This thesis highlights starting points underlying the notions of two feminist utopians, Christine de Pizan and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In approaching their texts, it focuses on the notions central to understand their writings. These would be historical, social, and cultural contexts. Defining concepts as utopian in its varying forms and feminism has been of significance. A feministic approach grounded in Simone de Beauvoirs philosophical phenomenology in the study of feministic utopia's visibility, has contributed to the understanding of the power structures to which women are tethered. In order to understand the way women are presented, it has become obvious that The Book of the City of Ladies and Herland are literary works that are related not only by their authors’ background and personality but by the society in which they lived. Through their engagement in the contemporary intellectual debate on all social planes, both authors contributed to shifting the focus of their own contemporary notions of a woman to the notion of a woman equal to men. Woman, in Christine de Pizans utopia, is given specific properties and through themes of issues given meaning. She is not free in the sense that Simone de Beauvoir says.  She has a broader repertoire than was historically assigned, but her freedom is not arbitrary, contingent, and temporary and judged by her actions. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's woman is in her novel subordinated by biology in contrast to her real society where she is a result of economic and social oppression in history and society. By being united, women can drive social change and thereby change their living conditions. In Herland, the author shows what this superior human togetherness can lead to in a socialist society. By focusing on issues related to motherhood, community and work, she challenges the reader to question the universal starting point for their understanding of masculinity and femininity

El nuevo palacio del Retiro (1634), El cubo de la Almudena (1651), La devoción de la misa (1658), and El santo rey don Fernando (first and second parts, 1671) are works of a religious literary genre unique to Spain: the auto sacramental. Until recently, such plays have suffered a lack of critical attention, possibly due to their complicated theological focus. Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681), the master of this genre, is the author of nearly eighty of these one-act works celebrating the Eucharist. Of these, the most studied are those using biblical and mythological characters. Calderón's autos which use Spanish historical figures, such as the above five, have been the object of extremely few studies. Most of these analyses remain at a superficial level, focusing on the works' historical contents, rather than their central spiritual elements. These works illustrate the cosmography of the time and place of their conception. To uncover these autos' full meaning, it is necessary to interpret all other theatrical components in light of these works' primary topic: the Eucharist. Throughout El nuevo palacio del Retiro, El cubo de la Almudena, La devoción de la misa, and both parts of El santo rey don Fernando, the historical elements are framed by the spiritual. In the first, a competition in which the king participates is presented as an image of the transformation of Christ into the Eucharist. In the second, a historical Muslim siege of Madrid is used to assert the victory of Spain against historical and spiritual foes through the Sacrament. The third presents the devotion of a legendary soldier to the Mass as the source of victory in a historical battle. The two autos written on the occasion of the canonization of the medieval King Fernando III combine historical, legendary, and fictitious events to illustrate temporal and eternal victories through the Sacrament. As is evident in a more than superficial study, in these five autos, Calderón modifies history in order to convey an eternal message. / text

The purpose of this essay is to read Philebus based on three central themes – The Soul dialectic, the esoteric elements and some ethical problems, as well as to seek a comprehensive interpretation, rather than investigating, analyzing and interpreting individual concepts. Some questions that the essay aims to follow up are: 1) how can the dialogue on desire and rational knowledge highlighting Plato's ideas about the good life? 2) What are Plato’s real messages in the exposition of the good life? 3) Why are ethical questions related to esoteric elements of Plato's dialogues, and in general? The method is a reading between the lines; a hermeneutic interpretation process. Some patterns and contradictions were discovered during the reading, which shows an overall seemingly contradiction between ethics and metaphysics, but which with the the perspective of the dialectics be possible to reconcile. The final interpretation focuses on three concepts from Plato's own ranking of the good; beauty, proportion and truth. Together they constitute the good life in which pain plays an important role. Furthermore, it is possible to reach in Philebus about the good life, and the messages that one should always be true to oneself and to live modestly and always weigh reason to desire and choose wisdom. The ethical problems are both hidden in the shadows and elusive in Plato's dialogues, which can be a result of caution, but also a fear of losing oneself. Plato´s thinking is consistently dialectic, which is in this essay best illustrated by the allegory of the Cave.

The following thesis represents an attempt to account for the novelist Don DeLillo's last three novels (Underworld (1999), The Body Artist (2001), and Cosmopolis (2003)) through the examination of what I conceive as DeLillo's philosophy of language. It is my assertion that the crucial and articulating aspect of DeLillo's philosophy of language is his investment in, and investigation of, irony. As I argue, DeLillo's novels presume a certain conjugation of what I refer to as the work of irony (the seemingly impossible work of tendering both the allegorical imperative of naming and the ironic imperative of Otherness) with the work of art. In other words, DeLillo's theory of language reveals his theory of art and, thus, his own theory of writing. This aesthetic philosophy becomes the critical tool with which DeLillo evaluates the various symbolic economies of a culture and its individuals caught within late capitalism. The impossibility of defining irony becomes, for DeLillo, a metaphor by which to understand language itself as what I refer to as a fallen and tender economy, constituted by an Otherness, which language can only tender. In his novels, DeLillo, I argue, suggests that language and subjectivity ought to be conceived of as forms of a faith in an Otherness, impossible to represent as such, to which all speech, violence, art, commodity and reproduction are indebted, and which we may mourn and represent - as we must - more or less faithfully, more or less blindly, and, by virtue of irony, more or less tenderly. The possibilities of faith and the ethical in art and representation, thus, for DeLillo, arise through an attention to an Otherness that can only be tendered through the very tenderness (fallenness, profanity, weakness) of allegory and language. To understand this is to understand the role of irony in DeLillo's philosophy, and also to understand DeLillo's profound commitment to language, his renovation of allegory through its mortification by irony and, thus, its remembering and mourning of Otherness. In this regard, DeLillo shares much with the melancholia of deconstruction as evinced within the language philosophies of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, in particular, Derrida's economic consideration, differance, and his notion of the work of mourning, both of which, I argue, offer the reader of DeLillo's texts ways of tendering the work of irony.

Lawrence's work has almost invevitably been read as an aesthetic production whereby one must eventually agree or disagree with his vision of "reality". Those who assume a formalist standard of taste often find that Lawrence "loses control" of his material; those who offer ideological apologies for his work argue that disruptions in the aesthetic plane are representative of an exploratory genius, often seen as the outstanding characteristic of literary modernism. Both approaches, explicitly or otherwise , rely on the ultimate sanction of the achieved image, transmuted by the author always in control of his material. Yet anyone who reads Lawrence with an eye to to what the "tale" says in addition to what the "teller" claims discovers that Lawrence is not in full control of his material, thought it cannot simply be argued, on aesthetic or linguistic criteria, that he is out of control. Rather, there exists a "third" state whereby Lawrence both writes and is written, gives us a message with one hand, yet retracts, as it were, with the other. Because this double-move is preeminently suited to the language of fiction, and because it appears in Lawrence's fiction with the greatest versatility and incisiveness, this dissertation analyzes six of his novels for their rhetorical significance, understood as both an organization of tropes and figures and as a system of persuasive doctrine. A new definition for allegory is proposed, the introductions of thematic and structural "blanks" is examined, and a spread of narrative delays are identified and discussed, all concerned with the central problem of writing novels that direct themselves to the resurrection of a pre-linguistic universe, yet ironically depend more and more upon writing to bring this about. Ideas drawn from Continental philosophy and recent critical theory are incorporated for support and instruction. Attention is also focused on Lawrence's revision processes, often with specific emphasis on unpublished manuscript material.

The thesis is a survey of 291 frontispieces and illustrated title pages in European books on astronomy from the 17th century. It is a quantitative and qualitative survey of how motifs are related to consumption, identification and display. Elements in the motifs related to factual content as opposed to those aimed to raise the perceived value of astronomy are distinguished. The quantitative study shows that astronomical phenomena (90 per cent) and scientific instruments (62 per cent, or as much as 86 per cent if only titles with illustrations occupying an entire page are considered) are the most common motifs to inform the reader of the genre. Besides these, a wide range of depicted features indicate the particularity of each title. Different means for raising the value of astronomy and its attributes are identified. The interplay of “real” or “credible” elements with fictional ones was used to attract attention, create positive associations and promote acquisition and reading. The motifs mainly promote delectation and erudition, although some attract attention through their deliberately enigmatic design and a few through fear. The survey determines prevalent settings (palaces, the theatre, gardens, the wilderness and the heavens), activities (skilful use of instruments, conversations or disputes), references to the ancients and heraldic components. They present both the self-image of astronomers at the time and ideal components that contain connotations of an enhanced reality. This self-image also contributed to the definition of normative values for astronomers in the 17th century. The affinities between painters and astronomers are examined. In addition, an analysis of descriptions of frontispieces is undertaken, which shows that the user of the book was expected to devote considerable time to the frontispiece in order to understand all of its particular features and that the illustrations were suitable for display and learned digression.

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This dissertation examines how postmodernist narratives of memory in Graham Swift's Waterland, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, and Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines retrieve the stories of those who have been lost or forgotten in official history and refigure the temporal and spatial imaginary in intertwining personal stories of crisis with public history through acts of remembering. Questioning the modernist ideology of progress based on the idea of linear sequence of time, the novels not only retrace the heterogeneous and discontinuous layers of stories overlooked or repressed in official accounts of modern history, but also re-examine the contradictory and contested process by which subjects are situated or positioned, and its effects on the production of knowledge. These postmodern historical novels examine history as a discourse and explore its limits. The narrators of the novels are engaged with an autobiographical act of rewriting their lives, but their efforts to reconstitute themselves in unity and continuity are undermined by the disjunctive narrative form of the novels. The layered narrative of memory through which the novels reconstruct modern history is allegorical in the double sense that it exposes the act of signification by decentering the symbol of the transcendental signifier while telling an allegorical story of personal and familial history that mirrors national history in a fragmented way. In Waterland, Tom Crick retells his personal and familial stories intertwined with local and national history as alternative history lessons and challenges the Idea of Progress by revisiting sites of traumatic memory. Midnight's Children constructs counter-stories of Post-Independence India as multiple alternatives to one official version of history and addresses the limits of history in terms of "a border zone of temporality." In The Shadow Lines, the narrator retells his family history as a story of borders through his struggle with gaps in official history and creates a national imaginary with mirror images and events. The postmodernist narrative of memory in these novels turns the time of the now into a time for the "past as to come," a time to detect the unrealized and unfulfilled possibilities of the past, through retellings of the past.

The Ship of Fools is an ancient allegory that has long been a part of Western culture in literature, art and song... It has been chosen by many to comment on contemporary issues throughout history, highlighting the foibles of that society. The ship of fools however is also about our world, as a vessel, full of passengers of humanity, full of those who have no care what they do or where they are going... It is the 21st Century and we are all sailing on a Ship of Fools. We consume beyond reason, we want, and get the latest, newest, biggest things. We complain about interest rates and petrol prices, but consume beyond reason often with purchases on credit we don't really need. / Master of Arts (Visual Arts)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Catholic University of America, 1933. / At head of title: The Catholic University of America. Bibliography: p. 85-89.