No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

The main objective of this study is to understand how Valery, Pessoa and Jaccottet created or recreated the figure of the master. This figure has truly made its entry into the literary scene in the second half of the nineteenth century, and it contributed to impose a profane and more egalitarian vision of writing. In the writing of the three authors studied, the master is still seen as a strategy to develop a concept of creation, since it allows the writers to define their poetic. It is therefore a matter of maitres a penser (literally "thinking masters") or, better yet, maitres a ecrire ("writing masters"). / For Valery, the desire to make Mallarme his master is best explained by his search for mastery. Even if he is eager to understand what makes Mallarme an exceptional creator, Valery's quest is hindered by Mallarme's refusal to explain his poetic. This resistance seems to encourage Valery to make the creative act a major concern of his work. / By coming up with a "non-existent coterie" made up of imaginary writers, and by recognizing one of them as his own master, Pessoa hopes to fill the gaps in his literary filiation. In the concert of voices that compose his work, it is yet the master himself which undermines the very legitimacy of the master, and that is why Pessoa finally gets rid of his invention. / Finally, Jaccottet creates his masters for the learning they could provide to him: in Jaccottet's unique story, the character of the master fails, allowing the poet to take his distance from assumptions related with the romantic vision of creation; then, a "good master" whose agony is described by poems becomes a model whose wisdom is inseparable from a kind of ignorance. / The presence of the master generates a story elaborated from the writings of these writers: the development of their poetic requires not only the creation of a master figure, but also its removal. Ultimately, the maitre a ecrire is not only one who induces writing in a unique way, but also the one which should be written in order to succeed.

This comprehensive analysis of T. S. Eliot's literary-critical corpus provides both a long-overdue reassessment of the nature and extent of his commitment to notions of aesthetic autonomy, and an Eliotic critique of the hypostatization of art that characterizes both philosophical postmodernism and its literary-theoretical derivatives. / The broader context for these two primary objectives is the "ancient quarrel" between the poets and the philosophers and its various manifestations in the work of a number of prominent post- and anti-Enlightenment thinkers. Accordingly, I begin by highlighting several fundamental but much-neglected (or misunderstood) features of Eliot's critical canon that testify to his life-long preoccupation with this still resonant issue. Specifically, I demonstrate that there is a logical connection between his sustained opposition to those who seek in literature a substitute for religious faith or at least philosophic belief, his critique of various more or less sophisticated forms of generic confusion, and his robust defence of the integrity of different discursive forms, social practices, and disciplinary domains. In anticipation of my Eliotic critique of philosophical and literary-theoretical postmodernism, I then locate Eliot's account of these characteristic features of "the modern mind" within the context of Jurgen Habermas remarkably congenial The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. / In successive chapters, I next provide detailed analyses of Eliot's account of the discursive and functional integrity of art, literature, poetry, and criticism. By way of providing additional support for the concept of "integrity," and indicating its relevance to contemporary debates about the relationship between literature, criticism, and philosophy, I advert to the work of a number of other contemporary philosophers, John Searle, Goran Hermeren, Monroe Beardsley, Peter Lamarque, Paisley Livingston, and Richard Shusterman chief among them. I then demonstrate that Eliot's critique of the hypostatizing and levelling tendencies of many of his predecessors and contemporaries can itself legitimately be brought to bear on the similar practices of contemporary postmoderns such as Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty. / I conclude by suggesting that a return to Eliot's literary critical corpus is both timely and instructive, for it provides a much-needed corrective to some late twentieth-century trends in literary studies, and, in particular, to the influence of philosophical postmodernism upon it.

This thesis posits that the "observers" attendant in Eliot's poems The Love Song of Alfred Prurock, Portrait of a Lady, Preludes and Rhapsody on a Windy Night can be considered quintessential figures of modernity. Against a backdrop of more than 200 years of thought on the concept of modernity - a notion that in recent decades has been much under siege - French sociologist Alain Touraine, in his Critique of Modernity, offers a reinterpretation of the modern. I chose to hold this text against the four poems by Eliot because Eliot himself has been described as "emphatically modem". Recalling the initial triumph of the rationalist vision of modernity, Touraine calls for modernity to be redefined as a continuous and reflexive relationship between Subject and Reason, subjectivation and rationalisation. Using this idea of the modem subject having two faces (subjectivation and rationalisation) as a model of a quintessential figure of modernity I have attempted to match the "observers" to this blueprint offered by Touraine. I hope to show that these figures, wandering the streets of the rational and increasingly industrial and alienating world of the city and sitting drinking tea in its parlours, can be seen as both casualties of "classical" modernity and as the vanguard of Touraine's "new modernity". Almost drowning in the rationalism of metropolitan existence these figures are at once sensing their absorption by this rationalism and fighting to free their intense subjectivity the very struggle that characterises Touraine's modern subject. Finally, I hope to show that combination of rationalisation and subjectivation within the modern subject, while seemingly at odds with Eliot's theories (especially regarding the "objective correlative" and "inner voice") is not as far from his practice of poetry and criticism as may be assumed at first glance. The figures he has created in these four chosen poems testify to this. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2000.

Perhaps one of the greatest paradoxes in the history of modern Muslim India is embodied in the respective personalities and careers of Azad and Jinnah--a paradox in themselves as well as in opposition to each other. Muhammad 'Ali Jinnah, a "lay" person by descent, by training and by temperament chose to espouse the cause of religious communalism and, in spite of the contradictions between his personality and his career, he was audacious enough to proclaim his ideal loud and clear. On the other hand, Abul Kalam Azad, who was a religious person by birth, by education and by social classification, decided upon secularism as his goal but was not courageous enough to call a spade a spade. He could never get rid of religion as the final authority in his own arguments for secularism and he could never get the 'ulama, the personifications of religious authority, to olear out of politics once he had dragged them in. This thesis is an attempt on my part to assess the role of religion in, and its influence on, Indian Muslim politics in the present century, and to see how the earliest efforts at making Indian Muslims take a more secularist attitude towards politics met with failure.

No description available.

Thèse--Fribourg. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 171-174).

Zugl.: Brighton, Univ., Diss., 2007 / Hergestellt on demand