Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 1998. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 213-216).

Exegesis (MA--Art and Design) -- AUT University, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references. Also held in print (130 leaves : col. ill. ; 30 cm. + 1 booklet + 2 discs) in the Archive at the City Campus (T 709 KAI)

The expanding potential for the dissemination and archiving of aphorisms is explored in this practice-based research thesis. An aphorism is a short statement that communicates an insight about the world (and can sometimes function as a guide to action). Eric McLuhan, interviewed in Signs of the Times: The History of Writing (Goëss Video, 1996), suggests that the future of the book is the aphoristic statement. Aphoristic knowledge has traditionally been transmitted through texts and through libraries, but this project brings into play various modes of recirculating aphoristic texts using contemporary distribution networks and digital media such as moving image, projection on to urban screens, artists’ books, archival digital photography and glazed ceramics. Texts ‘virally inhabit’ a number of sites and languages in a series of works situated in the interdisciplinary context of contemporary text art and artists’ books. The sayings rejoin the cultural river of ideas in local and international incarnations. Practice-based work (80%) and exegesis (20%)

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This dissertation coordinates two problems which have hitherto resisted adequate synthesis: the form-critical problem of describing proverbial-sounding Synoptic sayings and the tradition-historical problem of assessing the rhetorical habits of Jesus and his immediate successors in oral tradition. The approach taken here to linking these qualifies not only form-critical assumptions of continuity between written forms - in Kleinliteratur - and identifies oral Sitze im Leben of mnemotechnical scholasticism, but also of the recent emphases on radical discontinuity between oral and writing modes of tradition. The connection proposed here between re-description of so- called Wisdom-sayings and oral traditional aspects of the gospels is in the Hellen educational category of gnome. Defined, exemplified and prescribed in basic Graeco-Roman educational texts as well as in technical, philosophical manuals of Rhetoric and in a rich collection-literature, gnome is superbly attested as an exercise in primary education, in all kinds of public-speaking and in cross-cultural (including Jewish) tradition. Moreover, Hellenistic cultivation of gnome primarily as a speech-type, indeed as a conversational means of argumentation in any Sitz im Leben, and only secondarily though still extensively as a literary technique makes it a particularly pertinent term of comparison for New Testament criticism. Recognizing gnomic continuity between oral and written Synoptic tradition allows discussion of the authenticity not only of individual sayings (on criteria of dissimilarity), but also collectively of the gnomic manner (on criteria of oral-literate continuity and multiple attestation): quite apart from the (in)authenticity of each gnome, gnomic style is central to Jesus' self-expression and earliest tradition. In this sense gnomai are a particularly valuable data-set for reassessing the critically controverted relationship between Jesus' rhetoric and law: in Synoptic tradition gnome is exploited suggestively as a non-legal means of addressing conventionally legal topics.

The expanding potential for the dissemination and archiving of aphorisms is explored in this practice-based research thesis. An aphorism is a short statement that communicates an insight about the world (and can sometimes function as a guide to action). Eric McLuhan, interviewed in Signs of the Times: The History of Writing (Goëss Video, 1996), suggests that the future of the book is the aphoristic statement. Aphoristic knowledge has traditionally been transmitted through texts and through libraries, but this project brings into play various modes of recirculating aphoristic texts using contemporary distribution networks and digital media such as moving image, projection on to urban screens, artists’ books, archival digital photography and glazed ceramics. Texts ‘virally inhabit’ a number of sites and languages in a series of works situated in the interdisciplinary context of contemporary text art and artists’ books. The sayings rejoin the cultural river of ideas in local and international incarnations. Practice-based work (80%) and exegesis (20%)

Les slogans révolutionnaires sont un genre de discours politique qui fait l’objet d’une attention récente : recueillis, archivés, édités parfois, ils échappent parfois à leur destin de matériau de lutte éphémère. Formes brèves modernes issues des cortèges de manifestants ou bombées à la va-vite sur les murs des villes insurrectionnelles, les slogans se situent à la frontière de la littérature et de la politique. Contre les slogans autoritaires des dictateurs et les slogans publicitaires des annonceurs, les slogans révolutionnaires inventent une langue commune de combat à l’heure où le peuple revendique le pouvoir pour soi. Cette thèse se propose d’examiner précisément comment poétique et politique s’articulent au sein de ces formes polémiques. Appréciées pour leurs qualités poétiques, elles peuvent parfois quitter leur contexte d’énonciation originel. Des murs des villes aux pages des livres, certaines trouvailles linguistiques et graphiques font alors leur chemin vers la littérature intentionnelle. Il s’agit de se demander comment cette dernière reconfigure ces formes originellement politiques, pour comprendre le rapport spécifique entre politique et littérature qui se noue dans la forme du slogan révolutionnaire. / Revolutionary slogans have recently emerged as a new speech genre. Simultaneously political and poetical, they have been archived and edited in collections. Slogans now play an integral part of media coverage during uprisings and revolutions, and, more generally, of all social movements. Coined as modern aphorisms, they exist as ephemeral tools serving political action: chanted throughout protests or spray-painted on walls. Revolutionary slogans can be read as catchphrases blurring the border between art and action, politics and poetics. Standing against the authoritarian slogans of dictatorships, or denouncing the commercial slogans of advertising, revolutionary slogans are held as the invention of a collective language in times of struggle. They are the language of the people speaking out against tyranny and reclaiming its sovereignty. The aim of this research is to propose a poetics of a political form. The assessment of the poetic nature of these slogans is fundamental in order to understand how they can be perceived as aphoristic forms. From the walls of rebellious cities to the blank pages of books, slogans can be adapted to literary discourse. How does literature reconfigure this particular genre of political speech? Is the revolutionary slogan a new kind of literature? By broaching a poetics of revolutionary slogans, the specific ties this new form establishes between politics and literature will be investigated.

The text that I have translated below, and for which the paper that precedes it is a critical introduction, is Hagiwara Sakutarō's Zetsubō no Tōsō, a collection of 204 aphorisms which I have translated as The Flight from Despair. My introduction concentrates on Sakutarō's use of the aphoristic form in order to show how he both follows and subverts the genre's conventions. First, I concentrate on the author's goal to tackle the "everyday" matters of life through his text rather than intellectual abstractions. I also bring attention to the concision of Sakutarō's style and the protean nature of the aphorism, which occupies an ambiguous zone between poetry and philosophy. Finally, I demonstrate how The Flight from Despair is a modernist text, and that Sakutarō's brand of modernism reveals itself most distinctly through his use of irony and paradox. However, I also indicate that Sakutarō remained a maverick in the literary establishment, and that pigeonholing him into any particular literary movement is risky.

Slightly revised version of her dissertation (Ph. D.), Universität-Bremen, 1999--Cf. p. (7). / Anhang presents the aphorisms chiefly discussed, those by Jean Paul, Novalis, and Friedrich Schlegel. Includes bibliographical references (p. 110-115).

Maxims, proverbs, and other forms of pithy sayings are sprinkled throughout ancient and medieval literature; polysemous and manipulable by nature, they serve as communicative tools whose precise meaning and function shifts from context to context. My dissertation explores how late antique and medieval Christians capitalized on the flexible forms of Greek and Latin aphorisms to negotiate and construct what it meant to be a Christian. Using theories and methods developed in the fields of folklore, linguistic anthropology, and ethno- and sociolinguistics, I investigate three examples in which Christians revised and reused wisdom in new contexts. First, I document the proverbial concept of gathering something useful from somewhere dangerous as expressed in sayings like “to pluck a rose from among thorns” and “to gather gold from shit,” charting how it originally went viral in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, remained in vogue well into the Middle Ages, and continued to evolve in meaning throughout its usage. I then analyze the Sentences of Sextus, a second-century collection of Greek maxims assembled from various Pythagorean aphorisms and sayings of Jesus. Whereas previous scholarship has focused on the authorship, content, and structure of the Sentences, I study the new meanings, functions, and forms the collection acquired as it underwent processes of translation, transcription, epitomization, excerption, and quotation. The text’s gnomic format and armchair morality contributed not only to its centuried popularity and widespread readership, but also to the dispersion of many of its individual sayings. In particular, I consider the extensive and unstudied reception of the Sentences of Sextus within the mid-ninth-century legal forgeries known as the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals. I show that the Sextine elements reveal the presence of recurring textual units across the Decretals and offer new insights regarding Pseudo-Isidore’s compositional method—a method that, in many ways, parallels the Sentences’ recycling of Pythagorean and biblical material. Ultimately, my project models how wisdom-centered investigations of late antique and medieval literature lead to new understandings of the craftsmanship of individual authors as well as to deeper understandings of the time and its culture.