My thesis is comprised of two articles, titled "Journeying Through (An)Other World: Examining the Role of Magic and Transformational Otherness in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and "Magic, Muggles, and Mudbloods: Examining Magical Otherness in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter Series." The introduction frames the thematic, theoretical, and critical connections...
Over the past fourteen years since the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Americans of varied political persuasions have continually identified the day as a defining moment in the history of the nation, which caused a rupture in the cultural rhythm and psyche. This sensibility is...
In the early part of his philosophical career, Paul Ricoeur worked out a general theory of symbols which he illustrated with the symbols of evil. He subsequently explained this theory in several essays (his final major statement on symbols can be found in Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of...
My thesis, entitled "Fantastic Histories: How Malory's Morte Darthur
Influenced Tolkien's The Silmarillion," argues that J.R.R. Tolkien's Silmarillion
shares distinct similarities in style and content with Sir Thomas Malory's Morte
Darthur, primarily in the lack of detail in the descriptions of characters and events, as
each attempts to create a...
Surveys of amateur artifact collections in southwest Oregon indicate
that traditional settlement pattern models for this region may be in error.
Based on the distribution of major styles of projectile points, at least
two distinct periods of occupation are definable. The Early period is
tentatively dated between 1000 B.C. and...
Novelist Toni Morrison is well-known for using the concept she calls rememory, or the process of actively revisiting and reconstructing a cultural past. Many critics agree that Morrison uses rememory in a strategic way, so that it provides
sturdy framework for a larger discussion of issues of race, class, and...
In the beginning of her travelogue, A Motor‐Flight Through France (1908), Edith Wharton declares that “the motor‐car has restored the romance of travel.” Many scholars have taken this statement as an index to the book’s themes. However, my reading closely examines particular moments of travel (specifically Wharton’s visits to Beauvais...
Virginia Woolf was a self-proclaimed atheist, yet her fictional and personal writing
reveal her ecstatic consciousness. Characters in Woolf s novels experience ecstasy, and
her letters and diaries support the theory that she herself had experienced ecstatic
consciousness. Major figures in the philosophy of religion assert that ecstatic
consciousness is...
For centuries, continental philosophy has clung to the belief that the world only meaningfully exists through human perception--that, in other words, when a tree falls in the forest, it does not make a sound. Literary theory, which has strong roots in continental philosophy, followed suit, remaining tied to humanism even...