Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Iowa, 2005. / Supervisor: Judith E. Liskin-Gasparro, Michael E. Everson. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 190-201).

Thesis (B.A.)--Bryn Mawr College, Dept. of English, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (B.A.)--Bryn Mawr College, Dept. of English, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references.

The author believes that the mediation of classic literature through drama would increase student's opportunity for academic success on the secondary and post-secondary levels of education. This project develops curriculum and materials using dramatic adaptations of ancient literature created by the author.

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The works of Lewis Carroll show an abiding interest on the part of the author in the relationship between education, language and authority. In particular, the Alices are the story of a young girl who must learn to deal with a variety of characters in dream-worlds where the power of language reigns. It is therefore necessary for Alice to learn how language is used for authoritarian purposes and to discover ways of defending herself against it. It is the purpose of this thesis to investigate, in many cases for the first time, the ways in which Alice is able to find "spaces" in language where authority breaks down, places where the fundamental nature of language is unable to support authoritarian use. In this way, "space" will become both a metaphor and a figurative model for Alice's growing knowledge of and resistance to authority.

This thesis argues that Patrick White’s Voss, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life depict landscape in a manner that reveals the inadequacies of imperial epistemological discourses and the rationalist model of subjectivity which enables them. The study demonstrates that these novels all emphasise the instabilities inherent in imperial epistemology. White, Ondaatje and Malouf chart their protagonists’ inability to comprehend and document the landscapes they encounter, and the ways in which this failure calls into question their subjectivity and the epistemologies that underpin it. One of the principal contentions of the study, then, is that the novels under consideration deploy a postmodern aesthetic of the sublime to undermine colonial discourses. The first chapter of the thesis outlines the postcolonial and poststructural theory that informs the readings in the later chapters. Chapter Two analyses White’s representation of subjectivity, imperial discourse and the Outback in Voss. The third chapter examines Ondaatje’s depiction of the Sahara Desert in The English Patient, and focuses on his concern with the ways in which language and cartographic discourse influence the subject’s perception of the natural world. Chapter Four investigates the representation of landscape, language and subjectivity in Malouf’s An Imaginary Life. Finally, then, this study argues that literature’s unique ability to acknowledge alterity enables it to serve as an effective tool for critiquing colonial discourses.

This thesis proposes a theory of literature's human relevance in literary terms, developing hints in the critical practice of twentieth century literary critic F.R. Leavis. It examines how literary texts can be humanly relevant in a manner that depends on their literary merit, and does so in three stages, interrogating: the way literary texts operate; the role literary language plays in thinking; and the interaction of literature and morality. The thesis has two, related, aims: to reconceptualise literature's relation to human living, and to offer a recharacterisation of Leavis's literary criticism, with the investigation of aspects of Leavis's practice forming part of the more fundamental enquiry regarding the nature of literature's human significance. In the first stage, the thesis argues that Leavis's critical practice in his works of the 1930s (his first major decade of critical output) provides fruitful ways for conceptualising the interaction between form and meaning in literature, with important consequences for present-day understandings of how literature functions and how it matters. It focuses on an untheorised (by him or others) achievement in Leavis's criticism, the introduction of the term 'attitude' into literary analysis and judgement, and argues that the term enables a different mode of attention to the question of how literature relates to the human world. The second stage first interrogates the role that language in general plays in understanding, constructing a hypothesis from arguments by philosophers R.G. Collingwood and Charles Taylor, and then turns to literary language, arguing that it enables a mode of relating to experience not otherwise possible, and forms a process of thinking, for reader and writer alike. The final stage focuses on arguments in aesthetics against literature's cognitive value, and in moral philosophy for its empathic and moral value. Building on earlier arguments about the operation of literary language and language's relation to thought, the thesis claims that literary language is humanly meaningful in a way that is both cognitively and morally significant. Throughout, the thesis argues for the inescapable link between well-written literature and the morally resonant, such that good literature forms what Taylor calls 'moral sources'. The crucial query is how literature functions, which will help us better to answer why it is humanly important. This thesis engages with literary criticism, philosophical aesthetics and moral philosophy, as well as offering close readings of literature itself.