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.

Le divin peut-il être à la fois mort et vivant ? Résonnant pour nous à partir de Nietzsche et de Heidegger, cette question traverse l’œuvre, d’abord poétique mais aussi pleinement philosophique, de Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843). Dès la querelle du panthéisme qui anime le débat intellectuel germanique au cours des années 1780, le dieu de la métaphysique identifié avec le dieu chrétien semble perdre son effectivité. Mais le divin n’est pas seulement pour Hölderlin un contenu dogmatique ou conceptuel : il désigne avant tout le lien qui s’établit avec la nature lorsque l’homme réfléchit le sentiment que celle-ci produit en lui-même. Dès lors, même s’il semble exposé à la mort en tant que Créateur transcendant du monde, Dieu ne cesse pas de pouvoir être approché comme la source vive de toute apparition. Il ne se manifeste toutefois comme tel qu’à condition de s’effacer comme antériorité et de donner lieu aux choses singulières, en une rupture de toute union prétendument originelle. Or, dire que le principe doit nier sa propre primauté, c’est dire que l’un tend à se séparer de soi pour accéder à sa propre unité, et qu’il doit nécessairement produire une image de lui-même. En défendant cette thèse héritière d’Héraclite et du néoplatonisme, Hölderlin s’oppose aux philosophes idéalistes subjectifs, qui identifient alors le principe de toute réalité avec le Moi, et il s’expose du même coup à l’objection d’être incohérent et exalté. Mais l’effet produit par ses poèmes, par son roman et par sa tragédie fait s’évanouir tout soupçon de Schwärmerei. La poésie hölderlinienne est réellement image de Dieu. L’étude de la méditation et de la mise en œuvre progressive d’une telle effectivité exige de distinguer trois périodes dans le développement de sa pensée. Entre 1785 et 1795, Hölderlin s’efforce de parvenir, après avoir lu Kant, Schiller, Fichte et Schelling, à une compréhension à la fois non subjective et non dogmatique de l’être. Entre 1795 et 1802, en nommant le principe à la fois « beauté » à partir de Platon et « un se différenciant en lui-même » à partir d’Héraclite, il conceptualise les moyens de traduire poétiquement la profusion de la vie divine. Entre 1802 et 1843, comme si la mort de Susette Gontard, l’isolement et la folie affrontés sur le plan biographique rejoignaient, sur les plans théorique et poétique, la méditation de Pindare, de Sophocle et de la figure du Christ, Hölderlin montre la dépendance de l’infini à l’égard de la finitude. Ainsi son œuvre entière donne-t-elle à voir, en sa tension interne entre le poème et la philosophie, la vie divine harmoniquement opposée. / Can the divinity be at once dead and alive? Resonating for us since the time of Nietzsche and Heidegger, this question runs all through the works of Hölderlin, in the first place poetic, but also, in the fullest sense, philosophic. From the time of the controversy over pantheism among German intellectuals in the 1780s the identification of the god of metaphysics with the Christian god seems to have lost its effectiveness. But the divinity for Hölderlin was not only a written dogma or concept ; it denotes above all the link established with nature when man reflects the feelings it arouses in him. From then on, god, even if he seems exposed to death as the transcendent creator of the world, continues to be approachable as the deepest source of all apparitions. However, god only manifests himself in this way if he effaces himself as anteriority, and breaking all union supposedly original, makes way for singular things. Now, to say that the principle denies its own primacy is to say that the one tends to separate from itself in order to reach its own unity, and that it must necessarily produce an image of itself. In defending this proposition, Hölderlin set himself in opposition to the subjective idealist philosophers, who identified the principle of all reality with the "I", and he exposed himself at the same time to the objection that he was incoherent and fanatical. But the effect produced by his poems, novel and tragedy dispels all suspicion of Schwärmerei. Hölderlin’s poetry really is the image of god. A study of his meditation and the progressive implementation of such a level of effectiveness makes it necessary to distinguish three periods in the evolution of his thought. Between 1785 and 1795, after having read Kant, Schiller, Fichte and Schelling, Hölderlin tried to achieve an understanding both non-subjective and non-dogmatic of Being. Between 1795 and 1802 he conceptualised the means of conveying through poetry the profusion of divine life, naming the principle both "beauty", after Plato, and "one differentiating in itself", after Heraclitus. Between 1802 and 1843, as if the death of Susette Gontard, isolation and madness confronted at a biographical level had conjoined, at a theoretic and poetic level, the meditation on Pindar, Sophocles and the face of Christ, Hölderlin showed the dependence of the infinite with regard to the finite. Thus, the whole body of his work, in its internal tension between poem and philosophy, reveals divine life in harmonic opposition.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 271-277). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 2000. / Includes abstract. Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 341-362).

Vollst. zugl.: Zürich, Univ., Habil.-Schr., 2006

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

Dublin Easter Rising of 1916 is widely recognized as an example of an intersection between nationalism and religion due to its use of the Christian symbolism of redemption via sacrifice. The religious aura, surrounding its leader and main ideologue, Patrick Pearse, was both a source of his posthumous "triumph" - the Irish independence shaped to a large extent by his legacy, and his "black legend" of the spiritual father of the sectarian violence in the twentieth century Irish politics. Due to the high degree of politicization of the debate over Pearse's role in Irish history, his intellectual legacy was rarely treated sine ira et studio. After a delineation of the problematic legacy of Pearse in the context of Irish Studies and the general introduction to the theme of the relations between nationalism and religion, this work proceeds to the re-examination of the place of religion in Pearse's thought. Pearse's conceptualization of Irish nationalism should be perceived as a synthesis emerging from the interplay between his deep indebtedness to the religious mind-frame and the Romantic and modernist influences that shaped the atmosphere of the pre-1914 Europe. It is based on a structural analogy between the Church and the nation. The analogy is created by means of a mechanism of the transposition of...

In the context of a renascent interest in the thought of Jean-Paul Sartre, this thesis proposes a close examination of one of his less studied texts, the study of Gustave Flaubert, L'Idiot de la famille (1971-72). The analysis focuses on theoretical developments that emerge from Sartre's biographical enquiry, pursuing an interdisciplinary approach combining a consideration of literary theory and literary history with the perspective of Sartre's philosophy of subjectivity. L'Idiot is situated amongst a wide variety of texts by Sartre, from Qu'est-ce que la littérature? (1948) to the Critique de la raison dialectique (1960), identifying theoretical innovations within Sartre's understanding of the subject (ch. 1), his social theory (ch. 2), his theory of the imaginary (ch. 3), of literary production (ch. 4) and of reading (ch. 5). Additionally, hitherto largely unexplored passages highlight Sartre's reflections on the situation of the late 1960s. Previous analyses of the philosophical innovations presented in L'Idiot have often focused on the strictly theoretical passages in the biography. The present thesis also concentrates on the 'imagined' scenes presented throughout the text. Read as an integral part of Sartre's method, it is suggested that the dramatization facilitated by the biographical format is an integral part of the theoretical enquiry. Despite the lack of explicit referencing provided by Sartre, the biography is explored in its open character, identifying a series of resonances and similarities with a diverse range of authors. The different chapters consider thinkers whose relationship with Sartre has received little or no attention (such as Pierre Bourdieu and Walter Benjamin), or whose work resonates with Sartre in ways that have so far gone unnoticed (Roland Barthes, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Maurice Blanchot).

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This works deals with ethics of sexuality in the chosen canonical works of the Euro- American Belles-Lettres literature. It tries to concentrate on the changes of the preferred bases which ethics of sexuality is based on, furthermore it analyses the expressed ethical stances and finally it emphasises some sexual-ethical themes, which appeared in the analysed books. The emphasis is put on the different nature of two ethical layers: shared customs and individual morality, which can radically differ from the prevailing customs, protest against them or expand them further. Based on 42 canonical works, this work names and described 7 possible approaches to the ethics of sexuality and 7 ethical topics which were recurrently appearing in the analysed books.