No description available.

Transcending the boundaries of literature, the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Stanislaw Lem contribute to a dialogue between literary, philosophical, and scientific cultures. A critical approach to these writers that ignores the epistemic dimension in their works opens itself to the charge of misunderstanding their artistic goals and aspirations. In my dissertation I thus define, justify, and conduct an interdisciplinary study of Poe and Lem's works. / My project is underwritten by the epistemological assumption that literary works, and notably works of fiction, can make a contribution to knowledge that can be assessed in terms of interdisciplinary criteria. In the first chapter, where I discuss literature and knowledge within the interdisciplinary context, I examine various epistemological arguments in light of my central assertion. Next I examine the concepts involved in the discussion of literary works. Following the pragmatic re-orientation in literary and philosophical aesthetics, many fundamental concepts we take for granted--artworks, fictions, and texts among them--require exact re-examination and definition. Consequently, in Chapters Two and Three I review and refine the recent theories concerning the nature of works of art, the specificity of literary fictions, and the problem of literary interpretations. / My subsequent discussion of Poe and Lem is built on the theoretical base of (literary) epistemology and analytical aesthetics. I study Poe and Lem's literary fictions and theoretical essays, and the contributions they make to various fields of inquiry. In the process I critique, and sometimes refine, the explicit and implicit hypotheses articulated in their works. Specifically In Chapters Four and Five I discuss strategic and game theoretic models in the interpretation of fiction, including the concepts of communication and rationality. In Chapter Six, completing the epistemological circle inaugurated in Chapter One, I discuss the epistemological and cosmological theories proposed in Poe's "Eureka".

The aim of this thesis is to explore the elements of power-knowledge in two SF novels written amid the Space Race during the Cold War era. While the dominant interest of both Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris and Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama generally revolves around the implications of human interactions with an alien presence, my focus is primarily on the power structures that propel those interactions: questioning the intentions of scientific pursuits and analyzing the effects of Foucauldian power relations on the human individual. I do this by applying Foucault’s theories of the duality of the subject and his work on biopolitics. What is gleaned is not only a study of the interests of power, but an emphasis on the intersectional restrictions of power and cognition. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2020. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Diploma thesis deals with three forms of Solaris. Specifically with novel by Stanislaw Lem, a film adaptation of Andrei Tarkovsky and the second film adaptation of Steven Soderbergh. The aim of this work is comparison of individual authors practices that led to different semantic tone. Thesis analyzes six basic aspects of individual works: basis, genre, semantic structure, syntactic structure - a dramatic structure, characters and space-time.

This dissertation examines Soviet and Polish science fiction from the 1960s to 1980s as a political genre that investigates power and society. The problem of alterity is central for this genre: it is ungovernable because it is incomprehensible. Science fiction of this kind explores the possibilities and impossibilities of living with the Other that can impact social organization dramatically and lethally while that Other cannot be impacted in return. Living peacefully with such alterity is the fundamental premise of pluralism as a principle of social organization, according to the conclusions of the study. The dissertation explores alterity in science fiction by Ivan Efremov (1908–1972), Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (1925–1991 and 1933–2012), Stanisław Lem (1921–2006), and Volodymyr Savchenko (1933–2005). My goal is to reveal in their works a transformative epistemological shift that had manifested itself through the tropes of alterity. Among these tropes the dissertation highlights aliens and alien civilizations, artificial intelligence, anisotropic universe, distant planets endowed with unique natural attributes, the more abstract unknown, and non-human elements running out-of-control within human species. I also examine specifically science-fictional notions such as the bull and progressor, which represent the intelligentsia’s relations with power and the masses. The analyzed literary worlds also represent their authors’ views of alternative societal organization, ruled by the powerful alterity such as a mega-computer or alien super-intelligence. Another important trope of alterity is based upon a simultaneous performance of contradictory competing logics that create an effect known as parallax: the reader may interpret the same characters and/or stories in multiple, mutually incompatible, ways. Beyond avoiding censorship, these tropes set the stage for the authors’ utopias, in which the Other appears as an impenetrable alterity that affects those who encounter it. For these writers, alterity serves as the tool for problematizing progress, as it was imagined after World War II by the majority of political elites under socialism and in the West. I suggest that their science fiction contributed, among many other factors, to the lexicon and the imaginary of a cohort of political dissidents and Communist Party functionaries alike who translated science-fictional themes into political science terms to shape Perestroika’s discourse. The dissertation, thus, establishes a historical connection between Soviet and Polish science fiction of the post-Stalin period and the ways in which democracy was discursively constructed in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and other former socialist nations.

The study examines cognitive rationality as to()l for problemsolving within the context of a movement from determinism and monolithic universal Reason towards indeterminism and plurality. It is contended that theories of literature do not provide an adequate conceptual framework, and therefore, extensive use is made of pluralist fallibilism (Popper, Helmut Spinner) and chaos theory. The philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche is viewed as a decisive influence in the shift towards plurality and scepticism. In chapter 2, Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, a novel by Agatha Christie and Gaston Leroux's Le mystere de Ia chambre jaune are discussed as examples of optimistic rationalism. Chapter 3 indicates that Eco's II nome della rosa emphasizes the conjectural nature of truth and objective knowledge, underpinned by a 'soft' rationalism which amounts to monopolistic pluralism. Chapter 4 analyses the defeat of cognitive rationality by the complex interaction of a multiplicity of independent causal series. The detectives' relationship with the feminine exemplifies the interpenetration of rationality and the instinctual, while the mystery of the feminine is a metaphor for impenetrable complexity. Chapter 5 shows that hypotheses concerning random complex systems remain inconclusive. However, as the trajectory of a complex system can be regulated, so reason can be viewed as the underlying regulative pattern (strange attractorl for an infinite proliferation of hypotheses. Thus, despite .shifting conceptions of rationality and order, all the detectives in the study accept objective truth as regulative principle and are involved in a search for objective knowledge / Afrikaans & Theory of Literature / D.Litt. et Phil. (Theory of literature)

The study examines cognitive rationality as to()l for problemsolving within the context of a movement from determinism and monolithic universal Reason towards indeterminism and plurality. It is contended that theories of literature do not provide an adequate conceptual framework, and therefore, extensive use is made of pluralist fallibilism (Popper, Helmut Spinner) and chaos theory. The philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche is viewed as a decisive influence in the shift towards plurality and scepticism. In chapter 2, Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, a novel by Agatha Christie and Gaston Leroux's Le mystere de Ia chambre jaune are discussed as examples of optimistic rationalism. Chapter 3 indicates that Eco's II nome della rosa emphasizes the conjectural nature of truth and objective knowledge, underpinned by a 'soft' rationalism which amounts to monopolistic pluralism. Chapter 4 analyses the defeat of cognitive rationality by the complex interaction of a multiplicity of independent causal series. The detectives' relationship with the feminine exemplifies the interpenetration of rationality and the instinctual, while the mystery of the feminine is a metaphor for impenetrable complexity. Chapter 5 shows that hypotheses concerning random complex systems remain inconclusive. However, as the trajectory of a complex system can be regulated, so reason can be viewed as the underlying regulative pattern (strange attractorl for an infinite proliferation of hypotheses. Thus, despite .shifting conceptions of rationality and order, all the detectives in the study accept objective truth as regulative principle and are involved in a search for objective knowledge / Afrikaans and Theory of Literature / D.Litt. et Phil. (Theory of literature)