Este trabalho tem como percurso de pesquisa o estudo de algumas ambiências críticas ao conceito de representação no Ocidente, desde suas origens na tradição platônico- aristotélica até o posterior desenvolvimento na contemporaneidade, com suas implicações inerentes nas artes e no pensamento. Na contemporaneidade, observamos os estatutos de validação e imposição epistêmica do conceito referido, através de um princípio teleológico de auto-afirmação, assim como as contribuições que os filósofos Vilém Flüsser e Jacques Derrida trazem à discussão. Colocamos, também, em evidência, algumas propostas de Deleuze e Bergson para um pensamento que ultrapassasse os princípios constitutivos da razão representativa. Por fim, tentamos comentar algumas relações entre os principais conceitos vistos e a ficção literária em especial. / This piece of work has as its course of research the study of some critical ambiences of the representation concept in the Occident, from its origins in the platonic and aristotelian tradition till its ulterior development in the contemporaneity, with its inherent implications in arts and though. In the contemporaneity, we observe its validation statute and epistemic imposition through a self affirming teleological principle, as well as the contributions which the philosophers Vilém Flusser and Jacques Derrida bring to the discussion. Weve put in evidence some of the proposals from Deleuze and Bergson for a thought that surpasses the constituted principles of representative reason. Lastly, weve tried to produce relations between the main concepts weve seen and literary fiction in especial.

This dissertation discusses and analyses Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin's conscious strategy of self-fashioning and reinvention, which is realised in his life and supported by the theoretical constructs contained in his Collected Works. It addresses the ambiguities and uncertainties in Bakhtin's life and work and uses two aspects of his philosophical approach and constructs to explicate these inconsistencies: his theory of identity and his theory of language. The analytical tools used to arrive at this conclusion include the notion of reflexivity (using Bakhtin's own theoretical constructs to analyse incidents in his life, and in turn, using those incidents to illustrate the concepts he developed). Theoretical support for Bakhtin's self-fashioning is provided by Fitzpatrick's theory of reinvention through impersonation and imposture in Revolutionary Russia. Bakhtin's theory of identity (expressed in his Nietzsche-influenced concept of the mask and its associated concept of travesty) supports this reinvention. Bakhtin's notion of double-voicedness, supported by his linguistic theories of interdiscursivity, heteroglossia and the utterance reinforce these two lines of thought. Bakhtin's two figures of speech: the word with a 'backward glance' and the word with a 'loophole' encapsulate this convergence of theory and life. These two constructs are brought into sharp relief when illuminated by Wittgenstein's theory of language-games, Austin's concept of performativity and Benveniste's formulation of deixis. The overarching metaphor for this dissertation is the Classical Greek concept of metis, or 'cunning intelligence', a concept that is instantiated in the way in which Bakhtin framed the narrative of his life and the manner in which he performed his work. The dissertation concludes that Bakhtin evolved a multi-threaded philosophy which was self-consistent in the way in which it addressed the creation of identity, the expression of language and the performance of life and work through the metaphor of metis.

[From Introduction]. L'oeuvre dramatique d'Arthur Adamov (1908-1970) s'lténd sur une trentaine d'années et révèle une grande variété d'influences et d'intérêts. Depuis son point de départ "absurde" des années quarante en passant par une période oú s'imposent des préoccupations d'ordre social et politique pour aboutir á une fusion des sujets métaphysiques et des sujets engagés dans un théâtre qui est de nouveau non-réaliste et onirique, nous pouvons tracer des influences aussi diverses que celle provenant de Flaubert et des premiers surréalistes, de Strindberg et de Kafka, de Dostoîevsky et des expressionnistes russes et allemands, de Buchner, d'Antonin Artaud, de Brecht et de Karl Marx.

In this study on literature and thought from the early 20th century, I examine techniques of organization – including rhetoric, poetics and citation – across the work of the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) and the Austrian writer Robert Musil (1880-1942). With particular attention to Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms and Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, this dissertation analyzes the prose strategies, by which the authors develop a poetics of orientation. Responding to shifts in the epistemological foundations of the empirical sciences, the authors reimagine genre and style as a way to direct the reader in the interpretive process. Although the inflection of this poetics of orientation differs in Cassirer’s cultural philosophy and Musil’s essays and narrative, they both follow dynamic moments in thought, the drama that unfolds as the interpersonal experience of making sense of the world. The displacement of substance by function in the sciences provides the shared ground against which the patterns of their prose emerge. In the first section, “Ernst Cassirer. Problemgeschichte: from genre to texture”, I engage Cassirer’s shift from a critique of reason to a critique of culture, in which language and myth are treated alongside theoretical knowledge as interfaces for knowing the world. His mode of thought develops in a mode of writing, modifying the philosophical genre Problemgeschichte, which developed in the 19th century and was the dominant mode of philosophy among Neo-Kantians at the turn of the 19th to 20th century. He extends the genre’s diction of direction, such as the ubiquitous terms Richtung and Weg, with a decidedly mathematical accent. This figural register reflects the epistemic shift from substance to function, which also typifies his characterization of problems as sites of discursive interference. Building on this discussion of the philosophical genre Problemgeschichte, I then analyze narrative aspects of Cassirer’s writing, such as focalization, in order to understand how his play of citation demonstrates functional thinking. In the second section, “Orientation: Robert Musil’s Reise vom Hundertsten ins Tausendste”, I follow Musil’s prose detours as an intentional gambit, connecting heterogeneous intellectual inquiry. Arguing that his prose innovation cannot be exhausted by a discussion of his essayistic style, I challenge standard accounts of the dissolution of narrative in Musil’s writing. The shift from substance to function as the epistemological foundation in the empirical sciences informs Musil’s displacement of narrative schema by narrative impulses, which preserves traces of traditional story telling as devices for helping the reader find their way in a textual space. Both Cassirer’s and Musil’s poetics of orientation demonstrate engagement with the tumultuous Interwar period, which counters anti-Enlightenment tendencies of intellectual inquiry, common in the German-language cultural production of the early 20th century. The authors’ prose strategies are the vehicle for an intellectual vision, which maintains the potential for an open future.

Text in French with an abstract in English / The loss of a life for natural causes has always been, always is and always will be something tragic for human beings, even if it was foreseen. It is all the more tragic when the loss of human life is caused by violent circumstances such as murder or an accident, as in the case of the untimely death of Albert Camus in a car accident. The worst, however, is when a miscarriage of justice in court, due to an error on the part of the judge, results in the loss of a valuable life by the death penalty. This value must be assessed in existential terms, in terms of the human being contextualized in a life worth living despite its absurdity, as described by Camus. It must be realized that this brutal death is imposed by a few words pronounced by a fallible judge, imposing the death penalty on another fallible human being, and that the sentence is then carried out by another fallible human being – all of whom are fundamentally subject to human imperfection and who regularly make mistakes in life. By emphasizing the fallibility of the human being in various ways in his literary works, Camus convincingly demonstrated that, in our already absurd existence, the death penalty is the ultimate scandal, making this punishment truly exponentially absurd – the absurdity of absurdity. How the author demonstrated that fallibility, the eternal imperfection of human beings, is the main reason why the death penalty exceeds absurdity. Using L'Étranger as a starting point, a novel in which the death penalty is mentioned only at trial, on death row, and in the very last part of the novel, and which is strategically supported by other works by Camus, this essay explores how Camus may have used his characters to subtly illustrate the relationship between the everyday imperfections of human beings and the possible death penalty. The essential principle is that there is a precise operational link between the essence and structure of everyday conflicts and the structure of a trial. Parallels are drawn between conflict and trial, particularly with regard to the fallible human beings participating in both, in various judicial capacities, confirming Camus' conviction that the death penalty is the absurdity of absurdity. / Linguistics and Modern Languages / M.A. (French)

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A study has been made of (1) the various philosophies of idealism and materialism, (2) the effects of these philosophies upon the life and thought of England in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and (3) the demonstration of these philosophies in John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga with a view to indicating the trends and tendencies in the philosophy of England which have helped to shape the personal and national life of the British people of today.

Many Old English poems reflect the Anglo-Saxon writers's interest in who could exercise power and how language could be used to signal a position of power or powerlessness. In previous Old English studies, the prevailing critical attitude has been to associate the exercise of power with sex—the distinction between males and females based upon biological and physiological differences—or with sex-oriented social roles or sphere of operation. Scholarship of the last twenty years has just begun to explore the connection between power and gender-coded traits, attributes which initially were tied to the heroic code and were primarily male-oriented. By the eighth and ninth centuries, the period in which most of the extant Old English poetry was probably composed, these qualities had become disassociated from biological sex but retained their gender affiliations. A re-examination of "The Dream of the Rood," "The Wanderer," "The Husband's Message," "The Wife's Lament," "Wulf and Eadwacer" and Beowulf confirms that the poets used gender-coded language to indicate which poetic characters, female as well as male, held positions of power and powerlessness. A status of power or powerlessness was signalled by the exercise of particular gendered traits that were open for assumption by men and women. Powerful individuals were depicted with masculine-coded language affiliated with honor, mastery, aggression, victory, bravery, independence, martial prowess, assertiveness, physical strength, verbal acuteness, firmness or hardness, and respect from others. Conversely, the powerless were described with non-masculine or feminine-coded language suggesting dishonor, subservience, passivity, defeat, cowardice, dependence, defenselessness, lack of volition, softness or indecisiveness, and lack of respect from others. Once attained, neither status was permanent; women and men trafficked back and forth between the two. Depending upon the circumstances, members of both sexes could experience reversals of fortunes which would necessitate moving from one category to the other, on more than one occasion in a lifetime.

This thesis probes the materiality of a text by focusing on elliptical matters. In The Culture of Time and Space, Stephen Kern introduces the term "positive-negative space" to describe the primacy of empty space as a formal subject matter in sculptures of the early twentieth century. With some caveats and distinctions, the thesis argues that Kern's theory of positive-negative space is crucial for reading Faulkner's crytic and polyvalent production of space. Using a smorgasbord of approaches including psychoanalytic and reader-response criticism, feminist and critical race theories, post-structuralist and formalist notions of space, theories of the "hole" in fine arts sculpture, and the New Southern studies, my thesis reinvents the conception of positive-negative space, and asserts that positive-negative space as an artistic principle" is the modus operandi of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Sanctuary. / by Simone Maria Puleo. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2012. / Includes bibliography. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / System requirements: Adobe Reader.

The topics of identity and subjectivity are well-trodden paths in posthuman thought, and the trend has been to reduce the self to its material, social, and technoscientific components. Yet the posthuman model of subjectivity—influenced by the tenets of postmodernism—tends to be disabling because it does not focus on the subject’s agency or the possibility of liberation from social tyranny. In this thesis, I use a sampling of what I call “religious wisdom literature”—specifically, the wisdom books of the Old Testament and contemporary Buddhist writings—to challenge the assumption that the self is indistinguishable from the ideologies that produce it. I provide models from religious texts that instead, emphasize critical agency, flexibility, and resistive power. I also suggest that focusing on these qualities may ultimately be useful in the composition classroom, where we can use “self-centered” expressivist techniques (reflective assignments, emotional awareness) to meet the social-epistemic goal of ideological critique. Ultimately, posthumanism, with its emphasis on the construction of subjectivity, is better suited to question strict materialism and inquire into the inspiring possibilities of ancient wisdom. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2013.