Thesis advisor: Thomas D. Stegman / Thesis advisor: Andrew R. Davis / Thesis (STL) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. School of Theology and Ministry. / Discipline: Sacred Theology.

This thesis is an analysis of female prophecy as it is constituted, represented or performed in seventeenth-century texts. I consider both the way in which prophecy is socially constructed and the role of prophetic experience in the development of feminine subjectivity. I argue that interpreting prophecy within the context of psychopathology or feminism (to take two examples of critical practice) colludes in the early modern objectification of women's speech and somatic experience. Using an interdisciplinary approach, I argue that prophecy needs to be understood as a media event and as a site of discursive proliferation. In this study, I examine texts which participate in the explication of a prophetic event and interrogate their intentions and functions. I suggest that an inclusive reading of prophecy allows the critic to recuperate women's agency. My study of prophecy combines the seventeenth-century notion of prophecy as a category for diverse linguistic and bodily manifestations with an analysis of the rhetorical strategies of the prophetic text. In the course of this thesis I consider: 1. the work of various scholars who have attempted to explicate the relations between gender and radical religiosity; 2. how a comparison between hysteria and prophecy illuminates the primacy of psychopathology in the interpretation of seventeenth- and nineteenth-century women's experience; 3. the interplay between scriptural models of prophecy and early modern biblical exegesis; 4. the role of texts in (in)validating female bodily experience and 5. how seventeenth century antisectarian texts attempt to police the female creative imagination.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--McMaster University, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 320-344). Also available on the Internet.

This thesis provides a rhetorical analysis of prophetic texts, non-fiction premillennialist dispensational studies, the fictional series, Left Behind and interviews with series’ readers. This thesis argues that prophetic rhetoric constitutes an epistemological position whereby Rapture believers create knowledge, cast knowledge as good or evil and finally act as gatekeepers to determine what can and should be known. Rapture subculture is composed of both a hard core and a set of narrative believers, those who have acquired the nomenclature, but perhaps not the dogmatic belief in a Rapture, Tribulation, Armageddon, and Millennium schema. The process of turning narrative believers into hard core believers relies on the use of a range of topoi, appeals to authority, evil and time. Rapture rhetoric, aimed at bolstering the beliefs of the hard core and cultivating the beliefs of those still undecided, relies on the process of transfer to gain acceptance for one claim based on acceptance of another and then relies on narrative plasticity to enlarge the basis for those accepted claims. These arguments are exchanged for stories in the fictional Left Behind series, whereby the characters, institutions and knowledge of the end-times becomes encapsulated in an easy-to-read and simple-to-relate tale that codes knowledge as either good knowledge revealed from God or evil knowledge acquired through human understanding. These narratives and arguments both get used among prophetic believers to explain their lives and their world, internally and externally to the prophetic subculture, in order to convince more narrative believers of the truth of their claims. Prophetic communities develop knowledge products, cultural entailments and cultural manifestations of prophetic belief to serve as symbols of the end-times narrative. Rapture subculture, based on prophetic beliefs, is not monolithic; however, this thesis is able to draw some broad generalizations about the prophetic community and the rhetoric they use to explain their claims within their ranks and to the outside world.

This thesis provides a rhetorical analysis of prophetic texts, non-fiction premillennialist dispensational studies, the fictional series, Left Behind and interviews with series’ readers. This thesis argues that prophetic rhetoric constitutes an epistemological position whereby Rapture believers create knowledge, cast knowledge as good or evil and finally act as gatekeepers to determine what can and should be known. Rapture subculture is composed of both a hard core and a set of narrative believers, those who have acquired the nomenclature, but perhaps not the dogmatic belief in a Rapture, Tribulation, Armageddon, and Millennium schema. The process of turning narrative believers into hard core believers relies on the use of a range of topoi, appeals to authority, evil and time. Rapture rhetoric, aimed at bolstering the beliefs of the hard core and cultivating the beliefs of those still undecided, relies on the process of transfer to gain acceptance for one claim based on acceptance of another and then relies on narrative plasticity to enlarge the basis for those accepted claims. These arguments are exchanged for stories in the fictional Left Behind series, whereby the characters, institutions and knowledge of the end-times becomes encapsulated in an easy-to-read and simple-to-relate tale that codes knowledge as either good knowledge revealed from God or evil knowledge acquired through human understanding. These narratives and arguments both get used among prophetic believers to explain their lives and their world, internally and externally to the prophetic subculture, in order to convince more narrative believers of the truth of their claims. Prophetic communities develop knowledge products, cultural entailments and cultural manifestations of prophetic belief to serve as symbols of the end-times narrative. Rapture subculture, based on prophetic beliefs, is not monolithic; however, this thesis is able to draw some broad generalizations about the prophetic community and the rhetoric they use to explain their claims within their ranks and to the outside world.

Published in 1851, Moby-Dick is audaciously experimental and defiantly unique for its time. Many scholars attribute problematic aspects of the book to this authorial ambition, and for the Melville critic, the figure of Fedallah is one of those problems. This study aims to explore how the Oriental character, Fedallah, operates within the larger world of reading and interpretation in Moby-Dick. Major critics of the past have struggled to reconcile the Parsee’s shadowy essence with the materiality of the whale ship, and have interpreted this figure as an evil force, or often bluntly, a devil. However, like many other subjects in the book, Fedallah evades definition. This thesis explores the idea that Fedallah is not an inconsequential bystander to the action, but a character of significant depth and feeling, and an active participant in the interpolated questing and prophetic narratives that lie at the heart of Moby-Dick.

Thesis (M.A.)--Calvary Bible College, 1985. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 62-69).

Zugl.: Köln, Univ., Diss., 2008

Thèse--Faculté des lettres de Paris, 1879.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--McMaster University, 2005. / Advisor: Stephen Westerholm. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 320-344). Also available via World Wide Web.