The heroes in Virgil?s Aeneid and Tolkien?s The Lord of the Rings are compared and contrasted. Some of the heroic characteristics that Tolkien instills in his characters are similar to Aeneas?s, but the primary heroes?Frodo, Sam, Aragorn, and Gandalf?display particularly Christian virtues that complement and fulfill Virgil?s pre-Christian ideals. The comparison begins with Aeneas?s and Frodo?s choices to leave Carthage and Lothlorien because those two cities pose similar temptations. However the protagonists? decisions have differing motivations. Motive marks the beginning of the contrast which then proceeds to analyze goals and hopes of the characters. The virtues advocated by the two authors are directly connected to the theologies at work in their plots, and the varying celestial powers and forces of evil are contrasted as well. Finally, the conclusions of the two works reveal the greatest difference between the heroes?the power and importance of mercy rather than strength.

Although Jack Kerouac has begun to be recognized as one of the great 20th century American writers, scholars have not yet fully explored the influence that his conflicting religious beliefs had on his work. Kerouac?s internal struggle to reconcile his Buddhist and Catholic thinking, and his ultimate attempt to embrace Catholicism, had a profound effect on his writing, giving it the religiously tumultuous charge that is essential to Kerouac?s distinctive writing style. This study addresses Kerouac?s religious life and its effect on his work by focusing primarily on three of his works: Visions of Gerard, The Dharma Bums, and Big Sur. Kerouac?s complex relationship between Buddhism and Catholicism and the effect this conflict had on his work has heretofore gone largely uninvestigated. However, it is essential to a complete understanding of his work. Exploring this element of his work sheds new light on Kerouac?s novels that illuminates his depth and solemnity as a writer. Kerouac?s religious quest was a cornerstone of his artistic development, and the three novels I have examined illustrate how Catholicism and Buddhism together informed that quest.

This study attempts to follow George MacDonald as he engages in the strange juggling act by which he simultaneously idealizes women and releases them from the grasp of idolizing males, proclaims their purity and concerns himself with their healthy maturation into sexuality. A comparison of Phantastes and Adela Cathcart reveals the complicating role of sexuality in the coming of age process of both males and females. The male protagonist of the fantasy work Phantastes is asked to learn to control his sexuality and to abandon selfishness in love, and he does so in part by understanding that women, too, have sexual natures. In Phantastes, however, MacDonald hesitates between idealizing, and thus desexualizing, women and accepting sexuality as part of women?s nature, as Anodos?s continuing celibacy upon his return from Fairy Land illustrates. The realistic setting of Adela Cathcart compels MacDonald to address women?s sexuality. The novel demonstrates that a woman can fulfill her traditional angelic role even while confronting the demands of her sexuality. Women are fallen angels who must be taught how to live in their fallen bodies without compromising their angelic calling. In order to become the ?angel in the house,? the moral center of the home, individual women must undergo a coming of age process similar to that of the males who struggle so much with handling their sexuality. To mature successfully, and to stave off the selfishness that is threatening to manifest itself in her, Adela, like Anodos, embarks on a journey through fantasy, though she will be borne there through the imagination and words of others. Taken together, these two works by MacDonald manifest both the importance of the image of women?s natural innocence in the nineteenth century and a growing awareness of the inadequacy of that image.

<p> This thesis investigates the extent to which localized contact situations figure in the early development of African-American speech. Because many African American varieties of English have their roots in the rural Southern United States, evidence from the longstanding, bi-racial insular contact situation in Hyde County, North Carolina, provides a valuable opportunity to shed light on the earlier development of African-American speech. This thesis focuses on the morphosyntactic features of past tense BE and copula absence as two variables diagnostic in situating ethnolinguistic alignment for this African-American community. The analysis examines speech samples for 32 Anglo-American and African-American Hyde County speakers that show disparate patterns of ethnolinguistic alignment. I hypothesize that this mixed alignment patterning is attributable to the long-term effects of ethnic boundaries within a broader context of localized coastal identity. At the same time, I also hypothesize that AAVE in Hyde County is moving away from that local dialect identity towards a more uniform AAVE norm as part of the larger cultural reorientation of African American identity that evolved coterminous with the Civil Rights movement and school desegregation. <P>

<p>(Under the direction of R. V. Young.)<BR><BR><BR> Contrary to critics who assert that Elizabethan and Jacobean poets can be categorically differentiated from each other according to their philosophical outlook and style, Sir Philip Sidney' shows them to be contiguous and continuous innovators in the Petrarchan love lyric. <BR><BR>Both terminates with Astrophil trapped within the conditions he has defined. <BR><BR>This novel conclusion, although firmly based in conventional Petrarchan precepts, exposes the issues that constantly loom before any Petrarchan love lyricist; that is, the problematic identities and relationships of images, ideas, and realities; invention, inspiration, and imitation. On the other hand, in their arguments and attitudes toward love and poetry, but several of the most poignant and exploratory poems admit the necessity of idealized image-making while also accepting the inevitable irony in such images. Thus Donne's sequence can be seen as an acknowledgment of Sidney's exposure of the inherent instability involved in poetic attempts to transpose the ideal into the real, but it can also be seen as an innovative response to this problem that entails embracing the instability and irony of Petrarchan lyricism and then using that instability and irony prominently in poems whose speakers are conscious of the limitations of their conceits. As the primary example of this attitude, Donne's speaker in "A nocturnal upon S. Lucies day, Being the shortest day" explores the inherent irony in idealized images of the union of human lovers while yet recognizing the vision and direction they afford as sacramental foretypes of eternity and divine love.<P>

<p>The purpose of this thesis is to study the viability of individuality in a fast-paced, consumer-driven, late capitalist society in light of Don DeLillo?s White Noise (1984) and Mao II (1991). One way of considering American late capitalism is to treat it as a mass movement with striking similarities to more overtly tyrannical mass movements like Nazism and Mooneyism. DeLillo makes such comparisons in White Noise and Mao II, and his fiction ultimately suggests that an unchecked late capitalist consumer culture is frighteningly capable of not only tyranny, but also of liquidating individuality. A more acute analysis of the methodology employed by mass movements can be made using a Frankfurt School approach. Theodor Adorno?s essay, ?Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,? offers a useful framework for studying how mass movements are able to seduce, manipulate, tyrannize, and incorporate individuals. Adorno argues that Nazism depended on knowledge of certain psychological desires to seduce individuals. This essay argues that the American consumer culture uses similar methods to seduce individuals by not only employing psychological weapons, but also by taking advantage of a highly systemetized technological apparatus whose development has coincided with the unprecedented rise of the American consumer culture. <P>

<p>AbstractRoughton, Dean Morris. Blackwater: A Collection of Stories. (Under the direction of Angela Davis-Gardner.)The stories in this collection all either take place in or deal with characters from Blackwater, a fictional town in eastern North Carolina. Blackwater is not meant to represent any real town, but is more an amalgamation of the small towns that exist in the region. Eastern North Carolina serves as a point of convergence for various waters, salt and fresh, alkaline and acidic. The term blackwater refers to a specific kind of water often found in the slow moving rivers of the region and named for its dark color which is, as described on a plaque at the entrance of a river boardwalk/nature trail in an eastern NC town, "the result of a continuous process by which bacteria and fungi in the wetland soil break down plant material." The visitor will often comment upon perceiving a foul odor rising from this highly acidic water, a byproduct of the dense nutrients in suspension. Despite the displeasing smell, these waters are home to an abundance of wildlife, fish and aquatic animals, which would not thrive so readily in different waters but which do manage to survive and even do reasonably well at the points of converging waters where a mixture of elements is achieved.I find blackwater an apt metaphor for the culture in the region and, so, have named my fictional town accordingly. Life in eastern North Carolina, comparatively speaking, is often slower on the surface than in more metropolitan areas. However, there is a rich undercurrent of events, which often are avoided in conversation.The stories in this collection, for the most part, are not given to monumental action, but instead focus on what lies beneath the surface. In addition, several of the stories investigate the way characters develop from or respond to a convergence of waters. It is my purpose in writing these stories neither to condemn nor uphold life as it exists in Blackwater; nor is it my purpose to condemn or uphold life as it exists in the waters that converge. I write in the hope that the reader will recognize that, though the breadth of towns like Blackwater is less than that of other areas, the depth is not lacking.<P>

<p>The purpose of the research has been to develop a theory of identity that addresses Toni Morrison?s treatment of home as a metaphor for self-identity, not just an idealized locus in the past. One application of this theory has been explored in the novel Tar Baby in which Morrison addresses the predicament of homelessness in relationship to African-American love relationships. Another application of this theory deals with the problem of being at home in a cultural and psychological sense and being at home in a physical and bodily sense.<p> In both Beloved and Tar Baby, Toni Morrison reveals that these considerations are indivisible. There is also consideration that Beloved reveals Morrison?s theory on writing the female black body in response to the treatment of that body in historical documents. For Morrison the black female body is peripheral either in previous slave narratives or in historical master narratives. Thus, for Morrison, a theory of self-identity includes the idea that cultural and bodily identity are inseparable from notions of home and together these elements give insight into self-identity, self-direction and self-fulfillment. <P>

<p>With existing technological capabilities, writing instructors are confronted with many choices regarding the facilitation of their instruction. They must be aware of the potential benefits and shortcomings of using Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) in their writing instruction, and then they must decide if this technology will support their pedagogy. If so, they face the decision of choosing a conferencing software product and incorporating it into their classroom. This study was designed to provide some guidance for instructors trying to determine if and how to use conferencing software to enhance their instruction. It reviews the educational theories that promote conversation and support community building in writing instruction and examines how CMC can support these theories. To examine the options available to writing instructors wishing to incorporate CMC in their classroom, it compares seven existing conferencing software applications. This comparison attempts to help instructors, who want to foster conversation, involvement, and a student-centered pedagogy, gain insight into available products. In order to make this comparison information accessible via the Internet, I have created a companion website, which can be found at www4.ncsu.edu/~smfiore. <P>

<p>Recent studies of bi-ethnic enclave communities in coastal North Carolina (e.g., Wolfram, Thomas, and Green 2000) suggest that earlier African American speech both accommodated localized dialect norms and also exhibited a persistent substratal effect from the early African-European contact situation. To determine if such situations were the norm or an anomaly, this study examines Beech Bottom, North Carolina, a long-term, bi-ethnic enclave mountain community. In the early 1900s, Beech Bottom?s population ranged from 80 to 110 residents, but community size dwindled with the decline of feldspar mining. Currently, about ten longtime residents live in Beech Bottom: three are European Americans and the rest are designated as ?African Americans? in the historical bi-racial taxonomy of the American South, although they are actually of mixed descent.This study specifically examines dialect accommodation for the Beech Bottom African American speakers. To what extent do they share the local Appalachian dialect with cohort European Americans, and what does this reflect about the status of earlier African American English? Is there a contemporary ethnolinguistic divide, and if so, how is it manifested? To answer these questions, a representative set of diagnostic phonological (e.g., postvocalic r-lessness, /aI/ ungliding) and morphosyntactic (e.g., 3rd pl. ?s attachment, 3rd sg. ?s absence) variables for a sample of current residents is considered. The analysis supports the conclusion that earlier African American speech accommodated to local dialect norms, and it suggests that there has been subtle but persistent substrate influence in the historical development of AAVE.<P>