Digital Commons Network^™

Not So Immaculately Conceived: Imagining The Protestant Madonna 1850-1910, Deborah Ann Scaperoth

Doctoral Dissertations

Pius IX in the 1854 Bull Ineffabilis Deus defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception as the belief that Mary; mother of Jesus, was from the moment of her conception free from the "stain of original sin." This idea was a part of ecclesiastical tradition, but prior to this time, the church had not officially defined Mary's sinless nature in writing. The publication of this definition, along with published accounts of Marian sightings, contributed to an already heightened awareness of her in a literate, culturally aware public. As a result, Protestant writers who sought to invoke her image interpreted a …

Democracy And Capitalism In The American Western, Michelle C. Greenwald

Doctoral Dissertations

In “Democracy and Capitalism in the American Western,” I argue that the Western consistently dramatizes the tensions between democracy and capitalism while revealing the cultural structure of feeling at the time of its production. Since the first modern Western, Wister’s The Virginian (1902), the genre has expressed a concern that the balance between democracy and capitalism has been upset and that this imbalance has engendered or exacerbated other social problems. The genre generally worked to promote consensus about progress until the breakdown of the liberal consensus in the 1960s, when Americans’ belief in progress was shaken, resulting, in turn, in …

The Liar As A Comic Figure In Plays By Ruiz De Alarcon, Corneille And Moliere, Robert Matthew Patrick

Doctoral Dissertations

This study on the liar as a comic figure centers on protagonists in five seventeenth-century comic plays: La verdad sospechosa (Ruiz de Alarcon), Melite, Le Menteur (Corneille), Tartuffe and Dom Juan (Moliere). It applies a model combining the concepts of "ironic comedy" (Frye), "the world as stage," metatheater, and theories of laughter. Through this model, supplemented by a comparative-literature approach and additional research, the study attempts to demonstrate that in the plays examined an alazon (impostor) is always punished for his contempt for an ideal of truth that is conceived mainly in secular terms, as well as that in the …

Embodying History: Women, Representation, And Resistance In Twentieth-Century Southern African And Caribbean Literature, April Conley Kilinski

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation illustrates how twentieth-century Southern African and Caribbean authors of English fictions recuperate the metaphorical and material female body from the male-centered project of British colonization by employing the female body as a site of resistance through representations of illness, eating disorders, and racial and gender performance. I include works by men and women as well as white and minority authors to illustrate how the female body becomes a point of convergence for narratives of resistance in these postcolonial works. Since each narrative is informed by hybridity--through syncretism, miscegenation, and contact with the metropolis through immigration--I argue that each …

From The Voice To The Violent Act: Language And Violence In Contemporary Drama, Richard A. Bryan

Doctoral Dissertations

Aleks Sierz coined the phrase "In-Yer-Face Theatre" to categorize a new generation of plays written by a group of upstart playwrights in Britain and America. In addressing these plays, I draw upon recent contributions within the social sciences in order to understand better the interstices of language and violence in this drama. This interdisciplinary approach underscores the social considerations at the heart of these plays. Although frequently criticized for a perceived lack of social consciousness and a seemingly gratuitous use of profanity, prurient sexuality, and graphic violence, these writers in fact continue, and contribute to, a tradition of theater that …

The Tractatus As An Ethical Deed: Seeing And Feeling The World "Sub Specie Aeternitatis, Sam Matthew Von Mizener

Doctoral Dissertations

The Tractatus Logico Philosophicus is primarily the expression of a transcendental perspective with respect to language and the world - "viewing the world sub specie aeterni" (6.45) - that has an aesthetic-ethical aspect to it - "feeling the world" sub specie aeterni (6.54). Interpreting the Tractatus in this way enables me to explain, in a way that no other interpretation of his early work has (1) why Wittgenstein regarded the Tractatus as an "ethical deed" or as having an "ethical point"; (2) how his 'propositions' about the connection between language and the world are nonsense but at the same …

Virtues And Dying: Patient Virtues And Good Deaths, William Paul Kabasenche

Doctoral Dissertations

I argue that for most patients a good death involves more than contemporary medicine can or should be expected to provide and that virtues can secure goods not provided by medicine. Currently, medical care at the end of life focuses on addressing pain and suffering, supporting independent functioning and autonomy, providing aggressive care near death when desired, and preserving overall quality of life, among other aims. When bioethicists have discussed a good death, they have argued primarily for the provision of such services and for respect of patients’ autonomy. However, I argue that such circumstances are not sufficient by themselves …

The Tension And Coherence Of Love, Identification, And Detachment In Gandhi’S Thought, Sanjay Lal

Doctoral Dissertations

Mahatma Gandhi intended for the concepts of universal love and identification with all living beings to be seen as compatible with the traditional Hindu ideal of detachment (sannyasi). This is problematic given that love and identification entail very real degrees of psychological attachment.

After showing the significance my project has for the attempt to implement Gandhian principles in everyday, social, and political life, I give an overview of Gandhian thought in my first chapter. This overview demonstrates the plausibility of Gandhi’s ideas to philosophical Western readers. Then, in chapter 2, I explore the basis Gandhi saw for conjointly advocating love, …

Remember The Ordinary, If You Can’: Metaphor, Memory And Meaning Of 9/11 In The Leading Articles Of The Times Of London, Anne Snellen

Doctoral Dissertations

This study is developed in conjunction with the Center for Applied Phenomenological Research at the University of Tennessee and the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, to examine how the editorial pages of The Times of London sought to provide a collective understanding of the events of 9/11 during the first year after the attacks. Leaning on the methods of historiography, phenomenology, and rhetorical analysis, this study offers an interdisciplinary approach to discovering meaning translated through the interrelated processes of conjuring historical memory, inventing novel, figurative terminology, and building narrative structures to frame our understanding of events. This study considers how …

Chaucer's Questioning Impulse: Reading The Dream Visions And Troilus And Criseyde, Anita K. Bergeson

Doctoral Dissertations

Models of medieval reading often describe a process that divorces emotion from intellect or that sees the reader in a position of dominance over the text. This project examines rēden, with its overlapping meanings of interpretation, counsel, advice, and control, and reading scenes in Chaucer’s early dream visions and Troilus and Criseyde. In these poems. Chaucer uses rēden to question and reassess acts of reading as an interactive process between text and reader. In the Book of the Duchess, reading is emotive interpretation that consoles neither the narrator nor the Black Knight. The House of Fame explores reading …

Unholstered And Unquestioned: The Rise Of Post-World War Ii American Gun Cultures, Angela Frye Keaton

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine the historical roots of America's contemporary fascination with firearms. America's gun cultures reached new heights in the era after World War II due to a renewed focus on the family and national heritage and a growing preoccupation with defending traditional gender roles. In addition, the research reveals that America does not have a monolithic gun culture. Instead, multiple subcultures that flourished in the Cold War era, including one stemming from childhood play, one among recreational gunners and sport hunters, and one that flourished as a result of civil and military defense efforts. …

White Collar Radicals: New Deal Labor And Red Scare Communists In The Tennessee Valley Authority, 1935-1955, Aaron D. Purcell

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation follows the lives of fifteen former TV A employees, focusing on their 1930s activities and the subsequent 1940s and 1950s investigations into their perceived radical deeds. Collectively referred to in this dissertation as the "Knoxville Fifteen," this group includes Mabel Abercrombie, Forrest Benson, Bernard "Buck" Borah, Howard Bridgman, Katherine "Kit" Buckles, Christine Eversole, John Frantz, Howard Frazier, Henry Hart, Elizabeth Winston McConnell, David Stone Martin, William Remington, Muriel Speare, Merwin Todd, and Burton Zien. As binding criteria for the group, these fifteen individuals worked for TV A during the 1930s, had not reached 35 years of age, held …

Gender, Power, And The January-May Marriage In Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Esther Liu Godfrey

Doctoral Dissertations

In Charlotte Brontë’s 1848 Jane Eyre, Rochester’s housekeeper Mrs. Fairfax responds to Jane with certain dismay at the thought of her forty-year-old master marrying the twenty-five-year-old Blanche Ingram: “I should scarcely fancy Mr. Rochester would entertain an idea of the sort” (163). Yet to Mrs. Fairfax’s great surprise,Rochester later makes an “unequal match” with an even greater disparity in age to Jane, ultimately bringing the novel to a sentimental close. Marriages with large age differences form an important narrative frame in nineteenth-century British literature, and they conveniently merge disruptive and conservative forces. Although they play with normative codes of …