Digital Commons Network^™

Romeo And Juliet As A Dramatized Sonnet, Maxine Elizabeth Crain

Student Work

In An Apology for Poetry, Sidney repeats the ancient dictum that poesy in an “art of imitation.” He continues by explaining that poesy is essentially “a speaking picture” with an end to teach and delight. This conception of literature was not confined to the study of poetry. The writers of emblem books, common from the medieval allegory writers to the metaphysical, suggest that painting is even dumb poetry. This is not necessarily a confusion of genres, but it says something about the basic premise of this paper. The sonnet tradition and what Shakespeare wrote in his sonnet sequence, particularly Sonnets …

Renaissance Kings-Mirror Literature: The Dual Vision, Andrea Doerr

Student Work

Since man has lived in some semblance of organized society, whether banding together out of need for protection or for fellowship, he has felt a need for some form of government. Who rules? How is he selected? What powers does he have? What are his obligations to his subjects? In many primitive societies, such decisions were made on the basis of strength and brutality, which the victor becoming the ruler until someone stronger could grasp authority for himself, only to struggle consistently to remain in power. In many cases the oldest person ruled, judged to be the wisest by virtue …

Prophets Of Doom: The Views Of Jonathan Swift And George Orwell, Mardelle J. Susman

Student Work

Although some two hundred years remove them from one another, English satirist Johnathan Swift and Eric Hugh Blair (George Orwell) share a close literary kinship. Swift, the eighteenth-century author of the world classic Gulliver’s Travels, is generally recognized as the superior of the two, since he possesses the distinguished reputation of the Enlightenment man who rubbed elbows with other recognized greats, such as Alexander Pope, John Gray, Addison and Steele. Orwell, a twentieth-century man, and the son of an English soldier perhaps has not yet arrived at the same height of greatness. The author of seven novels and an essayist …

A Study Of Zillah High School's Individualized English Program For The School Year 1969-1979, Seth T. Tweedy

All Master's Theses

This thesis suggests curriculum and structural changes in the high school English classes at Zillah High School, Yakima, WA based on current research in education.

Webster's Dark Vision, Dianne Fox

Student Work

In a recent article in The Saturday Review. Edward Albee said, “Art is not escape; it is engagement.” Although he was speaking about modern theatre, it applies to the drama of all times. It is difficult to divorce a play from its environment and still expect to receive the total impact it once produced. On the other hand, it is not enough for a play to have relevance to its own time; if our age is not read, it must also speak to our sensibilities.

Eros And Miss Austen: A Selective Mythologycal Explication Of Jane Austen's Major Novels, Robert L. Corey

Student Work

A few words about method are in order before approaching Jane Austen’s six major novels with a critical method which, although frequently misunderstood or too hastily dismissed as just another tangential pseudo-science, proffers rather to the discriminating reader a critical tool of immense value moving centripetally toward deeper levels of meaning and archaic significance not only in the creative and individual powers of the artist but with the central collective myth-making and ritual of the human community as well.

The Utopian Tradition: A Comparison Of "The Republic" And "Utopia" With James Hilton's 'Lost Horizon", Laurence J. Sokol

Student Work

Utopia -- the concept more than the word -- has captured the imagination and fostered the hopes of men through thousands of years of recorded history. Behind the concept, one which various ages have redefined for their own particular situations, lies the nascent belief that humankind, working in harmony and unison, can create a better world and achieve maximum progress towards happiness.

God And Death In Selected Works Of James Agee, John William Jobst

Student Work

James Agee died in 1955; he was forty-five years old. While riding in a New York taxi cab, the author was stricken with a fatal heart attack which was not completely unexpected. Agee, a tall, gangling individual, had little regard for physical fitness and he often subsisted on heavy smoking, drinking, and all-night bull sessions. His personal appearance was his least worry as a close friend relates: his clothes were dark and shiny. I can't imagine him in a new suit. Black shoes scuffed Gray, wrinkled collar, a button off his shirt and a ravelled tie -- He wore clothes …

The Psychological And Spiritual Quest For Personal Identity In The Poetry Of Theodore Roethke, Patrick J. Stricklett

Student Work

In a panel discussion on “Identity” at Northwestern University in February of 1963, Theodore Roethke listed the major themes of his poetry; (1) the multiplicity, the chaos of modern life; (2) the way, the means of establishing a personal identity, a self, in the face of that chaos; (3) the nature of creation, that faculty for producing order out of disorder in the arts, particularly in poetry; and (4) the nature of God himself. The two major experimental sequences of poetry in Roethke’s career, included in The Lost Some and Other Poems (1948) and Praise to the End! (1951) are …

Social Criticism In The Works Of Dylan Thomas, John K. Quammen

Student Work

The genesis of this thesis is the belief that an artist's primary purpose is to communicate some aspect of human existence to his fellow man. Regardless of how the creative art is rendered, whether through the arrangement of color and texture on a canvas, or sounds in or out of harmonica chord, or shapes carved out of blocks of stone, or sounds articulated in the spoken word, the realization of the artistic process is meaningful only in the final communication of the imaginative urge which motivates an artist. Therefore, art exists for both the creation of it and the reception …

Fresh Threads Of Connection: The Role Of Imagery In George Eliot's "Middlemarch", Phyllis C. Ralph

Student Work

Although the novels of George Elliott enjoyed great contemporary success, both with the reading public and the critics, by the end of the nineteenth-century they had fallen into disfavor with both. Here they remained for many years, largely due to what was regarded as heavy-handed didacticism. They were criticized for the large amount of commentary by the author, which was felt to be overly moral an often unnecessary. George Eliot herself was held in high regard as a philosopher and moralist, but was not felt to be much of a literary artist. She wrote to preach and did not worry …

A Structural And Thematic Analysis Of The Early Picaresque Novel, Marion Grandone

Student Work

In form the picaresque novel is episodic; the hero travels from place to place meeting various people and undergoing various adventures. Since the characters of one episode seldom reappear, the incidents of one episode often have no connection with any other, the major unity is achieved only because the novel is written as the first person memoirs of a hero who appears in most of the adventures.

An Application Of A Revised Morrissett's Curriculum Analysis System To A High School English Program, Eldon Richard Loewe

All Master's Theses

The problem presented in this thesis is threefold. Taken together, these items present the bulk of work for any person attempting curriculum evaluation at the local level:

1. Meaningful evaluative information must be obtained. Instead of glib and generalized assumptions about what ought to be, one should achieve specific information relevant to the researcher as well as his departmental colleagues.

2. The information must relate to other studies so that a larger curriculum analysis will result. If the soundest method of national evaluation is to create concrete building blocks locally, these individual studies must mesh to provide something larger and …