Milton?s story of the original sin of Adam and Eve and the resulting fall of mankind is a story that is bound up in food imagery and the language of consumption. A meal for Adam and Eve holds significance far beyond its value as sustenance. Milton embeds his epic with seventeenth-century beliefs on diet and health that help to emphasize the physical and spiritual innocence of the prelapsarian pair and the fallen state of the England of Milton?s time. Moreover, the couple?s meals in Paradise become not only dietary indications of man?s pre-fallen perfection, but also precursors to the Eucharistic meal that will be instrumental to man?s redemption once he is fallen. In his writing, Milton exemplifies his ability to merge scientific beliefs of the time with his own religious views, thus bringing the secular and the sacred together in an epic where food and eating become indicative of one?s relationship with God.

Kafka?s well-known obsessions with both language and death need to be understood in light of their common factor?the psychoanalytic concept of the repetition compulsion. Since these obsessions act as motivating forces compelling Kafka?s writing, it is crucial to understand the constitutive nature of the repetition compulsion in Kafka?s texts by examining its presence in two of his prominent works, ?The Judgment? and The Trial. I will begin this study by first establishing my theoretical framework, defining the compulsion to repeat and the death instinct as they function in Freud?s psychoanalytic theory. Next I will differentiate Lacan?s (re)formulation of the repetition compulsion and the death instinct and show the critical role the symbolic order qua language has in this conception. Following this, I will examine Kafka?s story, ?The Judgment,? looking at a typical piece of psychoanalytic criticism focused on Kafka?s supposed Oedipus complex and then showing the pitfalls of such an approach. I will go on to show the possibilities for deeper readings offered by post-Freudian psychoanalytic concepts, focusing on the repetitive and constitutive role that the letter has for the subject, the function of the return of the repressed, and the significance of the space ?between two deaths,? where the story ends. The next section will examine The Trial in a similar manner; the focus will be on the importance of language in the novel, including the court as an agency of language and also the role lying or deceit plays in signification. I will also address the effect on K. of the initial trauma of his arrest, the role of memory and forgetting in the novel, and the relevance of the space ?between two deaths.?

Something Blue is a collection of poems that explore the physicality of relationships. ?Light on Lake Michigan,? the first poem in the manuscript, explores a mother?s suicide by drowning. In the title poem, ?Something Blue,? the speaker finds out an ex-lover has married and wonders if his abuse has continued with his new wife. ?Fourteen? and ?Purge? examine the objectification of bodies that today?s teenage girls inflict upon themselves. The poems are mostly written in free verse, with careful attention paid to line and stanza lengths and internal rhythm.

When Bertram Wyatt-Brown published Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South in 1982, he established honor as a key to understanding the culture, of the antebellum South, and created a new anthropological framework for analyzing Southern patterns of conduct. This essay describes, through the lens of honor, the attempts of Nat Turner and Margaret Whitehead to rebel against the patriarchal code of Southern honor, and explores their failures to subvert the rigid assumptions of the prevailing system. Disrespected, mistreated, and enslaved, Nat wishes to disrupt the perpetual social system of white honor and black deference; he uses his literacy and the patriarchal models of the Old Testament and his father to rebel against his social condition and to sustain his plan for insurrection and eventual liberation. Emotionally distant from the patriarchal authority of her brother and the influence of her mother, unable to communicate freely with her peers or family, and distraught and torn by her socially unacceptable belief that slavery should be abolished, Margaret rebels against these socially imposed controls and ideologically commits herself to her convictions about equality, tolerance, and Christian love. Though both Nat and Margaret actively rebel against the existing honor system, they fail to consider the influence of the public sphere. This failure to identify the public perceptions of various social communities results in the collapse of Natâs and Margaretâs rebellions, and it contributes to their eventual deaths.

Focusing on feminism, language, and history, this thesis explores the ways in which the theories of creolization set forth in Michelle Cliff's novels, Abeng (1984), No Telephone to Heaven (1987), and Free Enterprise (1990), explain existence in an increasingly cross-cultural world.

Thomas Moreâs Latin epigrams, published with the second edition of Utopia in 1518, were apparently widely read both among contemporary European intellectuals and during the subsequent development of English poetry. With a humble audacity that could engage Classical authors in a Christian posture, More cultivated a literary climate that could retain the earthiness of the middle ages in dialogue with the ancients, and is more responsible for the ensuing expansion of vernacular poetry than perhaps any other Henrican author. This thesis probes the Classical influences and Humanist practices at work in the epigrams, explores their contemporary reception on the continent, and traces their legacy among sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English poets.

In this thesis, I read through Kristeva?s theory of the abject as a way of interpreting Cristina Garcia?s <i>Dreaming in Cuban</i> (1993) and interrogating common psychoanalytic readings of Christina Rossetti?s <i>Goblin Market</i> (1859) and Bram Stoker?s <i>Dracula</i> (1897). The purpose of each of these readings has been to gauge the usefulness of Kristeva?s theory as a critical tool and to determine what it allows us to achieve as literary critics and, even, as readers. Although Kristeva is clear about her desire to see women liberate themselves from the confining roles ascribed to them by psychoanalytic theory and patriarchal norms, she is not clear about how her theory can be used. Therefore, I apply her theory, specifically that of the abject, to these three fundamentally different texts in order to both investigate its usefulness and to determine what is, if anything, the triumphant result of its application (in terms of feminism).

This thesis suggests that composition studies is in need of further efforts to bring the concept and practice of nonviolence into the discipline?s theoretical and pedagogical framework. I survey and synthesize existing literature on nonviolence in composition as well as related writing on spirituality in education, feminism, the environment, and moral education. The implications of critical pedagogy and social construction theory for the subject are also considered. Ultimately, I argue for the importance of an approach incorporating the personal and the spiritual on the part of both teachers and students. Such an approach retains a strong social perspective because it works toward an understanding that the self cannot be seen as separate from its others. Guided by these ideas, I present and discuss a proposal for a one-semester university-level composition course entitled ?Writing Nonviolence.? I conclude the thesis by briefly considering alternate pedagogical models and by calling for further exploration, testimony, and commitment by teachers and scholars of composition and rhetoric.

?Spectacular, Spectacular? looks at Baz Luhrmann?s Red Curtain Trilogy?Strictly Ballroom (1992), Romeo + Juliet (1996), and Moulin Rouge (2001)?in the context of the mythologies of the theatre and cinema that Luhrmann builds. Evoking themes, images, and concepts found within these two mediums, Luhrmann goes to great lengths to signify both the cinematic and the theatrical within these films through references to popular culture, and these references incrementally mesh the worlds of theatre and cinema throughout the trilogy. In Strictly Ballroom, Luhrmann explores the concepts of performance, spectacle, and realism while at the same time replicating a popular cinematic form of the time, the non-diegetic musical. Moving further away from the popular genre that Strictly Ballroom mirrored, Luhrmann next made Romeo + Juliet, a film that speaks to many of the same conventions of theatre and film while also adding features of diegetic song and self-referentiality to heighten this connection. Moulin Rouge, Luhrmann?s final film, is an overt musical homage, complete with internal and external references to both theatre and film with an overwhelming sense of awareness of popular culture. Although many critics, including Luhrmann himself, have praised him for his innovative style, this thesis argues that Luhrmann?s trilogy does not create a new film form. Rather, ?Spectacular, Spectacular? will demonstrate that his self-proclaimed genre, Red Curtain Cinema, is a modernized echo of an earlier idea?using popular culture and referentiality to pay tribute to a fading genre?found in one of the most popular movie musicals of all time, Singin? in the Rain.

Knots is a screenplay that tells the story of Joel Greer, a witty yet underachieving English teacher bumbling his way towards his thirties. One day, Joel returns home to find a wedding invitation in the mail. The invitation turns out to be to the wedding of Vanessa, the ex-girlfriend for whom he still pines some two years after their break-up. After much internal debate, Joel convinces himself that attending the wedding would be the mature decision, one that will show the woman who always doubted him that he has finally matured. However, Joel quickly comes to regret his decision, as through a series of unusual circumstances, he is thrust into spending the eve of the wedding with Neil, Vanessa?s husband-to-be. While Neil appears perfect on the surface, it does not take long for his unexpected intentions for the evening to emerge. Over the course of one night, as Joel struggles with whether or not to try and thwart Neil?s plans, he comes to understand love, relationships, and what it?s like to finally grow up and move on.