Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 264-276). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1962. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 238-248).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin, 1964. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Bibliography: leaves 345-382.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 186-198).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 264-276).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2005. / Supervisor: César Salgado. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2004. / Supervisors: John P. Farrell and Adam Zachary Newton. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis explores Eliot's allusive method, that is his use of Judaeo-Christianity with its analogues (and sometimes sources) in pre-Biblical primitive myths and legends. The first chapters study The Confidential Clerk and the draft material of the play which contains overt allusions-subsequently expurgated - to Sargon and Dionysos'as pre-Biblical archetypes of Moses and Christ respectively. I discuss the growth and development of the two legends of Sargon and Dionysos and their Biblical counterparts through successive drafts of the' play. In adapting the Sargon-Moses legend, Eliot was influenced by Sigmund Freud and Sir James George Frazer who both believed that the legend of Moses's birth and early life closely resembles that of his Babylonian predecessor, Sargon of Accad, which the Hebrews imitated. In adapting, on another level of the play, the Dionysos-Christ legend, Eliot was in debt of Frazer and. John M. Robertson who have persuasively shorn the shaping influence of Dionysos and the Dionysos religion upon the Founder of Christianity and the Christian system. I have used the same approach in studying the other plays of Eliot, The same pattern,ie.,the adaptation of a pre-Biblical legend which has its counterpart in the Bible is to be found in The Family Reunion in which Eliot drew upon the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh from which he adapted the pre- Biblical legend of the Fall and the deluge story. For the minutiae of these legends in the epic of Gilgamesh and their Old Testament parallels Eliot is indebted to Alfred Loisy, the French Modernist theologian who explains the Genesis in terms of Babylonian mythology. In writing. The Cocktail Party, Eliot went to The Golden Ass of Apuleius, an anti- Christian work, from which he transformed the pre-Biblical legend of Isis, the forerunner of the Virgin Mary, as well as other motifs. Finally The Elder Statesman, Eliot's last play, adapts the pre-Biblical legend of Ahriman, an archetype of the Biblical story of Satan and the concept of evil in the Old Testament. But I have not included this play in my thesis, although I have investigated it, because of limitations of length, and also because the connection of text and sub-text in The Elder Statesman is less significant than that in the other plays.

The works of the English poet T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) reveal a thematic and aesthetic interest in the subject of “time” as human experience, whether collective, as history, or subjective, as memory. His first poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1916), is a pioneer experiment on the stream of consciousness technique through which are shown the complex mental processes of its character, Prufrock, in a complex fabric of times and logical chains. The temporal dimension was an object of analysis for many critics of the poem, most of whom relied on interpretations based on philosophical perspectives, dispensing, however, with another fundamental aspect of “The Love Song”: the irony. Thus we sought to reconcile in our study the two main aspects of the poem, time and irony, lessening the philosophical perspective in favor of an aesthetic and stylistic approach. For this purpose we proposed an analysis of the time in “The Love Song”, based on the the rhetorical study of Dubois et. al. (1960), and its interpretation following the insights of Søren Kierkegaard (2010; 2013) and Paul de Man (1986; 1996) concerning the relationship between irony and temporality. As a result, we observed that the kind of time depicted in the poem corresponds to the time that theoriticians define as characteristic of the structure of irony: a time in which the present is felt as tedious or discontinuous; the past, as absent of mystified; and the future, as postponed or as anxiety. / A obra do poeta inglês T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) reflete um interesse temático e estético sobre o “tempo” enquanto experiência humana, seja coletiva, como história, seja subjetiva, como memória. Seu primeiro poema publicado, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1916), é um experimento pioneiro na técnica do fluxo de consciência, através do qual revelam-se processos mentais de seu protagonista, Prufrock, em uma complexa construção de tempos e encadeamentos lógicos. A dimensão temporal foi, de fato, objeto de análise de diversos críticos do poema, os quais, em sua maioria, recorreram a interpretações baseadas em perspectivas filosóficas, prescindindo, todavia, de outro aspecto fundamental do poema: a ironia. Portanto, procuramos conciliar, em nosso estudo, os dois aspectos que consideramos centrais em “The Love Song”, o tempo e a ironia, atenuando a perspectiva filosófica em favor de uma abordagem estética e estilística. Para tanto, propusemos uma análise do tempo em “The Love Song”, baseada no estudo retórico de Dubois et. al. (1960), e sua interpretação a partir das visões de Søren Kierkegaard (2010; 2013) e Paul de Man (1986; 1996) sobre a relação entre ironia e temporalidade. Ao fim, constatamos que o tempo predominante no poema corresponde ao que os teóricos definem como sendo característico da estrutura da ironia: um tempo no qual o presente é sentido como tedioso ou descontínuo; o passado, como inexistente ou ficcionado; e o futuro, como prorrogado ou como angústia.

Many critics resort to explaining readers' experiences of poems like William Blake's Jerusalem and T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets in terms of "spirituality" or "religion". These experiences are broadly defined in this thesis as jouissance (after Roland Barthes' essay The Pleasure of the Text) or "experience qua experience". Critical attempts at the reduction of jouissance into abstract constructs serve merely as stopgap measures by which critics might avoid having to account for the limits of their own rational discourse. These poems, in particular, are deliberately structured to preserve the reader's experience of the poem from reduction to any particular meta-discursive construct, including "the spiritual". Through a broad application of Rezeption-Asthetik principles, this thesis demonstrates how the poems are structured to direct readers' faculties to engage with the hypothetical realm within which jouissance occurs, beyond the rationally abstractable. T.S. Eliot's poetic oeuvre appears to chart his growing confidence in non-rational, pre-critical faculties. Through "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", The Waste Land, and Four Quartets, Eliot's poetry becomes gradually less prescriptive of the terms to which the experience of his poetry might be reduced. In Four Quartets he finally entrusts readers with a great deal of responsibility for "co-creating" the poem's significance. Like T.S . Eliot, although more consistently throughout his oeuvre, William Blake is similarly concerned with the validation of the reader's subjective interpretative/creative faculties. Blake's Jerusalem is carefully structured on various intertwined levels to rouse and exercise in the reader what the poet calls the "All Glorious Imagination" (Keynes 1972: 679). The jouissance of Jerusalem or Four Quartets is located in the reader's efforts to co-create the significance of the poems. It is only during a direct engagement with this process, rather than in subsequent attempts to abstract it, that the "experience qua experience" may be understood.