Diss.--Berlin--Freie Universität, 1992.

As fascist movements took hold across Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, there emerged a body of lyric poetry concerned with revolution, authority, heroism, sacrifice, community, heritage, and national identity. While the Nazi rise to power saw the deception, persecution, and brutalization of conservatives both in the Reichstag and in the streets, these themes resonated with fascists and conservatives alike, particularly in Germany. Whether they welcomed the new regime out of fear or opportunism, many conservative beneficiaries of National Socialism shared, and celebrated in poetry, the same ideological principles as the fascists. Such thematic continuities have made it seem as though certain conservative writers, including T. S. Eliot, Stefan George, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, were proto-fascist, their work cohering around criteria consonant with fascist ideology. My dissertation, however, emphasizes the limits of such cohesion, arguing that fascist poetry rejects, whereas conservative poetry affirms, the possibility of indeterminacy and inadequacy. While the fascist poem blindly believes it can effect material political change, the conservative poem affirms the failure of its thematic content to correspond entirely to material political reality. It displays neither pure political commitment nor aesthetic autonomy, suspending these categories in an unresolved tension. Paul de Man's work on allegory hinges on identifying a reading practice that addresses this space between political commitment and aesthetic autonomy. His tendency to forget the immanence of history, however, is problematic in the context of fascism. Considering rhetorical formalism alongside dialectical materialism, in particular Adorno's essay "Lyric Poetry and Society," allows for a more rounded and ethical methodological approach. The poetic dramatization of the very indeterminacy that historically constituted conservative politics in late-Weimar Germany both distinguishes the conservative from the fascist poem while also accounting for its complicity. Fascism necessitated widespread and wild enthusiasm, but it also succeeded through the (unintentional) proliferation of political indifference as registered, for example, by the popularity of entertainment literature. While the work of certain conservative high modernists reflected critically on its own failures, such indeterminacy nonetheless resembles the failure to politically commit oneself against institutionalized violence and systematic oppression.

Thesis (Th. M.)--St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, Crestwood, N.Y., 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 192-198).

Hegel's view of poetry clarifies the overall role of language in his system and allows him to makes sense of a difficult linguistic issue: how to distinguish between poetry and prose. For Hegel, this distinction is crucial because it illuminates the different ways poetry and prose allow us to understand ourselves as members of an ethical community. In this paper, I argue, using Hegel, that the distinction between poetry and prose can only properly be understood in terms of their fundamentally different kinds of content instead of in terms of any formal differences between the two. Then, I address an objection to Hegel by Paul de Man which uses Hegel's concept of memory to collapse the distinction between poetry and philosophical prose. Finally, I argue that Hegel can respond to this objection by showing how de Man misunderstands how philosophical thought conceptually develops from memory.

2013 will mark the thirtieth anniversary of Paul de Man’s death, and the twentieth anniversary of the 2003 MLA special session titled “Is Now the Time for Paul de Man?” Is now the time, the panel asked, to put the scandal of de Man’s Wartime Journalism behind us? Arguing (via an allegory of “the suicide note”) that to give Paul de Man a “time” would be a negation of spectrality and a contradiction to his thought, this paper asks instead: How are we to respond to Paul de Man now, thirty years after his death? For as Jacques Derrida writes in his response to Wartime Journalism, this scandal (the scandal of Paul de Man’s suicide note) is “happening to us,” and it is happening now. To read his writings still entails certain responsibilities. Taking Theseus from Euripides’ Hippolytus as the hapless reader par excellence, I suggest that it is not misreading which produces irresponsibility, but rather a failure to have read—or even, perhaps, the failure to have continued reading. How are we to respond to Paul de Man now, thirty years after his death? How are we to grieve his death, to read his suicide note? I conclude, with Avital Ronell, that if we are to have responded to Paul de Man, we will need to do so not by becoming better interpreters, but rather by becoming better mis-readers of the texts he leaves behind, like suicide notes, after his death. / text

The following thesis represents an attempt to account for the novelist Don DeLillo's last three novels (Underworld (1999), The Body Artist (2001), and Cosmopolis (2003)) through the examination of what I conceive as DeLillo's philosophy of language. It is my assertion that the crucial and articulating aspect of DeLillo's philosophy of language is his investment in, and investigation of, irony. As I argue, DeLillo's novels presume a certain conjugation of what I refer to as the work of irony (the seemingly impossible work of tendering both the allegorical imperative of naming and the ironic imperative of Otherness) with the work of art. In other words, DeLillo's theory of language reveals his theory of art and, thus, his own theory of writing. This aesthetic philosophy becomes the critical tool with which DeLillo evaluates the various symbolic economies of a culture and its individuals caught within late capitalism. The impossibility of defining irony becomes, for DeLillo, a metaphor by which to understand language itself as what I refer to as a fallen and tender economy, constituted by an Otherness, which language can only tender. In his novels, DeLillo, I argue, suggests that language and subjectivity ought to be conceived of as forms of a faith in an Otherness, impossible to represent as such, to which all speech, violence, art, commodity and reproduction are indebted, and which we may mourn and represent - as we must - more or less faithfully, more or less blindly, and, by virtue of irony, more or less tenderly. The possibilities of faith and the ethical in art and representation, thus, for DeLillo, arise through an attention to an Otherness that can only be tendered through the very tenderness (fallenness, profanity, weakness) of allegory and language. To understand this is to understand the role of irony in DeLillo's philosophy, and also to understand DeLillo's profound commitment to language, his renovation of allegory through its mortification by irony and, thus, its remembering and mourning of Otherness. In this regard, DeLillo shares much with the melancholia of deconstruction as evinced within the language philosophies of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, in particular, Derrida's economic consideration, differance, and his notion of the work of mourning, both of which, I argue, offer the reader of DeLillo's texts ways of tendering the work of irony.

The master thesis discusses the novel Spas by Ivan Matoušek published in 2001. The description of the structure and narrative time of the novel is followed by a characterization of the ironic self-conscious narrator and his relationship to the fictional world and the main character. The interpretation is partly inspired by a theoretical paper on irony by Vladimir Jankélévitch, which is compared with Paul de Man's concept of irony. The thesis also refers to Linda Hutcheon's theory of self- reflexivity and metafiction and employs the concept of mise en abyme.

Η παρούσα εργασία επικεντρώνει το ενδιαφέρον της στην προσέγγιση των ποιημάτων, τα οποία περιέχονται στα Κείμενα Νεοελληνικής Λογοτεχνίας της Α΄ τάξης του Γυμνασίου. Η προσέγγιση αυτή επιχειρείται σύμφωνα με τη «ρητορική εκδοχή» της Αναγνωστικής Θεωρίας, τη βάση της οποίας συγκροτούν οι θεωρίες των: Roman Jakobson, Paul de Man και Wayne Booth. Η βασική μας υπόθεση ότι η όλη προσέγγιση των ποιημάτων για την Α΄ τάξη του Γυμνασίου διέπεται και από τη «ρητορική εκδοχή», όχι μόνο από την «ερμηνευτική» που αναφέρει το Διαθεματικό Ενιαίο Πλαίσιο Προγράμματος Σπουδών (2002), επιβεβαιώθηκε. Από την ανάλυση του υλικού μας, το οποίο περιλαμβάνει δεκαεννέα (19) ποιήματα, προέκυψαν ορισμένα ενδιαφέροντα ευρήματα. Πιο συγκεκριμένα, η μελέτη μας εντόπισε ότι στα ποιήματα της Α΄ τάξης του Γυμνασίου υπάρχουν αρκετοί ρητορικοί τρόποι, όπως, η μετωνυμία, η προσωποποίηση, η ρητορική ερώτηση, το σύμβολο, η αλληγορία, η ειρωνεία, με κυρίαρχη, ωστόσο, τη μεταφορά. Επίσης, στα ποιήματα καταγράφηκαν οι έννοιες του υπονοούμενου συγγραφέα και του υπονοούμενου αναγνώστη, ενώ αρκετές από τις ερωτήσεις/εργασίες που συνοδεύουν κάθε ποίημα στο σχολικό βιβλίο παραπέμπουν σε μεγάλο βαθμό στις θεωρητικές θέσεις των τριών βασικών εκπροσώπων της «ρητορικής εκδοχής» της Αναγνωστικής Θεωρίας. Το κύριο συμπέρασμά μας είναι ότι η διδασκαλία της Λογοτεχνίας στη Δευτεροβάθμια Εκπαίδευση, συγκεκριμένα στην Α΄ τάξη του Γυμνασίου, αξιοποιεί εκτός από την «ερμηνευτική εκδοχή» και τη «ρητορική εκδοχή» της Αναγνωστικής Θεωρίας, εφόσον στηρίζεται και χρησιμοποιεί αρκετές από τις θέσεις, τους όρους και τις έννοιες που συναντούμε στις θεωρίες των βασικών εκπροσώπων της «ρητορικής εκδοχής». Η διαπίστωση αυτή μπορεί να διευρύνει και να εμπλουτίσει ουσιαστικά τις διδακτικές προσεγγίσεις της Λογοτεχνίας στη Δευτεροβάθμια Εκπαίδευση. / This paper focuses on the approach of the poems contained in the Texts of Modern Greek Literature, the A΄ class of the Gymnasium. This approach was attempted in accordance with the «rhetoric version» of Reader-Response Theory, the basis of which, is formed by theories of: Roman Jakobson, Paul de Man and Wayne Booth. Our basic assumption that the whole approach of the poems for the first grade of the High school is governed by the «rhetoric version», not only by the «hermeneutic», as described by the Curriculum (2002), confirmed. From the analysis of the material employed, which includes nineteen (19) poems, there are some interesting findings. More specifically, our study found that the poems of A΄ class of high school there are several rhetorical modes, such as metonymy, personification, rhetorical question, symbol, allegory, irony, principal, however, the metaphor. Also, the poems were recorded concepts of implied author and implied reader, while several of the questions/ tasks that accompany each poem in the text book refer largely to the theoretical positions of the three main representatives of the «rhetoric version» of Reader-Response Theory. The main conclusion is that the teaching of Literature in Secondary School, specifically in the first grade of high school, utilizes the «rhetorical version» of Reader-Response Theory, apart from the «hermeneutic» one, since it is based on and uses many of the views, terms and concepts encountered in the theories of fundamentals representatives of the «rhetorical version». This finding can broaden and enrich substantially the teaching approaches of Literature in Secondary Education.

Romantic symbolism is a poorly understood concept. It was first formulated by the Romantics in a variety of contexts. Goethe develops his theory of the symbol most notably in his scientific works. Schelling's approach to the Romantic symbol is firmly rooted in his philosophical writings. Coleridge articulates a Romantic notion of symbolism across his extensive literary criticism. The foundational influence of these related theories of Romantic symbolism can be seen in the artistic, literary, and scientific productions of Romantic minded individuals all over Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. However, the nature and scope of the Romantic symbol as originally formulated by Goethe, Schelling, and others has been obfuscated in unfortunate ways by the contemporary theoretical assumptions and narrow interpretations of recent academic scholarship. This thesis restores the original connotation of the Romantic symbol by identifying the common way in which it is misconstrued: the ontic fallacy.

This essay investigates the prospect of Romantic Irony’s potential resurgence in contemporary poetics and discusses its relevance and likeness with metamodernism. The internet has by now not only seeped into, but fully permeated, the process of literary production and distribution. The effect of this has been the birth of a new kind of poetic discourse which can broadly be called metamodernism, The New Sincerity or Alt-lit. This movement is characterized by its self-reflexive metacommentary, fragmentary nature and an oscillation between of irony and sincerity. Vermeulen and Akker, among others, have hinted at metamodernism’s relation to Romanticism, but research into the specifics of its tendency towards Romantic Irony is scarce. By viewing the writings of Steve Roggenbuck (a central figure in the new poetic movement), alongside the philosophy of Friedrich Schlegel, I propose a comparative framework for discussion of sincerity, irony and the instrumentalization of contemporary metamodernist writing. I demonstrate that Roggenbuck’s writing displays narratological, tropological and thematic tendencies commonly associated with both Romantic Irony and metamodernism. Apart from broader structural comparison, I attempt a comparative analysis between Roggenbuck’s poetry (2010-2015) and Thomas Carlyle’s novel “Sartor Resartus” (1833-1834) in order to provide a visualisation of the rhetorical and narratological strategies of Romantic Irony. I aim to frame Romantic Irony as a sensibility, or mode of discourse - rather than a strict system of thought - which may still be at work today. In extension, the sensibilities of Romantic Irony may shed further light into the philosophical potential of the seemingly incomprehensible and contradictory tendencies of metamodernism. By ironicizing its poetic form, literary ambition and desire for sincerity in a post-postmodern era, Roggenbuck’s poetry celebrates ambiguity and literary failure, ultimately framing irony as a constructive and potentially democratic operation.