Zugleich: Diss. Würzburg, 2007. / Literaturverz.

Thesis (B.A.)--Haverford College, Dept. of English, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis argues that tasting appears as an act of creative empathy and of knowledge acquisition in Virginia Woolf's writing. First contextualising my discussion within Woolf's own reading of the aesthetic and literary history of ‘taste', I then use Cixous' essay ‘Extreme Fidelity' (renamed ‘The Author in Truth') as a theoretical entryway to passages from The Voyage Out, Jacob's Room, A Room of One's Own, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, and Orlando which centralise the role of gustatory pleasure in creativity and epistemology. Cixous elaborates an oral, ‘poetic' and feminine ontology rooted in a receptivity to sensual pleasure, a concept that assists my reading of Woolf in several aspects. I suggest that in Woolf, both literal and figurative experiences of taste contribute to physical and psychic repletion, consequently eliciting empathy with the other (Cixous' term). This empathy which originates in the body constitutes an epistemological source distinct from intellectual or emotional intelligences, but one equally integral to the creative process. I assert that empathy features in Woolf as an extension or enlargement of the imagination through which a subject incorporates knowledge of alterity, but without consuming the other - as in the act of tasting. This ideation differs from notions of empathy as an analogical mapping or projection of self onto other. I discuss the ways in which a ‘gustatory epistemology' informs Woolf's approach to her craft, shapes the interrelationships of her characters, and materialises stylistically in her development of a ‘poetic' prose language.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 261-272).

This thesis explores the history of the New Age movement through a political analysis of influential New Age books. By drawing upon cultural, religious and American studies, and concepts from literary criticism and political science, a new understanding of the movement becomes possible. This thesis analyses the ideological representations and rhetorical strategies employed in both New Age literature and American presidential discourse. It is argued that their shared imagery and discursive features indicate that New Age writings derive their ideological underpinnings and textual devices from dominant beliefs of American nationalism. This historical examination begins with the Cold War in the late 1940s and ends with the 1990s. Each chapter traces parallels between a particular presidential discourse and New Age texts published in the same decade commencing with Dwight D. Eisenhower and The Doors of Perception and finishing with William J. Clinton and The Celestine Prophecy: An Adventure. It argues that the appropriation of particular spiritualities in New Age texts is closely related to contemporary American geo-political interests and understandings. Major New Age spiritual trends are derived from regions, most often in the third world, which are considered to be under threat from forces such as Communism. New Age writings construct an imaginary possession of these worlds, reconfiguring these sites into frontiers of American influence. In particular, this study examines the influence of the jeremiads and the ensuing Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny ideologies upon post-war national beliefs and the extent to which these understandings of nationalism inform New Age discourse. Representations of time and space, destiny and landscape, and self and other in these literary and political contexts are analysed. From this perspective, the eclecticism that marks the New Age can be historically understood as a shifting cultural expression of Cold War and post-Cold War political responses. Consequently, New Age literature is one of the means by which dominant American identity is reproduced and disseminated in what seems to be an alternative spiritual context.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2008.

x, 197 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / This dissertation investigates the cultural importance of the "monstrous Other" in postmodern literature, including novels from Sweden, Finland, and the United States. While the theoretical concept of "the Other" is in wide circulation in the humanities and social sciences, the concept has only recently been modified with the adjective "monstrous" to highlight a special case of the Other that plays an important role in the formation of human subjectivity. In order to better understand the representational legacy of the monstrous Other, I explore some of the principal venues in which it has appeared in western literature, philosophy, folklore, and politics. Using a Foucauldian archaeological approach in my literature survey allows me to trace the tradition of the monstrous Other in such sources as medieval bestiaries, the wild man motif in folklore and popular culture, and the medicalization of intersexual embodiment. In all cases, the monstrous Other is a complex phenomenon with broad implications for the politics of subjectivity and the future of social and political justice. Moreover, the monstrous Other poses significant challenges for the ongoing tenability of normative notions of the human, including such primary human traits as sexuality and a gendered, "natural" embodiment. Given the complexities of the monstrous Other and the ways in which it both upholds and intervenes in normative human identities, no single theoretical approach is adequate to the task of examining its functioning. Instead, the project calls for an approach that blends the methodologies of (post)psychoanalytic and queer theory while retaining a critical awareness of both the representational nature of subjectivity and its material effects. By employing both strains of theory, I am able to "read" the monstrous Other as both a necessary condition of subjectivity and a model of intersubjectivity that could provide an alternative to the positivism and binarism of normative subjectivity. The texts that I examine here reveal the ways in which postmodern reconfigurations of the monstrous Other challenge the (hetero)normativity of human subjectivity and its hierarchical forms of differentiation. My reading of these texts locates the possibilities for a hybridized, cyborgian existence beyond the outermost limits of positivistic, western subjectivity. / Committee in charge: Ellen Rees, Chairperson, German and Scandinavian; Daniel Wojcik, Member, English; Jenifer Presto, Member, Comparative Literature; Aletta Biersack, Outside Member, Anthropology

This dissertation examines Soviet and Polish science fiction from the 1960s to 1980s as a political genre that investigates power and society. The problem of alterity is central for this genre: it is ungovernable because it is incomprehensible. Science fiction of this kind explores the possibilities and impossibilities of living with the Other that can impact social organization dramatically and lethally while that Other cannot be impacted in return. Living peacefully with such alterity is the fundamental premise of pluralism as a principle of social organization, according to the conclusions of the study. The dissertation explores alterity in science fiction by Ivan Efremov (1908–1972), Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (1925–1991 and 1933–2012), Stanisław Lem (1921–2006), and Volodymyr Savchenko (1933–2005). My goal is to reveal in their works a transformative epistemological shift that had manifested itself through the tropes of alterity. Among these tropes the dissertation highlights aliens and alien civilizations, artificial intelligence, anisotropic universe, distant planets endowed with unique natural attributes, the more abstract unknown, and non-human elements running out-of-control within human species. I also examine specifically science-fictional notions such as the bull and progressor, which represent the intelligentsia’s relations with power and the masses. The analyzed literary worlds also represent their authors’ views of alternative societal organization, ruled by the powerful alterity such as a mega-computer or alien super-intelligence. Another important trope of alterity is based upon a simultaneous performance of contradictory competing logics that create an effect known as parallax: the reader may interpret the same characters and/or stories in multiple, mutually incompatible, ways. Beyond avoiding censorship, these tropes set the stage for the authors’ utopias, in which the Other appears as an impenetrable alterity that affects those who encounter it. For these writers, alterity serves as the tool for problematizing progress, as it was imagined after World War II by the majority of political elites under socialism and in the West. I suggest that their science fiction contributed, among many other factors, to the lexicon and the imaginary of a cohort of political dissidents and Communist Party functionaries alike who translated science-fictional themes into political science terms to shape Perestroika’s discourse. The dissertation, thus, establishes a historical connection between Soviet and Polish science fiction of the post-Stalin period and the ways in which democracy was discursively constructed in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and other former socialist nations.