This dissertation examines temporal frames in the Gospel of John and the Johannine letters and traces the ways that these texts and those who received them constructed and employed temporality to shape belief in Christ. Building on existing scholarship on Johannine literature and temporality, I situate these writers and their readers within their contemporary Greek, Roman, and Jewish social and rhetorical contexts, exploring the use of temporal markers, calendrical calculations, and claims about the past, present, and future in ancient discourses of self-definition. The Gospel of John uses an account of Jesus’s life and deeds to assert the God of Israel’s exclusive prerogative to create, control, and dominate not only time but also earthly authorities. The writer(s) of the Gospel place the Logos “in the beginning,” situate events within Jewish temporal frames, and align Jesus’s resurrection with solar time to portray Jesus as a sovereign, divine agent. The Johannine letters also employ temporality, but differently. The letters link the past with the present to establish an identity for the audience by assuring them of their genealogical and temporal bonds with Jesus. The letters seek to distance perceived opponents, who are labeled “Antichrist,” by describing them as agents of the devil who sinned “from the beginning.” A later group of Christ believers known as the “Quartodecimans” received and adopted Johannine temporality for their own purposes. Celebrating Easter in full coordination with the Passover, for example, Melito of Sardis envisioned God’s salvific work in a continuity that directly linked salvation from the Exodus to Jesus’s death and resurrection. Melito employed temporality to create a mobile and porous boundary between Christ believers and other groups and to claim the theological superiority of his own group. This analysis of Johannine literature indicates that ancient writers widely employed claims about temporality to distinguish their perceived audiences from other groups. These writers sought to persuade the followers of Christ to adopt particular temporal outlooks and to ascribe them to concomitant theological assertions. They thus established their exclusive authority to interpret Jesus’s life and deeds and defame false teachings.

Orientador: Carlos Eduardo Mendes de Moraes / Banca: Brunno Vinicius Gonçalves Vieira / Banca: Helena de Oliveira Belleza Negro / Banca: Marcio Roberto Pereira / Banca: Francisco Claudio Alves Marques / Resumo: Em razão de poucos estudos sobre o autor Frei António das Chagas, esta pesquisa aborda uma de suas principais obras: as Cartas Espirituais. Chagas, nome religioso de António da Fonseca Soares (1631 a 1682), ao se tornar franciscano em 1662, foi representante vivo da dualidade encontrada no seiscentismo português, uma vez que dividiu sua vida entre o laicismo e a religiosidade. A essência do autor, condizente com o período referido, trata das dualidades corpo e alma, condenação e salvação, vícios mundanos e virtudes divinas, uma vez que parte de sua vida foi voltada aos prazeres e à guerra, depois, tocada pela religião. Nessa fase, o Frei produz, entre outros escritos, cartas com um forte apelo místico de uma autêntica poesia religiosa. As Cartas Espirituais resultam de compilação "post mortem" do autor e são apresentadas em dois volumes, perfazendo o total de 380 cartas, escritas entre 1662 a 1682. A obra reflete o momento de sua maturidade espiritual e procura preparar o espírito de seu leitor para o desengano do mundo e a negação de si. Assim, o Frei Chagas compõe discursos articulados por diversos recursos retóricos, produzindo efeitos e sentidos na intenção de comover e persuadir seus destinatários, aconselhando-os e orientando-os na busca da salvação de suas almas. Frei Chagas não foi só o missionário religioso, mas demonstrou experiência literária, que, por meio de suas cartas, transpõe o tempo. Guiado por seu amor a Deus e consciente de si, o seu discurso efetiva... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: Due to few studies about the author Frei António das Chagas, this research addresses one of his main works: the Spiritual Letters. Chagas, religious name of António da Fonseca Soares (1631 to 1682), when becoming a Franciscan in 1662, was a living representative of the duality found in Portuguese seiscentism, since he divided his life between secularism and religiosity. The essence of the author, corresponding to the period referred, deals with the dualities body and soul, condemnation and salvation, worldly vices and divine virtues, since part of his life was turned to pleasures and war, then touched by religion. In this phase, the Friar produces, among other writings, letters with a strong mystical appeal of an authentic religious poetry. The Spiritual Letters result from the author's postmortem compilation and are presented in two volumes, making a total of 380 letters, written between 1662 and 1682. The work reflects the moment of his spiritual maturity and seeks to prepare the spirit of his reader for the disillusionment of the world and the denial of self. Thus, Frei Chagas composes discourses articulated by various rhetorical resources, producing effects and meanings in the intention of moving and persuading its recipients, advising them and guiding them in the search for the salvation of their souls. Frei Chagas was not only the religious missionary, but he demonstrated literary experience, which, through his letters, transposed time. Guided by his love for God and conscious of himself, his effective discourse reiterates and consolidates his "missionary" action, having as main argumentative model of refutation his own worldly experience as poet / military António da Fonseca Soares. In order to analyze these singularities, we resort to the fields of Rhetoric and Poetics... (Complete abstract click electronic access below) / Doutor

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Dress is both an individual and a societal means of communication. Understanding the meaning of dress within a society, culture, and specific time period can aid researchers in understanding the social, political, and economic events and changes that take place in dress. The Scottish Highland dress differed in the 17th and early 18th centuries from that of the Scottish Lowlanders (i.e., people of Scotland below the Highlands) due to differences in culture and geography. Highland dress has been difficult to study because few extant garments exist before the 19th century and most of the records that exist deal with the upper class garments. The purpose of this research was to determine whether or not poetry (i.e., poems, ballads, and songs) could be used as a source of knowledge on historic dress in a social, political, or economic context, using the dress of Scottish Highlanders from 1603 through 1830 as an example, and to triangulate the findings with other sources that portray dress through the written word or visual image. This research cross-referenced the items of dress with social, political, and economic events that occurred in the lives of the Scottish and Highland people. The main source of documentation for this research was 3,501 Scottish poems written between 1603 and 1830 gathered from 18 anthologies and there were 394 poems with male dress references and 245 poems with female dress references, which was 18% of the poems. A large number (N=1531) of individual dress items were referenced within those poems. The poems were triangulated with 34 letters and 332 portraits from the same time period. The study of Highland dress in poetry expanded the knowledge base regarding specific items worn by males and females. The majority of the poems and dress references were found in the 18th century. The plaid and the kilt were the focus of poems related to war. The letters and portraits provided new information on dress, as well as providing support for the information gathered in the poems. Triangulation with the letters and portraits validated poetry as a source of Highland dress between 1603 and 1830. / Ph. D.

This study uses the Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) comment letters to investigate the SEC's role as a monitor of financial reporting. I examine whether the SEC effectively comments on firms with poor disclosure quality. I utilize forward earnings response coefficients (FERC) as a measure of the market's perception of disclosure quality. I expect comment letter firms to have lower disclosure quality and thus lower FERCs. Secondly, within the firms selected for comment, I investigate whether the Division allocates a greater amount of resources towards firms with more severe disclosure deficiencies. Results indicate that comment letter recipients have significantly lower forward earnings response coefficients than non- recipients. Results also document that comment letter recipients have lower contemporaneous earnings response coefficients than non-recipients. These findings are consistent with the DCF being effective in selecting firms that are perceived by the market as having low disclosure and earnings quality. However, within comment letter firms, I am unable to provide any evidence that the DCF allocates more resources to firms with lower forward earnings response coefficients. / Ph. D.

Although Chris Kraus's I Love Dick has been largely read as autofictional or autotheoretical, I argue that its formal characteristics and innovations can be better understood by looking at seventeenth- and eighteenth-century precedents in the amatory epistolary genre. By examining the formal constraints that belong to the epistolary medium Kraus employed—requirements such as the "I" of the writer, the "you" of the receiver, and a desire for exchange—I show how she deploys epistolary tropes such as the woman in love as natural writer of letters, and the assumed truthful nature of such letters. These epistolary affordances and the ways in which I Love Dick uses and in part revises them allow Kraus to blur the line between reality and fiction, but more importantly allow her to achieve an expansion of the "I" of the writer through what I call her stalking method of writing. It is precisely in the process of writing and in the concomitant minimizing and objectifying of the "you" of the receiver that the expansion of the "I" occurs. / Master of Arts / Chris Kraus's first novel I Love Dick was published by Semiotext(e)'s Native Agent series in 1997, but it was upon its second edition in 2006, and after a television adaptation by Jill Soloway in 2017, that the novel found a larger audience. Since then, critics have mainly discussed I Love Dick in relation to the genre of autotheory and autofiction, and called it the urtext for a certain kind of North American female writing that relies heavily on real, personal experiences that undergo varying degrees of fictionalization. While these are valuable interpretations, my research aims to correct an oversight in the current discourse around I Love Dick. By situating the novel within the tradition of love letter writing in the female voice, I show how I Love Dick employs and revises the affordances of the epistolary medium in general, and of the amatory epistolary genre in particular. Through a close analysis both of I Love Dick and of other lesser-known essays and interviews, as well as an analysis of Kraus's precedents, both in the Native Agent's series that she edited in the 1990s and in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century amatory epistolary fiction, I reveal paradoxes that ultimately make I Love Dick a complex and ambiguous novel that defies simple categorizations.

Arquivos pessoais, pela abundância de informações que contêm, por sua diversidade, complexidade e caráter intimista dão lugar a considerações interdisciplinares, na perspectiva histórica, social, arquivística, linguística, literária, inclusive. Esta pesquisa tem por objeto cartas de amor escritas nas décadas de 1920 e 1930, pertencentes ao arquivo pessoal de uma pessoa comum, e visa contribuir para uma melhor compreensão dos arquivos privados. Partindo de uma introdução ao assunto, passa-se a uma abordagem interdisciplinar dos arquivos pessoais e das unidades que os compõem nos dois primeiros capítulos. Os objetivos específicos consistem em apresentar um estudo sobre cartas, no caso, o epistolário franciscano, no terceiro capítulo, explorando, após, os temas etiqueta social e cotidiano nos dois capítulos finais. A metodologia utilizada consistiu em uma abordagem qualitativa e exploratória das referências bibliográficas, com reprodução de imagens de unidades do arquivo de Lysia, um arquivo pessoal, bem como de trechos das cartas pesquisadas que, ao longo do texto, são colocados na perspectiva dos referenciais bibliográficos utilizados, buscando pertinências e conexões. Imagens das cartas cujos trechos foram transcritos nos quadros são reproduzidas integralmente no anexo desta pesquisa, no segundo volume, na mesma ordem em que aparecem no texto. / Personal archives, because of the abundance of information they contain, because of their diversity, complexity and intimate character give rise to interdisciplinary considerations, from a historical, social, archival, linguistic, and literary perspective. This research deals with letters of love written in the 1920s and 1930s, belonging to the personal archive of an ordinary person, and aims to contribute to a better understanding of private archives. Starting from an introduction to the subject, an interdisciplinary approach is taken to the personal archives and the units that compose them in the first two chapters. The specific objectives are to present a study of letters, in this case the Franciscan epistolary, in the third chapter, exploring after the themes social etiquette and daily life in the two final chapters. The methodology used consisted of a qualitative and exploratory approach of the bibliographical references, with reproduction of images of units of the Lysia archive, a personal archive, as well as excerpts of the letters searched that, throughout the text, are placed in perspective of bibliographical references used, searching for pertinences and connections. Images of the letters whose excerpts were transcribed in the tables are reproduced integrally in the annex of this research, in the second volume, in the same order as they appear in the text.