Engaging with a variety of literary and historical sources, in both prose and verse, including letters, chronicles, treaties and the neo-Latin epic, this dissertation examines the centrality of the classically-informed, philosophical idea of friendship (amicitia) in the community-building discourse of Francesco Petrarca's Italy. The first chapter examines Petrarch's treatment of Scipio Africanus as humanistic leader and idealized friend in the Africa. The second chapter proposes a reading of Cola di Rienzo as the first "political Petrarchist" and contextualizes his epistolary campaign to unify mid-fourteenth century Italy. The third chapter explores Petrarch's politics of familiaritas in the letters he addressed to leaders of prominent Italian city-states attempting to reconcile old friends. This study presents an analysis of the rhetorical strategies underlying Petrarch's career as public intellectual, diplomat and poet.

Religions of Doubt: Religion, Critique, and Modernity in Jalal Al-e Ahmad and Walter Benjamin is a work of comparative philosophy addressing selected works of the Iranian novelist and political thinker Jalal Al-e Ahmad and the German-Jewish critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin. I demonstrate that the perceived failure of utopian modern projects, particularly Marxism, led each of these twentieth century thinkers to re-engage with religious questions and concerns in a simultaneous critique of the corrosive, reductive, and catastrophic nature of the modern condition and the idea of traditional religion - static, irrational, regressive - that modernist thought had conjured. Furthermore, both Al-e Ahmad and Benjamin were compelled to move beyond the worlds of traditional philosophical inquiry or political action, into questions and practices of art, literature, science, technology, and ritual. I argue that reading these thinkers together allows a glimpse at ideas and modes in philosophical thought that were largely derailed by varying discourses of secularism, poststructuralism, naturalism, and fundamentalism. This reading suggests new synthetic possibilities for philosophy in the twenty-first century.

This dissertation examines quotation specifically, and intertextuality more generally, in the development of American/literary culture from the birth of the republic through the Civil War. This period, already known for its preoccupation with national unification and the development of a self-reliant national literature, was also a period of quotation, reprinting and copying. Within the analogy of literature and nation characterizing the rhetoric of the period, this study translates the transtextual figure of quotation as a protean form that sheds a critical light on the nationalist project. This project follows both how texts move (transnational migration) and how they settle into place (national naturalization). Combining a theoretical mapping of how texts move and transform intertextually and a book historical mapping of how texts move and transform materially, the dissertation traces nineteenth century examples of the culture of quotation and how its literary mutability both disrupts and participates in the period's national and literary movements. The first chapter engages scholarship on republican print culture and on republican emulation to interrogate the literary roots of American nationalism in its transatlantic context. Looking at commonplace books, autobiographies, morality tales, and histories, it examines how quotation as a practice of memory impression functions in national re-membering. The second chapter follows quotation in early nineteenth-century national and literary contests of space and fashioning, the movement for international copyright in the culture of reprinting and the calls for a national literature. The third chapter considers questions of appropriation, assimilation, and translation in hemispheric poetic interactions within the context of the annexation and Manifest Destiny. The last chapter examines quotation in the antebellum period where, in the absence of a unifying authority, the fragments of quotation offer a way to tell the story of the nation

Toward a Poetics of Animality is a study of the place and function of animals in the works of four major modernist authors: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, Luigi Pirandello, and Franz Kafka. Through a series of close readings of canonical as well as lesser-known texts, I show how the so-called "Sprachkrise"- the crisis of language and representation that dominated European literature around 1900 - was inextricably bound up with an attendant crisis of anthropocentrism and of man's relationship to the animal. Since antiquity, man has been defined as the animal that has language; hence a crisis of language necessarily called into question the assumption of human superiority and the strict division between humans and animals on the basis of language. Furthermore, in response to author and critic John Berger's provocative suggestion that "the first metaphor was animal" I explore the essential and constantly reaffirmed link between animals and metaphorical language. The implication is that the poetic imagination and the problem of representation have always on some level been bound up with the figure of the animal. Thus, the "poetics of animality" I identify in the authors under examination gestures toward the origin of poetry and figurative language as such.

This dissertation explores the transmission, reception, and appropriation of Franz Kafka in Czechoslovakia during the Cold War, against the background of the contemporary international readings of Kafka, especially in West Germany. The first chapter examines Paul Eisner's translation of the Trial in the context of his influential triple "ghetto theory" and from the perspective of his contemporary translation discourse as well as recent translation theories. The second chapter focuses on the reception of Gustav Janouch's Conversations with Kafka, and the reasons why this controversial text was welcomed in the West and dismissed in the East as a forgery. The chapter uses new archival discoveries about Janouch and discusses questions of witness and testimony. The role of "witness" took an ominous turn in the case of Eduard Goldstücker, who is the focus of the third chapter. Goldstücker was tried in the Slánský show trials in the early 1950s and forced to testify against Slánský. The chapter explores how Goldstücker attempted to come to terms with his past through reading of Kafka. The secret police files that were kept on him provide new insights on Goldstücker's published texts, public persona, and the Liblice Conference that succeeded in rehabilitating Kafka in 1963. The last chapter examines the samizdat publications of Kafka's works. This chapter spans the 1960s to the 1980s Underground culture and examines the appropriation by Ivan Jirous of the "ghetto" topos and Kafka for the Czech Underground. I address the following topics: the status of witness as a legitimization of an "authentic" reading, censorship, the interplay between politics and literature, and the construction of authorship.

This dissertation examines images of China produced in early Soviet culture, focusing in particular on the mid-to-late 1920s, a period of heightened Soviet involvement in Chinese politics. It argues that China became in this period the primary testing ground for the creation of an "internationalist aesthetics": a mode of representation that might express horizontal solidarity over vertical dominance, and inscribe China into the global map envisioned by Marist-Leninist theories of revolution. Seeking to produce a new China to replace the exotic Orient, Soviet artists and writers experimented with multiple genres and media--reportage, film, theatre, biography--in their search for the correct mode for internationalist aesthetics. The struggle over how to represent the world for a revolutionary society thus coalesces, in this period, around the question of how to represent China. Such an aesthetics is inevitably interconnected with politics, and internationalist aesthetics encountered and expressed the same ambiguities as the political project of Soviet internationalism: a liberatory, anti-imperial ideology that simultaneously sought to control political and historical narratives from the world revolution's proclaimed centre in Moscow. Consequently, these disparate images are united by an insistence on the privileged position and perspective of the Soviet observer, who looks at Chinese reality with a combination of advanced modern knowledge, sympathy with oppression, and revolutionary experience that is purportedly inaccessible to other Europeans, or indeed to the Chinese themselves. This privileged perspective on China undergirds the claims of internationalist aesthetics to present a true image of the world. The search for an authoritative mode for internationalist aesthetics is hampered, however, by recurrent issues of access, mediation and translatability, and by lingering parallels between this avowedly anti-imperialist discourse and the imperial systems of knowledge production it supposedly replaces.

This dissertation explores how the imagined semiotic mode of the unconscious, illiterate "savage" was instrumental to twentieth-century technologies of production in two respects: firstly, in the context of a global division of labor, as a way to disqualify certain groups' intellectual products from the category of intellectual property; and, secondly, in disciplines of aesthetic production, as an imaginary model on which to base new technologies of design and communication. In my dissertation, Savage Mind to Savage Machine: Techniques and Disciplines of Creativity (1870-1985), I argue that class inequalities under capitalism have been linked to the ongoing formulation of two distinct--albeit tacit--categories of epistemic subjectivity: one whose creative intellectual processes are believed to constitute personal property, and one whose creative intellectual processes--because these are deemed rote or unconscious--are not regarded as the property of those who wield them. This epistemic apartheid exists despite the fact that the unconscious psyche or, as I call it, the "Savage Mind," was, at the same time, repeatedly invoked by modernist designers in their efforts to formulate creative technologies, ones that tended increasingly towards digital modes of production. The history I examine in the dissertation reveals how modernist design has implicitly constituted itself as the process through which unconscious, magical creativity becomes consciously systematized and reified as technological, scientific forms of production. The dissertation is structured around four disciplinary paradigms of design, which collectively span the late nineteenth to late twentieth centuries--industrial design, architecture, environmental design, and media arts--and asks how and why each of these sub-disciplines invoked "savage thought" to develop new methods of creativity. While it is well-known that Europe's avant-gardes often imitated the visual forms of so-called primitive societies, there is scant scholarship accounting for how the alleged thought processes of an "originary" intelligence--gleaned from the theories of anthropologists, psychologists, and other social scientists--were translated into modernist design methods. Designers in fact hoped to discover in "primitive" and magical thought specific intellectual mechanisms for linking designed things to larger contexts of signification, a search that dovetailed with early endeavors in the field of Artificial Intelligence to devise computational languages and environments. The Savage Mind thus lies at the heart of new media technologies, even while intellectual property in those technologies remains the purview of a scientific elite.

This dissertation offers a new perspective on the birth of modern Chinese literature by investigating the following question: How did literature come to be understood as an effective vehicle of national salvation? The following chapters locate the answer to this question in intertwining ideas on religion and realism. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw an upsurge of vernacular literature portraying contemporary life in China alongside deliberations on the meaning of a newly introduced term: “religion” (zongjiao). This process launched a long lasting perception of literature as effective—capable of turning a country in flux to a strong nation. The story of modern Chinese literature’s rise to such prominence forms part of a transnational history, linking national literatures and Christian modernity. Across the colonial world, Protestant missionaries introduced the idea that a true-to-life literary portrayal can mobilize readers into action by appealing to their natural sympathy towards human suffering. These theories found a seedbed in China, Japan, India and Africa, where various authors modified the Christian evangelical message into a thorough critique of imperialist thought. Chapter One begins with the global rise of “Life” in the 1910’s as a new epistemology for understanding the human. In China, deliberations over the meaning of life hinged upon interactions with social Darwinism, American Protestant ideas on religious experience, Bergsonian vitalism, critiques of materialism in German Lebensphilosophie, and Chinese Neo-Confucian ethical thought. “Life” became the main axis pivoting debates on how to save China from its plight: Could evolutionary biology account for the truth of life? Could religion explain aspects of life that biology cannot? The task of representing the truth of life was entrusted upon the fledgling modern Chinese fiction and poetry. Chapters Two and Three trace this conviction in the powers of literature to nineteen-century missionary essay contests. Held in sites of imperial encroachment around the world, these contests promoted fiction writing as a miraculous endeavor. Similar to the way that reading the scriptures was supposed to produce a sense of connection to the great beyond, so too was the spiritual message of literary texts believed to ignite a “sympathetic resonance” (gongming) between authors and readers that would propel the latter to social action. The religious concept of sympathy inspired Chinese authors to further explore the connections between man and the universe in search of the perfect representation of life. This search led to an important encounter with the Bengali Renaissance Movement, explored in Chapters Four and Five. Rabindranath Tagore’s visit in China (1924) serves as a point of departure to investigate how prominent Chinese authors experimented with concepts such as “Eastern Spirituality” “The Poet’s Religion” and “Folktales”. Such literary interactions added important dimensions to the formation of Chinese realism, by envisioning Pan-Asian literary sympathies, which redefined the meaning of religion, life, and the nation. By foregrounding the transnational collaborations and interactions of religion, realism, and Asian solidarity in shaping Chinese literature, this dissertation offers a multi-sited perspective on the unmatched significance of modern literature to China’s national revival and, in turn, delivers a new understanding of China’s role in a global deliberation over the meaning of human life.

This study tracks tensions between different modes of knowledge in a body of eighteenth-century fictions centered around themes of detection and punishment of crimes, exemplary among which are Aphra Behn’s The History of the Nun (1689), Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (1724), Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748), Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), and William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794). Focusing on crimes as varied as forgery, rape, and murder, this set of fictions raises important questions about eighteenth-century narrative techniques and formal elements. For example, why is the narrator of Aphra Behn’s The History of the Nun at once omniscient and limited? Why does the ending of Defoe’s Roxana seem abrupt and inconclusive? Critics struggle to find satisfactory answers to these questions because they often read intrusive narrators, abrupt conclusions, and disconcerting tonal shifts as stylistic faults or as ineptitude at realistic narration. I argue that formal peculiarities of eighteenth-century fiction about criminal investigation are in fact revealing narrative symptoms of an attempt to resolve conflicts between competing theories of knowledge rooted in theology, empirical philosophy, probabilistic reasoning, and other modes of understanding.

Abstract How to Believe in Nothing: Moses Mendelssohn’s Subjectivity and the Empty Core of Tradition Yuval Kremnitzer The purpose of this study is twofold. Firstly, it aims to illuminate key aspects of the work of Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), the ‘Father of Jewish Enlightenment,’ in particular, his well-known, and universally rejected, theory of Judaism. Secondly, it brings Mendelssohn’s ideas and insights to bear on the problem of Nihilism, a problem in the development of which Mendelssohn is usually considered to have played a merely incidental role. It is argued that these two domains, seemingly worlds apart, are mutually illuminating. Moses Mendelssohn enters our history books in two separate contexts, which seem to have nothing in common. In the context of ‘Jewish Studies,’ Mendelssohn is best known for his idiosyncratic view of Judaism as a religion devoid of any principles of belief, and for his confidence in its compatibility with reason – positions developed in his Jerusalem: Or, On Religious Power and Judaism (1783). In the history of philosophy, Mendelssohn is known as the last representative of the dogmatic Leibniz-Wolff School, rendered obsolete by Kant’s critical, transcendental turn. In this broader context, Mendelssohn is also widely recognized to have played a role, if only contingently, in the emergence of the term Nihilism at a decisive moment in the historical development of the problem, namely, the so-called pantheism controversy, in the context of which he published his last work of philosophy, Morning Hours: Lectures on God’s existence (1785). And yet he has never been taken as belonging to the development of the problem in its essence. This dissertation aims to show that Moses Mendelssohn’s work offers a decisive intervention in the problem of Nihilism, arguably the fundamental problem of Modernity, an intervention that has great value for contemporary debates of the problem. Following and expanding on Kant’s intervention in the controversy, which I show to have been deeply engaged with Mendelssohn, makes it possible to bring to light Mendelssohn’s unrecognized contribution. In response to Kant’s groundbreaking critical philosophy, which seeks to account for the conditions of possible experience, Mendelssohn develops a theory of the experience of possibility. Implicit in this theory is a profound reformulation of the problem of Nihilism, as a crisis in the experience of possibility. Mendelssohn’s unique post-Kantian philosophical position regarding subjectivity, nature and the divine absolute is given more concrete articulation in being related and traced back to his political theology and his reflections on Judaism. In this way, the two separate lines in Mendelssohn’s reception – as the father of Jewish enlightenment and as an incidental facilitator, or vanishing mediator, in the consequential pantheism controversy – coalesce, and illuminate each other.