Library: Language, Literature, and Linguistic

Samuel Johnson included in his Lives of the Poets a "Life of Jonathan Swift." His friends, including his biographer, believed he had formed a prejudice against Swift's life and works. They were relieved to find that Johnson's biography of Swift was fair and judicious, indeed. This dissertation shows the parallels, as well as divergences, between the two writers in satire, political thought, and theological philosophy.

The turn of the nineteenth century saw a change in the perception of woman's nature. Trying to salvage a female self-identity from the distorted version of the preceding Victorian era, New Woman novelists attempted to tease out of a morass of social dictates of femininity a genuine female nature. In their novels they wrote New Woman heroines who, like themselves, faced the conundrum of discerning the truth from the fallacy of what society proposed as their identity and social role. This awareness for neither novelists nor heroines was the complete solution to their social problem. The Ne...

Much of the discussion about Peake's Titus Books has been about how to place them in the lexicon of English literature. I am proposing that these books should be read as works of postmodern existentialism. Both postmodern theory and existential theory are interested in the same issues, such as the loss of grand narratives, the rejection of totalizing world views, the subjectivity of truth, the nature of one's existence, and the search for meaning in an increasingly incomprehensible world. Societal issues, such as political upheaval, the growth of major cities, war, and advances in science and...

This dissertation attempts to investigate some interactional features in the conversation of women and men taking into account verbosity, turn-taking, use of standard forms, directness and assertiveness. To do so, an ethnographic method of natural conversation video-recording was utilized within a group of 2 female and 2 male Brazilian Portuguese speakers and 2 females and 2 males in a group of English speakers. This study suggests that the amount of talk uttered by women and men when they are in informal occasions may not vary so drastically. Accordingly, this investigation also shows that fe...

This study investigates the problems translators encounter when rendering features of Dickens's style in A Tale of Two Cities into Arabic. Examples of these features are singled out and analyzed. Then, they are compared with their counterparts in published translations of the novel in Arabic. The comparisons depend on back translation to give non-readers of Arabic a clear idea about the similarities and differences between the source text and target one(s). The features under focus are sound effects, figurative language, humor, repetition, and the French element. The discussion dedicated to o...

This study aims to discuss a number of terms dealing with ibadat, ‘religious observances’ in Islam as represented in the Five Pillars of Islam, and other related deeds, from a translational perspective. The study will also include some terms denoting the times, places and persons required to perform these deeds and rituals. These terms have not previously been discussed and analysed for their own specific purposes. Rather, they have been discussed in the context of translations of either the Qur’an or Hadith and thus have not given rise to much interest or explanation. The study is restricted...

Despite the advent of second wave feminism in the late 1960s, it took more than twenty years before feminist literary criticism started to pay attention to the complex role of women Beat writers. Merely Being There Is Not Enough theorizes the memoirs of Diane di Prima, Joyce Johnson, Hettie Jones, and Brenda Frazer, and analyzes their contributions to the Beat movement. Among the writings of female Beat authors, the memoir has become the most commonly used literary genre. At the height of the Beat movement, Frazer published Troia: Mexican Memoirs in 1969, the same year that saw the publicatio...

The purpose of this dissertation is to introduce a general reading audience to the major themes found in the fiction of Richard Powers with an emphasis on his use of science. For Powers, science is something more than the accumulation of technical data and the proliferation of theories developed to explain physical phenomena. It is an evolving body of knowledge which has important insights to contribute into the conditions which ground human experience The close and often detailed discussions of contemporary issues in science which Powers incorporates into his fiction indicate the extent to wh...

This research integrates cognitively based lexical semantics and formal syntactic analyses with relation to philosophy and logic of language. It deals with a broad range of issues and contributes relevant observations and analysis by offering a new approach to lexical and syntactic representations. Different theoretical frameworks are employed within the compass of generative syntax/ semantics. Data from Russian and other languages (Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Romance languages, English, Hebrew) are analyzed to bring out the nature of the categories each language possesses. To answer the question o...

The elements of menace and terror are crucial aspects of Elizabeth Bowen's pervasive theme of betrayal in her investigation of human relationships. Bowen introduces menace into the familiar and predictable environment of her characters and threatens their sense of security and safety.