Thesis (M.F.A.)--West Virginia University, 2010. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains iii, 49 p. : ill. (some col.). Vita. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 44-45).

published_or_final_version / Literary Studies / Master / Master of Arts

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 224-234).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Sydney, 2004. / Title from title screen (viewed 5 May 2008). Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the Sydney College of the Arts. Degree awarded 2004; thesis submitted 2003. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in print form.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 71-77).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 71-77). Also available in print.

This dissertation highlights the influence of the extension of Empire in India on Enlightenment in Scotland. It argues, consistently, that an ever increasing contact with the Eastern parts of Empire over the eighteenth century created productive tensions between the personal, material and intellectual worlds of the Edinburgh literati. Scottish thinkers stood in close contact to one another and congregated in the Select Society and the Poker Club. Beyond the domestic boundaries, they had practical and personal interests in contemporary events in the East Indies. All had relatives or acquaintances in India and were all correspondents of Sir John Macpherson, Governor-General of India (1785-6). The dissertation shows that a revision of civic humanism on the one hand and scientific Whiggism on the other, found their main dilemma in “luxury” and “despotism” respectively. Both of these concepts were intrinsically connected with the perception of India at the beginning of the eighteenth century. One of the outcomes of the literati’s personal and intellectual engagement with India was the different solutions for the regulation of Empire. Ferguson, following the tradition of civic humanism, argued for the importance of civic virtue in order to maintain Empire. His thoughts stood in stark contrast to Smith, Hume and particularly Robertson. Vigour, instead of civic virtue, needed to be developed and strengthened. No monolithic canon of how Empire could be sustained was developed by these men, but all were involved in squaring the circle of improvement through Empire. The constant interplay between domestic, cosmopolitan and imperial spheres suggests that Enlightenment had an imperial nature, which is highlighted in relation to the literati’s particular investigation of “luxury” and “despotism” and their positive perception of Nabobs. Moreover, the dissertation emphasises that Edinburgh associations can not only be viewed as pillars of Enlightenment in Scotland, but also as networks and the gateways to Empire from at least the 1760s. The evidence assembled suggests that men like Ferguson and Robertson were active players in a world which was intellectually and practically shaped by Empire.

This dissertation is a performance of, meditation on, and inquiry into the practice of close reading as it relates to the teaching, learning, and interpretation of literature. The objects of close reading include literature, the history of literary pedagogy and its relationship to critical theory, and a narrative that recounts my experience as an instructor of a teacher education course centered on literature and literary pedagogy. The seven chapters form a series of interlocking interpretive essays or “readings” that together raise questions about the relationship between aesthetic experiences with literary texts, the practice of literary interpretation, and pedagogical approaches in the literature classroom. The study is framed by an exploration of John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, both of which, I argue, dramatize interpretive acts in ways that tacitly cue reading practices that would become familiar in twentieth-century literary and pedagogical theory. These two texts, the latter of which can be viewed as a “reading” of the former, provide a useful framework for conceptualizing literary knowledge as a kind of experiential knowledge, dramatizing Baconian empiricism and Coleridgean imagination in anticipation of twentieth-century theories of participatory aesthetics associated with I.A. Richards, John Dewey, and Louise Rosenblatt. Paradise Lost and Frankenstein also provide a testing ground for my own practice of close reading. At the heart of this study is a re-reading of the work of Rosenblatt and some of the New Critics: I argue that Rosenblatt and the New Critics, particularly Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, were pioneers of parallel, rather than opposing, pedagogical traditions, informed by the shared influence of Richards and Dewey. I decouple a vision for an authentic practice of close reading—grounded in aesthetic experience and supported by meaningful interpretive discourse—from the narrower version of close reading promoted by the Common Core State Standards in literacy, which have been widely critiqued in ways that invite reductive accounts of literary history. Through a return to Rosenblatt and the New Critics, alongside a discussion of contemporary debates about the place of close reading in the literature classroom, I articulate principles of practice that could unite secondary and college teachers of literature and inform the teaching and learning of close reading in the twenty-first century. I conclude with a narrative in which I attempt to enact some of these principles in a literature course for teachers, offering a close reading of the tensions and discoveries that emerge in my own teaching.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- McMaster University, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 382-394). Also available via World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - James Cook University, 2005. / Typescript (photocopy) Bibliography: leaves 542-561.