Browsing by Author "Grob, Alan"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Battles, beasts, and banquets: pattern of imagery in Much Ado About Nothing
    (1981) Gammill, Karen Russell; Huston, J. Dennis; Skura, Meredith; Grob, Alan
    To date, the three most important works on Shakespearean imagery are Caroline Spurgeon's Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us, Edward Armstrong's Shakespeare's Imagination, and translated from the German, Wolfgang Clemen's The Development of Shakespeare's Imagery. Surprisingly, though, only Clemen attempts to relate image-clusters to the theme of each play—and has nothing to say about Much Ado about Nothing. My thesis traces three patterns of imagery through the play and attempts to relate changes in the use of these three images to the development of the characters and the theme of the play. The image of battle pervades Much Ado on many levels, from the "skirmish of wit" between Beatrice and Benedick to the conflict over Hero's reputation and Beatrice's demand that Benedick "Kill Claudio." In Benedick and Claudio, Shakespeare gives us two variations of Miles Gloriosus; romantic and anti-romantic pride contrast in the two characters. Ultimately, Benedick's use of battle imagery confirms a change in his entire approach to life and love. His main concern is no longer to avoid humiliation, and Beatrice's "paper bullets of the brain" no longer deter him. The play finally comes full circle back to a comic use of battle imagery, with Benedick "dying" in Beatrice's lap by. the end of the play. Animal imagery serves to point up the changing patterns of predators within the play; characters are transformed from predators to prey very quickly. Also emphasized are the characters' efforts to bait or trap one another into love, anger, or deception. Animal imagery strengthens the undercurrent of sexuality between Beatrice and Benedick in particular, and ultimately highlights the changes these two characters undergo as Beatrice vows to "tame my wild heart" and Benedick shrugs off ridicule to assert that "the only reverent staff is one tipped with horn." I have divided banquet imagery into two separate chapters, one dealing with images of food and eating, the other dealing with images of song and dance; the movement of the two sets of images in the play is parallel. Much Ado begins with a homecoming feast and masque, and these traditional symbols of community are disrupted with the plottings of various attending characters. As the play then moves into darkness, images of eating become expressions of aggression, while the light songs of the early play become a dirge for Hero's "death." As do the other two images, the banquet metaphor comes full circle; Much Ado ends with a wedding feast and dance, and our awareness in this final scene of community is heightened by the changes that these three sets of images have undergone.
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    Matthew Arnold and democracy
    (1981) Laigle, Ruth Louise; Grob, Alan; Piper, William B.; Morris, Wesley
    This thesis is a study of Matthew Arnold's "democracy" as it is defined and explained in select examples of his critical essays, especially in Culture and Anarchy. This first part of the thesis sets forth some of the literary theories and attitudes which have bearing on Arnold's views of society, for behind every critical judgment of literature that he will make lies a social and political judgment. It covers the "Preface to the First Edition of Poems, 1853," the essay on "Literary Influence of Academies," the political pamphlet on "England and the Italian Question," and the essays entitled "Democracy" and "Equality." It attempts to show the ideas, influences, and methods present in these essays which bear fruit in Culture and Anarchy and which contribute to an understanding of Arnold's "democracy". I have also made brief mention of his views on America and on religion. The second part of the thesis is a discussion of Culture and Anarchy, the work which ranks as a political and educational classic, and the one in which Arnold presents his famous notion of the State, and his discussion of Hebraism, Hellenism, and culture. The conclusion attempts to make clear, finally, what "democracy" finally is to Matthew Arnold.
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    The "unspeakable" quality of E. M. Forster's narrative voice
    (1991) Fleming, Madeline Joan; Grob, Alan
    This dissertation is an examination of the complex problem of narrative voice in three novels of E. M. Forster. Much of the recent critical commentary on Forster's narrative voice either discusses narrative voice as an extension of character, or discusses narrative voice as a biographical and psychological extension of Forster. Despite these approaches to Forster's narrative voice, Forster's narrative voice continues to "irritate" us, as it did Lionel Trilling in 1944, in its "refusal to be great." I examine Forster's narrative voice as an autonomous element disconnected from the trappings of characterological, biographical and psychological criticism. I discuss how the narrative voice develops a moral and philosophical view that begins with a pessimism about the possibility of human relationships in Where Angels Fear To Tread, continues with a fantasy of perfectly unified relationships in A Room With A View, and culminates in A Passage To India in which the narrative voice promises unity and continuance through an implied acceptance of metaphysical and metaphorical assumptions. The protagonists in the three novels that I discuss all have an experience which they cannot define in words. The characters' inability to define experience parallels the narrative voice's detachment from the reader, and it also foreshadows the narrative voice's ultimate refusal to provide a definition, or an interpretation of itself. The characters' inability to define experience makes them appear to be characters who are limited, or "flat" stereotypes; and in all three cases, the protagonist requires another figure to act as an intermediary between it and the totalizing experience of "the other." This intermediary figure provides character with a circumlocutory interpretation of experience; and it therefore evokes the characters' simultaneous desire and inability to describe the subject of its experience. This circumlocutory figure becomes a figure that exposes and exists within the implied space between character and narrative voice, and the narrative voice and the reader. When the narrative voice describes a character's use of a circumlocutory figure, it points to both the character's, and its own elision.
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