This thesis presents a rhetorical analysis of Alfred de Musset's La Confession d'un enfant du siecle. The methodology used for the purpose of the analysis gives a certain originality to this dissertation. It is quite unusual among the literary scholars to associate rhetoric to a text that is typically romantic by its form and content, rhetoric being traditionally used for discourse analysis only, not for a novel. What our research has shown us is that nobody has ever approached, with a rhetorical eye, that novel which, moreover, has almost never been studied nor commented. The main idea for this paper was that the literary genre of the confession, because of its religious and judicial origins, necessarily implies a desire of persuasion. To obtain total redemption of his crimes or sins, one must convince the other that he regrets what he has done, that he acted against his own will, that he suffers from what he did, that he acted without knowing his actions or words would hurt someone; one can even say that he is the victim of false accusations, etc. Rhetoric is then called to play an important part in this justification and persuasion enterprise. That is why we came with this hypothesis that there was in Musset's novel a persuasion mechanism working to gain the support of the reader toward the narrator's thesis. This dissertation tries to emphasize the persuasion mechanism by doing a rhetorical analysis of the text.

Since English lawyers started writing text books about the law of evidence, they have denied that religious confession privilege exists at common law. However, that statement of the law surprises those who recognise confessional secrecy dating back into the first millennium AD. It is also counter-intuitive in Federal Australia since the one human freedom which the Constitution has guaranteed since 1901 is the “free exercise of any religion”. This thesis analyses the legal conclusion that there is no religious confession privilege at common law against available historical materials. Those materials include the origin of confessional secrecy in Christian practice and the entrenchment of that practice in canon law; the recognition and even the reception of canonical practices in the custom that became the common law; and all the English common law cases that have affirmed or denied religious confession privilege whether in passing or in an arguably precedential way. The reason why clear evidence of the existence of the privilege even seventy years after the English Reformation has been ignored by the text writers is traced to an uncorrected interpretive error made by the text writer Peake in 1801. His error has been uncritically followed and affirmed by later commentators and judges. However, until Gavan Duffy J decided Cook v Carroll in Ireland in 1945 and the Supreme Court of Canada decided R v Gruenke in 1991, there was no reported decision on religious confession privilege anywhere in the British Commonwealth. All else that had been written was at best obiter dicta. The factors that influenced those two courts to recognise not a narrow religious confession privilege but a more encompassing confidential religious communications privilege are then measured against Australian jurisprudence to suggest whether the High Court of Australia would come to a similar conclusion.

Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio University, August, 2007. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references.

Applied research project (D. Min.)--School of Theology and Missions, Oral Roberts University, 2006. / Includes abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 132-138).

Applied research project (D. Min.)--School of Theology and Missions, Oral Roberts University, 2006. / Includes abstract and vita. Translated from Korean. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 151-156).

Thesis (M. Div.)--St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, 1991. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 57-61).

Habilitationsschrift--Halle, 1970. / Bibliography: p. 149-151.

Originally presented as the author's thesis, Göttingen, 1974. / At head of title: Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR. Zentralinstitut für Alte Geschichte und Archäologie. Romanized text, German translation and facsimile reproduction of Mss. CH/U7570 of Turfan-Sammlung of Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR. "Das Thema des Insadi-Sūtra sind die Prāvaraṇā-Zeremonie (die Zeremonie des "Einander-Einladens") und insbesondere ihre Entstehungsgründe."--P. 10. Includes bibliographical references (p. [19]-22).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 44-45).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Texas at El Paso, 2009. / Title from title screen. Vita. CD-ROM. Includes bibliographical references. Also available online.