This document investigates a subject apparently rather traditional, perhaps even traditionalist: the exploration of the phonological, syntactical and semantical resources by means of which French symbolist poetry acts upon the reader. This project is not, however, as strange to the current theoretical conceptions as one might believe. Derrida, Foucault, Blanchot, Kristeva, and Barthes had Mallarme in the center of their reflections on language. Indeed, a metaphysics of old platonic origins serves as the foundation of the aesthetic enterprise of symbolism. The poem becomes an epiphany: it points towards an invisible world in comparison to our physical reality, proving to be no more than a pale reflection. This ambitious project---has it failed as an aesthetic adventure or as a vision of the universe? Herewith is one of the questions that this study attempts to propose answers based on the concrete analysis of poems by Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud and Mallarme. Following the goals that I have set for myself, musical analogies will play a fundamental role in this dissertation.

<p>Few philosophers have been more critical of the Western philosophical tradition than Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Nietzsche and Wittgenstein did not just reject the conclusions of their philosophical predecessors; they rejected their most basic assumptions. They rejected the very idea of philosophy as the attempt to rationally develop objective theories of the world. And yet Wittgenstein and Nietzsche have now been absorbed into the discipline they wanted to abolish. This dissertation attempts to recapture the force and extent of their respective criticisms of philosophy, and evaluate their conceptions of what philosophy should be. </p><p>I begin by examining Wittgenstein's claim that philosophical problems rest on a misunderstanding of language. I show that this claim does not entail a quietist refusal to engage in philosophical problems, as many have argued. Rather, it offers new insights into these problems, and I demonstrate these insights by considering Wittgenstein's analysis of G.E. Moore's attempt to refute external world skepticism. In the case of Nietzsche, I argue that his criticism of philosophy extends beyond the metaphysics of Plato, Descartes, and Kant to include even those anti-metaphysical philosophical movements with which he is now associated: post-structuralism and naturalism. In this way, his criticism of philosophy is more extensive than has been recognized. I conclude by describing his alternative conception of philosophy as the creation of new concepts, and compare it with Wittgenstein's conception of assembling reminders of what we ordinarily say.</p> / Dissertation

The main objective of this dissertation was to provide researchers interested in the history and evolution of "comparative literature" with a collection of references delineating the evolution of the concept and the development of academic departments dedicated to its study. The paper includes a first section describing the main issues contributing to the "identity crisis" with which studies and departments defining themselves as "comparative" were consistently confronted ever since the term was coined. The "preliminary concepts" section offers an overview of the elements that usually confer a "comparative" quality to a literary study, such as interdisciplinarity and multiculturalism, together with a few relevant definitions (in chronological order) describing the commonly accepted meaning of the term at a particular point in time. The next chapter, "chronological overview," continues the analysis with additional details, references and comments also in chronological order, dividing the matter in sub-chapters dedicated to as many historical periods, from the Antiquity until the mid-20th century. A separate section, offers a review of the most important institutions and publications contributing to the development of the comparative field. The last chapter is a sketch of the current status of the concept and of the institutions dedicated to its study. The research for the present dissertation focused primarily on facts and documents from the European and North American continents. Its main purpose is not to arbitrate the multitude of trends and opinions trying to associate the term with a singular meaning. It merely attempts to provide the reader with a systematic perspective of the subject matter.

The main aim of this dissertation is to show how the discourse of the psychoanalytical other--femininity, death, madness, disorder, and impiety--overlaps with colonial discourse in some plays from Shakespearean and Greek-Roman tragedy, and what difference or similarity there is between the two ages. The hypothesis is that foreigners are allegories of the psychoanalytical other. For this purpose, the research tries to grasp the concept of the other, from the viewpoint of psychoanalysis, and to analyze the core of colonial discourse on the basis of the concept of the psychoanalytical other. The starting point of the dissertation is that the other is related to the "uncanny other" within ourselves, which is "the hidden face of our identity," arising from the dialectic between desire and anxiety. The dissertation puts emphasis on the fact that colonial imagination relates the imagination of the colonial other to that of the "uncanny other" within. In relation to Greek tragedy, the psychological tendency is called "basic tendency" by Frank Snowden, which develops into "power relations" in Shakespeare's plays, where the psychological other becomes the object of politics--that is, the politicization of the other. For instance, the color black is psychologically related to death in some of Hellenistic tragedy, which is as natural as even Africans equate blackness with evil. But since the Mediaeval Ages, the black-evil equation was established as a frame of politics of a theatre-state. However, the dissertation doesn't ignore the possibility that Shakespeare debunks the colonial imagination of the Renaissance Europeans.

This dissertation examines Emmanuel Levinass Talmudic readings and the hermeneutics employed to translate the Talmud into modern language. Levinas claims to be translating Hebrew into Greek by rendering into a universal, philosophical language (Greek) the ethical structure of subjectivity (Hebrew) within the Talmud. Since they investigate the structure of subjectivity, extensive use of his philosophical works and the influential works of others are used to analyze his Talmudic readings. Chapter One places Levinass project against the background of the Talmud, Judaic tradition, and projects like Rudolf Bultmanns New Testament readings and Thorleif Bomans comparative study of Greek and Hebrew. A brief abstract of Levinass philosophy emphasizing his understanding of the hermeneutics of subjectivity is given. Chapters Two and Three examine Husserl and Heideggers formative influences, especially their hermeneutics of everyday experience, wherein Levinas locates the essential flaw of Western philosophy, which begins with an already constituted subjectivity. Although all three view the structure of hermeneutics as essentially discursive, Levinas insists that the subject is not the source for these discursive structures, or even for its own subjectivity. Rather, that source, where any philosophical understanding must start, is the Other. Levinas sees exhortations against things like sorcery and temptation as the Talmuds mode of resisting and restraining subjectivitys natural tendency to seek out its own freedom and power. Western philosophy, however, actually tends to either start from this condition or work toward it. Chapter Four discusses the idea of infinity according to Levinas and Descartes, and its role in founding consciousness. In this respect, infinity coincides with the idea of God . Chapter five looks at ethics and its relation to the structure of subjectivity. Levinas reads the Talmud in light of the ethical situation confronting the subject in the encounter with the Other. The Other actually establishes subjectivity and its discursive hermeneutical structures, so subjectivity begins and continues as an ethical response. The Conclusion looks at the idea of messianic politics, showing how Levinas describes the structure of subjectivity as a unique chosenness, revealing its discursive hermeneutical structures to be orientating the subject to future ethical responses.

Both Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda wanted to create epic works that would distinguish American literature from the literary traditions of Europe, works that would grow organically from the native landscapes and peoples of the Americas. Part of their projects included creating works that would act as political sourcebooks for their cultures. Whitman wanted to foster a democratic culture in the United States through writing a grand poetic work, while Neruda wanted to create a communist culture in Latin America through an epic work. Soon into the project Whitman realized that the traditional epic was not a suitable form for his task, so in attempting to construct a new form, he created the lyric-epic in his Leaves of Grass. Since Neruda believed that Whitman was the first authentic literary voice of the Americas and that the lyric-epic was a native form, he used Leaves of Grass as a paradigm when writing his Canto general. In separate discussions of each work, this study examines the politics of both writers and why they wanted to write political sourcebooks; their use of camaraderie/fraternity to tie readers together for democratic or communist governments; their rewriting of history as redemption and as the progression of democracy or communism; and lastly, their endeavors to teach readers to read as democrats or communists. Ultimately, the study argues that Neruda and Whitman were the foundations and the peaks of their literary traditions and that studying Whitman's and Neruda's lyric-epics reveals a common form for poetic epic attempts in the Americas after Whitman; moreover, it argues that even while Neruda used Leaves of Grass as a paradigm, he wrote a work of equal standing to it in Canto general.

The surrogation of Caliban from Shakespeares The Tempest to Césaires A Tempest has always been related to colonialism. In Shakespeares time, Caliban, depicted as half animal, served to represent the Other in an emerging colonial discourse. As opposed to Shakespeares character, Césaires Caliban is blatantly black and racially oppressed. Césaire indicates that A Tempest is an adaptation of Shakespeares The Tempest for black theater. As an adaptation, the play reinterprets the figure of Caliban to express postcolonial attitudes of the time. This thesis addresses the questions of how the figure of Caliban in Shakespeares play fits into the discourse of colonialism and how the figure of the black Caliban in Césaires play reinterprets Caliban in a postcolonial context. To answer the questions, this thesis employs postcolonial theory as advanced by, among others, Aimé Césaire, Leopold Senghor, Frantz Fanon and Homi Bhabha. The discussion indicates that each figuration of Caliban, both on stage and in critical theory, always functions as a surrogate for another reinterpretation of the figure within a given political context. Césaires Caliban, as a refiguring of Shakespeares Caliban, however, also invites another surrogation, one that relates to the later wave of postcolonial theory emphasizing hybridity, which views Caliban as one who blends borders and identities in a hybrid formation.

This dissertation traces the development of the supernatural from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth-century. Since supernatural elements are unknown and unfamiliar, they easily arouse anxiety, fear, and even result in terror. As such they produce the effect of the uncanny and introduce the psychological component into the selected literary corpus taken from the English Gothic novel, the German Schauerroman, and the French littérature fantastique. The analysis of the selected material is based on a psychoanalytical approach using Sigmund Freuds understanding of the uncanny, his dream analysis, and his view of the conscious and unconscious, but also considers Carl Gustav Jungs perception of dreams and of the unconscious. In doing so, man descends into his psyche, the place where he confronts something unfamiliar, something unheimlich. In stressing literatures psychological component and in focusing on the literary formation of the uncanny, I elaborate the development of a genre, which has always existed but so far never been defined: the Literature of the uncanny; a genre comprising Gothic fiction, Schauerroman, and la littérature fantastique. Within this comparative project, I do not only attempt to erase the long-erroneous apprehension that the three genres just mentioned are culturally and temporally independent from each other, but I demonstrate that these genres are rather building blocks than independent factors of uncanny literary fiction. This project will illustrate that the uncanny has always been an important characteristic of the genre, but that, over time, its psychological connotation has architecturally changed from the once gothic setting of an old mysterious castle to the human mind, encompassing the Freudian ego, Id, and super-ego on the one hand, and / or the Jungian personal and collective unconscious on the other hand.

Exile is a phenomenon probably as ancient as humanity itself, and one of the oldest topics in universal literature. The great majority of its variants (political, economical, social,) are founded on the idea of "forced displacement." Consequently, most often exile is reflected in literary creations in discourses dominated by a sentiment of loss. However, in some cases exile is not seen as a tragic event, but rather as an opportunity for intellectual growth - as attested by a number of authors who have chosen voluntarily to exile themselves. The rationale behind this occurrence is a mental process I called "severance." The first chapter of this study is an overview of the phenomenon of exile from historical and theoretical perspectives, followed by a number of examples where the subject's stance vis-à-vis their exile diverges from the "classic" definition of the subject. Based on these examples, "severance" is defined as a distinct issue among the various forms of exile, and the term is analyzed from linguistic and psychological perspectives. The following three chapters are case studies of instances of severance reflected in the works of Tristan Tzara, Gregor von Rezzori, and Vintilă Horia. The comparative analysis of these author's texts provide an extensive examination of the phenomenon, highlighting its importance and supporting the idea about the necessity of marking out "severance" as a new and distinct subject matter in exile studies. Tzara's works are arguably the ideal illustration of the concept; Gregor von Rezzori's creations reflect a similar intellectual evolution, with the added benefit of several extremely lucid self-analyses directly related to the phenomenon in question. Finally, the study of Vintilă Horia's case allows the discussion of an additional number of issues related to the concept of severance. The last chapter begins with a brief re-evaluation of the phenomenon, based on a retrospective, comparative overview of the analyzed writings; its closing section focuses on two prior works related to the idea of "severance," their main points being contrasted with the conclusions of the current inquiry in order to highlight the original elements contributed by this dissertation to the field of literary criticism.

The nineteenth-century novelists studied in this dissertation used tragic form to investigate economic and social changes taking place around them. Honoré de Balzacs Le Père Goriot (1834), William Dean Howells The Rise of Silas Lapham (1884-1885), Giovanni Vergas Mastro-don Gesualdo (1888), Benito Pérez Galdóss Miau, (1888), and Thomas Manns Buddenbrooks (1901) reflect the interest of writers in France, the United States, Italy, Spain, and Germany in questions concerning how money in an evolving capitalist society not only had a major role in shaping the behavior and personalities of specific individuals but also affected such institutions as the family. Under these changing social conditions, these writers developed a new tragic model: a middle-class individual destroyed by social and economic change involving the role of money in a capitalist society. In their novels, the businessman or bureaucrat replaced the nobility as a subject for a tragedy, which could consist of an entire novel or a tragic narrative imbedded in a novel. One aspect of the role of money which these novelists chose to investigate was how bankruptcy, either the catastrophe itself or the fear of it, could lead to tragedy. Caught up in the struggle to prosper, the individual man, and in the novels studied here it is always a man, became alienated within his family and society as relations based on the need to make money replaced traditional bonds based on family and social ties. The lives of the main protagonists revealed similar characteristics related to how money affected their function in society and gave the novelists the tools they needed for an investigation of the new capitalism. These novels parallel work being done by the writers contemporaries who were analyzing the same social phenomena and developing ideas which would become modern social science. The tragic figure in these novels could easily be seen as being caught in Max Webers iron cage, the result of allowing capitalisms ethic of money-making to become too important in his life. Georg Simmels writing on the function of money, tragedy, exchange theory, and gratitude are also important in understanding these novels.