This project relies on two main bodies of work: the text and reception history of Moby-Dick. I argue that the novel’s prophetic insights unfold in its failure and resurrection. The reception history consists of early reviewers, biographers, and critics both hailing and discounting Moby-Dick’s literary value. The first section, “Proto-Modernist Melville: Specific Difficulty in Moby-Dick,” explores the peculiar difficulty inherent in the text of Moby-Dick, namely its divergent, evasive, and hieroglyphic properties. Chapter 2, “Reception: Nineteenth-Century Failure and Modernist Success,” chronicles the novel’s reception history, focusing largely on the critics of twentieth-century modernism. In “Moby-Dick as Prophetic Anticipation and Fulfillment,” I examine the link between the inherent difficulty found within Moby-Dick and its reception history. I propose that Melville’s novel theorizes its prophetic anticipation of literary modernism as well as Melville’s own authorial failure and redemption narrative.

This thesis explores the transmission and reception of Benjamin of Tudela’s Book of Travels, a twelfth-century Hebrew travel narrative. Scholarship of the Book of Travels is fragmentary, descriptive and largely focused on what the narrative can tell scholars about the twelfth-century Jewish and non-Jewish worlds. This study presents a methodological shift away from an intra-textual examination of the text by seeking to answer how the text has been transmitted, how successive copiers and printers have changed the text, and how readers interpreted and used the text between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries. It begins with an outline of the extant manuscripts through a codicological examination and textual comparison. Based on a close reading of the manuscripts, it illustrates how the Book of Travels has survived in four separate textual witnesses. This study, however, highlights the centrality of the Jerusalem manuscript, which carried the transmission of the Book of Travels from manuscript into print. Whilst scholars have argued that the text has been edited and redacted, this thesis offers a more nuanced argument for scribal intervention as copyists, and later printers, altered the text through error and deliberate omissions and additions. Consequently, there is no single transmission of the Book of Travels. Although the core of the text remained unchanged, readers would have encountered different texts through the lens of copyists and printers. The second half of the thesis addresses the medieval and early modern reception of the Book of Travels. It argues that the narrative was used in a variety of contexts, from polemics, to biblical geography and history by medieval Jewish scholars. The early modern reception, discussed more broadly, indicates that the printed Hebrew editions of 1543 and 1556 were read by an Sephardic audience for the purposes of connecting to their Iberian heritage, with an additional layer of interpretation which linked the text to the hope for redemption and the coming of the Messiah. As the text becomes introduced to Christian readers in both Hebrew and Latin, the Book of Travels was initially understood and used in a similar manner. The 1583 Hebrew edition and first Latin translation of 1575 also applied the text to history and biblical geography. This study thus illuminates the continuity in the way in which the Book of Travels was understood – as an eye-witness and authoritative source which found contemporary resonance with later readers. The second Latin translation of 1633 represents an evolution in the way in which the Book of Travels was interpreted, as the text was now engaged polemically to attack the Jews. This study also investigates the censorship of the Book of Travels. It analyses not just the text which has been excised through self-censorship, and the prohibition and expurgations proscribed by both the Italian and Spanish Inquisitions, but also how this impacted the transmission and reception of the narrative. It is shown that whilst Inquisitorial censorship was seemingly systematic, it was unevenly applied and did not impact on the Book of Travels’ transmission. This thesis is ultimately a pioneering study of the afterlives of a Hebrew travel narrative which enjoyed a rich manuscript and printed tradition. In attracting both Jewish and Christian readers alike, the Book of Travels endured and continued to find relevance amongst audiences. As a result of its versatility the Book of Travels achieved a prominent position within the Jewish and Christian worlds crossing cultural and religious divides between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries.

This dissertation builds on the common notion that Beethoven's music sounds inward by grounding this impression analytically. The chapters frame Beethoven's music in terms of inward, outward, and liminal spaces. Inward spaces are slow, lyrical, formally enclosed, and harmonically distant, and they often appear under the aura of what I call a "modulating trill" or a "diffused theme." Drawing on Schmalfeldt's references to inwardness, I describe outward spaces as inward moments that "radiate outward" and note that these restore tonal stability, lost thematic material, and bass notes that had once disappeared. Finally, liminal spaces are passages that quickly juxtapose inward and outward moments, and thus they seem to exist at the cusp between these two spaces. I examine how these passages evolve throughout entire pieces, typically withdrawing deeper within.

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<p>On the most general, theological level this dissertation explores the origins, ensuing articulations, and intellectual implications of what has been characterized as a new Christian "political-historical consciousness" (politisch-historisches Bewusstsein)&mdashthat totalizing reconception of history and ecclesial identity that enabled early Christians to imagine themselves as simultaneously new to the world in terms of revelation and yet also ancient with respect to God's eternal plan. On the more specific and descriptive level, I propose that a key to mapping the early development of this new historical consciousness comes via detailed analysis of a single term introduced by the apostle Paul into the Christian theological lexicon, the noun <italic>mysterion</italic> and the particular understanding of history and revelation that is commonly coupled with it, an understanding I refer to in varying ways as the "once hidden, now revealed" mystery schema. It is, I claim, the historical arrangement of this once hidden/now revealed discourse, and thus the comprehensive division of time into adjacent eras of concealment and revelation, that provided Christians of the first two centuries with the intellectual architecture and concomitant discursive schema that formulated and then further legitimized some of the most original claims of Christian theology. Among these claims are, most notably, ecclesiological propositions regarding the status of the Gentiles among the people of God, hermeneutical propositions related to the revisionary Christian readings of Israel's scriptures, and christological propositions about the unified identity of the newly revealed Christ and the creator God of Israel. Insofar as such propositions were named as mysteries--which is to say, as realities newly revealed but eternally known by the God of Israel--and yet were argued independently of, if not in contradiction of, Torah and other authoritative Jewish writings (see chapters five), or on the basis of Jewish scriptures but without any obvious presence in their "plain sense" (see chapters six and seven), or by appeal to what had become a textual field of authoritative Christian writings (see chapter eight), some sort of new intellectual apparatus was needed to articulate these novel claims. The notion of an eternal mystery previously hidden but recently disclosed to the world, provided just such an apparatus. A detailed lexical analysis of "mystery" in Paul and other early Christian authors should thus provide a helpful constraint for analyzing these larger and less tangible subjects of early Christian thinking about divine revelation and the structure of history. </p><p> To be clear, in training my attention on the word and the "once hidden, now revealed" discourse, I am not presuming some sort of idealized concept-in-word equation (or, in this case, a discourse-in-word equation), the error of nomenclaturism as Saussure termed it. Nor am I suggesting that <italic>mysterion</italic> had any sort of fixed meaning, much less a totality of meanings to be smuggled into every occurrence. The linguistic axioms that words and things share no inviolable, one-to-one correspondence, and that sentences (or more complex syntactical strucutres), not individual lexemes, are to be regarded as the fundamental units determining meaning should by now be truisms. My focus on <italic>mysterion</italic> is simply motivated, first, by the observation that when this signifier is used by early Christian authors it most frequently refers to some theological or hermeneutical claim that was previously hidden but is now currently disclosed and thus, second, by the practicality of treating this word as a limiting heuristic for analyzing the more nebulous hidden/revealed discursive formation. This is not to confuse the word for the discourse. Rather it is to use this particular word, which so often appears to be a near technical term for the discourse, as an entry point into it.</p> / Dissertation

<p>The New Testament contains two important and potentially conflicting understandings of resurrection. One integrates resurrection into salvation, suggesting that it is restricted to the righteous; this view is found most prominently in the Pauline epistles. The other understands resurrection as a prerequisite for eschatological judgment and therefore explicitly extends it to all; this view is found most prominently in the book of Revelation. In the former, moral transformation is part of the process that results in resurrection; in the latter, moral transformation only affects what comes after resurrection, not the event of resurrection itself. The New Testament itself provides no account of how to hold together these understandings of resurrection and moral transformation.</p><p>This dissertation is an investigation of the ways in which second- and third-century Christian authors creatively struggled to bring together these two understandings. I select key authors who are not only important in the history of early Christian discussions of resurrection but who also make extensive use of the Pauline epistles. For each author, I investigate not only how they develop or resist the Pauline connection between resurrection and moral transformation but also how they relate that connection to the doctrine of the resurrection of all to face judgment found in Revelation (if they do at all).</p><p>The results are remarkably diverse. Irenaeus develops the Pauline connection between resurrection and moral transformation through the Spirit of God but fails to account for the resurrection of those who do not receive that Spirit in this life (although affirming that resurrection nonetheless). Tertullian begins from the model that takes resurrection to be fundamentally a prerequisite for judgment and struggles to account for Paul's connections between resurrection and salvation. Two Valentinian texts, the Treatise on the Resurrection and the Gospel of Philip, adopt the Pauline model to the exclusion of the resurrection of the wicked. Origen connects resurrection to moral transformation in yet another way, making it an event that pedagogically reflects the moral transformation of all rational creatures--whether for the better or worse. For Methodius of Olympus, the resurrection of the body produces the moral transformation that is the eradication of the entrenched inclination to sin, but the moral transformation in this life that is the resistance of the promptings of that entrenched inclination produces reward after the resurrection. In each case, strategies for holding together the two views found in the New Testament reveal the fundamental theological commitments underlying the author's overall understanding of resurrection.</p> / Dissertation

This thesis shows that patristic interpretation of the Transfiguration had a sensitivity to visionary and ecstatic motifs within the synoptic Transfiguration narratives, and particularly Luke’s, which prompted a rich breadth of hermeneutic interaction with our texts. I offer the evidence of my survey of the reception history of the Transfiguration in the first 900 years of Christian history as a way of filling a number of gaps in knowledge in modern biblical scholarship concerning the Transfiguration narratives. This thesis begins, in Chapters 1, 2, and 3, with an appraisal of interpretation offered by modern biblical scholars, patrologists, and art historians. Critical comment often overlooks a series of ambiguities in the narratives, particularly the distinct characteristics of Luke’s version. These include the question of whether the disciples enter the overshadowing cloud, the presence of priestly or cultic imagery, visionary motifs frequently found in apocalyptic texts, such as the disciples’ drowsiness, and Peter’s confusion at not knowing what he said. Chapters 4-7 examine the earliest reception in 2 Peter, the Apocalypse of Peter, and the Acts of Peter, explore at some length Origen’s and Tertullian’s interpretation, and also look at Latin and Greek comment after Origen. I show many ancient writers to understand the disciples as experiencing ecstatic vision. Some also use cultic language appertaining to the Jerusalem Temple in their exegesis of the Transfiguration. They also employ the narrative to interpret other prophetic or visionary texts. Many of these distinguishing features of interpretation frequently stem from their attentiveness to the Lucan narrative. Chapter 8 examines the earliest artistic depictions of the Transfiguration from the sixth century onwards. This chapter indicates that many of the visionary and cultic themes we have outlined in previous chapters are frequently overlooked by art historians, and also that Luke’s narrative exercised a greater influence on representation of the Transfiguration than many people have imagined. This thesis concludes with a reconsideration of the visionary character of the Transfiguration narratives. Many of the ambiguities, overlooked details, and distinctive traits we pointed to in our opening chapters will be seen to have had much greater significance through many centuries of early hermeneutic tradition and artistic depiction than is the case in modern historical critical scholarship.

When the Joffrey Ballet reconstructed the 1913 production of Le Sacre du printemps in 1987 and restaged Les Noces in 1989, the reception of these ballets drew upon the prevailing ideals of authenticity that also existed in music. The period’s Early Music revival emphasized the historically-informed performance of past music, using period instruments and techniques to approach an assumedly “authentic” performance. Over the course of twenty years in the late twentieth century the repertoire performed and recorded expanded chronologically closer to the present, challenging original conceptions that the nineteenth century was the benchmark for modern music and influencing the critical reception of later artistic works, including those of the Joffrey. Because the Joffrey’s productions took place at Hancher Auditorium at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, this thesis presents a reception history of them that highlights both a national and local, Iowan narrative. This history is informed by archival documents from the University of Iowa’s Special Collections on the Iowa Center for the Performing Arts and from Hancher Auditorium. Hancher’s collection of press releases, coupled with the newspaper and magazine clippings, contributed to the cultivation of the Joffrey’s public image and those of the two ballets. These works—specifically their scores by Igor Stravinsky and their original choreographers Vaslav Nijinky and Bronislava Nijinska—are seen as pioneers of modernism. Yet, the reception of their reconstructed ballets took place at the height of the Early Music movement’s popularity. Reviewers weighed in on Le Sacre du printemps’ authenticity and their discussion of Les Noces also emphasizes legacy—be it that of the Joffrey Company itself, the legacy of the sibling choreographers, or that of the two works within the ballet repertoire. A comparison of the reception of these two productions also reveals the distinctions between reconstruction and revival.

This essay examines how the critical reception of French nouveaux réaliste-artist Raymond Hains 1961 exhibition La France déchirée has been articulated at two historically separate occasions. In her 2010 book Nouveau Réalisme, 1960’s France and the Neo-avant-garde, art historian Jill Carrick examines the fundamental impact the founder of nouveau réalisme – French art critic and theorist Pierre Restany – has had on the movement’s historical reception. According to Carrick Restanys writing established an interpretive framework that remained more or less intact for several decades. In addition to a closer analysis of the movement’s critical reception during the 1960s’, Carrick provides a set of new, alternative readings of a number of nouveaux réaliste artworks, which all originates from a position outside of Restanys interpretive framework. However, at no occasion does Carrick show in what way, or to what extent, her theories about the movements reception history applies to artist Raymond Hains or his practise of décollage. Nor has the historical reception of La France déchirée been examined. The overall purpose of this essay is to examine whether or not the nature of the critical reception of Raymond Hains 1961 exhibition La France déchirée can be said to fit into the image of the historical reception of nouveau réalisme provided by Carrick. This is done through an analysis of Restanys theorisation of nouveau réalism as provided in the movement’s manifestos. Thereafter follows an examination of in which way and to what extent the critical reception of La France déchirée at two historically separate moments relates to this theorisation. The critical reception of these two moments in time is also compared to each other. An analysis of the exhibitions historical reception showed that Carrick’s theory of the movement’s reception history could not entirely account for the different aspects of La France déchirées critical reception. By introducing the exhibitions political context into the examination of its historical reception, a new and valuable perspective became clear. Unlike other nouveax réaliste-artworks, La France déchirée had a distinct political character, which situated its historical reception not only within a cultural context, but more importantly within a political one.

In this report, I examine the reception of Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood (1936) from contemporary reviews in periodicals to twenty-first century online reviews. I am interested in how the novel has been situated in both historical and personal canons. I focus on how Nightwood has been read through the lenses of experimental modernism, lesbian feminism and postmodern queer theory, and how my own readings of it have changed over the years. / text