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ACCESSION No: AAI9998656 TITLE: WITHIN THE REALM OF POSSIBILITY: MAGIC AND MEDIATION IN NATIVE AMERICAN AND CHICANO/A LITERATURE AUTHOR(S): BARIA, AMY GREENWOOD DEGREE: PH.D. YEAR: 2000 PAGES: 00205 INSTITUTION: THE LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY AND AGRICULTURAL AND MECHANICAL COLLEGE; 0107 ADVISOR: DIRECTOR CARL H. FREEDMAN SOURCE: DAI, 61, NO. 12A (2000): P. 4771 Abstract: Bloodlines create an overlap in Native American and Chicano/a history, but this dissertation studies these ethnic groups together for reasons beyond this. Native Americans and Chicanos/as share more than blood; overlaps occur in language, religion, and United States geography. Psychic geography for each group also presents a kinship, for in the search for a redemptive personal identity (to stand against the forcible near-extinction of Native Americans and the cultural dismissal of Chicanos/as by their “native” land) each cultural group recognizes its difference. Having very little in dominant culture upon which to build an identity, Native Americans and Chicanos/as have turned inward to create their own texts of rediscovery. To achieve this personal rediscovery, Chicano/a and Native American writers often turn to magical realism. Through an examination of contemporary novels written by and about Native Americans and Chicanos/as, this dissertation explores the impact of magical realism on cultural mediation. Whether because of mixed ancestry or a liminal, borderlands setting, characters of the novels discussed in Chapters Two and Three face conflicting cultures (their own culture versus the dominant culture), and, because of magical intervention, are able to emerge from their respective conflicts with a blended sense of identity, taking the best each culture has to offer to form a new perspective. The works presented in Chapter Four study what I believe to be a uniquely Chicano/a trait: nearly magical writing. Chapter Two presents four characters and five novels as examples of the coming of age story, or bildungsroman, and the role of magical realism in this rite of passage. They are Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima, Louise Erdrich's The Bingo Palace and Love Medicine, Linda Hogan's Solar Storms, and Ana Castillo's So Far From God . Chapter Three explores adult reactions to magical realism, noting the differences in Chicano/a and Native American perspectives. Under discussion are Ana Castillo's So Far From God, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, and Paula Gunn Allen's The Woman Who Owned the Shadows. The final chapter addresses what I have termed nearly magical literature, using Sandra Cisneros' Woman Hollering Creek to illustrate this idea. Accession No: AAI1400587 TITLE: PUTTING THE MAGIC BACK INTO MEDIEVAL ROMANCE: A SELECT EXAMINATION OF 14TH-CENTURY TEXTS AUTHOR(S): BURTON, KIMBERLY S. DEGREE: M.A. YEAR: 2000 PAGES: 00066 INSTITUTION: UNIVERSITY OF LOUISVILLE; 0110 ADVISOR: DIRECTOR THOMAS A. VAN SOURCE: MAI, 39, NO. 01 (2000): P. 40 Abstract: This study argues that magic in the selected fourteenth-century texts is a combination of processes or experiences which interact with one another, pushing the plot forward via the confrontation and transgression of social, emotional, and physical limits. I propose and explore phenomenological definitions of four types of magical experience: magic that is supernatural/demonic; magic which is good, separate from and defensive against supernatural evil; magic which is good yet still supernatural; and magic that is manipulated perception, or trickery. Via the texts SGGK, Sir Orfeo, “Launfal,” and “The Franklin's Tale”, this study demonstrates that magic functions within the romance plot to facilitate and/or offer protection during key boundary transgressions. ACCESSION NO: AAI9993459 TITLE: SUBVERSIVE FORM OR SUBVERSIVE IDEOLOGY: FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF CONTEMPORARY MAGIC REALIST NOVELS AUTHOR(S): DILLER, SHERRILL DUCHOCK DEGREE: PH.D. YEAR: 2000 PAGES: 00169 INSTITUTION: EMORY UNIVERSITY; 0665 ADVISOR: ADVISER MARTINE WATSON BROWNLEY SOURCE: DAI, 61, NO. 10A (2000): P. 3984 Abstract: Amaryll Chanady's structural definition of magic realism,
and the acknowledged historical moments of this literary mode's development—those
periods in which artistic use of the mode flourished while the label attracted
significant critical attention—support the critical consensus that magic
realism subversively challenges prevailing narratives. A tendency towards
critical myopia exists, however, as critics assume that all magic realist
texts present revolutionary ideas. Deconstructive form does not necessarily
result in subversion of hegemonic discourse. Feminist analysis of four magic
realist novels in this study reveals that magic realism, with all its deconstructive
potential, can reinscribe existing oppressive ideology. ACCESSION NO: AAI9990569 TITLE: HERMETIC HERMENEUTICS: LANGUAGE, MAGIC, AND POWER IN CORNELIUS AGRIPPA'S "DE OCCULTA PHILOSOPHIA" (HEINRICH CORNELIUS AGRIPPA VON NETTESHEIM) AUTHOR(S): LEHRICH, CHRISTOPHER IAN DEGREE: PH.D. YEAR: 2000 PAGES: 00382 INSTITUTION: THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO; 0330 ADVISOR: ADVISER JONATHAN Z. SMITH SOURCE: DAI, 61, NO. 10A (2000): P. 4139 Abstract: This dissertation re-examines the masterwork of a distinguished
humanist and magician (Cornelius Agrippa, 1486–1535) in light of contemporary
philosophical and theoretical discourse. Each chapter reads closely one book
of De occulta philosophia libri tres (1531/33) and explicates its complex
interwoven philosophical arguments with regard to nature, language, the sign,
and the human subject. This analysis is furthered and clarified by setting
Agrippa into a kind of conversation with such modern thinkers as Umberto
Eco, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Derrida, and Paul Ricoeur. ACCESSION NO: AAI1399228 TITLE: AN EXAMINATION OF THE USE OF MAGIC AND MADNESS AS NARRATIVE DEVICES IN THE NOVELS OF GRAZIA DELEDDA AND TONI MORRISON (ITALY) AUTHOR(S): EBINGER, EDWIN J. DEGREE: M.A. YEAR: 2000 PAGES: 00206 INSTITUTION: CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, DOMINGUEZ HILLS; 0582 ADVISOR: ADVISER JOANNE J. ZITELLI SOURCE: MAI, 38, NO. 05 (2000): P. 1166 STANDARD NO: ISBN: 0-599-73281-4 Abstract: The novels of Nobel Laureates Grazia Deledda and Toni
Morrison share many characteristics with respect to their narrative strategies.
Among these commonalities is the similar employment of magic and madness
as narrative devices. This comparative study examines the structural impacts
of magic and madness on the narrative process within these two authors' novels.
Specifically, the functionality of these tools as they relate to the formulation
of setting, plot, and character is investigated in depth. The resulting comparisons
reveal that magic and madness significantly contribute to the development
of the narrative strategy through multiple and varied effects, depending
on their mode of employment. The similar utilization of magic and madness
throughout their numerous applications reveals many of the communicative
and literary attributes of these two devices. These discoveries, garnered
through the detailed analysis within these specific texts, provide insight
into the roles of magic and madness throughout the twentieth-century literary
corpus. Abstract: This dissertation examines slave narratives, neo-slave narratives, and histories of slavery. Using critical race theory, narrative theory, and philosophical critiques of objectivity, I trace how academic histories, such as U. B. Phillips's American Negro Slavery, developed a grammar of white supremacy that excluded African-Americans from equal citizenship. These texts claimed to present a “transparent” view of the past by highlighting the perceived (through physical, documentable evidence) and eliding the role of perceiver and of language in the creation of narrative history. In order to write themselves into history, I argue, both fugitive slaves and contemporary novelists have drawn on the oral conjure and trickster tales that enslaved African-Americans told as a means of subverting the masters' authority. Both conjure and trickster narratives deny that narrative can present a transparent description of the past, and yet they work in contradictory, sometimes antagonistic ways. To counter the grammar of white supremacy and its Cartesian claim to a “universal,” disembodied perspective, conjure narratives emphasize the embodied perceiver, while trickster narratives emphasize language, as the mediums through which we know both history and identity. Conjure narratives such as Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom, Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Chesnutt's conjure tales, Bontemps's Black Thunder, and Morrison's Beloved depict the dominant discourse as a “magic” rhetoric that transforms reality while claiming to simply describe it. Invoking magic and ancestral spirits, conjure discourse disrupts mechanistic assumptions about reality, reunites body, mind, and spirit, and creates a communal, participatory history. In contrast, trickster narratives such as Bibb's Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, Chesnutt's “The Dumb Witness,” Reed's Flight to Canada , and Johnson's Oxherding Tale present the master narrative as a set of generic conventions that we have been duped into accepting as reality. Through anachronism, parody, mixed genres, and linguistic “sleight of hand,” trickster narratives disrupt teleological history, erase distinctions between slave and free, black and white, past and present, and remind readers that narrative constructs both history and identity. Finally, I examine Johnson's Middle Passage, which integrates trickster and conjure narrative to explore the tension between self and community. ACCESSION NO: AAI9983281 Title: Haunted cartographies: Ghostly figures and contemporary epic
in the Americas Author(s): Lorenz, Johnny Anderson Degree: Ph.D. Abstract: Haunted Cartographies: Ghostly Figures and Contemporary
Epic in the Americas approaches “haunting” not as an encounter with a necessarily
phantasmal terror but as a lived experience of history. This history has
been shaped by genocide, diasporas, and disappearances endured by communities
across the Americas, initiated by the Western project of “discovery,” and
continued through policies of “development.” My study of literary texts spans
the Americas because this broad scope affords me the opportunity to investigate
a different kind of “American literature.” My approach is not limited to
the national borders both imagined and strictly guarded by legislators and
border patrols. I take my lead from a ghost. If ghosts are the metonymic
representations of communities relegated to the shadows—scripted as out of
time, doomed, or vanishing—we must remember that ghosts are more than victims.
They constitute a community without documents, the anti-citizens, the survivors
who should be dead. Ghosts are the clever and recalcitrant travelers who
cross borders and resist the too-easy dialectic of presence and absence,
here and there, this world and that world, a First World and a Third World
conjured by fences, papers, and guns. My project considers a transamerican
list of literary texts: Derek Walcott's Omeros, Leslie Silko's Almanac of
the Dead, and Eduardo Galeano's Memoria del fuego . The dissertation studies
the ways in which these haunted cartographies—these epics of disappearances—commit
to paper the experience of the haunt and, in so doing, suggest the literary
text itself as a space both haunted and haunting. The dissertation reveals
what I identify as a long history of state magic. Such magic involves a textual
sorcery that creates ghostly communities: communities rendered invisible,
banished to cells and to cemeteries. Against this backdrop of textual and
physical erasure, writers across the Americas re-imagine themselves not as
ghostly beings but as haunted beings , transforming the rhetoric of invisibility
and the barely-there into a radical articulation of presence. Abstract: Throughout all of history, society encouraged the art
of its shamans, priest/esses, and magicians because they fostered a connection
between the physical and spirit worlds and could provide magical remedies
to worldly problems such as love, illness, and poverty. As civilization developed
and religion became centralized around an omnipotent male god, the magical
practitioner began to lose favor in the eyes of the politically powerful.
By the Middle Ages the Christian Church had grown powerful enough that it
could convince much of the population that, while Christian adherents who
performed feats of magic were saints, non-Christian practitioners of magic
were the servants of Satan; thus was born the witch. Secular political figures
endorsed this idea because they depended on the Church for political support.
Famine and plague also helped to convince the general population that Satan
intended to destroy the world and that he had engaged a group of witches
to help him. TITLE: THE "TRACTAT DE PRENOSTICATION DE LA VIDA NATURAL DELS HOMENS": A FIFTEENTH CENTURY CATALAN ASTRO-NUMEROLOGICAL TREATISE, TEXTUAL STUDY, CRITICAL EDITION, AND PALEOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION AUTHOR(S): LUCAS, JOHN SCOTT DEGREE: PH.D. YEAR: 2000 PAGES: 00249 INSTITUTION: THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY; 0176 ADVISOR: ADVISER DONNA M. ROGERS SOURCE: DAI, 61, NO. 08A (2000): P. 3197 STANDARD NO: ISBN: 0-599-88804-0 Abstract: The present work is an edition of the Tractat de prenostication
de la vida natural dels hòmens, a late fifteenth century Catalan incunable.
The Tractat exemplifies medieval syncretism, the tendency to pull together
various strands of philosophy into one system. The text is a practical manual
for predicting an individual's future that draws on a rich tradition including
astrological magic, geomancy, Pythagorean numerology, and Hebrew gematria.
The method of determining the birth sign is based upon calculations performed
on the subject's name and his or her mother's name. There is clear evidence
that an editorial hand has attempted to frame the source materials in a manner
acceptable to the Christian theology of the time. Abstract: This dissertation examines witchcraft trials, pamphlets,
and plays from the Early Modern Period in terms of their spatial constructions.
The project argues that space—which can be viewed in terms of local, macro,
bodily, and geographical aspects—becomes a principal metaphor in the development
of witchcraft in this period. The dissertation begins with an investigation
of space in village level beliefs. Chapter One, entitled “Domesticating the
Witch: Village Level Tensions,” examines how witchcraft tracts include significant
details about domestic space of the women accused and accusing others of
witchcraft. Chapter One looks at how the body, and especially the witch's
body, had come to be scrutinized as a leaky vessel which could too easily
exceed its own boundaries. Chapter Two, entitled “Crossing the Line: The
Role of Familiars in Witchcraft Cases,” continues to explore the development
of space by examining the particular role that familiars played in English
witchcraft cases. Interestingly, familiars always break these boundaries—house,
hearth, and field—and cause maleficium wherever they wish. Chapter Three,
entitled “The Space of the Witches' Sabbath,” looks at the development of
the witches' Sabbath and its connection to spatial constructs. Chapter Four,
entitled “Uncontrollable Women: Witches on the Early Modern Stage,” examines
the similarities and differences in respect to space between the witchcraft
tracts and the plays that deal specifically with magic. Witches, indeed,
often are portrayed on stage in a wild space far removed from any village
community. At the same time, though, she adopts the befouled trappings of
domesticity as the witches do in Macbeth or Middleton's The Witch . Chapter
Five, “Male Magical Space on the Early Modern Stage,” compares female witch
representations to that of her male counterparts. Unlike their female counterparts,
male magicians are often represented in connection with or within an architectural
space. They do not gyrate, sing, or dance to cast a spell as the witches
do in Jonson's Masque of Queens . Instead, they carefully consult books,
look to the stars, and prognosticate the future. Space becomes a metaphor
for control in that just as the male magician can be placed within a geographical
or architectural construct, he participates in a type of magic that depends
on controlling or confining of space with pentagrams and diagrams. Abstract: This dissertation examines the responses
to evil in the Avesta that take the form of spells, curses, and exorcisms,
by an analysis of the texts based largely on the approaches of scholars in
the anthropology of religion such as Malinowski and Tambiah. This dissertation
demonstrates how magic in general is part of the Avestan worldview and especially
that the use of spells and curses are present to a much greater extent than
has been recognized. Spells, curses, and exorcisms have been identified and
thus the scope of magic and its forms and functions in the Avesta has been
clearly demonstrated, indicating the range of magical practices central to
much of the Avestan expression. This thesis demonstrates that belief in witchcraft
and sorcery and means of protection against them are pervasive throughout
the Avesta and it illustrates that one must recognize these practices in
order to really understand the religious world of the Avestan people. Further,
it suggests that in the Avesta, the practices that are specific to the fight
against evil fall into the realm of magic, as opposed to other practices
that may be considered to be more strictly religion. Abstract: Because of the high degree of conservative uniformity
it was possible to draw a database of medieval Marian legends written from
the twelfth to fifteenth century. A proposed “Mary legend” surface narrative
structure, based on the theories of Vladimir Propp, has seventeen functions
and seven character roles. The goodness of fit for the sample is more than
67%. Those tales that did not fit were memorates, fit a shorter structure
based on a Dundes scheme, or represented another sub-genre (fable, novella,
romance). The Mary Legend formula discloses a high coherence with Propp's
heroic fairy tales. Fairy tale structure and motifs about the Marvelous present
in the Mary legends (ghosts, magic, dreams, and otherworldly journeys) contain
an inherent bivalency between doctrinal notions, which promulgate religious
conformation, and folk or secular notions, which preserve magical belief
systems. A suggested cultural model describes how the dynamic between these
two streams establishes a cultural equilibrium. One, a centripetal force,
uses orthodox and pietistic notions symbolically imbedded in these motifs
to pattern obedience to doctrine through Marian devotion. The other, a centrifugal
force, draws the hearer or reader out into the secular world of folk notions,
imaginative literary themes, and subversive adherence to Mary as a magic
worker, using the folk and magic elements suggested by these motifs. Taken
together they serve to stabilize the local culture, allowing for safe amelioration
of popular folk beliefs into a Christian society. However during times of
social crisis, this cooperative system breaks down, and attempts are made
by the institutional church to eliminate folk beliefs. TITLE: H. RIDER HAGGARD AND THE VICTORIAN OCCULT AUTHOR(S): MCINTIRE, JANET ELIZABETH DEGREE: PH.D. YEAR: 2000 PAGES: 00132 INSTITUTION: NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY; 0160 ADVISOR: ADVISER FRANCIS BLESSINGTON SOURCE: DAI, 61, NO. 02A (2000): P. 621 Abstract: In themes of spiritualism, Zulu magic, and oriental mysticism
that both subvert and support colonialism, H. Rider Haggard depicts British
subjects in foreign settings in three novels of the late nineteenth century:
King Solomon's Mines, Nada the Lily, and She . Haggard's best known novels
were written at the height of British imperialism, when England was exporting
its language and culture to its colonies, and inadvertently showing its colonized
its methods of advantage and rule which the colonized ultimately appropriated
for themselves. Although an avowed imperialist, Haggard's fiction nevertheless
demonstrates his empathy for this appropriation, and the occult is the medium
through which his subtle subversions of empire, gender and race are presented.
In a discourse of the Victorian occult, supported by material from Haggard's
diaries and autobiography, this project shows Haggard assigning his fictional
Africans supernatural power, and focusing on their imperial tendencies. Informed
by his experiences in the seance parlors of late nineteenth-century London,
and his apprenticeship as a British civil servant in England's Government
House in Natal, Haggard's quest romances demonstrate not only how much the
occult was an obsession among colonial Victorians, but also how much race
and gender, when privileged by the occult, contributed to colonial attitudes
and prejudices about Britain's colonized. Abstract: This dissertation considers Roger Bacon's apocalyptic
vision from the perspective of his scientific views. It argues that the nature
and depth of Bacon's apocalyptic views have not been properly appreciated
because scholarship has not applied his scientific theories to them. Once
these two aspects of Bacon's thought are considered in tandem, his sweeping
vision concerning the “physics” of the Apocalypse emerges. The Following Titles Were Listed in 1999 ACCESSION NO.: AAG9820200 ACCESSION NO.: AAG9915466 ACCESSION NO.: AAG9913763 ACCESSION NO.: AAG9911197 ACCESSION NO.: AAG9903376 ACCESSION NO.: AAG9900938 ACCESSION NO.: AAG9836329 ACCESSION NO.: AAG9829037 ACCESSION NO.: AAG9826333
FOLLOWING TITLES LISTED IN JANUARY, 1999 ACCESSION NO.: AAG9813885 TITLE: DARK STAR RISING: THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN OCCULTISM, 1800-1950 (MYSTICISM, F. G. IRWIN, ALEISTER CROWLEY) AUTHOR: VERTER, BRADFORD J. M. DEGREE: PH.D. YEAR: 1997 INSTITUTION: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY; 0181 SOURCE: DAI, VOL. 58-11A, Page 4310, 00405 Pages DESCRIPTORS: RELIGION, HISTORY OF; HISTORY, UNITED STATES; AMERICAN STUDIES ABSTRACT: Focusing on occultism as the active pursuit of mystical experience through ostensibly secret techniques, this study chronicles some of the changes in which the category was conceived in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chapter One examines how research by anthropologists, philologists, and folklorists was more subtly damaging to Christian hegemony than the work of evolutionary theorists and Biblical critics, as they inadvertently offered the public a panoply of intriguing alternatives to the Church whose monopoly they challenged. The parallels these scholars drew between nonwestern subjects and more familiar topics--between ancient necromancy and modern spiritualism, for instance- -generated a new religious hybrid that posited a universal basis for all forms of mystical practice from alchemy to yoga. Chapter Two investigates the crucial role publishers played in popularizing the new occult paradigm. Although specialized books and journals began to appear by the 1830s, far greater was the influence of articles in general magazines such as All the Year Round and The North American Review, which reached people such as F. G. Irwin, whose scrapbooks testify to the universalizing conclusions middle-class readers could draw even without the help of synthesists such as F. Max Muller. F. G. Irwin could afford the time and money required to pursue his mystical researches. Chapter Three examines the social bifurcation in occult discourse that resulted from differential access to information. The new esotericism became increasingly identified with other forms of high culture, particularly after it was embraced by fin-de-siecle aesthetes and their Bohemian offspring. In both England and America, an open-minded association with the occult became a badge of elite sophistication. Focusing especially on the notorious figure of Aleister Crowley, Chapter Four explores the shift in the early twentieth century of occultism's reputation from morally neutral to evil as a populist mass media came to associate the practice with decadence and sexual perversity. In response, rival occult leaders such as Dion Fortune developed esoteric systems that pursued the same goals and used the same techniques as Crowley, but expressed them within normative moral frameworks. ACCESSION NO.: AAG9634219 TITLE: AS ABOVE, SO BELOW: YEATS, CROWLEY, AND QABALAH (WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, ALEISTER CROWLEY, MACGREGOR MATHERS) AUTHOR: SERRA, CHARLES NICHOLAS DEGREE: PH.D. YEAR: 1996 INSTITUTION: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT BINGHAMTON; 0792 SOURCE: DAI, VOL. 57-06A, Page 2496, 00292 Pages DESCRIPTORS: LITERATURE, ENGLISH; LITERATURE, COMPARATIVE ABSTRACT: Readers and critics of W. B. Yeats have long been aware that the "sixty-year-old smiling public man" was actively involved in occult research and experiment for the majority of his life. Most would agree that Yeats's primary influence in esoteric matters, the source of his information on the use and manipulation of symbol qua symbol, was MacGregor Mathers and his Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Further, while Yeats learned the basics of many divergent esoteric systems as a member of the Golden Dawn, the Order's principal ideology or symbolic overstructure was an Hermetic- Rosicrucian adaption of the Qabalah: traditional Judaic mysticism. Even though it was unlikely that readers would understand his "initiated" subtexts, Yeats deliberately fragmented his esoteric symbol patterns because he swore an oath of secrecy as a Golden Dawn Neophyte. Many critics have complained that, though Yeats included recognizably esoteric elements in his poetry, drama, and fiction, they are only accessible or meaningful to "the initiated." Consequently, it is extremely difficult for the average reader to discover the larger--initiated--didactic message that is implied by the recurrence of esoteric themes in the literary works of a poet who was also a practicing magician. Fortunately, in Aleister Crowley scholars have an instructor who teaches the basics of Mathers's system, and also describes how theoretical Qabalah (the initiated principles of symbol manipulation) is put into application--as poetry, exegesis, or magic. Crowley was a contemporary of Yeats in the Golden Dawn, had the same magical mentor (Mathers), was of at least an equivalent magical grade and, most importantly, wrote a great number of technical texts that explain the Golden Dawn's qabalistic system for the uninformed reader. It is obvious that if Yeats used methods learned in the Golden Dawn to structure his poetic symbols, then he was using the qabalistic method of patterning that he learned from Mathers. Likewise, if one comes to Yeats's texts with an understanding of Qabalah in application (via Crowley) then one should be able to reconstruct Yeats's deliberately fragmented symbolic overstructure or didactic message. Crowley's texts provide the reader with thousands of discrete symbols unified through the Qabalah's Tree of Life. Using this information, I offer a close examination of Yeats's symbolism--in "The Two Trees," "Rosa Alchemica," "The Tables of the Law," "The Adoration of the Magi," and A Vision--and expose a consistent didactic message that is identical to that of the Golden Dawn: seek total union with the divine through esoteric practice, internal balance, and gradual stages of purification and initiation. This method of reading also uncovers a number of faulty assumptions worked deeply into the criticism of Yeats with regard to Crowley's magical ideology, the nature of the information he provides, and his relation to Yeats and the Golden Dawn. There were many personal, political, and moral differences that stood in the way of a friendship between Yeats and Crowley. However, coming from a common Golden Dawn background, the two are remarkably similar in terms of their individual esoteric beliefs. Likewise, in 1892 Yeats chidingly informed John O'Leary that he-- Yeats--should not be considered "weak" because he persisted in his study of magic, "next to my poetry, the most important pursuit of my life." With this in mind, we can hardly prejudge or denigrate Crowley simply because he chose to make the study of magic the foremost pursuit of his. ACCESSION NO.: AAG9829981 TITLE: THE PROFESSION OF BRUJERIA ON SPIRITUAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN PUERTO RICO (WITCHCRAFT) AUTHOR: ROMBERG, RAQUEL DEGREE: PH.D. YEAR: 1998 INSTITUTION: UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA; 0175 ADVISER: Adviser: MARGARET MILLS SOURCE: DAI, VOL. 59-04A, Page 1239, 00362 Pages DESCRIPTORS: ANTHROPOLOGY, CULTURAL; FOLKLORE; HISTORY, LATIN AMERICAN ABSTRACT: This study explores the commodification of witchcraft (brujeria) in an urban, capitalist context in Puerto Rico. Against the predictions of the Enlightenment, witchcraft has not disappeared with modernity; it has selectively changed its modus operandi to adapt to the new social space of consumer capitalism and transnationalism. Due to what appears to be a kind of cultural Darwinism and a historic disregard for orthodoxy, the Puerto Rican blend of Kardecean Spiritism, popular Mediterranean Catholicism, and Afro- Latin witchcraft and magic is a winning combination that offers an answer to the ambiguities of a society guided by late consumer capitalism and the welfare state. A historic perspective and a survey of the public debate about witchcraft adds to the ethnographic research, providing a comparative view on the relationships of the state and global discourses to brujeria since Spanish Catholic colonial rule, the process of nineteenth century nation-state building, until the total separation of State and religion under U.S. rule. Witches, after centuries of religious change that transformed them from "heretics" to "charlatans," operate today in a commodified "laissez-faire" social space as "spiritual entrepreneurs." Brujeria lives and thrives in a transnational world and a post-capitalist society, turning the contemporary social space of witchcraft into an arena of complex interests and threats. The transnational circulation of goods and people has increased the pool of saints, deities, charms, prayers and potions to draw from in order to summon the occult forces that help to attain personal power and material success. This dissertation tests a major and potentially controversial question: must witchcraft be relegated to the exotic or the subversive? Rather, this research is proof of a safe coexistence and/or deep connection of witchcraft and capitalism which flies in the face of any attempt to perceive human action in dual terms. Brujeria today has elevated material success to a morally and spiritually grounded ethos; viz., a "calling" and a "blessing." This form of "spiritualized materialism" is simultaneously recharging the reproductive energies of brujeria and consumer capitalism. ACCESSION NO.: AAG9829767 TITLE: MYSTERY, MAGIC, AND METAPHOR: THE EUCHARIST AND THE EPIDEICTIC IDEAL AUTHOR: CICHORACKI, JAMES R. DEGREE: PH.D. YEAR: 1998 INSTITUTION: MICHIGAN TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY; 0129 ADVISER: Chair: DALE L. SULLIVAN SOURCE: DAI, VOL. 59-04A, Page 1145, 00387 Pages DESCRIPTORS: LANGUAGE, RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION; RELIGION, GENERAL; HISTORY, CHURCH ABSTRACT: Epideictic rhetoric has been a marginalized genre since its inception under Aristotle's codification of the rhetorical arts. However, the status of epideictic has changed significantly over the past forty years. Originally defined by Aristotle (and later by Chase) as the rhetoric of praise and blame, epideictic has been characterized more recently as a numinous experience of celebratory revelation (Rosenfield), a vehicle for increasing understanding apart from overt persuasion (Oravec), education that reinforces communal values (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca), ritual behavior (Carter), the rhetoric of orthodoxies (Sullivan), radical and transformative rhetoric (Park; Jaehne), and even subversive ideological maneuvering (Poulakos; Murphy). Such diverse understandings of epideictic rhetoric threaten to make the genre's distinctions uselessly broad and amorphous. However, if we allow for genre to be both explicitly constitutive and inevitably dynamic, such conflicting characterizations can become a locus of possibilities. To embrace these paradoxical attributes as valid understandings of the genre, I divide epideictic into three interrelated subgenres: "re- creative" epideictic functions to demonstrate and celebrate communal values through an internal numinous experience that inspires joy and wonder; "super- visory" epideictic employs education and legitimation to inculcate values and establish boundaries; "re-visionary" epideictic invokes criticism to foster a renewed celebration that calls the community back to a revitalized understanding of its own tradition. Re-creative epideictic is primarily concerned with the Beautiful and presents Reality as Mystery; super-visory epideictic focuses on the True, mystifying Reality as Magic; re-visionary epideictic pursues the Excellent and reclaims Reality as Metaphor. To construct my schema of re-creative, super-visory, and re-visionary epideictic, I rely on the traditional communication triangle of rhetor, audience, and subject and highlight how each subgenre reconfigures the relationships between these three elements. To illuminate my schema, I explore the Roman Catholic tradition of the Eucharist, examining first-century practices as re-creative epideictic, the dogmatic and ritualistic developments of the Middle Ages as super- visory epideictic, and the reforms of Vatican II as re- visionary epideictic. By considering how the Eucharist as an epideictic expression dynamically reconfigures relationships, I unpack idealistic visions of the genre and explore how epideictic encompasses many different and contradictory meanings, thereby harmonizing incongruities and embracing paradox. ACCESSION NO.: AAG9829037 TITLE: GENDERING MAGIC IN LATE ANTIQUE JUDAISM (RABBINIC JUDAISM, MASCULINE, FEMININE, ANTIQUITY) AUTHOR: AUBIN, MELISSA MARGARET DEGREE: PH.D. YEAR: 1998 INSTITUTION: DUKE UNIVERSITY; 0066 ADVISER: Supervisor: ERIC M. MEYERS SOURCE: DAI, VOL. 59-04A, Page 1204, 00281 Pages DESCRIPTORS: RELIGION, GENERAL; RELIGION, HISTORY OF; HISTORY, ANCIENT ABSTRACT: Cultural fictions linking women or femininity with magic appear repeatedly in every extant rabbinic literary corpus from late antiquity. The regularity of this notion and its authorization by the sages themselves leave a legacy in second-order scholarship, where it is frequently assumed that rabbinic stereotypes persuasively speak social and cultural "truths." Thus, both ancient sages and modern scholars construct a clear polarity between magic and religion, linking the feminine to manipulative, negative, illicit magic, in opposition to an "orthodox," licit, religious masculine antitype. This study identifies the trend in rabbinic literature, contextualizes it within the broader late antique cultural topoi and challenges it, using an anthropological definition of magic and insights from ideological critique. It is argued that magic is a category whose valences are socially and culturally stipulated, though most often in rabbinic rhetoric magic negatively characterized femininity. Ideological critique illuminates several rabbinic rhetorical strategies that served to fix the representation of the magical feminine. Both textual and archaeological evidence reveal that rituals practiced among the "orthodox" implicate the sages in the very practices they condemn, if the sages' own phenomenological definition of others' magic is upheld for the sages themselves. ACCESSION NO.: AAG9827756 TITLE: PIERCING THE MAGIC VEIL: TOWARD A THEORY OF THE CONTE (MONDAIN, FOLK NARRATIVE) AUTHOR: NEEMANN, HAROLD PETER DEGREE: PH.D. YEAR: 1998 INSTITUTION: UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT BOULDER; 0051 ADVISER: Director: CHRISTOPHER BRAIDER SOURCE: DAI, VOL. 59-03A, Page 0840, 00272 Pages DESCRIPTORS: LITERATURE, ROMANCE; FOLKLORE ABSTRACT: My dissertation proposes a multidisciplinary theoretical approach to the complex phenomenon of the conte merveilleux, both as a seventeenth-century narrative genre and as a subject of twentieth-century international scholarship. My study examines the ways in which the seventeenth-century mondain authors of literary fairy tales have shaped the subsequent definition and reception of the genre. The complexity of the conte poses many theoretical and methodological problems, which require (re)defining the genre in all its ramifications. As the tales consist of literary, folkloric, mythological, and cultural elements, the definition of the genre elaborated in chapter one extends the investigation beyond literary studies to other academic disciplines, especially with regard to folklore. By situating the narratives in the context of both the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes and of mondain society, chapter two deals with the conte's function as a model of modernist literature and with the role women authors played in developing the genre. Studying the productive social context reveals that the literary appropriation of folklore, deliberately put to strategic use by the modernes, contributed to marginalizing the genre. Yet it is precisely this marginal position that allowed the authors to explore a vast field of meanings and effect different semantic shifts. The complex issues concerning the production and reception of the contes clearly demonstrate that the tales are neither timeless nor universal and indeed have a history. The narratives are the product of various historical periods during which they have been subject to multiple socio-cultural influences. Chapter three explores the transition from oral tradition to literary production, as well as the interrelationships between popular and literary versions. The second part of my study engages in a critical discussion of several interpretative approaches for two major reasons: (1) most interpretations are based on the notion of conte as largely defined by Perrault and his contemporaries; and (2) given the multiplicity of analyses to which the contes have been subject, the different methods employed have also informed the narratives and, in turn, added to constituting the tales. The theoretical approaches discussed include structuralism, morphology, semiotics, narratology, and social semiology (chapter four), as well as psychoanalysis (chapter five). ACCESSION NO.: AAG9826333 TITLE: THE "MALLEUS MALEFICARUM" AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF WITCHCRAFT: ENCOUNTERS WITH THE SUPERNATURAL BETWEEN THEOLOGY AND POPULAR BELIEF (FIFTEENTH CENTURY) AUTHOR: BROEDEL, HANS PETER DEGREE: PH.D. YEAR: 1998 INSTITUTION: UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON; 0250 ADVISER: Adviser: ROBERT STACEY SOURCE: DAI, VOL. 59-03A, Page 0917, 00593 Pages DESCRIPTORS: HISTORY, MEDIEVAL; LITERATURE, MEDIEVAL ABSTRACT: This dissertation explores the evolution of witch- beliefs in the 15th-C., focusing particularly upon one text of unusual importance, Henry Institoris and Jacob Sprenger's Malleus Maleficarum (1487). During the later middle ages, a conception of witchcraft which would be accepted by skeptics and believers alike emerged out of a vociferous debate over the witchcraft's nature and reality. The arguments of the Malleus are an expression of this discourse, and one which would exert unusual persuasive power. In this study, the author maps the conceptual playing field in which learned notions of witchcraft arose and evolved. As a category, witchcraft was informed on the one hand by theoretical theological considerations--a particular and peculiar understanding of the role of the devil and diabolic power, and an especially permissive view of divine oversight. On the other, learned witchcraft was grounded in the beliefs and experiences of common people, for whom malevolent magic was a fact of daily life. To make sense of these beliefs, however, theoreticians of witchcraft applied various conceptual templates to the available evidence--notions of diabolic heresy, maleficium, superstition, and accounts of night- traveling female spirits, all inherited from authoritative clerical tradition. In the Malleus, Institoris and Sprenger systematically constructed an image of witchcraft around perceptions of malevolent magic which was consistent with both experiential reality and the tenets of orthodox theology. More than in any of its competitors, witchcraft in the Malleus successfully assimilated learned theology to the level of popular belief where ascriptions of witchcraft were most often made. For this reason, the Malleus provided the basis for most subsequent discussion of witchcraft in learned circles. ACCESSION NO.: AAG9810617 TITLE: THE "ROMANCE OF THE ROSE": A CARTOGRAPHY OF DESIRE (GUILLAUME DE LORRIS, FRENCH TEXT) AUTHOR: PERRAND, FRANCOISE MARIE-THERESE DEGREE: PH.D. YEAR: 1997 INSTITUTION: THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN - MADISON; 0262 ADVISER: Supervisor: DOUGLAS KELLY SOURCE: DAI, VOL. 59-03A, Page 0840, 00883 Pages DESCRIPTORS: LITERATURE, ROMANCE; LITERATURE, MEDIEVAL LANGUAGE: French ABSTRACT: This dissertation offers a step-by-step discovery of Guillaume de Lorris' Romance of the Rose as a mnemonic landscape, illustrating the correspondences between Man's conflicting desires, and his place in the "fallen" world. The first chapter outlines the visual architecture progressively unveiled in the text. Each stage of the hero's quest for the rose is accompanied by key images, designed to fit into a global system of analogies and contrasts. The second chapter presents textual evidence suggesting that Guillaume's book should be read according to a systematic use of metaphors, associated with images of daylight and awakening. This approach unveils multiple analogies between the hero's, the narrator's and the reader's experiences and the cyclic order of Nature, respectively. The third chapter analyzes the description of the magic garden where most of the hero's experiences take place. Careful reading of the text reveals that the nature of the garden may be interpreted on four different levels: literal, allegorical, moral and spiritual. The fourth chapter is focused on the central episode of the "fountain of Narcissus." The visualization of this story reveals that Narcissus died after seeing his own image from four different perspectives, and that he may exemplify four types of readers. His death illustrates the weaknesses of human perceptions and serves as a call for reparation. The fifth chapter demonstrates that all data presented in the preceding chapters justify a new understanding of the text and of its apparent incompletion. Four successive readings may allow the reader to "see" a complete story. The rose symbol represents a superposition of mediations, reflecting in succession one ideal mediation between the human and the divine. This archetypal reconciliation is in turn reflected in the Romance of the Rose, whose narrator has attempted to repair language, and to capture an echo of Adam's original speech. The thesis ends with arguments showing that this endeavor may have stemmed from either a religious or an alchemical context. ACCESSION NO.: AAG1388994 TITLE: MEDICINE MEN (ORIGINAL WRITING, PLAY) AUTHOR: KARP, JACK MARTIN DEGREE: M.F.A. YEAR: 1998 INSTITUTION: THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY; 0008 ADVISER: Chair: HENRY TAYLOR SOURCE: MAI, VOL. 36-04, Page 0873, 00100 Pages DESCRIPTORS: THEATER; LITERATURE, AMERICAN ABSTRACT: It has been three months since Sarah Drummond first hallucinated her husband's ghost, and it has been three months since Sarah's two sons returned home to heal her. Charlie, a doctor, convinced that his mother has slipped into insanity, attempts to treat her with conventional medicine, while Sam, a medicine man like his father, attempts to use his magic to heal Sarah. Now, though, after months of failure, Sam is forced to face the possibility that his father's magic, and, thus, his own, is merely an elaborate con and that Sarah truly is insane. It is through this clash between medicine and magic, belief and insanity, and between brothers, that the play attempts to deal with the ways in which we hurt those we love when our faith in them fails, and the ways in which we try to heal, or fail to heal, the wounds left as a result. ACCESSION NO.: AAG1388909 TITLE: THE MAGICAL WRITINGS OF POETIC BRUJAS (SOME OF WHICH ARE MEXICAMERINDIAN-XICANISTA-AND/OR-GRANNY-HEALERS) AUTHOR: ABERNATHY, ELANA JANE DEGREE: M.A. YEAR: 1997 INSTITUTION: THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON; 2502 ADVISER: Supervisor: STACY ALAIMO SOURCE: MAI, VOL. 36-04, Page 0908, 00065 Pages DESCRIPTORS: LITERATURE, MODERN; LITERATURE, AMERICAN; LITERATURE, LATIN AMERICAN ABSTRACT: The struggle women-of-color embark upon in this world to achieve political agency is explored in relation to literary and daily bodily activity. The central argument revolves around two key ideas. The first is represented by the conceptual presence of the 'thinking-body' and the ways a reality which accepts this concept refutes a Cartesian understanding of the universe. The second is the act of writing as power source, comfort, and a path to the divine peace of a bodily structured dailiness. Through an analysis of texts by Ana Castillo, Gloria Anzaldua, Luce Irigaray and others--in terms of what they have to say on topics related to writings by thinking-bodies: food, disease, torture, sex and magic-- an original hypothesis of writing as 'poetic magic' is presented. ACCESSION NO.: AAG9818533 TITLE: MAGICAL MONTAIGNE: WITCHCRAFT, RHETORIC AND THE FETISHIZATION OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE ESSAIS (MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE, FRANCE) AUTHOR: SPIRES, MARGARET ANN DEGREE: PH.D. YEAR: 1997 INSTITUTION: DUKE UNIVERSITY; 0066 ADVISER: Supervisor: MARCEL TETEL SOURCE: DAI, VOL. 58-12A, Page 4679, 00217 Pages DESCRIPTORS: LITERATURE, ROMANCE; HISTORY, EUROPEAN; PHILOSOPHY ABSTRACT: MAGICAL MONTAIGNE is a reading of Montaigne's Essais through the lens of magic and magical agency, focusing on what I call the fetishistic manipulations of Montaigne's text. In its metaphorical and metonymical workings, the fetish can be seen to be an emblem of the textual processes of Montaigne's book, demystifing any stable notions of identity or essence. But the fetish's workings must be distinguished from its effects: the fetish is a magical charm which pretends to effect stable notions of gender, identity, epistemology and faith through a disavowal of indeterminacy. In this way, Montaigne's magical charms and his statements on magic can be read not only as demystifications but also as ironically staged mystifications. Three of Montaigne's chapters on magic contain a fetish: an object of desire created to supplement for a perceived lack, or to cover over unbelief. In I:21, Montaigne gives a magical talisman to a friend to guard against impotence. In I:26 the "true face of philosophy" is a paradoxical mask designed to simultaneously proclaim and cover over the absence of easy access to wisdom. In III:11, truth itself becomes a fetish, an unattainable object of desire which is nonetheless proclaimed as attainable. Montaigne's 'magic' permits an authoritarian presence in the Essais, a presence which at different times becomes that of a Magus, an inquisitor, a magistrate, a believer in Catholic dogma. Montaigne simultaneously demystifies and conjures each of these personae. With each of these performances, the essayist simultaneously demonstrates the mechanisms of belief and seeks to overcome the indeterminacy of his own fragmented discourse. A first chapter traces the link between Freudian fetishism and the faculty of the imagination as conceived in the Renaissance. Subsequent chapters treat fetishism and ironic maneuvers as they coincide with the presentation of the occult in four essays: "De la force de l'imagination" (I:21), "Des boyteux" (III:11), "De l'institution des enfans" (I:26) and "C'est folie de rapporter le vray et le faux a nostre suffisance" (I:27). ACCESSION NO.: AAG9816228 TITLE: PIAGET'S "DECENTRATION" FROM LEVY-BRUHL TO HABERMAS: MULTIDISCIPLINARY THEORY-BUILDING (JURGEN HABERMAS, JEAN PIAGET, LUCIEN LEVY-BRUHL, STEPHEN J. GOULD) AUTHOR: PETERMAN, BARBARA S. DEGREE: PH.D. YEAR: 1997 INSTITUTION: UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON; 0087 SOURCE: DAI, VOL. 58-11A, Page 4187, 00263 Pages DESCRIPTORS: EDUCATION, EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY; EDUCATION, PSYCHOLOGY; SOCIOLOGY, SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND DEVELOPMENT; SOCIOLOGY, THEORY AND METHODS ABSTRACT: In his two-volume masterwork The Theory of Communicative Action (1981/1987), Jurgen Habermas's view of human rational potential depends on the concept of decentration from Jean Piaget's genetic epistemology. The methods chosen for clarifying this crucial but confusing concept are qualitative, hermeneutic ones guided by Habermas's reconstructive methods and by concepts ranging from ontogeny and phylogeny to rationalization and sinnverstehen. The study draws the historic;al and conceptual origins of decentration from Lucien Levy-Bruhl (1910), from Stephen J. Gould (1977), and especially from Piaget's four books and one philosophical-sociological address of the 1920's. The findings indicate that Decentration originated as Piaget's response to the rationality question as it was argued in early anthropology: Is rationality universal to the human species or is it relative to culture? His interdisciplinary theory-building integrated metatheory and methods from epistemology, biology and anthropology with the object domain of child psychology. He posited that every child or culture starts with a primal ontology or "conception of the world" that develops in tandem with underlying logical structure. The primal view assumes without question that the perceived world is "the real," but continuing experience leads to a more differentiated and relativized view of reality. Knowledge (content and structure) thus moves from primal naivete to rational choice, from magic to noncontradiction and causality, from egocentric to decentered. Habermas extends Piaget's differentiation of subjective, objective and social worlds into a complex system of validity claims that are prerequisite to human communication and therefore transcultural and always to some extent commensurable. In the end, the work of both theorists suggests that the universalism-relativism dilemma hotly debatable from within one discipline is reformulated less absolutistically when approached with integrative or dialectical methods, especially when the interdisciplinary perspective includes the developmental dimension. Levy-Bruhl as a cautious relativist complements Habermas's cautious universalist. Between these positions, Piaget is avidly both universalist and relativist: Epistemological function and developmental mechanism are universal; knowledge structures are variable; knowledge contents are increasingly relativized by development. ACCESSION NO.: AAG9815673 TITLE: IRONIA, AUTOBIOGRAFIA E FRAMMENTO NELLA PROSA POETICA DI UGO FOSCOLO: L'ARMONIA DISSONANTE E LE ORIGINI OTTOCENTESCHE DEL REALISMO MAGICO ITALIANO (MASSIMO BONTEMPELLI, DISHARMONIC HARMONY, ITALIAN TEXT) AUTHOR: FOGLI, GIOVANNA DEGREE: PH.D. YEAR: 1997 INSTITUTION: YALE UNIVERSITY; 0265 ADVISER: Director: PAOLO VALESIO SOURCE: DAI, VOL. 58-11A, Page 4291, 00314 Pages DESCRIPTORS: LITERATURE, ROMANCE; LITERATURE, MODERN LANGUAGE: Italian ABSTRACT: This is an inquiry on the poetic nature of Ugo Foscolo's prose and its role as original model for the writers of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Italian Literature. I argue that Foscolo begins a literary tradition not always fully acknowledged by critics and historians and that his originality lies in a modern use of irony; in the fragmentary nature of his prose, linked to an original understanding of the relation between life and text; in his thriving to bring together ancient and modern in a disharmonic harmony ("armonia dissonante"); and finally, between paradox and tragedy, elegy and irony, in his opening the text to fantastic and even surreal elements. The authors that he influences (defined sometimes as exponents of an 'anti- novelistic tradition'), and particularly the various Scapigliati, have generally been seen as writers of the Fantastic genre. However, the definition of Fantastic genre most widely used includes any prose departing even minimally from a realistic representation of reality, while for many of these authors we are faced not with an attempt to overcome reality, but rather with the intention of preserving the mystery which permeates reality. The aesthetic difference is crucial and allows a reading of such works not simply as generally fantastic, but more precisely as anticipation of a magic realistic narrative whose traits are inherently European and Italian. The writer that in Italy, and in Europe, elaborates the concept of 'Realismo Magico' in literature is the critic and author Massimo Bontempelli in the first half of the Twentieth Century. The dissertation deals with Bontempelli's innovative attempt in the light of the Italian literary tradition that originates with Foscolo. It is this literary tradition that offers Bontempelli the coordinates for the construction of his literary universe. ACCESSION NO.: AAG9812433 TITLE: WHEN MIRACLES BECOME MAGIC: WITCHCRAFT AND THE EFFORT TO REFORM RELIGIOUS PRACTICE IN LATE MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ENGLAND AUTHOR: ATKINSON, NANCY ELAINE DEGREE: PH.D. YEAR: 1997 INSTITUTION: UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH; 0178 SOURCE: DAI, VOL. 58-10A, Page 3927, 00227 Pages DESCRIPTORS: LITERATURE, ENGLISH; RELIGION, HISTORY OF; HISTORY, MEDIEVAL ABSTRACT: My dissertation challenges the traditional divisions between medieval and Renaissance culture by showing how late medieval ritual practices continue to structure the laity's understanding of evil and their relationship to the supernatural world in early modern England. Through a close analysis of sermons, dramas, and religious treatises, I investigate the ways that ritual practices constructed the laity and helped to shape lay responses to changes in religious worship. My project traces an epistemological battle: it considers the Protestant effort to desacralize lay practice by figuring liturgical and paraliturgical rites as idolatry, devil worship, and witchcraft. In my first chapter, I explore how the late medieval laity may have perceived the purposes of the rites that shaped them by looking at how sermons defined rites for parishioners. My second chapter considers how audiences understood the figure of Satan and evil through an analysis of Corpus Christi dramas. In my third chapter, I look at how figurations of Satan, witches, and witchcraft were a vehicle religious change and argue that in order to desacralize clerical and lay practice, reformers insisted that Catholic were idolatrous and a form of devil worship. My fourth chapter considers how demonologists attempted to re-educate the laity through literature that purports to explain the existence of witches. I argue that this literature challenged the ways that the laity had come to understand evil and attacked a way of knowing that continued to be formed through ritual practice. My last chapter continues this discussion through an investigation of antitheatrical writings on the idolatry of stage playing and an analysis of early modern witchcraft dramas. I examine how dramas exploited the connections made by antitheatricalists and demonologists. By spectacularizing witchcraft rituals and by presenting "evil" on stage, playwrights exposed and ridiculed the fears of their enemies. This study, as a whole, illustrates the moments that formed the Christian/magical dichotomy. ACCESSION NO.: AAGNQ22248 TITLE: "SPER KRIUZ UNDE DORN": GLORIFICATION AND MILLENARIAN CONCEPTS IN MEDIEVAL GERMAN LITERATURE (SPEAR, CROSS, CROWN) AUTHOR: WEINGARTEN, LARRY DEGREE: PH.D. YEAR: 1997 INSTITUTION: UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO (CANADA); 1141 ADVISER: Adviser: JOHN WHITON SOURCE: DAI, VOL. 58-10A, Page 3937, 00291 Pages DESCRIPTORS: LITERATURE, GERMANIC; LITERATURE, MEDIEVAL; RELIGION, HISTORY OF ISBN: 0-612-22248-9 ABSTRACT: The spear, cross and crown were not only symbols of the Holy Roman Empire's authority, but also symbols of glorification and the millennial rule of Christ. Medieval German literature has many references to the instruments of the Passion. They had specific meaning and importance. The first chapter of the thesis deals with the Crucifixion, the Longinus legend and the symbolism associated with the spear used to stab Christ. The aura of magic surrounding the spear was heightened by the widespread belief that Christ was alive when speared. The second chapter discusses the Crusades and is centred around the speech given by Pope Urban II in 1095 declaring the First Crusade. His references to the cross and to the rewards of crusading were to be repeated by poets for over two centuries. The simpler folk among the crusaders were millenarians who viewed Jerusalem, the physical city, synonymous with the Heavenly Jerusalem. Crusaders sought an eternal reward, the crown, for their efforts in overcoming the "heathen." The third chapter deals with the medieval conception of the eternal crown, glorification and eternal life. Since an eternal crown implies eternal life, medieval man sought to explore its characteristics. In discussing the motif of glorification, one must bear in mind that glorification is figuratively compared to a mirror, particularly in thirteenth-century German literature. As well, medieval authors seized upon the idea of man as God's handiwork ("hantgetat") which was to undergo a change at the resurrection. The fourth chapter has as its focus the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. The crown was a type of the eternal crown to be inherited by the glorified dead. The crown of the Holy Roman Empire is so structured as to reflect the description of the Heavenly Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation. Medieval man believed that the fourth kingdom foreseen by Nebuchadnezzar was the Holy Roman Empire which was to be succeeded by the Kingdom of God. The fifth chapter explores The Last Emperor legend which brings together all three symbols since the Last Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire travels to Jerusalem to surrender the spear, cross and crown to Christ. The legend culminates in the defeat of the usurping Antichrist and the return of Christ and the Day of Judgement in which the spear, cross and crown are used to justify a transfigured Christ as supreme judge. The conclusion drawn by the thesis is that the spear, cross and crown were not merely symbolic of the Passion of Christ but symbolized rulership and the millennium. They were employed by medieval poets to embody various aspects of salvation, reward and rulership. ACCESSION NO.: AAG9810739 TITLE: ALFONSO DE LA TORRE'S "VISION DELEYTABLE": PHILOSOPHICAL RATIONALISM AND THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION IN 15TH CENTURY SPAIN (FIFTEENTH CENTURY) AUTHOR: GIRON NEGRON, LUIS MANUEL DEGREE: PH.D. YEAR: 1997 INSTITUTION: HARVARD UNIVERSITY; 0084 SOURCE: DAI, VOL. 58-09A, Page 3578, 00300 Pages DESCRIPTORS: RELIGION, HISTORY OF; LITERATURE, ROMANCE; LITERATURE, MEDIEVAL ABSTRACT: Alfonso de la Torre's Vision Deleytable, an allegorico- didactic fable and the only extant primer of philosophy in Spanish from the 15th century, offers a complex witness to an important feature in Spanish religious history: the belated impact of Medieval Aristotelianism on the religious sensibilities and cultural imagination of 15th century Spain. It illustrates in particular the preeminent role of 15th century Spanish Jews in the philosophic acculturation of their Christian contemporaries and the latter's receptivity to a moderate tradition of Aristotelian rationalism derived from the competing interpretations of Maimonides' Guide. In this dissertation, the Hispano-Christian fate of Maimonidean rationalism is examined through a close analysis of Vision Deleytable as a historical source, a religious encyclopedia and a literary influence and from the combined perspectives of three scholarly traditions: Jewish studies, Spanish literature and history of religions. Chapter one reconstructs the Jewish and Christian frames for De la Torre's didactico-intellectual ideals against the general state of philosophical learning in 15th century Spain. Chapter two reviews the philosophical content of Vision Deleytable in light of its pedagogical intent, theological directives and Greek, Jewish, Christian and Muslim sources as a comprehensive articulation of a religious Weltanschauung. Chapter three examines the editorial and literary fate of Vision Deleytable in Spain, Italy and the Netherlands from the 15th through the 17th century. Special attention is paid to the literary meditation of three Spanish authors on De la Torre's tradition of religious philosophy: Juan de Mena, Inigo Lopez de Mendoza and Fernando de Rojas. Four themes in the study of religion are also addressed throughout the thesis: (1) the sources of religious knowledge; (2) "religion," "science," "magic" and "rationality" in comparative studies; (3) the construction of a religious cosmology in the encyclopedic tradition; and (4) the use of imaginative literature in the phenomenology of religion. ACCESSION NO.: AAG9808376 TITLE: THE CORRUPTION OF ANGELS: INQUISITORS AND HERETICS IN THIRTEENTH-CENTURY EUROPE (FRANCE, CATHARISM) AUTHOR: PEGG, MARK GREGORY DEGREE: PH.D. YEAR: 1997 INSTITUTION: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY; 0181 SOURCE: DAI, VOL. 58-09A, Page 3669, 00240 Pages DESCRIPTORS: HISTORY, MEDIEVAL; HISTORY, ASIA, AUSTRALIA AND OCEANIA; HISTORY, CHURCH ABSTRACT: This dissertation draws upon unpublished testimonies collected over two hundred and one days (between the first of May 1245 and the first of August 1246 beneath the great basilica of Saint-Sernin at Toulouse) that five thousand four hundred and seventy-one men and women gave before two inquisitors, Bernard de Caux and Jean de Saint-Pierre, about the Cathar heresy. Unlike almost every other study of Catharism in medieval Europe, where the governing assumption is that heresy (like any religion) is basically a kind of thought, a distinctive attitude, a philosophy, a discourse, and so divorced from anything that is not the stuff of ideas, my dissertation interweaves thoughts and actions, metaphors and matter, so as to explain how and why a medieval community adopted, retained, and remembered particular beliefs rather than others--despite the threat of coercion, torture and death. By underscoring the connection between thoughts and actions, my analysis endeavors to grasp the meaning of Catharism and Catholicism for the men and women of the Toulousain and the Lauragais (the two regions from where most of those who confessed came). In presenting a historically nuanced and ethnographically complex portrait of a past community, this study attempts to offer an explanation for why any society, at any time and in any place, will adopt a certain understanding or entrench a certain practice. The dissertation, consisting of twenty chapters of roughly ten to twenty pages each, opens by characterizing Cathar and Catholic notions of heaven and earth--especially the Cathars' belief that they were angels who had fallen to earth and, as such, were spiritual beings trapped in corrupting physical bodies made, as were all visible things, by the devil. The next eight chapters introduce the two inquisitors; the historiography of the inquisition and Catharism; the Albigensian Crusade and some of its consequences (notably the inquisition); the climate and terrain of the Lauragais and the Toulousain; the social, economic and political structures of the Toulousain; and the spatial layout of villages and farms in the Lauragais. The following six chapters begin with the gruesome murder of some inquisitors before going on to discuss Cathar conceptions of good and evil and the relation of these two things had to books, magic, time, memory, lying, gift-giving, space, punishment, and money. The next five chapters incorporate not only the medical notions of the Cathars and the role that healing seemed to have played in the life of the heretics but also the questions of sexuality, food, maleness, femaleness, and death, that swirled around the Cathar body. The last chapter is about how male and female Cathars, as well as the inquisitors, understood their reasons for existing, understood the nature of themselves and their actions in the thirteenth century. In other words, why some people became heretics, while others did not. ACCESSION NO.: AAG9807814 TITLE: MAGICAL THEORIES: MAGIC, RELIGION AND SCIENCE IN MODERNITY AUTHOR: STYERS, RANDALL GRAY DEGREE: PH.D. YEAR: 1997 INSTITUTION: DUKE UNIVERSITY; 0066 ADVISER: Supervisor: BRUCE B. LAWRENCE SOURCE: DAI, VOL. 58-09A, Page 3579, 00386 Pages DESCRIPTORS: RELIGION, HISTORY OF; RELIGION, PHILOSOPHY OF; HISTORY OF SCIENCE ABSTRACT: Since the emergence of religious studies and the social sciences as academic disciplines in the late nineteenth century, the category "magic" has played a major role in defining "religion" and in mediating religion's relation to "science," yet traditional efforts to formulate distinctions among these categories have proved notoriously unstable, the subject of repeated critique and deconstruction. This dissertation explores why a category as amorphous and indeterminate as magic has maintained such currency in the theoretical literature of anthropology, sociology and religious studies since the late nineteenth century. This text applies the tools of post-colonial criticism, gender theory, critical anthropology and the work of other cultural theorists to explore the ways in which magic has functioned within these disciplines. In this broad analytical tradition, magic has often served to designate a form of alterity or deviance, against which dominant notions of appropriate religious piety, legitimate instrumental rationality and orderly social relations have been brought into relief. The first chapter of the dissertation examines the social and intellectual context within which definitions of magic emerged in the modern West, focusing particularly on the rise of Enlightenment notions of religion, the emergence of Western science and capitalism, and the spread of European and American colonial power. The dissertation then proceeds in three chapters which consider the construction of magic in relation to the regulation of liberal religious piety, modern scientific rationality and capitalist social relations. The theoretical formulations of magic in these academic disciplines have relied on distinctive normative notions of human agency and subjectivity and have stigmatized forms of practice that contravene rationalist, post- Enlightenment piety. Indeed, debates over the relation between magic, religion and science have often revolved on concern with policing human relations with nature and technology. At the core of these disputes lie fundamental questions of social order. This dissertation thus concludes that the analytical discourses on magic have provided a valuable site at which scholars and social theorists have articulated--and contested--the very nature of modernity. ACCESSION NO.: AAG9738703 TITLE: AMERICAN MAGIC, AMERICAN TECHNOLOGY: VISUAL CULTURE AND POPULAR SCIENCE IN THE MACHINE AGE (NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, MARK TWAIN, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, EDISON MANUFACTURING COMPANY) AUTHOR: ERSOZ, MERYEM DEGREE: PH.D. YEAR: 1997 INSTITUTION: UNIVERSITY OF OREGON; 0171 SOURCE: DAI, VOL. 58-07A, Page 2651, 00293 Pages DESCRIPTORS: LITERATURE, AMERICAN; CINEMA; AMERICAN STUDIES; HISTORY OF SCIENCE ABSTRACT: This project compares the representation of visual technologies in several different nineteenth-century and turn-of-the-century texts, including early editions of Scientific American magazine, the literature of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain, and the early trick films of the Edison Manufacturing Company. I place these disparate texts in conversation with each other in order to consider how the new technologies of visual representation which emerged in the nineteenth century were imagined in American culture as both "scientific" and "magical" objects. The competing sensations of hope and terror, of pleasure and anxiety, which these new technologies inspired in an emerging nineteenth-century "scientific American" identity resulted in the development of a discourse of "popular science" which helped to assimilate these new technologies into the culture by grafting images of magic and its associations with play and visual pleasure onto the language of science and technology. The introduction examines the term "popular science," situating it in relationship to the fusion of magical imagery with the language of science and technology which was used as a means of representing visual culture in the nineteenth century. Chapter I situates other important terms--such as "science," "pseudo-science," and "technology"--historically and considers how Scientific American magazine generated a readership of race-, class-, and gender-specific "scientific Americans." Chapter II interrogates the role which the image of the stage magician plays in determining a "scientific American" identity in the magazine and considers the interplay between the magazine's representations of stage magicians and the professionalization processes of actual stage magicians. Chapters III and IV examine how authors Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain, respectively, deploy magical imagery to depict various visual layers within the technologically-mediated landscape and to contain their own ambivalent fascination with and distrust of technologically-produced spectacles. Chapter V concludes this investigation by re-situating the magical imagery in American trick films in context with the images contained in the other artifacts included in this study in order to revise the notion that American trick films are simply poor imitations of earlier French innovations. ACCESSION NO.: AAGMM17986 TITLE: LOVE AND MAGIC: A SOCIAL SOCIETY OF ROMAN EROTIC DEFLIXIONES AUTHOR: RIPAT, PAULINE LAURA DEGREE: M.A. YEAR: 1996 INSTITUTION: UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA (CANADA); 0244 ADVISER: Adviser: KEITH R. BRADLEY SOURCE: MAI, VOL. 35-05, Page 1180, 00182 Pages DESCRIPTORS: ANTHROPOLOGY, CULTURAL; HISTORY, ANCIENT; LITERATURE, CLASSICAL ISBN: 0-612-17986-9 ABSTRACT: The purpose of this thesis is to analyse a collection of forty-six erotic defixiones (curse tablets) found to date in Italy and the western provinces of the Roman Empire for the information they contain concerning affective relationships in Roman society. Chapter One summarises the major trends of scholarship to date concerning both the study of ancient magical practices and Roman conjugal relationships. Chapter Two describes and analyses the western erotic curse tablets, the material of the study. Topics discussed include trends in chronological and geographical distribution, trends in the desired effect of the tablets, formulaic wording, and the gender ratios of practitioners and victims. The tablets are also placed within the greater context of ancient cursing tradition and ancient defixio usage in general. Chapter Three examines the social significance of the tablets. An inventory of the forty-six tablets follows the main text, and includes a text, a translation wherever possible, and a bibliography for each tablet, in addition to the location of its discovery, its date, and a general description of its appearance. (Abstract shortened by UMI.) |