R-3 Repository :: Browsing by Author "Isle, Walter W."

Browsing by Author "Isle, Walter W."

Now showing 1 - 20 of 20

An analysis of John Dos Passos' Streets of Night and its seminal effect on Manhattan Transfer and U.S.A
(1968) Breedlove, Nancy Elizabeth P; Isle, Walter W.
Common to all of John Dos Passos' early novels is a pessimistic view of man's ability to fulfill himself and to make a worthy contribution to society at the same time. The author's philosophy has been examined with respect to almost all of his early novels culminating in U.S.A, except for Streets of Night. Although Streets of Night is an immature work, in an overall analysis of Dos Passos' work the novel merits study. The characters in Streets of Night may be no more than stereotypes, but they represent types that Dos Passos repeatedly uses. Chapter One of the thesis is an analysis of the three main characters -- Fanshaw Macdougan, David Wendell, and Nancibel Taylor--to establish what the types are from whom Dos Passos draws his characters in Manhattan Transfer and U.S.A. Simultaneously the study shows that lifeless as the characters are, they are drawn with a precision that marks Dos Passos' maturing craftsmanship. The author*s use of imagery and his careful meshing of imagery with structure is examined in Chapter Two. In his awareness that imagery must be functional rather than decorative for it to have meaning and that structure is one of the major concerns of the novelist, Dos Passos demonstrates a sophistication that is absent in his earlier works. In Chapter Three the characters, imagery, and structure of Streets of Night are studied in relationship to those of Manhattan Transfer and of U.S.A. . One ultimately observes that although Streets of Night seems to have little relation to U.S.A. , the novelist's character types and his low estimation of man's ability and willingness to make his life personally and socially rewarding remain essentially the same from the somewhat unsuccessful efforts of the apprentice to the masterpiece of the accomplished writer.
Anti-romantic elements in the biographical-critical poems of W. H. Auden's Another time
(1966) Terrell, Sarah Lilly; Isle, Walter W.
W. H. Auden first published the volume of poems entitled Another Time on February 7, 1940. There has been no study of the volume as an artistic entity, and only a few of the poems have received detailed commentary. This thesis will consider a selected group of poems from Another Time, the biographical-critical poems, in some detail. They have been selected for major emphasis because they reflect the dominant concerns of the volume. Furthermore, because each biographical portrait is based on an informed knowledge of the life and work of the writer it depicts, the reader must be similarly informed before he can appreciate the richness of reference and astuteness of judgment which characterize these poems. The poems will be viewed from two perspectives: that suggested by Auden's prose writings on Romanticism and that provided by the context of the volume as a whole. The second chapter of this thesis surveys the wealth of primary sources in prose available to the critic interested in Auden's attitude towards Romanticism. The prose written from 1937-1941 is pervaded by Auden's concern with the implications of Romanticism. The address given at Smith College in 1940 contains Auden's most explicit statement of the relationship of Romanticism to the then current political situation. The urgency of his preoccupation results from his conviction that the Romantics' failure to grasp the proper relationship of freedom to necessity has an immediate and direct bearing on the rise of fascism. This preoccupation appears repeatedly in the many book reviews Auden wrote during this period. There are two additional prose sources in which Auden deals with Romanticism: "The Enchafed Flood" and the introductions to volumes four and five of Poets of she English Language, which he edited with N. H. Pearson. "The Enchafed Flood", was published in 1950; "Poets of the English Lanouage" appeared in 1952. However, since Auden's assessment of Romanticism remains remarkably unchanged, these writings may be regarded as elaborations of the ideas discussed in the prose of 1937-1941. They are descriptive works and as such are particularly useful in filling in the details of Auden's analysis of Romanticism as a literary movement. The discussion of the biographical-critical poems in Chapter three of this thesis is preceded by a commentary on a small number of other poems from Another Time, The selection and the discussion emphasize the psychological analysis which Auden applies to the historical situation in Europe. In the course of the discussion of the biographical-critical poems, they will be further connected to the context of the volume. I will show some of the interrelationships between poems in order to indicate the importance of the selection and arrangement of poems in the original volume. The discussion of the biographical-critical poems themselves centers around Auden's search for the proper poetic role, his attempt to find an adequate formulation of the dialectic of freedom and necessity, and his criticism of the Romantics' view of the world and the artist's relation to it. This is emphatically a volume of exploration; a careful study of the poems reveals a multiplicity of attitudes and stances. The volume is unified by virtue of the recurrence of the problems considered, rather than by any single formula for their resolution.
Art and artifact in selected fiction of Edith Wharton
(1964) Teichgraeber, Stephen Emile, 1940-; Isle, Walter W.
The thesis is a study of Edith Wharton's functional use of the significant detail. There are three categories of details: the art of decoration or interior and exterior architecture; artifacts, predominantly such things as clothing, jewelry, china; and specific works of art, including music, literature, sculpture, and painting. These details function to reveal character and interrelationships between characters. They motivate and support the action of the novels by often foreshadowing certain events in the novel; thus they serve as structural devices. By using these details as a system of observation in the novel, it is possible to obtain insights into Mrs. Wharton's philosophy and ultimately arrive at more precise thematic definition. Finally, when such details appear as symbols, several functions are combined; and, as a result, the meaning of the novel is enriched. In satiric novels of manners such as The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country, functional details serve as guideposts between the various strata of society and plot the ascent and descent of characters through these levels. They also function as a means to compare and contrast the aristocracies of Europe and America. In The Reef, a novel of situation, the setting for the psychological, moral drama provides a sensitive register for the varied temperaments and moral codes of the characters. When only one stratum of society is being discussed, Mrs. Wharton's selection of the significant detail provides for subtle differentiation between members of that stratum and reveals their individualities. Thus, in the historic novel of manners such as The Age of Innocence and The Old Maid, the rigid social structure of New York in the third quarter of the nineteenth century is found to contain its revolutionaries whose spirit of revolt is indicated by significant details of the three categories. This description is not merely used to establish the period. An interesting dramatic extension of a symbolic artifact in The Old Maid provides that novelette with compounded irony and unifies the main and subordinate actions. Observations of the symbolic-detail in Ethan Frome, Summer, Hudson River Bracketed, and The Gods Arrive leads to the emergence of two main themes in Edith Wharton's fiction: the deterministic forces of the past which prevent individuals from pursuing their wants, and the utility of the tradition of the art and society which is to be found in the past. All these works have in common the use of a pervading symbol. In her last novel, The Buccaneers, she has combined several functions, of the significant detail. By revealing character and foreshadowing action, these details forecast the future structure of the unfinished novel. Mrs. Wharton's use of detail throughout the corpus of her fiction is consistent, and many conclusions concerning her philosophy of life and art can be obtained through the observation of this artistic method.
Assertion-through-structure: some formal considerations in the fiction of Thomas Pynchon
(1975) Thompson, Gary; Isle, Walter W.
Pynchon's early fiction establishes the idea of "social thermodynamics"; events in society are subject to impulses of decay parallel to entropy. The human condition is composed of extremes/ the "street" and the "hothouse," i.e., synchronic and diachronic modes of perception; and both for contrasting reasons are inadequate. The second chapter discusses the problem of metaphor and its limitations in dealing with the world. Metaphor for Pynchon in V is a deception; this is contrasted with Emerson's use of metaphor to define human activity. In V., metaphor is the basis of constructing patterns, and patterns ultimately falsify the world they are intended to order. Chapter three discusses "Mondaugen's Story" as a microcosm of V; "Mondaugen's Story" is a parable of Wittgenstein's first proposition; Pynchon's fiction is compared to propositions, since both undergo a projective relation to the world. Both V. and the Tractatus are "hollow" works, denying their own media. Chapter four develops the metaphor of the interface in Gravity's Rainbow; because based on a physical phenomenon, it is an externally observable metaphor, and consequently is not subject to the distrust elicited by Stencil's V-symbols. The novel's interfaces appear first in a psychological context, and then are extended to "different orders of reality." Pynchon, through a process of establishing realistic fictional illusions only to break them, sets up and breaks the interface of his fiction. Chapter five considers an interface of some importance, deferred from chapter four, films film provides a referent inside the novel for the processes of art as they affect the lives and behavior of the characters. By its use of film devices, the novel shapes how we perceive its structure and thus meaning; paradoxically, film is both an expression of communal dreams or fantasies and an individual, one-to-one address. Chapter six develops the concept of the Zone as interface The Zone is the occupied territories after Germany's fall, a system of provisional reality and thus of infinite possibility, and a means of suggesting the need for systems and the difficulty of constructing them. Slothrop's disappearance is one mode of dealing with paranoia and limiting systems. The Zone finally is a metaphor for contingent existence.
Fish hooks and desert places: Space and the reader in the fiction of John Hawkes
(1989) Hamilton, Winifred Jean; Isle, Walter W.
The novels of contemporary American fiction writer John Hawkes are commonly labeled experimental, postmodern, surrealistic. While they share characteristics with each of these loosely defined categories, what really distinguishes Hawkes's fictions is their radical humanism. Hawkes's fictions seek to be experienced by the reader and in so doing expose and expand who we are. In these concerns Hawkes is more easily associated with such writers as Flannery O'Connor, Nathaneal West and William Faulkner. While each of Hawkes's novels is significantly different, all actively encourage the reader into the text--without the benefit of a magnetic plot or characters with whom it is easy to identify. Hawkes uses empty space--areas of "not knowing"--much as Faulkner uses character and O'Connor plot to draw the reader into his fictions where the violence and beauty of the images and prose assail, exhaust and affirm the reader. Four types of empty space are examined: textual gaps and blanks, landscapes of desolation, silence, and sexual and ethical assault. While these ideas are discussed with reference to all of Hawkes's fiction and to other contemporary novels as well, extended discussion is given only to four of Hawkes's novels: Death, Sleep & the Traveler, Whistlejacket, Travesty, and Virginie: her two lives. Reader-response and psychoanalytic criticism, and several philosophical approaches to space are explored in the process of delineating those ideas which link physical, philosophical and ethical "holes" in Hawkes's texts to provocation, response, and vulnerability. Ultimately the center of the argument rests on vulnerability--how Hawkes's fictions render us unusually vulnerable, and how such vulnerability is vital to the intensity and satisfaction of the reading experience.
For Esme--with Love and Compassion: J. D. Salinger's "positive" art
(1967) Hempel, Peter Andrew; Isle, Walter W.
The basic conflict dominating Salinger's fiction, particularly his earlier work, is the conflict between the "innocence" of the protagonist and the "squalor" of the world around him. The protagonist must adapt or die. In this thesis I Propose to explore Salinger's use of an underlying growth pattern as a structural basis for much of his "positive" art. In Salinger's "positive" work the protagonist is able to come to some sort of resolution of this conflict and thus attain' at least a partial integration into society; the "negative" alternatives are spiritual death or suicide. "Growth" for the protagonist involves a movement from an immature "love," which is uncompromising in its insistence upon the purity of the objects of its love, to a mature "compassion," a love combined with an understanding of the "fallen" human condition, which can accept imperfection rather than being forced to reject an "imperfect" object or person. In "For Esme--with Love and Squalor," this change occurs in both the narrator and Esme, though with the narrator the focus is upon the emotional crisis of the conflict, while with Esme the focus is upon the transition from "love" to "compassion" as part of the overall growth to adulthood. This pattern serves also as the structural basis for The Catcher in the Rye and "De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period," as well as, to a certain extent, Franny and Zooey. In my final chapter I attempt to indicate how this "love-compassion" pattern is reflected in Salinger's later works either in form or in his attempts to explore philosophical solutions to the conflict of innocence and squalor.
Lillian Hellman's memoirs: "Writing is oneself"
(1988) Recknagel, Marsha Lee; Isle, Walter W.
Following Lillian Hellman's death in 1984, friends and foes alike came forward to dispute the truth of Hellman's account of her life presented in her memoirs, An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, Scoundrel Time and Maybe, A Story. Two camps emerged: the critics who believed there was no excuse for lying in non-fiction and those who believed that by its nature autobiography is a process by which one shapes one's life, and Hellman, they argued, only re-worked her story to a greater degree than most memoirialists. The evidence is substantial that Hellman dramatized her life, creating an image of herself by both adding and deleting important information. In 1986 William Wright published Hellman's biography in which he exposed her literary inaccuracies and documented her personal flaws in detail. There was much discrepancy revealed between the "self" Hellman had presented in the memoirs and the fiery-tempered, mean-spirited woman Wright portrayed. Yet Wright failed to draw any significant conclusions about why Hellman would have felt the need to fictionalize an already fascinating life. I focus on the psychology, on why she would have falsified and distorted her rendition of her "self." Several patterns emerge in the memoirs in the form of language, structure, and recurring themes that suggest that Hellman had severe conflicts around the developmental issues of separation and individuation. Her external self-assurance and bravado, it is argued, actually masked a weak sense of self-identity; and she used the writing of the memoirs as a means of writing through these problems, although rarely on a conscious level. During various stages of the writing process Hellman achieved certain psychological resolutions, correcting some original, unsatisfying developmental dynamics by creating characters and situations that imitated certain childhood configurations. Through the re-defining of her relationship with Dashiell Hammett, she re-defined the childhood Oedipal phase of development; and when she writes of her childhood friend Julia, making up as a best friend a woman she apparently had never met but who in fact existed, Hellman relives the pre-Oedipal stage; she writes herself into a mother-daughter configuration with Julia, differentiating from the mother when she creates and then destroys Julia. Hellman emerges from the experience more autonomous than before, having written herself into a stronger sense of self.
Made women: And then there was Eve...Isabel, Tess, Daisy, Brett, Caddy, and Sarah
(1992) Orr Montoya, Moragh Jean; Isle, Walter W.
The myth of the disobedient woman, along with patriarchal myths of virginity, provide writers with what appears to be a natural alliance between womanhood and fiction. This alliance, not natural but artificial, is between man and fiction using woman's virginally "empty" form as a metaphorical space in which the writer creates himself and his stories. In The Portrait of a Lady, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, The Sound and the Fury and The French Lieutenant's Woman male novelists use disobedient women to tell surface narratives which appear to be about their female heroes but which are actually about the needs, desires and fears of the male writers, narrators, characters. The story of the woman hero, when it exists, lies buried in the margins of the male stories, moving in secret contradiction below the surface reflection of the male story. The surface narrative of The Portrait is built on a series of misunderstandings of Isabel's ideas and intentions. She is judged based on these misunderstandings rather than on what she herself achieves. Similarly, Hardy's surface narrative obscures the fact that Tess is a fierce woman whose individuality leads to her end on the gallows. Daisy provides the perfectly silent, compliant form for tales told by Nick, Gatsby, and Fitzgerald. While Brett tells the story that Hemingway gives her to tell, she also maintains great individual power. Caddy is usually seen as the means to a fuller understanding of her brothers, or, more recently, as a blank mirror reflecting male desire. Though she is used in both these ways inside the novel she is also a character with a strong voice and a story that I believe Faulkner meant us to hear. Sarah, often viewed as a feminist, actually has no story nor voice. Fowles's story is of man's fear of woman s power to "make" man in her image. These authors write fantasies of control that they cannot maintain. Depending on the author, what emerges is either a strong woman who tells her own story or the secret story of the writer.
Mistaken identity in Mark Twain's major fiction
(1964) Kinnebrew, Mary Ann; Isle, Walter W.
In most of Mark Twain's major novels, mistaken identity is the central plot device and satiric device. The main variation is the romantic convention of the disguised aristocrat who undertakes an incognito journey, which appears in The Prince and the Pauper. A Connecticut Yankee. The American Claimant, Huckleberry Finn, and The Mysterious Stranger. It is the structural principle of plot organization in The Prince and the Pauper and The American Claimant, and one major episode in A Connecticut Yankee is based on the romantic convention. In all three novels it is adapted as a satiric vehicle and a3 an example of Twain's theories of determining training and environment. The initial device of switched identities—the change of clothes between commoner and aristocrat—forces the aristocrat into an incognito journey, which becomes a moral pilgrimage as his ingrained ideas give way to the new environmental forces that are brought to bear on him. The journey motif offers the satirist a wide scope to display the crimes of a hereditary aristocracy in The Prince and the Pauper and A Connecticut Yankee and the inequalities of American democracy in The American Claimant. The simple formula of the educational journey initiated by the device of switched identities appears also in Twain's masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn. In the characters of the King and the Duke, Twain treats on a burlesque level the romantic convention of the aristocrat in disguise, for the purpose of uniting his satiric themes of the moral depravity of a slave-holding aristocracy and the detrimental effects of romantic literature. He uses the romantic conventions again in the controversial conclusion to draw his incipient tragedy back into the realm of comedy and farce. In The Mysterious Stranger, mistaken identity is used on both the allegorical and psychological-philosophical levels of the narrative action as the organizing structural principle and as a vehicle for Twain's theories of determinism and for his condemnation of the damned human race." In the allegory, Satan-Philip Traum is the celestial aristocrat in disguise who journeys to the earth to observe the peculiarities of the human species. He is both satiric observer and Theodor Fischer's mentor in disillusionment as he takes him on supernatural journeys around the earth and instructs him about the Moral Sense and Twain’s theories of determinism. On the psychological-philosophical level of the action, Satan is Theodor's reason arriving at progressive realizations of the absurdity of the human predicament. The Mysterious Stranger is thus related to Twain’s comic fantasy, "The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut," in which he presents the dual personality of man and conscience. In Pudd'nhead Wilson. Twain uses the convention of changelings in the cradle as his central plot device. The switch of identities between master and slave is used to satirize slavery and to illustrate the effects of environment and training on behavior. In one of its aspects, Pudd'nhead Wilson is the detective thriller, and the mistaken identity plot, with its inherent confusion of appearance and reality and the possibilities that it offers for dramatic unraveling, furnishes the necessary suspense.
Of kings and common touch: An answer to the question of James and the educated lay reader
(2001) Samples, Ronald Carson; Isle, Walter W.
"Of Kings and the Common Touch" asserts that James is accessible and likeable in ways consistent with the fundamental interests of common readers. The American depicts a transcendently American Christopher Newman who models legitimate cultural identity, Europeans and expatriate Americans who are pathologically motivated, and European "legitimists" who are anachronistic and "dead." The Bostonians portrays a deterministic democratic impulse embodied by Miss Birdseye and all else in the novel, with Olive Chancellor too self-contradictory to be a genuine feminist and Basil Ransom an ironically rightful advocate of the fundamentality of male-female relationships despite undeniable shortcomings. Through John Marcher's failures in "The Beast in the Jungle" James condemns the exclusivity of manners and elitist society and endorses the common that May Bartrum represents, while concerns in the "The Real Thing"---with the artist's attempt to maintain rapport with an underappreciative audience while also maintaining fidelity to his craft, the change of eras from the aristocratic to the democratic, and the accusative depiction of boredom as the pathological motive for both characters and readers---parallel the concerns in a work as popular and accessible as Richard Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game." Finally, a la Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," The Sacred Fount amusingly depicts a significantly nameless narrator's self-victimization as he foregoes actual heterosexual penetration to participate in an engaging drama of intellectual penetration that ultimately renders him unmanned, emasculated, and penetrated rather than penetrating.
Orpheus and Eurydice in hell and other quantum spaces: The Golden Mean and spiritual transformation in Pynchon's fiction
(2000) Patrick Jennings, Mary Kay; Isle, Walter W.
Pynchon's inclusion of scientific principles and mathematical concepts in his novels has been duly noted by critics as part of the encyclopedic references in his fiction. Pynchon, however, fictionally employs his scientific and mathematical acumen as part of an encompassing Metaphor of Extremes and Means that both provides a structure for his fiction and describes the great complexity human beings experience when they attempt to interpret the natural world and their unique position in it. Pynchon's metaphor has as it basis two extreme perspectives of the natural world: the mythological world view which has shaped most of human thought over the ages, and the Newtonian view which displaced the mythological in the seventeenth century and ushered in the Age of Reason. Pynchon peoples his fictional worlds with two extreme groups of characters: those who function intuitively and exhibit attributes akin to the frenzied rituals associated with the worship of Dionysus, the ancient Earth God, and those who operate on the Apollonian principles of causality and a will to power. Together, these two perspectives and these two groups of characters provide the extremes in Pynchon's Metaphor. More difficult to recognize is Pynchon's representation of the Golden Mean, identifiable by both a mediating perspective and characters open to alternative possibilities. The mediating perspective he identifies with quantum physics which contains both the mythological view point in its intuitive sense of forces operating below or behind the sensually observable world and the Newtonian perspective upon which quantum principles depend. The mediating characters in Pynchon's Metaphor are Orpheus and Eurydice figures who have connections with both Dionysians and Apollonians in the various novels and often initially exhibit Dionysian or Apollonian characteristics. Yet, they depart from such behavior to forge new paths in search of the Golden Mean. Doing so requires that they lose their Dionysian or Apollonian selves by means of a descent into a quantum-like space from which they emerge enlightened and ready to encounter an absolutely new order of existence---one in which their spiritual identity is retained and the constraints of physical existence which ends in entropy and death is transcended. Increasingly in Thomas Pynchon's novels is the idea that loss of self and interconnectedness is necessary for spiritual transformation which has ramifications far beyond the transformation of the individual. In his most recent novel, Mason & Dixon, the novel's protagonist is a dual-natured Orpheus consisting of both Mason and Dixon who are finally inseparable, joined as they are by the Line they drew. The Golden Mean is the point at which connections occur and distinctions between seemingly mutually exclusive extremes begin to blur. Each extreme is ameliorated by the Golden Mean even as it remains part of a larger pattern that can be glimpsed at and articulated through metaphor, the most human of connecting devices. In Pynchon's Metaphor the Golden Mean suggests a way back to connectedness with that which is larger than oneself and offers the possibility of spiritual redemption and continued existence after death.
Propaganda as fiction: an explication of the works of Dotson Rader and Shane Stevens
(1973) Whitlock, Jerry Michael; Isle, Walter W.
Dotson Rader's first book. I Ain't Marchin' Anymore (1969), is a partisan's account of the Columbia University student revolt. Rader's first novel, Gov't Inspected Meat (1971), is autobiographical, but the decade of the '6's and of student dissent looms large in the plot. Shane Stevens shares Rader's interest in the decade of the '6's and in political dissent, but he writes in his two novels about the despair and defiance of the black ghetto and of young black men in particular. Stevens' Go Down Dead (1969) is narrated by a sixteen-year old Harlem gang leader introduced in a violent struggle with a competing white gang and with his now emerging manhood. Way Up Town in Another World (1971) is narrated by Marcus Garvey Black, whose commentary on the American political and racial scene is bitter, acerbic, and largely unconvincing. The writing of Dotson Rader and Shane Stevens possesses one major flaw: the authors' concerns with didactic racial criticism becomes propagandist. Political aims supersede aesthetic considerations in the shaping of the novels. The consequences for the novels and for readers are severe. Technique is less important than the authors' political doctrines. The latter overwhelm character and plot, so that all characters speak with one voice, all plots plod through to a predetermined end. With Rader and Stevens this flaw is debilitating. Their novels cannot profitably be read; the message becomes the medium. Finally, the same propaganda emerges from different novels; the four works are a monotone, a single party line.
Reminiscent scrutinies: Individual memory and social life in Anthony Powell's "A Dance to the Music of Time"
(1988) Frost, Laurie Anne Adams; Isle, Walter W.
In The Music of Time, Anthony Powell examines the tension between the internal reality of memory and the external social world in which the self is defined. The twelve volumes are presented as the fictional memoirs of Nicholas Jenkins; Powell's interest is in depicting voluntary memory and the stories we tell to explain who we are. Since Nick is both character and narrator, two philosophies of time are developed. On the one hand, internalized time is depicted; the memories Nick the narrator records are present simultaneously in his mind, and thus Nick remembers the past in terms of the future. But Nick the character functions in external, sequential time. Representing both internal and external concepts of time demands stylistic innovations; the effort is that the work's style is distinguished by its maintenance of chronology and accommodation of interruptions. Furthermore, since he functions as both narrator and protagonist, Nick must be defined socially. The voices of other characters are heard, and a bridge is thus formed between Nick's internal world, his memories, and an external, objective world; and the pleasure of shared experience, the basic impulse for narration, is reaffirmed. Finally, what makes narrative possible is order, seeing patterns in experience, and it is through the agency of memory that we detect patterns in external reality. Patterns are found to be at once imposed by the mind to order information and revealed in experience. These patterns are found on three levels: in language, plot, and characterization. But that patterns are discernible in experience does not mean that Powell is depicting a deterministic world; his characters seem to act as free agents, and the final cause of any episode in a pattern is indeterminable. Those causes that are discerned are those which fit the future effect. There is thus throughout The Music of Time a dynamic quality to Nick's narration: a stress between the power of the past to determine the future and the power of the future to determine the past; and it is through the depiction of individual memory and the patterns of social life that this tension is realized.
Samuel Beckett and William Faulkner: the retreat into magic
(1970) Lloyd-Davies, Karen S; Isle, Walter W.
The purpose or this thesis is to examine the way in which two authors, William Faulkner and Samuel Beckett, view the traditional function of language in specific works. To some extent in each words appear to explain, but fail to do so meaningfully. Rather, language is revered for its tower as a felt physical force and for its ability to explain away or to exorcise. I shall begin by briefly discussing Beckettts Waiting for Godot, a play in which the four characters are alone on stage with nothing to do. They are left to their imaginative resources for diversion and order and so develop a kind, of primitive dependence on word games, stories, and wishes reminiscent of early civilized man. Waiting for Godot serves mainly as a reference point with which to illustrate the principles of Cassirer, Boheim, and others which I discuss next. The anthropology and epistemology of this group provide useful theories of the origin of rudimentary linguistic forms and their application as magic. Next, we will turn to William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and examine the relationship of Quentin Compson to his own speech, a project which requires consideration of his attitudes, history and surroundings. Hopefully, the parallel between Quentin's responses and those of primitive men in analagous situations will emerge in this analysis, Finally, in Watt, by Samuel Beckett, we will find a specific portrait of a man's language wresting control of itself away from the speaker, a process about which Watt, the protagonist, is but dimly aware, So the value of language as a symbol for "experience" or "meaning" is seriously questioned in these novels. Instead, Beckett, and to some extent Faulkner find language to be a maker of its own laws, and they reject its traditional mimetic function.
Sisters in bonds: "Minnie's Sacrifice"
(1997) Moore, Shirley Walker; Isle, Walter W.
During the nineteenth century, both black women and white women were at the mercy of the white patriarchy, albeit at differing degrees to and natures in which they experienced bondage, marginality, and empowerment. In Minnie's Sacrifice, Frances E. W. Harper addresses the roles these women played in confronting and defeating the patriarchy. We first encounter Camilla Le Croix, the daughter of a white slave owner. Her actions parallel and reflect the evolving role of the nineteenth-century female in America: Camilla moves from the domestic sphere into the public sphere, becoming the author of a new moral code. Bernard Le Croix, Camilla's father, tries to silence Camilla's voice when she pleads to place the young orphaned slave, Louis, in their home, but Camilla prevails. Because of her involvement in their world, she witnesses the slaves' survival techniques. Drawing strength from her experiences, Camilla creates a new world for herself and her two slaves, Miriam and her grandson Louis, who is actually Camilla's step-brother. Camilla and Miriam unite to forge a new society. While Louis is being groomed by these two women for entrance into the public sphere, his future wife, Minnie, is being prepared for the same by her mother, Ellen, "the beautiful quadroon." Ellen begins her bid for empowerment when she presents her mulatto daughter, fathered by her master to visiting Northern guests. Fully aware of the physical similarities between Minnie and the slave owner's other daughter, Marie, Ellen places Minnie in a prominent position dressed so as to reveal the girls' likenesses. When the slave mistress demands that Minnie be sold, Ellen prevails in her appeals to the master. She gains freedom for Minnie, who is sent North to live as a white child, only to be reunited much later with her mother, at which time, Minnie sacrifices her rights as a white woman and embraces her black heritage. She later marries Louis, who has gained his freedom and rightful inheritance. Together, they represent a new order, one won by the works of two women, one white, one black.
Structure and unity in the novels of Sherwood Anderson
(1964) Wood, Marilee May; Isle, Walter W.
The purpose of this thesis is to study Sherwood Anderson's novels, showing how the unity of the works is destroyed by the author's limited ability to develop and sustain characterizations and themes. Anderson was uniquely limited by personal experience, and when he stepped beyond the bounds of this experience in his development of themes and characterizations, his writing became inconsistent and unconvincing. Chapter I shows how in his first novel, Windy McPherson’s Son. Anderson worked within his limitations as he wrote the first section of the work. The early part of Windy deals with the small town milieu, and Anderson's writing is coherent, unified, and forceful. However, in the second half of the novel, the emphasis falls on the intellectual and social problems of an urban society of which Anderson was not really a part. Thus the unity of the novel is broken as the author deals with unfamiliar material. In Chapter II Anderson's fourth novel, Poor White, is analyzed. This is another novel in which the opening sections succeed as Anderson tells the story of Hugh McVey and shows the effects of industrialization on a small Midwestern town. In the midst of this novel Anderson suddenly begins to develop a new set of characters and crops the themes of social and economic development. This break in the unity of the novel is never healed although Anderson does try to return to his original themes as the novel ends. Chapter III deals entirely with Winesburg. Ohio. Anderson’s most artistically successful work. In Winesburg Anderson developed a form which allowed him more freedom than he had found in the conventional novel. In this volume of loosely bound but closely related sketches Anderson created a unity of tone and theme which makes Winesburg his most unified and coherent piece of work. In dealing with a small town and the problems of its people, Anderson developed symbols, themes, characters, mood, and tone to produce a real sense of unity in the book. The last chapter of this thesis deals briefly with Anderson's six other novels, Marching Men, Many Marriages. Dark Laughter. Tar, Beyond Desire, and Kit Brandon. Anderson's use of characters and themes is discussed, and the role which his personal experience played in causing disunity in the novels is evaluated. Patterns of development similar to those found in Windy McPherson’s Son and Poor White are pointed out, and lack of unity in development of characters and themes is noted as the fault which causes each of these novels to fail to be artistically satisfying.
Tales all tolled and keys to dreamland. Reiteration, recirculation, and redefinition in our wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer: Funn at "Finnegans Wake"
(1993) Ligon, Betty Lee; Isle, Walter W.
Inter-textual relationships between James Joyce's works have long-since been noted, but the monographic studies that illuminate his works from different positions and theoretical bases tend toward specificity. The challenge of understanding the role the Wake plays in the structural cohesiveness of his corpus yet remains; it is this challenge that I address, and I suggest that Joyce provides us the key in Finnegans Wake and expects us to recognize it. The Wake is not only a unique instance of metafiction, but it refers to the earlier works in a provectional (to use Fritz Senn's word) fashion that provides the ultimate level of what I call a "gyre," a structural basis that offers a cohesive frame for Joyce's works; furthermore, Joyce points to this gyre in a number of self-conscious instances. A provection is a recasting with expansion, and as it relates to Joyce's corpus, it becomes expanded redefinition, reiteration, and/or recombination, as well. What I am suggesting, then, is that each work leads into a subsequent work which is both a product of the previous one(s) and simultaneously an expansion into an even broader level, forming a "cone" or "spiral"--or what I shall call a "gyre." As the final gyration, Finnegans Wake encompasses Dubliners, Hero, Portrait, and Ulysses, just as each of them recapitulates aspects of the work(s) that has/have preceded it. But because the Wake has no closure, the reiteration and recirculation of the people, city, and themes show that not only does each of his works grow out of its predecessor, but it prepares the way for a succeeding work. If the Wake is, indeed, the final swoop of a gyre, then Joyce is presenting us with a "container" (the siglum $\square\square,$ which is the title) of all his works, is telling us that he is doing so, and is challenging us to see both the gyre (the key) and the explicit statements concerning it, to see that in this final work are all his works recapitulated, reiterated, recast.
The intrusive past: history and identity in the novels of Wallace Stegner
(1978) Jones, Dan R.; Isle, Walter W.
Wallace Stegner believes in history, and one gets the impression from reading his books that he wishes more Americans did. A protagonist of one of his novels declares that "I believe in the life chronological, not the life existential,’’ which aptly reflects Stegner's own conception of time. Only by making ourselves aware of the past may we become fully aware of the present, he contends. Much of his fiction is an attempt to explore the relationship between America's past and present, particularly that of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in an effort to establish what he calls the "pontoon bridge" of history. He concludes that awareness of tradition is the only adequate basis for identity, cultural or individual. In this formulation, individual identity is defined by its association with corporate history. This definition is similar to the concept of corporate sainthood, as defined by Puritan theologians. For Stegner, the affirmation of selfhood is accomplished not through religious salvation, but by perceiving one's place in the corporate historical continuum. Ideally this continuum may be perceived as a series of dialectical operations in time. Two early novels, The Big Rock Candy Mountain and A Shooting Star, are structured around the process of affirming personal identity by the enlightened perception of the dialectical flow of corporate history. In later novels, this view of time comes to be regarded as naive and simplistic. In All the Little Live Things, the forces of disorder in the world axe found to be greater than the ability of man to base his self-awareness on a strictly rational view of the world. Angle of Repose translates this finding into the chronological realm. Lyman Ward discovers that he is unable to force history into dialectical molds. The Spectator Bird encapsulates the process of re-examining the myth of corporate* chronological identity. Stegner concludes that an awareness of the chronological structure of history cannot serve, by itself, as an adequate basis for personal identity, since it does not always complete describe all of the processes of history.
The Rosenberg story(ies): A literary history
(1991) Carmichael, Virginia; Isle, Walter W.
The 1950-1953 story of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg's trial, conviction, and execution for allegedly giving away the atomic bomb "secret" demonstrates an oscillation and reciprocity between material history and its motivated and collaborative narrative construction. An examination of government documents, court records, print media, letters, diaries, historiographies, biographies, and FBI and Department of Justice files released since the 1974 FOI Act, reveals the intertextual, formal, and rhetorical operations involved in the construction of the official Rosenberg story. These documents also reveal the extent to which the outcome of that story depended upon race, class, and gender. The coherent official version manifests a polarized conflictual plot, a cause-effect narrative line, and the most definitive ending available in fiction or history--death as retribution and redemption--despite documented government uncertainties. Operating in excess of any concept of the "real" story, the elaboration of the official version over time also gives voice to its historical context and motivations, demonstrating political positionality as prior to any telling of the Rosenberg story. It developed as an embedded narrative in the frame narrative of the cold war, and was intended to force Julius to tell the story of an FBI-alleged Atomic Spy Ring. But the desired official story stopped with the Rosenbergs' deaths, and instead a cultural re-telling began, using the Rosenbergs as the occasion for an historical interrogation of the function of narrative in history-masking and/or -making. E. L. Doctorow's 1971 Book of Daniel and Robert Coover's 1977 Public Burning offer fictional/factual critiques of the Rosenberg story, its historical frame narrative, cold war ideology, and of a twentieth-century capitalist, masculist society which Coover figures as operating according to the binary logic and obsessions of early anality. These postmodern anti-narrative novels figure, dramatize, and formally enact the potentials for and limits to contemporary oppositional cultural political work--a homeopathic and often sacrificial practice of narrating to undo narrative, of positing narrative sequences and relationships masked by narrative sequences and relationships, and of resisting closure in order to remain open to narrative/historical transformation. In this, the postmodern artist and critic may share the same purpose.
Writing off the map: The postcolonial landscapes of Pynchon, Marshall, Silko, and Vea
(2001) Slappey, Lisa Ann; Isle, Walter W.
This dissertation examines literary renderings of postcolonial American space through close readings of novels by four contemporary American writers: Thomas Pynchon's Vineland and Mason & Dixon, Paule Marshall's The Chosen Place, the Timeless People, Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead, and Alfredo Vea, Jr.'s La Maravilla. My study is grounded in environmental criticism's emphasis on the relationships between humans and non-human nature, particularly the interactions between peoples and places. I explore questions of domination and subjugation, possession, dispossession, and repossession, home and homelessness in the world we think we know, and the worlds we can only imagine. The novelists in this study raise difficult questions about America as a philosophical ideal and as a political entity. Where does this nation fit, historically and currently, within global affairs? To what extent does America have the moral authority it assumes over itself or anyone else? At times, these questions are posed through comparisons, both subtle and overt, between the United States and other regimes more recognizable for their egregious human rights records, such as Spanish Mexico, Nazi Germany, and Dutch South Africa. The authors then locate oppression at home by addressing the enduring effects of the genocide of indigenous peoples, the slave trade and the Middle Passage, and the creation of a racially diverse American underclass. In each case, human oppression is depicted within the highly-contested social space of the physical landscape and is shown to go hand in hand with environmental destruction.

Browsing by Author "Isle, Walter W."

Results Per Page

Sort Options