Read the abstract in the section 00front of this document. / Dissertation (MA(English))--University of Pretoria, 2006. / English / unrestricted

Social breakdown and the failure of Han Confucianism in the middle of third century A.D. China turned the Shi literati to Daoism for inspiration to construct an authentic way of life. The subsequent one hundred and fifty years were a cultural process of dissonant cacophony, in which the synthesis of the two ideologies finally had to give way to Buddhism. The process, what is called the Neo-Daoist Movement, is to date still in demand of an interdisciplinary, vigorously historical, study. This writing traces a dialectical cultural and mental development by examining the Shi-literati's life and works, including philosophy and literature, and their often exaggerated behavior in everyday life. It reveals that, in yearning for a life of transcendence, the Shi also wanted to maintain their worldly engagement, and subsequently constructed a paradoxical world view that provided them a spiritual space in a time of social turmoil. By investigating the Shi's cosmology, and their sense of community and self-definition, the present study elucidates the possibilities, as well as the limits, of what they constructed as the authentic life. The possibilities and limits can be seen most clearly in the works of Tao Yuan-mind, a great poet who lived at the ending period of the era. Living the life of a farmer, Tao Yuan-mind roughed through life's hardship by taking a spiritual stance that was congenial to both Confucianism and Daoism. In its own way, Tao's poetry brought out what Neo-Daoism should have come to but never did. Precisely because of this nature, Tao's works were historical while transcending the times. In this detailed study of an individual writer and Neo-Daoism, we complete the spiritual-mapping of the era.

This dissertation enters the conversation about what experimentalism has to do with poets of color while paying particular attention to the ways in which three women writing now—Myung Mi Kim, Claudia Rankine, and Marlene Nourbese Philip (the latter poet publishes under the name “M. Nourbese Philip)—deal with the complicated matter of contemporary selfhood. In all of their works, one of the central questions of poetic inquiry, “Who is speaking?” turns out to be a rather inappropriate question that forces traditional readings on these non-traditional texts, thus producing meanings that have more to do with poetic convention than the texts at hand. Instead, this project approaches these writers' texts asking, what kind of reading do these texts invite, as well as resist? Indeed, what kind of contemporary poetics do they create? This dissertation looks at how contemporary experimental poetry of racial mourning locates its grief not in racial experience itself, but in what produces identity-based experience in the first place. It contends that racial identity creates melancholia precisely because it is, paradoxically, a social construction that feels natural to us. Poets Kim, Philip, and Rankine use formal and linguistic innovation—including fragmentation, stammers, brackets, blank spaces, made-up words, lists, and pictograms—to re-imagine identity as inauthentic and unstable, while acknowledging the desire for a sense of one's self that's more whole, more sayable, more recognizable. This dissertation contextualizes their experimental work by charting a kinship between them, early elegiac poetries of racial mourning, and other contemporary poetry from Frederick Douglass to Major Jackson.

Pothos, "longing" or "absence", is identified as the singular topos accounting for both the origin of tragedy and the origin of ontology from the epic and pre-Socratic narratives of the tragic crisis in Mythos. In Homer's Iliad it is the pothos of Achilles' curse upon the Achaeans which distinguishes the genius of Homer's Iliad from the Iliadic tradition whence it arises in supplanting the tradition theme of menis, or "wrath". As substance of the curse, Achilles' pothos, or "absence" from battle, ultimately redounds back upon him in his pothos, or "longing" for his surrogate Patroclus. Although pothos per se recedes into the background among the pre-Socratics, its repercussions are evident in the disarticulation of the integrity of Mythos in the unfolding developments associated with the limit (peras), from Anaximander through Parmenides and Empedocles. It is in this context that the origins of ontology are discovered as arising in Hesiod. The putatively metaphysical dicta of Anaximander, and even Parmenides' positive apodeixis of Being are interpreted against the tragic backdrop of the end of epic and as anticipating in a singular historical development the origin of tragedy proper. The retrospective orientation of Parmenides to the archaic Dike, "Justice", of Epic is overextended. The apparent positivity of his apodeixis of Being, is over-determined and belies the now advanced and ineluctable crisis of the tragic. Aeschylus' apotheosis of tragedy in the Oresteia emerges from the penumbra of the transit of Being (einai) before Mythos, and will thus be written in the shadow of what was objectively 'revealed' in Parmenides' noetic transcendence to the open sphere of Dike. This is evident first in the disaesthesis of the archaic symbolon in the active Empedoclean optics of the gorgonic epiphany of the graphe in the sacrifice of Iphigeneia, in which the enigmas of the parodos of the Agamemnon are cledonographically revealed. This disaesthesis is, however, but the obverse of the opsis, or "image", of Helen's phasma which appears, hypostatized, independently of human experience hovering above Aeschylus's inversion of Empedocles's cosmogonic whirlpool of Love and hate, hovering over the cosmophthoric abyss of pothos.

This dissertation investigates and analyzes the process of subject formation among Turkish immigrants of the second and third generation in the southwestern German region of Swabia (Schwaben). The study shows how Turkish immigrants find salient ways to formulate their subjectivities in deliberate contradistinction to a straightforward Cartesian model. In the ethnographic section of the dissertation four Turkish immigrant narratives are presented. In discussing these cases, it is shown that Turkish immigrant existence in the region of Swabia is characterized by a fascinating diversity and differentiation. This existence is thus a far cry from the homogenizing imaginaries that persist about Turkish immigrants and Turkish-German culture in German mainstream society. Of particular interest here are the skillful and often ingenious ways in which immigrants reconcile their seemingly antagonistic desires for remaining in touch with their Turkish heritage and traditions and a claim to belong to a present or future (German) modernity. There exist manifold ways in which Turkish immigrants in Swabia can, for instance, utilize forms of regional, national, and transnational identification to achieve a reconciliation of modern with traditional ways of life. Analysis of the immigrants' situation in Swabia suggests that forms of regional identification have recently gained significantly in importance. Identification at the regional level apparently offers immigrants the most accessible inroad into mainstream societies of their new homelands. The emphasis lies here on demonstrating the diversity of possible ways available to immigrants to achieve these goals. The analysis of the ethnographic material at hand focuses on the salience of recent models of subjectivity and the substantial critiques these models have furnished of the traditional way Cartesian subjectivity has been conceived. It is argued that many of these critiques offer valuable and indispensable qualifications or modifications to the homogenizing force of the cogito approach that has come to be the hallmark of modernity. This study also shows, however, that the ideal image of the Cartesian subject cannot be simply eliminated from our registers since it serves as a negative counter-point against the backdrop of which more heterogeneous versions of subjectivity can be formulated. For Turkish immigrants in Swabia, this means that their subjectivities are formulated beyond, but in constant (negative) reference to, the demands placed on them by German mainstream society to adopt a homogeneous, cogito -driven form of subjectivity in order to prove their claim for belonging to ‘the right kind of’ modernity. Instead of giving in to these demands, the immigrants complement their modern subject formations with key elements that are located beyond the grasp of modernity—thus subverting German claims that they prove their belonging to the modern world in a particular way. In the final analysis, the study thus suggests that we need to retain the conceptual image of Cartesian subjectivity because it continues to serve as a salient model for many in today's allegedly postmodern world. However, many contemporary subjects—such as the Turkish immigrants of Swabia—refine the model of Cartesian subjectivity in their desire to account for important pre- or postmodern elements in their lives. Descartes' cogito as a main pillar of modern subjectivity is thus in need, today, of important amplifications that pay tribute to the rapid changes in a globalizing world that, not just in the case of Europe, has simultaneously rediscovered the importance of regional identities. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

This dissertation examines a series of conceptions shared by the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan and two key, first-generation members of the American pragmatist school of philosophy, Charles Sanders Peirce and George Herbert Mead. In one sense, this undertaking responds to the recent international interest in uncovering affinities between pragmatism and continental postmodern thought, but in a more polemical vein, the dissertation inveighs against the work of neopragmatists who configure “pragmatism” as a nominalist-oriented, anti-theoretical system of thought. By emphasizing pragmatist formulations of two often-overlooked members of the pragmatist school, Pragmatism and the Unconscious attempts to restore a stridently abstract, unapologetically theoretical, and indeed pragmatist cast of mind to its proper place. Lacan's writings and seminars have gained notoriety as a form of obscurantism, but in linking Lacanian theory to pragmatism, the dissertation does not merely attempt an improbable synthesis of opposites. Rather, the premise here is that Lacanian theory is the natural partner of pragmatist philosophy, and for very concrete reasons. One of these is that Lacan's central thesis, that “the unconscious is structured like a language,” emerged in part out of Lacan's engagement with the founding texts of pragmatism, the semiotic theories of C. S. Peirce; another is that the social psychology of George Herbert Mead provides perhaps the closest analogue to Lacan's treatment of intersubjectivity we may find in the twentieth century. Pragmatism and the Lacanian unconscious are thus already linked both in terms of textual transmission and conceptual affinity; Pragmatism and the Unconscious merely attempts to reveal these linkages in their philosophical richness. American narrative plays an explicative role in the dissertation. Whereas Chapter One stages a meeting between Peirce and Lacan, Chapter Two locates the shared concerns of these thinkers within the status of women in Nathaniel Hawthorne's fiction. While Chapter Three focuses on George Herbert Mead's ideas concerning identity as an effect and process of social collaboration as well as Lacan's approximations of such notions, Chapter Four locates these problems as a fundamental issue for Nella Larsen's treatment of African-American subjectivity in her novels Passing and Quicksand .* *Originally published in DAI Vol. 62, No. 4. Republished here with corrected abstract.

The tendency to assume that Schiller's early works follow a pro-revolutionary program and from there to assume Schiller's positive uncritical anticipation of the French Revolution show great disregard for Schiller's highly articulated moral-philosophical concept of rebellion prior to 1789 and accordingly obscures the interpretation of Schiller's specific reactions to the French Revolution. Schiller's first writings on aesthetics and moral philosophy comprise a moral philosophical and teleological system with which Schiller analyzed the moral dynamics of political rebellions. This concept stem from Schiller's categorization of action dominated by either sensual drives or abstract reason and his use of these categories for the critical analysis of rebels and rebellion. These early categories reveal that Schiller's distance from the French Revolution should have come as no surprise, on the contrary, in light of this highly articulated concept of rebellion, anything more than ambivalence would have marked a surprising change of direction. In Chapter I, this system provides the basis for the analysis of Schiller's judgement of his own dramatic portrayal of rebels and rebellion and of those in his historical works. Schiller's portrayals of rebellion up to the execution of Louis XVI will be analyzed in order to demonstrate that his later concept of rebellion corroborates his early moral philosophy and teleological theories, and thus was not notably altered by the French Revolution. Schiller's distance shows no change in his written reactions at any point in the early French Revolution. In Chapter II examples from Schiller's most famous quotes regarding the French Revolution are discussed in context, in order to demonstrate that none of these letters, conversations, and events indicate anything but Schiller's ambivalence toward the French Revolution, in contrast to the ideologically polarized interpretations they have inspired, which have in turn clouded the understanding of Schiller's politics in general. Chapter III analyses Schiller's biography and publications from the years 1788–1796, in which Schiller's poetic and dramatic production decreased and during which Schiller undertook a study of aesthetics, years which coincidentally correlate with the French Revolution and the publication of Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790). This approximate synchronicity led to the theory that Schiller, disappointed by the political reality and under the dominant influence of Kant, turned his back on politics and sought refuge in the abstract world of philosophy. Since, however, Schiller was not shocked, and since his preoccupation with politics was never documentably stronger than directly after the execution of Louis XVI, it is evident that the disregard of Schiller's early writings is the prerequisite for the misleading canonical periodization of Schiller's concept of rebellion into the phases (1) hope for, (2) disappointment in, (3) flight from political rebellion.

This dissertation concerns itself with a comparison of the differing aesthetic theories set forth by Theodor W. Adorno and Jacques Derrida. After an introduction to the varying backgrounds informing Adorno and Derrida, Neo-Marxism and a certain kind of Heideggerian Phenomenology respectively, the dissertation then describes the most relevant points of these theories to this discussion and furthermore, how these transform any exegesis of literary texts. Subjects under discussion are the historic background of literary texts, truth-value in a piece of art, the question of societal relevance to/of literature, negativity in art, the critique of subjectivity, the question of the "text" and the relationship of literature to philosophy. These items are then further developed in critical practice; for that purpose, Adorno's essays on Stefan George and Derrida's work on Paul Celan were chosen. It is being argued that while Adorno takes a prescriptive stance on some issues of literature (e.g. canonization and a rejection of newer art forms), when it comes to the societal applications of literature, it is Adorno's theory that is better able to account for these, since it has a framework which allows for minute descriptions of these processes. On the other hand, Derridean text analyses can be more yielding due to various theoretical constructs such as differance, trace, dissemination, but his theory lacks a working definition for a societal grounding of literature, thereby seriously impeding its own progress. This becomes clear in his treatment of Paul Celan. While he is able to interpret many facets of Celan's poetry and theory of writing in a very interesting way, the one aspect informing all of Celan's writings, the Holocaust, is left aside. Due to the Derridan theory's lack of grounding in actual history, the historical fact of the Holocaust cannot inform his own writing, thereby cutting short an otherwise invigorating and extensive hermeneutical interpretation. Both theories have their advantages, but as theory geared toward societal change, Adorno's theory proves to be more yielding.

<p> This project is an investigation into the extent to which popular fantasy fictions entice their audiences to imaginatively reconsider their ethical commitments, relationships, and world views. Building upon the work of Richard Rorty and Martha C. Nussbaum's ethical criticism, I argue that the popular fantasy fictions by C. L. Wilson, George R. R. Martin, and Jim Butcher can assist audiences to understand the constructed nature of individual identity and the social construction of reality, allowing them to participate in discursive communities that empower them to see beyond stereotypes and to consider other people, no matter their differences, as humans equally capable of and entitled to their own decision-making. C. L. Wilson's <i>Tairen Soul</i> series provides a lesson on the importance of inclusion and communication, as it demonstrates that the differences people perceive in cultural groups are constructed and not actual. George R. R. Martin's <i>A Song of Ice and Fire</i> demonstrates that buying into others' notions of identity, particularly in terms of gender, can be debilitating and restricting, and Jim Butcher's <i>The Dresden Files</i> shows that people with differing religious identities and beliefs can cooperate to solve problems even when they cannot agree upon their constructions of reality. Fantasy as a genre is valuable for cultural criticism, as it can function allegorically to allow audiences to experience emotions genuinely in an arena outside of their assumptions, engaging in experience-taking and learning how constructed realities are dependent upon their own interpretative, but not infallible, frameworks. Fantasy, in other words, can be used to engage people in discussions about values independent of real life that can then be applied to real life, allowing more people into the discussion about how to increase human happiness, a project that Rorty sees as the goal of human progress.</p>

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