Sample proposal #1

I would like to pursue a paper I wrote on the country house poem, “The Description of Cooke-ham,” included at end of Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, Aemilia Lanyer's 1611 volume of religious verse. This poem presents an alternate model to the ideology of the aristocratic lord dwelling on his estate expressed in “To Penshurst,” Ben Jonson's poem of the same genre. It centers on the inability of the English gentlewomen to whom Cooke-ham has been loaned to dwell there, as is immediately signaled by in the opening words of the poem: “Farewell (sweet Cook-ham).” Cooke-ham was loaned to Lanyer's patrons, Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland and her daughter, Anne Clifford, by William Russell, Margaret's brother, soon after her husband's death. Because George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, was to die without a male heir, he left the Barony and all the lands that came with it to his brother Francis Clifford instead of to his daughter. The Clifford women subsequently devoted their lives to regaining the ownership of the Cumberland lands; none of their suits succeeded. My reading of “The Description of Cooke-ham” rests on the Clifford women's failed suits, which effectively disbarred them from any proprietal relationship with the land, and not only with this particular estate at Cooke-ham.“

The Description of Cooke-ham” not only reflects this displacement, but also attempts to replace it with a religious notion of ownership. By claiming throughout the poem that the Clifford women are vessels in which grace and virtue are housed, Lanyer casts her patrons as houses themselves, thus fulfilling a model of the Protestant inner life, which is by nature completely their own. Though this alternative is coupled with an awareness that spiritual self-ownership does not present the same stability as political ownership of the land, Lanyer transforms this fundamental flaw into its greatest virtue in the final lines of the poem, in which she asserts that through Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, which she claims was inspired by the Cliffords, her patron Margaret's own virtue and grace are now transferred and lodged in Lanyer. Thus, just as virtue can be transferred to one's husband through the act of marriage - as happens when Lanyer describes Anne Clifford's marriage to the Earl of Dorset - it can also be transferred to another woman through the act of patronage, or “those rich chains” (“Cooke-ham” l. 210).

This is the line I would like to investigate, as, indeed, Lanyer was the first woman to bid for patronage in the manner of John Donne or Ben Jonson, and her poetic pleas reveal her conception of patronage between women in particular. In both “The Description of Cooke-ham” at the end of Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum and the dedicatory poems and letters with which it opens, Lanyer seems to construct patronage as a community, or coterie-forming, relationship. In my thesis, I would like to explore how - or even whether - this relationship developed. How could a woman, and more particularly Lanyer herself, obtain patronage? What poetic techniques could she deploy? And, on the other side, how did patronage develop into a domain where women like Margaret and Anne Clifford, who were otherwise disenfranchised, seem able to exercise a certain amount of economic control?

Moreover, I plan to explore Lanyer's position as an early modern author, both as she constructs it for herself in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, and as it is constructed for her by factors such as gender and the emerging print culture in which she participated. In the first lines of her opening dedication, Lanyer describes her poetry as “that which is seldome seene / A Womans writing of divinest things” (l. 3), and in doing so, begins to alert the reader to the inherent contradictions of being a woman writer at the time. My thesis would explore the different ways in which she characterizes herself and the different tactics she uses to resolve these contradictions. It would also look to her female contemporaries and their own authorial justifications. Finally, with regard to the external factors of Lanyer's publication, what sort of social network produced the possibility of a published woman? And, if this coterie of women could not exist in reality, as is suggested by the fact that there is little evidence that the Clifford women actually had as close a relationship with Lanyer as she describes, to what extent did print culture allow Lanyer to construct a coterie as abstract as the form of ownership on which it was based?


Sample proposal #2

Examining trials as theatrical spectacles provides many rich opportunities to study the rhetoric of ideology and the interdependency of justice and the word. Trials are part of human consciousness. The ability to conduct a fair trial in which justice is dispensed to an individual according to prescribed law remains one of the benchmarks of a civilized society. The last three thousand years have seen a steady growth in the importance of the trial as both a practical measure and as a philosophical practice. Societies often look to trials as a means of reinforcing cultural norms and the dispassionate rule of law. However, there are moments when cultural pressures seek different uses from the process of a trial. From Socrates to O.J. Simpson, when the important or famous stand trial, the process has the potential to become something other than simply a just method to determine an individual's culpability on a given indictment. Instead, the process becomes a theater for cultural self-examination. The method of fact finding and dispensation of justice moves from the dispassionate toward the sensational.

In a sensationalized trial, the normally individual scene is magnified to represent the norms of a society on a larger stage. The judgment rendered often results in significant cultural consequences. Sensational trials help nourish a `performative' environment that gives rise to a rhetoric with the power to affect the perception and ideology of the larger cultural paradigm in which it functions. These representations of the trial in turn do specific transformative work on cultural norms. National identities, religious convictions, a people's moral and ethical ideology, for example, all can shift under the weight of the artificial vocabulary used within the courtroom in a scene then broadcast as `performance' to the public. The media descends upon the scene, and subsequent pamphlets, sound-bytes, quotes, phrases, and summary all focus on myth making. Heroes are created, battle-lines are drawn, the “champions of a just cause” begin to assert their own moral legitimacy, and the theatrical language of the public spectacle draws more and more people to identify personally with one side or the other. The individual on trial is lost somewhere behind the curtain. The new concept of `public' justice that emerges increasingly depends on the supremacy of the word. Characters in the courtroom consciously act to secure the legitimacy of their own cause by controlling the vocabulary of the trial and its perception by the media and others who will represent it to the public. Prejudices, sympathies, and unconscious values are appealed to on a grand scale with rhetoric designed and used with great self-awareness. Ultimately, judgment rests with the audience's response. The case holding becomes a mere critical review. Justice removes her blindfold and watches the show.

A study of the rhetoric involved in these phenomena becomes an important window into understanding the word's role in a sensationalized trial and what it means for theories of justice. To accomplish this study I will focus primarily on the impeachment of Warren Hastings by the British House of Lords between the years of 1788-1795. The leading voice in the affair was that of Edmund Burke, supported by his close associate Richard Brinsley Sheridan, famous playwright and politician. Together they helped create a new rhetoric of reform that brought Warren Hastings to trial for his crimes against the Indian people. I will look first at the orations by Burke and Sheridan and then at the media's responses to the trial, including the proliferation of satiric representations and other related dramatic works. Attended by the Prince of Wales, most of the Lords, the high Clergy, and writers of such fame and talent as Fanny Burney and Samuel Johnson, the trial captured as much of the public's attention as any other fashionable display in Britain. Sheridan's symbolic tragedy Pizarro, written ten years after the trial but showcasing many of the same issues and rhetorical devices used there to describe empire and abuses of power, will figure prominently in my analysis. Other satiric and non-fictional representations of the event in the form of newspaper, diary, and novelistic accounts will supply ample fodder for theoretical critique. Finally, I will attempt to draw parallels between the Hastings trial and other noteworthy or `sensational' trials of the past. More specifically, both the Eichmann trial and the O.J. Simpson trial may prove worthy avenues of study and could provide more context for analysis. Among the theorists I am considering, Hannah Arendt is essential. These auxiliary examinations will help concentrate my focus on the rhetoric within the problematic generally posed by the Hastings inquiry.

The questions this thesis asks will center on the nature of rhetoric, specifically rhetoric that surrounds a public spectacle. How does rhetoric evolves in situations that attract mass attention and what kinds of power do certain vocabularies manifest in specific situations? Does literature respond, both culturally and aesthetically, to these developments? The power of rhetoric to `create' tropes of the good, bad, evil, and heroic will come under scrutiny, and I will closely study the words selected by the players involved in the trial in order to understand how spectacle seeks to represent itself. The project's central analysis will culminate in observations about the potential that sensationalized rhetoric has to effect cultural change, and the ways in which the trial marks a more general transition in Britain from a language of politeness to a language of commerce that takes empire into account.


Sample proposal #3

Vladimir Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is not often treated by critics or scholars. The few articles that have been published on Nabokov's first English novel tend to stress the novel's perceived attitude toward life and art: its insistence on a separation between the work of art and the world. The Real Life not only lends itself to this interpretation, the novel courts it. Sebastian Knight, the narrator's “half brother” and the famous author who is the subject of the book, falls to the floor upon completing a novel and says, “`No, . . . I'm not dead. I have finished building a world, and this is my Sabbath rest.'” The final sentence of Nabokov's novel is “I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows.” The narrator of the book refuses to disclose his “simple Russian” surname, and only offers “V.” for a first name (think “V. Nabokov”).

Transparently, the author (Vladimir Nabokov) is the narrator (V.), who is his subject (Sebastian Knight), who in turn creates characters of his own. Nabokov's world can collapse back to its origin at any moment, and with such a tenuous existence it seems only dimly related to the “real” world, but the relationship is much more complicated than that. The novel nurtures a vehement distrust of received truth, particularly in the forms of cliché and stereotype, but also in the form of the modish “modern ideas” the narrator and his half brother find so repugnant (Freudianism among them). Anything, in short, that would set itself up between the individual and the world and somehow dilute one's experience of the world is thoroughly excoriated. Contrary to what has become the traditional interpretation, the relationship between The Real Life and the world is intimate - and imperative to an understanding of the novel.

I propose a very thorough, very close reading of The Real Life to unravel this complex relationship. I will attempt to draw out the text's relationship to the world and answer the question of why the uniqueness of this or any text (Sebastian's books are always lauded as “new,” “original,” “different”) is so important to the narrator. Moving on from there, I will explore the implications of this relationship - the theory (or what might be called the anti-theory) of the individual behind the text. To further illustrate V.'s position, I will briefly discuss Freud's theories of the individual to show why Knight and V. find them so unsatisfactory and why, throughout his life, Nabokov so consistently and virulently denounced Freud, whom he referred to as “the Viennese quack.”Though Nabokov's ideas about art and the individual can be found in his many interviews, his autobiography (Speak, Memory), and his other non-fiction works, no where else are they so seamlessly and intricately woven into one of his books. Moreover, these ideas are essential to an understanding of Nabokov's anti-Freudianism, which is often discussed, though never grounded in a single text. I hope to come to a finer comprehension of both of these problems through a close reading of The Real Life.