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- Blom, Mattias Bolkéus
(författare)
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Stories of Old : The Imagined West and the Crisis of Historical Symbology in the 1970s
- 1999
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- For all the criticism that has been leveled against cultural representations of the American West, ideas of the westward expansion and its significance have remained powerful impulses for the negotiation of history and identity. Such notions of the past, and the cultural symbology with which they can be expressed, are more or less available to writers and other cultural agents for employment in political, cultural, or literary discourse. Understood in this way, the imagined West, to use Richard White's term, has continued to supply material that affirms or contests political and ideological change. The rejection of the conventionally imagined past in the 1970s provided writers with an opportunity to re-formulate historical representation and to make sense of history anew. Thus the imagined West reinforced its paradoxical status in American culture as a symbolic resource that signifies both historical inertia and constant change.This study investigates representations of the West as they appear in the literary discourse of the 1970s. In readings of four non-genre texts, Don DeLillo's Americana (1971), Robert Coover's The Public Burning (1977), Joan Didion's The White Album (1979), and Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff (1979), this study situates the cultural symbology of the West in a historico-political, cultural, and literary context. The study shows how these four writers utilize preconceptions about the meaning of the past, at the same time as they reshape that past to fit their own literary and ideological strategies. They do so by incorporating into the texts elements of historical representation and their ideological constituents, or ideologemes. Taken together, these texts are seen to illustrate the trajectory of the imagined West during a time of critical negotiation of American history.
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- Cederlöf, Mikael
(författare)
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The element -stow in the history of English
- 1998
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The present study deals with words ending in -stow throughout the history of English. The OE element-stow derives from the IG root *st(h)au-o, which is the extended form of the simple *st(h)a. In the thesis, parallel forms from a number of IG languages are given and commented on. A number of cognates of the element -stow are discussed, their etymologies are established and their uses are compared to the different uses of -stow. Both similarities and dissimilarities are pointed out.The thesis then turns to OE appellative compounds in -stow. Their etymologies are established and discussed. The compounds are classified according to a system based on semantic functions. Parallel compounds with close cognates of -stow as their second elements are given together with OE appellative compounds with -stow as the second element. English place-names in -stow are given, discussed and classified according to a modified version of the classificatory system applied to the OE appellative compounds. One of the main findings in this context is that -stow as a place-name element could mean "place of a church". This has been deduced from comparisons with Welsh and Latin words. The similarities and dissimilarities between names and appellatives are illuminated and commented upon through a thorough investigation of material excerpted from OE charters. The distributional patterns of OE appellative compounds in -stow are studied in material drawn from the Toronto Corpus.The survival of the element -stow in Middle English and Early Modern English is described in some detail. The main finding is the survival of the appellative -stow as a mining term well into the 19th century. The uses of stow as a verb root are described in great detail. The-only extant example of OE stowjan is discussed. The two ME forms of this verb, simplex stouen and compound be-stouen, and the uses of EModE stow and bestow are described and discussed. The distributional patterns of ME and EModB appellative stow, simplex and compound, as well as those of ME stouen / be-stouen and EModE stow / bestow are established through the use of material drawn from the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts and the Oxford Text Archive. The most important finding is the diminishing use of the simplex appellative stow in EModE and the great increase in the use of bestow in the 16th and 17th centuries. Material excerpted from The Records of the Commissioners of Sewers in the Parts of Holland (dating from the 16th and 17th centuries) shows that the appellative stow in technical and terminological registers could survive well into the EModE period.
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- Gilsenan Nordin, Irene
(författare)
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Crediting marvels in Seamus Heaney's Seeing things
- 1999
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This is a study of the Irish, Nobel prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney's Seeing Things, (1991), a volume which marks a turning point in Heaney's writing. From an earlier concern with the outer physicality of things, Heaney turns with deepened awareness to the inner landscapes of the mind, where the thingness of things is explored and expressed in language. The dissertation examines this new departure in the light of what Heidegger terms a call to "primordial authenticity," which is uncovered in the everydayness of things and given voice in the poetic utterance. The focus of this thesis differs from previous scholarship in that it sets out to make a detailed analysis of the whole volume of Seeing Things and takes as its starting point a Heideggerian approach, where the basic concept of "being-in-the-world" is understood in terms of the belonging together of self and world. I examine how this interrelation manifests itself in Heaney's poetry. Heidegger rejects the transcendental subject as a starting point, and begins instead from an understanding of the immanent "givenness" of human existence. These ideas are thus used to explore the poetry of Seeing Things. In addition to Heidegger, this study is also influenced by the writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Gadamer's theoretical approach with its concern for what he calls the "fusion of horizons", is especially useful in studying Heaney's poetry, where a strong sense of dialectic movement is evident between opposing forces. Using these ideas of Heidegger and Gadamer, I trace a thematic Dantean quest for understanding in Seeing Things, and explore how, in the context of this journey, thresholds are crossed in a constant Heraclitean flow between the forces of fixity and flux. The study also traces various other binaries, such as absence and presence, speech and silence, which are part of our experience of being-in-the-world. I show how these oppositions are brought together in a poetics of understanding. Such experiences of awareness are seen as moments of epiphany, or what Gadamer calls "a shattering and demolition of the familiar." Thus, central to this study is an understanding of the mystery and power of language, and of how poetry acts as a transforming vision of reality, or in the Heideggerian sense, as a proclamation of the holy that takes the "mysterious measure" of things.
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