Thesis (doctoral)--Université de Poitiers, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 655-677).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Villanova University, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references.

No description available.

Thesis (D.Phil.)--University of Oxford, 2008. / Supervisor: Professor David Womersley. Bibliography: leaves 254-261.

published_or_final_version / Chinese / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / abstract / English / Master / Master of Philosophy

This thesis examines the relationship between Spanish author and Buchenwald deportee Jorge Semprún and his philosophy of history. Firstly we examine Semprún's testimonies and the means he adopts to tell his traumatic past. Within this area a few of the questions that we shall consider are: of what importance is historical fidelity in the narration of the Blanchotian ‘limit-experience'? What effect does the establishment of a literary canon of testimony have on a diasporic author such as Semprún? How and with what effect does Semprún articulate notions of self and subjectivity? How does Semprún write the death of the other? Secondly from this anterior view onto history we will then switch to a future orientated anticipatory gaze and examine the relationship between Semprún and his philosophy of history: what is it that history has to tell us? How should the concentration camps be remembered now? What should happen to the physical remains of the camps? How, do we in the present, respond to the onerous burden of the past? In exploring these questions this thesis will show that Jorge Semprún forces us to reconsider not only our relationship with the past, for the sake of both the present and the future, but also forces us to reconsider our relationship with testimony and many of the criticisms which are only too often levelled at those who choose literary artifice as their means of bearing witness. From these points of reconsideration and only from these points will we be able to approach an understanding of the truly limitless and incomprehensible nothingness of the univers concentrationnaire.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis--M.A., University of Hong Kong. / Typewritten.

The past and the present are never involved in a fixed relation; they are, in fact, constantly shaping and affecting one another. As we seek to learn more about the past, our perceptions of the present change, and, as we seek to understand more about the present, our approaches to (and explorations of) the past alter. There is a mutually reinforcing rhetorical force to historical investigations and their connections to contemporary ends. Claims about the past set boundaries; when one person (or family or nation) makes a statement about history, rhetorical, social and political lines are drawn. Maneuvering within and between and around those boundaries is the rhetorical practice of historiography; the results of those rhetorical maneuvers are the political practice of historiography. Claims about the past are used to do many things, and this dissertation is about those rhetorical uses and the boundaries that they establish. This dissertation is about the epistemological power of historical rhetoric, the social and political work done in the present by knowledge claims we make about the past. Different ways of talking about the past are both a rhetorical practice (a way to construct believable histories) and a source of knowledge. It is important for rhetorical critics to recognize that the constructions of history are doing something at the same time that they are becoming something for others to use rhetorically, politically, and socially. In this dissertation, I explore four different rhetorics of history: Experienced History, Professional History, Collective Memory, and Simulated History. Suggesting that effective persuasive arguments are shaped and predicted by the cultures from which they stem, I investigate and compare these knowledge claims about the past. Using four rhetorical dimensions (Materiality, Perspective, Standards of Practice, and Silences), I examine how knowledge claims about the past differ, how the methods work rhetorically, and how those different rhetorical powers create distinct understandings of the past.