Browsing by Subject "Imagination."
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Item "Books with more in them" : reading and imagination in the novels of George Eliot.(2012-08-08) Assink, Jessica L.; Vitanza, Dianna M.; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.This thesis examines the connections between reading and the imagination in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda. The ideal imagination, for Eliot, is both sympathetic and reality-infused, which is a result of her continuous attention to sympathy and realism in her fiction and nonfiction. Although Eliot’s characters struggle to implement this ideal imagination, they learn, through their reading and their experiences, how to use their imaginations to connect with others and to live with an awareness of their circumstances. Through the lives of Maggie Tulliver, Dorothea Brooke, and Daniel Deronda, Eliot encourages reading as a way to extend experience and imagination as a tool to make well-informed, conscientious decisions.Item Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem : Wilfrid Ward and the art of Newman.(2013-09-24) Frank, Mary C., 1984-; Prickett, Stephen.; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.This dissertation investigates John Henry Newman's understanding of the imagination and its role in religious and aesthetic experience. Newman’s fictional and poetic works fell into the background in scholarly discussions of his life and works shortly after his death. This, I suggest, was in part because the relationship between art and orthodox religion became strained during the crisis precipitated by Catholic Modernism. The Church’s response to Modernism was an affirmation of the authority of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and a crackdown on intellectual activity outside of its supervision and control. Wilfrid Ward’s 1912 Life of Cardinal Newman, written under close scrutiny by the Catholic hierarchy during the Modernist controversy, established a precedent for the relative neglect of Newman’s fictional and poetic works. However, an examination of Newman’s treatment of the imagination and his exercise of it in his own poetry and fiction reveals the vital importance of this term to his mature understanding of religious experience. Though he begins with an attitude of suspicion toward the power of the imagination and advocates—even in his poetry—an attitude of contemptus mundi to counter the world’s siren song, he eventually comes to describe the imagination as the primary means by which the human mind encounters reality. Whereas in his early works he attempts to make great works of the imagination “safe” by requiring that they also express a standard of moral excellence, he gradually abandons this criterion to argue instead that the imagination is that which recognizes and submits to what exceeds it, whether that be divine and morally perfect or human and wildly unsafe. In either case, the act of submission has value in itself, by drawing the imaginer into relationship with something greater than him or herself and prompting a response of devotion and love. Therefore, Newman’s mature understanding of the imagination, emphasizing openness and the willingness to engage with what exceeds one’s control, goes directly to the heart of the deep anxieties of the late nineteenth-century Catholic Church.Item Imagining membership and its obligations : the voice of John Ruskin in Wendell Berry's fiction.(2012-11-29) Kimery, Millard J.; Donnelly, Phillip J. (Phillip Johnathan), 1969-; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.This study explores the ways in which John Ruskin’s artistic and social criticism illuminate persuasive elements in Wendell Berry’s fiction, primarily his three major novels: A Place on Earth, Hannah Coulter, and Jayber Crow. By attending to Ruskin’s voice, readers of Berry learn how ethical formation requires cultivation of the imagination through an attentiveness to particulars that is informed both by sympathy and an affectionate sense of obligation to others. This insight transforms Berry’s fiction from simply another mode of the social criticism found in his essays to a concrete vision of the good life. Chapter One establishes a link between Ruskin and Berry in the similarities between the Agrarian Movement in twentieth-century America and Tory Radicalism in nineteenth-century England. Chapter Two discusses intertextuality, exploring the literary relationship between Ruskin and Berry in light of Berry’s idea of “convocation.” Chapter Three addresses realism and reconciles Ruskin’s stance on realism with the emphasis on imagination that Berry claims for his fiction. Chapter Four examines Berry’s novel, A Place on Earth, in light of Ruskin’s argument with proponents of classical liberalism. Ruskin’s claim that obligations are not devoid of affection illuminates both community and care of the land in Berry’s fiction. Chapter Five places Berry’s short story, “Making It Home,” in dialogue with Ruskin’s speech to the military cadets at Woolrich Academy. The comparison reveals the close relationship between economic practices and practices of modern warfare, and clarifies the critique of military heroism implicit in the story’s end. Chapter Six takes up the question of imagination’s role in ethical formation. Ruskin’s art criticism elucidates the connections, in Hannah Coulter, between vision, desire, and agricultural practice, as Hannah learns that attending to particulars is never just a matter of material perception. Chapter Seven returns to the themes of obligation and autonomy with a study of the protagonist in Jayber Crow as a pastoral figure. Comparison with Ruskin reveals an opposition between pastorship and institutional oversight that is similar to the nineteenth-century debates over the Poor Laws and that places Jayber in dialogue with opposing interpretations of professionalism.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.