Rolando Hinojosa's Klail Citv Death Trip Series purports to give a picture of life in the Texas Rio Grande Valley from roughly the 1930s to the present. Much of Hinojosa's attention is directed toward the tensions that characterize relations between the mexicano and Anglo cultures. Hinojosa's novel sequence in large part documents the ever-increasing acculturation and assimilation of the mexicano into Anglo society.

Because his search for self is such a dominant and important theme of his work and because it grows out of a rich tradition in western thought, it is the purpose of this thesis to examine this search and to clarify Aiken's ideas concerning the self and the methods and form he used to communicate these ideas.

Theories of Relativity is a post-modern novella that questions the authority of truth. Multiple perspectives are utilized in the narrative to recount how the murder of a young girl has affected the tragedy's survivors. The focus of the narrative is not to determine the innocence or guilt of the accused, but to show how perspective influences our perception of truth. Eighteen pages of prefatory remarks comprise the body of an essay that explores the parameters of truth.

The purpose of this investigation is to evaluate and synthesize the conflicting views of those critics who deal with the manner in which William Faulkner conceives time in his fiction.

Ways of Pulling A Person Out of the Water contains a preface, which discusses the writing process as well as a discussion of the short story form, ten original short stories, and two chapters of a novel-in-progress. A number of the short stories explore issues such as eating disorders, sexual violence, and artistic choice in the specialized context of the dance community. The novel chapters further develop one of the short stories, "When You Are the Camera and the Camera Is You." The narrator, Diane, explores her life coping with agoraphobia and her family's car accident.

This paper explores the role of children and childhood in Nathaniel Hawthorne's fiction. Moreover, it asserts that the child and childhood are keys to a better understanding of Hawthorne's fiction.

The forty-one poems comprising this thesis are written in a variety of styles and reflect my general international eclecticism. The most prominent influences on my work are ancient Chinese verse, as exemplified by the poems for N., and Zen tanka and haiku, as exemplified by "Detail from a Cubistic Autobiography." Largely imagistic rather than narrative, the poems were conceived in an effort to record my experiences and to define my reactions to those experiences.

A collection of poetry.

Walker Percy differs from other American novelists in that he started writing fiction relatively late in life, after being trained as a physician and after considerable reading and writing in philosophy. Although critics have appreciated Percy's skills as a writer, they have seen Percy above all as a novelist of ideas, and, accordingly, the majority of critical articles and books about Percy has dealt with his themes, especially his philosophical themes, as well as with his philosophical sources. This study explores, therefore, the critical response to philosophical ideas in Percy's five novels to date, as evidenced first by reviews, then by the later articles and books. The critical response developed gradually as critics became aware of Percy's aims and pointed out his use of Christian existentialism and his attacks upon Cartesianism, Stoicism, and modern secular gnosticism. These critical evaluations of Percy's philosophical concerns have sometimes overshadowed interest in his more purely artistic concerns. However, the more a reader understands the underlying philosophical concepts that inform Percy's novels, the more he may understand what Percy is trying to say and the more he may appreciate Percy's accomplishment in expressing his philosophical ideas so skillfully in fictional form. Critics and readers may …

In this collection of poems and essays, the author demonstrates two different methods for examining the same theme: the notion of "home"—how to get there, how to remain there and bear articulate witness to the forces which drive that author to write. The introduction sets forth an explanation for the use of the specific form chosen for expression, with an analysis of the intent behind that form. In these essays and poems, the author accounts for her years on the Texas Panhandle, in Montana, and a year spent teaching in Prague, Czechoslovakia. These locations furnish the moments and incidents of conflict and resolution that make up the dramatic incidents of the included material.

Studies of the English Renaissance reveal a patriarchal structure that informed its politics and its literature; and the drama especially demonstrates a patriarchal response to what society perceived to be the problem of women's efforts to grow beyond the traditional medieval view of "good" women as chaste, silent, and obedient. Thirteen comedies, whose creation spans roughly the same time frame as the pamphlet wars of the so-called "woman controversy," from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries, feature women who have no public power, but who find opportunities for varying degrees of power in the private or domestic setting.

The critical introduction to this collection of short fiction argues that writing is reading and that reading is writing. The argument draws descriptions of writing as reading from such diverse sources as Sherwood Anderson, Roland Barthes, Neil Simon, J. Hillis Miller and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, as well as from the author's own experience. Descriptions of reading from phenomenological and subjective criticism, including the theories of Georges Poulet, Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish and David Bleich, affirm the creative role of the reader, show that the reader, in fact, writes the text in the process of reading. The introduction concludes that reader, writer and text are all constructs of language, that both reading and writing are, ultimately and primarily, thought.

This study analyzes the themes of victimization and self-sacrifice as they appear in the life and works of Oscar Wilde. "Victimization" is defined as an instance in which one character disregards, damages, or destroys another's well-being; "self-sacrifice" is an instance in which one character acts to his own detriment in order to help another or through dedication to a cause or belief. Chapter I discusses the way in which these concepts affected Wilde's personal life. Chapters II-VI discuss their inclusion in his romantic/decadent dramas, social comedies, various stories and tales, novel, and final poem; and Chapter VII concludes by demonstrating the overall tone of charitable morality that these two themes create in Wilde's work as a whole.

Current ESL instructors and theorists agree that university students of ESL have a need for a large passive vocabulary. This research was undertaken to determine the effectiveness of a semantic field approach to passive vocabulary acquisition in comparison to a traditional approach. A quantitative analysis of the short-term and long-range results of each approach is presented. Future research and teaching implications are discussed. The outcome of the experimentation lends tentative support to a semantic field approach.

This study is concerned with the dramaturgic use of the fools of five of Shakespeare's plays. After the Introduction, Chapter II investigates the fool as a historical figure and establishes his credibility. Chapter III examines the comic methods and techniques of the fools. Chapter IV is an investigation of the use of the fool in his capacity as choric voice to present a particular viewpoint on the play. Chapter V is a study of how the fool fits into the action as a character, and Chapter VI investigates the ways in which he may be used in structural duties. The study concludes that the Shakespearean fool is an effective device due to his historical credibility and his recognized position as an entertainer.

There is an absence of any significant written material applying standard rhetorical principles to the communication of the results of basic legal research. This study attempts to fill that void. It proceeds from a discussion on the nature of legal precedents (stare decisis) to a chapter on legal research tools and techniques which enable one to discover these precedents. It continues with an explanation of what a "legal issue" is and how one discovers it among various facts relevant to a case, but not necessarily vital to it. The balance of this thesis concisely details the adaptability of traditional rhetorical techniques to legal writing, then pragmatically concludes by suggesting how one can prepare an appellate brief by combining this two-fold principle, which is both academic and legal.

Analyzing Chesnutt's fiction from the angle of the West African trickster tradition explains the varying interpretations of his texts and his authorial intentions. The discussion also illustrates the influence that audience and editorial concerns may have had on African-American authors at the turn of the century.

This dissertation purposes to answer the question of whether or not the verb system of Black English in Dallas has the same features as those that characterize Black English in other sections of the country. Specifically, it describes in detail the use of the verb "be" within the speech of blacks in the Dallas metropolitan area and accounts for these usages formally within the framework of a transformational-generative grammar of the type proposed by Noam Chomsky.

The ephemeral life of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood belies the importance of an organization that grows from and transcends its originally limited aesthetic principles and circumscribed credo. The founding of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 really marks the beginning of a movement that metamorphizes into Aestheticism/Decadence. It is the purpose of this dissertation to demonstrate that, from its inception, Pre-Raphaelitism is the first English manifestation of Aestheticism/Decadence. Although the connection between Pre- Raphaelitism and the Aesthete/Decadent movement is proposed or mentioned by several writers, none has written a coherent justification for the viewing of Pre-Raphaelitism as the starting point for English Decadence This dissertation attempts to establish the primacy of Pre-Raphaelitism in the development of Aestheticism/Decadence.

In this dissertation, I bring together film theory, literary criticism, anthropology and psychology to develop a paradigm for the study of teen films that can also be effectively applied to other areas of pop culture studies as well as literary genres. Expanding on Thomas Doherty's discussion of 1950s teen films and Ian Jarvie's study of films as social criticism, I argue that teen films are a discrete genre that appeals to adolescents to the exclusion of other groups. Teen films subvert social mores of the adult world and validate adolescent subculture by reflecting that subculture's values and viewpoints. The locus of this subversion is the means by which teenagers, through the teen films, vicariously experience anxiety-provoking adult subjects such as sexual experimentation and physical violence, particularly the extreme expressions of sex and violence that society labels taboo. Through analyzing the rhetoric of teen lifestyle films, specifically the teen romance and sex farce, I explore how the films offer teens vicarious experience of many adolescent "firsts." In addition, I claim that teen films can effectively appropriate other genres while remaining identifiable as teen films. I discuss hybrid films which combine the teen film with the science fiction genre, specifically Back to …

This comic romantic novel engages the question of how the Christianity of the southern, fundamentalist world of the Texas bible belt, finding its primary cultural assumptions about human existence challenged by the more confusing elements of a modern sensibility, a sensibility over-laden with strange-attractors, mechanistic psychologies, relativistic physics and ethics, evolutionary premises, newly proclaimed rights and freedoms, a deterioration in cultural political naivete, and the advent of an increasingly incomprehensible set of technologies, can survive. The "central" character is a young, slightly deformed man raised by his ostensibly "Christian" grandparents who, through a rather odd set of legal circumstances and physical events, not only become wealthy, but somewhat powerful in their immediate community. He finds himself involved with a young woman, raised in an equally "Christian" household, but, as is true of any romantic plot, the relationship between the two is destined, by virtue of circumstance and the meddling of other characters, to struggle and mishap. In the end, the text, in its own fashion, asserts that the Christian impulse can survive the modern era by virtue of one of its central tenets: faith, in the Christian world, is very much the same as life itself, a process of waiting …

Frederick Buechner is an American novelist, born in 1926, who, since 1950, has created eight novels and five works of nonfiction. Although his work has been reviewed and admired by prestigious critics, no lengthy study has yet appeared. Yet the merit of Buechner's work deserves wider critical attention. This study does not attempt to deal comprehensively with Buechner's twenty-five year span of creativity. Instead it presents a consideration of what has been Buechner's most consistent concern throughout his work: his attempt to justify the ways of God to contemporary man. This study is unique in that much of it is based upon a personal conversation with the author rather than on secondary sources. On March 15, 1976, a personal interview was granted with Mr. Buechner in Hobe Sound, Florida. It was a rare opportunity to question an author about his works and his life, especially since this interview occurred simultaneously with the writing of this paper. In addition to the personal interview, Buechner's nonfictional works were used to illuminate his fictional themes. The religious dimension is present in Buechner's works from the beginning, even before he had formally studied theology. Although Buechner is still a relatively young novelist who will …

Families in much of William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fiction are built upon traditional patriarchal structure with the father as head and provider and the mother or mother figure in charge of keeping the home and raising the children. Even though the roles appear to be clearly defined and observed, the families decline and disintegrate.

This study surveys pronominal reference marking in active and inverse languages. Active and inverse languages have in common that they distinguish two sets of reference marking, which are referred to as Actor and Undergoer. The choice of one series of marking over another is shown to be semantically and pragmatically determined.