<p>This study attmepts to present a thorough comparative analysis and evaluation of Brecht's Coriolan adaptation and his Shakespearean model. Brecht's actual achievement is measured by the standards of his critical theory of literary adaptation of classical drama, and especially of Shakespeare, on the modern, 'epic' stage. It is shown why Brecht's insistence on shifting our central interest and sympathy from the hero, on whom Shakespeare had focussed the entire action, to the people's collective, had to result in an admirable failure.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>This thesis is an examination of the relationship between Keats's concept of Negative Capability and Wordsworth's concept of "wise passiveness". Since the poets' idead on imagination, reason, sensation, and philosophy are related to their thoughts on Negative Capability and "wise passiveness", they are aso examined. The final chapter is an attempt to show how Keats's ideas concerning Negative Capability are worked out in his Odes.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>In a news industry that seems to have lost its way, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart occupies a critical space in the public sphere, remapping traditional news categories to create a hybrid official/alternative/popular style, and restructuring audience demographics to include leftist college students and moderate conservatives, all of whom flock to a format that resolves to search for truth and to combat those who stand in its way. Host Jon Stewart is a revolutionary public figure who combines the roles of concerned citizen, comic activist and public intellectual to gain trust, moral authority, and respect from an audience tired of the split-screen debates, punditry and bullshit, and thirsty for a reinvigoration of critical analysis and political engagement.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>Although there have been a large number of studies done on the subject of vampires which indirectly deal with Bram Stoker's Dracula, there have been very few attempts to examine the novel from a literary perspective. There are a few works which chronicle the appearance of the vampire in literature, but these tend to be essentially anthropological or historical studies. The only extensive literary analysis of the novel is that provided by Leonard Wolf in A Dream of Dracula. Wolf characterizes Dracula as a gothic romance and then proceeds to examine the novel within the tradition of the gothic novel.</p> <p>While this study deals briefly with the influence of the gothic tradition on Dracula, in essence it is an attempt to examine Dracula within the context of romance literature and the conventions of that tradition as articulated by Northrop Frye. An analysis of the novel is put forward based on Stoker's use of these conventions. Thereaher, the conventions of romance and the analysis of the novel which they suggest are then discussed with re ference to various theories of the psychological significance of romance; most notably the theories of Carl Jung and his disciple, Erich Neumann.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>In recent years, an interest in religious (especially Christian) discourses has resurged, as evidenced by the popularity of the conservative Catholic film, <em>The Passion of the Christ</em> (2004) and Dan Brown's Church-conspiracy thriller <em>The Da Vinci Code</em> (2003). My thesis explores the character of Mary Magdalen within such texts, comparing her<br />contemporary imaginings with the imaginings of late medieval English texts. This<br />comparison emphasizes the similarities between each archive--both eras are intent upon adding to the content and meaning of Mary's story-and their differences in purpose-medieval texts are largely devotional, contemporary ones much more iconoclastic. I examine such disparate texts as <em>The Golden Legend</em>, a late-medieval play called <em>Mary</em><em> Magdalen</em>, films <em>Jesus Christ Superstar</em> (1973), <em>The Last Temptation of Christ</em> (1988), <em>Jesus</em> (1999) and <em>The Passion of the Christ</em>, thriller <em>The Da Vinci Code</em> and Nino Ricci's novelization Testament (2003). Each text depicts Mary with a different role, and she often plays more. than one role in the same text. The narrative impulse is so similar in both archives that I believe it is not possible to read the medieval archive as a less progressive version of the contemporary one-neither is immune to misogyny, neither is entirely misogynist. The constant reinterpretation of Mary Magdalen engenders a hybridity in her characterization; using Bakhtin's concept dialogism and some mythographic theory, I argue that the paradoxality and plurality of these reimaginings allow her to become a central part of the unfixing ofmeaning in the gospels. Using feminist theology I argue that Mary's marginality makes her an ideal site for such imaginings.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>The thesis attempts, by a chronological examination of a selection of Lawrence's shorter works, to explore Lawrence's attitude toward a particular aspect of dualism: the mental and physical duality of man. The chronological sequence enables the reader to trace the similarities and developments in Lawrence's treatment of this problem over the course of his career.</p> <p>By means of close textual analysis, the thesis reveals how Lawrence effectively presented his philosophical viewpoint through the medium of fiction.</p> <p>This thesis also stands as an apologia for Lawrence's shorter works, which, to date, have not received the critical attention which they justly merit.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>James Matthew Barrie, a Scottish novelist and dramatist, created a large and successful body of work during his lifetime. While Barrie's oeuvre includes over fifty fictional works, his reputation as a writer is based almost entirely on his text <em>Peter Pan</em>. Recently there has been a vast interest in <em>Peter Pan</em> (1911), an interest that is reflected by the numerous fictional and cinematic adaptations that have appeared over the last few decades. These modem adaptations of Barrie's work consistently simplify <em>Peter Pan</em> by disregarding the homosocial aspects of the text and presenting the narrative with heterosexual denotations that are non-existent in the original. For example, P. J. Hogan's film <em>Peter Pan</em> (2003) exaggerates the Peter and Wendy plot to establish an archetypal-like romance. Hogan inserts a romantic plotline between Peter and Wendy that does not exist in Barrie's original text. Most modem adaptations also simplify the narrative by removing the issues ofheterosexual uncertainty and masculine insecurity, which are prevalent themes in Barrie's original. In Walt Disney's <em>Peter Pan</em> (1953), the male protagonists are presented as highly masculine individuals, particularly Peter who is given a deep voice and adult-like features. By ignoring the issues of masculinity and male homosociality, these modem adaptations fail to showcase Barrie's social criticism on the negative effects of Edwardian constructions of gender identity. Although the interest in <em>Peter Pan</em> narrative is also reflected by the recent increase in Barrie scholarship, many ofthese critics also heterosexualize Barrie's work and ignore the issues of masculinity that saturate the <em>Peter Pan</em> stories. Most critics focus entirely on the 1911 novel <em>Peter Pan</em> and ignore the significance of other <em>Peter Pan</em> stories such as, <em>Sentimental Tommy</em> (1896), <em>Tommy and Grizel </em>(1900), <em>The Little White Bird </em>(1901), and <em>Peter Pan, or The Boy</em><em> Who Would Not Grow Up</em> (1928). A study of Barrie's earlier Peter Pan stories demonstrates Barrie's social criticism of the nineteenth-century masculine identity.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>This thesis is a close reading of Shakespeare's Timon of Athens. It is probably one of the first attempts at analyzing every act and scene of the play. There is a particular focus on tracing the unities in the play, and in understanding how the play works dramatically.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>This thesis explores the concept of the monstrous in two contemporary Canadian poetry books, Esta Spalding's Anchoress (1997) and Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red (1998), in relation to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818). Drawing from the idea that each person possesses monstrous qualities identifiable in the "other," I will focus on the monster as a literal and a symbolic double for the poem's characters that crosses multiple boundaries: life/death, creation/destruction, personal/political, feminine/masculine, and spirit/body. Spalding and Carson practice what Alicia Ostriker calls "revisionist mythmaking," questioning the ideological frameworks of classical myths such as Antigone and Herakles and complicating the political, social, and ethical issues already presented in the originals. Their narrative choices, in terms of chronology and viewpoint, for instance, reflect their interest in destabilizing popular portrayals of monstrosity and, by consequence, portrayals of humanity. In addition to Ostriker's theory of revisionist mythmaking, I also employ Sigmund Freud's theory of the uncanny and G.W.F. Hegel's master-slave dialectic in my exploration of the monster as a problematized double or doppelganger, and Jacques Lacan's theories of the imaginary and the symbolic order in my examination of how the monster troubles the self/other division. Finally, I use theories that examine the role of love in political change-such as Jacques Derrida's arguments on friendship and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's vision of the multitude-in my final assessment of the monster as a figure that can represent and incite productive political dialogue and action, and of love as a concept whose effects extend beyond the personal realm. Ultimately, the thesis supports the idea that love as a social network amongst various people has the potential to galvanize radical political change because it breaks the division between what is considered to be human and what is considered to be monstrous.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>That an explication of symbolism in Under the Volcano is crucial to an understanding of Malcolm Lowry's masterwork remains uncontested. Although the conviction that the novel is founded upon an enormous variety of symbols drawn from an extensive and diverse list of literary sources and traditions is the subject of a consensus of critical opinion, the available critical work has tended to give but cursory attention to the detailed analysis and the relating of the many symbols.</p> <p>In the examination of Lowry's use of a complex, striated, and endlessly reverberating matrix of symbols which provide the dynamic for the inexorable destruction of Goeffrey Firmin, ex British Consul in Mexico, the symbols are related to two basic "concepts", or overall thematic symbols. These "thematic symbols" are the wheel and the abyss, and this study thus falls naturally into two parts. The wheel provides an analogy for the malignant forces of "the gods", or the forces behind self-destruction, as the origins of Firmin's downfall are variously viewed. The abyss exists as the ultimate punishment for the Consul's condition, and, at a universal level, it is a symbol of twentieth-century dereliction both spiritual and physical, and of the punishment of the vast unspecified guilt of mankind as a whole.</p> <p>Ultimately, all attempts to objectify the causes of Firmin's downfall, and to delude the self that the origins of tragedy are external are in fact mere projections of the chaos within onto the landscape and social environment. In addition, the attempt to portray an objective and realistic environment culminates simply in a symbolic representation of the mind's disorder, and Under the Volcano emerges as a symbolic landscape of the mind's divide. The symbolic effigies of the Consul's mind point not only towards his inexorable fate, but also imply origins in anxiety, fear, and guilt which demand analysis for a complete interpretation of the novel.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)