Browsing by Author "Thomas Lisk, Committee Member"

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Elizabeth Bishop's Quest for the Ordinary
(2007-04-27) Helm, Daniel Joseph; Nick Halpern, Committee Chair; Thomas Lisk, Committee Member; Anne Baker, Committee Member
Poetry by Elizabeth Bishop is filled with issues of domesticity and belonging, intimacy and loss, as well as transparent language and local scenes, all of which are types or expressions of ordinariness. Building from the philosophy of Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell proposes that ordinariness — both ordinary language and everyday life — presents the greatest challenge to philosophical skepticism. To Cavell, skepticism threatens us with doubt and the inhumanity of disconnection from life and the world. In In Quest of the Ordinary, Cavell describes challenging the skeptical threat with the resettling of the everyday, a domestication of skepticism that makes life a livable place. Cavell's sense of a need for opposition to skepticism that makes life livable is confirmed by readers of Bishop who find her handling questions, doubts, and the frustration of loss in a way that seems manageable and a way that also emphasizes the significance of ordinariness. Cavell's work is an opportunity to characterize the recurring patterns and themes as well as the contrasts and the differences in Bishop's poems as a search for ordinariness. I claim that ordinariness in Bishop's poetry exists, as in Cavell, in dialogue with skepticism, so that Bishop's quest for the ordinary is a struggle to protect against as well as preserve skepticism. The quest, as both Cavell and Bishop depict it, is endless because ordinariness is elusive, but a struggle with and for ordinariness is appealing, both in Bishop's poetry and Cavell's philosophy, because it alternately allows hope and skepticism. Her poems are widely appreciated because, as Randall Jarrell said, they suggest —it is barely but perfectly possible— to live in the world.
Half a Woman: The Nun in Film from WWII to the Present
(2005-12-06) Krocker, Sarah Elizabeth; Maria Pramaggiore, Committee Chair; Marsha Orgeron, Committee Member; Thomas Lisk, Committee Member
Half a Woman examines how six prominent nun films signify the changing perception of the nun in postwar America and Great Britain. Through the changing perspective of the populace, as well as historical influences such as the Feminist Movement, the nun has shifted from the angelic entity of the mid-1940s in The Bells of St. Mary's (1945) and Lilies of the Field (1963) to the sexual demon of the 1970s and 1980s with The Devils (1971). After the 1980s, the nun was not only a sexual demon but a platform for political commentary. Agnes of God (1983), Dead Man Walking (1995), and The Magdalene Sisters (2002) all use the nun to express a political stance on topics affecting women, as well as society at the turn of the 21st century.
Hamlet's Fathers: An Analysis of Paternity and Filial Duty in Shakespeare's "Hamlet"
(2004-09-03) Drewry, Justin Dathan Anders; M. Thomas Hester, Committee Chair; Brian Blackley, Committee Member; Thomas Lisk, Committee Member
In Hamlet, Shakespeare presents the audience with the "common theme" of nature, "death of fathers," and three sons—Hamlet, Laertes and Fortinbras—who feel the filial duty to revenge these premature deaths (I, ii, 103-4). At first, all three sons idealize their fathers, with Hamlet giving his father god-like characteristics, but their paths to filial duty quickly diverge as Hamlet questions the morality of the Ghost's call for revenge. While Laertes and Fortinbras accept the pagan code of blood vengeance supported by Claudius's court and steadily move towards revenge, Hamlet delays because this code contrasts with his Christian faith. Ultimately, Hamlet's tragedy results when he attempts revenge, striking through the curtain and killing the wrong man. However, Hamlet quickly recognizes the significance of his actions and the power of "providence" through the many miracles on his sea voyage as he returns to Denmark offering Laertes an exchange of forgiveness. Hamlet's revelation has come too late, but his final offer of forgiveness portrays the triumph of his Christian faith and his belief in "providence" over the codes of his earthly father.
"A Place for the Lost": Ron Rash and Contemporary Southern Identity
(2007-07-23) Vernon, Zackary Dwayne; Michael Grimwood, Committee Chair; Thomas Lisk, Committee Member; Jill McCorkle, Committee Member
In his seminal essay "The Search for Southern Identity," C. Vann Woodward asserts, "The time is coming, if indeed it has not already arrived, when the Southerner will begin to ask himself whether there is really any longer very much point in calling himself a Southerner. Or if he does, he might well wonder occasionally whether it is worthwhile insisting on the point" (3). Although Woodward first published this essay in 1958, his assertions may be even more pertinent today, given the effect that an increasingly homogeneous national culture has had on American regionalism. Over the past half century, the persistence of questions such as those Woodward raises has manifested itself in an enormous amount of writing about the idea of a distinctively Southern identity. In this essay, I will examine the literature of Ron Rash, a contemporary writer from western North Carolina, and I will explain Rash's complex relationship with Southern identity by considering, at least tangentially, his three poetry collections as well as his three novels. Ultimately, after examining the history of Southern identity, Rash's use of Southern identity and culture in his fiction and poetry, the ways in which Rash's characters exploit Southern identity, and the version of Southern identity that Rash perpetuates in his own life, I will show that Rash is justifiable in his employment and portrayal of Southern identity. Rather than consciously commodifying Southern identity and culture as a marketing tool to sell his work to a specific audience, Rash artfully records a disappearing culture to which he has strong personal ties.
Travelling in the direction of mortality': Wandering the Topography of Wordsworthian Selfhood
(2004-06-24) Chernik, Aria Fortune; Sharon Setzer, Committee Member; Thomas Lisk, Committee Member; John Morillo, Committee Chair
One of the primary attributes of a wanderer, as one who is in constant motion, is that he or she is not beholden to traditional spatio-temporal constructs, and, thus, to traditional constructs of life and death. This thesis examines some of Wordsworth's seminal wanderer figures, such as the peripatetic speaker and his uncanny double, the Leech Gatherer, in 'Resolution and Independence' and the transcendent Wanderer in the first book of The Excursion, 'The Wanderer,' and investigates the way in which movement functions as an integral component of the phenomenological and ontological construction of Wordsworthian selfhood. In 'Resolution,' wandering allows the speaker to traverse the natural boundaries of his environment and arrive at a place of liminality where he encounters his spectral other, the Leech Gatherer. Applying Freud's theory of the uncanny, I reveal how the Leech Gatherer ameliorates the severe anxiety within the speaker about dying in 'despondency and madness' because of failed artistic accomplishment in a world of materiality, and thus never attaining literary fame, a kind of immortality after death. In contrast, while the Wanderer may certainly be characterized as an immortal figure, he achieves immortality not by negating the existence or permanence of death, but by perfecting a dynamic, relational selfhood that synthesizes the Kierkegaardian dialectic of selfhood. Under Kierkegaard's vision of selfhood, transcendence is achieved by constantly balancing the finite, temporal body and soul and the infinite, atemporal spirit. Wordsworth's wandering figures are not limited to poetic characters, however. Wandering is also an intrinsic element of some rhetorical tropes. Employing Paul de Man's analysis of the rhetorical figure of prosopopoeia as a figure propelled by 'the art of delicate transition,' this thesis unearths the way in which Wordsworth, in 'Essay upon Epitaphs,' portrays epitaph as an archetypical example of prosopopoeic transition. Indeed, in 'Essay,' Wordsworth writes extensively about the epitaphic function of granting a voice, and thus life, back to the dead and explains how, shrouded within the context of prosopopoeia and epitaph, a sepulchral monument is not a final resting place, but merely a platform from which the dead speak and through which they journey back.