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Item Bitter business and spoken daggers: George Peele's senecanism and the origins of William Shakespeare's ethos of revenge in 'Titus Andronicus'(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2017) Lynch, Jeff Raymond; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Gretchen E. MintonFor nearly three centuries, scholars and critics have argued that Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare's earliest revenge tragedy, lacks for thematic and characterological consistency and dramaturgical merit. Many have suggested that Titus was not written by Shakespeare--or not written by him alone. In 2002, British scholar Brian Vickers presented a comprehensive study of the authorship of the play, concluding that Titus was co-written by Shakespeare and his early modern contemporary George Peele. Critical literary scholarship has not caught up with Vickers's settlement of the authorship question and there exists a lacuna in the analysis of the play, namely, for my purposes, how do the disparately authored scenes reflect sourcing influences and intratextual character development regarding revenge as a literary descendant of classical drama and as an ethical enterprise of moral agents. Shakespeare's subsequent treatments of the ethical dimensions of vengeance, as both a public and private manifestation of the quest for justice and a psychological response to injury, spawn from the complex tropology in Titus--both those he assumed from Peele and those he introduced into the text himself. A study of the moral philosophy espoused in the joint composition of Titus affords the opportunity for a deeper understanding of how early modern playwrights addressed the desire for revenge as a psychological and moral activity and how the jointly composed play launched Shakespeare's subsequent negotiation with the revenge tragedy genre and the ethos of revenge in his later revenge tragedies.Item Recovering the ethics of readership from immediacy : Holocaust and deconstructive criticism's spectre in Anglophone African trauma narratives(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2010) Oines, Luke Anton; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Robert BennettAnglophone African Trauma Narratives is a title that classifies a growing subgenre of Lost Boy and child soldier narratives. This corpus is represented by works such as: A Long Way Gone, What is the What, War Child, Beasts of No Nation, and They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky. Such works market the memories of violent childhood as an empathy-creating nexus for Western audiences. Despite the humanitarian appeal, the aesthetic architecture of AATN creates serious problems for ethical readership. The virtuality created by these texts (to varying degrees) has the effect of transporting the reader's consciousness into the "presently happening" mind of the narrator. The result of this intimate spectatorship is that readers' ethical discriminations are lessened because of the close proximity to scenes of violence. Such frames of reading are argued to create false empathy, numbness, and complicity to violence. If this subgenre inherently creates problems for ethical reading, an outside ostension of ethical paradigms is needed. My thesis argues that recovery from the problem of presence in AATN can only derive from ethical-literary recognitions of absence. The works of Primo Levi and Theodor Adorno argue for aesthetic representations that recognize ethical absence and distance. Such Holocaust critics deny narrative testimony's inherent right to frame events through abject or sublime expressions. Holocaust critics set important ethical demands for AATN's presentation of aesthetic excess. Secondly, my thesis asserts that deconstructive ethical criticism shares similar ethical aims to Holocaust values of absence. Levinas' concept of alterity, and Derrida's deconstructive mourning each create a deeply motivated ethical value of absence. These frames of reading otherness may deny readers the ability to create unethical empathies and equivocations. My thesis confirms that Holocaust and deconstructive ethical lenses are structured in such a way that they create a double-demand to otherness. The aporia created by this double-demand makes for the most ethical recognition of absences in traumatic narrative. The scope of my argument suggests that meaningful relationships to the past can alter the way that "presence" is responded to in reading.