This dissertation pairs a nineteenth-century American writer, Herman Melville, and a twentieth-century New Zealand writer, Janet Frame, to consider points of overlap between two novelists who were unusually sensitive to the problem of political thinking and decision in situations of state emergency. Consisting of three chapters on Melville’s later maritime fiction (Moby-Dick, Benito Cereno, and Billy Budd, Sailor) and two interleaving chapters on Frame’s late autobiographical and fictional writings (An Angel at My Table and The Carpathians), the dissertation explores how, in the work of these writers, figural work builds around interlinked questions of emergency and judgment. Both writers are interested in situations of peril when the fragility of bodily life is exposed and when the coherence of given political orders is tested. Both probe the response of the human legislative urge and the limits of the power of judgment in the time of crisis and exception, producing narratives of the tense moment of executive decision. Their literary forms heighten awareness of the mechanisms, frameworks, and effects of different modes of judgment--whether cognitive, moral, legal, aesthetic, or political--under emergency conditions. Out of this engagement with the nexus of judgment and security, both writers ask what might happen if we were to abide with precariousness and insecurity rather than default to the often destructive praxis of security. Melville and Frame also push the capacities of language and form in their attempt to represent the possibility of modes of judgment adequate to such political renewal. In their rhetoric and formal structures--including their experimental “disfiguration” of narrative lines--and in their creation of intricate, reflexive literary voices, these writers imagine what it would mean to come up against the limit of, and even to overturn, accepted categories of knowledge and thought, of calculation and judgment.

This dissertation pairs a nineteenth-century American writer, Herman Melville, and a twentieth-century New Zealand writer, Janet Frame, to consider points of overlap between two novelists who were unusually sensitive to the problem of political thinking and decision in situations of state emergency. Consisting of three chapters on Melville’s later maritime fiction (Moby-Dick, Benito Cereno, and Billy Budd, Sailor) and two interleaving chapters on Frame’s late autobiographical and fictional writings (An Angel at My Table and The Carpathians), the dissertation explores how, in the work of these writers, figural work builds around interlinked questions of emergency and judgment. Both writers are interested in situations of peril when the fragility of bodily life is exposed and when the coherence of given political orders is tested. Both probe the response of the human legislative urge and the limits of the power of judgment in the time of crisis and exception, producing narratives of the tense moment of executive decision. Their literary forms heighten awareness of the mechanisms, frameworks, and effects of different modes of judgment--whether cognitive, moral, legal, aesthetic, or political--under emergency conditions. Out of this engagement with the nexus of judgment and security, both writers ask what might happen if we were to abide with precariousness and insecurity rather than default to the often destructive praxis of security. Melville and Frame also push the capacities of language and form in their attempt to represent the possibility of modes of judgment adequate to such political renewal. In their rhetoric and formal structures--including their experimental “disfiguration” of narrative lines--and in their creation of intricate, reflexive literary voices, these writers imagine what it would mean to come up against the limit of, and even to overturn, accepted categories of knowledge and thought, of calculation and judgment.

<p>"The Uses of Literature: Gilles Deleuze's American Rhizome" puts four writers - Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, George Jackson and William S. Burroughs - in conjunction with four concepts - becoming-democratic, belief in the world, the line of flight, and finally, control societies. The aim of this study is to elaborate and expand on Gilles Deleuze's extensive use of American literature and to examine possible conjunctions of his philosophy with contemporary American literary criticism and American Studies. I argue that Deleuze's interest in American writing not only productively complicates recent historical accounts of "French Theory's" incursion into American academia, but also provides a compelling way think about the relationship between literature and history, language and experience, and the categories of minor and major that organize national literary traditions. Beginning with the concept of the "American rhizome" this dissertation approaches the question of rhizomatic thought as a constructivist methodology for engaging the relationship between literary texts and broader social movements. Following an introduction laying out the basic coordinates of such an approach, and their historical relevance with respect to the reception of "French Theory" in the United States, the subsequent chapters each take an experimental approach with respect to a single American writer invoked in Deleuze's work and a concept that resonantes with the literary text under consideration. In foregrounding the question of the use of literature this dissertation explores the ways literature has been appropriated, set to work, or dismissed in various historical and institutional arrangements, but also seeks to suggest the possibility of creating conditions in which literature can be said to take on a life of its own.</p> / Dissertation

This thesis examines the connections between three frequently associated nineteenth-century texts, Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, Melville's Moby Dick, and Thoreau's Walden. It begins by reviewing the contexts normally offered for them, and then proposes an alternative one, "dialogic irony," that is based upon the complementary theoretical models of Friedrich Schlegel and Mikhail Bakhtin. After this conceptual background is outlined, the various modes of dialogic irony presented in the three works are discussed. That of Walden arises out of a close analogy between self and text: both are a series of inner voices juxtaposed with and often contradicting one another. Sartor complicates this relatively unobstructed form of selfhood through the inclusion of the Editor, whose unitary voice represents a challenge to the kind of selfhood sanctioned by Walden. Moby Dick also challenges dialogic irony, but its forms of opposition are more penetrating and various: while in Carlyle's text dialogic irony is ultimately affirmed through the figure of Teufelsdrockh, Ishmael is left stranded and displaced by the multitude of voices in his text. Melville's work therefore provides an excellent way to review and critique some of the prevailing assumptions about dialogue in contemporary criticism, a task sketched in the conclusion.

Within Judeo-Christianity there is a belief in an all perfect God who is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. However, in this world evil and suffering exists, so how is it possible that an all perfect God can exist? This is called the problem of evil. This thesis examines the problem of evil and how philosophers like Alvin Plantinga, John Hick, and Richard Swinburne attempt to solve the problem of evil through different theodicies. In this paper I argue that all three philosophers and their theodicies fail to solve the problem of evil. I then turn to the writings of Herman Melville, specifically Mardi: and a Voyage Thither and Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, and consider how he, as an author, struggled with the problem of evil and religion. While Melville may have struggled I argue that within his works we can find part of the solution to the problem of evil. Through these two novels Melville demonstrates that God is not good. My final chapter considers this fact that God is not good and also considers how God is not evil. In the end I argue that God is neither good nor evil which allows us to no longer have to face the problem of evil.

Thesis (M.A.)--Florida State University, 2005. / Advisor: Dr. William T. Lhamon, Jr., Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of American and Florida Studies. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed June 8, 2005). Document formatted into pages; contains iv, 35 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

Zugl.: Erlangen-Nürnberg, Universiẗat, Diss., 2008.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1952. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 485-499).

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