As they took stock of the ways that the Great Migration and America’s post-war global role were changing the South, Richard Wright, Carson McCullers, Ralph Ellison, and Albert Murray crafted narratives that articulated a particular perspective on the South. These writers dreamed of putting the regionally distinctive characteristics that they found valuable in the South into conversation with a sense of expansiveness and possibility, one that they associated with a migratory and increasingly globally-connected nation. In this project, I examine these southern cosmopolitan negotiations in Wright, McCullers, Ellison, and Murray’s southern narratives, and I argue that these writers are crucial to our understanding of the post-migration South in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. / text

Looking primarily at the family photographs in Anne Carson’s epitaph in book form, this essay explores how Nox multiply exhibits translation as the approximation of an imperfect nearness. The replica of a testimonial object Carson created after her brother’s passing, Nox is a resolutely non- narrative work of poetry structured around a belabored translation of a Catullan elegy, prose poems, photographs, and other fragments of memorial matter. Examining Nox as an intimate archive made public through Carson’s act of curation, my project draws attention to how this work analogizes translation to the understanding of affective life. Inspired by Marianne Hirsch’s critical work on vernacular photography, I demonstrate that the exhibited family photographs in Nox not only thematize Carson’s focus on illumination and darkness, but also materially amplify the inaccessibility of the felt lives they encapsulate. I argue that Nox, like the photographs it houses, models a memorial practice insistent simultaneously on materiality and the incomplete proximity to what remains. / text

No description available.

This dissertation examines the evangelicalism of Alexander Carson (ca. 1776- 1844) using David Bebbington's evangelical quadrilateral--biblicism, crucicentrism, conversionism, and activism--as a framework. Chapter 1 gives an introduction to the study and a biographical sketch of Carson's life and ministry. Chapter 2 examines Carson's view of Scripture in the areas of inspiration, Bible translation, and the transmission of Scripture. Carson's views on the inspiration of Scripture and the principles by which it was to be translated were given within the context of the theological controversies in which he was involved. Chapter 3 examines Carson's view of the atonement. It looks at his understanding of humanity's sin, divine justice and mercy, God's sovereignty, and the completed nature of the atonement. Chapter 4 is a study of Carson's understanding of how people are converted. The chapter discusses his views on the definition of saving faith, the relation between faith and works, the conversion experience, and the divine role in conversion. Chapter 5 looks at Carson's views on evangelism in four areas: the use of the Bible in evangelism, the importance of religious liberty to evangelize, the role of divine providence in evangelism, and the Christian's duty to evangelize. Although the four characteristics of evangelicalism set forth by Bebbington do not include other areas of theology important to Carson, such as his views on baptism and church order, the quadrilaterial does focus on what Carson believed to be central to Christianity, namely, the gospel. Therefore, considering Bebbington's quadrilateral to be a sound framework for understanding Carson's view of the gospel, the thesis of this study is that Carson's belief in the Bible as a verbally and completely inspired text was an infallible source for his understanding of the gospel as being centered upon the atonement, effective through justification by faith alone, and the motivation for evangelism. / This dissertation was under embargo until 2014-05-23.

Thesis (M.A.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of History.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of English, 2004. / Chair: Susan Gubar.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of English, 2004. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-01, Section: A, page: 0177. Chair: Susan Gubar. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Oct. 12, 2006).

Metaphor as tool is a concept that has increasing analysis and support in the past several years. Long before the wealth of contemporary analysis, Rachel Carson produced Silent Spring, a book hailed as the motivation for a new environmental movement in the United States. The use of metaphor in Silent Spring is most apparent in the title. The title's focus, however poignant, even moving and motivating, is complemented by a rich set of metaphorical entailments and implications that reinforce and strengthen the title's metaphor and represent systemic forces and practices that lead to and prevent a spring of silence. Carson skillfully appropriated marketing metaphors used by chemical companies to sell insecticides and pesticides. She transformed these metaphors into powerful criticisms of indiscriminate chemical practices, forcefully undercutting industry arguments for chemicals as a means of guaranteeing "control." The effects of Carson's metaphors, built on a strong, complex foundation of scientific studies, invite reader participation and interaction as outlined by Lakoff and Johnson. The metaphors further entertain, educate, explain, describe in the sense of Wittgenstein's language games, and tightly integrate action and language. More fundamentally, her metaphors helped to establish a systems view and nature-oriented paradigm for analyzing, and resolving environmental issues and problems in the United States, creating a framework for debate and policy development and implementation, in the vein of Schon's and Rein's arguments for framing and policy design. The metaphors also set a stage for personal motivation by connecting individual human homes to nature and the global environment. / Master of Science

No description available.

The loneliness theme of Carson McCullers' fiction falls into three divisions or levels. And because of her focus on the individual, her general theme of loneliness as it results from human isolation is universal. She develops her "broad principal theme" through an examination of human characteristics common to all human beings. In expressing her concept of isolation as a human condition, however, she presents loneliness as she believes it exists in her own culture, and, for this reason, her works present a loneliness that results from American cultural attitudes and is tempered by a Southern sense of nostalgia. After first establishing an understanding of McCullers' basic theme through an analysis of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, this study analyzes the nature of the Southern tradition and its influence on the criticism of her fiction with particular focus on the problems of determining to what degree her Southern settings inhibit the interpretation of her works beyond a regional perspective. A comparison of thematic elements, events, and characterization in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter to nonfiction critical discussions of American culture in The Image by Daniel Boorstin and The Pursuit of Loneliness by Philip Slater shows that the social context and the theme of isolation in the novel reflect a condition of life that is American, not distinctively Southern. The final portion of this study continues the analysis of McCullers' basic theme in Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Member of the Wedding, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, and Clock Without Hands, comparing elements of these later works to The Image and The Pursuit of Loneliness in order to demonstrate the particularly American loneliness of her characters and the value of her works to the tradition of American novel.