This dissertation charts a lineage of nineteenth-century British literary interventions into the arena of science and philosophy jointly known as vitalism. Intended in part as a contribution to the history of science, Passive Life reconstructs the largely forgotten genealogy of a robust tradition of Victorian-era materialist vitalism, or vital materialism: the theory that a principle of life inheres in all physical matter. I connect this scientific trend to a concurrent surge of cultural engagement with the seventeenth-century philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, whose monist doctrine received renewed attention as experimental developments in biology, physics, physiology, and epidemiology increasingly supported a vital materialist account of the nature of life. Through readings of novels by Mary Shelley, Harriet Martineau, and George Eliot, I position these three women writers as key figures in vitalism’s cultural reception. By attending to the thematic resonances between their novels and materialist vitalism’s major principles and provocations, Passive Life traces the narrative arc of Victorian vitalism, deepening and expanding extant scholarly accounts of the rich interchange among literature and science in the nineteenth century. Moving beyond reception history, however, this dissertation argues that the novels of Shelley, Martineau, and Eliot worked to construct critical interpretations of vitalist theory with a shared emphasis on passivity as a fundamental feature of life. Through innovative techniques of description and characterization, their fiction locates the passivity of life at the level of the material body, in its inherent contingency, fluidity, and impressibility. The view of embodied subjectivity that thus emerges from these novels complicates the liberal humanist model that rose to predominance in Victorian culture and privileged an active, self-determining subject. Within the counter-tradition to which Shelley, Martineau, and Eliot belonged, the idea of “passive life” occasioned pressing ethical and political quandaries involving the relationships between self and other and between subject and environment. On the one hand, treating embodied life as passive pointed speculatively toward more liberated, open-ended, and mutually sustaining forms of communal being. On the other hand, “passive life” also suggested the vulnerability and precarity of bodies helplessly exposed to their material and affective surroundings, raising important questions regarding intention, obligation, and accountability. How do we live well in a world where so many other embodied lives impress upon our own? Can pain and harm be prevented in such a world? What habits of perception and practices of sociality might be evolved and adapted to the realities of passive life? In confronting these questions, nineteenth-century British fiction provides conceptual frameworks well suited to interrogating the political and ethical implications of the twenty-first-century new materialist turn.

Advances in technologies of voice profiling shed new light on questions of listening and its entanglement with antiblackness as a structuring paradigm of modernity. To contest current conceptions of listening with regards to the question of race and antiblackness while also shining light on the potentials offered by blackness, this dissertation engages listening at three distinct sites that are entangled with this modern question of voice profiling AI. In the process, this dissertation elaborates on the ethical stakes involved in listening itself. Chapter 1 excavates the way in which the ears of enslaved Black lives were ritualized. It centers an analysis of the role of the punishment of ear cropping and how this performed both a claim over slaves’ belonging and an inhibition on their freedom. Scholarship from Hebrew law aids in uncovering the meaning of the specific form of punishment. The chapter concludes by comparing the conception of slaves’ ears to Black artistic expressions such as Harriet Jacobs’s various methods of narration in Incidents of a Slave Girl and Blind Tom Wiggins’ unique use of clusters and graphic notation in Battle of Manassas, so as to demonstrate their methods of resistance and refusal to a claimed all-encompassing regime of listening. Chapter 2 engages modern notions of sound and listening. The way in which sound is theorized and engaged in modern digital technologies is entangled with the conception of what listening is and what it entails. Hermann von Helmholtz provides an axis after which sound and listening, as well as the relation between an inner world of perceptions and an outer world of sensations, has to be engaged as a question of listening as entangled in societal questions. The chapter critically elaborates alongside questions of categorical distinction in sound, such as the use of skull shapes as referents for AI listening, instrument classification systems, and the general question of the form of sound, or sound as object. The concluding Chapter 3 discusses, alongside Sylvia Wynter’s work and Roscoe Mitchell’s piece S II Examples (date) the kinds of questions we must pose in the development of modern AI listening technologies to move past antiblackness. Immanuel Kant’s theorizing of race and his influence on Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s classification of skulls relate tomodern voice profiling AI technology directly through the question of using cranial shapes. Wynter’s work challenges both a turn to varieties that do not allow the addressing of structural antiblackness, and a continuation of claims to proper knowledge on the basis of antiblackness. Ultimately, Wynter aids us in hearing Mitchell’s continual shapeshifting practice on the saxophone as a proposal towards a refiguring of our conception of sound, listening, and us.

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1938 H63

This study examines the paradoxical and at the same time interesting relationship between Christian religion and the system of slavery in the American historical context. Through the use of Kenneth Burke’s concept and theory of Perception by Incongruity as a theoretical and conceptual framework, this study examines Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Frederick Douglass’ The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave. In the view of this study, Perception by Incongruity, as a theoretical and conceptual tool has the literary and the rhetorical resources to unmask the ironies and paradoxes involved in slave holding religion and religion holding slaves. The principal research question of the present study seeks to probe the usability of the Christian faith by slave owners to dominate and pacify the slaves, and the instrumentalisation by the slaves of the Christian faith as a liberatory and emancipatory belief. Perception by Incongruity enriches the present study in so far as it unmasks the incongruity and paradox of masters and slaves sharing the same definition of God and faith and still remaining in their conflictual positions of masters and slaves. Since this study is a study in literature, the methods of literature study and textual analysis are deployed in examining the primary texts, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave. A multiplicity of secondary texts; in form of critical and empirical literature; are used throughout this study to support observations, arguments and conclusions that are advanced by the study. Summatively, this study observes and concludes that religion, in this case Christianity occupies a perceptively incongruous position where it is suable by people in conflicting situations. Further, where domination, power and capitalism as an economic system meet, religion belongs in the mind and the eye of the beholders who seeks to use it to justify and defend their particular interests and positions. / English Studies / M.A. (English Studies)

張婉麗. / "2000年8月" / 論文 (哲學碩士)--香港中文大學, 2000. / 參考文獻 (leaves 208-219) / 附中英文摘要. / "2000 nian 8 yue" / Zhang Wanli. / Lun wen (zhe xue shuo shi)--Xianggang Zhong wen da xue, 2000. / Can kao wen xian (leaves 208-219) / Fu Zhong Ying wen zhai yao. / 摘要 --- p.i / 前言 --- p.v / 目錄 / Chapter 第一章 --- 引言 --- p.1 / Chapter 第二章 --- 小說敘事者與操縱理論 --- p.8 / Chapter 2.1 --- 小說的敘事者 --- p.8 / Chapter 2.2 --- 操縱理論 --- p.14 / Chapter 2.3 --- 《黑奴籲天錄》的敘事者與譯文操縱 --- p.24 / Chapter 第三章 --- 《黑奴籲天錄》的翻譯背景 --- p.26 / Chapter 3.1 --- 原文的内容 --- p.26 / Chapter 3.2 --- 原文的文化系統 --- p.28 / Chapter 3.2.1 --- 政治 --- p.28 / Chapter 3.2.2 --- 宗教 --- p.3 2 / Chapter 3.2.3 --- 婦女地位 --- p.33 / Chapter 3.2.4 --- 作者 --- p.35 / Chapter 3.3 --- 對 Uncle Tom´ةs Cabin 的評論 --- p.40 / Chapter 3.4 --- 譯文的文化系統 --- p.48 / Chapter 3.4.1 --- 政治 --- p.49 / Chapter 3.4.2 --- 教會的活動 --- p.52 / Chapter 3.4.3 --- 婦女地位 --- p.53 / Chapter 3.4.4 --- 翻譯的功利主義 --- p.55 / Chapter 3.4.5 --- 譯者 --- p.58 / Chapter 3.4.5.1 --- 林纾 --- p.58 / 家庭 --- p.58 / 政治思想 --- p.60 / 婦女觀 --- p.63 / 文學作品 --- p.65 / Chapter (一） --- 創作及文學觀 --- p.65 / Chapter (二） --- 翻譯及翻譯觀 --- p.68 / Chapter 3.4.5.2 --- 魏易 --- p.73 / Chapter 3.5 --- 對《黑奴籲天錄》的評論 --- p.75 / Chapter 第四章 --- 《黑奴籲天錄》的敘事者（一） ´ؤ´ؤ宗教的表述及婦女形象的表述 --- p.85 / Chapter 4.1 --- 宗教的表述 --- p.86 / Chapter 4.1.1 --- 基督教與小說中的人物 --- p.89 / Tom與湯姆 --- p.90 / Cassy與凱雪 --- p.107 / Quimbo與昆蒲、Sambo與三蒲 --- p.110 / Topsy與托弗收 --- p.112 / 其他 --- p.115 / George與哲而治 --- p.116 / Chapter 4.1.2 --- 基督教與敘事者聲音 --- p.126 / Chapter 4.1.3 --- 宗教的表述´ؤ´ؤ總結 --- p.135 / Chapter 4.2 --- 婦女形象的表述 --- p.137 / Chapter 4.2.1 --- 婦女形象 --- p.138 / 婦女角色 --- p.138 / 女性讀者 --- p.148 / Chapter 4.2.2 --- 廚房的比喻 --- p.156 / Chapter 4.2.3 --- 婦女形象的表述´ؤ´ؤ總結 --- p.164 / Chapter 第五章 --- 《黑奴籲天錄》的敘事者（二） ´ؤ´ؤ敘事距離與奴隸制度的關係 --- p.166 / Chapter 5.1 --- 敘事者與小說人物的距離 --- p.166 / Chapter 5.2 --- 敘事者與讀者的距離 --- p.172 / Chapter 5.3 --- 總結 --- p.184 / Chapter 第六章 --- 結語 --- p.187 / Chapter 6.1 --- 譯者對敘事者的操縱 --- p.187 / Chapter 6.2 --- 「忠實的譯者」 --- p.199 / 參考書目 --- p.208

Questa tesi esamina il significato e il ruolo che lo spazio ha assunto nella vita e nell’opera di Harriet Martineau. Nella prima parte della tesi l’attaccamento al – o il rifiuto del – luogo, i.e., la casa, è stato ritenuto significativo per lo sviluppo identitario e il senso di benessere esperiti da Martineau. Il racconto economico di Martineau datato 1834 e intitolato The Land’s End è stato scelto invece quale focus nella seconda parte della tesi – scelta basata sulla possibilità di illustrare una strategia narrativa che si avvale dell’utilizzo concreto e simbolico di immagini spaziali da parte della scrittrice. / This dissertation examines the meaning and the role of place in Harriet Martineau’s life and work. In the first part of the dissertation, the attachment to – or rejection of – place, i.e. home, has been acknowledged as significant in Martineau’s development of self-identity and feeling of well-being. Moreover, Martineau’s 1834 economic tale entitled The Land’s End has been chosen as the focus for the second part of the dissertation – a choice based on the possibility of showing the woman writer’s narrative strategy and use of space images in both a concrete and symbolic way.

This dissertation explores the importance of the panorama for American Renaissance writers' participation in ideological formations in the antebellum period. I analyze how Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Wells Brown, Henry Box Brown, and Harriet Beecher Stowe use the panorama as a metaphorical site to contest their different positions on epistemological and sociopolitical agendas such as transcendentalism, masculinist expansionism, and radical abolitionism. Emerson uses the panorama as a key metaphor to underpin his transcendental idealism and situate it in contemporary debates on vision, gender, and race. Connecting the panorama with optical theories on light and color, Emerson appropriates them to theorize his transcendental optics and makes a hierarchical distinction between light/transparency/panorama as metaphors for spirit, masculinity, and race-neutral man versus color/opacity/myopic vision for body, femininity, and racial-colored skin. In his paean to the moving panorama, Thoreau expresses his desire for Emersonian correspondence between nature and the spirit through transcendental panoramic vision. However, Thoreau's esteem for nature's materiality causes his panoramic vision to be corporeal and empirical in its deviation from the decorporealized vision in Emerson?s notion of transparent eyeball. Hawthorne repudiates the Transcendentalists' and social reformers' totalizing and absolutist idealism through his critique of the panorama and the emphasis on opacity and ambiguity of the human mind and vision. Hawthorne reveals how the panorama satisfies the desire for visual and physical control over the rapidly expanding world and the fantasy of access to truth. Countering the dominant convention of the Mississippi panorama that objectifies slaves as a spectacle for romantic tourism, Box Brown and Wells Brown open up a new American subgenre of the moving panorama, the anti-slavery panorama. They reconstruct black masculinity by verbally and visually representing real-life stories of some male fugitive slaves and idealizing them as masculine heroes of the anti-slavery movement. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe criticizes how the favorable representation of slavery and the objectification of slaves in the Mississippi panorama and the picturesque help to construct her northern readers' uncompassionate and hard-hearted attitudes toward the cruel realities of slavery and presents Tom's sympathetic and humanized "eyes" as an alternative vision.

Univ., Diss.--Mannheim, 2002. / Literaturverz. S. 295 - 304.

This study examines the paradoxical and at the same time interesting relationship between Christian religion and the system of slavery in the American historical context. Through the use of Kenneth Burke’s concept and theory of Perception by Incongruity as a theoretical and conceptual framework, this study examines Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Frederick Douglass’ The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave. In the view of this study, Perception by Incongruity, as a theoretical and conceptual tool has the literary and the rhetorical resources to unmask the ironies and paradoxes involved in slave holding religion and religion holding slaves. The principal research question of the present study seeks to probe the usability of the Christian faith by slave owners to dominate and pacify the slaves, and the instrumentalisation by the slaves of the Christian faith as a liberatory and emancipatory belief. Perception by Incongruity enriches the present study in so far as it unmasks the incongruity and paradox of masters and slaves sharing the same definition of God and faith and still remaining in their conflictual positions of masters and slaves. Since this study is a study in literature, the methods of literature study and textual analysis are deployed in examining the primary texts, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave. A multiplicity of secondary texts; in form of critical and empirical literature; are used throughout this study to support observations, arguments and conclusions that are advanced by the study. Summatively, this study observes and concludes that religion, in this case Christianity occupies a perceptively incongruous position where it is suable by people in conflicting situations. Further, where domination, power and capitalism as an economic system meet, religion belongs in the mind and the eye of the beholders who seeks to use it to justify and defend their particular interests and positions. / English Studies / M.A. (English Studies)

In her bibliography, Incidents in the life of a Salve Girl, Harriet Ann Jacobs appropriates the autobiographical "I" in order to tell her own story of slavery and talk back to the dominant culture that enslaves her. Through analysis and explication of the text, this thesis examines Jacobs' rhetorical and psyshological evolution from slave to self as she struggles against patriarchal power that would rob her of her identity as well as her freedom. Included in the discussion is an analysis of the concept of self in western plilosophy, an overview of american autobiography prior to the publication of Jacobs' narrative, a discussion of the history of the slave narrative as a genre, and a discussion of the history of Jacobs' narrative.