English Theses and Dissertations

Ginsberg, Warren Nelson, Sharity 2013-10-10T23:19:04Z 2013-10-10T23:19:04Z 2013-10-10 http://hdl.handle.net/1794/13420 A common assumption in theories of the aesthetic is that it is a concept and experience that belongs to modernity. However, as Umberto Eco has shown, the aesthetic was a topic of great consideration by medieval thinkers. As this project demonstrates in the study of the poetry of William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer, the aesthetic was, in fact, a dynamic and complex concept in the Middle Ages that could affirm institutional ideologies even as it challenged them and suggested alternative perspectives for comprehending truth. This project focuses on the ways in which the poets' respective vernacular literary masterpieces, Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales, individually craft theories of the aesthetic and defend its role as a privileged discursive epistemology. I argue that, for Langland and Chaucer, the aesthetic is a discursive mode through which the reader comes to possess a complex knowledge that matches his or her nature, material and immaterial, sensitive and intellective; the reader arrives at this knowledge by engaging his or her wits in a translation of the poetics of Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales. For Langland, this translative exercise is evoked by the complex interplay of allegory and irony, and the result of the aesthetic experience is an embodied knowledge of God's truth that he refers to as "kind knowing." For Chaucer, the aesthetic is configured through the experience of irony, a figure that engages the process of translation as it confirms the complexity of truth as we can comprehend it. The aesthetic is also, for Chaucer, represented by the privileged mode of parody, which allows the reader to hear, as it were, what is missing and, in reading, supply the missing voice and create a dialogue--between text and reader and/or tale and tale--that in effect remasters whatever is monoaural by translating it into stereo. Ultimately, for both Langland and Chaucer, the aesthetic engenders instruction and pleasure, and both together are essential to our embodied comprehension of truth. en_US University of Oregon All Rights Reserved. Between "Ernest" and "Game": The Aesthetics of Knowing and Poetics of "Witte" in William Langland's Piers Plowman and Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales Electronic Thesis or Dissertation Ph.D. doctoral Department of English University of Oregon

Spillman, Deborah Vasavada, Megan 2013-10-03T23:31:47Z 2013-10-03T23:31:47Z 2013-10-03 http://hdl.handle.net/1794/13240 This dissertation draws on studies of gift exchange by cultural anthropologists and social theorists to examine representations of gifts and gift giving in nineteenth-century British novels. While most studies of the economic imagination of nineteenth-century literature rely on and respond to a framework formulated by classical political economy and consequently overlook nonmarket forms of social exchange, I draw on gift theory in order to make visible the alternate, everyday exchanges shaping social relations and identity within the English novel. By analyzing formal and thematic representations of gifting over the course of the nineteenth century, in novels by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, I consider the way that gift exchange relates and responds to the emergence of capitalism and consumer culture. I trace two distinct developments in nineteenth-century gift culture: the first, the emergence of an idealized view of the gift as purely disinterested, spontaneous, and free, and the second, the emergence of a view of charity as demoralizing to the poor. These developments, I contend, were distinct ideological formations of liberal economic society and reveal a desire to make the gift conform to individualism. However, I suggest further that these transformations of the gift proceeded unevenly, for in their attention to the logic and practice of giving, nineteenth-century writers both give voice to and subvert these cultural formations. Alongside the figure of the benevolent philanthropist, the demoralized pauper, and the quintessential image of altruism, the selflessly giving domestic woman, nineteenth-century novels present another view of gift exchange, one that sees the gift as a mix of interest and disinterest, freedom and obligation, and persons and things. Ultimately, by reading the gift relations animating nineteenth-century novels, I draw attention to the competing conceptions of selfhood underlying gift and market forms of exchange in order to offer a broader history of exchange and personhood. In its recognition of expansive conceptions of the self and obligatory gifts, this dissertation recovers a history of the gift that calls into question the ascendency of the autonomous individual and the view of exchange as an anonymous, self-interested transaction. en_US University of Oregon All Rights Reserved. Austen Jane Dickens Charles Eliot George Gift exchange Nineteenth-century British Novel Novel Gifts: The Form and Function of Gift Exchange in Nineteenth-century England Electronic Thesis or Dissertation Ph.D. doctoral Department of English University of Oregon