Aphoristic thoughts must be distinguished from their articulation in aphorisms, for they are found in all other genres of discourse as well. Within these discourses they present non-discursive points, i.e. points where the mind interrupts the linear progression of the text in order to stop and contemplate a momentary end of thinking. This study seeks to isolate the thought from thinking. It does so in a series of reflections on German, French and English aphoristic texts. These reflections explore a viable alternative to the contextualist paradigms of literary criticism, history, and philosophy. Instead of reintegrating the isolated thought in an extended historical narrative or critical argument, this method seeks to respond to it with another thought. The "context" of the thinker's thought is not a genre, a literal text, or field of inquiry, but a world that is only rarely textual in a literal sense. Unlike the disciplines to which most serious reflection is devoted, the aphoristic utterance makes sense outside a formal discipline. One motif around which the independent sections of this study are arranged are Goethe's and Nietzsche's thoughtful wanderer, exposed to the elements outside. Another is Nietzsche's gay or cheerful science, in which ultimately nihilistic ideals like certainty, consistency and truth are diagnosed, treated with and replaced by the wit, partiality and idiosyncracy of the aphorist. In addition, the study discusses aspects of the scholarship, addresses the problem of the aphoristic collection, and attempts an inventory of aphoristic ends.

This book speaks for the view that the human body, "with its miracle of order," as Whitehead says, is the basis of both passion and intellectual clarity in the construction of texts by readers and writers alike. Critically, its antecedents are the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics which, in spite of being ignored by classicists of the old humanism, or alleged "humanities," have changed forever our sense of the relations between subjects and events, disorder and order in real life. And yet my ideas are equally derived from the work of poets and artists, scientists of feeling, who have proven in all eras, and not without risk, that the mind is not a transcendental authority but an occasion that constructs and reconstructs itself from the changing materials of sense and through the most precise recognitions of order inherent among them. The chapters are as follows: (I) "The Idea of Faith": a repudiation of classical dualism via a critique of Santayana's Scepticism and Animal Faith. (II) "Risking Belief: An 'Allegory of Reading' thinspace": an interpretation of the final scene of A Midsummer Night's Dream as a critique of the classical ideal of rational love. (III) "IF ...: Getting Beyond the Dynamics of Contradiction in Wallace Stevens' 'Palace of the Babies' thinspace": a demonstration of how textual ambiguities unthinkable to classical poetics are resolved through coenesthesis in the reader. (IV) "Wallace Stevens Reading: The Idea of Acoustic Order in 'The Idea of Order at Key West' thinspace": an argument via a computer-aided study of Stevens' vocal performance in favor of the idea that the grammar of a text is generated not from an extrinsic "competence" but within the act of enunciation itself. (V) "The Exquisite Corpse of Charles Baudelaire: The Female Imaginative Sublime in a Post-materialist Phenomenology of Experience": a demonstration of how Baudelaire, in cultivating "flowers from evil" subverts his narrators' and even his own male-dominant, idealist poetics with one rooted in the physical as represented not only by the artificiality of modern life about which he is candid, but by an underlying, creative vitality in the female erotic.

It is the purpose of this paper to illustrate from the novels themselves that Defoe's protagonists are essentially isolated individuals and that this isolation is the result of the circumstances of their births, the nature of their professions, their spiritually isolating religious beliefs, and their attitudes toward their fellow men.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Thesis (MA (Afrikaans and Dutch))--University of Stellenbosch, 2006. / In fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Master in Afrikaans Creative Writing, the following has been submitted: (i) an assignment, titled Postcolonial Correspondence: resistance against or alliance with Colonialism, taking the form of an essay on the problematic surrounding the representation of the Other in postcolonial discourse; (ii) a volume of short prose, titled Tweespoor, wherein a representation of general human experiences within recognizable South African milieus was attempted.

This thesis traces the development of thought in the philosophical and other writings of three nineteenth-century thinkers, whose work exemplifies that century’s attempts to think beyond the divisions of culture from nature and to reconcile empirical science with metaphysical truth. Drawing on nineteenth-century debates on the origin of language and evolutionary theory, the thesis argues that the ideas of John Henry Newman, George Eliot and Lady Victoria Welby were cultural precursors to the biosemiotic thought of the second half of the twentieth century and beyond, specifically in the way in which these three thinkers sought to find a ‘common grammar’ between natural and human practices. While only Lady Welby communicated with the scientist, logician and father of modern semiotics, Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914), all three contributed to the cultural sensibility that informed subsequent work in biology/ethology (Jakob von Uexküll (1864-1944), zoosemiotics (Thomas A. Sebeok (1920-2001), and the development of biosemiotics (Thomas A. Sebeok and Jesper Hoffmeyer (1943-present), Kalevi Kull (1952-present) among others. Each of these nineteenth-century writer’s intellectual development show strong parallels with the interdisciplinary endeavour of biosemiotics. The latter’s observation that biology is semiotics, its postulation of the continuity between the natural and cultural world through semiosis and evolutionary semiotic scaffolding its emphasis on the coordination of organic life processes on all levels, from simple cells to human beings, via semiotic interactions that depend on interpretation, communication and learning, and its consequent refusal of Cartesian divide, all find distinct resonances with these earlier thinkers. The thesis thus argues that Newman, Eliot and Welby all gave articulation to what the thesis identifies as the growth of a ‘biosemiotic imagination.’ It argues that Newman, Eliot and Lady Welby envisaged a unity, or a holistic understanding, of life based on a European developmental tradition of biology, philosophy and language which was familiar to Charles Darwin himself. This evolutionary ontology called forth a new epistemology grounded in a mode of unconscious creative inference (biosemiotic imagination) akin to Charles S. Peirce’s concept of abduction. Abduction is the logical operation which introduces a new idea and, as such, is the only source of adaptive and creative growth. For Peirce, it is closely tied to the growth of knowledge via the evolutionary action of sign relations. The thesis shows how these thinkers conceptualised their own version of what I suggest can be understood as this biosemiotic imagination and the implications this has for understanding creativity in nature and culture. For John Henry Newman, it was a common source of inspiration in religion and science. For George Eliot, it lay at the basis of any creative process, natural and cultural, between which it forged a link. Similarly to Eliot, Lady Victoria Welby saw abduction as a signifying process that subtends creativity both in nature and culture.