Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Sacred Mnemonics In Late Medieval England: Ars Memoria In The Hagiography Of Osbern Bokenham, Erica C. Leighton

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines the practice and understanding of the ancient ars memoria (art of memory) tradition in late medieval England. Using the work of fifteenth-century Augustinian friar Osbern Bokenham, I argue that his hagiography demonstrates a pronounced engagement with both ancient ars memoria techniques and original medieval adaptations and expansions of these narrative mnemonic strategies. The late medieval ars memoria, therefore, speaks to the education and training that allowed for complex and fluid approaches to mnemonic narration.

Bokenham’s surviving body of work includes a set of commissioned female saints’ lives entitled Legendys of Hooly Wummen, and a sizeable …

Education, Migration And Development Panel, Henri Boyi

Africa-Western Collaborations Day 2020

8 graduate students/recent graduate presentations on education, migration and development. Moderated by Dr. Henri Boyi. Reporting of panel done by current GHS students of the 2021 class. Abstracts can be found under "Africa-Western Collaborations Day 2020 Abstracts". Presenters as follows:

Jemima Nomunume Baada, "Experiences of Social Reproduction among Migrant Women in the Brong-Ahafo Region of Ghana"

Elmond Bandauko, "This is a Good Place to Live! Narratives and Counternarratives on Territorial Stigmatization in Harare's Informal Settlements"

Chinelo Ezenwa, "A History of 19th Century European Missionaries in Colonial Africa with Specific References to the Impact of Missionary Schools"

Rebecca Jackson, Jade Rozal, …

Material Witness: Occult Affects In The Mystery Fiction Of The Fin De Siècle, Thomas Matthew Stuart

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

As the nineteenth century progressed, Spiritualism blossomed from a religious movement to a cultural moment. While it remained an object of faith or ancillary faith, Spiritualism became as well a voice for radical reform, parlour entertainment, means of negotiating an increasingly mediated world, and so forth. Combined with enthusiasm for occult knowledge, Spiritualism offered intricately interrelated modes of narrating our relation to a consistently present past, in light of a rapidly approaching future. My project reads this fin-de-siècle fascination as a sensibility. Occult figures and spiritualist impulses, I argue, provide a vocabulary of feelings evoked in encounters with the mysterious. …

Critiquing Psychiatry, Narrating Trauma: Madness In Twentieth-Century North American Literature And Film, Sarah Blanchette

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation explores representations of trauma and mental distress in twentieth-century novels and films. Drawn on research that emphasizes the ways that marginalized communities—in particular women-coded, racialized, and Indigenous persons—have historically been pathologized, the thesis considers how select novels and films query biomedical approaches to mental illness and critique psychiatric contexts, which prioritize social control more than they provide substantive and humane forms of support and care. How might representations of trauma and mental distress be understood without confirming regimes of psy-authority or psy-power? The thesis takes up this core issue by building on theories drawn from Mad Studies, illuminating …

Atmosphere And Religious Experience In American Transcendentalism, Thomas Sorensen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

I propose a new intellectual history of how the aesthetic obtains religious value in the American literary tradition. According to the account that prevails from Perry Miller to Tracy Fessenden, the Transcendentalists collapse scripture and literature into a single secular category. I argue instead that the Transcendentalists redraw the distinction along aesthetic criteria. A text’s sacred status has little to do with who wrote it when, and everything to do with a particular aesthetic quality expressive of divine inspiration. Scholarship has neglected two concepts instrumental to this development: the religious sentiment and atmosphere. Unitarian and Calvinist norms held all religious …

Malory, Chivalric Medievalism, And New Imperialist Masculinity, Andrew Livecchi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Over the course of the nineteenth century, Sir Thomas Malory’s fifteenth-century work of Arthurian romance, Le Morte Darthur, underwent significant reevaluation, from being warily considered a trivial, morally problematic text to being hailed as a national epic with a central place in the English canon. This shift in Malory’s status coincided with the rise of an increasingly competitive and unabashedly aggressive model of imperialism in the 1870s, which historians conventionally term New Imperialism. At the same time, a new model of masculinity emerged, one that bemoaned the “decadence” of the modernized, leisurely man and that celebrated the hypermasculine ideal …

Duration And Depravity: Religious And Secular Temporality In Puritanism And The American Gothic, Taylor Kraayenbrink

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Duration and Depravity identifies a temporality of “sinful feeling” operating in the archive of Puritan writings of personal piety, such as diaries, autobiographies, conversion narratives, and sermons, and persisting into early American gothic literature. This temporality of sinful feeling is an attempt to discipline the self through temporal projection oriented towards the theological fact and religiously experienced feeling of sinfulness. Duration and Depravity engages with the proliferation of postsecular criticism in American literature studies generally, and Puritan studies more specifically. Postsecular criticism in literary studies is a style of historicism that reconsiders its primary archive’s position in newly complicated narratives …

A History Of 19th Century European Missionaries In Colonial Africa With Specific References To The Impact Of Missionary Schools, Chinelo Ezenwa

Africa Western Collaborations Day 2020 Abstracts

No abstract provided.

The Poetics Of Sunyata: Conveying The Unconveyable Of Emptiness, Simon Stan

2020 Undergraduate Awards

Can the language of philosophy adequately articulate emptiness and nothingness? Rather, might poetry articulate that which conventional philosophical writing fails to achieve? Tasked with articulating the very nature of emptiness is Keiji Nishitani (Japanese philosopher and prominent scholar of the Kyoto School). In his seminal book entitled Religion and Nothingness, Nishitani discusses at length the standpoint of śūnyatā (otherwise known as emptiness). In many ways, Nishitani eloquently situates into dialogue both poetry and philosophy with the goal of unravelling a deeper understanding of the human condition. By employing poetry throughout his work, Nishitani capitalizes on the experiential and aesthetic contributions …

Consultation With The Self: The Diary As Speakability In “A Castaway”, Simon Stan

2020 Undergraduate Awards

Together with the diary and dramatic monologue, Augusta Webster’s poem “A Castaway” achieves a fiercely critical appraisal of Victorian society and the subjugation of its female community. Provoking the performativity of the monologue, the diary enables and empowers the voice of the protagonist, affording a space—A Room of One’s Own—to sincerely and persuasively relay the societal injustices that pervade the life of the Victorian sex worker and that thrust them into the darker, morally depraved recesses of Victorian society. The novelty of this paper is its investigation of the purpose of the diary as it relates to dramatic monologue and …

Babble, Babble, Words: The Solitary Child, The Absent Father, And The Roles Of Codependence, Love And Storytelling In Samuel Beckett’S Endgame, Elliott K. Cooper

2020 Undergraduate Awards

Samuel Beckett’s Endgame can be a very uncomfortable experience for readers or the audiences it is performed for. The atmosphere it creates is almost unrelentingly bleak, with very little signs of hope for the future or for the characters we’re introduced to. For victims of codependent relationships - particularly those that involved parental abuse, neglect and manipulation - the discomfort portrayed may be all too familiar. This essay explores Endgame as a depiction of the oppressive dynamics of a broken home which outlines the generational nature of trauma, poverty and disability. It examines the narrative through the lens of psychology, …