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Gongora's "Soledades" As A Problem Of Language And Meaning In Seventeenth Century Spain., Ted Eustace Mcvay Jr

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

The exploration of the epistemological assumptions necessary for the interpretation of Luis de Gongora's "Soledades" is an area of critical attention that has gone virtually neglected since his 1927 "rehabilitation." This study offers an approach to understanding the long, difficult poem and the bitter critical reaction against it in the context of the seventeenth-century shift of predominant epistemologies discussed by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things. An approach that focuses on how the world is known is most appropriate to a study of the "Soledades" for several reasons, one being that those writers who attacked the poem did so …

To Be West Indian: Autobiography And West Indian Literature., Margaret Kent Bass

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Although some critics claim that autobiography is not a West Indian literary mode, I maintain that autobiography, of a special West Indian variety, is necessarily present, for it provides a way of defining the self and bringing the parts of the self together into a unified and coherent whole. Autobiography is the genre that oppressed and colonized populations have traditionally used to write themselves into history and to proclaim their humanity to the world. The writing of autobiography is essential to the process of decolonization, for the colonized must define themselves and recreate themselves in their own images thereby resisting …

Description And Meaning In Three Novels By Gustave Flaubert., Corrada Biazzo Curry

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This study focuses on the problematic of description and meaning in literature, based on three master-works by Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary, Salammbo, and L'Education sentimentale. Description generally tends to create digressions and gratuitous accumulations that can break the narrative development. However, in the classical realist text descriptive details are to represent a global image and be available to a possible interpretive recuperation which can be mimetic and establish the basic story line, or symbolic, that is, primarily connoting the themes of the novel or the characters' feelings. Using Flaubert's works as examples, this study analyzes the constant tensions of these …

The Hair Wreath: Mary Wilkins Freeman's Artist Fiction, Norma Johnsen

Doctoral Dissertations

Mary Wilkins Freeman uses an artist protagonist to explore conflicts and issues she herself faced as a woman writing in male-defined culture. Her artists make art in the content of a highly developed, expressive, sometime subversive, and always deeply personal women's art tradition. Their singing, their poems and stories, and their decorative "household arts" speak a complex poetic language.

The Mary Wilkins artist defines self through her art. In "A New England Nun" the artist preserves her artistic identity by retreating to her solitary pleasures of household arranging, sewing, and distilling. Other household artists or architects assert their identity by …

Modernism's Illegitimate Progeny: Fictions Of Crime And The Experience Of Modernity., Jon Francis Thompson

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation has two main concerns. The first is to see fictions of crime--a general term which I use to signify those genres concerned with crime, including detective fiction, spy thrillers, and crime fiction proper--as attempts to mediate and contain the anxieties brought about by the experience of modernity. Modernity is theorized as having three primary moments: the nineteenth, early twentieth-century experience of imperialism; the post World War I period, the high water mark of urban capitalism; and the post World War II period, which I theorize as postmodernism. I attempt to situate crime fiction within these social contexts, and …

Some Aspects Of Browning's Satire: Browning, Donne, And Mandeville, Barbara Ruth Ryerse

Digitized Theses

The purpose of this study is to show that some aspects of Browning's satire clarify his use of tradition by indicating his readiness to appropriate and adapt satiric forms of ancient origin to his own poetic purposes. A main focus on religious, aesthetic, and satiric elements in Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day leads to a comparison of this poem with the Satyres of John Donne that were written in the tradition of formal verse satire. Similarly, the later poem With Bernard de Mandeville is compared to Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees and the tradition of Menippean satire. These comparisons reveal common …

Los And The Science Of The Elohim, John Michael Smith

Digitized Theses

This study re-examines what have been commonplace propositions for Blake criticism: that Los is Blake's chief symbol for the activity of imagination in the prophecies; that the theme of Los's labours, his attempt in Golgonooza to practise "the Science of the Elohim," serves as a focus for Blake's critique of, and alternative to, the science of "Bacon, Newton and Locke"; and that Blake's opposition to the latter stems from his rejection of its "Cartesian" foundation, its dualism of mind and body, subjective and objective realms. This study begins by attempting to show that, while we have agreed to place Los …

Daphne Marlatt's Salmon Texts Going To Swimming/Jumping The Margins/Barriers, Brenda Joy Carr

Digitized Theses

Entitled "Daphne Marlatt's Salmon Texts {dollar}\to{dollar} Swimming/Jumping the Margins/Barriers," my dissertation, the first full-length study of Marlatt's life/text, examines her works, up to and including How Hug a Stone, through the lens of her present feminist poetics. The first of three sections, "Translation and Transgression {dollar}\to{dollar} A Writing Woman Writing 'Woman'," situates Daphne Marlatt's life-writing in the doubled context of a masculinist postmodern tradition, in which she has links with poets affiliated with Black Mountain College, and an emerging feminist countertradition, in which she has affinities with such precursors as Gertrude Stein, and with such contemporaries as Nicole Brossard. My …

Layers Of Identity: Multiple Voices And Contradictory Patterns In Spenser's "Shepheardes Calender", Marianne Micros

Digitized Theses

Spenser, in his Shepheardes Calender, created "a Calender for euery yeare," but the calendar of each speaker, and possibly of every reader, varies based on a person's attitude towards his or her place in the natural and cosmic cycles. Although many critics have tried to impose regularity of structure and content on Spenser's poem, and have attempted to define Spenser's viewpoint, it seems likely that Spenser was not attempting to present one consistent, inflexible viewpoint.;I propose that The Shepheardes Calender is a work consisting of many voices, not only the voices of the fictional characters within the work, but also …

La Programacion Espacio/Temporal Del Relato., M. Ellen Blossman

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

La programacion espacio/temporal es el conjunto de dos elementos: el elemento espacial, que implica la organizacion del proceso por el cual se enlazan los espacios discretos mediante la sintagmatica; y el elemento temporal, que implica la representacion cronologica de la organizacion narrativa. A veces dicha representacion cronologica no coincide con el orden logico de los acontecimientos. Esto puede ocurrir por la intercalacion de la metaficcion en la ficcion. Tanto la ficcion como la metaficcion se componen de esa unidad espacio/temporal, aunque no siempre los dos elementos de esta unidad se presenten explicitamente en la superficie del texto. La programacion espacio/temporal …

"Burning Dinner Is Not Incompetence But War": Marriage And Madness In Contemporary Domestic Fiction, Susan Jean Schenk

Digitized Theses

This thesis explores the prevalent theme of marriage and madness in sixteen "domestic" novels published between 1958 and 1985 by writers such as Anderson, Atwood, Ballantyne, Engel, Kaufman, Laurence, Lessing, Mortimer and Plath. The representation of the restrictiveness of traditional domestic roles figures centrally in the work of many women writers during this period; almost as common is the conjunction between this sense of restriction and the need to escape these "ties that bind." Departure and divorce present themselves as possibilities, but for women who are economically and emotionally dependent on the traditional structure of marriage in Western society, various …

The Arts, Literature, And Music Of The Napoleonic Age, Anne Elizabeth Schneider

Honors Capstones

In this thesis, I have attempted to describe the arts, music, and literature of the Napoleonic Age. In doing so, I have included England, France, and Germany. In order to understand the mind and manner of Napoleon, I have included historical background and pre-existing styles of this age. In order to fully understand the Napoleonic Age, I found it necessary to include important information about Corsica, Napoleon’s birthplace, Josephine and Marie Louise, Napoleon’s wives, and Napoleon himself. This information helps give the reader a common reference point concerning why Napoleon would act in a certain way. My research included extensive …

Wallace Stevens And The Long Poem: Constructing A New Stage, Lorraine Christine Dicicco

Digitized Theses

It is the aim of this study to challenge the traditionalist reading of the modern long poem by closely reading the long poems of a reputedly lyric poet--Wallace Stevens. Critics of his long pieces have recurrently interpreted him as perpetuating the chain of strong (male) lyric poets from Wordsworth to Williams. Their familiarity with the Romantic song of the self has led them to institute a blanket reading of the modernist long poem as an extended lyric.;Close readings of Stevens' long poems show how his diverge radically from those of his predecessors. First, Stevens exorcised himself from the tradition of …

A Study Of Voltaire's "Princesse De Babylone", Helen Grace Heller

Digitized Theses

La Princess de Babylone 1768 has been neglected by modern scholarship. A study of Voltaire's correspondence for the period covering the conte's genesis, composition, and publication reveals that the merry, optimistic tone of La Princess de Babylone, so different from other contes of the period, reflects a singularly happy time in Voltaire's life when he was enjoying domestic harmony, fulfillment in his role as Ferney's patriarch, and satisfaction in his victories in the war against the Infame.;A comparison of Voltaire's oriental contes shows how he drew on the Mille et une nuit literary tradition and focuses on his use of …