“Taliessin in the Rose-Garden”: A Symbolic Analysis

In this analysis of a poem from Charles Williams’s Taliessin cycle, Taliessin in the Rose-Garden, I sought to demonstrate that our reading of the poem could be helped with the use of certain traditional categories of symbolism. In particular I focussed on how Williams adapts the classical model of hylomorphism to offer his own take on the relationship between spirit and matter. That he was able to accomplish this through the medium of poetry is a considerable testament to his skill and the scope of his vision. I also tried to show where hermetic ideas encroach upon his Christian storytelling, potentially posing problems for an orthodox reading of his poetic cycle as a whole

Salvation and Community in the Works of Charles Williams

The twentieth century American evangelical Church co-opted many of its values from the surrounding American culture, among them, the tremendous importance it placed on individualism and self-sufficiency. The work of British Christian writer Charles Williams, though, provides a corrective, emphasizing the role of community in the salvation of one’s soul. This thesis provides a reading of three of Charles Williams’ last works—The Region of the Summer Stars, Descent into Hell, and All Hallows’ Eve—and examines the function of community in his work. In the Arthurian poem Region of the Summer Stars, Williams imagines a small community, the household of Taliessin, in which mutual acts of service preserve the vision of the Emperor (God) for his people, but which goes unrealized in the larger kingdom of Britain. The community of the household of Taliessin is organized around such communal concepts integral to Williams’ theology as the Ways of Affirmation and Negation, largesse, co-inherence, exchange, and substitution. Williams employs a more modern setting in the two novels. In Descent into Hell, the salvation of protagonist Pauline Anstruther, her ancestor, and a deceased laborer hinges on the help of others in their small community, in contrast to the demise of Laurence Wentworth and Lily Sammile who insist on finding their fulfillment within themselves rather than among the members of the community of Battle Hill. In All Hallows’ Eve, the salvation of Lester Furnival and childhood friend Betty Wallingford is achieved only after engaging in communal acts such as repentance, confession, forgiveness, and substitution among those of their small community of friends. The self-absorption of Evelyn Mercer, in contrast, reveals the peril of rejecting the opportunities for mutual care that the interactions of community afford. Williams’ depiction of the power of community offers a convincing alternative for those unsatisfied by the American reverence of the self-made man

A deductive and typed object-oriented language

In this paper we introduce a logical query language extended with object-oriented typing facilities. This language, called DTL (from DataTypeLog), can be seen as an extension of Datalog equipped with complex objects, object identities, and multiple inheritance based on Cardelli type theory. The language also incorporates a very general notion of sets as first-class objects. The paper offers a formal description of DTL, as well as a denotational semantics for DTL programs

To Reach the Unreachable Stars: Reexamining the Shared Arthurian Vision of C. S. Lewis\u27s Science Fiction Trilogy and Raymond Chandler\u27s Marlowe Novels

Although Raymond Chandler and C. S. Lewis seem to be a rather strange pairing, the ways in which they both borrow from Arthurian literature and use the myth to speak to their cultural moment are strikingly similar. Following T. S. Eliot’s use of the Grail quest in The Waste Land (which set a standard for the use of such material in Modern literature), these authors use Arthurian elements as a means of exposing hidden connections between the fragments of the literary past and the present within Chandler’s Marlowe novels and Lewis’s science fiction trilogy. Both men present Western identity as fundamentally dialectical, with every nation and individual struggling between an idealized and corrupted system of values. By making their heroes modern version of Galahad the sacred knight and exploring their conflicts with twentieth-century culture, both authors suggest that the Western world must move beyond corrupted moral codes like chivalry and accept a higher standard of moral idealism in order to escape from this dialectic and destroy the evil that threatens to consume their world

Heirs of the Round Table: French Arthurian Fiction from 1977 to the Present

While the English-speaking tradition has dominated the production of Arthurian-themed materials since the nineteenth-century Arthurian Revival, there is evidence that the publication of modern Arthurian fiction in French has enjoyed a major upswing over the past few decades. Notable contributions include Michel Rio\u27s Merlin-Morgane-Arthur trilogy, Jacques Roubaud and Florence Delay\u27s ten-volume cycle Graal théâtre, a half-dozen fantasy novels about the origins of the Arthurian world by Jean-Louis Fetjaine, and medievalist Michel Zink\u27s young adult novel Déodat, ou la transparence. Such texts are deeply anchored in the medieval tradition, invested in co-opting the flavor of medieval source texts at the level of narration as well as plot. Textual genealogies are frequently thematized in modern French Arthuriana by authors who credit a medieval parentage, whether through a narratorial intervention or paratexual references. As modern texts seek their own ground--whether as parodies, pastiches, entirely new adventures, or retellings of familiar stories from new perspectives--they continually draw upon the dozens of Arthurian works produced centuries before, presenting themselves as heirs to a literary tradition. With this implicit authorization, they continue its evolution. This paradigm replicates that which is already found in the medieval source material, whether in the Vulgate Cycle\u27s transformation of the Grail Quest from the romance conceived by Chrétien de Troyes into a Christian work exhorting scriptural exegesis, or in Wace\u27s appropriation of Geoffrey of Monmouth\u27s Historia Regum Brittaniae. Modern authors engage with the same process in ways that reflect a canny understanding of Arthurian literature, both its early iterations and its ongoing trajectory. Intertwined threads of genealogy, authority, legacy, and tradition in modern French Arthurian texts reveal an affinity between medieval and postmodern literary practice. As authors of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries appropriate Arthurian material, they adopt techniques and textual strategies closely associated with medieval literature, recycling them to advance postmodern agendas

Obsolescence d’un personnage arborescent : quêtes autour de Gauvain

La lecture des principaux ouvrages de la matière arthurienne, et en particulier des romans en vers, confronte le lecteur à une grande variété de personnages, dont la nature et l’individualité ne peuvent pas être inscrites dans un schéma fixe mais qui, au contraire, évoluent selon leur contexte culturel et narratif. Ces personnages sont « omniprésents », pour utiliser la définition de Keith Busby dans son riche travail sur le personnage de Gauvain. Ils sont donc le miroir d’un changement de se..