<p>"The Uses of Literature: Gilles Deleuze's American Rhizome" puts four writers - Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, George Jackson and William S. Burroughs - in conjunction with four concepts - becoming-democratic, belief in the world, the line of flight, and finally, control societies. The aim of this study is to elaborate and expand on Gilles Deleuze's extensive use of American literature and to examine possible conjunctions of his philosophy with contemporary American literary criticism and American Studies. I argue that Deleuze's interest in American writing not only productively complicates recent historical accounts of "French Theory's" incursion into American academia, but also provides a compelling way think about the relationship between literature and history, language and experience, and the categories of minor and major that organize national literary traditions. Beginning with the concept of the "American rhizome" this dissertation approaches the question of rhizomatic thought as a constructivist methodology for engaging the relationship between literary texts and broader social movements. Following an introduction laying out the basic coordinates of such an approach, and their historical relevance with respect to the reception of "French Theory" in the United States, the subsequent chapters each take an experimental approach with respect to a single American writer invoked in Deleuze's work and a concept that resonantes with the literary text under consideration. In foregrounding the question of the use of literature this dissertation explores the ways literature has been appropriated, set to work, or dismissed in various historical and institutional arrangements, but also seeks to suggest the possibility of creating conditions in which literature can be said to take on a life of its own.</p> / Dissertation

Within Judeo-Christianity there is a belief in an all perfect God who is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. However, in this world evil and suffering exists, so how is it possible that an all perfect God can exist? This is called the problem of evil. This thesis examines the problem of evil and how philosophers like Alvin Plantinga, John Hick, and Richard Swinburne attempt to solve the problem of evil through different theodicies. In this paper I argue that all three philosophers and their theodicies fail to solve the problem of evil. I then turn to the writings of Herman Melville, specifically Mardi: and a Voyage Thither and Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, and consider how he, as an author, struggled with the problem of evil and religion. While Melville may have struggled I argue that within his works we can find part of the solution to the problem of evil. Through these two novels Melville demonstrates that God is not good. My final chapter considers this fact that God is not good and also considers how God is not evil. In the end I argue that God is neither good nor evil which allows us to no longer have to face the problem of evil.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Lehigh University, 2005. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 225-238).

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These documents supplement the previously deposited Murray and Tillett working paper: “Cataloging Theory in Search of Graph Theory and Other Ivory Towers. Object: Cultural Heritage Resource Description Networks.” http://hdl.handle.net/10150/136270. A different version of Fig 8, “FRBR Paper Tool Diagram Elements And Graphs” is included. Documents not referenced in the paper include: “Modeling The Superwork Issue,” which models the concept of a Work composed of other Works two ways; “Progressive Disaggregation,” which demonstrates the recursive process by which simple resource and descriptions composed of other descriptions are resolved to elementary graph structures; and “Serial Publication,” which highlights the pedagogical and IT system guidance role that FRBR resource description diagrams can play with respect to complex publishing phenomena. A “Find & Navigate” diagram element has been introduced in the serial publication diagram as a theoretical necessity with practical implications. The elements provide a consistent means for depicting the linking functions provided by identifiers, name and subject authority records, and prescribed and arbitrary relationships. The tables and legends found on the right side of the diagram suggest how diagram components may be expressed as “triple” style statements for implementation-minded readers.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Neste estudo de análise e interpretação de Moby-Dick (1851), de Herman Melville (1819-1891), pretendemos formular e esclarecer questões relativas ao momento de definição do romance norte-americano, bem como à obra que se traduz como o esforço mais radical de um norte-americano na tentativa de, então, levar a forma romance ao estudo e reflexão sobre sua sociedade. Para tanto, recuperamos da leitura da obra os aspectos que mais fortemente tematizam tal intento: a crise ideológica de fins da década de 1840, quando os ideais revolucionários de igualdade da antiga república são finalmente confrontados com as consequências de sua integração no sistema capitalista mundializado questão central de Redburn (1849) e White-Jacket (1850), romances que preparam Moby-Dick e marcam as primeiras experiências de Melville como escritor social; o conceito de fronteira, problema de definição identitária norte-americana que abarca desde a ocupação da wilderness puritana no século XVII ao estabelecimento, à época de Melville, de uma política de Estado imperialista e, ademais, passa pela cristalização de perspectivas culturalmente particulares de propriedade e formação social de classe; e, finalmente, as noções de técnica e trabalho, diretamente implicadas na atividade baleeira e, de modo mais amplo, no avanço civilizatório norte-americano, e para quais pesam a consciência do valor social do trabalho livre e sua coexistência com a escravidão. É sob tais preocupações que contemplaremos, à luz da teoria crítica e da tradição crítica brasileira, as especificidades formais do romance, a saber, a apropriação estrutural do trágico em contraposição à épica, que define o percurso de Ahab, o capitão do Pequod, em sua caçada a Moby Dick, e a formação de um narrador reflexionante, o sobrevivente Ishmael, que retoma o passado da catástrofe para ferir o presente em que se perpetuam, no roldão do ingresso norte-americano na modernidade, as condições para sua reprodução. / Through an analytical and interpretative study of Herman Melvilles Moby-Dick I intend to formulate and clarify the historical turning point of the American novel, specifically what is deemed the most radical effort of an American writer to bring a comprehensive study on society into novelistic form. In order to accomplish that, I reconsider some of the features of Moby-Dick that strongly appealed to the times. First the ideological crisis of the 1840s, when the equalitarian revolutionary ideals of the Independence were finally confronted by the consequences of the U.S. being fully compromised to the Industrial Revolution and the capitalistic worldwide system. This is a central issue in Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850), both novels where some major features of Moby-Dick are anticipated and firstly tested. Second, I scrutinize the concept of frontier -- a national identity issue that can be traced back to the Puritan 17th century errand into the wilderness that is strongly attached in the age of Melville to the ideological making of American imperialism. Besides, it also has had a major role in the crystallization of culturally specific perspectives on property and the establishment of social classes. Finally, I reconsider the notions of technique and labor, directly implied in the whaling industry and in a more general way in the marching of American civilization towards the West, which has had a strong impact on the understanding of the social significance of free labor and its coexistence with slavery. With those things under consideration, and through the surmises of the Critical Theory and the Brazilian tradition of social and literary criticism as well, it is my aim to shed light on some esthetical features of the novel, particularly on the tragic structure (as opposed to the epic) that defines the career of Pequods Captain Ahab and his obsessive chasing of Moby Dick, and the constitution of a self-reflexive narrator, the survivor Ishmael, who recalls the past of the catastrophe in order to attack the social reproduction of its conditions in the present.

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This thesis explores Herman Melville’s relationship to sceptical philosophy. By reading Melville’s fictions of the 1840s and 1850s alongside the writings of Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, I seek to show that they manifest by turns expression, rebuttal, and mitigated acceptance of philosophical doubt. Melville was an attentive reader of philosophical texts, and he refers specifically to concepts such as Berkeleyan immaterialism and the Kantian “noumenon”. But Melville does not simply dramatise pre-existing theories; rather, in works such as Mardi, Moby-Dick, and Pierre he enacts sceptical and anti-sceptical ideas through his literary strategies, demonstrating their relevance in particular regions of human experience. In so doing he makes a substantive contribution to a philosophical discourse that has often been criticised – by commentators including Samuel Johnson and Jonathan Swift – for its tendency to abstraction. Melville’s interest in scepticism might be read as part of a wider cultural response to a period of unprecedented social and political change in antebellum America, and with this in mind I compare and contrast his work with that of Dickinson, Douglass, Emerson, and Thoreau. But in many respects Melville’s distinctive and original treatment of scepticism sets him apart from his contemporaries, and in order to fully make sense of it one must range more widely through the canons of philosophy and literature. His exploration of the ethical consequences of doubt in The Piazza Tales, for example, can be seen to anticipate with remarkable precision the theories of twentieth-century thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas and Stanley Cavell. I work chronologically though selected prose from the period 1849-1857, paying close attention to the textual effects and philosophical allusions in each work. In so doing I hope to offer fresh ways of looking at Melville’s handling of literary form and the wider shape of his career. I conclude with reflections on how Melville’s normative emphasis on the acknowledgement of epistemological limitation might inform the practice of literary criticism.