Browsing by Author "John Morillo, Committee Member"

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Creating Structure: Verbal and Visual Architecture in Chaucer
(2002-11-12) Hollis, Amanda Julia; Linda T. Holley, Committee Chair; John Morillo, Committee Member; Charlotte Gross, Committee Member
Chaucer uses physical structures in his dream-vision House of Fame and The Canterbury Tales in order to shape the action of his poetry. I am particularly concerned with the way in which Chaucer uses these buildings to narrate space. Building on theoretical foundations of Horace, St. Augustine, and Boccaccio, Chaucer outlines his own theory of how issues of sight and tradition should come into play in a work of art. Chaucer uses as an analogue to his buildings the tower that Jealousy builds to protect the Rose in Romance of the Rose. In House of Fame, the dreamer Geffrey encounters a glass temple of Venus, the house of Fame, and the house of Rumor. As the dreamer walks through and surveys these buildings, Chaucer allows the dreamer's visual scope to guide the narrative flow of the vision. Visual structures imitate and reinforce Chaucer's verbal structures. The organization of buildings here serves as a prototype for a secondary framing of The Canterbury Tales. In The Knight's Tale, two buildings become the focus of the action of the tales. Theseus first imprisons Arcite and Palamon in a tower and later commissions a theater for a battle between the two cousins. The tower shows the narrowing scope of the knights' vision, while the theater serves as a microcosm for the rest of the tales in The Canterbury Tales. The thesis examines the role of these buildings in their respective works and how they are developed in The Canterbury Tales in a way that builds upon ideas in House of Fame.
Ghosts of Chances for Redemption via Abjection in Wilson Harris's Palace of the Peacock and Others
(2005-06-27) Powell, Ethel Anne; Deborah Wyrick, Committee Chair; Michael Grimwood, Committee Member; John Morillo, Committee Member
This thesis explores, in three works of literature, possibilities for redemption via abjection. Julia Kristeva's semanalysis is the primary theoretical tool with which Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688) is examined as a nascent work in Caribbean literature. Next, and central to this thesis, the Guyanese Wilson Harris's The Palace of the Peacock (1960) is discussed within Kristevan context and within Caribbeanist literary critical context. Mariella, a central and fluid character in Palace, acts as a semiotic agent of destruction and of abjectly sublime redemption for Donne and his crew of river boatmen in pursuit of Other ethnically mixed peoples in Guyana's interior. Donne's moment of epiphany, wherein he comes to understand how inhumanely he has treated Others, is followed by his 'second' death and rebirth in a celestial palace (along with the rest of the crew), marking his and their transformation from abject slavers to abjectly sublime and redeemed beings. The semiotic linguistic characteristics of Palace are investigated: while written in the style of Magical Realism, Palace contains lexical and dialectal features stemming from African and Amerindian influences. Flannery O'Connor's 'Revelation' (1965) is the final work examined. Via legacies of plantation slavery and ensuing discrimination against freed African-Americans, many works of Southern U.S. literature contain qualities of postcolonial literatures, particularly the element of abject Otherness. In 'Revelation' Mrs. Ruby Turpin's ideas about abject Others are transformed, as she is transformed from an abject avatar of white Southern racism and classism, into an abjectly sublime person who receives a 'revelation' of her wrongs righted in a celestial march of all human beings. Her 'revelation' is markedly similar to Donne's in Palace, both in what she sees and in the language employed to describe what is revealed to her. In Palace and in 'Revelation,' characters are redeemed by their limitations, by recognition of their abjections, and thus from these abject restrictions. Although Behn's narrator aborts her encounter with an Other, she comes very close to actualizing abject sublimity as is evinced in a fractured and digressive narrative, indicative of the narrator's conflicted psyche. At least she is conflicted about New World colonial enterprises and their institutions of brutal enslavement. Rather than abjure abject Otherness, perhaps readers—students of life and of literature—would embrace abjection, the eschewed Otherness within, as a critical agent for and means to the sublime.
Girl Defending Herself Against Love
(2003-04-09) Beaudoin, Maria Elaine; Wilton Barnhardt, Committee Member; John Morillo, Committee Member; John Kessel, Committee Chair
Kali Nichols is a young woman struggling to build an art career and a prosperous life for herself in New York City. She moved to the city on an art scholarship from Winston-Salem, North Carolina. While at Hunter College, Kali tries to sell her paintings with no success. But her life changes when she enters an art competition and meets an ambitious art dealer, Bailey Sterne, who offers to represent Kali in his drive to open his own gallery one day. As Kali struggles to create a new life for herself in New York, all of her work is ruined when her alcoholic mother who comes to visit her. Kali struggles to understand her relationship with her mother and her relationships with her other family members who she believes have abandoned her. As Kali fights harder to distance herself from the past, she finds herself being drawn back into it. In the end, Kali must come to understand her own relationship with her mother to understand herself and to be truly happy.
Mapping the Interior: Memories of Africa
(2007-06-26) Koning, Paul Eugene; Elaine Neil Orr, Committee Chair; John Morillo, Committee Member; Wilton Barnhardt, Committee Member
This thesis takes the form of a literary memoir relating my experiences in East Africa, both as the child of missionaries and as a young adult returning to teach. In crafting a memoir of my thirteen years in Africa, I hope to explore a number of issues relating to place and identity formation. Like many missionary children and others who have grown up in cultures not their own, I struggled with the sense that I belonged neither in East Africa nor in the United States, the place my parents called "home." My relationship to East Africa remains complex. On the one hand, I came to love it with a fierceness I have yet to fully understand. Yet because of the stain of colonialism, I am forced to wonder whether or not I even have the right to do so. In an age of postmodern disorientation and postcolonial displacement, an examination of the attachment to and disengagement from place seems a topic worthy of consideration. For me as a child, Africa was a place of adventure. My memories are predominantly of the frontier atmosphere, the vaguely lawless feeling of life on the edge. As a member of an elite minority, I was able to enjoy many aspects of this paradise that most of its inhabitants will never know. In retrospect, the great sadness of my time in Africa was the way in which I was almost totally isolated from the African people themselves. Tall hedges, comparatively great wealth, and a vast cultural chasm divided my family from them. While the motives of my parents and many other missionaries were genuine, the fact remained that our position was privileged and our lives relatively easy. The memoir opens with a scene in which young African boys hurl stones at a group of white missionary children walking their bicycles along a dusty road. The flight of the stone that struck me, the sound of my bicycle clattering to the ground, and the sight of my blood trickling into the dust have remained with me ever since. Only now am I beginning to realize the value inherent in that painful moment. This minor clash has given me a window onto the larger landscape of cultural conflict and the wounds that remain from the colonial era. Another aspect of the project, a recurring theme that provides a kind of framing mechanism for the narrative, is an exploration of the act of mapping. Autobiographical writing and the art of mapping share a number of qualities. Each attempts to fix on paper a representation of its particular subject. Both provide for a reader a rather limited and wholly biased portrait of the place or person being described. The cartographer and the memoirist select the elements to include and, perhaps more revealingly, the elements to leave out. Because of these factors, memoir can perhaps be seen as fictional, or at best as a two-dimensional view of a life. Does this diminish its "truth"? As I relate stories from my childhood and early adulthood, I am inscribing a record of my life. Can such a record be trusted? Perhaps not, but even so it will provide both writer and reader with the opportunity to consider issues of postcolonial existence that they might otherwise have passed by.
A Matter of Degrees: an Evaluation of Instructor Concept of Writing Effectiveness in an Adult Accelerated Degree Completion Program
(2003-01-24) Tillett, Tanya R; Chris M. Anson, Committee Chair; Ann M. Penrose, Committee Member; John Morillo, Committee Member
Most modern theories of responding to student writing typically advocate a meaning-centered, whole text holistic approach (as opposed to an analytic mode of response, which allows for the separate evaluation of different criteria). In a holistic assessment, certain criteria may be considered together on one descriptive scale, which renders a final assessment that allows for broader judgments on the quality of particular writing products. As a result, a holistic assessment is usually not quite as rigid as an analytic assessment. This study examined a non-traditional writing program that was highly traditional in its emphasis on stressing the rules of writing mechanics (an analytic method). It specifically focused on instructor familiarity with the program's required citation format. My research questions: how well would instructors score if given the task of finding deliberately inserted errors? What is instructor perception of format in writing evaluation? And, what, if any, influence does instructor training and experience have on the ability to apply citation format? In addition to being asked to detect 33 deliberately inserted errors in documentation format in a typical student paper, ten instructors at the program, an adult accelerated degree completion program, were also asked to complete a demographic survey. As predicted, except for two notable exceptions, average instructor scores were low (68%). In the follow-up survey, most indicated that they were satisfied with the program's required APA citation format, and finally, neither length of experience nor discipline-specific training proved to be significant factors in the average of the instructors' scores. As part of the project, the program's director and the two highest scorers (an English instructor and an accounting instructor) were interviewed to gain insight into how writing requirements fit into the program's overall curriculum. The director of the program felt that stressing the importance of documentation format helped provide the students in the program with a solid academic grounding. And, despite my intuitive notion that the English instructor would provide the most insightful views on how to promote better student writing, it was the accounting instructor who provided the most helpful feedback (which included a recommendation for the use of other documentation styles in the program). It is hoped that this study offers implications for more in-depth study of instructor response to actual student writing, and more study of other non-traditional writing programs.
Sacramental Conversation: The Poetry of Coleridge and Hopkins
(2004-05-12) Morris, Gabriel Stephen; Antony Harrison, Committee Chair; John Morillo, Committee Member; Robert Young, Committee Member
While much scholarship has considered the theological and metaphysical foundations of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's and Gerard Manley Hopkins' poetry, this study seeks to add to the conversation by examining how a conversational mode of meditation unique to Christian sacrament inspires that poetry. Both Coleridge and Hopkins demonstrate an understanding of Christian sacrament that emphasizes engagement and encounter with God through language and creation; in turn, they create a poetry that uses all aspects of the form -- musical sound yoked to philosophical sense -- to record and reenact this sacramental encounter. Chapter 1 discusses how Coleridge, beginning from the Idealism of George Berkeley, counters Berkeley's passive, non-sacramental reading of nature with a theory of active engagement with nature, man, and God. We see how this theory issues in the "conversation poems," a set of meditations that enact the sacramental interchange that results from the poet's awareness of God's presence in the fullness of creation. Chapter 2 considers how Hopkins steps beyond the subtle machinations of Scotist theology to the meditative engagement of Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Exercises. Encouraged by Ignatius' emphasis on detail and particularity, Hopkins creates a poetic practice that uses the music of words to their fullest sacramental potential, demonstrating in poetry how man encounters God through active engagement with the world and takes on the image of Christ through sacrament.