Once considered the great listeners and tellers of a community's stories of illness and recovery, physicians have ostensibly been displaced from their role and have therefore become less effective practitioners of empathetic medicine. The emerging movement known as "narrative-based medicine" purposes to counteract this deterioration by teaching students and physicians to be more insightful readers of literature and more skillful creative writers. To that end, programs in narrative medicine include three basic components: close readings of literary texts, creative writing, and reflective discussion groups. Although "literature and medicine" programs have long been in existence, there is at least one aspect of narrative medicine that is unique and valuable: the narrative medical write-up, a non-traditional patient work-up in which students narrate the patient's story, focusing on the individual experience of illness. The narrative medical write-up recasts the student-doctor as the "storyteller" of the hospital, insisting on his or her role as both reader and writer of the intricate dramas of daily life on the wards. It is this distinction that sets the narrative medical write-up apart from all other aspects of narrative medicine and which sets narrative medicine apart from its long line of "literature and medicine" predecessors. This paper discusses the narrative medical write-up from a theoretical perspective, with emphasis on understanding its form as prerequisite to suggesting its function within medical education.

In His Trust and His Trust Fulfilled, his first two-reeler for Biograph, D.W. Griffith produces a romantic vision of a strong patriarchal system that is self-sustaining, transmitted and re-inscribed by its faithful members. Griffith bases this vision in an allegorical antebellum plantation family, which allows him to illustrate the natural suitability of each member to their role within the family hierarchy. To demonstrate the stability of this patriarchy, he creates within the family a patriarchal presence strong enough to be maintained even in the absence of a white male figure. Griffith enacts this presence-in-absence structure through a triangulated arrangement that replicates the hierarchical organization of patriarchy. By re-inscribing the comparative assessments that establish the characters and rankings of individuals within this hierarchy, Griffith uses standards of presence and absence, completeness and lack, to characterize the system ideal and its correlated subordinates, as well as to construct the relationships between them within this triangulated arrangement. Griffith then uses a principle of three to inscribe this triangulation into the fabric of both films by placing the characters within the cinematic plane in a triangular positioning that reflects their rank within the patriarchal family. By using these devices, Griffith reaffirms traditional racial and gender roles, asserts the inherent stability of patriarchal ideologies and structures, and underscores the natural correspondence of each patriarchal member to their respective role. But these very same devices also reveal the inconsistency and conflict embedded within the structure Griffith uses to underwrite and stabilize his patriarchal system.

In 1790, a year after the Constitution of the United States was ratified, Congress passed an act to establish a federal city: Washington D.C. The principal actors in the early designs of the capital, George Washington and Pierre Charles LEnfant, understood the dialectic between the physical space and its inhabitants within a larger political framework and sought to use this aesthetic project of urban design to reinforce the political narrative of the federalists. But read through Ed Whites theoretical paradigm of the early American federalist synthesizers, and the subsequent trans-temporal re-inscription of this federalist synthesis by what he terms the megasynthesizers, Washington D.C. becomes not the putative coalescence of the ideology of the federalists, but rather an imperialist attempt to materially and physically silence the traces of competing and contestatory voices of the early nation. Further, borrowing Ed Whites conception of an antifederalist critique, George Washington and LEnfants plans to construct a physical iteration of a unified and imposing empire are seen to contain the seeds of its own subversion: LEnfants carrefoursthe star-shaped intersections of the federal citytransform from a top-down orchestration of human interaction to an emancipatory space that may be reclaimed as pedagogical tools for rediscovering a pre-national memory of a space that insists on heterogeneity, multiplicity, and contestation as democratic requirements. Only by recovering these silenced conflicts and spaces will we be able to resume a democratic dialogue and seek out the frontiers in our cities as sites for civic participation.

In John Henry Days (2001), Colson Whitehead develops a hermeneutic in which the experiences of three generations of tourists, all in search of the folk hero John Henry, become ways of reading and rediscovering the forgotten history of the African-American experience from which John Henry arose. In tracing the intermingled narratives of Dr. Guy Johnson, Mr. Street, J. Sutter and Pamela Street, Whitehead foregrounds the epistemological and ontological methods by which tourists shape meaning from their experiences, confronting the postmodern dilemma of a history which is at once infinitely appropriable and far too complex to be captured in any single reading. Ultimately, Whiteheads solution to this problem of postmodern historicism is found in the characters who write themselves into the legend of John Henry, adding their own stories to the vast corpus of the John Henry tradition through their writings, collections, and acts.

Most analyses of Michelangelo Antonionis films have emphasized themes of alienation, but these interpretations have ignored postwar attempts to address issues of ethical responsibility. As much as Antonionis films are about individuation and isolation, individuation as alterity becomes a way to talk about altruism and compassion. In my paper, I examine the implications of Deleuzes time-image, which point to a past, diachronic time that never emerges on screen in La Notte. The time-image relies on visual, audio, and tactile details to draw the spectators attention to time as an abstract concept, and Antonionis time-image cinema allows for a merging of exterior and internal space. I place La Notte both in context with other postwar neorealist films and recent theoretical discussions of Deleuze. At the same time, I argue that Antonionis interest in ethical responsibility, which begins with an acknowledgment of the selfs limitations, parallels Levinass philosophical formulations about the proximity of the other. In the context of postwar concerns, Levinas radically argues that ethical behavior begins with a recognition of alterity between individuals.

Women pioneers who entered the medical profession in the latter half of the nineteenth century encountered strong antagonism from their male medical contemporaries. Some medical women such as Elizabeth Blackwell embraced the critics essentialist charges of being unfit for medicine due to their feminine tender and nurturing qualities, claiming that these womanly characteristics were in fact imperative to medicines progress. The womens method of using their critics complaints to support their cause, however, obfuscated the role of the lady-doctor professionally as well as culturally. Nineteenth-century observers who perceived the womens entrance into medicine as one of many related concurrent agitations for social progress such as suffragism, health reform, and abolitionism contributed to the misapprehensions surrounding the new woman doctor. Henry James addressed these concerns in his 1886 novel The Bostonians in which he places a minor character, Dr. Mary Prance, amidst a bewildering mix of abolitionists, mesmerists, and suffragists in the post-Reconstruction era. James lady-doctor, Dr. Prance, is distinct from other fictional and non-fictional representations of women doctors at the time because Dr. Prance defies her contemporaries attempts to categorize her as a type by bestriding traditional gender and professional roles, independently defining her own sphere. Dr. Sophia Jex-Blake, an outspoken and active nineteenth-century woman doctor, approved entirely of Dr. Prances characterization, suggesting that James representation resonated with Jex-Blakes actual encounters with the complex gender and professional assumptions that confronted nineteenth-century women doctors.

ENGLISH INDIVIDUALISM POSSESSED: THE SUPERNATURAL MARRIAGE PLOT, 1820-1870 MELANIE BUTLER HOLLADAY Dissertation under the direction of Professor Cecelia Tichi This project focuses on the supernatural marriage plot, a previously unexplored American genre which peaks between 1820 and 1870, the decades between the emergence of the Angel in the House and the rise of the New Woman. This genre deploys metaphoric supernaturalismequating female characters with supernatural figures such as fairies, elves, and witchesto counter the supernaturalism implicitly associated with angelic True Womanhood, and is embroiled in the cultural debate between selfless angeldom and self-interested individualism as models of female identity. The supernatural marriage plot is also engaged in an ongoing dialogue with the hugely popular genre of domestic fiction, a genre which focuses on the process of angel formation. Whereas domestic fiction typically involves the transformation of a rebellious, individualistic girl into a submissive, self-sacrificing angel in the house, supernatural marriage fiction thwarts this transformation, allowing the rebellious heroine to retain the autonomy and self-interestedness associated with individualism. The genre thus aligns itself with Victorian proponents of womans rights in its concern with promoting an individualistic identity for women and permitting women to assert power openly and directly rather than covertly. Supernatural marriage fiction also singles out ghostliness as a problematic form of supernaturalism, thus rejecting the figurative disembodiment associated with angeldom. The genre thus replaces the spiritualized angel with a variety of embodied supernatural figures. In so doing, it participates in a broader cultural trendthe shift from an earlier rhetorical model of citizenship, one founded in the notion of equal, disembodied souls, to an embodied version of citizenshipand this insistent embodiment in turn allows female characters access to possessive individualism. Further, the genres promotion of physicalityin which its heroines metaphorically inhabit a variety of alternate, supernatural bodiesallows its female individualists both to evade the disembodiment of angeldom and to avoid being pinned down to a single, monochromatic, angelic identity.

ENGLISH NEITHER LYE NOR ROMANCE: NARRATIVITY IN THE OLD BAILEY SESSIONS PAPERS CHARLES KINIAN COSNER, JR. Dissertation under the direction of Professor John Halperin This study examines the ways in which the Old Bailey Sessions Papers operate as narrative and are given meaning through specific intertextual relationships with a variety of factual, fictional, and legal texts of the seventh and eighteenth centuries. The Sessions Papers are journalistic accounts of common felony trials (as set down and compiled by shorthand reporters), before there was any official report of such cases. The study shows ways in which the Sessions Papers can be read as literature and particular instances where legal reports are incorporated into literature itself. The Sessions Papers as stories for sale are situated in the context of what has been traditionally termed the rise of the eighteenth-century British novel. Specific literary texts and novels discussed in detail include John Bunyans The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680), Samuel Richardsons Clarissa (1747-48), and Tobias Smolletts The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751). Specific relationships of these texts to contemporary Sessions Papers are explored. This study contains an extensive analysis of the Sessions Papers from July 1742 of the murder trial of James Annesley and Joseph Redding for the homicide of Thomas Egglestone. Contemporary press coverage and other popular accounts dealing with the inheritance claim of James Annesley are examined to explicate the expectations of contemporary readers of the Sessions Reports. The incorporation of the trial narrative into Tobias Smolletts The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle indicates ways in which these legal texts were (mis)read by contemporary novelists. Through an examination of the ways in which factual legal reportage and literary discourse share tropes and rhetorical strategies, the traditional boundary between fact and fiction is shown to be both fluid and amorphous. By showing the provisionality of these basic narrative classifications, the study challenges traditional assumptions concerning the rise of the novel in Britain.

According to R. G. Collingwood, the historian does far more than simply present a series of facts to his audience. Such an individual actually re-enacts past thought...within the context of his own knowledge and therefore, in reenacting it, criticizes it, forms his own judgment of its value, [and] corrects whatever errors he can discern in it [my emphasis]. This groundbreaking re-assessment of what history is and what historians are supposed to do has recently opened up the field to all kinds of opportunities for scholars to reenact, critique, and revise historical record. However, I would argue that hip hop music is an art form that also reenacts, judges, and critiques both history and present-day culture by using bits of pre-recorded music as an intricate part of its incisive social commentary. In this thesis, I will use three songs to illustrate how hip hop as a musical genre achieves what Collingwood says true history should. The three songs are: Tupac Shakurs posthumously-released 1998 single titled Changes, Jay-Zs 2002 I Did It My Way, and Lupe Fiascos recently-released Daydreamin (September 2006). I will argue that, in each song, the artists rely on the irony of the sampled selection to reinforce the urgency of their messages, thus using reenactment as both a re-visioning of the artistic merits of the borrowed texts as well as a call for national redress of some of Americas most egregious and longstanding social ills.

In this dissertation, I conceive of three interlocking developments in geography: the revolution of infrastructure, the circulation of goods and print, and the completion of the map of the world. The enclosure of lands and the construction of turnpikes and canals not only broadened opportunities for travel and navigation but also accelerated the dissemination of commodities of all sorts. I argue that these geographical developments expanded, sometimes beyond the point of recognition, familiar notions of place that were framed by a parish or estate or even a metropolis. The connection between familiar locales and vastly expanded zones of travel and voyaging became increasingly tenuous. Centrality as an idea was threatened by the reach and complexity of this new Britain and the new New world. Through successive waves of expansion each more extensive and pervasive than the previous the relationship between the center and the periphery was radically altered. The ownership of the eye from a fixed, central place was, then, not adequate or sufficient for describing the experience of movement. The impact on literature was correspondingly great. The traveling poem, literature of the road, the grand tour, poems of place, and the lyrical ballad undermined the authority of a stable prospect, displacing it into a stereographic projection of multiple, mobile, and provisional points of view. My first chapter on Anne Finch discusses Eastwell Park as a local center in transition. Finchs withdrawal from the Court into the country was for her a loss of power and influence, but she compensated for it by writing landscape poetry, which was a significant departure from rural idealization. In my second chapter, Robinson Crusoes flight from the New world breaks the archetype of the merchant adventurer by setting it in an island whose subtleties reflected in the great-thoroughfare of the settlers brain. In chapter 3, I treat Joseph Banks as another failed archetype, this time of a Linnaean taxonomist. Banks brought data and specimens home from the South Seas in order to place them into classes and genera, but this plan was foiled by the singularity of his experiences there. Banks became a hybrid figure, the grand tourist turned into a native, a scientist turned into a collector of curiosities. In chapter 4, I discuss georgic and topographical poetry as a literary development indissolubly linked with the systole and diastole of world-wide traffic. John Drydens London, John Dyers trans-Severn Siluria as well as William Wordsworths Blackcomb are the specific poetic locales enveloped by an ever more complex sense of the world. In my final chapter, I turn the argument of the dissertation to Wordsworth as chief inheritor of this real geographic revolution. In writing Salisbury Plain, Wordsworth sought for a poetic law of movement that would simulate this revolution in the material world. Wordsworths ceaseless movement as a traveler transformed the region of Salisbury into a sea, and he sailed on a gypsy caravan into the island of Stonehenge, an uncanny place that combined personal alienation and cultural dislocation in 1793. My critical perspective has been developed in a framework of recent thinkers, such as Michel Serres, Kevin Hetherington, Bruno Latour, and Alain Badiou. A fresh, original theme in their work is what I call trajectivity - the rhythmic tracing and retracing of fluid lines of connection between events and situations. My dissertation claims that the materiality of this geographic trajectory now took place in literary imaginings of their own global network and thus constituted a new geographical condition of superposing post-colonial literary empire on British imperialism.