Faraci, Mary

Various approaches have been taken toward the study of
language. Prescriptive and descriptive approaches have
been the most common, both assuming a set of natural
language rules. The Fixed Choice point of view, evolving
out of the descriptive approach, questions the nature of
language rules and discovers, through the study of the
word, classic, that this new point of view is also the
point of view of the propagandist.

This thesis is a comparison of Old English infinitives with
present day English infinitive forms. The comparisons in this thesis
provide insight into historical differences and developments involving
the infinitive. One of the most obvious differences between Old English
and present day English is the variety of Old English word orders;
the evidence shows different patterns of interrogative and declarative
subject-verb inversions, as well as adverb, adjective and object
placement when the infinitive without to was used. With the exception
of the interrogatives, the tendency in present day English is to have the
modal or verb follow the subject and precede the infinitive. In comparing
the uses of Old English verbs that cannot take the to + infinitive
with those of present day English that must, it is evident that the
to + infinitive structure is now much more common in sentences. One
can assume that the present day preference for the to + infinitive after
main verbs, with the exception of modal auxiliaries, has grown out of
the Old English use of the inflected infinitive with to.

Robert Browning's dramatic monologues often characterize the darker aspect of romantic love through speakers who demonstrate their devotion to violence. Exploring the innovations in discourse, Browning gives his narrators voices that allow them to speak from an ancient literary tradition. For Browning's speakers, words make the silencing of the lover either the act of ultimate devotion or the result of disappointed expectations. The narrator speaks of the absence of God, as when Porphyria's lover holds her body to him: "and yet God has not said a word!" With the poet's strong speech---in all his attractiveness, his destructive display of love and his dismissal of God---Browning has helped to create a discourse that has sculpted the literary force of the romantic killer. Three novelists in particular employ the literary force of Browning's experiments: Anne Rice's The Vampire Lestat, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho and Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter novels. Intertextual comparisons among these narratives delineate how Robert Browning's innovation of the seductive antihero has persisted in literature.

Joyce Carol Oates's novel them and Wallace Stevens's poetry can be examined in light of Oates's critical essay "Against Nature." These fictions illustrate Oates's idea of Nature not existing as a noun, Nature, but as an experience which we attempt to understand through language. Indirectly, Oates calls on other authors and theorists to argue for a redefinition of Nature. She comes to conclude that what we call "Nature" in reality exists as Nature-as-experience. Once we fully understand Nature-as-experience, we can utilize those principles to understand a relatively new occurrence in history and literature: the manmade city. In them, the city, in much the same way as Nature, becomes City-as-experience and in fact lives in the experience of the character Maureen.

Sylvia Plath's poetry pulses with imagery and sound; it excites, disturbs, and unnerves. When Plath writes "I," one rarely questions the authenticity of the speaker. One feels privy to certain aspects of the poet's life experience. Her father's death, her subsequent psychotherapy, and the dissolution of her marriage contribute directly to the often surreal affect of the poetry. Plath's unique voice emerges from the bubbling cauldron of repetitive grief issues, existential tendencies, and patriarchy to create a new order of post-modern poetry. The thesis attempts to lead readers to a better appreciation of that poetry by demonstrating that Plath did not desire death, but rather desired growth, in an understanding of her own mysterious existence. It is evident through textual analysis that she was writing to achieve liberation from a crippling grief, autonomy as a woman artist, and absolution from years of guilt, at the time of her suicide.

The title character of Beowulf functions as an archetypal hero who can be analyzed through the work of mythologist, Joseph Campbell. Beowulf's adventures follow the separation-initiation-return pattern described by Campbell. Furthermore, Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf adds to mythological understanding of the poem which is clarified by reading it in light of Campbell's theory. Just as sixty years ago, Tolkien's work gave the reader a new way of understanding Beowulf, Heaney's interpretation allows the reader to notice fresh aspects of the poem. Additionally, Heaney's reading, with its emphasis on the "mythic potency" of the work, is especially receptive to interpretation in the light of the mythic undercurrents that Campbell examines so extensively. The introduction, too, stresses the universality and timelessness of these old tales. Moreover, comparing these folkloric elements to similar ones found in fairy tales might broaden the reader's understanding of the poem.

Since its appearance, Pound's translation of the Old English poem, The Seafarer, has occupied a significant place in literary history and criticism. Among established descriptions in Anglo-Saxon studies, the original has been called "an indestructible tribute to the mariners of England." Pound's work adds to this tribute in a new way, making important statements concerning the history of language and literature of the sea. At the same time, Pound's translation explores the concept of literary "indestructibility," raising implications about how "texts" acquire meaning. By studying the different ways Pound attempted to bring Anglo-Saxon language to the present in The Seafarer, this thesis aspires to reckon with not only the categorical conflicts of Pound's early translation, but also the importance that it represents to Pound's means of redefining English poetry. This thesis conducts an analysis of Ezra Pound's 1911 translation of the Anglo-Saxon Seafarer poem emphasizing Pound's inventive use of unfamiliar language serving to challenge the accepted academic role of the translator.

All narratives in which the human image is presented establish an interconnectedness of time and space, what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the chronotope. When Victor Hugo wrote Les Miserables, he drew upon a historical chronotope originating in the narratives that accompanied the spread of Christianity, and which found its purest distillate in the genre of hagiography---the narrating of the lives of saints. When the mode of sacred time established in the conventionally brief hagiologic narrative, which depended on a linear progression having unity with God as its end, is integrated into the extended form of the novel, it finds itself at odds with the ubiquitous adventure time---the random disjunctions of time and space without which there is no plot. The delineated spaces of roads and gardens in Les Miserables serve to concretize the mediation between these two modes of time, resulting in the ordinary time of the novel.