M.Litt. et Phil. (Clinical Psychology) / People are deeply influenced by what they believe. Their basic epistemology is embodied in everything they create, material or otherwise. Thus, for example, every person's epistemology is reflected in his behaviour. Psychology is more and more aware of this aspect and there are studies and literature investigating the presuppositions of individuals as possible sources of pathology. There are further studies investigating the prejudices of psychological theories in an effort to expose their suppositions. The possibility of these theories contributing to the creation of pathology is investigated. Furthermore there are studies that describe the general intellectual spirit of an epoch. This time-spirit can influence people living in the same era to the extent that they can look, think, feel and act in a similar way. This study tries to identify the present general time-spirit that would contribute the most to the creation of a certain epistemology in the broad life-attitude of the man on street. The spirit of the Reasonable and Scientific Enlightenment is identified as the most prevalent force and influence in the life of western man. The specific presuppositions of this school of thought are described. It is then indicated to what extent these prejudices generate certain pathological effects. Furthermore it is seen how these suppositions facilitate a particular cognitive style, namely exclusive dualistic conceptualisation, and how it can create anxiety. An attempt is made to identify the so-called new and Post-Modernistic time-spirit that is developing in other disciplines and which is opposing the spirit of the Enlightenment. This study suggests that the prejudices of the ecosystemic and interactional models in Psychology can be reconciled with the presuppositions of Post-Modernism. The possibility that the epistemology of Post-Modernism can have a healing effect on the .symptomatic behaviour facilitated by the spirit of the Enlightenment, is put forward.

This volume contains two short papers on ways in which Africa was depicted in fictional works published between 1689 and 1856. The first discusses four lesser-known German prose works from the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, indicating how they were influenced not only by contemporary ethnography but also by literary fashions and - in the Enlightenment - by philosophical debates. The second paper deals with a British woman who visited West Africa in the early nineteenth century and subsequently included her ethnographic observations in fictional writings.

This dissertation is an intransigent probing into the Enlightenment scientific conjectures and theories of the eighteenth century that fantasized into existence a character called ‘Man.’ It explores how the category of the human, particularly at the intersection of certain genres like ‘race’ and ‘gender,’ was elaborated in the scientific thought of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment and later re-scripted in contemporary art, literature, and film, both from the Afro-diaspora and otherwise. Working at the nexus of several intersecting threads of scholarship, including comparative literature, black feminist theory, performance studies, slavery studies, memory studies, and the history of science, this dissertation examines how this Enlightenment scientific writing and experimentation on the human turned to people racialized black, specifically young women—their bodies, their children—to construct speculative (and to a large degree, enduring) conceptions of a Western ‘Man’ universalized as the only iteration of the human. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the notion of the human was not a given but a problem, an unfixed nexus of ideas, contested beliefs, and scientific experiment central to the shifting conception of Western ‘Man.’ This dissertation sets out to emphasize both the “performative” and the “speculative” nature of these shifting perceptions as they were played out through the literal commodification of people racialized black and non-white. This commodification within scientific practice of the period not only perpetuated the ideologies of the system of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade, but also directly informed the evolution of these competing, scientific theories of the human. The labor these individuals racialized non-white were asked to contribute in the name of eighteenth-century science (via, for instance, their circulation and participation as subjects in experiments) would support the continuation of a scientific empire unapologetically structured around an anthropocentric project of whiteness. This dissertation is structured around three core “Acts,” organized respectively around Denise Ferreira da Silva’s three onto-epistemological pillars of Western ‘Man’—separability, determinacy, and sequentiality. Each Act engages in reading practices in which the eighteenth-century archive is analyzed both through fiction and as a type of fiction. This type of reading helps denaturalize this Enlightenment archive’s performative fictions, pulling to the surface the speculative maneuvers at play in the formation of the category of ‘Man’ that continue, to this day, to present themselves as objective, axiomatic, factual, and universal. Through these cross-temporal analyses, this dissertation seeks to remain attentive to the ways in which the memories, postmemories, afterlives, and current-day lived legacies of this history all speak to a scholarly and artistic need to continue wrestling with the conundrums that this historical and intellectual construction of the human has left in its wake.

Text in French with abstracts in French and English. Translated title in English / La recherche montre Voltaire comme un auteur très connu du « Siècle des Lumières ». Voltaire a pu démontrer la véritable situation de la femme à l’époque. Les romans de Voltaire bien que courts, sont pleins d’esprit et lui ont valu jusqu’à aujourd’hui la plus grande part de sa gloire dans la littérature. Les propres expériences de Voltaire avec les femmes qu’il a rencontrées dans sa vie sont dépeintes dans ses romans. Il a mis l’accent sur l’exploitation des femmes dans les années 1800 à travers ses romans. Il dépeint la sensualité des femmes qui a longtemps été un sujet qu’il aimait exprimer dans ses œuvres. Voltaire critique et ridiculise la sensualité des femmes. Pour comprendre l’’attitude paradoxale de Voltaire envers la femme dans ses œuvres, il est important de connaître les relations qu’il a partagées avec les femmes tout au long de sa vie. Son attitude sceptique est dépeinte dans beaucoup de ses romans. / This research shows Voltaire as a well-known author of the “Enlightenment Age”. Voltaire has been able to demonstrate the true situation of woman at that time. Voltaire’s novels though short are full of spirit and have earned him until today the greater share to his glory in literature. Voltaire’s own experiences with women he met in his life are portrayed in his novels. He emphasized the exploitation of females in the 1800’s through his novels. He portrays the sensuality of women that has long been a subject that he liked to express in his works. Voltaire criticizes and ridicules the sensuality of women. To understand Voltaire’s paradoxical attitude towards woman in his works, it is important to know the relationships he shared with women throughout his life. His skeptical attitude is portrayed in many of his novels. / Classics and World Languages / M.A. (French)