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

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

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

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

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

Making sense of public administrative leadership in the Republic of Ireland: an interpretive research project

This research is a research into the perceptions of senior public administrative leaders in the Republic of Ireland regarding their own leadership at the time when Ireland was facing a significant socio-economic crisis. The research examines the senior Irish administrative leaders’ own perspectives on how leadership should be exercised, and explores how they perceived the environment they were in and on how they made sense of their own leadership responses to the perceived environment. The research takes the Republic of Ireland as a national case study, and focuses on the public administrative leadership, which is the leadership of the implementation of public policies, rather than on the political leadership, which is the leadership of the selection of public policies (Montesquieu 1748, Ostrom 1973, Osborne and Plastrik 1997, Alimo-Metcalfe and Alban-Metcalfe 2003, Van Wart and Dicke 2008). The research is preluded by a conceptual discussion on leadership, morality, ethics and values (Chau 2007b); a qualitative research on leadership values in the Irish public services (Chau 2008); and a quantitative research on public service delivery perspectives in Ireland (Chau 2009). The research interviews were conducted amongst the top two echelons of public administrative leaders, with participation drawn from the Secretary General or Assistant Secretary levels of the Irish civil service, or their equivalent amongst the State Agencies

The Trinity Reporter, May 1995

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

Uncommon readers? The Paston family and the textual cultures of fifteenth-century East Anglia

This study brings together the extant evidence surrounding the literary and manuscript culture of the Paston family. By placing in dialogue bills, inventories letters, and manuscripts this thesis will map the circulation of texts and manuscripts within the networks of people associated with this prominent medieval gentry family and establish in what ways the Pastons were typical or a-typical in their selection and acquisition of texts and manuscript. The project considers John Paston II’s commissioning of manuscripts and his collaboration with the scribe, William Ebesham, to compile and curate London, British Library, MS Lansdowne 285 (a manuscript John Paston II called his “boke of knyghthode”). The thesis then moves to explore some features of John Paston II’s wider library, looking at how it displays an engagement with a local hub of textual production, to which Paston had strong social connections, before turning to consider Paston as a reader of more widely circulating and popular works (such as those by Chaucer and Lydgate). In the final section of the thesis I consider the evidence for other members of the Paston family engaging with textual culture. Here I explore the ways in which both John Paston II and his sister, Anne Paston, are simultaneously quite typical in their owning and reading of works by John Lydgate and idiosyncratic in the types of text they had and how they were put to a form of cultural use. Finally, I look at the ways the texts of these manuscripts appear to have pervaded the writing of certain members of the Paston family. Through these lines of enquiry this project establishes the Pastons within an East Anglian textual culture but, through this collection of evidences, assesses the nature of that culture

Jesus as shepherd in the gospel of Matthew

The aim of this thesis is to demonstrate that Matthew and those who first received and transmitted Matthew's Gospel during the late first century believed that Jesus was the righteous and royal Shepherd-Messiah of Israel, the Son of David. Matthew also believed that Jesus was the true teacher and interpreter of the law who could give definitive leadership and guidance to Israel in the aftermath of the Jewish war. Matthew's Gospel was written sometime during the last quarter of the first century, during the formative period of early Judaism. In this context, Matthew presented Jesus as the defining figure for the future of Israel. Jesus, as the righteous royal shepherd, will provide the authoritative understanding of Judaism and her traditions. Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of David, and fulfils the promises of the Hebrew Scriptures. Therefore, as God's choice, he is the one to be turned to during this time of transition and change. As the Son of God and Messiah, he has been given God’s authority and is personally present with the community to give this guidance. One of the ways the evangelist demonstrates this is in his use of the shepherd metaphor in regard to Jesus. The ancient metaphor of shepherd was an image for leadership in the history of the tradition. The shepherd metaphor was often associated with the spiritual and national leaders in Israel, for example, Moses and David. According to Matthew qualities of this kind of shepherd leadership are now revealed in their fullness in Jesus, the Son of God. Jesus as Shepherd-Messiah is revealed both explicitly and implicitly in Matthew. He is revealed explicitly in the shepherd texts of Matthew and implicitly in the Gospel through the literary and typological correspondences in the history of Israel. The shepherd metaphor has a long history both inside and outside Israel’s tradition. Kings and rulers of many types were referred to as shepherds. In the thesis, the metaphor IS explored in the Ancient Near East generally, the biblical tradition, second Temple Judaism, the Dead Sea Scrolls and Philo. The shepherd metaphor was also used to describe evil, false or abusive rulers and leaders. In Israel's tradition this false shepherd metaphor became especially prominent in the exilic and post-exilic prophets. After the time of the exile, messianic hopes grew. The shepherd metaphor became associated with these messianic expectations. Other relevant texts from Rabbinic Judaism and Greco-Roman sources are also considered. In light of this social and historical background, the intertextual and narrative implications of Matthew's use of the shepherd motif will be investigated in relation to his christological concerns. Finally, the shepherd metaphor as it is applied to 'Jesus as shepherd' is thoroughly examined in regard to the Gospel of Matthew. It is the intention of this thesis therefore to make a contribution concerning Matthew's use of the shepherd metaphor in the wider context of Matthean Christology

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

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