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Toward A Theory Of Narrative Rhetoric, Edwardo Raul Perez

English Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation suggests that the question of whether or not America should employ torture as a means of fighting a post-9/11 War on Terror was not so much debated as it was asserted (in the affirmative) by the presidential administration of George W. Bush and the news media contemporary to his administration. Building on an observation by media researcher Sasha Torres, who recognized a representation of thinking on television that served to counter the Bush Administration and the media, this dissertation investigates how television functioned as an alternate forum for a debate on torture by examining the narratives of three …

Dramatic Immediacy And Imaginative Distortion In Robert Olen Butler's "Anne Boleyn," Severance, Alice Clark

Short Story

No abstract provided.

Acting Virtuous: Chastity, Theatricality, And The Tragedie Of Mariam, Kent Lehnhof

English Faculty Books and Book Chapters

Given the interrelation of female chastity and female theatricality in early modem discourses, it comes as no surprise that both figure importantly in what is believed to be the first original English drama to be written by a woman. As Elizabeth Cary explores a Jewish queen 's sexual purity in The Tragedie of Mariam, she does so by concentrating on questions of performance. Cary's title character explicitly abjures theatricality even as she embraces chastity, creating a fissure in Renaissance discourses on women that threatens to swallow up the antifeminist idea that female chastity is always an act.

Evangelical Literacies: Predestination And Print, 1739-1740, Jennifer Snead

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

In his 1744 The Reverend Mr. Whitefield's Answer to the Bishop of London's Last Pastoral Letter, the controversial evangelical George Whitefield claimed that he would indeed own up to any of his writings found "blameable in any Respect:' Reader John Holmes of Exeter commented in the margins of his copy, "Oh ho! And how do you know and distinguish your mistakes from verities? Supposing that there are any verities and realities:'1 Frank Lambert, in his 1994 study of Whitefield in the context of transatlantic print culture, cites Holmes's marginalia as an instance of "readers... [ engaging] in dialogue with writers …

Front Matter

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

No abstract provided.

Early American Mikvaot: Ritual Baths As The Hope Of Israel, Laura Arnold Leibman

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

On July 27, 1656, at the age of twenty-three, Baruch Spinoza was cast out of the Jewish community of Amsterdam. In a proclamation read publicly in the Portuguese Synagogue, the "Lords of the ma'amad" [Synagogue Board] declared that,

having long known of the evil opinions and the acts of Baruch de Spinoza... [and] having failed to make him mend his wicked ways, and, on the contrary, daily receiving more and more serious information about the abominable heresies which he practiced and taught and about his monstrous deeds... [we] have decided... that the said Espinoza should be excommunicated and expelled …

Preface, Brett C. Mcinelly

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

As I was breaking into the profession some years ago, religion was a mere blip on my radar of scholarly interests. Having come through graduate school in the 1990s, I naturally followed disciplinary trends in literary and eighteenth-century studies, focusing much of my research on issues of race, class, and gender and examining the relationships between Britain's imperial history and the literature and culture of the period. Religion factored into my queries at times, say, in considering the ways Crusoe's Protestantism informed his sense of self while taking possession of a West Indian island. But religion itself remained on the …

"Expectation And Amendment Maketh Me To Become An Usurer": Usury, Providentialism, And The Age Of Projects, Dwight D. Codr

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

In an Internet postscript to his 1989 history of usury, Norman Jones remarks that "by the eighteenth century the moral issue of usury was no longer of interest to most Protestant thinkers. In practice lending at interest with collateral had become normal, as had deposit banking:'1 Indeed, usury itself was of relatively minor importance to economic theorization and debate in the eighteenth century when compared to the financial debates of the period Jones's work covers, 1571-1624, spanning Elizabeth's Act Against Usury and the Usury Act of 1624. During the earlier period, usury was not simply linked to an emerging system …

The Primitive Church, The Primitive Mind, And Methodism In The Eighteenth Century, Kathryn Stasio, Micheal J. Stasio

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

In The Evangelist of Desire: John Wesley and the Methodists, Henry Abelove reminds his readers that Methodism was part of a larger evangelical movement that began in the 1730s but, while it grew, other sects barely sustained their numbers or disappeared entirely. Citing Frank Baker, Abelove notes that when Wesley died in 1791, Methodists owned 558 preaching houses in the British Isles, and membership totaled 72,476.1 Abelove then chronicles Wesley's ability to lead the Methodist movement, crediting much of its success to the force of Wesley's personality. Yet not all of Wesley's contemporaries found him so charming, as the anti-Methodist …

Sermon Publishing, Clerical Reading, And John Wilkins's Ecclesiastes, 1646-1750, Rosemary Dixon

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Francis Bacon had little to say about the study of divinity in The Advancement of Learning (1605), his critical survey of the state of knowledge at the turn of the seventeenth century. In contrast to the other fields of learning Bacon explored, divinity needed but little encouragement: "For I can finde no space or ground that lieth vacant and vnsowne in the matter of Diuinitie, so diligent haue men beene, either in sowing of good seede, or in sowing of Tares:' Bacon did, however, have an intriguing suggestion for a hypothetical theological book:

that forme of writing in Diuinitie, which …

The Holy Surprise Party: Glimpses Of Divinity In Suddenly Emerging Literary, Artistic, And Geographical Settings, 1660-1785, Kevin L. Cope

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Antiquity, eternity, and expectation often intersect in outof- the-way environments. In rural southwest Louisiana, an unlikely venue in which to encounter the Ancient of Days, the Zigler Museum, a pair of exhibition halls housed in an incongruous, somewhat less than Cajun colonial-style building, displays its collection of eighteenth-century paintings beneath an optimistic sign reading "The Age of Reason:' The symmetrically arranged portraits gaze on an imagined focal point near the center of the room while scattered landscape paintings open windows on a mild English pastoral world far away from rice fields and crawfish ponds. Imported memories of a British culture …

Front Matter - Table Of Contents

Short Story

No abstract provided.

Liminal Practice In A Maturing Writing Department, Louise Wetherbee Phelps

English Faculty Publications

[First Paragraph]

In Spring 2011 I was awarded a Fulbright Specialist Grant to "consult, collaborate, and inform" on the future of the Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications at the University of Winnipeg, located in the city of Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada. The Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications department (hereafter, RWC) was a pioneer in writing instruction in Canada, where it became the first unit to establish itself independently as a department with a full-‐time faculty committed to both teaching and scholarship in writing and rhetoric. It remains a rare phenomenon on the Canadian higher education scene, where studies …

"Play Your Fan": Exploring Hand Props And Gender On The Restoration Stage Through The Country Wife, The Man Of Mode, The Rover, And The Way Of The World, Jarred Wiehe

Theses and Dissertations

The full irony and wit of Restoration comedies relies not only on what characters communicate to each other, but also on what they communicate to the audience, both verbally and physically. Hand props help foster this important relationship with the audience as props provide moments of dramatic irony where the visual meaning portrayed through the object complicates the verbal text. Specifically, gendered props such as the fan, the sword, and the pistol visually establish conventions for the sexes, yet are also used to subvert these conventions through gesture, appropriation, or misuse. Thus far, the critical conversation concerning the possibility of …

Purpose Found: Conditions Of Meaningful Existence, Selfhood And The Role Of The Other In John Milton's Paradise Lost, Anna Sawch

Honors Theses

While Biblical interpretations of Genesis posit God as omnipotent creator and teacher, in John Milton's Paradise Lost it is Adam and Eve‟s relationship and interactions with one another that make them who they are and mold them into who they become. The Adam and Eve of Paradise Lost are true characters, and dynamic ones at that. Rather than serve an allegory or work to create a lofty moral lesson, Adam and Eve grow through speech, desire, and language, interfacing with one another in the spirit of true human curiosity and self-discovery. I first explored this observation that Milton's Adam and …

Recalling Walden: Thoreau's Embodied Aesthetics And Australian Writings On Place, John Charles Ryan

Research outputs 2011

This essay argues that the works of the nineteenth-century American philosopher, poet, and naturalist Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) have moulded Australian place writings of the last one hundred years. Beginning with the foundational work into Australian literature done by the American critics C. Hartley Grattan (1902-1980), A. Grove Day (1904-1994), and Joseph Jones (1908-1999), the article goes on to contextualize the discussion in the contemporary transhemispherical scholarship of Australian literary historian Harry Heseltine and American ecocritic Robert Zeller. Both syncretic and embodied, Thoreau’s literary approach to place draws from a fusion of multi-sensory experience, ethnographic inquiry, and bodily participation in …

Women And Bodily Separation In Literature From The Victorian Era Until Today, Delisa Leonard

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

The dualities that are often associated with female characters have taken many forms throughout the centuries. In the Victorian era, female characters were often presented as dual natured; oftentimes this division was represented through the use of a madwoman and a heroine. In the early 20th century, however, this motif was picked up by female poets, who used duality in order to express the disconnect women often feel from their family, their friends, and, especially, their bodies. In today‟s literature, these feelings of duality and separation are expressed through a literal separation, not between good and evil, but of body …

All Shall Be Well: Julian And Bartholomew, Ena Taylor

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The creative content of my thesis has been developed from a personal experience that became the catalyst, and source material for the creative part of the novella All Shall Be Well: Julian and Bartholomew. The essay, and the preface to the creative side, situates the thesis as a work of reflection and memoir combining with creativity, and proposes that threads of beliefs and feelings, represented in the social, and the cultural life of the English fourteenth century, are also relevant to, and for those to be found in contemporary society. This applies particularly to the importance of compassion in society, …

The Power Of Words: The Use Of Language In Ethan Frome, Heather Faye Spear

Masters Theses

Edith Wharton's novel, Ethan Frome, has been sharply criticized for its tragic ending, yet Wharton's compelling storytelling which depicts universal conditions of mankind accomplishes something powerful through its narrative: it defends language. The complicated relationship between the three main characters, Zeena, Ethan, and Mattie is rooted in their utilization of language. Using a combination of close reading for textual analysis and identifying a communicative style for each character, this thesis asserts that how the characters in this novel utilize language contests the meaninglessness and relativity supported by deconstructionists. Wharton clearly illustrates Zeena's linguistic power over both Ethan and Mattie, and …

The Marine, My Students, And Me, Kim Irvine

The Utah English Journal

My philosophy of education and learning is simple. I believe that all students can learn. I believe that student learning is incumbent upon me, the teacher. I believe that the future of the quality of life for each of my students is directly related to whether or not they learn what I have to teach them. I believe that authentic learning can only occur in an informed, stimulating, and safe environment, and I believe that the creation of that environment is my responsibility.