<p>When debating the structure of the cosmos, Raphael delivers to Adam perhaps Milton's most famous line: "be lowly wise." With the promise to "justify the ways of God to men," Milton does not limit man's knowledge to base matters, but reclaims the heights of "other worlds" for the poet. Over the course of the seventeenth century, the natural philosophers' material explanations of the natural order were slowly gaining authority over other sources of knowledge, the poets prime among them. My dissertation takes up the competing early modern claims to knowledge that Milton lays down for Adam. I argue that natural philosophy, what today we call "science," emerged as the dominant authority over knowledge by appropriating the poet's imagination.</p><p>The poet's imagination had long revealed the divine hand that marked nature--a task that, as Sidney put it, merited the poet a "peerlesse" rank among other professions. For Bacon, Galileo, and Royal Society fellows, the poetic imagination revealed material explanations of nature's order that other orthodox models and methods could not. For the first decades of the seventeenth century, the imagination aligned poetry and natural philosophy as complementary pursuits of knowledge: Sidney's poet was to imagine a "golden" world that revealed the divine order, the material cause of which Bacon's natural philosopher was to discover in nature. But as the Royal Society fellows countered the claim that they peddled fancies, they severed ties with the poet. In one ingenious rhetorical move, Royal Society fellows proclaimed themselves to have perfected the poet's imaginative work, securing the imagination for natural philosophy while disavowing poetry as the product of an idle fancy. Such rhetoric proved as powerful then as it does now. For Margaret Cavendish, the poet occupies the supplemental role that "recreate[s] the mind" once it grows tired of the "serious" natural philosophical studies. After the Restoration, then, the important role of the poetic imagination would go largely unrecognized even as it set itself to work in what would become the separate disciplines of literature and science.</p> / Dissertation

Scholars and literary enthusiasts have struggled for decades to account for editor Maxwell Perkins’s unparalleled success in facilitating the careers of many of the early twentieth century’s most enduring and profitable writers, among them F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. This study seeks to penetrate that mystery by dissecting Perkins’s editorial practice and examining how he navigated the competing tensions between commercial success and aesthetic integrity in various circumstances. At play in the construction of his literary legacy are prevailing perceptions of authorship, complex interpersonal relationships, and the inherent battle between art and commerce. Focusing on his day-to-day activities, it is apparent that Perkins was guided by a unique editorial double vision—the propensity to appreciate the aesthetic experience while retaining the critical detachment necessary to appraise a literary work from a commercial standpoint—when solving the paradoxical dilemmas inherent in modern publishing.

In the twenty-first century, as in the sixteenth, a blindfolded woman holding a sword and scales personifies justice; her blindfold conveys impartiality, her scales evenhandedness, and her sword the authority to compel obedience. In pre-democratic early modern England, Justice’s iconography was often used to legitimate the pain that the state imposed on those who broke the common peace. Simultaneously, the creative and cultural narratives within which the penal code was embedded often complicated and contradicted the state’s legally violent precepts. The relationship between legal violence and justice is at the center of this project: Must the law be violent to control violence? Does the law’s violence promote justice or disrupt it? How do the formal mechanisms of law and social control operate within the complex world of art, sermons, and literature? This project maps the late Elizabethan and early Stuart engagement with those questions. I examine a continuum of responses to legal violence embedded in the judicial institutions of Parliament, the Star Chamber, and the Queen’s Bench as well as in poetry, plays, sermons, broadsides, iconography, utopian narratives, paintings, and engravings. Often drawing on the metaphoric force of Justice’s symbols, the early modern response to legal violence was not purely semantic but strongly aesthetic, defending, mediating, reflecting, and refracting the state’s formal mechanisms of law. Reading case law along with works by Thomas More, Elizabeth I, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Edward Coke, John Donne, George Herbert, Thomas Hobbes, John Milton, and Margaret Cavendish, I trace law as a cultural practice, expressed and understood aesthetically through both codified and creative means.

Through the gossip and rumors in a small town in Minnesota, the townspeople discuss and react to the Levison family's claimed perfection.

A work of poetry that offers a new method of poetics. By examining translation as a means of understanding relationships, this work offers a nuanced manner for the writing and experience of poetry. When Bird and Fish Fall in Love is a close examination of language, relationships, translation, and the intimacy of conflation.

A reelaboração de mitos caracteriza, fundamentalmente, a obra do francês Michel Tournier. Nesta pesquisa, procurou-se analisar o romance Le Roi des Aulnes, publicado em 1970, que narra a trajetória de uma personagem fantástica em busca de seu destino em plena segunda guerra, no centro do império nazista. O trabalho foca as estratégias empregadas para construir uma narrativa que vincula tão fortemente questões históricas com elementos míticos, além de investigar o potencial crítico da obra. A partir de bibliografia específica, procurou-se situar o conceito de mito, observar seus aspectos religiosos e políticos e analisar a configuração que o autor deu ao mito em sua obra. De modo geral, a recriação mítica se mostrou um conceito insuficiente para a análise e interpretação literária, pois a limitação do romance em sua esfera mítico-religiosa empobrece a compreensão da obra. A pesquisa revelou ainda que entre mito e história há vários processos de travessia de sentido, que operam graças à fabulação e à criatividade do autor, de modo que os elementos históricos foram incorporados à obra de maneira distorcida, velada, por vezes mitologizada, assim como os elementos míticos e fantásticos conduzem uma crítica severa à ideologia e política nazistas. Os aspectos míticos da obra trabalham em função sobretudo de criar as balizas morais dentro das quais as personagens atuam, além de abrir um espaço para que o leitor participe da construção do sentido da obra na medida em que ele é envolvido pelas regras do sistema mítico configurado. Por sua vez, a historicidade da obra conta sobretudo com a instabilidade dos elementos formais, bem como dos paradoxos e vicissitudes engendrados pelos elementos míticos para indicar, muito mais do que o registro de uma época, a projeção literária de uma dilema histórico. Em outras palavras, este romance é profundamente crítico e historicizante justamente porque ele não conta com uma linguagem realista, descritiva e estável; é no reconhecimento da precariedade da expressão, no momento em que apenas uma linguagem multireferenciada e delirante consegue abordar um contexto histórico problemático que a possibilidade de lucidez e elaboração desponta no horizonte. / The re-elaboration of myths deeply characterizes the work of the French writer, Michel Tournier. The present research focused itself on the analysis of his novel Le Roi des Aulnes, published in 1970, which narrates the trajectory of a fantastic character in a quest for his fate in the middle of World War II, at the center of the Nazist Empire. The research focused on the strategies employed to build a narrative that so strongly links historic issues with mythic elements, aside from investigating the critical potential of that work. From a specific bibliography, it tried to place the concept of myth, observe its religious and political aspects and analyze the configuration that the author gave to myth in his work. In general, mythic re-creation showed itself to be an insufficient concept to the literary analysis and interpretation, since limiting the novel to its mythic-religious sphere leads to poor comprehension of the work. The research also revealed that between myth and history there are several sense transference processes, which operate thanks to the author\'s storytelling and creativity, so that historic elements were incorporated to the work in twisted, veiled and at times mythologized ways, just as mythic elements conduce severe critics to nazist ideology and politics. Mythic aspects of the work operate above all to create moral guidelines within which characters act, besides making room for the reader to participate in the construction of the sense of the work, as he gets involved by the configured mythic system. On its turn, the historicity of this work counts above all with the instability of formal elements as well as of the paradoxes and vicissitudes engendered by mythic elements to indicate, far more than the record of a time, the literary projection of a historic dilemma. In other words, this novel is deeply critical and historicizing precisely because it does not employ realistic descriptive and stable language; it is in the recognition of the precariety of expression - on those moments that only multireferenced and delirious language can approach a problematic historic context - that the possibility for lucidity and elaboration shimmers on the horizon.

A cosmodern reading of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas creates a positive vision of the future for readers through various techniques of fragmentation including fragmentation of voice, language, and time. By fragmentation, I have in mind the consistent interruption of the novel’s voice, language, and time that requires an active and aware readership. The reader’s interaction with the text makes the novel re-constructive. In fact, the global nature of Mitchell’s novel, its hopeful ending, and its exploration of the effects of globalization can be considered as a means of exploring the dynamic relationships between the characters, the reader, and Mitchell’s authorial voice. Rather than falling back on familiar postmodernist truisms such as the hopelessness of genuine communication or the impossibility of truth, Mitchell creates a hopeful vision of the future of the world, one that champions the life, agency, and personal narrative of the individual.

The popular Harry Potter series serves as the basis for my study of the oracles that appear throughout the series. By focusing specifically on Professor Sybill Trelawney, Ron Weasley, and the Sorting Hat, I show the relationships between Harry Potter and the Oracles. I also focus on a few of Trelawney's various methods of Divination and her prophecies.

abstract: The study of genre literature in general, and fantasy or fairy tale literature in particular, by its very nature, falls outside the normal course of literary theory. This paper evaluates various approaches taken to create a framework within which scholarly research and evaluation of these types of genre literature might occur. This is done applying Secondary World theory to better-established literary foci, such as psychological analysis and monster theory while still respecting the premises posited in traditional literary inquiry. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis English 2019

The Revolt against Mourning calls into question the widespread critical alignment of literary modernism with Freudian melancholia. Focusing instead on “mourning,” through close readings of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, I demonstrate how their depictions of this notion overturn both its traditional and contemporary understandings. Whereas Freud conceives mourning as a psychic labor that the subject slowly and painfully carries out, Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner convey it as a destabilizing, subversive, and transformative force to which the subject is radically passive. For Freud, mourning is a matter of severing one’s libidinal bond to the lost other and reinvesting the free libido in a new object. But these modernists show that this bond is not in fact something we have the power to sever. Rather, precisely because we must stay internally bound to the lost other, we are always exposed to being usurped and altered by its alterity. Indeed, what my readings disclose is that these novels end up being (dis)possessed by the spectral force unleashed in them. I argue, however, that each writer can be read as attempting a textual exorcism to free his or her novel from this force by invoking a vital, dynamic movement I call “life.” But although Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner seek such liberation, their narrative experiments ultimately fail to achieve it. And yet, for that very reason, Mrs. Dalloway, Ulysses, and The Sound and the Fury further illuminate how mourning both precedes and exceeds our desire to master it and binds us to the others we lose, perhaps for the entirety of our lives.