Faraci, Mary

Ben Jonson's Volpone has attracted audiences since its first performance in 1606. This powerful work continues to present interesting problems for critics and teachers. Recent discourse-based critical approaches to literary works, based on the work of Heidegger, Kristeva, and Cixous, promise to reveal imaginative uses of the English language by Jonson in Volpone. The seductive figures of speech work in creating the dramatic interest of the characters and spiralling audience investment. What the audience members think they feel about the characters depends on Jonson's genius behind it all. Jonson used English for innovative seductive effects: for example, "Shall I make you a poultice?" (3.2.96) examined rhetorically and grammatically reveals seductive intent. By analyzing in detail the seductive aspects of the language of the play as if heard for the first time, a discourse-based analysis returns the beginnings of seductive dramatic effects to their creator, Jonson, who in Volpone creates multiple meanings of seduction.

This thesis is a comparative study of John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, based on the imagery and theme of Borges's "forking paths." Both authors are indebted to Borges's work for providing the experimental narrative devices that made it possible for them to challenge their "ghosts." In Barth's case, he loses himself in the Funhouse, haunted by the "same old stories" (102); Kingston finds her voice in the Chinese stories and shocking images of the past. The thesis will work toward a presentation of the dramatic performances and brilliant images in Barth's Lost in the Funhouse and in Kingston's The Woman Warrior. Readers become players who surrender their conventional notions about narrative in Borges's "Garden of the Forking Paths." Fortunately, the writing of Barth and Kingston continues to keep storytelling a lively art where time and memory are the main characters.

A complex and compelling variation of the archetypal Oedipal complex, embodied in unorthodox, vigorous, and symbolic linguistic expression, Lawrence's work envelops the reader in a Promethean, didactic, life-affirming embrace of vitalism. The work involves a peculiar fusion and mirroring of souls, an intense and prolonged struggle with the self on the part of the character of Paul Morel, and an emergence the self or rebirth of the psyche. Within this tapestry, Lawrence has woven intricate threads of his philosophy of vitalism and blood-consciousness, utilizing universal, primordial archetypes which resound mnemonically in the psyche of the reader, urging humanity to embrace the mystical, universal, creative force of life, to repel the externalities of convention and repression, and to yearn and struggle to be alive.

For the most part, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's work has been considered primarily as Southern Regionalist. Her use of language, however, in detailed descriptions of nature evidence an ecological consciousness. Examining her use of certain words used in descriptions of natural places, we see that Rawlings views nature as a place of learning and that man fits in not as a dominant figure, but as a part of the ecological community, and is subject to the vicissitudes of nature. The analysis of her language is the indication that Rawlings was as concerned with nature as she was with the Regionalism of Cross Creek. Her use of certain words portrays an unpredictable world. Rawlings portrays her characters in the basic condition of mankind, not as dominant figures, but as survivors in the unpredictable settings of Nature.

Mark Twain was popular in Europe from the start. His bitter satire and his humor appealed to European readers. "We are all offspring of Europe," Twain once said, and he was fascinated by the Old World throughout his career. First in The Innocents Abroad the writer traveled in European countries as an innocent tourist to experience European history and culture. He came to see, though, that the Catholic Church had excessive power there, that there were beggars and filth everywhere, and that the old masters' paintings were neglected. A Tramp Abroad continued satirizing the living conditions in Europe. The tone in the latter book is mostly pessimistic, and the author's increasing bitterness toward the Old World is well revealed in it.

Tolkien's trilogy deserves a more serious consideration than many are willing to give. Through Tolkien's fantasy it is possible to discover how we come to know what we know about the metaphysical world so that we can experience the proper cosmic pattern that gives us, as Mircea Eliade writes in Cosmos And History, "the nostalgia for eternity" because its patterns "can never be uprooted: it can only be debased" (122). If we are to understand Tolkien, we must discuss Tolkien's ideas such as power, the nature of good and evil, and free will and individual responsibility. The virtue of the elves becomes the focal point for those ideas since the elves are the structural force that gives the work its power and meaning. To further explain the virtue of the elves, Tolkien plunges into basic human emotions and a symbolic structure that can surmount cultural boundaries. He thus creates a world through the ancient device of exemplifying morals in unfamiliar personalities in order to bring home truths in which modern man can believe.

The illustrations in this thesis provide an insight into the findings that the text is a joint product of an interpretive community. The underlying knowledge of a Kenyan reader is loaded with constraints that are a product of British colonialism, a specific history, background, and experience. The application of this underlying knowledge during the interpretation of Charles Dickens's Hard Times requires several adjustments to this text. The art of Dickens's structuring of Hard Times would be lost on the reader who is not familiar with the differences between the uses and effects of various styles of English writing. This thesis seeks to show that the conscientious critic could reveal to the non-native speaker the differences in styles of writing in the speeches of Dickens's characters.

Thomas Hardy includes in his Wessex novels images of
women oppressed by the patriarchal system. Even though he
exposes the abuses in the system, he suggests that the
women fall short of the qualities of intelligence and
language which the narrative voice respects. Lovely Tess
is naive, simple, and impulsive; Sue appears narcissistic,
revolutionary, and bizarre; Arabella, also
narcissistic, is amoral and coarse as well; thus, in Tess
of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure there is a sense
created by the patriarchal narrative voice that the women
are not capable of the tasks required for vreat ing
intellectual human communities.

The interpretive history of the "fop" can be illuminated
through the application of Saussure's explanation of the
systems of evolution, creation, and permanance in language. Thus,
the critical "texts" created by eighteenth-century critics are
subject to the same transformations, formations, and pressures that
prescribe, under certain conditions, the survival of meanings in
language. Like the history of surviving units of sounds and
meanings in the language, the value attached to the "fop" can be
viewed as a survivor from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
to the twentieth, guarded by the writings of "interpretive
authorities" of eighteenth-century studies.

The characterizations in The Tempest resemble the archetypes of the
collective unconscious and appear to gather their momentum from
Shakespeare's understanding of the individuation process. In depicting
the unfolding dynamics of psychic change, the playwright anticipates
Jung's theory of individuation by showing the compensatory influence
these numinous figures have on the characters' conscious orientations
as they move from separation to subsequent union. The characters'
agitated and irrational responses to the archetypal manifestations
are a reflection of the psychic division characteristic of the individuating
mind. Harmony and reason are achieved as the characters
heal their division by integrating the conscious contents of their
projections. This enlarging of the personality and broadening of
collective relationships transform The Tempest into a variation on the
quest for individuation offering a psychic stage for the Jungian notions
of process and renewal.