Social breakdown and the failure of Han Confucianism in the middle of third century A.D. China turned the Shi literati to Daoism for inspiration to construct an authentic way of life. The subsequent one hundred and fifty years were a cultural process of dissonant cacophony, in which the synthesis of the two ideologies finally had to give way to Buddhism. The process, what is called the Neo-Daoist Movement, is to date still in demand of an interdisciplinary, vigorously historical, study. This writing traces a dialectical cultural and mental development by examining the Shi-literati's life and works, including philosophy and literature, and their often exaggerated behavior in everyday life. It reveals that, in yearning for a life of transcendence, the Shi also wanted to maintain their worldly engagement, and subsequently constructed a paradoxical world view that provided them a spiritual space in a time of social turmoil. By investigating the Shi's cosmology, and their sense of community and self-definition, the present study elucidates the possibilities, as well as the limits, of what they constructed as the authentic life. The possibilities and limits can be seen most clearly in the works of Tao Yuan-mind, a great poet who lived at the ending period of the era. Living the life of a farmer, Tao Yuan-mind roughed through life's hardship by taking a spiritual stance that was congenial to both Confucianism and Daoism. In its own way, Tao's poetry brought out what Neo-Daoism should have come to but never did. Precisely because of this nature, Tao's works were historical while transcending the times. In this detailed study of an individual writer and Neo-Daoism, we complete the spiritual-mapping of the era.

Caribbean authors, due to the unique geographical, social and historical contexts of their work, have long been preoccupied with the notion of authenticity. Yet the project of uncovering or inventing an "authentic" Caribbean discourse has repeatedly confronted difficulties resulting from the intrinsic hybridity and dynamism of the region. In particular, discourses of origin and belonging based on national boundaries or ethnic essentialism have proven inadequate for rendering the "essence" of the Caribbean experience. This problem has been exacerbated by the fact that such discourses are generally dependent on European literary forms to be their vehicle. For each of the three novelists studied in this dissertation, the discourse of the marvelous seemed to offer a path for creating a fictional identity quest which would be able to capture something of this unique but elusive Caribbean "essence". The dissertation argues that by tracing the transcultural route taken by Marvelous Realism and later Magic Realism through three novels by Jacques Stephen Alexis of Haiti, Alejo Carpentier of Cuba, and Simone Schwarz-Bart of Guadeloupe, one becomes aware of an evolution in the use of the marvelous which reflects different approaches to the dilemma faced by the Caribbean artist coping with the seemingly contradictory demands of a Parisian intellectual formation and an authentic "Caribbean" sensibility. This evolution reveals an emerging "postmodernist" consciousness in the quest for an authentic Caribbean discourse, suggesting a growing acceptance on the part of Caribbean writers of the hybrid nature of their intellectual and cultural heritage. Using analysis based on writings by Antonio Gramsci, Edouard Glissant, Gayatri Spivak, Regine Robin, Stephen Slemon and Paul Gilroy among others, the dissertation explores the ways in which these three novelists, poised uneasily between two continents, have through their fiction and essays struggled and/or come to terms with the "decentered" positionality which seems to be so "central" to the Caribbean experience.

My dissertation examines moments of Arabic linguistic and formal importation and cultural translation in colonial and postcolonial texts and offers ways of engaging these often misunderstood or overlooked moments. Sparse and seemingly ineffective, importations do indeed play a significant dialogic role between Arabic and the texts in English. Implicit within the term importation are the issues of exchange and value. Manifesting predominantly in transliteration, importation wears an English letter-form but yields an opaque Arabic content. The rubbing of form and content within an importation produces many possibilities concerning that importation and its role within an English linguistic sphere. The dissertation's principal goal, then, is to demonstrate how Arabic and Islam participate in these texts' discourses and how these texts represent and participate in cross-cultural and cross-religious moments of importation. I engage four main issues of importation and translation: (1) importation, where transliterated Arabic or Qur'anic phrases find their way into these texts without being translated; (2) contextually defined importation, where the transliterated words or phrases are interpreted intratextually; (3) formal importation, where imported Arabic forms (poetic meters and rhetorical devices) become the underlying cause of opaque content; (4) cultural translation, which shows the often painful identity and physical negotiations between languages and the cultures they carry across rigid divides. I examine nineteenth-century works including George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Locksley Hall. I also engage twentieth-century and twenty-first century works including Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh, and Diana Abu-Jaber's Arabian Jazz and Crescent. These seemingly disparate texts across time and space all participate in importations of Arabic and Qur'anic words and forms. The idea of the oriental other, specifically the Arabic and Muslim other, is interwoven deeply into the texture of these works in English. The ways these texts engage representations of the Arab/Muslim reveal much about the cultures within which they operate.

This study traces the representations of the Nizari Isma'ilis, or Assassins, in medieval European texts, a process revealing three different discourses about the sect. I argue that when the crusaders first encountered the Syrian branch of the sect, they sought to enter into an alliance with its members. Early texts discussing the Assassins reflect this desire for an alliance and treat the sect correspondingly. The events at the end of the twelfth century—especially the assassination of Marquis Conrad of Montferrat, newly elected King of Jerusalem—introduce a new way of approaching the sect in Latin Christian histories and chronicles of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. To the historians chronicling the death of Conrad, the sect functions as an instrument in the portrayal, positive or negative, of more significant historical figures such as Richard the Lion-Heart of England, Philip Augustus of France, and Conrad himself. Although the occasion of Conrad's murder did not immediately lead to the rejection of a discourse of alliance in treating the Assassins, this early approach to the sect was eventually replaced by one of exoticization in the thirteenth century. This third and final discourse rose to prominence as the historical Nizaris lost their independence and power, ultimately falling to the Mongols in 1256. As a result of the process of exoticization, the Assassins came to be seen as a “wonder of the East.” The three approaches to the Assassins outlined above did not succeed each other, but rather overlapped and sometimes existed simultaneously. Nonetheless each discourse achieves dominance at a different time. Thus, the discourse of alliance predominates in the early years of the medieval European representation of the sect, but the assassination of Conrad of Montferrat informs the perception and depiction of the Assassins from 1192 to the first third of the thirteenth century. Thereafter the discourse of exoticization becomes the dominant discourse about the Assassins in Latin Christendom, one that continues to influence our understanding of the sect to this day.

Perception, particularly in the case of dance spectatorship, is a kind of performance. This study considers how spectators' perception of a dance performance is shaped by a combination of the material conditions of the space, spectators' kinetic and psychological histories, as well as their previous encounters with dance and the individual performers. In particular, whether we have experience performing the kind of movement enacted by the dancers can greatly alter how we perceive the movement. Kinesthetic empathy, or the ability to intuit what others are experiencing based upon their bodily behavior, is particularly shaped by our movement histories. As understood by phenomenological theory, kinesthetic empathy is a socially informed, intentional perception of others' experiences, such as physical pain, as being distinct from one's own. Phenomenological accounts then differ from neurological approaches, such as those put forth by mirror neuron theorists, holding that we unconsciously simulate others' behavior and then project our sensation of that simulation onto them. It is suggested that phenomenological accounts of dance performances, replete with idiosyncratic, visceral responses to the performances spaces and performers alike serve as a complement and/or corrective to disembodied, non-embedded neurological studies and abstracted theoretical treatments of dance. A phenomenological approach to discussing kinesthetic empathy will be performed upon works by contemporary choreographers, including: Rosie Kay, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Nir de Vollf , and Sasha Waltz.

In this dissertation, "Transgressing Space and Subverting Hierarchies: A Comparative Analysis of Street Theater Groups in Sri Lanka, India, and the United States," I explore how street theater artists in three different national contexts make innovative use of space, performance traditions, language, and audience in order to question economic, political, and cultural power structures. My study involves a comparative analysis of the work of The Wayside and Open Theater in Sri Lanka, People's Theater Forum (Janam) in India, and Bread and Puppet Theater in the United States. I study the ways in which these groups appropriate spaces and, through their performances, transform them into transgressive sites where existing power hierarchies are questioned and subverted. I examine their use of hybridized forms of aesthetics - a combination of traditional formal performance methods and western performance traditions - as well as language to create a dialogic relationship with diverse audiences. While the study of Sri Lankan and Indian street theater groups interrogates the dynamics of space as it manifests itself in postcolonial contexts, my analysis of Bread and Puppet Theater provides material for comparison and contrast by examining the workings of space and power in a "first world" context. My investigation is informed by Ngugi wa Thiong'o's and Safdar Hashmi's work on space, performance, and power as well as theories of national culture and identity elaborated by Frantz Fanon and Homi Bhabha. I will likewise refer to Jacques Derrida's arguments about language and play and André Lefevere's ideas concerning translation and rewriting in order to examine the language used in the plays. While prior studies of street theater focus primarily on its status as a political or cultural event, I propose to engage in an in depth analysis of the performance texts - both written and visual - and examine the nuances in language and the particular performance techniques used by the groups in specific locations.

Pothos, "longing" or "absence", is identified as the singular topos accounting for both the origin of tragedy and the origin of ontology from the epic and pre-Socratic narratives of the tragic crisis in Mythos. In Homer's Iliad it is the pothos of Achilles' curse upon the Achaeans which distinguishes the genius of Homer's Iliad from the Iliadic tradition whence it arises in supplanting the tradition theme of menis, or "wrath". As substance of the curse, Achilles' pothos, or "absence" from battle, ultimately redounds back upon him in his pothos, or "longing" for his surrogate Patroclus. Although pothos per se recedes into the background among the pre-Socratics, its repercussions are evident in the disarticulation of the integrity of Mythos in the unfolding developments associated with the limit (peras), from Anaximander through Parmenides and Empedocles. It is in this context that the origins of ontology are discovered as arising in Hesiod. The putatively metaphysical dicta of Anaximander, and even Parmenides' positive apodeixis of Being are interpreted against the tragic backdrop of the end of epic and as anticipating in a singular historical development the origin of tragedy proper. The retrospective orientation of Parmenides to the archaic Dike, "Justice", of Epic is overextended. The apparent positivity of his apodeixis of Being, is over-determined and belies the now advanced and ineluctable crisis of the tragic. Aeschylus' apotheosis of tragedy in the Oresteia emerges from the penumbra of the transit of Being (einai) before Mythos, and will thus be written in the shadow of what was objectively 'revealed' in Parmenides' noetic transcendence to the open sphere of Dike. This is evident first in the disaesthesis of the archaic symbolon in the active Empedoclean optics of the gorgonic epiphany of the graphe in the sacrifice of Iphigeneia, in which the enigmas of the parodos of the Agamemnon are cledonographically revealed. This disaesthesis is, however, but the obverse of the opsis, or "image", of Helen's phasma which appears, hypostatized, independently of human experience hovering above Aeschylus's inversion of Empedocles's cosmogonic whirlpool of Love and hate, hovering over the cosmophthoric abyss of pothos.

This dissertation analyzes the findings of a ten year study of the 1568–70 Geneva Bible originally owned and annotated by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550–1604), and now owned by the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. (Folger shelf mark 1427). This is the first and—presently—only dissertation in literary studies which pursues with open respect the heretical and thesis of John Thomas Looney (1920), B. M. Ward (1928), Charlton Ogburn Jr. (1984) and other “amateur” scholars, which postulates de Vere as the literary mind behind the popular nom de plume “William Shakespeare.” The dissertation reviews a selection of the many credible supports for this theory and then considers confirmatory evidence from the annotations of the de Vere Bible, demonstrating the coherence of life, literary preceden, and art, which is the inevitable consequence of the theory. Appendices offer detailed paleographical analysis, review the history of the authorship question, consider the chronology of the Shakespearean canon, and refute the claim of some critics that the alleged connections between the de Vere Bible and “Shakespeare” are “random.”

This dissertation concerns itself with a comparison of the differing aesthetic theories set forth by Theodor W. Adorno and Jacques Derrida. After an introduction to the varying backgrounds informing Adorno and Derrida, Neo-Marxism and a certain kind of Heideggerian Phenomenology respectively, the dissertation then describes the most relevant points of these theories to this discussion and furthermore, how these transform any exegesis of literary texts. Subjects under discussion are the historic background of literary texts, truth-value in a piece of art, the question of societal relevance to/of literature, negativity in art, the critique of subjectivity, the question of the "text" and the relationship of literature to philosophy. These items are then further developed in critical practice; for that purpose, Adorno's essays on Stefan George and Derrida's work on Paul Celan were chosen. It is being argued that while Adorno takes a prescriptive stance on some issues of literature (e.g. canonization and a rejection of newer art forms), when it comes to the societal applications of literature, it is Adorno's theory that is better able to account for these, since it has a framework which allows for minute descriptions of these processes. On the other hand, Derridean text analyses can be more yielding due to various theoretical constructs such as differance, trace, dissemination, but his theory lacks a working definition for a societal grounding of literature, thereby seriously impeding its own progress. This becomes clear in his treatment of Paul Celan. While he is able to interpret many facets of Celan's poetry and theory of writing in a very interesting way, the one aspect informing all of Celan's writings, the Holocaust, is left aside. Due to the Derridan theory's lack of grounding in actual history, the historical fact of the Holocaust cannot inform his own writing, thereby cutting short an otherwise invigorating and extensive hermeneutical interpretation. Both theories have their advantages, but as theory geared toward societal change, Adorno's theory proves to be more yielding.

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