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This study is an exploration into the Romantics' transcendence of the dualistic world view and their attainment of a holistic vision. Chapter I formulates a dichotomy between the archaic (sacrosanct) world view and the modern (mechanistic) world view. Chapter II discusses the reality of the religious experience in Romanticism. Chapter III elucidates the Romantics' use of mystic myths and noetic symbols. Chapter IV treats the Romantic transcendence of the dualistic world view and the problems of expressing the transcendental experience in aesthetic form. Supporting theories include those of Henri Bergson, Martin Buber, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and M. H. Abrams. The study concludes by assessing the validity of the Romantic vision in the modern world.

Amelia Rosselli has often been considered an obscure and impenetrable author, whose language may be identified with the expression of the unconscious. In this study I argue, on the contrary, that a strong cognitive tension underlies the poet's multilingual production (in Italian, English, and French). I therefore explore its imaginative and philosophical depth, by reconstructing Rosselli's project to transpose into writing the complexity of human experience in a fickle, chaotic, and contradictory world. In the first chapter I focus on language, in particular on lexical fusions and distortions, mainly questioning Pasolini's interpretation based on of the notion of freudian slip. With the aid of hermeneutical tools borrowed from the philosophy of language, I claim that Rosselli's language aims on the one hand at mirroring reality, and on the other at making textual experience potentially infinite, thus engaging the reader in a never-ending interpretation. I also maintain that the category of the baroque allows us to appreciate Rosselli's aesthetics from an original point of view. In the second chapter I investigate Rosselli's elaboration of a new metrical form, stressing its relations to the poet's studies in musicology, ethnomusicology and acoustics. Through the meter Rosselli tries to restrain subjectivity, hence accessing a more objective and universal poetic dimension. The last chapter is devoted to Rosselli's mysticism. The mystic tradition offers a vivid imagery and a refined rhetoric to an author who wants to put the subject aside and depict the unstable (or vain?) nature of the world. However, Rosselli's attempt to find a metaphysical or divine remedy to violence and chaos does not succeed. Her longing for transcendency remains unfulfilled.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2009. / "Graduate Program in Comparative Literature." Includes bibliographical references (p. 264-275).

One of the unfortunate corollaries of poststructuralist theorizing about literary texts has been the equation of a skepticism concerning language with a skepticism concerning meaning. The menace of unrestrained relativism has tended to polarize the critical community into proponents of a 'logo-diffuse' onto-epistemology and proponents of a 'logo-centric' one, and critical practice has followed this lead. The critic who attempts to situate literature within the parameters of such a debate is likely to fail unless he or she appeals to a much more extensive discourse, one which antedates the provincial contours of the current discussion. Medieval mysticism is a significant entry in the lineage of influence which comprises the western tradition. This thesis looks at the apophatic or negative strategies of mystical texts in order to locate meaning in the interplay of negation and affirmation with which they are concerned.