Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Solomon Islands literature (English)'

The Old English Solomon and Saturn II has received virtually no extended critical commentary since Robert J. Menner's 1941 edition of it and its companion piece, Solomon and Saturn I. The few brief attempts made to explain the poem, moreover, have been without reference to the body of OE sapiential thought to which it belongs. This thesis offers a close structural and thematic reading of SS II as it appears against the background of general notions and concepts belonging to the body of OE wisdom. The thesis begins with a review of the poem's history and related literary criticism. Lexical and thematic material is then selected from the entire OE corpus to present those aspects of OE wisdom that bear on an understanding of SS II. The thesis addresses the conceptual and intellectual formulations of wisdom in the Anglo-Saxon period, rather than simply its literary forms, and it takes into account both pre-conversion and Christian views on human and divine wisdom. The thesis then illustrates how SS II reflects certain patterns that exist in the general OE wisdom tradition. The narrator's framework establishes a metaphysical context for the whole poem that is consistent with the Christian Anglo-Saxon concept of divine Wisdom. The epistemological premises of the debate itself, as well as a core of beliefs and implicit assumptions shared by the opponents, Solomon and Saturn, reflect the tensions and harmonies that appear in the broad view of OE wisdom. The interaction between Saturn and Solomon--the one a travelling Chaldean noble, the other the Old Testament King, is examined next. The competition between an epic rhetorical model, namely, the visit of a roving hero to the court of an established king, and the Christian typology that surrounds the wise King Solomon, is arguably a significant source of meaning in the poem. The tension between literary and figural patterns provides an interpretive matrix against which the audience can follow the discourse of the two men. Finally, the thesis turns to the structure of the SS II dialogue and demonstrates that far from being a simple contest of wit and "wisdom," the poem is a sophisticated process of education through dialogue whose central concern is the emancipation of the mind from the illusions of language. The dialogue shares several "habits of thought" with Boethius' Consolation Philosophiae and Augustine's Soliloquia in the process by which it restores to Saturn's infirm and misguided mind its natural wisdom and its power of interpretation.

This study is an excavation and examination of the works of Virgin Islands poets, Cyril Creque, I. P. Gimenez, and Antonio Jarvis, who wrote in the first half of the twentieth century. It looks at the historical and literary context that fostered them and provides a thorough study of one aspect of each man's poetry. In particular Creque's Romanticism is examined, as are Gimenez's vernacular poems, and Jarvis' dual consciousness. All three are examined from the perspective of the tensions created by their being products of the United States Virgin Islands, a territory at once Caribbean and American. The study set out to refute the assertions of critics that Virgin Islands poets were mere imitators of the European style. What has been revealed is a rich tapestry of original imagery and language, reflective of the Virgin Islands unique history and culture. A thorough examination of selected poems of each writer was conducted, as was research on each writer. This research was supported by available data and to a significant extent by information gathered from interviews with persons who knew the subjects of the study. This dissertation is, most likely, the first comprehensive critical work on Virgin Islands poetry and on Creque, Gimenez, and Jarvis. As such it will be useful to scholars interested in the literature of the Virgin Islands and also of the Caribbean and the United States of which the territory is a part. It verifies, not only the presence of a poetic heritage, but testifies to its quality as well as its significance in the two poetic traditions of which it is a part.

In Song of Solomon, published during a transitional moment in the history of U.S. feminism, Toni Morrison portrays the destructive forces of hegemonic female beauty standards, materialism, and consumerism in a Midwestern African-American community from the 1930s to the 1960s. She reveals a hierarchy in which men define standards of beauty and respectability that enforce white bourgeois ideals. Focusing on five female characters, this thesis examines this hierarchy; the agents who maintain it; and the ways in which it affects female characters who accept and/or reject it. While one of the characters, Hagar, perishes in her attempt to live up to normative beauty standards, her cousin Corinthians is liberated when she leaves her oppressive father and moves in with a working class male partner. Morrison thus creates a viable alternative to strict adherence to materialist values, while representing the destructive force of oppressive beauty norms and standards of respectability.

A comparative analysis of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, with a focus on individual as well as collective memory work in historically marginalized indigenous and African-American communities, respectively. This represents a critical study of how the novels invoke progressive and redemptive models of remembering, as well as foreground the role of spiritual guides in the transformative process from trauma towards healing.

This thesis is a consideration of the intertextual relationship between William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. It considers the objectification and destruction of women and female-coded men in the service of the male protagonist's journey to selfhood, with particular focus on the construction of race, gender, and class performances.

Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2005.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The stories and histories of the human race are littered with the remnants of utopia. These utopias always exist in some "far away" place, whether this place be removed in terms of time (either as a nostalgically remembered past, or an idealistically projected future), or in terms of space (as a place that one must arrive at). In our attempts to attain these utopias, we construct our worlddefinitions in accordance with our projections of these ideal places and ways of "being". Our discourses come to embody and perpetuate these ideals, which are maintained by excluding any definitions of the world that run counter to these ideals. The continued existence of utopia relies on the subjects of that utopia continuing their belief in its ideals, and not questioning its construction. Counter-discourse to utopia manifests in the same space as the original utopia and gives rise to questions that threaten the stability of the ideal. Questions challenge belief, and therefore the discourse of the ideal must neutralise those who question and challenge it. This process of neutralisation requires that more definitions be constructed within utopian discourse - definitions that allow the subjects of the discourse to objectify the questioner. However, as these new definitions arise, they create yet more counter-definitions, thereby increasing the fragmentation of the aforementioned space. A subject of any "dominant" discourse, removed from that discourse, is exposed to the questions inherent in counter-discourse. In such circumstances, the definitions of the questioner - the "other" - that have previously enabled the subject to disregard the questioner's existence and/or point of view are no longer reinforced, and the subject begins to question those definitions. Once this questioning process starts, the utopia of the subject is re-defined as dystopia, for the questioning highlights the (often violent) methods of exclusion needed to maintain that utopia. Foucault's theory of heterotopia, used as the basis for the analysis of the three texts in question, suggests a space in which several conflicting and contradictory discourses which seemingly bear no relation to each other are found grouped together. Whereas utopia sustains myth in discourse, running with the grain of language, heterotopias run against the grain, undermining the order that we create through language, because they destroy the syntax that holds words and things together. The narrators in the three texts dealt with are all subjects of dominant discourses sustained by exclusive definitions and informed by ideals that require this exclusion in order to exist. Displaced into spaces that subvert the definitions within their discourses, the narrators experience a sense of "madness", resulting from the disintegration of their perception of "order". However, through embracing and perpetuating that which challenged their established sense of identity, the narrators can regain their sense of agency, and so their narratives become vehicles for the reconstitution of the subject-status of the narrators, as well as a means of perpetuating the counter-discourse.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Utopias spikkel die landskap van menseheugenis as plekke in "lank lank gelede" of "eendag", in "n land baie ver van hier", en is dus altyd verwyderd van die huidige, óf in ruimte, óf in tyd. In ons strewe na die ideale, skep ons definisies van die wêreld wat in voeling is met hierdie idealistiese plekke en bestaanswyses. Sulke definisies sypel deur die diskoers, of taal, waarmee ons ons omgewing beskryf. Die ideale wat dan in die diskoers omvat word, word onderhou deur die uitsluiting van enige definisie wat teenstrydig is met dié in die idealistiese diskoers. Die volgehoue bestaan van utopie berus daarop dat die subjekte van daardie utopie voortdurend glo in die ideale voorgehou in en onderhou deur die diskoers, en dus nie die diskoers se konstruksie bevraagteken nie. Die manifestering van teen-diskoers in dieselfde ruimte as die utopie, gee aanleiding tot vrae wat die bestaan van die ideaal bedreig omdat geloof in die ideaal noodsaaklik is vir die ideaal se voortbestaan. Aangesien bevraagtekening dikwels geloof uitdaag en ontwrig, lei dit daartoe dat die diskoers wat die ideaal onderhou, diegene wat dit bevraagteken, neutraliseer. Hierdie neutraliseringsproses behels die vorming van nog definisies binne die diskoers wat die vraagsteller objektiveer. Die vorming van nuwe definisies loop op sy beurt uit op die vorming van teen-definisies wat bloot verdere verbrokkeling van die voorgenoemde ruimte veroorsaak. "n Subjek van die "dominante" diskoers van die utopie wat hom- /haarself buite die spergebiede van sy/haar diskoers bevind, word blootgestel aan vrae wat in teen-diskoers omvat word. In sulke omstandighede is die subjek verwyder van die versterking van daardie definisies wat die vraagsteller - die "ander" - se opinies of bestaan as nietig voorgestel het, en die subjek mag dan hierdie definisies bevraagteken. Sodra hierdie proses begin, vind "n herdefinisie van ruimte plaas, en utopie word distopie soos die vrae (soms geweldadige) uitsluitingsmetodes wat die onderhoud van die ideaal behels, aan die lig bring en, in sommige gevalle, aan die kaak stel. Hierdie tesis gebruik Foucault se teorie van "heterotopia" om die drie tekste te analiseer. Dié teorie veronderstel "n ruimte waarin die oorvleueling van verskeie teenstrydighede (diskoerse) plaasvind. Waar utopie die bestaan van fabels en diskoerse akkommodeer, ondermyn heterotopia die orde wat ons deur taal en definisie skep omdat dit die sintaks vernietig wat woorde aan konsepte koppel. Die drie vertellers is elkeen "n subjek van "n "dominante diskoers" wat onderhou word deur uitsluitende definisies in "n utopia waar die voortgesette bestaan van die ideale wat in die diskoers omvat word op eksklusiwiteit staatmaak. Omdat die vertellers verplaas is na ruimtes wat hulle eksklusiewe definisies omverwerp, vind hulle dat hulle aan "n soort waansin grens wat veroorsaak is deur die verbrokkeling van hul sin van "orde". Deur die teen-diskoers in hul stories in te bou as verteltaal, of te implementeer as die meganisme van oordrag, kan die vertellers hul "selfsin" herwin. Deur vertelling hervestig die vertellers dus hul status as subjek, en verseker hulle hul plek in die opkomende diskoers deur middel van hulle voortsetting daarvan.

Although philosopher Robert Solomon and rhetorician Kenneth Burke wrote in isolation from one another, they discuss similar concepts and ideas. Since its introduction in Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives, identification has always been important to rhetorical theory, and recent studies in emotion, such as Solomon's, provide new insight into modes of identification—that human beings can identify with one another on an emotional level. This paper places Solomon and Burke in conversation with one another, arguing that both terministic screens and emotions are ways of seeing, acting, engaging, and judging. Hence, terministic screens and emotions affect ethos, or character, both in a specific moment and over periods of time as they are cultivated through habit. Because emotions influence ethos, it is important for a speaker to cultivate the right emotions at the right time—Solomon's notion of emotional integrity. Emotional integrity facilitates Burkean identification between speaker and audience because it enables human beings to see the other as synecdochically related to themselves, a part of the whole. Hence, this paper ultimately argues that a speaker will improve his or her ethos by cultivating emotional integrity.

From fourteenth century medieval literature to contemporary American and African American literature, researchers have singled out and analyzed writing from every genre that is prophetic in nature, predicting or warning about events, both revolutionary and dire, to come. One twentieth-century American whose work embodies the essence of warning and foretelling through history-laden literature is Toni Morrison. This modern-day literary prophet reinterprets eras gone by through what she calls “re-memory” in order to guide her readers, and her society, to a greater understanding of the consequences of slavery and racism in America and to prompt both races to escape the pernicious effects of this heritage. Several critics have recognized and written about Morrison’s unique style of prophetic prose. These critics, however, have either taken a general cursory analysis of her complete body of works or they are only focused on one of her texts as a site of evidence. Despite the many critical essays and journal articles that have been written about Morrison as literary prophet, no critic has extensively investigated Morrison’s major works by way of textual analysis under this subject, to discuss Morrison prophetic prose, her motivation for engaging in a form of prophetic writing, and the context of this writing in a wider general, as well as an African-American, tradition. This dissertation takes on a more comprehensive, cross-sectional analysis of her works that has been previously employed, concentrating on five of Morrison’s major novels: The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Jazz and Paradise, in an order to assess how Morrison develops and infuses warnings and admonitions of biblical proportions. This investigation seeks to reveal Morrison’s motivation to prophecy to Americans, black and white, the context in which she engages with her historical and contemporary subjects, and the nature of the admonitions to present and future action she offers to what she sees as a contemporary generation of socially and historically oblivious African Americans, using literary prophecy as the tool by which to accomplish her objectives. This dissertation also demonstrates—by way of textual analysis and literary theory—the evolution through five novels of Morrison’s development as a literary prophet.

There have always been rogues who dared to go against the traditional "intellectual" writing style of science and academia, a style that seems bent on transcending the "merely personal." Those who take this risk are embracing the rhetorical tradition of pathos, one that goes as far back as Aristotle. Current academic trends support a genre devoid of pathos and lacking true ethos—a deviation from classic rhetoric, and one that supports the Cartesian split of mind-body dualism. Neurological studies done by Antonio Damasio and others suggest that a holistic view is a more accurate picture of how a human soul functions. Philosophy and psychology support this same perspective, proving that the opposite of logic is not emotion: the opposite of logic is illogic. By the same token, there are two types of emotion: reasonable emotion and unreasonable emotion, one good, the other bad. There are dangers when emotion is left on its own, but there are equal dangers when logic is left on its own; so it is crucial that the two be united. Changing the academic super-genre and inviting pathos back will require writers to pursue, to an extent, divergent thinking.

Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2008.
Title from file title page. Carol Marsh-Lockett , committee chair; Mary Zeigler, Kameelah Martin Samuel, committee members. Electronic text (99 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Nov. 19, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 96-99).

Literary conventions in the writing of the Gulf Islands of the British Columbia coast have “invented” the islands as a distinct region. Lying at the centre of the Strait of Georgia urban region, the islands function as objects of pastoral desire: in representing escape from the city, they are perceived as “natural” by contrast. The landscapes of the Gulf Islands posit a version of “nature” radically different from that common elsewhere in Canada. The protected waters of inland sea and archipelago, benign climate, naturally-occurring alternation of forest and meadow, and defining liminal zone of the beach make the local landscape seem inherently pastoral. As does the pastoral mode, the tropes of discovery and settlement provide convenient, familiar frames for neo-colonial experience of nature and representation of landscape. Using a broadly historical approach, the thesis traces the longevity of local landscape conventions since Spanish exploration of the islands in 1791 and 1792. Rapid population growth intensifies the dominance of the pastoral, while tropes of discovery and settlement give newcomers and established residents the rhetorical means to claim origins in the Gulf Islands. The need to establish origins shapes community politics, which are codified in the Islands Trust, the provincially-funded body that oversees land-use issues in the islands. The thesis consists of ten chapters, the first two of which examine local conventions for defining Gulf Islands space and for writing the history of the islands. Chapters Three and Four discuss the tropes discovery and settlement, respectively, and Chapter Five focusses on characteristic narratives used to express the notion of “Gulf Island.” Chapters Six through Eight revisit the themes of the previous three chapters, inverting the order of discovery and settlement in the second cycle to reflect the ahistorical, simultaneous invocation of these ideas locally. Whereas Chapter Five demonstrates how one Gulf Island version of pastoral dominates the region’s presentation of itself in imaginative writing, Chapter Eight examines the consequences for local narrative when events cannot be articulated within the pastoral mode. As a counterpoint to analysis, in Chapter Four, of how settlement functions as a rhetorical device in Gulf Islands writing, Chapter Six examines aspects of the physical, settled landscape--specifically architecture and the ornamentation of holiday homes and homesites with objects gathered from the beach--as deliberate expressions of indigenousness. In a similar pairing, Chapter Seven examines nostalgic uses of the “discovery” trope intended to express local space, extending the scope of Chapter Three, which explicates attitudes toward the islands expressed through two “original” European voyages of discovery in the islands. Chapters Nine and Ten discuss the role of intertexts in Gulf Island writing: only very recently has the idea of a Gulf Islands “canon”--as indicated by intertextual references between Gulf Islands texts--become current, Gulf Islands writing continues to rely on intertextual references to imperial foundation texts to define, and determine significance in, local landscape. The “sketch” form, which permeates all genres and modes of landscape representation in the islands, in itself articulates the “natural” and thus expresses the condition of “Gulf Island.”

My thesis explores the formation of the subject in the novels of Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, and Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day. I attach the concept of property in terms of how male protagonists are obsessed with materialistic ownership and with the subordination of women who, as properties, consolidate their manhood. The three novelists despite their racial, gendered, and literary differences share the view that identity and truth are mere social and cultural constructs. I incorporate the work of Judith Butler and other poststructuralist figures, who see identity as a matter of performance rather than a natural entity. My thesis explores the theme of freedom, which I attached to the ways characters use their bodies either to confine or to emancipate themselves from the restricting world of race, class, and gender. The three novelists deconstruct any system of belief that promulgates the objectivity of truth in historical documents. History in the three novels, as with the protagonists, perception of identity, remains a social construct laden with distortions to serve particular political or ideological agendas. My thesis gives voice to African American female characters who are associated with love and racial and gender resistance. They become the reservoirs of the African American legacy in terms of their association with the oral and intuitionist mode of knowing, which subverts the male characters’ obsession with property and with the mainstream empiricist world. In this dissertation, I use the concept of hybridity as a literary and theoretical devise that African-American writers employ. In effect, I embark on the postcolonial studies of Henry Louise Gates, Paul Gilroy, W. E. B Du Bois, James Clifford, and Arjun Appadurai in order to reflect upon the fluidity of Morrison’s and Naylor’s works. I show how these two novelists subvert Faulkner’s essentialist perception of truth, and of racial and gendered identity. They associate the myth of the Flying African with the notion of hybridity by making their male protagonists criss-cross Northern and Southern regions. I refer to Mae Gwendolyn Henderson’s article on “Speaking in Tongues” in my analysis of how Naylor subverts the patriarchal text of both Faulkner and Morrison in embarking on a more feminine version of the flying African, which she relates to an ex-slave, Sapphira Wade, a volatile female character who resists fixed claim over her story and identity. In dealing with the concept of hybridity, I show that Naylor rewrites both authors’ South by making Willow Springs a more fluid space, an assumption that unsettles the scores of critics who associate the island with authenticity and exclusive rootedness.
Ma thèse est une étude comparative entre William Faulkner, Toni Morrison et Gloria Naylor. Elle me permet d’explorer comment les protagonistes males construisent leur identités en se référant à la possession matérialiste et en se basant sur la subordination de la femme, qui est une autre forme de possession, afin de consolider leur masculinité. Dans leurs textes respectifs, Go Down, Moses, Song of Solomon, et Mama Day, les trois auteurs, malgré leur différences culturelles et même littéraires, partagent l’idée que l’identité, l’histoire, et la vérité ne sont que des construits culturels et sociales. On se basant sur la théorie de Judith Butler et d’autres théoriciens poststructuralistes et contemporains, ma thèse reflète qu’il n’y a pas d’identité « naturelle » ou de réalité objective. La perception identitaire n’est qu’une illusion imaginaire et idéologique ou le sujet ne fait que répéter et performer le discours de son environnent. Faulkner, Morrison, et Naylor basent leurs oeuvres sur le thème de la liberté. Ils explorent comment, à partir de leurs corps, leurs caractères se conforment ou bien se détachent de l’idéologie qui confine leurs identités sexuelles, raciales et sociales. En critiquant, non seulement l’identité’ mais aussi l’histoire, ma thèse montre que les trois écrivains détruisent la perception que la vérité est objective surtout dans les documents historiques. Ainsi, la vérité devient qu’une forme de distorsion qui consolide une certaine idéologie. Ma thèse montre que les trois auteurs mettent en valeur la voix de la femme Afro-Américaine. Elle joue le rôle d’une médiatrice pour les protagonistes males. Elle rejette le discours matérialiste et sexiste. Cette voix féminine représente le thème de l’amour et la survie de sa communauté noire et la résistance raciale. La femme Afro-Américaine préserve la culture Africaine à travers son attachement à la tradition orale et à la connaissance intuitive. En se basant sur la tendance subversive de l’art et de la littérature postcoloniale qui est promulguée par les théories de Henry Louise Gates, Paul Gilroy, W. E. B Du Bois, James Clifford et Arjun Appadurai, je montre qu’à travers Toni Morrison et Gloria Naylor, le texte de Faulkner reste logocentrique et essentialiste dans sa vision hiérarchique de l’identité raciale et sexuelle. Morrison et Naylor se référant au mythe de l’Africain volant afin de justifier qu’il n’y a pas d’identité fixe et stable, donnant ainsi la voix a une identité hybride et fluide. En se basant sur l’article, « Parler en Langues » de Mae Gwendolyn Henderson, ma thèse explore comment en réécrivant d’autres textes, Gloria Naylor déconstruit non seulement Faulkner, mais aussi le sexisme qui demeure résident dans le texte de Toni Morrison. L’histoire de Willow Springs se base sur le mythe féminin d’une ex esclave Sapphira Wade, qui en étant volatile, son histoire et son identité résistent toute forme de catégorisations. En étudiant l’hybridité’ dans la culture Afro-Américaine, ma thèse montre que le Sud qui est décrit dans l’oeuvre de Mama Day est plus hybride que celui de Faulkner et Morrison.

Submitted in the partial fulfilment for the degree of Master of Arts to the Department of African Literature University of the Witwatersrand, 2017
Sol Plaatje’s novel Mhudi revisits prominent events detailing the relationship between the various clans that occupied the South African Landscape in the 1800’s. This story is a reflection of the conflict that arises between the different groups, how it is overcome and prospects of a new harmonious beginning. Plaatje writes his novel in the light of the occurrences in South Africa following the 1913 Natives Land Act. Plaatje uses various elements of culture and literary aesthetics to pose Mhudi as an allegory of the 1913 Natives Land Act. Literature is a carrier of culture and knowledge that can be used as a credible source to assess the past, the present and the future. Plaatje uses a story of love to elucidate how love conquers evil, the story of land and the knowledge and cultural significance it holds. Through this he highlights the wisdom that lies in the knowledge and application of culture through reverence.
XL2018