Thesis (Ph. D.)--Lehigh University, 2001. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 365-371).

Thesis (M.A.)--West Virginia University, 2003. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains iv, 58 p. Vita. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 52-55).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-05, Section: A, page: 1811. Adviser: Alexander L. Mayer. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 304-329) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Irvine, 2007. / (UMI)AAI3271310. Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-07, Section: A, page: 2965. Adviser: Ellen Burt.

Al-Sirr al-Maktūm is one of the most compelling theoretical and practical accounts of astral magic written in the post-classical period of Islamic thought. Of central concern to its reader is to understand why the great philosopher-theologian, Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d.606/1210) should have written it. The occult practices described therein are attributed to the Sabians, a historical group who lived in Harrān in Upper Mesopotamia. Representing the last vestiges of Ancient Mesopotamian paganism during the early Islamic period, their religion involved the veneration of the seven planets, which they believed were ensouled celestial beings and the proximate causes of all sublunary change. By means of such astrolatry they were able, remotely, to change reality in ways which defied the customary pattern of causation in this world. The main focus of al-Rāzī‘s treatment of their practice is a long ritual during which the aspirant successively brings under his will each of the seven planets. On completion of the ritual, the aspirant would have transcended the limitations of his human existence and his soul would have attained complete perfection. This thesis will argue that for al-Rāzī, the Sabians constituted a heresiological category, representative of a soteriological system which dispensed with the need for the Islamic institution of prophethood. It relied instead on the individual‘s ability, by means of spiritual discipline and intellectual rigour, to attain noetic connection with the celestial souls. In so doing, the Sabian adept not only gains occult knowledge and power, but more importantly he realizes the ultimate aim of perfecting his soul. Al-Rāzī constructs this soteriology as a synthesis of cosmological and psychological doctrines gleaned from Avicenna, and Abū‘l-Barakāt al-Baghdādī. In this way, al-Rāzī hoped to state as succinctly as possible the intellectual challenges to which any systematic theological defence of the Islamic faith must answer if it is to triumph over rival systems of thought.

Two paradoxical elements in Camus's work, both kept at a distance by the author, are the feminine and the sacred. The feminine is paradoxical in its patterns of speech and silence, and of partial or aspectual absence and presence. Whereas feminine speech and presence are abundant in Camus's theatre, absence, silence and fragmentation of the feminine characterize his narrative works, with the exception of the short story, "La femme adultere." The sense of the sacred, which permeates Camus's work, represents a philosophical paradox. Indeed, how to reconcile Camus's agnosticism and his philosophy of the absurd, which denies transcendance, with this sense of the sacred? How to explain the experience of "La femme adultere"? For it is in this text, after having intersected in the plays, that the paradoxes of the sacred and the feminine climactically come together and approach the metaphysical. A first critical approach sets the sacred in the context of Camus's time. Juxtaposing the early Camusian essays with certain writings of contemporary authors relative to religion and the sacred, it considers the sacred from philosophical, historical and sociological as well as religious perspectives. A second approach, psychoanalytic and feminist, explores Camus's narrative works and his drama. Referring mainly to the writings of Kristeva and taking up her notion of the "myth of the feminine" as the "last refuge of the sacred", it examines the absences and silences of the mother in the narrative works before concerning itself with the speech and presence of the female companion in the plays. This difference between the two genres is analyzed. Finally, the last part of the thesis, which focuses on "La femme adultere", examines the modalities of desire. It is this context of desire, linked to the Camusian concept of the absurd, that opens the feminine to the sacred. This double paradox is examined along with the possible meaning of the unexpected alliance of the feminine and the sacred in a corpus of work mostly perceived as masculine and agnostic.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 40-41).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2002. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 173-180). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

James Joyce remains a logocentric figure, a position confirmed in his perceived relation to Dante within a patriarchal canonical lineage and its philosophical implications. Joyce also occupies this position within the writing and thought of Jacques Derrida, for whom his work then represents both the logos and its own deconstruction. In contrast, this thesis proposes that Joyce in fact is not a logocentric author, and that his writing is explicitly directed towards a deconstruction of the idea of the logos. This claim is advanced through the suggestion that there is in Joyce a deconstruction rather than a validation of the phonocentric linguistic theory and practice of Dante, and concomitantly of a patriarchal Joyce construed through that Dante. In this interrogation of the Dantean logos by Joyce’s writing the thesis then reads the Derridean view on Joyce and examines its investments, proposing that in it there are wider implications for a critical reading of Derrida’s work and for an understanding of his grammatology. It does so in three imagined papers on Joyce and Dante, an insert, a lecture and an essay. They constitute phantom artefacts in which to read deconstructively, and to read deconstruction, by unbinding Derrida’s Joyce. The first chapter is an imagined insert from Joyce and Dante into Of Grammatology and its first chapter, ‘The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing’. In the folds of the insert it is proposed that Derrida cleaves to the idea of the book and is bound to it in Joyce. This binding initiates a retrospective reading of ‘The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing’ and of the wider grammatological opening; its implications are unfolded in the insert. By then unbinding the thread of a logocentric Dante in Joyce, the insert unbinds Joyce from the Derridean idea of the book and furthermore suggests that Joyce, read in the deconstruction of Dante, represents the closure of the book as imagined in that essay. Building upon the proposal of a Joycean closure of the book as unfolded in chapter one, the second chapter advances and outlines the shape of that closure in an imagined lecture by Joyce. The chapter follows the displaced letter a in Ulysses as it interrogates mimesis, tracing the development of a subject in différance. The lecture performs that deconstruction of mimesis and, in doing so, announces not the apotheosis but the death of the realist novel in Ulysses. The final chapter draws together the conclusions of the previous two chapters in an imagined essay that arche-writes ‘Two Words for Joyce’ as an example of its own thesis. It does so in a previously untraced Dantean connection, through a conversation between Joyce and Beckett on Dante that finds its way into Finnegans Wake and is archived in the two words Derrida extracts as the spur for his essay. The imagined essay brings together Derrida, Beckett and Joyce in Dante as a concatenation of pairs within the pair of essays; it also shadows another pair, the Derridean Joyce and his other from whom the imagined essay comes. It both performs a deconstructive reading of Derrida in ‘Two Words for Joyce’ and then, through that reading, more widely affirms a Derridean grammatology. The argument of the thesis as it has advanced through the three chapters is here brought to a conclusion, suggesting that in Joyce’s writing it can be proposed that the relationship of deconstructive reading to its own practice is mediated through literature; it also proposes what might be a relationship between deconstructive reading and literature beyond those consequences.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of Comparative Literature, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references.