This dissertation examines the reconfiguration of the limits of representation in reference to the intermediary function of angels. The Modernist engagement with the figure of the angel entailed, primarily, a reconsideration of the problem of representation as well as an attempt to trace the contours of a poetics that plays itself outside the mimetic understanding of representation. My contention is that this transformation of literary referentiality was not simply a disengagement of art from reality but, rather, from the truthfalsity, reality-fiction, subject-object dichotomies. The angel, defined as the figure of passage par excellence, but also as the agency that induces the transformation of the visible in the invisible and vice versa, appears both as a model/archetype and as a guide towards the illumination of this intermediary aesthetic. Working with the joined perspectives from angelology, contemporary phenomenology, and poetics, this dissertation is an extended overview of the notion of intermediary spaces, as well as an attempt to probe the relevance of this concept for the field of literary studies. In the first case, this dissertation offers a theoretical background to the concept of intermediality, seen in its theological, phenomenological, aesthetic and ethical significances. In the second case, it presents the reader with a heuristic apparatus for approaching this problematic in the field of literary interpretation and provides examples of ways in which such an analysis can become relevant. The primary texts discussed here are all examples of attempts to redefine the notion of representation away from the truth-falsity or subject-object oppositions, as well as to create an aesthetic space with its own particularities, at the limit between visibility and invisibility, excessive presence and absence. Nicholas of Cusa’s “Preface” to The Vision of God proposes an ethics of reading defined by admiratio (the consubstantiation of immediacy and distance) under the aegis of the all-seeing icon of God. Louis Marin’s reading of the episode of the Resurrection reveals that history and narrative arise from the conjunction of the excessive absence of the empty tomb of Jesus and the excessive presence announcing the resurrection of Christ. Sohravardî’s “Recital of the Crimson Angel” is a presentation of the space-between of revelation, between cognitio matutina and cognitio vespertina. Walter Benjamin’s “Agesilaus Santander” restores the connections between the exoteric and the esoteric under the patient gaze of “Angelus Novus”. Paul Valéry’s Eupalinos, ou l’Architecte explores the aesthetic of “real appearance” in the space-between the image and the perceiving eye. Poe and Malamud’s short stories reveal the affinities between poetic language and angelophany. Elie Wiesel’s Les portes de la forêt expands the apophatic itinerary from the self to the radically other in a hermeneutical gesture which has the angel as its initial and final guide. Finally, Rafael Alberti’s Sobre los ángeles shows that the aphaeretic function of poetic language is very similar to the apophatic treatment of the world as representation; in this last sense too, the angels are indispensible guides.

This bachelor thesis engages in a quest to understand the concepts of necessity and grace in Simone Weils thinking. The question in play, in which many more questions lie hidden, reads as follows: How does Weil understand the operations of grace in relation to the ”blind necessity” of the natural world, and what are the philosophical implications of this concept of grace? What are, for instance, given her understanding of the world as God’s creation, the metaphysical grounds for a basic human activitiy such as thinking or reflexion? A reading of Simone Weils works on necessity, grace, affliction and attention is contrasted with her thoughts on science, method and truth. The concept of necessity is compared to the one of Spinoza, especially on the subject of how the good or the just relates to the true and the necessary: it shows there are interesting similarities and illuminating differences between the two philosophers’ lines of thought. Here, the concept of attention becomes central to the image: the idea of a cultivated mode of reception of the world and of the Other. Attention is analogously understood as a method of prayer and a cultivated ethical attitude towards other human beings – and an ideal scientific state of mind. In the final chapter of the analytic part of the composition, Weils concept of grace is investigated in regard to concepts of thinking and understanding. Here, Leibniz idea of the divine world and the divine mind plays a concise but important role on the matter of a tentative metaphysical grounding of thinking as such – how this can be thought and how it reflects and deepens Simone Weils metaphysics, especially her understanding of the highest states of insight into the nature of the world as partly a work of divine grace. In the last chapter Walter Benjamins vision of the coming philosophy as a consolidation between Immanuel Kants transcendental philosophy and religious experience – and religious thought – show the way for further investigation into the field, a field that the thesis has outlined at the same time as it has attempted to answer some specific questions that seems to be the most urgent ones.

Engel definieren sich vor allem durch ihre Undefinierbarkeit, ihre Zwischenwesenhaftigkeit. Das Spannungsfeld unvereinbarer Bereiche ermöglicht den Engeln die Existenz. Um ihre Aufgaben – besonders die des Mittlers bzw. Boten – zu erfüllen, können sie fliegen. Jeder Engel, schreibt Rilke, sei schrecklich. Als besonders schrecklich mögen diejenigen Engel sein, die gefallen sind. Ausgewählte Fall-Studien zu ihnen stehen im Zentrum dieser Arbeit. Engel büßen bei ihrem Fall die Fähigkeit zu fliegen und ihre privilegierte Position ein. Auf sich gestellt, zeigen gefallene Engel zwei Reaktionsmuster: Macht und Melancholie. Mächtigen gefallenen Engel gelingt es – oder: sie beabsichtigen es –, die Beziehungsrelation zur göttlichen Autorität nach ihrem Fall aufrechtzuerhalten bzw. neu zu definieren: Durch Errichtung neuer Reiche, rebellischer und sinnlicher, führen sie die Versuchung fort. Aber sie sind keine Mittler mehr, weil sie keine Mitteilungen mehr empfangen, sondern Botschafter eigener Botschaften. Melancholische gefallene Engel lassen dagegen die nutzlos gewordenen Flügel hängen. Auch sie haben vor ihrem Fall in einem Beziehungsverhältnis existiert. Fällt das Gegenüber weg, sinkt ihre Erscheinung in sich zusammen, erlischt ihre Botenfunktion, senden und empfangen sie nicht bzw. nichts Neues mehr. Macht und Melancholie sind in aber auch Aktionsfelder. Der Künstler reflektiert in der objektiv – für sein künstlerisches Schaffen – wie subjektiv – für sein künstlerisches Selbstverständnis – genutzten Identifikationsfigur des gefallenen Engels beide Positionen. So greifen Macht und Melancholie, Rebellion und Resignation, Schöpfen und Scheitern ineinander. Gefallene Engel sind eigentlich ihres Botenstatus’ beraubt. Doch haben sie eine einzige letzte Botschaft – sie sind selbst die Botschaft vom Ursprung ihres Falls und haben darin ihr Ziel. / Angels are defined above all by their indefinability, their mutable essence. The conflict zone between irreconcilable areas makes the existence of angels possible. To fulfill their function – in particular that of medium or messenger – they can fly. Every angel, Rilke wrote, is terrifying. Most terrifying among the angels are, perhaps, those that have fallen. Selected case studies of those form the core of this dissertation. When angels are cast out of heaven, they forfeit their capacity for flight and their privileged position. Left to their own defenses, fallen angels display one of two reaction modes – might or melancholy. Mighty fallen angels are able – or they aim – to maintain their relationship with divine authority, or to redefine it, after the fall. By erecting new realms, more rebellious and sensual, they carry on with temptation. But they are no longer media, because they no longer receive communications. Rather they are the messengers of their own message. Melancholy fallen angels, on the other hand, let their now-useless wings droop. They too existed in a relationship before the fall. When their vis-à-vis disappears, their apparition caves in; their messenger function extinguished, they send and receive nothing or at least nothing new. Yet might and melancholy are not only reaction modes, but also fields of action. The artist, in using the identification figure of the fallen angel both objectively – for his or her artistic creation – and subjectively – for his or her sense of artistic self, reflects both positions. So might and melancholy, rebellion and resignation, creation and collapse mesh. Fallen angels are in fact robbed of their messenger status because, unable to fly, they are no longer a medium. But they do have just one last message – they are themselves the message of the origins of their fall, and that is their goal.

Many of us believe that poetry, specifically activist and experimental poetry, is capable of intervening in our society, as though the right words will call people to action, give the voiceless a voice, and reorder the systems that perpetuate oppression, even if there are few examples of such instances. Nevertheless, my project looks at these very moments, when poetry alters the fabric of our real, to explore the ways these poetical interventions are, in effect, instances of what I have come to call “dissensual” poetry. Using Jacques Rancière’s concept of dissensus and the distribution of the sensible, my project investigates the ways in which dissensual poetry ruptures the distribution of the sensible—“our definite configurations of what is given as our real, as the object of our perceptions and the field of our interventions”—to look at the ways poetry actually does politics (Dissensus 156). I look at three different types of dissensual poetry: concrete poetry, sound poetry, and instapoetry. I argue that these poetic practices prompt a reordering of our society, of what is countable and unaccountable, and of how bodies, capacities, and systems operate. They allow for those whom Rancière calls the anonymous, and whom we might call the oppressed or marginalized, to become known. I argue that bpNichol’s, Judith Copithorne’s, and Steve McCaffery’s concrete poems; the Four Horsemen’s, Penn Kemp’s, and Christian Bök’s sound poems; and rupi kaur’s instapoems are examples of dissensual poetry.

This thesis identifies continuities and disruptions within the tradition of literary allegory in Latin America and critically revisits the category of “national allegory” (Jameson 1986) in order to articulate an interpretative model suited to contemporary “transnational allegorical fiction”. Based on the analysis of seven Mexican novels that register the transition of neoliberalism from the political-economic order to a form of biopolitical control (Althusser, Foucault, Žižek), I identify the emergence of what I call a “transnational affective field”: a symbolic horizon, alternative to the nation, where the prospective function of foundational romances (Sommer) and the retrospective function of mourning akin to postdictatorial fiction (Avelar), converge. This ideological device negotiates power relations, facilitates the transfer of local/global meaning, promotes intercultural empathy and compromise, and denounces mechanisms of exclusion; thereby, reconfiguring the affective and political functions of allegory in Latin American fiction. Part One discusses critical approaches to allegorical fiction in both Latin American and World literatures. Part Two compares the representation of the binomial nation/world in three historiographic metafictions by Carmen Boullosa, Francisco Rebolledo and J.E. Pacheco through recent approaches in post-/de-colonial and memory studies. Part Three examines the depiction of the nation as simulacrum and the figuration of postmodern subjectivities in Jorge Volpi and Juan Villoro from a poststructuralist perspective. It also contends that Álvaro Enrigue’s and Valeria Luiselli’s novels are representative of an emergent meta-allegorical imagination that, in an ironic reversal of allegory (de Man), simultaneously constructs it as a mechanism of ideological control as well as a conscious strategy to resist commodification and symbolic violence (Bourdieu) in the contemporary world. The analysis demonstrates the vitality of Mexican transnational allegorical fiction as a socio-political and affective counter-hegemonic discourse that also functions as an effective strategy of recognition in the international literary field.

This dissertation examines the reconfiguration of the limits of representation in reference to the intermediary function of angels. The Modernist engagement with the figure of the angel entailed, primarily, a reconsideration of the problem of representation as well as an attempt to trace the contours of a poetics that plays itself outside the mimetic understanding of representation. My contention is that this transformation of literary referentiality was not simply a disengagement of art from reality but, rather, from the truthfalsity, reality-fiction, subject-object dichotomies. The angel, defined as the figure of passage par excellence, but also as the agency that induces the transformation of the visible in the invisible and vice versa, appears both as a model/archetype and as a guide towards the illumination of this intermediary aesthetic. Working with the joined perspectives from angelology, contemporary phenomenology, and poetics, this dissertation is an extended overview of the notion of intermediary spaces, as well as an attempt to probe the relevance of this concept for the field of literary studies. In the first case, this dissertation offers a theoretical background to the concept of intermediality, seen in its theological, phenomenological, aesthetic and ethical significances. In the second case, it presents the reader with a heuristic apparatus for approaching this problematic in the field of literary interpretation and provides examples of ways in which such an analysis can become relevant. The primary texts discussed here are all examples of attempts to redefine the notion of representation away from the truth-falsity or subject-object oppositions, as well as to create an aesthetic space with its own particularities, at the limit between visibility and invisibility, excessive presence and absence. Nicholas of Cusa’s “Preface” to The Vision of God proposes an ethics of reading defined by admiratio (the consubstantiation of immediacy and distance) under the aegis of the all-seeing icon of God. Louis Marin’s reading of the episode of the Resurrection reveals that history and narrative arise from the conjunction of the excessive absence of the empty tomb of Jesus and the excessive presence announcing the resurrection of Christ. Sohravardî’s “Recital of the Crimson Angel” is a presentation of the space-between of revelation, between cognitio matutina and cognitio vespertina. Walter Benjamin’s “Agesilaus Santander” restores the connections between the exoteric and the esoteric under the patient gaze of “Angelus Novus”. Paul Valéry’s Eupalinos, ou l’Architecte explores the aesthetic of “real appearance” in the space-between the image and the perceiving eye. Poe and Malamud’s short stories reveal the affinities between poetic language and angelophany. Elie Wiesel’s Les portes de la forêt expands the apophatic itinerary from the self to the radically other in a hermeneutical gesture which has the angel as its initial and final guide. Finally, Rafael Alberti’s Sobre los ángeles shows that the aphaeretic function of poetic language is very similar to the apophatic treatment of the world as representation; in this last sense too, the angels are indispensible guides.

This thesis explores literary code-switching, i.e. multilingual aspects within a single speech, as a key polyphonic structural element in the selected works. First, it analyzes Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands: The New Mestiza = La Frontera (1987) as a work, where the author seeks to establish a literary tradition that would reflect the life in borderlands and the given community through a new language. Secondly, the language of photography and multilingual speech patterns in W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants (1992) are considered as vital elements of the authenticity play. The following chapter deals with Franz Kafka's short stories, where gestures form an essential part of, if not the whole stories, and determine the fragmentary nature of such writing. Finally, the importance of language of power, the discourse of social realism altogether with their emergence into private and intimate discussions through repetitions and variations is commented upon in Václav Havel's play The Garden Party (1963).

No description available.

Despite the authority that time holds in the discipline of studying events of the past, not all historians or writers analyzing the past use time to study history—some use space, including writers who write about and interact with an urban topography. The space used by these writers is built space, as well as inhabited and practiced "lived" space. Whereas time provides a transparent overview of history, the urban spaces tend to be opaque. Clarifying history through urban space is additionally troublesome, because built space and its attached memories are visibly forgotten and ignored as time advances. Despite the difficulties of working with and understanding urban space, some intellectuals specifically choose space as a tool of discernment of history. For these individuals, understanding history becomes an investigation of sensing, feeling, and divining human activity out of the mass of artifacts and used spaces. Hermine Cloeter is one such urban forensic historian.

This research analyses how the medium of television has taken up the question of art history through the historical and critical review of series that have been acclaimed by their mass audiences. Viewed from a historical perspective, a number of milestone series have left their mark on the history of television and art. Some of them have contributed to the construction and dissemination of art-historical discourse, often formal and sometimes critical. This work examines film and television production on art in the developed countries of North America and Western Europe, notably the United States, France and the United Kingdom, at the time of the emergence and institutionalization of the medium of television, between 1945 and 1970, and then looks at the resonances in subsequent and contemporary programs. And, secondly, in a spirit of critical analysis, to try to understand what "television is doing to art and its history" in order to identify the specific discourse of television art history. In practical terms, the aim is to add to the literature on a subject that has so far received very little attention from art historians, and to help legitimize the medium as an object of art criticism. / Cette recherche analyse comment le média télévision s'est emparé de la question de l'histoire de l'art à travers l'examen historique et critique de séries plébiscitées par le grand public. Dans une perspective historique, un certain nombre de séries phares ont marqué l'histoire de la télévision et de l’art, dont certaines ont contribué à la construction et à la diffusion d'un discours sur l'histoire de l'art, souvent formel, parfois critique. Cet ouvrage examine d’une part, la production cinématographique et télévisuelle sur l'art dans les pays développés d'Amérique du Nord et d'Europe occidentale, notamment les États-Unis, la France et le Royaume-Uni, au moment de l'émergence et de l'institutionnalisation du média télévisuel, entre 1945 et 1970, puis leur résonance dans les programmes ultérieurs et contemporains. D'autre part, dans un esprit d'analyse critique, il s’agit de comprendre ce que "la télévision fait à l'art et à son histoire" afin d'identifier le discours spécifique de l'histoire de l'art télévisuelle. Concrètement, cette thèse vient enrichir la littérature sur un sujet jusqu'ici peu traité par les historiens de l'art et des médias, et contribuer à légitimer le média comme objet de la critique d'art.