A sense of place and community in selected novels and travel writings of D.H. Lawrence

In 1919 Lawrence left England to search for a better society; his novels and travel sketches (the latter are usually seen as peripheral to the novels) continually questioned the values of Western society. This study examines D.H. Lawrence's great 'English' novels in the light of their vivid portrayal of place and community. However, to procure a new emphasis the novels and travel writing are brought into close alignment, in order to examine the way in which the sorts of philosophical questions Lawrence was interested in - ideas on human character, marriage, social structures, God, time, and history - influence his portrayal of place and community across both these genres. Chapter I, on Sons and Lovers, emphasises the way social and historical factors can shape human relationships as powerfully as personal psychology. In Chapter II, on Twilight in Italy, discussion of the effect of place on human character is broadened into a consideration of the differences between the Italian and English psyche; the philosophical passages are read in the light of revisions made to the periodical version. Chapters III and IV, on The Rainbow and Women in Love, conscious of the critique of English society that Lawrence made in Twilight, recognise that although Lawrence is concerned to show the flow of individual being he is no less interested in the relationship between the self and society, and the clash between psychological needs and social structures like work, marriage and industrialisation. Chapter V, on Sea and Sardinia, examines Lawrence's realisation that the state of travel engages with the present and impacts on individual needs and identity. Chapter VI, on Mornings in Mexico, studies the way Lawrence transcended the journalism usual to the travel genre and maintained a deep spirituality as he pondered the attributes of a primitive society and its appropriateness to Western Society. Because travel writing is both reactive and subjective (a writer's reaction to a country is underpinned by the metatext of his own concerns), I ask if Lawrence's presentation of experience can be thought of as accurate or whether places and people are constructs of his imagination. Chapter VIII examines Lady Chatterley's Lover as Lawrence's attempt to bring together the attitudes to sex, class and education witnessed on his travels with an English setting; to envisage a way of living that would meet the deep-rooted needs of man. Chapter VIII, on Etruscan Places, shows Lawrence conscious of encountering the ultimate journey, death, and pays tribute to the fact that while the book searches for philosophical answers on how to die, it is at the same time a paean to life and the beauty of landscape

The nature and value of emotion

"What is the nature of emotional states"? This thesis attempts to answer that question, by offering a "cognitive" theory of the emotions. That is; it emphasises the cognitive component of emotional states, and therefore argues that theories of emotion which regard them as falling outwith the category of the rational are mistaken. Against some current versions of cognitivism, however, I argue that the cognitive element is not a belief. The alternative account offered here argues that the cognitive element should be thought of as a "seeing-as". This account of the nature of emotional states leads to two further points. Firstly, it suggests an account of why emotional states are valuable. In elaborating such an account, I defend the claim that emotions offer a distinct kind of cognitive grasp not afforded by mere belief. I then consider an Aristotelian defence of this point in terms of the relationship between emotion and character. This sort of defence, I claim, is, however only partially successful; there remains a class of emotions whose value cannot be assessed in terms of the contribution they make to character. The second main point for which I argue is that psychological explanation generally must allow room for cognitive states other than belief. One result of a failure to do so, is, I claim, an inaccurate conception of the nature of rationality. In addition, a failure to acknowledge the role of other cognitive states leads to a tendency to ignore a range of types of conflict, both between emotional and beliefs and, more generally, between beliefs and other cognitive states. Lastly, I claim that, given the forgoing account of emotional understanding, we can see how the experience of artworks can offer understanding and contribute to the process of emotional education

Beyond traditional literature : towards oral theory as aural linguistics.

Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1996.Oral Theory, which is the discipline that studies the oral tradition, has been characterized as a literary anthropology, centered on essentially two notions: tradition on the one hand, literature on the other. Though emphasis has moved from an initial preoccupation with oral textual form (as advocated by Parry and Lord) to concerns with the oral text as social practice, the anthropological / literary orientation has generally remained intact. But through its designation of a traditional 'other' Oral Theory is, at best, a sub-field of anthropology; the literature it purports to study is not literature, but anthropological data. This undermines the existence of the field as discipline. In this study it is suggested that the essence of orality as subject matter of Oral Theory - should be seen not in the origins of its creativity (deemed 'traditional'), nor in its aesthetic process / product itself ('literature'), but in its use of language deriving from a different 'auditory' conception of language (as contrasted with the largely 'visualist' conception of language at least partly associated with writing). In other words, the study of orality should not be about specific oral 'genres', but about verbalization in general. In terms of its auditory conception, language is primarily defined as existing in sound, a definition which places it in a continuum with other symbolical / meaningful sounds, normally conceptualized as 'music'. Linguistics, being fundamentally scriptist (visualist) in orientation, fails to account for the auditory conception of language. To remedy this, Oral Theory needs to set itself up as an 'aural linguistics' - implying close interdisciplinary collaboration with the field of musicology - through which the linguistic sign of orality could be studied in all its particularity and complexity of meaning