67 research outputs found

    The place of cataloguing and classification in the curricula of South African universities

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    Bibliography: pages 361-372.The aim of this study is to determine the place of cataloguing and classification in the library and information science curricula of South African universities today, and to determine whether, in compiling the syllabus comprising bibliographic description and subject analysis, new developments and changes are being taken into consideration. With this in mind, attention has been given to the following: (a) Developments in general have been reconstructed by means of a review of the history of cataloguing and classification, from ancient to present times; (b) a review of the comprehensive development of education for librarianship overseas and in South Africa; and (c) an investigation of the present position of bibliographic description and subject analysis in the curricula of library and information science of South African universities

    Author index—Volumes 1–89

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    "Take Writing": News, Information, and Documentary Culture in Late Medieval England

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    This dissertation analyzes late medieval English texts in order to understand how they respond to the anxieties of a society experiencing the growing passion for news and the development of documentary culture. The author's reading of the Paston letters, Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale, and the Digby Mary Magdalene demonstrate these texts' common emergence in an environment preoccupied with the production and reception of documents. The discussion pays particular attention to actual and fictional letters in these texts since the intersection of two cultural forces finds expression in the proliferation of letters. As a written method of conveying and storing public information, the letters examined in this dissertation take on importance as documents. The author argues that the letters question the status of writing destabilized by the contemporary abuse of written documents. The dissertation offers a view of late medieval documentary culture in connection with early modern print culture and the growth of public media. The Introduction examines contemporary historical records and documents as a social context for the production of late medieval texts. Chapter 1 demonstrates that transmitting information about current affairs is one of the major concerns of the Pastons. The chapter argues that late medieval personal letters show an investment in documentary culture and prepared for the burgeoning of the bourgeois reading public. Whereas Chapter 1 discusses "real" letters, Chapter 2 and 3 focus on fictional letters. Comparing Donegild's counterfeit letters in The Man of Law's Tale and the Duke of Gloucester's confession (1391), Chapter 2 discusses the impact of documentary culture on the characterization of the narrator. The chapter argues that The Man of Law's Tale communicates Chaucer's reservations about the reliability of written documents. Chapter 3 explores medieval dramatic representation of ideological resistance to documentary culture and the government's dependence on textual authority. Focusing on the problem of disinformation in the Digby Mary Magdalene, the chapter discusses how developments in late medieval documentary culture are mobilized to demonstrate that the visual dimensions of theater give access to spiritual truths with a kind of immediacy, which the written document cannot provide

    Elegy in Crisis: Experimental Forms and the Influence of the Cult of the Dead in Middle-English Dream-Vision Elegies

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    This doctoral dissertation is a study of two late Middle-English dream-vision poems that demonstrates the utility of the generic category of elegy in reading Pearl and the Book of the Duchess. It is my argument that elegy is a form that offers a literary context to the pathological nature of grief in these poems that is otherwise illegible in their historical context. In the study, I define elegy as a mode that resists the consolation, a textual form that tends towards a completed mourning. Ultimately the thesis demonstrates that we can perceive an acute generic difference between the representations of mourning in consolation and elegy in these two poems. In the first chapter I demonstrate that the ubiquity of socio-religious forms of morally corrective mourning in the fourteenth century was conducive to the consolation form. Following on from this, I show how the period’s strong preference for a consolatory approach to mourning through a popular belief in Purgatory occasions new literary experimentations in vernacular languages that sought to subvert and redefine the consolation tradition. This experimentation in forms of textual mourning is epitomised by the elegiac qualities of Pearl and the Book of the Duchess, making them excellent subjects for the study of elegiac genre given their obvious resistance to the pervasive consolatory ideology of their time. In chapter two, I argue that Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess stands as a resistant and secularising monument to suffering that avoids Christian consolation and explores the ambivalence of mourning. In chapter three, I read the recursive poetic structure of Pearl as a similar resistance to the definitive resolutions of the consolation. I conclude the dissertation by reflecting on the similarities between these two poems in their vernacular and oneiric forms and posit the ways in which the reading of these poems as elegy sharpens our definition of the genre more generally

    The Apothecary's Tales: a game of language in a language of games

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    A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire, in partial fulfilment requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Creative Writing)The thesis shows how the novel The Apothecary's Tales manipulates narrative frames to create a 'simulachron', an unreliable virtual world, which problematises the reader's conceptions of the past. The novel transgresses the generic rules of 'historical fiction' to create a quality of 'historicity' located in the affect of alterity. This is argued to be a somatic response to peril deferred. The novel seeks to evoke alterity by defamiliarising linguistic norms. It does this principally through the use of 'diachronic polysemia' (lexical 'false friends') and intertexts to syncopate the reader continually between the disparate sensibilities of the 1ih and 21 st centuries. These sensibilities are simulated in the novel by the imbedment of sociolects and 'hypomemes', the tacit thoughtways supposed peculiar to a given milieu. To self-authenticate its fictions, the novel employs the 'parafictive' devices of a testamentary found artifact, an unreliable narrator and editor, plausible sociologuemes (social conventions) and ideologuemes (ideologies that inform behaviour), along with a density of period minutiae putatively grounded in the record. Any truth effects achieved are then ludically subverted by a process of critique in which structural units of the novel systematically parody the other. The novel is patterned in the structure of a nested diptych, of expositions contra posed in a mutual commentary, which extends from the defining templates of plot and episode to the micro levels of morphemes in polysemic wordplay. The tropes of nested framing and repetition of form and syntagm are defined in the thesis, respectively, as encubi/atio and 'emblematic resonance'. It is argued that these tropes, encoded in a fictive discourse that defies closure, provide a simulation of hermetic form that -when mapped upon the aleatory life world -can be productive of aesthetic affect. The agonistic elements of plot and incident in the novel are figured within the tapas of theatre, foregrounded by the duplicitous self-fashioning of the characters, and by the continual metaleptic shifts or 'frame syncopation' of narrative viewpoint, both intra and extra-diegetic. Frame syncopation is used advisedly to dilemmatise significations at both the structural and syntagmatic levels. The thesis contends that such contrived collisions of narrative interpretation may be the dynamic of affectivity in all aesthetic discourse

    Vestures Of The Past: The Other Historicisms Of Victorian Aesthetics

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    The importance of history to Victorian culture, and to nineteenth-century Europe more generally, is readily apprehended not only from its historiography, but also from its philosophy, art, literature, science, politics, and public institutions. This dissertation argues that the discourse of aesthetics in Victorian Britain constitutes a major area of historical thinking that, in contrast to the scientific and philosophical historicisms that dominated nineteenth-century European intellectual culture, focuses on individual experience. Its starting point is Walter Pater’s claim that we are born “clothed in a vesture of the past”—that is, that our relation to ourselves is historical and that our relation to history is aesthetic. Through readings of aesthetic theory and art criticism, along with works of historiography, fiction, poetry, and visual art, this dissertation explores some of the ways in which Victorian aesthetics addresses the problem of the relationship between the sensuous representation and experience of the historical, on the one hand, and the subjects of such representation and experience, on the other. Through these readings, aesthetic modes of historical relation such as memory, revival, contrast, haunting, collection, and displacement are addressed as modes of subjectivation. The dissertation considers a wide range of more and less canonical texts by John Ruskin, George Eliot, Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds, William Morris, Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, and Marcus Clarke. While the dissertation focuses on texts written in England, it takes a transnational approach, situating these texts in the broader contexts of the European intellectual discourses with which they engage and of British imperialism, which is addressed in the dissertation’s coda through texts created in colonial Australia. By highlighting the role of the aesthetic in the formation of subjectivity as historical, this dissertation revises the image of nineteenth-century aesthetics as either ahistorical, formulating the pleasures of a timeless subject, or, conversely, deterministic, finding in art merely a reflection of larger historical processes. Instead, aesthetics emerges here as a discourse for the problematization of the historicity of subjectivity

    The Trinity Reporter, May 1995

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    https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/reporter/2077/thumbnail.jp

    Linguistic style in Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage

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