This thesis examines the connections between three frequently associated nineteenth-century texts, Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, Melville's Moby Dick, and Thoreau's Walden. It begins by reviewing the contexts normally offered for them, and then proposes an alternative one, "dialogic irony," that is based upon the complementary theoretical models of Friedrich Schlegel and Mikhail Bakhtin. After this conceptual background is outlined, the various modes of dialogic irony presented in the three works are discussed. That of Walden arises out of a close analogy between self and text: both are a series of inner voices juxtaposed with and often contradicting one another. Sartor complicates this relatively unobstructed form of selfhood through the inclusion of the Editor, whose unitary voice represents a challenge to the kind of selfhood sanctioned by Walden. Moby Dick also challenges dialogic irony, but its forms of opposition are more penetrating and various: while in Carlyle's text dialogic irony is ultimately affirmed through the figure of Teufelsdrockh, Ishmael is left stranded and displaced by the multitude of voices in his text. Melville's work therefore provides an excellent way to review and critique some of the prevailing assumptions about dialogue in contemporary criticism, a task sketched in the conclusion.

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.

Diss. Univ. Köln, 2007.

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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.

Student Number : 7639580 - MA research report - Faculty of Humanities / This research report explores the motif of the water journey as a metaphor for philosophical enquiry in Melville and Conrad by comparing Moby-Dick with Heart of Darkness, and Billy Budd, Sailor with Lord Jim. It takes as its starting-point M.H. Abrams’s essay, “Spiritual Travelers in Western Literature”, and adapts the typology which he introduces by identifying four different kinds of fictional journey, namely, the physical, the experiential, the narrative and the hermeneutic. By concentrating on a broadly-based semiotic approach to interpretation (while also allowing for other critical possibilities), it examines Melville and Conrad’s treatment of certain pivotal issues in metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. It compares the narrative strategies of the two authors and, by offering close readings of the four texts under discussion, it highlights the similarities and differences in the authors’ responses to a universe of teasing complexity, as well as exploring the reader’s engagement with such texts.

Any text which criticizes, undermines and/or transforms the encyclopaedic ideal of ordering and textualizing the world in a closed, linear fashion can be defined as a post-encyclopaedic text. This thesis explores both theoretical and artistic texts which inhabit the realm of post-encyclopaedism. In the past, critical speculation on encyclopaedism in literature has been concerned with the ways in which artistic texts attempt to live up to the encyclopaedic ideal. In some cases, this effort to establish an identity between the artistic text and the encyclopaedia has led to an ignorance of the disruptive or even deconstructive effects of so-called fictional encyclopaedias. Once we recognize the existence of such effects, we must begin to examine the techniques and possibilities of post-encyclopaedism. Hence we can see post-encyclopaedic qualities in the condensed meta-encyclopaedism of Jorge Luis Borges' "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", the disrupted quests for encyclopaedic revelation in Herman Melville's Moby Dick and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, and the principle of textualized world as fugue in Louis Zukofsky's "A"-12. In addition, we can create a theoretical space for the post-encyclopaedic text by weaving together Mikhail Bakhtin'sideas on the novel as opposed to the epic, Michel Foucault's notion of restructuring the closed circle of the text through mirrored writing, Jurij Lotman's theory of internal and external recoding in texts, and Umberto Eco's concept of the open text. By combining an investigation of theoretical and artistic texts which lend themselves to post-encyclopaedism, we can create a generic distinction between texts which attempt to be encyclopaedic in themselves: and texts which disrupt and/or transform the encyclopaedic ideal / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This Master’s thesis focuses on calculation of power and temperature distribution in fuel assemblies of VVER-440 reactor at Dukovany Nuclear Power Plant. Theoretical section contains a brief description of VVER-440 technology, fuel and its development at Dukovany Nuclear Power Plant, basics of heat generation in nuclear reactors as well as an overview and categorization of computer codes, used for core calculations. Of these codes, the MOBY-DICK computer code is then described in depth, including its input and output files. The MOBY-DICK code is later on used for pinwise calculating power distribution of selected fuel cycles of defined units at Dukovany Nuclear Power Plant, with vizualization of output values for characteristic fuel assemblies. Results of this computation are then used for analysis, whether uneven power distribution in the core and heat generation gradient within fuel assemblies have any influence on measuring channel output temperatures, which is the pivotal part of this thesis.

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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.