Language and the decline of magic: Epistemological shifts in English literature from medieval to modernist.
Item
-
Title
-
Language and the decline of magic: Epistemological shifts in English literature from medieval to modernist.
-
Identifier
-
AAI3103165
-
identifier
-
3103165
-
Creator
-
Santana, Richard W.
-
Contributor
-
Adviser: Richard C. McCoy
-
Date
-
2003
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Literature, English
-
Abstract
-
According to V. A. Kolve, "In the Middle Ages, sacraments existed which could bring man to heaven---that was confidently believed..." (3). Since the sacraments were dependent on language, their efficacy in bringing a person to heaven resided in the power and function of language within medieval epistemology. Language in the Middle Ages, as Michel Foucault has noted, functions in concert with the physical world, within which sacramental language had the power to effect material change. The medieval Mass represents the epitome of what I call a performative epistemology. After the Reformation, this performative function of language starts to shift to a commemorative one.;This dissertation traces this shift in the function of language by interrogating representative texts along its trajectory and using J. L. Austin's theory of speech acts as an interpretive scheme. This performative epistemology is fully operant in the Corpus Christi Cycles, but only partly so in Shakespeare's Hamlet. By the twentieth century, the direction of this shift once again changes with the Modernist movement, represented in this study by James Joyce's Ulysses.;I begin with an analysis of the Corpus Christi Cycles as examples of a performative epistemology and trace their development as ritualistic language performed in a vernacular context to draw connections between Eucharistic sacrifice and dramatic representation. The plays' language shares in the strength and power of the sacrament to effect real change in the material world, and for the audience demonstrates the sacramental system through which they may reach heaven. I then examine Hamlet, in which Shakespeare conflates traces of the pre-reformist epistemology and the emergent commemorative epistemology as established through the reformists' abrogation of the Catholic Mass. Hamlet represents Shakespeare's most sustained interrogation of the epistemological condition of his society. In employing elements of the old sacramental system while inscribing a reformist attitude into the play, he depicts a society amid radical epistemic change. I then turn to Joyce's use of the elements of the Mass to structure Ulysses. Joyce co-opts the residual performative power present within the commemorative function of sacramental language and transforms it toward a completely literary end.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
