This dissertation presents an interdisciplinary approach to the understanding of interlace in Britain, while arguing that the Anglo-Saxons utilized the device as an instrument for uniting British cultures under Christianity. Interlace is firstly defined in terms of weaving; and its inception and evolution into other crafts, including literature, is summarized. The paths by which interlace is known to have reached Britain are thus identified, and reasons for its use are considered. The study then concentrates on development of interlace within the socio-historical and linguistic contexts of Great Britain, which help to identify the characteristics of the genre that emerges. Focus on those elements is refined by analysis and interpretation of interlace in the manuscript art of The Lindisfarne Gospels (BL, Cotton Nero Div, f. 27), and on stone crosses at Ruthwell, Bewcastle, Sandbach, and Gosforth. Finally, the text of the late tenth century poem, The Dream of the Rood, is analyzed as interlace and interpreted under the lens of its religio-political and historical contexts. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2010. / March 24, 2010. / Anglo-Saxon England, Early Britain, Interlace, Lindisfarne Gospels, Dream of the Rood, Interlace on Northumbrian Crosses / Includes bibliographical references. / David. F. Johnson, Professor Directing Dissertation; Lori Walters, University Representative; Bruce Boehrer, Committee Member; Eugene Crook, Committee Member; Nancy Bradley Warren, Committee Member.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references. / The following thesis investigates the role of hindsight and sexuality in The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles. In this instance I look closely at the two main characters of the novel, namely Charles Smithson and Sarah Woodruff, and I show the varying levels of freedom that each character displays in a Victorian world.

In South Africa, questions of space and censorship are inseparable. It is impossible to discuss one without discussing the other. The apartheid censors set themselves up as "guardians of the literary", purporting to create a protected space where a particularly South African literature could flourish. In this thesis, my argument is that to be a "guardian of the literary" meant to be a guardian of space in literature, the way it was represented and the way characters moved through it. In order explore this argument I have focused on the censors' response to one writer in particular, Nadine Gordimer. My argument will show that in Gordimer, some spaces seem to be more acceptable than others, as evidenced by the censors' response to her work. Six of her novels were submitted for scrutiny by the Censorship Board. Three were banned, and three were passed. In The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences, Peter McDonald asks "If all her novels ... engaged with the historical circumstances of apartheid South Africa in especially powerful and critical ways, then why were they not all deemed equally threatening to the established order?" My argument is that while it is difficult to provide a definitive answer, it is possible to make sense of the censors' decisions regarding her work by undertaking an analysis of the novels' literary geography. Focusing on the prevalence of certain spaces and the absence of others, and the way that characters move through these spaces, it is clear that they represent differing degrees of threat to the established order. In the censors' reports on Gordimer's work, crossing a physical boundary was the equivalent of crossing a moral boundary. Both the apartheid planners and the censors were fixated on boundaries and borders, on the importance of keeping some people in and more people out. My argument is that what the architects of apartheid tried to do in reality, the censors tried to do in fiction. Their attempt to police the borders of the imaginary meant that some spaces were more acceptable than others, that some stories were told while others were ignored. In my final chapter, I argue that the effects of this can still be seen in contemporary novels written about South Africa. The censors had such a powerful hand in "deforming" literature that their fingerprints can still be detected today. A close analysis of certain elements of Patrick Flanery's Absolution (2012) will show that the structure and form of the novel corresponds in interesting ways with the apartheid censors' ideas of what literature should do and be.

The 1998 film, Shakespeare in Love, sets Will Shakespeare (and itself) the challenge to "show the nature and truth of love ... to make it [love] true" - with an ideal presentation of Romeo and Juliet. The film finally achieves this by ensuring that Will and Viola end on stage as Romeo and Juliet, playing the parts they respectively inspire. The film, and the play within the film, can achieve the satisfactory embodiment of true love only, it seems, through the replacement of stage lover/player with 'real' lovers. The film attempts to unite love and art, but finds stage representation naturally adverse to its idea of true (authentic) love. Persuasion is similarly suppressed as inimical to the film's notion of art as expressive (of authentic emotion). But, where love is conceived as spectacularly mobile, mimetic and transformative - as I show it was, in the early modem period - to effectively communicate and to affectively produce love are, of necessity, linked. Joseph Roach has pointed persuasively to rhetoric's strong connection with humoral theory. Using texts from Wilson, Wright and Bulwer, I pursue and extend his focus on the early modem passionate, rhetorical actor; the interface between body and mind; and the possibility of powerful rhetorical passions, generated in performance. The film assumes (true) love as an emotion that is rare, elusive and, crucially, authentic. But as a renaissance 'passion', love would have very different qualities. Such passions would be vital, dynamic forces, directly communicable and contagious, commonly available and commonly shared. I argue that love, more properly "affect" or "passion", was frequently valued in the Renaissance, not as a stable locus of inner truth and authenticity (the thinking that necessitates the suppression of the actor in Shakespeare in Love), but for its very ability to 'move' where, in Rosemond Tove's words, "the unity of the process moving: persuading is not disturbed." I look for this movement in a number of Shakespeare's Elizabethan plays, particularly The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labours Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night and examine the forms of passion in compelling topoi that attend love in the plays - Petrarchan tropes powerfully linked to early modem ideas of representation (especially dramatic) and the interaction, in imitation, between bodies and minds. Early modem passions threaten clear distinctions between desires and emotions, body and mind and, importantly, self and other. I argue that, when passions are communicable and shared, the passionating actor participates in ideal forms beyond realistic imitation or personal, interior emotional experience - a process to which the real, ideal love of Shakespeare in Love is superfluous.

Bibliography: leaves 63-70. / It is part of the human condition to continually develop and redevelop narrative structures through which identities are portrayed. As Daniel Schwarz explains: "we make sense of our lives by ordering [them] and giving [them] shape. [ ... J Each of us is continually writing and rewriting the text of our life [ ... ] To the degree that we are self-conscious, we live in our narratives – our discourse - about our actions, thoughts and feelings"(Schwarz, 1991, 108). Narrative and the identity created and maintained through it does not exist exclusively in the space of the individual, but is influenced by the cultural and socio-political context in which the individual operates as part of a group, be it a community, society or nation. There is therefore a complex relation between individual and collective identities, where each should ideally shape and reshape the other. Myths are defined as collective narratives of identity that give a group a sense of coherence and unity of origin. It is easy for myths to become fixed and oppressive, so that the reciprocal relation between the formation of individual and collective identity is broken down and individual senses of identity become, to a large extent, determined by the collective narrative. An example of a such an oppressive narrative is the myth of the Afrikaner group in South Africa. This paper aims to examine the contrasts between entrapment within this Afrikaner myth and escape from it, between the dictatorial nature of the old Afrikaner myth and possibilities for new and more dynamic myths to appear, as explored in contemporary South African literature. Specifically it looks at two Afrikaans writers whose texts explore the nature of Afrikaans myths of identity in post-apartheid South Africa. Mark Behr's The Smell of Apples evokes the silence and shame of those inextricably tied to the Afrikaner myth. Behr indicates, through his novel and through a personal confession, that he is unable, or perhaps even unwilling, to break free of the Afrikaner myth. In contrast, Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull indicates a desire to reconstruct the Afrikaner myth. While Behr exhibits a sense of shame, Krog experiences a sense of guilt and responsibility as an Afrikaner that ties her to the actions committed by others in her group. This sense of guilt is known as metaphysical guilt, which "is not based on a narrow construal of what one does, but rather on the wider concept of who one chooses to be" (May, 1991, 241, my emphasis). Krog chooses to be integrated into post-apartheid South Africa, but this does not mean that she leaves her sense of being Afrikaans behind. Instead, she individually reinvents herself as an Afrikaner in the 'new' South Africa. Her individual reinvention also has implications for the collectivity: "[by individuals reshaping themselves], they might be reshaping what it means for others to consider themselves as members of that group" (May, 1991,252).

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 87-92). / The notion of place as something at once geographic, socio-cultural and psychological is a ubiquitous concern in the novels of Zakes Mda. It is surely not by chance that Mda's interest in the novelistic form, which materialised in the publication of Ways of Dying in 1995, was roughly coincident with South Africa's fledgling democracy a year earlier. The end of apartheid meant the opportunity of exploring new forms of cultural discourse untrammeled by the intense politicisation of art that had tended to collapse the literary with the didactic in rather one-dimensional ways. Mda's consideration of place, this thesis argues, is one instance of such an exploration. More specifically, it examines the intersection of the social and the spatial in two of his novels: Ways of Dying and The Heart of Redness. Starting at the junction of race, politics and literature, it moves into how the country's changing physical and political boundary lines have effected new ways of relating to its spaces. The focus of the Ways of Dying chapter is on urban space, where migrants and settled urbanites must reconcile the rather fragmented and cosmopolitan character of the city.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 83-87). / This study is an attempt to trace the construction and performance of violent masculinity. In this thesis I argue that a particular form of violent masculine identity emerges from within a hegemonic structure of gender relations. I employ two popular, contemporary novels, Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club (1997) and Irvine Welsh's Marabou Stork Nightmares (1996), to examine a form of masculinity which is involved in these relations. I explore these novels with the aim of identifying the ways in which their characters engage with those around them in accordance with the system of power which encompasses them. In doing so, I hope to explain the restricting limits placed upon their bodies, and clarify the compulsions which drive their private demeanours and interpersonal behaviour. I argue that these characters perform a model of masculine identity which is founded upon an ideology of naturalised male authority and grounded in the social practice of violent dominance. Marabou Stork Nightmares depicts a male narrator who, in enacting a model of hegemonic masculinity, becomes implicated in the reproduction of hegemonic masculine domination. Fight Club examines the role of this model in restricting its members to structural and physical domination. Each of these novels is concerned with outlining the limitations of performance of masculine gender identity directed through violence. In different ways they convey the extent to which a hegemonic system of dominance generates decidedly difficult and unhappy experience. Overall, this thesis attempts these novels, and to account for the problematic experiences of their characters.

Bibliography: leaves 100-108. / This dissertation attempts to account for the paralysis of Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, and thus of radical critique in relation to practice in general. It begins by demonstrating that there is a methodological problem in the connection of the dialectical method to Adorno and Horkheimer's philosophy of history, which posits Enlightenment both as break with the history of reason, and as ahistorical concept of that history. The dissertation takes as its point of departure their discussion of Kant, as exemplary Enlightenment thinker. I will use Martin Jay's The Dialectical Imagination and Axel Honneth's Critique of Power- Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory here. The strategy of the next section is to rehistoricise Kant's thought and thus the Enlightenment within its historical moment. This follows a close reading of Kant's political philosophy in his' An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?' and 'Contest of the Faculties' to show that Kant poses the problem of the morality versus politics in terms inseparable from his historical context: the emergence of the Modem state, and the French revolution. Two solutions to this problem present themselves within Kant's separation of public and private uses of reason. Public and private anticipates the Modem separation of state and civil society: 'moral-political' problem is thus solved by 'publicity', which plays a mediating role. A subtextual reading however, proposes that the public/private split refers to an internalisation of the political principle in what Etienne Balibar calls the 'citizen subject'. We will use Balibar's paper, ""Citizen Subject"", to show that the 'citizen subject' of Modernity emerges with the French revolution. Finally, these two possible solutions to the Kantian moral-political problem will be mapped to the political philosophical models of power of Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault respectively. Foucault's model of 'disciplinary' power will be connected to the 'citizen subject' while Habermas and Arendt's normative conceptions of publicness in their juridico-political models of power will be mapped to the first solution based on the dualism state/civil society. I will make use of Cohen and Arato's Civil Society and Political Theory, as well as various other secondary texts on political philosophy here. The last section will work out more clearly the relationship between Foucault's genealogical critique, the 'citizen subject' and the French revolution. It will show the similarity between Foucault's genealogy and the dialectical method in relation to Kant's historical reflection on his own present. To work out the conditions of this mode of what we will call radical critique of the present by Kant, and its basis on a Modern philosophy of history we will turn to Hannah Arendt's reading of Kant's political philosophy from his Aesthetics. Here Reinhart Koselleck' s Futures Past - On the Semantics of Historical Time will prove instructive on the link between Kant's philosophy of history, based on the metahistorical concept of revolution and Kant's judgement of the French revolution as historical event. The main thesis of this dissertation is that the radical critique of the present, in this case that of Foucault's genealogy and the dialectical philosophy of history of Adorno and Horkheimer are caught up in the same contradictions as Kant's radical judgement of the French revolution; and that this problem takes on an aesthetic form .

Please note: creative writing theses are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the lock icon and filled out the appropriate web form. / LORENA: a Tabloid Epic spins out of the media hailstorm surrounding Lorena Bobbitt, who became a sensation after she used a kitchen knife to cut off her abusive husband’s penis in 1993. The tacky dystopia of American pop culture tumbles onto the stage in a series of funhouse vignettes that know no bounds, while The Playwright desperately tries to protect Lorena from the play which has clearly gotten out of her control. Then, a twist ending re-contextualizes Lorena’s outsized epic through the lens of a quieter story that’s all too common. LORENA merges the personal with the political to reckon with our cultural sins and bring Lorena’s story into the present day. / 2999-01-01T00:00:00Z

Please note: creative writing theses are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the locked Download file link and fill out the appropriate web form. / Short stories / 2031-01-01