Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1985. / Vita. Bibliography: leaves [179]-187.

<p>"Scriblerian Ethics" proposes that the aesthetic and ethical standpoint of the writings of the Scriblerians (Pope, Swift, Gay, Arbuthnot, Oxford, Parnell) can be better understood through an attunement to their orientation towards the Longinian sublime and to the metamorphic poetics of Ovid. The project holds the negative and critical features of the group's writing in abeyance, as it attempts to account for the positive, phenomenological concepts and features of Scriblerian satiric and non-satiric writing. The intensities and affiliations of Scriblerian writing that emerge from this study gesture aesthetically and ethically beyond historical subjectivity to an opening to alterity and difference. This opening or hope for the achievement ethical dimension of writing is divulged as the intimate motivation of the literary or aesthetic components that accompany the negative, referential, and critical features of Scriblerian writing.</p><p>Examining closely the major writings of Pope and Swift in conjunction with the collaborative writings of the Scriblerus club, the project describes the concern with temporality that emerges from Longinian and Ovidan influence; the Scriblerian reflexivity that culminates in a highly virtual aesthetics; and the ethical elaboration of an orientation toward hospitality that emerges from this temporal and virtual aesthetic orientation. A "Scriblerian ethics" is an affinity for a hospitality not yet achieved in political, economic, and cultural life. Finally, the project analyzes throughout its readings of Scriblerian writing the violence that nevertheless accompanies Scriblerian aesthetics, examining the figures of modernity, criticism, and sexual violence (rape) that permeate Scriblerian texts as barriers or resistances to the achievement of an ethical orientation to alterity.</p> / Dissertation

<p>This dissertation explores the complex vocabularies of service and servitude in the Age of Chaucer. Working with three major Middle English texts--William Langland's <i>Piers Plowman</i> (chaps. 1 and 3), Julian of Norwich's <i>Revelation of Love</i> (chap. 2), and Geoffrey Chaucer's <i>Troilus and Criseyde</i> (chap. 4)--my thesis argues that the languages of service available to these writers provided them with a rich set of metaphorical tools for expressing the relation between metaphysics and social practice. For late medieval English culture, the word "service" was an all-encompassing marker used to describe relations between individuals and their loved ones, their neighbors, their church, their God, and their institutions of government. In the field of Middle English studies, these categories have too often been held apart from one another and the language of service has too often been understood as drawing its meanings solely from legal and economic discourses, the purview of social historians. <i>Love, Labor, Liturgy</i> sets out to correct this underanalysis by pointing to a diverse tradition of theological and philosophical thought concerning the possibilities and paradoxes of Christian service, a tradition ranging from Saint Augustine to Martin Luther and beyond.</p> / Dissertation

<p>This dissertation analyzes the period of late modernism (roughly 1930-1965) by attending to an understudied subgenre: fictions that depict the experiences of the dead in the afterworld. The project originated from my observation that a number of late modernist authors resorted to this type of writing, leading to the question of what made them do so. Such a project addresses the periodization and definition of late modernism, a period that has received relatively little critical attention until recent years. It also contributes indirectly to the study of European culture before and after the Second World War, identifying clusters of concerns around common experiences of belief and time during the period. </p><p>To approach this question, I adopt a situational approach. In this type of reading, I attempt to reconstruct the situations (both literary and extra-literary) of specific authors using historical and biographical material, then interpret the literary work as a response to that situation. Such a methodology allows me to ask what similarities between situations led to these convergent responses of afterlife writing. My primary objects are afterlife novels and plays by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Wyndham Lewis, Flann O'Brien, and Samuel Beckett.</p><p>I find that the subgenre provided late modernists with the literary tools to figure and contest changes in experiences of belief and time in mid-20th century Europe. The situation of modernism is marked by <italic>the loss of belief in the world</italic>, a failure in the faith in action to transform the world, and <italic>the serialization of time</italic>, the treatment of time as static repetition and change as something that can only occur at the individual rather than the systemic level. While earlier modernists challenged these trends with the production of idiosyncratic private mythologies, late modernists encountered them as brute facts, leading to a shift in aesthetic sensibilities and strategies. Belief was split between private opinion and external submission to authority, and change reappeared under the figure of catastrophe.</p> / Dissertation

<p>Despite general consensus among scholars that race in the West is an early modern phenomenon that dates to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, late medieval English texts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries expend no small amount of effort depicting the differences between people&mdash;individuals and groups&mdash;and categorizing those people accordingly. The contexts for the English literary concern with human difference were the Crusades and associated economic expansion and travel into Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Scholars who have argued that race is present in medieval texts have generally claimed that race is subordinate to religion, the dominant cultural force in medieval Europe. In &ldquo;Race and Conversion in Late Medieval England,&rdquo; I argue that race is not necessarily subordinate to religion. Rather, racial and religious discourses compete with one another for ideological dominance. I examine three texts, juxtaposed in only one extant manuscript, London, British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian E.16; the <italic>Three Kings of Cologne</italic>, the <italic>Siege of Jerusalem</italic>, and the physiognomy portion of the <italic>Secretum Secretorum</italic> together narrate competition between race and religion as community&ndash;forming ideologies in England through their treatments of religious identity and physical characteristics. In addition, I study Chaucer&rsquo;s <italic>Man of Law's Tale</italic>, which distills down questions of religious difference to genealogy and the interpretation of blood. &ldquo;Race and Conversion in Late Medieval England&rdquo; argues that racial ideology emerges from and competes with religion in late medieval English literature as a means of consolidating power in crusading Western Europe, even as the ever present possibility of Christian conversion threatens to undermine the essentializing work of race.</p> / Dissertation

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 201-208).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Kentucky, 2001. / Title from document title page. Includes abstract. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Lehigh University, 2002. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 255-269).

Authors̓ inaugural dissertation, Heidelberg. / "Literatur-Verzeichnis": p. [103]-110.