Browsing by Subject "Beauty."
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Item Imagining the present : perception, form and beauty in the novels of G.K. Chesterton.(2014-06-11) Moore, J. Cameron (John Cameron); Wood, Ralph C.; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.This dissertation argues that encounters with the beauty of being stand at the heart of Chesterton's novels; through his characters' ability to imaginatively encounter the forms around them, Chesterton's fiction offers visions of both the splendor of being shining through phenomenal forms and the enraptured responses which attend such visions. The real literary achievement of Chesterton's novels lies in the transformation of characters through the imagination as it leads those characters to encounter both the particular forms of the world and the depths of being to which those forms are translucent. This reading of Chesterton's novels is grounded in von Balthasar's account of theological aesthetics and form. As his characters see anew the particular forms which surround them, they encounter the depths of being present within those forms. Von Balthasar's linking of being and form requires that an account of Chesterton's fiction must address the presence of beauty, a term not readily found in the existing criticism. If Chesterton's characters are repeatedly moved by the being revealed through particular forms, this encounter and response takes place under the aegis of the beautiful. Chapter one provides a general introduction to the project. Chapter two situates Chesterton's novels in the contexts of medieval aesthetics, nouvelle theologie, and modernist epiphany. Chapter three provides an account of the peculiar form of the novels especially with regard to characterization and time. Recognizing the place of beauty in the novels explains their episodic structure and fixity of character. Within these strange narrative structures, the imaginative encounter with beauty takes three distinct forms. Each of the final three chapters is dedicated to exploring one particular mode of imagination as it appears in Chesterton's novels. Thus, chapter four investigates the perceptive imagination as a tool for making the familiar strange in Manalive. Chapter five examines the imagination of limits in The Flying Inn and The Napoleon of Notting Hill. Finally, chapter six considers the empathetic imagination of Gabriel Gale in The Poet and the Lunatics and Sunday in The Man Who Was Thursday and the charity to which it leads those characters.Item Reading as an Imitatio Christi : Flannery O’Connor and the hermeneutics of cruci-form beauty.(2013-09-16) Train, Daniel Mark.; Wood, Ralph C.; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.At its simplest, this dissertation proposes two, possibly counterintuitive but mutually dependent, claims: 1) that O’Connor’s fiction can be, even must be, considered “beautiful,” and 2) that O’Connor writes the way she does to make her audience better readers. Given the dark, shocking, grotesque, even carnivalesque character that pervades all her fiction, this first claim is likely to give the greatest offense or at least engender the most skepticism. But, as I argue throughout this work, it is essential that we be able to first conceive of her work as beautiful in order to also preempt one of the main objections to my second claim, a claim that O’Connor herself would be wary of endorsing in so far that it suggests and then elevates the didactic or pedagogical function of her art. To say she hopes to make better readers out of us would seem to suggest that her real contribution is as a schoolmarm rather than as an artist. Even worse, it would seem to place O’Connor squarely in that category of writing that she so abhorred: sentimental, pietistic moralizing in the guise of “fiction.” And yet, if we can entertain the possibility of O’Connor's work as exemplifying beauty, I argue that we can also: 1) avoid suggesting as so many have that O’Connor's work perpetrates a fundamental violence on her characters and/or readers (thereby further ratifying modern assumptions regarding the essential inevitability of violence); and 2) entertain the possibility that a non-violent, non-manipulative apprehension of the beautiful is in fact the ability to see or more clearly, or as in this case, to read more clearly. Indeed, as David Hart shows, only by restoring “the beautiful” as a proper dimension of not just aesthetic, but philosophical, theological, ecclesiological and ethical reflection, can we even conceive of a speech-act that is not ultimately just another expression of one violence over another in an interminable, self-extinguishing cycle.