Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Enchantment: A Teleology, Nathanael S. Toth

Senior Honors Theses

Despite the highly developed nature of his fictional world, Middle-earth, Tolkien never formally laid out a tabulated magic system for his fantasy creation. Nevertheless, unlike many stories by others in the fantasy genre, the magic he does include is far from just a shallow, world-building mechanism. Instead, it encapsulates the core theme of his fiction and the purposes which Ilúvatar (the God of Middle-earth) has given to the story’s many characters.

This paper will examine the nature and function of this magic from many angles: the identification of good magic with art and evil magic with domination; the delineation between …

Double/Cross: Erasure In Theory And Poetry, John Nyman

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation investigates the implications of overt textual erasure on literary and philosophical meaning, especially with reference to the poststructuralist phenomenological tradition culminating in the work of Jacques Derrida. Responding both to the emergence of “erasure poetry” as a recognizable genre of experimental literature and to the relative paucity of serious scholarship on Derrida’s “writing under erasure,” I focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary and philosophical works in which visible evidence of erasure is an intended component of the finished (i.e., printed and disseminated) document. Erasure, I argue, performs a complex doubling or double/crossing of meaning according to two asymmetrically …

Les Auteures Surréalistes : French And Francophone Women Surrealist Writers -- Joyce Mansour, Valentine Penrose And Gisèle Prassinos, Maitland Sierra Dunwoody

Masters Theses

The notion of the “author” and the purpose of its existence have been the subject of many contemporary debates, with Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault as key. For Barthes, language defines a literary work and the author is relegated to a minor place. And he believes that certain movements, surrealism as an example, effectively aided in the “death” of the author. Though that may sometimes be the case, within the movement of surrealism the author and their language are of almost equal importance – which differs entirely from Barthes’ view considering his notions on the surrealist movement and authorship. In …

A Philosophical Analysis Of Intellectual Property: In Defense Of Instrumentalism, Michael A. Kanning

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis argues in favor of an instrumental approach to Intellectual Property (IP). I begin by reviewing justifications for IP that have been offered in recent literature, including Lockean labor theory, Hegelian personality theory, Kantian property theory and utilitarianism. Upon a close and careful analysis, I argue that none of these justifications suffice to ground contemporary IP practice. I review some recent works that offer `pluralist' justifications for IP, which draw from multiple theories in order to account for the diverse field of IP-related laws and practices in existence. I argue that these pluralist theories are also insufficient, because there …

An Incompatibility Between Intentionalism And Multiple Authorship In Film, Steven Christopher Hager

Philosophy Theses

The multiple authorship view for film is the claim that multiple authors exist for almost any given film. This view is a recent development in opposition to the longstanding single authorship view which holds that there is only one author for every film, usually the director. One of the most often-cited reasons in support of the multiple authorship claim is that multiple authorship views more successfully explain the following fact about filmmaking better than single authorship views: filmmakers’ intentions sometimes conflict with each other during the production of a film. However, since multiple authorship views cannot adequately explain how a …

Foucault And Derrida: The Question Of Empowering And Disempowering The Author, Antonio Calcagno

Antonio Calcagno

This article focuses on Michel Foucault’s concepts of authorship and power. Jacques Derrida has often been accused of being more of a literary author than a philosopher or political theorist. Richard Rorty complains that Derrida’s views on politics are not pragmatic enough; he sees Derrida’s later work, including his political work, more as a “private self-fashioning” than concrete political thinking aimed at devising short-term solutions to problems here and now. Employing Foucault’s work around authorship and the origins of power, I show that Derrida is indeed fashioning himself. This self-fashioning is not merely private or fanciful. Rather, I argue that …

The Unfortunate Traveller And The Ramist Controversy: A Narrative Dilemma, Kurtis B. Haas

Quidditas

The narrative and rhetorical structure of Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller has vexed its critics almost since its initial appearance in 1593. Most modern critics have followed a line something akin to that of G.R. Hibbard, who sees Nashe as a writer unable at times to distinguish his own voice from that of the narrator, Jack Wilton. Stephen Hilliard’s study of Nashe notes the critical tendency to see The Unfortunate Traveller as “a formless work, spun out by a careless author with no fixed purpose” and, though he chides such critics for ignoring its many virtues, grants that they likely …

Unethical Author Attribution, Charles Weijer, Akira Akabayashi

Charles Weijer

I am an M.D/Ph.D. student and work as a research assistant for the director of a division of the school of medicine who is an M.D. He assigned me to research a certain topic and gave me no guidelines or guidance as to how to do it. Nevertheless, I did the research and wrote it up. My supervisor liked the report and said that he thought it was so good that “I would like to offer you the opportunity to publish it and list you as the primary author.” Some bells went off when he so grandly offered to let …

The Changing Understanding Of The Making Of Europe From Christopher Dawson To Robert Bartlett, Glenn W. Olsen

Quidditas

Two books with the same title, The Making of Europe, published sixty-one years apart, may help us assess profound shifts that have taken place in the understanding of Europe over the last two-thirds of the twentieth century. Both books were or are by master, if quite dissimilar, historians. Though the books share the same title, profound differences, perhaps the program of each author, is revealed in their subtitles. For Christopher Dawson (1889–1970), arguably the most eminent Catholic historian of the twentieth century, The Making of Europe was An Introduction to the History of European Unity (London, 1932). As a …

The Speaking Elephant: Rightly Dividing Macdonald's Fairy Tales, Darren Hotmire

Inklings Forever: Published Colloquium Proceedings 1997-2016

Due to the mythopoetic nature of George MacDonald’s writings many interpretations have arisen as to the meaning of his work. By studying his sermons, letters, and other writings we can discover the intended meanings of his Fairy Tales.

Presented at the 1997 Frances White Ewbank Colloquium.

Draft Of New Versus Old Authors - 1990, Wendy J. Gordon

Scholarship Chronologically

Virtually all the issues canvassed above embody the tension that exists in seeking to honor the interests of two generations of creators. For example, the essay has discussed the need for new adaptive artists to have a copyright in their own productions and the dangers that the "subconscious copying rule" poses to new creators, particularly in an age of ubiquitous media.

An Airborne Rescuer From The North In El Paso: "Ruggiero" Or "Perseus"? "Hippogriff" Or "Horse"?, John F. Moffitt

Quidditas

I. A Question of Procedure

Uncovering Women's Writings: Two Early Italian Women Poets, Paola Malpezzi Price

Quidditas

If ever there [were] a time which teaches that one must know the history of women to understand the history of literature, it is now.

Review Essay: Eric Sams, Ed, Shakespeare's Lost Play "Edmund Ironside", Charles L. Squier

Quidditas

Eric Sams, ed., Shakespeare's Lost Play "Edmund Ironside," St. Martin's Press, 1985.