Date of Award

1962

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (M.A.)

Department

Speech

First Advisor

Howard L. Runion

First Committee Member

Gordon Zimmerman

Second Committee Member

D. Brown

Abstract

When a writer desires to express a feeling rather than merely a fact, a strict research method of writing is not always the most effective. If one is not bound by the historical facts of a situation, he may make his treatment dramatic and greatly help an audience experience his feelings by speaking in the first person or by atttibutlng his words to some other person. Because aesthetic and emotional communication is possible only through one of the major fine arts, the present writer decided to prepare a creative thesis entltled "Death Shall Die." It is hoped that through this thesis an illusion will be created, a human experience will be communicated. and - since truth is the aim of literature - a truth will be clarified. The chief difficulty encountered in this thesis was that problem common to all art - the problem of transmitting to an audience an experience with intensity and meaning.

It has been agreed upon that the thesis itself shall consist of an original oral reading selection rather than the usual written thesis. The following few pages of explanation therefore, should not be considered the thesis, but are submitted as a supplement to the thesis. A copy of the oral reading follows the explanatory material. It is well to bear in mind. that the selection has been written to be heard rather than read; therefore, the appreciation of the work gained from reading it may not be the same thing as that gained from hearing it performed. While one may profit by reading this thesis, the nineteenth century French scholar, Paul Lorain, reminds us that if we read such a selection rather than hearing it, the work may be "like a dried flower: the substance, indeed, is there, but the color is faded and the perfume gone."

Pages

51

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