Recent conflicts in America concerning the environment (the harvesting of old growth timber in the Pacific Northwest, or the proposed opening of public lands in southern Utah to mining interests, for instance) have precipitated a personal examination of "historical others" (Jensen 64), individuals that possess very different sensibilities from a...
My thesis, entitled “The Clerk’s Tale: Literal Monstrosities and Allegorical Problems,” argues that Chaucer’s Clerk is engaging both sides of a binary system. The Clerk has situated himself in a precarious position between two major schools of thought in the medieval culture, Franciscan and Dominican; the former promotes the will...
My thesis examines a total of fourteen characters from The Portrait of a Lady and The Turn of the Screw. Primarily, I have discovered an overwhelming pattern in these two works by Henry James; when characters make direct entrances--that is when they are not described or discussed in absentia by...
This thesis situates a discussion of Thoreau's later natural history essays in the context of the author's other writings. Beginning with an examination of the writings of Thoreau's friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, this paper examines Thoreau's relation to and departure from Emerson's understanding of time, place, and pattern...
Recent changes in the historiography of American Transcendentalism
have inspired a reappraisal of the relationship between the Transcendentalist
movement in New England and the pietistic wing of the Unitarian church. This
thesis explores this reappraisal through a close reading of selected writings by
Henry Ware Jr. in juxtaposition to the...
My thesis explores the later work of author J.D. Salinger, including two narratives featured in Nine Stories, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," and "Teddy," and Franny and Zooey, "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters," and "Seymour: an Introduction." Through my analysis I argue that the religious nature of Salinger's fiction...
The 13 personal essays in Water over Stones: Oregon Watershed Stories explore the author's experiences in dozens of Oregon watersheds. Using the genre of the personal essay, the author, a fifth-generation Oregonian and amateur ecologist, writes about her life and family relationships in stories that are saturated with the waters...
Many authorities state that the development of macabre images were a result of the plague that first swept through western Europe 1347-1350. However, many aspects of the macabre were already in place prior to the plague. A more realistic explanation for the macabre is in the modification of religious belief,...
In this thesis I argue that Cormac McCarthy's 1985 novel Blood Meridian serves as a critique of the American Western mythos by collapsing aspects of myth, ideology, and the sublime into the question of violence's relationship to language. In explicating the novel, I demonstrate how the ironies staged between the...
Walt Whitman looked to the natural world, which he considered an original example of divine creation, for insights into the methods and patterns of the Creative Force; the poet then intuited connections between these divine natural patterns and human existence and spirituality. Convinced of the divinity of the human body,...