Pearce, Howard D.

The Apollonian-Dionysian duality is a mythical opposition that suggests a complex and fundamental pattern of looking at the world. In this opposition Nietzsche identified two antagonistic tendencies whose tense coexistence is a prerequisite of the tragic genre; in his formulation tragic conflict must essentially involve a tension between rationality and irrationality, at the level of plot, character, genre. I adopt this symbolic mythical pattern to explore the theme of dramatic conflict in an ancient play, Euripides's The Bacchae, and in a modern text, Schrader's screenplay Kiss of the Spider Woman. At the heart of both these dramatic works there lies a profound and balanced conflict between illusion and reality, emotion and reason, pragmatism and idealism, nature and culture, a conflict structured according to the Apollonian-Dionysian matrix. This thesis explores the connections between the two texts and reveals that their common predicament consists of an unsettled dramatic opposition of Apollonian and Dionysian imaginative realms.

Flannery O'Connor wrote two stories about antisocial twelve-year-old girls, who live in fractured households where they have little contact with males. In "Temple of the Holy Ghost," the unnamed child is comfortable in her perceived intellectual superiority and allows her imagination to keep her on a cerebral pedestal. The angry Sally Virginia in "A Circle in the Fire" takes refuge in a second-floor window, but later descends for a physical confrontation with three boys threatening the secure world run by her tyrannical mother. Both girls gain spiritual knowledge: the "Temple" child comes to recognize the sanctity of the female body, while Sally Virginia discovers the familial misery inherent in all people. But Sally Virginia includes both males and females in her understanding of human suffering, while the "Temple" child remains spiritually flawed because of a smugness that equates only females with purity.

In revising his works for inclusion in the New York Edition, James shows his artistic growth. The revised text of An International Episode, James's tale of the English in America and the Americans in England, startles the reader who compares it with the earlier Cornhill publication. The characters, as well as the worlds that they inhabit and visit, are changed by James's additions of new dialogue and description. An International Episode was initially reviewed as unfairly satirical in its portrayal of English customs and English characters. My thesis argues that many changes to the original text were James's response to this criticism. His text for the New York Edition shows a balancing of English and American characterizations, revealing a more equal satire.

The major theme of Margaret Atwood's work is the transcendence of duality. Several critics, led by Cheryl Grace, have emphasized the duality only, yet there are many examples of wholeness in Atwood's early poems and novels as well as in her more recent fiction. The clearest examples of the reconciliation of opposites are in Atwood's late poems. The poetics of the romantics Blake and Coleridge, as discussed by the twentieth-century critics Northrop Frye and I. A. Richards, and underscored by new theories in physics, may be used to clarify how Atwood resolves dualities. The last five poems of "New Poems 1985-1986" from Selected Poems II demonstrate the blending of life/death, God/human, spiritual/material, body/nature, real/imaginary, male/female, subject/object into one through the use of paradox, poetic image, and remaking of myth, techniques of the imagination that Atwood shares with Blake and Coleridge.

David Mamet's use of play and games in his dramas illustrates the nature of play: its power to attract and hold players in its spell. Play and games fascinate and master the characters. Shelley Levene in Glengarry Glen Ross, Bob Gold in Homicide, and Margaret Ford in House of Games are convinced that they know the rules of the game and thus believe they are in control. They assume roles that they believe make them major players in the game they think they are playing. But rather than being in control of the game and its rules, each of these characters is an unwitting player in a larger game where they are the pawns. In addition, these characters contribute to their own victimization by breaking the rules of their own games. The audience participates in these characters' games and adventures very much as the characters themselves do and are thus mesmerized, mastered, and ultimately set up by the game that Mamet plays with them.

Jane Austen and Flannery O'Connor possess essentially religious imaginations. The character of their work is determined by the degree of similarity or difference between their beliefs and those generally held by their intended audiences. Austen, an orthodox Anglican in a fundamentally religious era, creates a fiction of restraint: gently satiric, ultimately comic in form and intent, directed to a reader who shares her vision of spiritual and moral order revealed through social structure. O'Connor, a Catholic in an age of unbelief, writes a fiction of extremity, characterized by fierce satire, violence, grotesquerie, and the juxtaposition of comic characters and situations with tragic form and meaning, directed to an unbelieving reader whom she wishes to "shock" into a new awareness of the sacred. A comparison of the work of Austen and O'Connor in this context leads to a renewed appreciation of the interdependence of imagination and reality in determining the distinctive qualities of a writer's oeuvre.

The poetry of Wallace Stevens demonstrates a process of creativity through motion, color, and sound imagery. This process is one of creating or discovering a supreme fiction or a temporal ideal or order that will suffice for now but will continue in motion and change. A momentary blending of the imagination and reality creates this ideal poetry. Chaos, disorder, death, and decay are metaphors for the activity of decreation, which must precede creation in many poems. Nature constantly changes, but it does so with a pattern. The patterned motion in the poetry is a circular motion toward a center of form, balance, and perfection. Color imagery demonstrates a process much like the one that Newton demonstrated in the colors that make up light. Sound imagery evokes "inherited Memory" which we use to recreate a new fiction.

The mythological elements of the Apollonian and Dionysian in ancient tragedy as defined in Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy may be applied to the modern family, specifically Jamie and Edmund in O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, Lenny and Teddy in Pinter's The Homecoming, and Lee and Austin in Shepard's True West. The conflict between the modern brothers is representative of the struggle between and eventual "mimetic reciprocity" of Dionysus and Apollo; each brother of each set is perceived initially to be the polar opposite of his sibling, but as the action evolves his antithetical position dissolves and each becomes a mirror reflection of his brother. But these companion forces have the potential for destruction, and violence erupts when the Apollonian brothers struggle to maintain their individual identities against the stronger force of their Dionysian counterparts.

The interaction between mind (consciousness) and world (sensory phenomena) is explored in depth by poets William Wordsworth and Wallace Stevens, with particular attention given to the role of imagination. In The Prelude, Wordsworth describes events from his own early life, encounters between mind and world, leading to the development of a poetic sensibility. Stevens, writing in a playful, improvisational style very different from Wordsworth's, examines a variety of encounters between characters such as Crispin in "The Comedian as the Letter C" and external reality. For both poets, the boundaries between mind and world are indeterminate, and the question of supremacy in their dynamic relationship is unresolved. Yet the sense of a "something" that grounds this interplay, what Stevens identifies as "Being," leads the ever-active imagination to do its work, at home in the world.

Carl Sandburg's volumes of poetry, his comprehensive biography of Abraham Lincoln, and his collection of American folk songs established him as an author with a fascination and respect for American culture. The Rootabaga Stories are an unusual expression of his talent but have, for the most part, escaped critical notice. Growing up in the Midwest and traveling by himself for several years provided a background that enabled him to imbue the stories with an American spirit. The stories collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the literary tales of Hans Christian Andersen, and some American legends and folk tales combined to form the heritage Sandburg responded to in his creation of forty-nine stories. In fabricating the geography and culture of Rootabaga Country, Sandburg infused the stories with subtleties of language and attitude that are recognizably and exuberantly American.