UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

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Subject: search.filters.subject.Literature, Medieval

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Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Lauding and Loathing in the Works of Shakespeare: Epideictic Skepticism and the Ethics of Praise
    (2010) Tartamella, Suzanne Marie; Grossman, Marshall; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    My dissertation argues that Shakespeare transforms Aristotelian epideixis (the rhetorical mode comprising praise and blame) into a skeptical mode by laying bare its embedded ethical and epistemological problems. Shakespeare, that is, uses the evaluative procedures inherent within epideictic poetry to scrutinize its own principles of representation, transforming a poetics of praise into a poetics of appraisal. His innovations in the Petrarchan sonnet form stand at the center of my project, but I also illuminate how Shakespeare's epideictic skepticism underlies his experimentation with tragedy and comedy. In a broader perspective, my project shows how an intimacy between philosophical skepticism and the practice of praise had its roots in the cultural and religious upheavals of the sixteenth century. The cornerstone of my project is Shakespeare's young-man sonnets, which provide a unique angle from which to understand the dark-lady poems and some key Shakespearean plays. I show that while the first sequence (1-126) investigates the epistemology of praise, the second (127-52) describes the dramatic interactions between lovers who have advanced beyond epideictic poetry and its accompanying skepticism. Chapter 1, primarily an introduction to my study, considers the religious and cultural background for Shakespeare's epideictic skepticism, reviews classical and Renaissance theories of praise, and closely reads poems by Shakespeare and Petrarch. Chapter 2 explores the canker as the central symbol of Shakespeare's epideictic skepticism and as a threat to the rose of beauty and praise. Tracing the poet's struggle with this persistent figure of satire and blame, I contend that the canker is inherent in the practice of praise. My third chapter maps my interpretation of the canker and the rose onto a new reading of Hamlet. I argue that the young-man sonnets provide a paradigm for understanding Hamlet's relationship with his two fathers, his misogyny and verbal abuse, and the tragic path to which he finally commits himself. Chapter 4 offers a comic resolution to the rhetorical problems emphasized in the previous three chapters. Here, finally, I turn to the sonnets devoted to the notoriously rebellious dark mistress, exploring their relationship to Shakespearean comedy generally and to The Taming of the Shrew particularly.
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    The Wheel of Language: Representing Speech in Middle English Narrative, 1377-1422
    (2008-04-22) Coley, David Kennedy; Coletti, Theresa M; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation examines representations of speech in narrative poetry in English between 1377 and 1422, a four-and-a-half decade span marked by almost constant political, religious, social and economic upheaval. By analyzing the work that late medieval writers imagined the spoken word to perform - or, alternately, by examining how speech acts functioned performatively in medieval literary discourse - the author demonstrates how the spoken word functioned as a defining link between the Middle English text and the cultural tumult of the late medieval period. More important, by focusing on speech as a distinct category within linguistic discourse, the study allows for a reappraisal of the complicated relationships between text and cultural environment that have been illuminated by scholarship on the politics of vernacularity and the development of the English language. Chapter one uses The Manciple's Tale to probe Chaucer's engagement with the nominalist philosophy of William of Ockham, a philosophy which opposed the via antiqua and threatened to overturn the linguistic, epistemological, and ontological hierarchies that had been prevailed in various forms since the writings of Augustine of Hippo. Chapter two analyzes representations of sacramental and priestly speech in the anonymous Saint Erkenwald. By doing so, it redirects the critical conversation about the poem away from the role of baptism in redeeming the righteous heathen and toward the eucharistic theology that undergirds it, a critical that shift extends our understanding of the poem's engagement with the emerging Wycliffite heresy and with typological notions of medieval Christian identity. Chapter three focuses on the works of Thomas Hoccleve, fifteenth-century Privy Seal clerk and would-be court poet. By examining the overtly performative speech acts in Hoccleve's Marian lyrics, particularly "The Story of The Monk Who Clad the Virgin," it establishes the existence of an idiosyncratic economy of speech within the poet's canon, an economy that becomes paradigmatic for the mingled systems of monetary and interpersonal exchange that prevailed in the Lancastrian dynasty's early decades.
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    Ciceronian Rhetoric and the Art of Medieval French Hagiography
    (2007-12-11) McKinley, Kathryn; Campangne, Herve T; Modern French Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In the lives of the saints, it is clear that medieval hagiography reflects the statement, "Antiquity has a twofold life in the Middle Ages: reception and transformation." The vernacular poems of the virgin martyrs (Clemence of Barking's The Life of St. Catherine and the anonymous lives of St. Agnes and St. Barbara) as well as the prose biographies of the Beguines (Jacques de Vitry's The Life of Marie d'Oignies and Philippine de Porcellet's The Life of Saint Douceline) are testaments to this process as they reveal medieval perspectives on such topics as pagan learning and religion. Hagiography from the 12th to the 14th centuries presents a privileged view of a society defining itself against the past. Medieval hagiography is a product of writers trained in or somehow familiar with the treatises of the Ciceronian rhetorical tradition that were the standard textbooks of the time. Although often dismissed for their similarities, these works should be carefully considered by students of French literature given their precise following of precepts that govern their structure and content. Simply put, rhetoric once represented the whole of literary criticism, and one cannot read these texts without an appreciation for this fact. A rhetorical analysis of these texts highlights their literary value and illustrates their role in the history of ideas.
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    "Take Writing": News, Information, and Documentary Culture in Late Medieval England
    (2006-05-10) Lim, Hyunyang Kim; Coletti, Theresa; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation analyzes late medieval English texts in order to understand how they respond to the anxieties of a society experiencing the growing passion for news and the development of documentary culture. The author's reading of the Paston letters, Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale, and the Digby Mary Magdalene demonstrate these texts' common emergence in an environment preoccupied with the production and reception of documents. The discussion pays particular attention to actual and fictional letters in these texts since the intersection of two cultural forces finds expression in the proliferation of letters. As a written method of conveying and storing public information, the letters examined in this dissertation take on importance as documents. The author argues that the letters question the status of writing destabilized by the contemporary abuse of written documents. The dissertation offers a view of late medieval documentary culture in connection with early modern print culture and the growth of public media. The Introduction examines contemporary historical records and documents as a social context for the production of late medieval texts. Chapter 1 demonstrates that transmitting information about current affairs is one of the major concerns of the Pastons. The chapter argues that late medieval personal letters show an investment in documentary culture and prepared for the burgeoning of the bourgeois reading public. Whereas Chapter 1 discusses "real" letters, Chapter 2 and 3 focus on fictional letters. Comparing Donegild's counterfeit letters in The Man of Law's Tale and the Duke of Gloucester's confession (1391), Chapter 2 discusses the impact of documentary culture on the characterization of the narrator. The chapter argues that The Man of Law's Tale communicates Chaucer's reservations about the reliability of written documents. Chapter 3 explores medieval dramatic representation of ideological resistance to documentary culture and the government's dependence on textual authority. Focusing on the problem of disinformation in the Digby Mary Magdalene, the chapter discusses how developments in late medieval documentary culture are mobilized to demonstrate that the visual dimensions of theater give access to spiritual truths with a kind of immediacy, which the written document cannot provide.
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    The Spanish Shahrazad and her Entourage: The Powers of Storytelling Women in Libro de los engaños de las mujeres
    (2004-11-24) Hancock, Zennia Désirée; Benito-Vessels, Carmen; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE SPANISH SHAHRAZAD AND HER ENTOURAGE: THE POWERS OF STORYTELLING WOMEN IN LIBRO DE LOS ENGANOS DE LAS MUJERES Zennia Desiree Hancock, Doctor of Philosophy, 2004 Dissertation Directed By: Associate Professor Carmen Benito-Vessels Department of Spanish and Portuguese The anonymous Libro de los engaños e asayamientos de las mugeres (LEM) is a collection of exempla consisting of a frame tale and twenty-three interpolated tales. It forms part of the Seven Sages/Sindibad cycle, shares source material with the Arabic Alf layla wa layla (A Thousand and One Nights), and was ordered translated from Arabic into Romance by Prince Fadrique of Castile in 1253. In the text, females may be seen as presented according to the traditional archetypes of Eve and the Virgin Mary; however, the ambivalence of the work allows that it be interpreted as both misogynous and not, which complicates the straightforward designation of its female characters as "good" and bad." Given this, the topos of Eva/Ave as it applies to this text is re-evaluated. The reassessment is effected by exploring the theme of ambivalence and by considering the female characters as hybrids of both western and eastern tradition. The primary female character of the text, dubbed the "Spanish Shahrazad," along with other storytelling women in the interpolated tales, are proven to transcend binary paradigms through their intellect, which cannot be said to be inherently either good or evil, and which is expressed through speech acts and performances. Chapter I reviews the historical background of Alfonsine Spain and the social conditions of medieval women, and discusses the portrayal of females in literature, while Chapter II focuses on the history of the exempla, LEM, and critical approaches to the text, and then identifies Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque and Judith Butler's speech act theory of injurious language as appropriate methodologies, explaining how both are nuanced by feminist perspectives. A close reading of the text demonstrates how it may be interpreted as a misogynous work. Chapter III applies the theoretical tools in order to problematise the misogynous reading of the text and to demonstrate the agency of its female speaker-performers; the analysis centres on the Spanish Shahrazad, who represents a female subjectivity that transcends binary depictions of women and represents a holistic ideal of existence that is reflected in the calculated, harmonized use of both her intellect and corporeality.