Touching Brýnstone is the story of Beth, a young journalist who is troubled by misfortunes in her family and work circumstances. In a Pretoria library she is seduced by a book that consoles her and progressively becomes a fetish object. It sparks a journey to Japan, where she arrives to teach English. She is intent on meeting the author, whom she confounds with protagonist and book. This Bildungsroman is an exploration of the complex relationship between inner and outer self, and the struggle towards wholeness. Beth must find a way out of the obsession so that she can return to South Africa with an enriched insight into her shadow self.

M.A. / This dissertation investigates the work of black women poets in South Africa during the period 1970 - 1991, within the context of race and gender politics. The period 1970 - 1991 represents the approximately two decades in which black poetry became recognised as an important development in South African literary studies. Although several studies of the work of black male poets have been written, hitherto no substantial study of the writings of black women poets, in particular, has been undertaken. Although relatively few black women poets published their work during this era, when compared to their male counterparts, this critical survey will attempt to give a broad overview of the poetry black women produced. Focusing on poetry written in English, this dissertation will argue that the majority of black women poets writing during this period harnessed their writing to the anti-Apartheid or liberation struggle in South Africa. Many of these poets regarded their writing as a 'cultural weapon' which could contribute to political transformation, and although few regarded themselves as 'feminist' poets, their poetry reveals a deep concern with gender oppression as well as racial and class oppression. Chapter one, the introduction, focuses on the way in which black South African women poets have been largely ignored, neglected and 'silenced' by the majority of critics. This chapter will also consider some of the factors that may have prevented more black women from producing and publishing poetry: social factors such as education, literacy and access to publication will be explored. The second chapter explores the emergence of South African 'protest poetry', and focuses on the poetry of Jennifer Davids and Gladys Thomas in relation to the 'protest' tradition. It will be argued that while poet Gladys Thomas defined her writing in terms of 'protest' literature, Jennifer Davids produced a more introspective, personal poetry that was primarily concerned with the difficulties of 'finding an individual voice' in the South African environment. The third chapter focuses on the more intensified phase of 'protest poetry' which was produced after 1976 by the growing culture of literary activism in the black townships, and will show how women poets write of the suffering specific to township women. This chapter will also focus on an analysis of gender oppression within the poets' own homes and communities, as well as celebrations of political activities by women. In particular, this chapter concentrates on women's poetry published in the literary magazine, Staffrider, established to promote the work of black writers. The Trade Union Movement was a major influence on literary production during this time, as we shall see from the 'worker poetry' produced by many women in the 1980s. Chapter four will concentrate on the poetry produced by black South African women in exile, most of whom were active in the ANC. It will be argued that rather than producing introspective poetry about the condition of exile, these women harnessed their writing to `the struggle'. This poetry can broadly be defined as 'resistance' or 'liberation' poetry. Some of these poets also explore the issue of gender in relation to liberation politics.

This dissertation explores the use of romance across religious poetry in late medieval England. Medieval devotional poems frequently borrow motifs and devices from romance; they might, for example, figure Jesus as a knight jousting with the devil or adopt the romance technique of interlace to narrate the Passion. Critics most frequently read these borrowings as a popularizing method, arguing that the poets of these religious texts turn to romance in order to appeal to their secular audience. I argue instead that late 14th century Middle English poets use romance to explore difficult theological paradoxes and Christian practices. In Pearl, the romance descriptio personae helps articulate the paradoxes of divine reward, at once hierarchical and egalitarian. In Piers Plowman, the romance incognito demonstrates the shifting and multivalent nature of the Trinity. In St. Erkenwald, the slow indulgence of romance wonder stands in contrast to God’s time, which is simultaneously immediate and drawn-out. In the Canterbury Tales, the romance parody of Thopas primes the reader for the prudential lessons of Melibee. This dissertation adds to a growing body of scholarship that reads medieval romance, and in particular Middle English romance, as a genre that does not simply entertain audiences but also interrogates, challenges, or reiterates medieval values and ideas. However, this project adds to current scholarship by examining romance out of its native context and inside or beside religious genres instead. In the first three chapters, I argue that by triggering a romantic reading, the Middle English poems Pearl, Piers Plowman, and St. Erkenwald enact and demonstrate the conceptual difficulties of certain theological paradoxes. In these poems, romance serves as a contemplative tool by demonstrating the reader’s comprehensive limits in the face of the divine. My fourth chapter, which explores Chaucer’s romance parody Sir Thopas alongside his pedagogical treatise Melibee, instead considers the Christian virtue of prudence; here, the exaggerated romance tropes of Sir Thopas prepare the pilgrims to pay penance prudentially by feeling and contemplating time in daily Christian life. While romance does not articulate a paradox about God in Thopas-Melibee, it still prompts contemplation about a difficult Christian virtue, prudence. In all four chapters, I find that romance serves as a vehicle for spiritual contemplation because of its own modes of thinking, whether that be social, economic, or temporal. Whether romance is set within or beside devotional texts, the secular genre allows the reader to contemplate difficult Christian theology and practices and to experience them as difficult in contemplation. Romance, I argue, is a critical tool in the vernacular theologian’s toolkit.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Alberta, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references.

This collection of prose-poems and flash fiction, together with a few short stories, shows how romantic relationships colour our perspectives on the world. The collection has echoes throughout of speakers' voices, theme, imagery and tone. There is a narrative logic too, but working on a subtle level of echo and resonance

A collection of lyrical, imaginative prose, ranging from prose poems to more formal short stories to flash fiction. I challenge the ordinary or commonplace by exploring the realms between fiction and poetry, realism and fantasy, reality and illusion. I would like reading the collection to be a sensory experience, one that draws the reader deeper into the imaginary. Stylistically, I work elements of poetic language into the narrative in order to express the mystery and remoteness that the stories require.

The poetic effectiveness of Milton's God is a fundamental critical issue in Paradise Lost, and the thesis addresses this concern by first surveying the various representations of God contained in the Hebrew scriptures. To speak of the biblical God, one must first understand the tremendous diversity o f his portrayals: he meets with some people in human form, and with others as a voice, a light, or an awesome presence. Milton's God shares less with the God o f Genesis than he does with the God of the prophets; yet Milton's representation demonstrates that though Eden will be lost, God will continue to manifest himself to those who seek his face. The cosmology of the epic reveals both the immensity o f creation and the intimacy o f its Creator, since the entire world is filled with the glory o f God, and yet the garden where Adam and Eve live is an archetypal sanctuary and their bower a type of Inner Temple. Milton's justification o f God's ways rests upon the timelessness of God; events that appear anachronistic at first are used to establish a context that looks beyond the strict limits of human time. On the one hand, the Incarnation, Resurrection, and Apocalypse are separate events that have not yet come to pass; but on the other hand, Milton shows how these events are simultaneously present and completed in God's presence. From God's throne, we participate in a cosmic perspective where the categories of past, present, and future are compressed into one time: we are before and beyond time. Such a transcendent perspective engenders a powerful truth: before Adam and Eve have been tempted, God's grace and mercy have found them out and they have been restored. Though Eden must be lost, the paradise of God's presence will remain. Adam and Eve will fall and the legacy of their rash act will be paradoxically for all time, but not forever. God will restore his people and wipe away their tears, and, in the context of Milton's depiction of God, that time of redemption is now. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

More than any other period in the history of Western Europe, the Middle Ages were informed by translation. Practices of translation pervaded and underlay every aspect of medieval culture and politics. Yet, our understanding of how medieval writers thought about translation remains profoundly lacking. Most contemporary histories of translation theory choose to neglect the Middle Ages entirely, or to turn them into a footnote to Jerome’s distinction between “sense-for-sense” and “word-for-word” translation. Consuming the Word offers a new approach to medieval translation theory by considering texts, genres, and forms that have been largely neglected by scholars. While most research in this field has concentrated on texts that are regarded as explicitly “theoretical,” such as prefaces, commentaries, and treatises, Consuming the Word extends this investigation to the figurative language of “literary” works: poetical texts written primarily for moral and intellectual edification, aesthetic pleasure, and entertainment. By analyzing an archive of four 14th-century devotional poems composed in Spanish, Italian, and Middle English, this dissertation demonstrates that the writers of the Middle Ages articulated arguments on language, interpretation, and translation whose complexity and originality greatly surpassed the arid and derivative thinking about translation that is generally attributed to this period. Consuming the Word further demonstrates that, by the late 14th century, Christian devotional writers tended to deploy a particular figure to construct arguments on translation, interpretation, and vernacularity: the figure of gluttony. In the first chapter of this dissertation I examine the theories of language and translation conceived by Dante Alighieri in the first decades of the 14th century. I argue that the figures of consumption and gluttony that appear in the last section of Purgatorio are meant to convey a theoretical justification for his use of the vernacular, bringing to fruition several contradictory arguments that are only outlined in his two previous works on the subject: Convivio and De Vulgari Eloquentia. In the second chapter I concentrate on Cleanness, an anonymous and generally overlooked Middle English poem in which the poet ostensibly eulogizes the virtue of purity. By examining its figurative depictions of cooking and feasting, I contend that, rather than as a casual assortment of disparate scriptural episodes, Cleanness should be interpreted as a coherent argument in favor of vernacular translation. On the contrary, in the third chapter I show how a contemporary Middle English poem, the more famous Piers Plowman, relies on the personification of gluttony to disclose an almost antithetical argument. In Piers Plowman, vernacular translation is described as a losing bargain, morally and intellectually detrimental. In my fourth and final chapter, I turn to the celebrated Libro de Buen Amor, to analyze how its figures of eating and overeating convey an argument on the endlessness of all interpretation and on the importance of choice in the act of translating.

The collection of sonnets Rings of a Thundering Tree (2000), by R.K. Belcher, is rich in metaphorical imagery; lending itself particularly well to textual analyses of imagined sensory perceptions. Although perspectives on or theories about metaphor can be deployed in such analyses, an imagined sense of sensory perception in itself theoretically frames the study of this poetic imagery. In this regard, the titles of the sonnets within this collection and their themes, as well as the title of the collection and the theme of ”South African decay” (with which this title is linked), are explored with an emphasis on imagined sensory experiences. / English Studies / M.A. (English)