Recent Dissertations (III)

An Ethnographic Approach to Literature: Reading Wildfell Hall in the L1 and L2 Classroom
Malgesini, Frank. Dissertation: Dissertation (Ph.D.)--University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, 2010.

Though both literary critics and anthropologists have sometimes recognized converging aims and methods between ethnography and narrative fiction, few interpretive studies of fiction have been undertaken using the framework of ethnography of communication. Because ethnography of communication centers attention on language in situated communicative interaction, it could be a useful tool for exploring literary texts, especially texts within the genre of ―realistic fiction,‖ which sometimes also depend upon observation or creation of situated social interaction. This dissertation uses ethnography of communication to interpret a Victorian novel, Anne Bronte‘s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Ethnography of communication may also serve as a general framework for teaching literature, combining close linguistic or stylistic analysis of the language, detailed examination of the cultural and social situation, and re-creation of the meaning of the event as it may have been experienced by the participants. This approach may be especially appropriate in the case of L2 learners taking literature courses in university programs. The overall framework of the analysis, ethnography of communication, will be supplemented by Goffman‘s model of interaction ritual and the concept of co-construction of reality. These frameworks will be employed in the analysis of brief communicative events within the novel. Insights about the characters and the speech communities deriving from ethnographic interpretation will be used to build more precise understanding of the events of the novel, thereby contributing to traditional areas of literary criticism, and offering options for literary study in L1 and L2 contexts.

Milking Milton : Charlotte Brontë's re-narration of Paradise lost in The professor and Jane Eyre
Author(s): Crouse, Brent.
Year: 2010
Dissertation: Honours Thesis--University of New Brunswick in Saint John, Faculty of English

The Non-Specificity of Location in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights
Voroselo, Brian P.
Degree
Master of Arts in English, Cleveland State University, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, 2010.

Emily Brontë's sole novel, Wuthering Heights, is unusual among nineteenth-century works due to the non-specificity of its locations. While many of her contemporaries were very specific in the use of their settings, using real place names and locations that paralleled real-life locations of the time very closely, Brontë uses details of place that make it impossible to draw one-to-one correspondence between her settings and real-life locales, and includes details that serve to remind the reader that the places in which her story takes place, and thus the story itself, are unreal. She does this in order to exert total narrative control over her universe. This enables Brontë as an author to force her readers to confront the issue of power, since the reader must engage Brontë's narrative universe on the author’s terms.

Confidant and critic : the conflicting roles of the reader in Charlotte Brontë's Villette
Author: Holahan, Alisa 1987- Publication: 2010
Dissertation: Senior honors thesis (B.A.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2010.

Categories: Scholar