pseudonymous as well as his signed texts, what he says about the lily and the bird in these four Discourses is significant for all of Kierkegaard’s work. In the first and the third Discourses Kierkegaard writes lyrically of the beauty of nature, but concludes with a brutal picture of nature’s death and decay. It is not nature, this dissertation argues, but the trace nature leaves in language, that Kierkegaard is investigating. Kierkegaard ends the first Discourse by invoking the positing power of language: he says, “Let the lily wither”. As if in response to the death at the end of the first Discourse, the second is written in praise “on the day all goes black.” If the first two Discourses describe the authority of the lily and the bird in terms of the performative – of positing and praise – the third Discourse describes this authority in terms of receptivity. The lily and the bird are obedient, Kierkegaard says there. He develops an account of obedience that is, on the one hand, required for reading the lily and the bird (for granting authority), and on the other, is the lesson taught by the lily and the bird. In the fourth Discourse Kierkegaard presents the archi-image (Forbillede, previously translated in English as “pattern” or “prototype”) and what corresponds to it: “imitation.” Only when we imitate, rather than ape mimetically or endlessly interpret, can the image (Billede) that we are responding to be the archi-image (Forbillede). The lily and the bird, the dissertation argues, have the authority of the archi-image only if we can read them in a certain way, that is, if our reading is non-mimetic imitation. For Kierkegaard imitation is an act, made by an individual person at a concrete time and place in history; it therefore commits the reader, in her full responsibility (including “social” or “political”) in the risk of reading. The dissertation has four chapters, each devoted to one of Kierkegaard’s Lily Discourses. Accordingly, Chapter One describes Kierkegaard’s account of the authority of the lily and the bird as positing, Chapter Two as praise, Chapter Three as obedience and Chapter Four as imitation. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

PARABLES by ERIN DIXON Under the Direction of Joe Peragine ABSTRACT This is a thesis about my most recent paintings. This work represents a quest for a real understanding of what painting means to me, as well as an exploration of fictional narrative and allegory which is derived from my life experience. Yet despite all the associations I have with these paintings, even with the most auto-biographical ones, they are meant to be open-ended. It is not necessary to know anything about me upon viewing them. Parables fictitiously illustrate a moral principle, and this work celebrates what I have learned in life and school.