Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
English Language and Literature Commons™
Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Keyword
-
- Enlightenment (2)
- Ethics (2)
- Philosophy (2)
- Aesthetics (1)
- Alexander Pope (1)
-
- American literary naturalism (1)
- Buddha (1)
- Buddhism (1)
- Butcher's Crossing (1)
- Charity (1)
- Charles Dickens (1)
- Coetzee (1)
- Compassion (1)
- Crane (1)
- Critical Science (1)
- Criticism (1)
- Crousaz (1)
- Dos Passos (1)
- Doubt (1)
- Eighteenth Century (1)
- Enthusiasm (1)
- Flannery O'Connor (1)
- George Eliot (1)
- Humiliation (1)
- Israel (1)
- John Williams (1)
- Justice (1)
- Kabbalah (1)
- Kant (1)
- Leibniz (1)
- Publication
- Publication Type
Articles 1 - 10 of 10
Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
Negative Realism: Reading The Novels Of John Williams, William Wells
Negative Realism: Reading The Novels Of John Williams, William Wells
Masters Theses
This thesis attempts to posit a dynamic theory of literary realism that accounts not only for the commonly understood “historical” realisms of the 18th and 19th centuries, but for the more fluid realisms that arise in the modern and postmodern eras. Realisms of this sort are still understood to be expressions of particular, sociohistorical eras, but these expressions must be understood to be subject to material change in society. This paper breaks, then, with traditional Marxist conceptions of realism as the direct response to enlightenment thought and early capitalism, and instead argues for traceable eruptions of realism throughout …
Echoes Of Leibniz In Pope’S Essay On Man: Criticism And Cultural Shift In The Eighteenth Century, Sierra Billingslea
Echoes Of Leibniz In Pope’S Essay On Man: Criticism And Cultural Shift In The Eighteenth Century, Sierra Billingslea
Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee
This paper is an examination of the intellectual relationship between Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man and the philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. This relationship was accentuated by Crousaz, a Swiss critic, who accused Pope of plagiarizing Leibniz’s misguided philosophy due to the evidence of Leibniz’s Principle of the Best, Principle of Sufficient Reason, and Principle of Continuity found within An Essay on Man. This paper argues that both Leibniz and Popes’ philosophies do not reflect a direct relationship but instead share the spirit of Augustan thought as well as a similar classical upbringing. Crousaz and other critics who criticized …
Sketches, Impressions And Confessions: Literature As Experiment In The Nineteenth Century, Andrew Ragsdale Lallier
Sketches, Impressions And Confessions: Literature As Experiment In The Nineteenth Century, Andrew Ragsdale Lallier
Doctoral Dissertations
In this dissertation, I argue for the existence and critical relevance of a program of experimental literature in the long nineteenth century, developed in the aesthetics of German Romanticism and adapted in a set of texts by Thomas De Quincey, Charles Dickens and George Eliot. My introduction positions this argument in context of larger debates concerning form, theory and literary capacity, provides points of connection between these authors, and outlines the most prominent features of experimental literature. In the first chapter, I present an unorthodox reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, accompanied by a brief account of the literary-critical …
The "Vast And Terrible" Trauma: American Literary Naturalism, Ethics, And Levinas, Tyler Joseph Efird
The "Vast And Terrible" Trauma: American Literary Naturalism, Ethics, And Levinas, Tyler Joseph Efird
Doctoral Dissertations
In an 1896 essay, Frank Norris wrote that the reading world should abandon those “teacup tragedies” to which it had grown accustomed and embrace a new literature that would depict a “vast and terrible drama.” Realism, Norris claimed, could not be used to achieve an earnest portrait of the conditions that mark individual lives under capitalism. Instead, the world needed a romantic wrestling with the forces of existential inscrutability. Also, the perceived need for literature to depict a clear ethical system needed revising from the perspective of American literary naturalism, a school long denigrated for apparent moral vacuity. Through excruciating …
Flannery O'Connor And The Mystery Of Justice, Matthew Holland Bryant Cheney
Flannery O'Connor And The Mystery Of Justice, Matthew Holland Bryant Cheney
Masters Theses
The purpose of this study will be to begin to answer the question, “What is ‘justice’ in the work of Flannery O’Connor?” by approaching three stories—“The Comforts of Home,” “The Partridge Festival,” and finally “Everything that Rises Must Converge.” Each of these stories applies pressure to both individual and social conceptions of justice while fixating primarily on individuals’ just or unjust convictions and principles, usually in tension with those of their family or community. Flannery O’Connor’s work, while it seriously questions the possibility of “perfect” justice among a fallen humanity, exemplifies the paradoxes that arise from the contingency of our …
Deronda And The Tigress: Judaism, Buddhism, And Universal Compassion In George Eliot’S Daniel Deronda, Joshua Frank Moats
Deronda And The Tigress: Judaism, Buddhism, And Universal Compassion In George Eliot’S Daniel Deronda, Joshua Frank Moats
Masters Theses
Many scholars have discussed Judaism and the ethics of George Eliot in Daniel Deronda, but few have explored the impact of Buddhism upon the novel. This thesis is the first study to demonstrate the influence of Buddhism upon George Eliot's fiction. By tracing Eliot's interest in the emerging field of comparative religion, I argue that Buddhism offered Eliot a unique religion that was compatible with her secular humanism. Although Buddhism appears explicitly in Deronda in only a few instances, I contend that Eliot uses the tradition of Jewish mysticism known as Kabbalism as the predominant theology in Deronda because …
Collateral: Poems, Joshua Jon Robbins
Collateral: Poems, Joshua Jon Robbins
Doctoral Dissertations
In the lyric tradition of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Terrible Sonnets and James Wright’s odes to the Midwest, the poems in Collateral interrogate the complexities of faith and doubt in middle-class America and present a witness compelled to translate suburbia’s landscapes and evangelical banalities into a testimony of hard truths. These poems explore the emotional exhaustion that accompanies language’s broken connection to ideal meaning and how both are unable to fully correspond to our lives. The manuscript is also an exploration of my own corresponding lyric struggle to reconcile what is and what should be, the personal and the political …
Writing Duty: Religion, Obligation And Autonomy In George Eliot And Kant, Andrew Ragsdale Lallier
Writing Duty: Religion, Obligation And Autonomy In George Eliot And Kant, Andrew Ragsdale Lallier
Masters Theses
Connections between George Eliot and Immanuel Kant have been, for the most part, neglected. However, we have good reason to believe that Eliot not only read Kant (as well as many who were directly influenced by Kant), but substantially agreed with him on critical and moral issues. This thesis investigates one of the issues on which Kant and Eliot were most closely aligned, the need for duty in morality. Both the English novelist and the German philosopher upheld a vision of duty that could command absolutely while remaining consonant with human freedom and grounding a sense of moral dignity. This …
The Therapy Of Humiliation: Towards An Ethics Of Humility In The Works Of J.M. Coetzee, Ajitpaul Singh Mangat
The Therapy Of Humiliation: Towards An Ethics Of Humility In The Works Of J.M. Coetzee, Ajitpaul Singh Mangat
Masters Theses
This work asks how and for whom humiliation can be therapeutic. J. M. Coetzee, in his works Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K and Disgrace, does not simply critique the mentality of Empire, an “Enlightenment” or colonialist mode of knowing that knows no bounds to reason, but offers an alternative through the Magistrate, Michael K and David Lurie, all of whom are brutally shamed and “abjected”. Each character, I propose, experiences a Lacanian “therapy of humiliation” resulting in a subversion of their egos, which they come to understand as antagonistic, a site of …
Searching For America: The Development Of The Immigrant Narrative Across Jewish, African, Cuban, And Korean American Literature, Amanda Maree Lawrence
Searching For America: The Development Of The Immigrant Narrative Across Jewish, African, Cuban, And Korean American Literature, Amanda Maree Lawrence
Doctoral Dissertations
Searching for America: The Development of the Immigrant Narrative across Jewish, African, Cuban, and Korean American Literature is a longitudinal study that traces and accounts for the development of immigrant literature within specific ethnic groups, focusing on how different generations rewrite the immigrant narrative of their own cultures. Considering multiple texts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by Jewish, African, Cuban, and Korean American authors, I examine the changing relationship between language or literary form and identity politics for each group. In addition to exploring individual patterns of development, I suggest ways in which these very different ethnic texts speak …