Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Language of confession'

In the years following the military dictatorship in Argentina many novels were published that spoke about the violence, terror, and traumas experienced during the Junta's rule. These texts deal with the theme of memory and retell the traumas of the past as a form of mourning. Such novels look back to the past in an effort to redeem it. In this essay I explore the use of the confessional mode in postdictatorial literature as a vehicle for the task of mourning. In two of his novels, Qué solos se quedan los muertos (1985) and Cuestiones interiores (2003), Argentine author Mempo Giardinelli employs the confessional mode to tell the stories of two guilt-ridden protagonists who resort to writing in search of redemption. Giardinelli's use of the confessional mode highlights two aspects of confession that in actuality deny its completion. While confession aims to alleviate the guilt felt by the confessant and to provide him with a sense of self-understanding in light of his sins, the confessional act subverts these very purposes. The confession requires one to speak of guilt in order to arrive at a state of innocence, which only engenders more guilt and perpetuates the confession. Moreover, in confession the subject that speaks is also the object that it creates in speech. Confession as an attempt to present oneself as a coherent object to be understood and in turn to validate ones notion of identity involves a doubling effect of the self-inherent in language that reveals the impossibility of attaining an unmediated access to the self. These two aspects of the confessional act constitute the failure of confession to allow the confessant to attain the redemption and absolution they seek. I argue that the confessional mode serves as an ideal vehicle for the task of mourning and that the inherent failure of confession is comparable to what Idelvar Avelar calls the “interminability of mourning” (5). These two processes constitute a tool of memory needed in post dictatorial Argentina as a way to conserve the past and redeem it from oblivion.

Discussions with members of the Dutch Reformed Church and the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa in Ohrigstad, illustrate the possibilities of ubuntu language in dealing with misunderstanding and distrust. This research utilises a narrative approach, based on a postmodern epistemology and pastoral practical theology that explores ubuntu language as a helpful discourse. It engages the context of these two churches in Ohrigstad and investigates experiences and challenges within the local community. The local experiences are described against the broader history of the Dutch Reformed Church and the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa, which the Ohrigstad churches are imbedded in. Individual narrative research conversations with church members in Ohrigstad display a longstanding relationship with stories of trust and distrust. This culminates into a group discussion that explores the role of ubuntu language - and at times the lack thereof - in the concrete relationship between these two faith communities as an expression of recent South African history. The conversations offer local knowledge which displays both unique outcomes by strengthening identity, unleashing potential, celebrating diversity, awakening solidarity, revealing humanity, bolstering responsibility and enhancing Christianity, and it also deconstructs oppressive discourses including race and otherness, rich and poor, and language. The research offers an approach to deal with distrust and misunderstanding on grass roots level, using insights gained from ubuntu language.
Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2016.
Practical Theology
PhD
Unrestricted

Savremeni diskurs amaterske pornografije na internetu izmiče tradicionalnim interpretativnim shemama koje i “kućne” seks snimke povezuju sa delovanjem seks-industrije.Predmet istraživanja su internet stranice na kojima su dostupni pornografski sadržaji amaterske produkcije. U centru naučne pažnje rada nalaze se pornografski materijali i prakse “običnih ljudi” u virtuelnom domenu kiberprostora.Istraživanje polazi od stanovišta da je amaterska pornografija specifičan seksualni diskurs. Pornografija predstavlja gotovo dominantni način zapadnog govora o seksu koji ga u isto vreme i inauguriše, a specifična istraživačka pažnja pridaje se amaterskoj reartikulaciji pornografskog režima pri čemu se amaterizam određuje kao društveni registar svakodnevnih praksi baziranih na delovanju “iz ljubavi”.Internet predstavlja najpoznatiji kompjuterski mrežni sistem, to jest medijsku tehnologiju mrežne, decentralizovane, dehijerarhizovane i relativno slobodne komunikacije na globalnom nivou. U pitanju je tehnosocijalna platforma “kreativne aproprijacije” pornografskog diskursa od strane “običnih ljudi”, te transfera amaterske pornografije u društvenu pojavu globalnih razmera. Društvena upotreba Web 2.0 predstavlja središnji uslov mogućnosti, proliferacije i globalizacije amaterskog porno-diskursa.Centralna hipoteza rada glasi da amaterska pornografija na internetu predstavlja relativno novi način govora o seksu i seksualnosti. Istraživanje je okrenuto dokazivanju kako pornografske prakse “običnih ljudi” nisu finansijske, nego seksualne prirode, i u tom se smislu problemsko klupko istraživanja ogleda u specifikaciji amaterske pornografije kao diskurzivnog diskontinuiteta, to jest društvene činjenice da se u okviru postmoderne kulture za relativno kratko vreme prestalo o pornografiji razmišljati isključivo na prethodne načine.Istraživanje ukazuje na socijalni značaj koji aktuelno preoblikovanje reprezentacione politike seksa povlači po pitanju seksualnih interakcija i seksualnih identiteta njenih praktikanata i/li protagonista, i u tom smislu polazi i potvrđuje osnovnu teorijsku pretpostavku o društvenoj prirodi seksualnosti, sociokulturnom ustrojstvu sveta “prirode”. Jedan od centralnih istraživačkih problema mogao bi se formulisati pitanjem da li amaterski produktivizam uživanja fabrikuje seksualne subjekte poput seks industrije ili alternativni modus diskurzivnih postupaka imenovanja “realnog” seksa legitimiše i nove procedure identitetskog samoblikovanja, te neposrednog delovanja ispovednih “tehnologija sopstva”.Ispitivanje sociokulturnih aspekata amaterske pornografije na internetu strukturisano je na nekoliko interpretativnih nivoa i vrši se kroz analitiku konteksta pojave, materijalno-afektivne ravni praktikanata i korisnika, pornografskih reprezentacija, potrošačkog ustrojstva kiberprostora, rodne simetrije u okviru reprezentacija i korisničkih grupa, virtuelnog komunitarizma pornografskih praktikanata i identitetske politike seksualne ispovesti.7Analitičko dešifrovanje složenih veza između pornografskih praksi “običnih ljudi” i složene strukture “umreženog društva” polazi od epistemičkog polja sociokonstrukcionistički orijentisane sociologije seksualnosti, dok se na užem metodološkom planu predmetnog specifikuma istraživanja izdvaja upotreba kritičke diskurzivne analize. 
Contemporary discourse of amateur pornography on the Internet eludes traditional interpretative schemes that associate "home" sex videos with the sex industry business. This research is based on web sites with available amateur pornographic production. In the heart of the scientific interest of the work are pornographic materials and practices of “ordinary people” in the virtual domain of cyberspace.The research is based upon the premise that the amateur pornography is specific sexual discourse. Pornography is seen as almost predominant mode of western inaugurating narrative on sex. At the same time specific research attention is given to amateur rearticulating of pornographic regime, whereby amateurism is defined as a social register of daily practices based on the act "of love".Internet is the best-known computer network system, decentralized and relatively free media technology network of communication, without hierarchy on a global level. It is a techno-social platform of "creative appropriation" of pornographic discourse by "ordinary people", as well as transfer of amateur pornography into the social phenomenon of global proportions. Social use of Web 2.0 is the core condition of possibility of amateur porn discourse proliferation and globalization.The central hypothesis of this work is that amateur pornography on the Internet is a relatively new type of narrative on sex and sexuality. The research points out that “ordinary people” pornographic practice is not of financial but rather of a sexual nature. Following this sense problem of the research is reflected in the specification of amateur pornography as a discursive discontinuity, a social fact that within the framework of postmodern culture in a relatively short time, pornography has not being considered exclusively in prior way.The research points to the social importance that current remodeling of representational politics of sex entails in terms of sexual interactions and sexual identity of its practitioners and / or protagonists and in this sense starts with the main theoretical assumption on the social nature of sexuality, socio-cultural conformation of the world of "nature". One of the central research problems could be formulated as a dilemma whether amateur productivism of enjoyment fabricate sexual entities, such as sex industry, or the alternative mode of discursive designation procedures of "real" sex also legitimize new procedures of identity self-formation and direct action of confessional "technologies of the self".Examination of amateur pornography socio-cultural aspects on the Internet is structured on several interpretative levels and is done through analytics of phenomena context, materially-affective level of practitioners and users, pornographic representations, consumer conformation of cyberspace, gender symmetry within the framework of representations and user groups, virtual communitarianism among pornographic practitioners and identity policy of sexual confession.

A proposta desta tese de doutoramento consiste no estudo comparativo de cinco confessionários tupi aplicados em regiões missioneiras do Grão-Pará e Maranhão e do Brasil entre os séculos XVI e XVIII. O objetivo geral do estudo é apresentar os modelos de confissão católica pretendidos em cada um dos séculos tratados, considerando os locais de origem dos penitentes índios e a instituição religiosa à qual pertenciam os confessores, os modelos disponíveis para aplicar esse sacramento(ora impressos, ora manuscritos) e os contextos em que se desenvolveram as respectivas missões jesuíticas. Partimos do pressuposto de que os jesuítas, ainda que tivessem um propósito universalista de evangelização, tiveram de se adaptar às diferentes realidades apresentadas pelos interlocutores indígenas, condicionados pelos diferentes espaços culturais (físicos e temporais) onde ocorria a missionação. Para além da análise linguística (terminológica e de tradução) conduzida por dentro de uma perspectiva histórica com seus desdobramentos antropológicos, outra metodologia orientativa e de apoio será aquela já traçada pela Escola Italiana de História das Religiões.
This doctoral dissertationpresents acomparative study of five Tupi confessionals establishedin missionary regions of the Grão-Pará and Maranhão and Brazilprovincesbetween the 16thand 18thcenturies. The overall objective of the study is to present the intended Catholic confession models in each of the centuriesreferred to, considering the places of origin of penitent Indians and the religious institution to which theconfessorsbelonged, the different models available to apply the Sacramentof Penance(sometimes printed, sometimes manuscripts),and the contexts in which theJesuit missionswere developed. We assume that the Jesuits, despite havinga universal purpose of evangelization, had to adapt to the different realities presented by their indigenous interlocutors, conditioned by the different cultural spaces (physical and temporal) where the missioning had arisen. Besides the linguistic analysis (terminology and translation) conducted within a historical perspective andits anthropological repercussions, another methodologyusedfor guidance and support isthe one drafted by the Italian School of History of Religions.

Confessions of an American Ginseng Addict uses the Lazy Branch Holler in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky as a setting for a creative nonfiction work, which uses history, confession, remembrances, and digressions to tell the story of a man dealing with loss, mental health issues, environmental sustainability, and the power of ginseng. In the style of Desert Solitaire and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the narrative is a discursive work of raw unadulterated gonzo writing.

Master of Arts
Department of Communication Studies
Charles Griffin
The year 2015 provided a hotbed of discussion about trans* identities. Caitlyn Jenner’s public announcement of her identity as transgender shortly followed by Rachel Dolezal unveiling as a woman with Caucasian heritage. Using publically accessible interviews such as the Diane Sawyer interview with Bruce Jenner, both of Matt Lauer’s conversations with Dolezal and Jenner, Melissa Harris-Perry’s interview with Dolezal, as well as two Vanity Fair stories provide a space for a closer examination of how trans* identities are negotiated in a conversational setting. Using Hecht’s (1993) communication theory of identity to investigate how the four proposed frames (personal, enactment, relationship, and communal) operate under the lens of trans* identities in flux. This thesis aims to explore the kinds of linguist framing motifs used by both an exemplar of the transgender community and an individual treading the barrier between Caucasian and black identities, ultimately leading to a discussion about how language confines personal and socially structure identity and identification. The implications of this identity work tangles with the reliance on personal experience as an expression of identity and its persuasive power to impact discourse. The linguistic tropes that confine identity expression inherently impact a community of individuals struggling to navigate trans* identity acceptance in a larger sphere.

La thèse comprend tout d'abord une étude historique et littéraire de la confession en Angleterre au moyen âge. Cette étude préalable à l'édition apporte de nombreuses précisions quant au contexte ecclésiastique du moyen âge en Angleterre. L'étude présente également un grand nombre de textes en latin et en anglais à la disposition des confesseurs à cette époque afin que ceux-ci appliquent les règles imposées par les autorités ecclésiastiques en matière de confession. Cependant, l'élément essentiel de ce travail de recherche représente l'édition de cinq manuels de confession, en moyen anglais, rédigés au quinzième siècle. Les cinq manuels de confession sont décrits, datés avec le plus de précision possible, étudiés linguistiquement. Ils font ensuite l'objet d'une édition dont les règles sont formulées au préalable de l'édition. Ces cinq manuels sont contenus dans les manuscrits suivants : Cambridge, St John's College, MS S 35 ; Londres, British Library, MSS Harley 4172, Cotton Vespasian A xxv, Sloane 1584 ; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson D 913. Les cinq manuels représentent les seuls exemplaires existant de ce genre littéraire rédigé par des confesseurs pour leur propre usage. L'édition des textes est suivie de notes sur les citations, bibliques ou non, présentes dans les cinq textes. Un glossaire, une bibliographie, ainsi qu'une annexe d'illustrations sont également inclus.

Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2006.
Title from title screen. Paul Schmidt, committee chair ; Marti Singer, Chris Kocela, committee members. Electronic text (60 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Apr. 17, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p. 55-64).

This thesis examines Elizabeth Bishop's seemingly understated and yet nuanced poetry with a specific focus on loss, love, and language through domesticity to create a poetic home. In this sense, home offers security for a displaced orphan and lesbian, moving from filial to amorous love, as well as the literary home for a poet who struggled for critical recognition. Further, juxtaposing the familiar with the strange, Bishop situates her speaker in a construction of artificial and natural boundaries that break down across her topography and represent loss through the multiple female figures that permeate her poems to convey the uncertainty one experiences with homelessness. In order to establish home, Bishop sets her female relationships on a continuum as mother, aunt, grandmother, and lovers are equitably represented with similar tropes. In essence, what draws these women together remains their collective and familiar duty as potential caretaker, which is contrasted by their unusual absence in the respective poems that figure them. Contrary to the opinion most scholars hold, Bishop's reticence was a calculated device that progressed her speaker(s) toward moments of self discovery. In an attempt to uncover her voice, her place in the literary movements, and her very identity, critics narrowly define Bishop's vision by fracturing her identity and positing reductive readings of her work. By choosing multiple dichotomies that begin with a marginalized speaker and the centered women on her continuum, the paradox of Bishop's poetry eludes some readers as they try to queer her or simply reduce her to impersonal and reticent, while a holistic approach is needed to uncover the genesis of Bishop's poetic progression. To be sure, Bishop's women conflate into the collective image of loss, absence, and abandonment on Bishop's homosocial continuum as a way to achieve catharsis. Bishop's concern with unconditional love, coupled with the continual threat of abandonment she contends with coursing through her work, gives credence to the homosocial continuum that is driven by loss and love with the perpetual need to create a language to house Bishop from the painful memories of rejection. Bishop situates her speaker(s) in the margins, since it is at the center when the pain of loss is brought into light, to allow her fluid selves release from the prison loss creates. By reading her work through the lenses of orphan, lesbian, and female poet, the progression of her homosocial continuum, as I envision it, is revealed. It is through this continuum that Bishop comes to terms with loss and abandonment, while creating a speaking subject that grows with each poem. Without her continuum of powerful female relationships, Bishop's progression as a poet would be far less revealing. Indeed, defining herself through negation, Bishop's sense of homelessness is uncovered in juxtaposition to her centered female subjects, and I delve into these contestations of space/place as well as her figurations of home/ homelessness to discern Bishop's poetic craft as she channeled the painful details of her past, thus creating her "one art."
M.A.
Department of English
Arts and Humanities
English MA

Much has been said about the influence of Plotinus, the Platonist philosopher, on the ideas of Augustine of Hippo, the Western Church Father whose writings had the largest impact on Western Europe in the Middle Ages. This thesis considers both writers’ ideas concerning matter, evil, and language. It then considers the way in which these writers’ ideas influenced their style of writing in the Enneads and the Confessions. Plotinus’ more straightforward negative attitude towards the material word and its relationship to the One ultimately makes his writing more academic and less emotionally powerful. Augustine’s more complicated understanding of the material world and its relationship to God results in a more mystical and more emotionally powerful style, which derives its effectiveness especially from its use of antithesis and the first and second person.

Reading James Hogg’s 1824 novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner through a postsecular lens provides a new framework for spirituality. This framework establishes spirituality as a place of tension and uncertainty between the text’s main ideologies—Enlightenment rationality and religious, specifically Calvinist, fanaticism. The text explores this place of tension through its doubled narrative structure and by demonstrating the crisis of faith that the fictional Editor of the text undergoes. Confessions brings a compelling new paradigm to discussions of the postsecular that allows insight into the complex intersections of Enlightenment rationality and empiricism as well as religious zealotry and the supernatural.

Space is a visual communicator. The act of perceiving space is a neurological soiree that projects and negotiates meaning in our constructed world. The poetry that we observe within space is tied directly to our emotions and to previous experience. Within ourselves, we each have particular feelings, unconscious or not, relating to height, length, and depth, as well as light and shadow. For example, a long, narrow hallway may elicit anxiety, while an open, sunlit nave in a cathedral may bring about feelings of serenity and joy. Our observations and interactions within the perceptual confines of space reveal clues to construction, movement, and play. Additionally, this participation unveils our awareness of space, and thus, reveals that our relationship with space exists in our acknowledgement of it—in our permitting of perception through conscious participation. To explore these ideas further, I will utilize typography to create immersive, sensory experiences that challenge interpretation through the application of human thought, or sensations, to non-living things and material states. This method will assist the observers to rationalize and create meaning within their own world through simplifying an experience in relation to self. Here, spatial language—like light, shadow, dimension, and proximity—will be exposed as a universal and innate part of our perception.

In The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), James Hogg uses the uncanny trope of the bier-right, a medieval superstitious belief of Christian origin that a murdered corpse will bleed in the presence or at the touch of the actual murderer, to negotiate his struggle with fading belief in local superstitions and religious faith in the Scottish Borders. Examining the origins of the bier-right, court cases involving the bier-right, and Hogg's minor works using the bier-right I offer a comparison of how Hogg manipulates and morphs this trope in Confessions. I also argue that the main character, the sinner Robert Wringhim, becomes a living-dead embodiment of the bier-right corpse.

Despite the fame the prolific impressionistic, confessional poet, novelist, literary iconoclast, and pioneer of the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac, has acquired since the late 1950’s, his written letters are not recognized as works of literature.  The aim of this thesis is to examine the different ways in which Kerouac develops and employs the poetics he is most known for in the letters he wrote to friends and publishers before becoming a well-known literary figure.  In my analysis of Kerouac’s poetics, I analyze 20 letters from Selected Letters, 1940-1956.  These letters were written before the publication of his best-known literary work, On The Road. The thesis attempts to highlight the characteristics of Kerouac’s literary control in his letters and to demonstrate how the examination of these poetics: repetition, language, and narration merits the letters’ treatment as works of artistic literature. Likewise, through the scrutiny of my first novella, “Trails” it then illustrates how the in-depth analysis of Kerouac’s letters improved my personal poetics, which resemble the poetics featured in the letters.

This essay is a critical textual analysis of the poetry of Robert Lowell with focus on religious symbolism used in his work, and the Catholic theology which informed it. This results in a new, contrasting interpretation to the conventional view that he had abandoned his religious focus by mid-career, while accounting for his own assessment that he had not. Insights gained through this analysis, combined with those relating to Lowell’s personal history, reframe his confessional poetry while bolstering this claim.  Through this study, poems selected from Lord Weary’s Castle, The Mills of the Kavanaughs, Life Studies and For the Union Dead are reinterpreted in order to explore the consequences of what Lowell could have intended with this stylistic modification, and discover the religiosity that he claimed was hidden. Lowell’s confessional poetry up until 1964 is examined and recast as the anguished wails of a Catholic soul in Purgatory. This fresh approach to one of America’s finest twentieth-century poets provides a novel foundation for the reinterpretation of the entirety of Lowell’s professional oeuvre.

Although confusion about the genre of New Woman Ella D'Arcy's only novella has resulted in a lack of scholarship, The Bishop's Dilemma can now be read as a social commentary that reaches beyond the New Woman subversion of the Victorian marriage plot, broadening the gender discussion at the fin-de-siècle. In this essay, I examine how D'Arcy uses Catholicism as a vehicle to create a unique space in the Catholic ritual of the confession that gives her reader privileged access to Victorian manhood. I argue that by placing her examination of masculinity in the context of the Catholic priesthood, D'Arcy renders her protagonist, Herbert Fayler, unable to use the convention of marriage as a means of subjugation or salvation of Dilemma's female characters, removing the marriage plot as a framework for the tension in the text and leaving Fayler's masculinity vulnerable to his own self-censure. I conclude that D'Arcy does not condemn Fayler any more than she blames the New Woman characters of her earlier short stories for their plight, but rather, D'Arcy constructs a figure of masculinity that exposes dangers present when men are groomed in a romanticized world with idealized notions of masculine life.

Na presente tese, investigam-se aspectos da literariedade e as marcas enunciativas da vivência e do testemunho em dois textos da literatura brasileira contemporânea, cujo conteúdo narrativo é a experiência alheia e pessoal no universo carcerário. As discussões empreendidas neste trabalho têm como base quatro principais eixos que norteiam algumas questões concernentes à memória, responsável pelo processo de escritura de Luiz Alberto Mendes e Drauzio Varella; à escrita confessional, gênero eleito pelos dois escritores para recomporem suas lembranças; aos processos ficcionais, tão caros a ambos os autores na composição de suas memórias; e à linguagem, por meio da qual se procede à busca das pistas discursivas que diferenciam a vivência do testemunho e revelam os aspectos da literariedade nas narrativas engendradas pelos escritores referidos. A partir destes eixos, busca-se reconhecer a inserção do sujeito na linguagem nas obras Memórias de um sobrevivente (2001), de Luiz Alberto Mendes e Estação Carandiru (1999), de Drauzio Varella, a fim de explorar as marcas enunciativas que identificam e diferenciam a experiência pessoal do testemunho. Entre os diversos autores consultados para compor o substrato teórico que fundamenta as análises empreendidas estão Henri Bergson, Michel Foucault, Erich Auerbach, Walter Benjamin, Gerárd Genette, Philippe Lejeune, Wayne Booth, Wolfgang Kayser, Clara Crabbe Rocha, Antonio Candido, Lígia Chiappini Moraes Leite, Luiz Costa Lima, Bella Josef, Émile Benveniste, Dany-Robert Dufour, entre outros.
In this thesis, the aspects of literariness the experience and the testimony marks in two texts of contemporary Brazilian literature are investigated. The narrative content is the experience of other people and the personal experience, both in the prisional context. The discussions undertaken in this work are based on four main axes that guide issues, such as concerning memory, which is responsible for the writing process that Luiz Alberto Mendes and Drauzio Varella accomplish; concerning the writing confessional genre, which was chosen by the two writers to restore their memories; concerning the relevant fictional process meaningful to each of these authors during the exposure of their memories; and concerning the language through which it is possible to find out discursive clues that distinguish the experience of witness and reveal aspects of literariness in the narratives engendered by them. Taking into account the study of these four lines, this thesis aims at recognizing the subject insertion that appears in the language shown in Memórias de um sobrevivente (2001), written by Luiz Alberto Mendes and Estação Carandiru (1999), written by Drauzio Varella, in order to explore the marks of enunciation that identify and distinguish witness personal experience. Henri Bergson, Michel Foucault, Erich Auerbach, Walter Benjamin, Gerard Genette, Philippe Lejeune,Wayne Booth, Wolfgang Kayser, Clara Crabbe Rocha, Antonio Candido, Ligia Chiappini Moraes Leite, Luiz Costa Lima, Bella Josef, Émile Benveniste, Dany-Robert Dufour, and others were searched for the theoretical basis of the analysis in this paper.

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A pesquisa em questão quer ser a verificação em duas obras agostinianas (Confissões e Do Mestre), de três conceituações formais da filosofia analítica contemporânea; a partir da nomenclatura conceitual específica do segundo Wittgenstein (jogos de linguagem) e da articulação de dois conceitos em Frege (sentido e referência), chegar-se-a detectar e analisar uma intrínseca aproximação no que tange ao conhecimento e ao estudo da linguagem, no sentido de sua formação, utilização e aplicação através de vivências, inclusive a religiosa. A linguagem como forma de vida, como linguagem da vida (inclusive a religiosa) se estabelece e se afirma como ponto de contato, na presente dissertação, entre a articulação crítica das três conceituações em obras específicas dos três autores aqui estudados.
This research aims to be apresent verification, in two of Augustine’s works, Confessions and De Magistro (On the teacher), of three formal conceptualizations from contemporary analytic philosophy; starting with the specific conceptual nomenclature of second Wittgenstein (Language-games) and the articulation of two concepts in Frege (sense and reference), we shall be able to detect and analyse an intrinsic similarity with respect to knowledge and language study, concerning its formation, usage and application through living experiences, including religious ones. Language as a form of life, as language of life, including religious life, establishes and affirms itself as an intersection, in this dissertation, between the critical articulation of those three conceptualizations in specific works by those three authors under study.

Literature and medicine are not usually seen as related disciplines, but scholars have already begun producing fruitful scholarship regarding historical and aesthetic interactions between them. This thesis adds to that scholarship by examining medicine and literature in nineteenth-century Britain. More specifically, Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde both use nineteenth-century medical case conventions to tell their stories. Furthermore, because both works deal with addiction, divided selves, and the power that physical substances can have on morality and character, these two works provide an excellent comparison coming 65 years apart. As such, they are a great point from which to begin looking more closely at how the interactions between medicine and literature evolved during the nineteenth-century in Britain. This thesis examines the role that "scientific" discourse has played in medicine and literature as interpretive disciplines, the rhetorical techniques and innovations surrounding the intersection of the two disciplines, and the authority that each discipline derived by implicitly borrowing ideological assumptions and textual forms from the other. Confessions is a wonderful example of a Romantic, autobiographical text that clearly uses the medical case study conventions; in fact, De Quincey was often cited in the years following the publication of Confessions as an authority on opium and its uses. By the time Jekyll and Hyde was published, however, a work like Confessions could no longer hold its own in medical debates. The professional institutions of medicine and literature had changed too much. Hence, by analyzing these two works side-by-side, I intend to illustrate different narrative approaches to similar issues at the beginning and end of the century. More importantly, I hope to use these texts in conjunction with specific medical case histories to discuss each text's reliance on interdisciplinary authority.

My thesis explores the potential and the peril of Romantic literature's increasingly complex forms through a close comparative study of the works of William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey. These writers exemplify the Romantic predicament of how to make vision manifest – how to communicate one's imaginative and intellectual expansiveness without diminishing it. They sought different strategies for increasing the capacity of literary form, ostensibly in the hope of communicating more: clarifying meaning, increasing accessibility and intensifying original experience. But textual expansion – materially, stylistically and intellectually – often threatens more opportunities for confused and partial meanings to proliferate, overwhelming the reader by dividing texts and undermining attempts at coherent thought. Expansion thus becomes excess, with all its worrying associations of superfluity. To further complicate matters, Burke's influential tenet of the Sublime makes a virtue out of excess and obscurity, raising the problematic spectre of deliberately confused/confusing texts that embody an aesthetic of incomprehension. I explore these paradoxes through four types of 'textual excess' demonstrated by the writers under discussion: firstly, the tension between poetry and prose adjuncts, such as prefaces and notes, in Wordsworth and Coleridge; secondly, De Quincey's indulgent verbosity and struggle to control the freeing shapelessness of prose; thirdly, Wordsworth's and De Quincey's parallel experiences of revision as both uncontrollably diffusive and statically concentrated; and lastly, Blake's more deliberate, systematic attempt to enact a literary Sublime in which the reader is forced out of passivity by the competing demands of verbal and visual media. All are motivated and thwarted in varying degrees by their anxious preoccupation with saying "Enough", and the difficulty of determining when this becomes “Too much”. These authorial dilemmas also incorporate larger concerns with man's (over)ambition at a time of rapid and unprecedented economic, social and intellectual acceleration from the Enlightenment to industrialism. The fear that the concept and process of 'progress', or 'improvement', marks deficiency rather than fulfilment haunts Romantic writers.

This thesis explores modalities in two hagiographical collections from the late Middle Ages; the Legenda Aurea and the Gilte Legende by drawing inspiration from post-colonial hybridity theories.. It conducts a close textual analysis by studying the use of pronouns in five saints’ legends where female saints transcend traditional gender identities and become men, and focuses on how they transcend, live as men, and die. The study concludes that the use of pronouns is fluid in the Latin Legenda Aurea, while the Middle English Gilte Legende has more female pronouns and additions to the texts where the female identity of the saints is emphasised. This is interpreted as a sign of the feminisation of religious language in Europe during the late Middle Ages, and viewed parallel with the increase of holy women at that time. By doing this, it underlines the importance of new words and concepts when describing and understanding medieval views on gender.

This project examines the medieval practice of the sacrament of penance and the innovative ways in which medieval literature engaged with the pastoral project of the Catholic church to provide the penitent with a way to deal with sin. Drawing from medieval literature, religious writing and theological sources, this project begins by illustrating the extent to which each of these didactic texts produces a "model of confession" that reaffirms the teachings of the church. However, approaching these texts with careful attention to language and to the grammar of sin and penance, I show that each of these undeniably orthodox works departs from traditional accounts of the sacrament of penance in significant ways. I suggest that such departures point to moments of theological exploration. My dissertation thus interrogates the category of orthodoxy, showing it to be more capacious and exploratory than is generally recognized. Further, I suggest that the vernacular penitential literature of the late medieval period, motivated by pastoral considerations, actively engages with academic and clerical theological debates surrounding the heavily contested sacrament of penance.

Chapter one examines Jacob's Well, a fifteenth-century vernacular penitential treatise. I argue that the narrative exempla often work against the instruction offered within each chapter, compelling the reader to consider theological problems not addressed within the doctrinal material. These resistances, I suggest, are intentional and not only suggest certain limitations in traditional penitential manuals, but encourage a more conscientious penitential practice and a better understanding of church doctrine. In chapter two I consider the Showings of Julian of Norwich. I show how Julian critiques the church's penitential system and offers an alternative form of confession and penance that holds the sinner accountable for sins while reassuring the penitent of God's love and forgiveness. Chapter three compares two fifteenth-century morality plays, Mankind and the Castle of Perseverance. Through a reading of the treatment of mercy in both plays, I suggest that the Castle's departures from traditional accounts of sacramental confession allow the author to explore the scope of God's mercy and experiment with the idea of universal salvation while still promoting orthodox instruction. I conclude this dissertation with Thomas Hoccleve's poem "Lerne to Die," one of the earliest treatments of the Ars moriendi theme. Examining some of the differences between sacramental confession and deathbed confession, I show how the absence of the sacrament in this dramatic account of unprepared death emphasizes the power of God's grace and limitations of human effort. However, Hoccleve ultimately reaffirms the necessity of final confession by the end of the poem.

Dissertation

Victorian scholars of fiction have hitherto largely overlooked that fiction was an important site for Victorian authors and readers to engage in open discussion of religious issues in the Victorian period, often known, even to itself, as the "Age of 'Faith and Doubt.'" Along with sermons and religious tracts, which often directly addressed popular audiences, fiction became one of the most popular arenas for debating theology and religious practices. My project aims to revive interest in the religious novel genre by defining the genre, positioning it within its cultural context, and looking at how it engages in active and reciprocal conversations with other genres, fictional and nonfictional. This new approach reveals how the religious novel, long derided or ignored by critics, often leads the way with narrative innovations. Most interestingly, the religious novel, whose alternative name is tellingly the "theological romance," embraces and adopts one of the most popular plot lines of the Victorian novel tradition, namely the marriage/courtship plot, and develops it into the post-marriage plot, a plot that focuses on and examines marital life. The marriage plot serves, for many of these novels, in place of detailed theological arguments as a way of producing and embodying conversion. The religious novel actually anticipates changes in the nineteenth- century novel by expanding the plot beyond courtship and marriage.

The Confessio Amantis, a poem completed in 1393, opens with its author's pledge to: wryte of newe som matiere essampled of these olde wyse [write anew some matter modeled on these old wise books]. Expressing a commonplace among writers of vernacular literature in late medieval England, John Gower describes authorial activity as the process of translating and assimilating pre-existing narratives. This dissertation argues that such conceptualizations of authorship were embraced by illuminators of vernacular literature in their burgeoning notion of invention before the ascendance of print: as translation and compilation provided a model of creativity founded on the alteration of models, illuminators located an ideal congenial to both the restrictions and freedoms of their own profession. The centerpiece of the study is Pierpont Morgan MS M. 126, a manuscript of the Confessio Amantis produced c.1472 and made for Edward IV and his Queen Consort, Elizabeth Woodville. Although it has been acclaimed as one of the most impressive extant manuscripts of Middle English literature, it has never been the subject of a major study. The aim of the dissertation is to recognize and restore to the illustrator the power of his position between the conception of a text and the consumption of a book. Part One focuses on the illustrator's interactions with the textual voices of the Confessio Amantis, demonstrating how the images in nineteen manuscripts of the poem, including the Morgan Confessio, address the identity of the author of the poem (Chapter One); and how miniatures in the Morgan Confessio reinterpret its Ovidian narratives (Chapter Two). Part Two shifts attention to the illustrator's confrontation with his patrons. Although their impact on the production of this manuscript appears to have been minimal, I observe how, as patrons they furnished a visual context for the Morgan Confessio from within their own library of illustrated historical manuscripts (Chapter Three) and books on science (Chapter Four). Produced just before Caxton printed his first book in Westminster in 1476 and standing at the threshold of standardization, this manuscript offers a complex glimpse into the variance that epitomized creative activity in illustrated vernacular manuscripts.

Ce mémoire a pour but de montrer que le premier tournant herméneutique de Paul Ricœur en 1960 gravite essentiellement autour de la problématique de la volonté mauvaise. Nous soutenons autrement dit que Ricœur a initialement donné une tournure herméneutique à sa philosophie pour penser le serf-arbitre, c’est-à-dire pour penser la liberté captive d’elle-même. Afin de rendre compte adéquatement de ce tournant, notre attention sera principalement dirigée vers le deuxième tome de la Philosophie de la volonté de Ricœur, Finitude et culpabilité. Notre question se pose ainsi : comment et pourquoi, dans une problématique du mal, Ricœur entame-t-il son tournant herméneutique? Pour y répondre, nous expliciterons le parcours de Ricœur allant de L’homme faillible à La symbolique du mal. Nous verrons dans un premier temps que si le philosophe arrive à thématiser le concept de faillibilité à partir d’une ontologie de la disproportion, si la réflexion a accès à la possibilité du mal, il n’en ira pas de même pour le noème inintelligible que constitue le mal moral. Afin de penser la faute, nous verrons que Ricœur se tournera vers l’herméneutique en se mettant à l’écoute du langage de l’aveu. Ainsi, dans la deuxième partie de notre mémoire, nous expliciterons les trois moments de compréhension (phénoménologique, herméneutique et réflexif) propre à l’herméneutique philosophique de Ricœur de 1960.
The purpose of this dissertation is to show that the first hermeneutics turn of Paul Ricœur in 1960 essentially revolves around the problematic of bad will. We argue ie that Ricœur initially gave a hermeneutics twist to his philosophy to think the servile will, that is the freedom captive of itself. To properly account for this turn, our attention was mainly directed to the second volume of the Philosophy of the Will of Ricœur, Faillible man and The symbolism of evil. Our question is this : how and why, in a problematic of evil, Ricœur starts his hermeneutics turn? To answer this question, we will explain the course of Ricœur from Fallible man to The Symbolism of evil. We will see at first that if the philosopher comes to thematize the concept of fallibility from an ontology of disproportion, if the reflection has access to the possibility of evil, it does not go well for the unintelligible noema that is moral evil. To think of the fault, we will see that Ricœur will turn to hermeneutics is by listening to the language of confession. Thus, in the second part of our dissertation, we will explain the three stages of understanding (phenomenological, hermeneutics and reflexive) to own philosophical hermeneutics of Ricœur 1960.

Text in Afrikaans
I wanted to investigate the way people experienced confessional pastoral therapy by conducting a qualitative research study. The role of the pastor were examined as well as the effect of discourses of power and ethics in pastoral counseling. I interviewed clients who were counseled by pastors of the AFM Church (Apostolic Faith Mission). The research supposes that knowledge and power discourses have a major influence in pastoral counseling which is often not accounted for. I wanted to see how clients experienced the effects of these discourses of power and ethics. I furthermore wanted to see how these power discourses could result in clients feeling subordinate to the pastor and his knowledge and the effect that these feelings might have on them. The purpose of this study was not to generalize the experiences of the participants, but rather to set a contextual background of the experiences of power in confessional pastoral counseling.
Practical Theology
M. Th. (Pastorale Terapie)