Thesis (Ph. D.)--Indiana University of Pennsylvania. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--New York University, 1938. / Thesis note on half-title. Published also without thesis note. "Reference notes": p. [269]-282. Bibliography: p. [283]-295.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--New York University, 1938. / Thesis note on half-title. Published also without thesis note. "Reference notes": p. [269]-282. Bibliography: p. [283]-295.

Thesis (Ed. D.) -- University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2005. / Title from title page screen (viewed on Feb. 13, 2006). Thesis advisor: Colleen P. Gilrane. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

The dissertation undertakes a loosely chronological examination of Goethe's chief prose and poetic works in four areas of scientific inquiry: geology, botany, anatomy, and meteorology. Through a comparison of the prose essays and thematically related poems, it portrays the evolving relationship between prose and poetry in his scientific writings, explores the nature and scope of his programmatic reflections in regard to scientific language, and discloses underlying motivations which he veiled in his scientific prose. It is found that the union of science and poetry "auf hoherer Stelle" which Goethe envisioned applies not only to his explicitly didactic poetry, but has a germinal presence in the form of a poetic subtext within the related prose treatises. More broadly, the unified statement made by his prose and poetic science lifts it into the context of his entire literary production--a point underscored by his setting of scientific studies in their autobiographical context. This in turn is found to participate in a larger program of raising personal experience to archetypal status and viewing the particular as symbolic of the general. Goethe's demand that the language used to describe each domain be derived from that domain, is found to have implications beyond the striving to create appropriate terminology. The same impulse is reflected in scientific writings which create a formal mimesis of the natural phenomenon under study, or which more broadly reflect, by their tone and imagery, the character he experienced in that realm of nature. Finally, Goethe's freedom in dealing with scientific terminology is found to represent a form of linguistic irony, reflecting his perception that all language is "eigentlich bildlich" and cannot refer directly to reality. His recourse to poetry within science thus represents an epistemological statement.

This dissertation addresses an intensely contested issue in the Romantic and postmodern imaginations: the relation of literary aesthetics to political critique. Examining the aesthetic theories of Friedrich Schiller, William Wordsworth, Helen Maria Williams, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as four theorists of the twentieth century, I devise a theory of "Romantic aesthetic politics," an aesthetic interpretation of politics for reformist critique. While critics of "Romantic ideology" have interpreted Romantic theory as an obstacle to political action, I contend that Romanticism extends the possibilities for political action by refusing a narrow field of empiricism. The political force of Romanticism, I argue, is the extent to which it forces a rethinking of the terms of the political. The diverse set of writers gathered in my dissertation converge on one point: not only is all literature necessarily political, they argue, but all politics is necessarily literary. Part One of my dissertation investigates a Romantic theory that champions aesthetic formalism as revolutionary politics. Schiller, Wordsworth, Williams, and Shelley shift the field of the political from its common institutional manifestations--government, war, law--to a field of the symbolic--beauty, metaphor, verse. Each author finds in the aesthetic a model for an anti-absolutist, democratic state. Schiller states this position most succinctly in claiming that "it is only through Beauty that man makes his way to freedom." Similarly, Williams reads the early years of the Revolution as an aesthetic-political landscape where symbolism serves as a discursive means to political dispersal and plurality. Part Two of my dissertation examines the resonances of Romantic aesthetic politics in four aesthetic theories of the twentieth century. Romanticism, I contend, informs the aesthetic theories of the Frankfurt School represented by Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno, who draw on the radical potential of aesthetic subjectivity and irony in opposition to Lukacsian realism. Against the interpretation of deconstruction as politically quietist, de Man presents the aesthetic nature of politics as the very engine of political change, while Carl Schmitt--denouncer of "political Romanticism" and a supporter of Nazism--exposes a continuum between absolutist politics and an anti-aesthetic political critique.

No description available.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Central Florida, 2009. / Adviser: Robert Everett. Includes bibliographical references (p. 94-97).

The focus of this thesis is on four novels’ illustrations of the parallels and interrelations between the foundational crisis of mathematics and the political, linguistic, and epistemological crises around the turn to the twentieth century. While the latter crises with their climax in the First World War are commonly agreed to define modern culture and literature, this thesis concentrates on their relations with the ‘modernist transformation’ of mathematics as illustrated in Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (2006) and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers (1930-1932), and Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities (1930/32). In the revaluation of mathematics during its foundational crisis, the certainty and rationality of this most certain science is challenged, and the novels accordingly employ mathematics as an example for the dramatic transformation of the modern West, the wider loss of absolute truth, and the increasing scepticism towards Enlightenment values. Crisis, however, also implied some freedoms and opportunities for literature and criticism. When the developing modern notion of mathematics is defined by autonomy and independence from the natural world, it bears traits more commonly associated with literary fiction, and the novels examine the possible convergence of mathematics and literature in the freedom of imaginary existence. The novels thus highlight the unique position of the structural science mathematics in the relation of the (natural) sciences and the humanities and suggest it to escape or straddle the perceived divide between the disciplines. The examination and historicising of relations between fiction and mathematical conceptualisations of the world as introduced in the major works by Pynchon, Broch, and Musil thus also contributes to distinguishing the specific conditions of studying mathematics in fiction in the wider field of literature and science.

No description available.