It all began in the village. We would wake up with the sun, we would rest our laboured bodies underneath the moon. Gli vecchi (old folks) often told us: “In the end, all that will remain is our story. Nothing else really matters.” This thesis “Awakening the Calabrian Story: The Diverse Manifestations of Acquiring Knowledge” will take you into the lives of ten Southern Italian women from Calabria. They will lure you back to their villages: their place of birth, their hearth, to the midst of the olive trees. Their stories will then migrate to Canada, as these women take their first steps on Pier 21. “In the end, all that matters is our stories.” This thesis will give voice to ten Southern Italian women who will tell the world what, to them, matters most. They will tell their tales and pass on the wisdom they have learned along the way. With each breath and each step, they are always growing, never remaining the same. They go along and live out their villages wherever the thread takes them. This thesis itinerary will begin in the village, follow a journey across the Atlantic Ocean to a life in Canada. Chapter One: (Introduction) will outline and describe the background, purpose and objectives, on this journey of awakening. Chapter Two: (Literature Review) will look at pedagogical perspectives in curriculum theory. Chapter Three: (Methodology) will focus on the research methodology applied throughout this thesis process. Chapter Four: (Stories as Data) will lure readers into the personal lives and experiences of participants. Chapter Five: (Interpretation of Stories) will reveal the analysis of acquired knowledge as reported by participants. This thesis itinerary will continue and conclude by the fireside with a collection of Calabrian folktales told by these participants, and translated from the Calabrian dialect into English.

It all began in the village. We would wake up with the sun, we would rest our laboured bodies underneath the moon. Gli vecchi (old folks) often told us: “In the end, all that will remain is our story. Nothing else really matters.” This thesis “Awakening the Calabrian Story: The Diverse Manifestations of Acquiring Knowledge” will take you into the lives of ten Southern Italian women from Calabria. They will lure you back to their villages: their place of birth, their hearth, to the midst of the olive trees. Their stories will then migrate to Canada, as these women take their first steps on Pier 21. “In the end, all that matters is our stories.” This thesis will give voice to ten Southern Italian women who will tell the world what, to them, matters most. They will tell their tales and pass on the wisdom they have learned along the way. With each breath and each step, they are always growing, never remaining the same. They go along and live out their villages wherever the thread takes them. This thesis itinerary will begin in the village, follow a journey across the Atlantic Ocean to a life in Canada. Chapter One: (Introduction) will outline and describe the background, purpose and objectives, on this journey of awakening. Chapter Two: (Literature Review) will look at pedagogical perspectives in curriculum theory. Chapter Three: (Methodology) will focus on the research methodology applied throughout this thesis process. Chapter Four: (Stories as Data) will lure readers into the personal lives and experiences of participants. Chapter Five: (Interpretation of Stories) will reveal the analysis of acquired knowledge as reported by participants. This thesis itinerary will continue and conclude by the fireside with a collection of Calabrian folktales told by these participants, and translated from the Calabrian dialect into English.

Dans le corpus, "le corps dans tous ses états" évoque d’emblée l’Incarnation. Mais celle-ci présuppose le corps vivant du fidèle. C’est lui qui donne corps aux semblables sensibles et intelligibles par amour. En retour, ceux-ci le poussent à faire corps avec eux en s’y assimilant. Tel est le Christ, l’Homme-Dieu qui épouse la condition terrestre et donne corps à la métaphore. Son corps est ainsi le milieu qui conjugue les dissemblables du monde en semblables mystiques. Comme les époux qui se fondent en un corps autre, son corps est donc d’un genre troisième et mystérieux. Tout cela prend corps grâce au lecteur, que le corpus suscite car il en partage la langue qui fait corps avec la voix intérieure. Telle est la chair du corpus où s’incarnent le Verbe divin et les métaphores. / John Donne is a Christian. Therefore all his works center around the Incarnation. However, the divine assuming a human body out of love requires first that a living believer should give rise to couples of persons and beings alike though different. Then the believer strives to assimilate himself to the other couple member, as is the rule in a good metaphor. Such is Christ, who is both God and Man as well as a living metaphor. He is a third type of being, made visible in marriage. This is achieved through bodies sharing in the same innate interior words, which starts with the mere act of reading John Donne’s corpus. Finally, the body means Verbum embodied in language.

本論文以英國17世紀形上詩人唐恩的詩為研究對象。共分為三章，第一章分析唐恩在《歌與十四行詩集》(The Songs and Sonets)中的愛情觀。第二章分析唐恩的形上派奇想(metaphysical conceit)。第三章以唐恩的兩首《週年紀念》(The Anniversaries)為對象，討論其中包含的宗教觀，哲學觀，及生死觀。 / This thesis intendes to analyze John Donne's poetry. The thesis is divided into three chapters. The first chapter is devoted to the study of Donne's views of love in the Songs and Sonets. The second chapter is devoted especially to Donne's use of metaphysical conceit. The third chapter is a study of Donne's Anniversaries, two long poems dealing with science, philosophy, life, and death.

"Imagining Unity" investigates how an evolving concept of transcendence in early modern England, influenced by Reformation and counter-Reformation theology, created new ways of responding affectively and philosophically to emerging articulations of national identity in British devotional poetry. My project focuses on a series of politically disruptive moments in the seventeenth century--from the residual trauma of the Protestant Reformation to the Civil War of the 1640's--that troubled England's developing sense of national identity. In the shadow of these troubles, devotional poets reworked ideas of transcendence that they had inherited from medieval Catholicism to provide a sense of national cohesion in the midst of a changing political landscape. This dissertation explores transcendence as it is reconceived by four different authors: John Donne's work translates Catholic iconography to symbolize the ascension of a Protestant England; Aemelia Lanyer's poetry appeals to the exclusivity of religious esotericism as a palliative for the actual exclusion of women from political life; Richard Crashaw's writings reinterpret mystical union to rescue sovereignty from failure; and John Milton's work revises transubstantiation to authorize a new republic. By investigating how early modern poetry reimagines transcendence in response to political events, my project widens ongoing conversations in political theology and "the religious turn" of literary studies, which are often unilaterally focused on the influence that religion had on politics in the course of an inevitable secularization of culture. My contribution to this work, and the underlying premise to my argument, is that literature provides a forum for rethinking religious concepts at the heart of political organization despite the apparent impulse toward secularization. In doing so, literature serves as a cultural medium for testing the conceptual limits of transcendence--its viability as a tool for inspiring and maintaining social unity. This dissertation ultimately witnesses a concerted effort in the early modern period to extend the life of religious ideas within the political imagination through devotional poetry's insistent recasting of transcendence as central to the formulation of the body politic.

Not much ink has been spilled over John Donne’s relationship to negative, or apophatic, theology. A few scholars have written about apophatic discourse in Donne’s poetry and sermons, but, in general, the subject continues to be overlooked. This thesis seeks to (re)start the conversation by shedding light on Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, a text which has yet to be linked to the negative tradition despite its clear engagement in apophatic discourse. Indeed, throughout Devotions, Donne wields several apophatic strategies when speaking of God including via negativa, predicates of action, linguistic regress, paradox, and a consistent reliance upon metaphorical language. Each of these strategies uphold the two guiding principles of negative theology: the epistemic thesis which asserts that God is incomprehensible, and the semantic thesis which asserts that God is unspeakable therefore can only stand as the subject term in negative propositions. Significantly, my objective is not merely to qualify Devotions as an example of apophatic discourse; I also intend to contemplate the implications of qualifying it as such, namely how Devotions challenges the long-held assumption that apophasis requires the user to relinquish the body. Across the text, Donne’s apophasis does not lead him to un-body; on the contrary, the body gains new importance as Donne imagines the risen body, the interpersonal body, the body that cannot be lost because it is an inextricable facet of selfhood. Again, my hope is that this thesis will (re)start or (re)energize the conversation around Donne’s relationship to negative theology, a relationship that is much richer and more extensive than current scholarship suggests.

No description available.

In using the doctrine of the Incarnation as a lens to approach the devotional poetry of seventeenth-century Britain, ‘“And the Word was made flesh”: The Problem of the Incarnation in Seventeenth-Century Devotional Poetry' finds this central doctrine of Christianity to be a destabilising force in the religious controversies of the day. The fact that Roman Catholics, the Church of England, and Puritans all hold to the same belief in the Incarnation means that there is a central point of orthodoxy which allows poets from differing sects of Christianity to write devotional verse that is equally relevant for all churches. This creates a situation in which the more the writer focuses on the incarnate Jesus, the less ecclesiastically distinct their writings become and the more aware the reader is of how difficult it is to categorise poets by the sects of the day. The introduction historicises the doctrine of the Incarnation in Early Modern Europe through presenting statements of belief for the doctrine from reformers such as Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Huldryk Zwingli in addition to the Roman Catholic decrees of the Council of Trent and the Church of England's ‘39 Articles'. Additionally, there is a further focus on the Church of England provided through considering the writings of Richard Hooker and Lancelot Andrewes amongst others. In the ensuing chapters, the devotional poetry of John Donne, Aemilia Lanyer, George Herbert, Robert Herrick, and Richard Crashaw is discussed in regards to its use of the Incarnation and incarnational imagery in orthodox though diverse manners. Their use of words to appropriate the Word, and their embrace of the flesh as they approach the divine shows the elastic and problematic nature of a religion founded upon God becoming human and the mystery that the Church allows it to remain.

Through his use of "foundation" and "house" metaphors in his "First Sermon Preached to King Charles at St. James, 3 April 1625," John Donne discreetly presents his ideologies and principles before the new king, while simultaneously criticizing his contemporaries' misguided bickering over religio-political factions. This essay seeks to unpack the history surrounding, as well as the casuistical logic found within Donne's first sermon preached during the Caroline period, which both explicitly and implicitly addresses the foremost anxieties of the people of the changing age.

This dissertation examines early modern literary engagements with the rhetorical and ethical dimensions of law reform. One of the most important mechanisms of social regulation in late-Elizabethan and early-Jacobean England, law reform was a matter of, first, the “perfection” of the organization and expression of existing laws, legal instruments, and legal processes. However counter-intuitively, these officially-sponsored reforms were calculated to prevent more radical innovations that would generate “inconveniences,” systemic contradictions and uncertainties that threatened the law’s ability to produce just results. Second, law reformers generated a discourse on “execution” that targeted the character of legal representatives. This tradition of character criticism, delivered directly from the Lord Keeper’s mouth or circulated through other legal-political, literary, theatrical, didactic, and religious works, encouraged officers’ conscientious execution of their duties and alerted the English public to the signs of the abuse of authority. Law reform created a distinct critical orientation toward legal and governing activities that was reproduced throughout a system of justice in which an extraordinary number of subjects participated. It was a critical orientation, moreover, that was refracted in literature sensitive to the implications of the socio-political dominance of legal language, traditions, and officers. The principles and practices of law reform—along with the conflicts and anxieties that inspired and sprang from them—were appropriated by amateur and professional writers alike. Close readings reveal that Inns-of-Court revellers, Francis Bacon, John Donne and Shakespeare all engaged deeply with the potential, as well as the ethical and practical limitations, of law reform’s central role in local and national governance. In the Gesta Grayorum and Donne’s “Satyre V,” the reveller and the satiric speaker improvise on legal forms to compensate for the law’s imperfections that threaten the security and prosperity of the English subject. In Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale, the character of the legal-political officer and reformer is tested as he attempts to put policies and principles into practice.