Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Nevada, Reno, 2005. / "August 2005." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 229-239). Online version available on the World Wide Web. Library also has microfilm. Ann Arbor, Mich. : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [2005]. 1 microfilm reel ; 35 mm.

Post-structuralist theories of literary criticism such as deconstruction have provided useful tools with which to analyze "texts" but have also contributed to (and are symptomatic of) the widening gap that is experienced today between reader and "text," between "real life" and aesthetic experience, between interpretive practice and critical theory. Many contemporary theorists and teachers interested in bridging this gap are searching for new critical and pedagogical methodologies, for alternatives to deconstruction. A careful examination of Sartre's "progressive-regressive" method in terms of its potential for application in aesthetic theory and criticism will provide a valuable contribution to current discourse on relevant textual and socio-cultural issues. / Sartre's progressive-regressive method enacts a fusion of Marxist sociology and existential psychoanalysis. Sartre employed this method as a tool for both socio-historical and psycho-biographical research. The progressive-regressive method has three dialectical stages: (1) phenomenological description, (2) regressive analysis, and (3) progressive synthesis. / My purpose in this dissertation is to extract and modify those aspects of Sartre's method which might be applied in critical discourse on aesthetic experience. To achieve this goal, I employ the progressive-regressive method as the organizing principle of my investigation. / Part One of my study is devoted to theory and includes (1) a phenomenological description of the origins and purposes of Sartre's method, (2) a regressive analysis of Sartre's own development and implementation of the method as a tool for socio-historical and psycho-biographical research, and (3) a progressive synthesis as I impose the necessary modifications upon Sartre's method that are required for the project at hand. Part Two is devoted to practical demonstration: here I implement the progressive-regressive method as a tool for critical discourse on aesthetic experience in three practical demonstrations (1) on Samuel Beckett's novel How It Is, (2) on Simone Martini's Annunciation Altarpiece, and (3) on a theme in the literature of the Marquis de Sade. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-11, Section: A, page: 3938. / Major Professor: E. F. Kaelin. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1992.

The goal of this study is a critical analysis of W. B. Yeats's metaphysical system of ethics as it is developed in his visionary and apocalyptic writings. These writings include the great unpublished mass of his Automatic Script, the unpublished Sleep and Dream Notebooks, and the 1925 version of A Vision. / A Vision, with its attendant body of visionary materials, is the product of one of the most remarkable sustained psychical experiments in our time. Between October 1917, when W. B. Yeats married Georgie Hyde-Lees, and April 1925, when the first version of A Vision was complete, Yeats and his wife conducted almost daily a series of psychic experiments which included automatic writing and sleep and dream trances. The automatic writing experiments generally took on a question-answer format, with Yeats as the inquirer and George as the medium or interpreter for the response, which they insisted was transmitted through her from the spirit world. The resulting notebooks (some forty of them), along with the Sleep and Dream Notebooks, are a record of the Yeats's dialogue with the spirit world. The intent of this study is to examine Yeats's involvement in the early twentieth-century revolution in human consciousness through an analysis of the ethical concepts which can be derived from his visionary and apocalyptic writings, particularly the development of those theories over the course of his psychic experiments with George. / Yeats's labor led him to posit the necessity of developing a "Vision of Evil" for any further progression of the soul, and to locate the place of value at the level of image in the unconscious. His approach to the problem of evil in the Script was thus both inherited and radically original, supporting the notion that in our everyday experiences we not only find value but that we make it, and effecting a belief towards an ideal end which lies outside the mere fact of existence. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-10, Section: A, page: 3525. / Major Professor: George Mills Harper. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1992.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 32-04, Section: A, page: 2087. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1971.

Despite a writing career of only twenty years, George Orwell produced six novels, three documentary books, a small collection of poetry, and several hundred essays, commentaries and pieces of criticism. He was a prolific writer whose reputation seemingly now rests more upon his nonfictional prose than his fiction, in the eyes of many scholars. / Today it is Orwell's reportage and any of several essay collections which often draw the attention of readers of his work; the early novels especially, most of which are now out of print, have slipped to secondary status--more often cited to show Orwell at his less-polished. / This dissertation asserts that Orwell made several valuable contributions to and exercises in the form of the novel during his lifetime, and that although he never wrote a book-length work describing his own writing process or one which he might suggest to others, in his collected works, there is the basis for such a volume. / The text opens with a prefatory chapter establishing Orwell's ability as a novelist and prose writer in general, in the eyes of his peers and critics alike. This includes secondary criticism spanning Orwell's career through the more contemporary work of recent years. / After this set-up, the dissertation moves similarly into a more focused discussion of Orwell's background, work ethic and ability, followed by chapters considering his style, creation of characters and setting; before finally concluding with remarks on his impact on other writers, his view of the future of literature, and his final place in English literature of this century. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 57-03, Section: A, page: 1146. / Major Professor: Hunt Hawkins. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1996.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 35-05, Section: A, page: 3008. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1974.

Thesis advisor: Timothy Duket / Synthesizing elements of so many traditions, fantasy has grown into perhaps the most pervasive genre of literature in the western world. The archetypal adventures and themes that have been carried into fantasy through ancient legends and myths have survived over the ages because it was decided long ago those tales had great worth. It was the unpopular and poorly formed legends that died out, while the superior stories were carried from culture to culture under new guises. In this way, fantasy can be seen as the culmination of human legends, filtered throughout history so that only the great tales remain. On what greater pedestal could a form of literature be based? Fantasy has even continued the refinement process in the last fifty years, with active writers like Jordan and Goodkind incorporating elements from the greatest of previous fantasy authors like Tolkien, Howard, and Donaldson. Thus fantasy is continually improving upon itself and evolving in new ways through its modification of old themes. How long can critics refuse to recognize fantasy as a legitimate form? With such admirable authors writing today, it seems logical that the answer would be sooner rather than later. Might fantasy be vanquished by sneering critics and replaced with another form of fiction? Gandalf claims even the Wise cannot see all ends, and while in no way do I profess such wisdom, I find it difficult to believe that, as the successor of mythology, fantasy will ever fizzle and die. A force greater than all the magic swords and rings combined would be necessary to kill four thousand years of human imagination. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2003. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

Kant famously wrote, "Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind." The traditional reception of Kant understands this claim as a synopsis of his views about semantic content. On the one hand, according to this reading, our concepts and the thoughts they compose would be meaningless without perception, or "intuition," to verify them and thereby provide them with content; on the other, our perceptions would have no structure and would be of no cognitive use without concepts to direct them. Against the traditional reading, this dissertation argues that Kant's many claims about the necessary relations that run between intuitions and concepts are most fundamentally of epistemological rather than semantic significance. Kant's ultimate aim was to articulate the necessary conditions that must obtain for sensibility and understanding, intuitions and concepts, to cooperate in the pursuit of theoretical knowledge of the world. This interpretation is grounded on an analysis of three puzzles that arise around the function of intuition in his theoretical epistemology. The first puzzle arises for Kant's view of the nature of the content of perception. Is perception exhaustively conceptual in structure, or is it at all an independent representational faculty? According to Orthodox Conceptualism, Kant's central argument in the Transcendental Analytic entails that perception is conceptual. It is widely agreed that, in the Analytic, Kant aims to show that certain fundamental metaphysical concepts, called "categories," including the relation of cause and effect, genuinely apply to objects. Orthodox Conceptualism argues that the categories can only be shown to apply to objects if they necessarily structure our perception of objects. Against this orthodox reading, I argue that, in fact, the success of the Analytic presupposes a strong version of Non-Conceptualism. Orthodox Conceptualism saddles Kant with a kind of error theory of categorial judgments, by showing that the categories apply only to our mind's subjective organization of perceptual experience and not to the objects of that experience. Kant is and should be a non-conceptualist about perceptual content. The second puzzle arises when we consider Kant's postulate of actuality, which claims that perception provides necessary and sufficient justification for knowledge of the reality of things. Cartesian external world skepticism challenges this principle by, in part, appeal to an inferential model of perception. On that model we are only ever immediately aware of our own inner representations and then must infer the existence of things external to those inner states. If Descartes is right, then our knowledge of the external world will always be less certain than the knowledge we have of our own minds. How exactly does Kant mean to respond to this challenge and to what extent, if any, is it successful? Traditional interpretations of Kant's "Refutation" of Cartesian skepticism argue that even our knowledge of the temporal order of our own mental states, knowledge of the kind "I saw x, then saw y," depends on our possession of certain causal information about the things that caused those thoughts and which those thoughts are about, namely x and y. While I agree that Kant aims to argue that some form of self-knowledge, which Descartes thinks can be foundational for philosophy, is mediated by our knowledge of the external world, the traditional Causal Reading falls short in a variety of ways. Kant aimed to show that the capacity to have knowledge of our existence as a time-determinable self, in an objective empirical time, depends on our capacity to make true determinations about objects in space. Objects in space, according to Kant, must be used to fix the frames of reference in which empirical time-determinations can be made. So, if it is true that we can have objective knowledge of our own existence in time, then the objects in space that we use to ground those judgments must exist. If the Cartesian wishes to challenge the capacity to objectively determine even our own existence, then he leaves himself no philosophical ground to stand on, nor any way to move forward from the bare bones of his cogito. He also thereby transforms himself into an extreme skeptic. Although Kant cannot answer this extreme form of skepticism on its own terms, I argue that he has systematic resources for dismissing it as a real threat to theoretical philosophy. Extreme skepticism is nothing more than a subject's mere longing for a kind of perspective on her own cognitive situation that is in principle impossible for her to have, given the very nature of cognition. Such a perspective is what Kant would call "noumenal" and is therefore not a genuine question for theoretical reason. The third puzzle arises when we consider Kant's Transcendental Idealism in light of his claims that "noumena" are "merely logically possible." Noumena, by definition, are paradigmatic "empty" concepts, in Kant's sense, insofar as we can never experience them, and therefore have "no insight" into their real possibility. Nevertheless a core thesis of Kant's Transcendental Idealism is that the concept of noumena somehow epistemologically "limits" our empirical knowledge to the realm of "appearances," rather than "things in themselves." Now the puzzle arises: How can a mere empty concept, the object of which we cannot even say is really possible, set any kind of restriction on the scope of our empirical knowledge? I argue that the source of the puzzle lies in "metaphysical" interpretations of the distinction between phenomena and noumena, readings which distinguish either between two worlds with two kinds of objects, or between two kinds of property of one type of object. Dissolving the puzzle, I argue, requires adopting a strongly methodological reading of the distinction, according to which the phenomenal refers to that domain of metaphysical possibility into which we can legitimately inquire, and the noumenal to that space of mere logical possibilities that falls beyond. By distinguishing between the domains of legitimate metaphysically inquiry and metaphysical possibility per se, Kant can consistently demand a theoretical agnosticism about the real possibility of noumena while at the same time showing that the concept of noumena restricts the domain of empirical knowledge.

This dissertation examines how authors textually and semiotically appropriated the dynamics of industrialization to propose new interpretations of society. Through the analysis of the rhetorical use of three images central to industrial progress: energy, work, and movement, the study focuses in particular on the symbolic and material impact of the railroad and mining boom at the turn from nineteenth to twentieth century in Spain. Symbolically, the two phenomena contributed to the reformulation of social, political, and religious tensions. Materially, they generated new forms of perception by redefining notions of time and space. I suggest that these transformations produced a paradigm shift in the conceptualization of national identity by complicating the conditions of possibility through which authors attempted to reconcile past and present in the conflict-riddled ideological transition between the remnants of the Ancien Regime and the modern State. By reformulating the idea of Spanish national modernization as an uneven or incomplete process, this research demonstrates that the concepts of nation and identity are dynamic paradigms whose continual adjustments end up being resolved in the sphere of discourse.

While literary critics have explored the politics of labor in pre-war modernist literature, the post-45 avant-garde has continued to be framed as a depoliticized repetition of previous avant-garde styles. Examining American avant-garde literature in its relation to the political and economic shifts from the 1960s through the late 1980s, my dissertation corrects this narrative to show that labor and labor politics were central categories in post-war experimental poetry and fiction. I argue that writers as disparate as Charles Olson, William S. Burroughs, Samuel R. Delany, and Susan Howe reworked disjunctive modernist forms to cognitively map emergent economic tendencies in the US. Parataxis, collage, surrealist imagery, aleatory compositional methods, non-linear plotting, and metafictional narrative conceits all constitute the stylistic techniques of an avant-garde engaged in an extended dialogue about work and the politics of work. The canon of experimental literature functioned as a counter-discourse that contested and reshaped discourses of labor by considering it alongside categories of race, gender, and sexuality. By using labor as an entry point into the avant-garde, my dissertation reconsiders the post-war literary canon, revealing an avant-garde that includes writers working across modes and genres. The adaptation of experimental techniques in genre writing turned the avant-garde into a popular literary mode. My dissertation particularly focuses on science fiction (SF), where the adaptation of experimental style played a crucial role in the development of the genre. Beginning with the 1960s British and American New Wave movement, SF writers turned to the experimental novel--often by way of modernist poetics--as a way to challenge the reified form of mainstream science fiction novels. I argue that this critique of the novel also functioned as a covert critique of the labor practices of the literary market place that guided the production of genre fiction. In this way, I contest traditional accounts that see post-war and contemporary experimental literature as increasingly marginal and self-reflective by tracking the avant-garde's concern with depicting quotidian work, and representing themselves as workers, to critique institutions of intellectual and artistic production.