Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1983. / Vita. Bibliography: leaves [178]-199.

published_or_final_version / English Studies / Master / Master of Arts

Up where the dog barks (creation). Sitting around the table of a secret municipal council, a mayor and his aldermen, outraged by the village idiot's stupidity, are planning his death. On a beautiful spring's morning, they kidnap him and throw him in a isolated well, whose opening they carefully seal afterwards. Three days later, however, screams are heard from the bottom of the idiot's pit. Contaminated within their own cadastre by the innocent's cries, the villagers, one after another, will have to tell their story: their rural madness, hidden within their common unawareness. Then, without knowing it, it is with the dispossessed's eloquence that they will be caught inside short narratives with no beginning or end---many frames in movement---that will constitute a sole account since all determined by the same disturbing rumour. / The rhetoric of the idiot (criticism). In the shadow of the madman, literary character extremely fascinating lately, the idiot silently cradles himself. Many times portrayed in the works of various authors, its problem seems to differ from the "illuminated"'s. Often aphasic or having a poor vocabulary, the idiot is, in most cases, only described. However, some authors have been able to give him a voice, usually in a strongly poetic prose. Among these writers, William Faulkner ( The Sound and the Fury), Anne Hebert (Les fous de Bassan) and Suzanne Jacob (Laura Laur) distinguish themselves by letting the characters such as the idiot or the simple minded assume control, to a certain extent, of the narration in their fiction. Indeed, it will be the tools of the new rhetoric (rhetoric reconciled of the figures and the argumentation) as apprehended by Michel Meyer in his several works that will be used for the analysis of the three narrations. It will then be possible to investigate the necessary assimilation of the sense and the argumentation within what could be called a project common to the three authors.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1976. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 557-570).

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Princeton University, 1922.

Thesis (M.A.)--Eastern Illinois University, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [69-70]).

This thesis explores the representation of mental illness and mental incapacity in medieval Irish and Norse-Icelandic saga literature, with a particular focus on the theme of deception in representations of madness. These texts are compared using the methods of literary close reading. It begins (Chapters 1 and 2) with an overview of concepts of madness found in the two bodies of literature (drawing on law texts and poetry as well as the sagas) and the different narrative uses to which these concepts are put. Some general parallels and contrasts are drawn, and the cross-cultural transmission of the concept of the geilt is discussed in this context. Chapter 3 lays the ground for the thesis's analysis of deception in madness narratives by comparing two Irish and Norse-Icelandic narratives about fools and discussing links between the language of mental impairment and the notion of deception. Chapters 4 and 5 explore narrative representations of how deception is used with the aim of rehabilitating the mad person and reconnecting them with society, focusing in particular on the late Middle Irish saga Buile Shuibhne and an episode in the Icelandic family saga Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar. Chapter 5 concludes with an extended discussion of the role of poetry and memory in representations of mental illness as seen in these two texts. Chapter 6 explores narratives in which deception is used with the purpose of destroying or humiliating the person of unsound mind, here focusing on the late Middle Irish saga Aided Muirchertaig meic Erca and an episode in the Norwegian king's saga Ágrip.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--York University, 1999. Graduate Programme in English. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 277-287). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNQ43449.