Thesis--Uppsala. / "Index librorum": p. [ix]-xiv.

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Focusing on the A-text (1604) version of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus , this study further assesses biographical information on the poet and intellectual currents of the Counter Reformation, so as to investigate the play's relation to emergent trends of individualism in the Renaissance, recovery of the pagan past, and intellectual aspirations that could readily collide with orthodoxy. Clearly reflecting anxieties of the period about individual deviance from social norms through intellectual overreaching, Doctor Faustus powerfully testifies to the potential dangers of human aspiration and the scholarly spirit of unbounded learning. While thus exploring the exotic temptations of forbidden knowledge, the play resurrects and interrogates traditional taboos which related intellectual appetite to wrongful lust. Marlowe stages an explosive conflict between the conservative tradition of intellectual inquiry, which distrusted the unorthodox scholarship and Neoplatonic magic that some widely influential thinkers promoted in the Italian Renaissance, and Faustus's own creative desires, ambitions, and imagination. The tension between proscribed and prescribed knowledge climaxes in the invocation of Helen of Troy. While Helen's significance is complex, we find that, in relation to the play's concern with dissent from orthodoxy, she focuses the power of intellectual longing to seduce and ravish the mind. Apart from being a superior play, Doctor Faustus encapsulates Marlowe's awareness of his period's uneasy perception of unconventional thinking, and urges the importance of challenging restrictions on how much one is permitted to know.

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The study is an examination of the quest motif as it occurs in the Tarot and two dramatic works, King Lear and Marlowe's Dr. Faustus. The development of the quester is traced from his naivete, through a series of trials, to the consummation of his quest.The hero's quest is essentially to achieve an integration of polar opposites: light and dark, good and evil, the conscious and unconscious. Both the Fool of the Tarot and Lear seem to achieve that harmony, and, thus, I treat the Tarot and King Lear in separate sections of the first chapter. I begin with the Tarot also because of its enormous suggestiveness for elucidating the quests of Lear and Faustus. The archetypal nature of the quest is ultimately what unites the three works, and the Tarot provides a repository for the symbols and primordial images that inform quest literature.The second chapter deals with Dr. Faustus. Unlike the Fool and Lear, Faustus never seems to attain the hero's vision of light and harmony (however, the conclusion is ambiguous); indeed, he inverts the quest to its diabolical opposite and becomes the trickster in league with the demonic forces that form the negative corollary to the hero. Faustus' quest is the coexisting opposite of Lear's and the Fool's, and, as such, is the other pole that must be seen to experience the whole.

Trata-se de realizar uma articulação entre as imagens construídas pelo romance Doutor Fausto, de Thomas Mann, e o quadro teórico elaborado pela Escola de Frankfurt, a fim de compor uma interpretação filosoficamente investida do romance e alcançar uma melhor compreensão das ideias da Teoria Crítica. A vida do compositor Adrian Leverkühn, o Fausto de Mann, é narrada pelo amigo e biógrafo Serenus Zeitblom, e essa narrativa revela a identidade fundamental entre o músico e a Alemanha, aproximando suas características e histórias. Nossa abordagem tematiza especialmente a questão da salvação ou condenação da alma do pactário, tratando de matizar essas possibilidades na obra. Elaboramos uma noção de mito comum ao romance e àquele quadro teórico frankfurtiano, apontando sua força de estruturação totalizante, bem como sua inserção em uma dinâmica dialética. A seguir, propomos considerar que todos os elementos do romance que repõe a mitificação apontariam para a condenação do Fausto, enquanto, inversamente, os aspectos da obra que revelam os limites ou se contrapõem à força do mito anunciariam a possibilidade de salvação do pactário. A noção de sofrimento é especialmente importante, pois comparece em ambas as perspectivas. Isso quer dizer que o sofrimento pode ser interpretado tanto como a evidenciação de um destino como se as dores e a infelicidade de Adrian Leverkühn antecipassem a condenação , quanto pode ser compreendido como um sintoma que denuncia o mito como se revelasse a inverdade do destino aparente e as possibilidades do devir. Finalmente, análise da música, um tema central no romance, também revela sua ambivalência, pois ela pode tanto ser a reposição do mito quanto uma crítica ao mundo mitificado. / This work articulates the images constructed by Thomas Manns novel Doctor Faustus with the theoretical framework developed by the Frankfurt School, in order to compose a philosophically invested interpretation of the novel, as well as achieve a better understanding of Critical Theorys ideas. The life of the composer Adrian Leverkühn, Manns Faustus, is narrated by his friend and biographer Serenus Zeitblom, and this narrative reveals the fundamental identity between the musician and Germany, relating their characteristics and histories. Our approach on the novel specially studies the questions of the salvation or the damnation of Fausts soul, trying to precise these possibilities within the work. We develop a notion of myth common to the novel and to that frankfurtian theoretical framework, pointing its totalizing strength, as well as its insertion in a dialectical dynamic. Next, we propose to consider that all the novels elements that instigate the mythification would point to the condemnation of Faust, while, conversely, the novels aspects that reveal the limits of the myth or contradict it would announce the possibility of the mans salvation. The notion of suffering is especially important, as it appears in both perspectives. This means that suffering can be interpreted both as the disclosure of fate as if Adrians pain and sadness would anticipate the condemnation as can be understood as a symptom that denounces the myth as if it would reveal the lie of the apparent destination and the possibilities of future. Finally, the inquire on músic, a central theme of the novel, also reveals its ambivalente, for it can either strengthen the myth, as it can exercise a critic of the mythologized world.

My dissertation explores the parodic Biblical language employed by medieval and early modern staged heretics. The plays' coupling of parody and heresy forges ideological connections between the two, as when they disrupt authorized, orthodox models of the Word, as both the Scriptures and the Host. My Introduction addresses the theological controversies over the relationship between language and meaning that arise from Lollard, Catholic, and Protestant heresies. Chapter two analyzes how, in the Chester cycle, Antichrist's theological and verbal dissents are eerily similar to orthodox models. That framework forces the audience to depend on the context of the heretic's words and deeds, rather than the words and deeds themselves, to interpret meaning. Chapter three examines Mankind's construction of orthodox and parodic registers of language and its mapping of Mankind's fall and ascent through his transition from one register to the other. Chapter four addresses how the Croxton Play of the Sacrament defends the doctrine of the Real Presence by aligning the transformative power of the consecratory words with the transformative power of believers' confessions at conversion, wherein both enact a transubstantiation. Chapter five argues that John Bale's Three Laws relies on the dichotomy of the letter and the spirit to characterize his parodic Catholic vices as legalistic adherents to the Word and his Protestant heroes as spiritually-enlightened believers. Chapter six analyzes how Falstaff's Puritan parody, in the Henry IV plays, locates meaning in the audience rather than the speaker, particularly through dramatic irony, equivocation, and allusions. Lastly, chapter seven examines how, in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, the spectrum of orthodox and parodic language use collapses into Faustus's idiom, and I contend that Faustus's heresy is ultimately his indecision. My conclusion ultimately finds that the univocity between language and meaning is a specious construction, and, collectively, these texts demonstrate that language may be a marker but not a maker of meaning.

Zugl.: Berlin, Freie Univ., Diss., 2004