Rebirth in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land

Rob Heggestad

In The Waste Land, Eliot uses many historical myths, pagan vegetation and fertility rites, the quest of the Grail, and the story of Christ to portray a world full of spiritual and sexual decay. The protagonist in the poem fluctuates between Tiresias, the Ganged Man of the Tarot Pack, and the Fisher King. Eliot takes his protagonist on a journey through the Waste Land. Most critics argue that Eliot ends the poem with death and despair. However, I argue that Eliot ends the poem with a rebirth, just as winter always evolves into spring, and just as Christ rises from Hell.

Works Cited

Aeclectic Tarot. “The Hanged Man.” 5 April 206 <http://www.aedectic.net/tarot/basics/Hangedman.shtml>

Campbell, Jeseph. The Hero With a Thousand Faces. New York: Bollingen, 1953.

Eliot, T.S. The Wast Land and Other Poems. Ed. Frank Kermode. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Frazer, Sir James George. The Golden Bough. New York: Macmillan, 1940.

Lockerd, Benjamin. Aethereal Rumours. London: Bucknell UP, 1988.

New International Version of The Holy Bible. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1988.

Nietzche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974.

Surette, Leon. “The Waste Land and Jessie Weston: A Reassessment” Twentieth Century Literature 34.2 (1988): 223-245.

Weston, Jessie. From Ritual to Romance. New York: Peter Smith, 1941.

Best-Seller or Entire Mistake? : The Effect of Form on Receptions of Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Mrs. Henry Wood’s East Lynne

Elizabeth A. Eshelman

The best-selling novel of the nineteenth century, Mrs. Henry Wood’s East Lynne, is not commonly read today; neither is Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. These books, published only twelve years apart, share strikingly similar sensational elements and common themes. However, they were received very differently; while the early critics disapproved of the subject matter of the both books, they praised East Lynne highly yet criticized The Tenant, setting the stage of each book’s fate through the first part of the twentieth century. As I show in this section of my honors thesis, it is first and foremost the form of these books – point of view, style, and structure – that determines their early treatment. Since the Victorian era refused to give voice to the experience of vicious living, The Tenant threatens the Victorian disguise of respectability by allowing the reader to witness – through a first-person narrator and a structure composed of a letter and a diary – scenes of debauchery and immoral behavior. East Lynne, on the other hand, distances the reader from the immorality in the book by using a third-person, storyteller perspective, thus presenting the story as exactly that – a story, rather than a truthful account.

Constructing Truth: Tim O’Brien’s Form and Function

Sean Golden

Tim O’Brien is a well respected author known for his exploration of the Vietnam War and its impact on its combatants. O’Brien’s stylistic elements are creations made to achieve a goal in telling his war stories. By exploring techniques that O’Brien uses in his novels The Things They Carried and In The Lake Of The Woods, such as repetition, context, and character identity, I intend to prove that O’Brien’s goal is to reveal the emotional truth of the soldier’s experience of Vietnam and that his form and fuction are the tools he uses to construct that truth.

Works Cited

Heberle, Mark A. A Trauma Artist: Tim O’Brien and the Fiction of Vietnam. Iowa City, Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2001.

Hunt, Patrick. “Ten Questions With Tim O’Brien.” Flyer News 10 Oct. 2003. Arts and Entertainment. 20 Feb. 2006 <http://www.flyernews.com/article.php?section=AE&volume=51&issue=9&artnum=01>.

King, Rosemary. “O’Brien’s How to Tell a True War Story.” Explicator 57 (1999): 1-3.

Liparulo, Steven P. “’Incense and Ashes’: The Postmodern Work of Refutation in Three Vietnam War Novels.” War, Literature, and the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities 15 (2003): 71-94.

O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. Boston: Random House, 1990.

---. In The Lake of the Woods. New York: Penguin Books, 1994.

Smith, Patrick A. Tim O’Brien: A Critical Companion. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2005.

Timmerman, John H. “Tim O’Brien and the Art of the True War Story: ‘Night March’ and ‘Speaking of Courage.’” Twentieth Century Literature 46 (2000): 41-46.

 Quieting the Cry of the Naked: W.E.B Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece as a Medium for the Souls of Black Folk

Michael Henderson

In his collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois propagates his message for poor, post-slavery blacks. However, keeping in mind that his main target audience is less educated than the majority of white America, he needed a more tangible, relatable, and easy to understand medium to get his message out. This is the role of his first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece, as it is more easily understandable to many blacks. The setting, characters and situations are all relatable to many early twentieth-century blacks.

Works Cited

Alilunas, Leo. “What our Schools Teach About Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois.” The Journal of Negro Education 42 (1973): 176-86.

Bone, Robert. “The Negro Novel in America.” From the Yale University Press. Contemporary Literary Criticism Volume 1. Ed. Carolyn Riley. Detroit: Gale, 1973. 80.

Du Bois, W.E.B. The Quest of the Silver Fleece. New York: Harlem Moon, 2004.

---. The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois. USA: International, 1968.

---. “The Talented Tenth.” Teaching American History. 2004. Ashland University. 17 February 2005. <http://teachingamericanhistory.org/libray/index.asp?document=174

---. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Penguin, 1989.

Horn, Gerald and Mary Young, eds. W.E.B. Du Bois: An Encyclopedia. Westport, CT : Greenwood, 2001.

Lee, Maurice. “Du Bois the Novelist: White Influence, Black Spirit, and The Quest of the Silver Fleece.” African American Review 33.3 (Autumn, 1999): 389-400.

Wolters, Raymond. Du Bois and his Rivals. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2002.

Wellington, Darrly. “Reconsidering the Souls of Black Folk: Thoughts on the Groundbreaking Classic Work of W.E.B. Du Bois.” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 38 (2003): 131.

“Dr W.E.B. Du Bois: A Man for the People and for Every Season.” The Philadelphia Enquirer. 13 September 1996: 4-B.

 Christianity in Writing: The Impact of C.S. Lewis’s Conversion

Ben Kreucher

C.S. Lewis’s writing is widely read and has had a lasting impact on generations after him. He could have chosen to write cholarly works or non-Christian works but that would not have been fulfilling to him. As a result of his conversion, he wrote Christian themed Stories, Christian apologetics, and Christian allegories. It was not a burden to him to write the works that his peers at Oxford did not approve of, he thought of it as his “labor of love.” He did not need the praise of his peers to make him feel a success; he only wrote what he believed, not for other people’s comforts. Despite the pressure against him, he became a well-conwon author, a devout Christian, an apologetic, and a professor at both Oxford and Cambridge.

Works Cited

Gresham, Douglas. Jack’s Life, Nashville, Tennessee: Broadman and Holman Publishers, 2005.

Kilby, Clyde S. The Christian World of C.S. Lewis, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1964.

Lewis, C.S. Mere Christianity, foreword by Kathleen Norris, San Francisco, California: HarperCollins, 1952.

Mills, David, ed. The Pilgrim’s Guide: C.S. Lewis and the Art of Witness, Grand Rapids, Michigan / Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998.

Note: (Mills 3-14)

Mitchell, Christopher W. “Bearing the Weight of Glory: The Cost of C.S. Lewis’ Witness” The Pilgrim’s Guide: C.S. Lewis and the Art of Witness, Grand Rapids, Michigan / Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998.

Note: (Mills 221-235)

Root, Jerry. “Tools Inadequate and Incomplete: C.S. Lewis and the Great Religions” The Pilgrim’s Guide: C.S. Lewis and the Art of Witness, Grand Rapids, Michigan / Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998.

Shultz, Jeffery D. and West, John G. Jr., eds. The C.S. Lewis Reader’s Encyclopedia, foreword by Christpher Mitchell, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 1998.
 

Flirting With Obscene: John Wilmot’s “Signior Dildo” and “The Disabled Debauchee”

Megan M. O’Neil

Using ambiguous language, 17th century poet John Wilmot produce works such as “Signior Dildo” and “The Disabled Debauchee” that aroused not only the images of sexual encounters and conquests, but also images of war and politics. Top toeing a line between political propaganda and pornography, Wilmot’s unique writing style has had critics in heated debate for years as to how his works should be interpreted. I however argue that John Wilmot has manipulated language in such a way that creates an individual voice through both the use of political and pornographical themes.

Works Cited

Campion, Peter. “Rochester’s Honesty” The New Criterion (2005):17-20.

Gill, James E. “The Fragmented Self in Three of Rochester’s Poems.” Modern Language Quarterly: a Journal of Literary History. 49 (1988): 19-37.

Sitter, John E. “Rocherster’s Reader and the Problem Satiric Audience.” Papers on Language and Literature: a Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature. 12 (1976): 285-298.

Thormählen, Marianne. “Rochester and The Fall: the Roots of Discontent.” English Studies: a Journal of English Language and Literature. 69 (1988): 396-409.

Wilcoxon, Reba. “The Rhetoric of Sex in Rochester’s Burlesque.” Papers on Language and Literature: a Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature. 12 (1976): 273-284.

---. “Porography, Obscenity, and Rochester’s ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. 15 (1975): 375-390.

Wilmot, John “The Disabled Debouchee.” Poetry from 1660 to 1780. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002. 78-79.

“Signior Dildo.” Poetry from 1660 to 1780. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002. 80-82.