Signs of meaning in morley callaghan's fiction

Secular power and sacred authority

Contrapuntal convictions

english literature

A sociolinguistic study

Major works

DISSERTATION ABSTRACT DREAMING IN CRISIS: ANGELS AND THE ALLEGORICAL IMAGINATION IN POST-WAR AMERICA Emily Bauman, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2003 This dissertation bridges literary and cultural studies in order to offer a critical reading of the fascination with angels that appears in America at the beginning and end of the Cold War. Though the contemporary wave of interest spans genres of mass entertainment, pop psychology, and high modernist literature and film, I find angelic representations to be consistent. Invested in the idea of a separated intelligence, these representations expose larger concerns with personal sovereignty and historical determinism. From fantasy to true story, the encounter with the pure and providential spectator consecrates the subject within a special temporality, a temporality of imagination and reception. Angelic illumination thus answers a crisis of attention that renders the human paralyzed. In all of the texts considered the attendant spirit confers personal chosenness and historical beginning through the act of judgment, an idea I discuss in reference to the theories of agency of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Immanual Kant. One distinguishing feature of the angelic spectrum is that popular and highbrow treatments differ radically in their attitudes toward angelic revelation. Its a Wonderful Life and other movies of the sentimental fantasy genre, the true stories books, the self-help books, and the TV drama Touched by an Angel represent the angel-guardian as a figure of completion that assimilates an unsteady future to the rational structures of the past. Implicit already in Tony Kushners Broadway hit Angels in America and fully expressed in the angelic poetry since the second world war, angels appear as expressions of partialness, ruin, and decay. I analyze the differences between sentimental and tragic appropriations of angels by investigating them in relation to the logic of allegory. A paradoxically populist-hierarchical way of reading, allegorical thinking defines both the angels of annunciatory blessing and the angels of impotence and destruction. Through a final engagement with the work of Walter Benjamin, I argue that as a way of reading experience through its own alterity, allegory is itself an angelic hermeneutic.

The Seductive Fallacy provides a literary focus for feminist critiques of fascist gender and sexuality. It explores two fascist and three anti-fascist novelsWyndham Lewis The Revenge for Love (1937), Olive Hawks What Hope for Green Street? (1945), Virginia Woolfs The Years (1937), Phyllis Bottomes The Mortal Storm (1938) and The Lifeline (1946)that illuminate British domestic fictions rhetorical range in the prolonged crisis of liberal hegemony after World War I. Across political purposes and a range of readerships and styles, they illuminate the genres efficacy to theorize modern womens social, political, and cultural agency. In particular, the dissertations critical readings of these novels explore fascisms emergence within liberal democracies. Juxtaposing Lewis and Hawks with literature from the archives of the British Union of Fascists (BUF), the first two chapters stress fascisms production and consumption of political fantasies prevalent throughout the British novels humanist tradition, especially notions of womens agency inscribed in the traditions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century domestic literature. The last two chapters highlight and evaluate Bottomes and Woolfs divergent critical representations of fascist domesticity. The dissertation concludes that Woolfs anti-humanist feminist domestic fiction better enables readers to perceive the irreducible modernity of fascism.

This study combines philosophical, historical, and cultural modes of inquiry in order to explore what has occurred when selected authors have attempted to "write the body." Augmented by archival and primary cultural research, the dissertation is grounded in the experiential, "everyday" qualities of women's lives. Samples of women's cultural materials such as beauty, cookery, and household management texts, and popular women's magazines serve as informative backdrops for an investigation of middle- and working-class British and Anglo-Irish women's culture during the twentieth century. This study investigates some of the ways in which women have thought about food in relation to more global cultural concerns such as class and gender. As tropes within female texts, food and eating are bestowed with the properties of larger social concerns. By foregrounding consumption, authors can address difficult issues, such as sexuality and social class, obliquely. In order to make sense out of a rapidly shifting modernity, the women writers whose work I examine have used one of the most common, daily occurrences-eating-in order to grapple with changes in society and in social codes and roles for women. A close examination of some of the ways in which this has occurred can help to illuminate the connections of everyday cultures, so long relegated to women, to the larger structure of a modern world and to its impact upon female agency and social empowerment. By creating pairs of female characters who are oppositional with regard to food consumption, the authors examined all implicate the division of mind from body central to Western philosophies. The two are necessary complements, however, and my work does not seek to give primacy to either the flesh or the intellect, but instead examines ways in which the two work together, as well as the ways that the coming together of the physical and the psychical are represented by authors concerned not with the and mind/body binary, but with problematizing the very division that has underscored cultural development.

Spirit Matter(s): Post-Dualism Representations of Spirituality in Fiction by Walker Percy, Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor, examines the ways in which these authors have presented spirituality in The Moviegoer, Song of Solomon, and Mama Day respectively. In these works, spirituality is a need for connection among humans in this world, rather than a notion that points to dualistic views of the spiritual and the material as two different realms. Through this perspective on spirituality as a reality of the physical world, the political and socio-economic problems of the world are notnor can they beset aside in favor of the spiritual search. The solitary quest of the individual that overcomes distinctions of class, race, sex, etc. to gain enlightenment proves insufficient to explain modern spiritual concerns. Instead, the examined texts propose that problems such as injustice and exploitation, and the struggles that arise when people fight against them, are part of the human condition, and therefore of the human spirit as well. The ethical obligations that arise from connection with one another guide people to the ways in which spiritual awareness can become ethical praxis, and so spirituality leads to a concern with the problems of the political and socio-economic sphere rather than to an escape from them by transcending such concerns. Finally, a vision of spirituality as part of the physical world affirms life and valorizes struggle in it rather than sacrificial death.