Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

A pesquisa sintetiza as diversas linguagens promovidas por Saul Bellow, escritor judeu norte-americano, Prêmio Nobel de Literatura (1976) em seu primeiro romance, Dangling Man. A narrativa é redigida em forma de diário, onde Joseph, o herói, reinterpreta o seu cotidiano em Chicago, enquanto aguarda o desenlace burocrático relativo ao seu engajamento militar. O momento histórico da Segunda Grande Guerra transparece como cenário de fundo e permeia o clima dos relatos de Joseph. A abordagem proposta incursiona no panorama da crítica norte-americana a partir do lançamento do romance em 1944 até o presente, esmiuçando o que veio a se constituir uma nova perspectiva literária e um novo movimento de vanguarda intelectual. Finalmente, o trabalho reflete sobre as diferentes manifestações do judaico ao longo do romance de Bellow. / The research synthesizes the different language styles promoted by Saul Bellow, the American Jewish writer and winner of the Nobel Prize (1976) in his first novel, Dangling Man. The narrative is written in a daily record form, where Joseph, the hero, interprets his daily life in Chicago, while awaiting the outcome of the long bureaucratic process of his enrollment in the army. The historical moment of the II Word War appears as the back scenario, imprinting an atmosphere of suspense in Josephs reports. The research analyses the extensive gamut of American Literary criticism, from the very moment of the publication of the novel in 1944 until nowadays, trying to illuminate what has become a new literary perspective and vanguard trend. Finally, the exposition reflects on the different manifestation of Judaism throughout Bellows novel.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

A pesquisa sintetiza as diversas linguagens promovidas por Saul Bellow, escritor judeu norte-americano, Prêmio Nobel de Literatura (1976) em seu primeiro romance, Dangling Man. A narrativa é redigida em forma de diário, onde Joseph, o herói, reinterpreta o seu cotidiano em Chicago, enquanto aguarda o desenlace burocrático relativo ao seu engajamento militar. O momento histórico da Segunda Grande Guerra transparece como cenário de fundo e permeia o clima dos relatos de Joseph. A abordagem proposta incursiona no panorama da crítica norte-americana a partir do lançamento do romance em 1944 até o presente, esmiuçando o que veio a se constituir uma nova perspectiva literária e um novo movimento de vanguarda intelectual. Finalmente, o trabalho reflete sobre as diferentes manifestações do judaico ao longo do romance de Bellow. / The research synthesizes the different language styles promoted by Saul Bellow, the American Jewish writer and winner of the Nobel Prize (1976) in his first novel, Dangling Man. The narrative is written in a daily record form, where Joseph, the hero, interprets his daily life in Chicago, while awaiting the outcome of the long bureaucratic process of his enrollment in the army. The historical moment of the II Word War appears as the back scenario, imprinting an atmosphere of suspense in Josephs reports. The research analyses the extensive gamut of American Literary criticism, from the very moment of the publication of the novel in 1944 until nowadays, trying to illuminate what has become a new literary perspective and vanguard trend. Finally, the exposition reflects on the different manifestation of Judaism throughout Bellows novel.

The thesis argues that we can maintain that the so-called History of David’s Rise (HDR) existed independently before the deuteronomistic work, by identifying its beginning in I Samuel 16. 14 and ending in II Samuel 5. 3. Additionally, the thesis proposes that the source was first composed during Hezekiah’s reign with a view to persuading the northerners to embrace Hezekiah’s one Israel policy, and then went through two major redactions – one in the late exilic period and the other in the post-exilic period. These later redactions were prompted not only by the political situations of the time, but also by the literary milieu. In other words, a growing interest in narratives and the emergence of the ‘Jewish novelistic impulse’ in the Neo-Babylonian and Persian period triggered the creation of more extensive narratives about Saul and David. These historical-critical arguments are preceded in the thesis by a methodological argument that a traditio-historical issue is inevitably related to a literary understanding of the larger whole. The background for this two-foci research is the wild disagreement on the issue, and the confusion around the methodology that has been aggravated by an unnecessary tension between different approaches. The thesis therefore discusses the methodological issues as carefully as possible, so that it might be transparent what actually happens when one does biblical criticism. This gives the thesis the features of a case study, but the thesis also hopes to present a satisfactory and attractive view on a particular traditio-historical issue in its own right. The study hopes to be an experiment of self-reflective biblical criticism that is serious but open. Since the thesis has two different but essentially related theses, the conclusion is established in two stages – methodological and historical. Chapter 1 shows that a literary understanding of the whole is foundational to traditio-historical discussions, and Chapter 2 demonstrates that literary understanding is always open to revision, and so are historical answers, as the latter are inevitably related to the former. Chapter 3 asks what is the most appropriate understanding of the whole HDR at this point, and the answer provides the last two chapters with the foundation by which various evidences can be measured. Chapter 4 revisits the initial question, and provides a provisional answer. And Chapter 5, after discussing the relationship between the materials in the books of Samuel, confirms the conclusion reached in the previous chapter, and elaborates further implications.

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A consistent feature of Saul Bellow???s fiction is the protagonist???s encounter with one or more teaching figures. Dialogue with such individuals prompts the Bellovian protagonist to reject his current state of selfhood as inadequate and provokes him to re-form as a new person. The teacher figure offers a better self to which the protagonist is attracted; or, more frequently in Bellow, the protagonist is repelled by both his teacher and his own current state to form a new, previously unrepresented self. This thesis argues that Bellow???s self inherits and modifies the perfectionist philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, in a literary reinterpretation that parallels Stanley Cavell???s philosophical revaluation of the American Transcendentalists. In Emerson and Thoreau, and in Cavell???s reading of perfectionism, the self is attracted onward only by a better representation of selfhood in another, while Bellow???s self may also be, and often is, provoked by a repellent other to inhabit a new form of selfhood. This thesis takes the evolution of selfhood in Bellow to be structured by travel. In The Adventures of Augie March, Augie???s movement between selves is impelled by conversation with teacher figures and paralleled by his unending journeys. In Herzog, Herzog???s self-transformations and travels are provoked by reading and writing, and by the ecstasy of loss revealed to him through apostrophic conversations with the dead and absent in a series of unsent and mental letters. Letter-writing, the provocation for Herzog???s self-perfection, becomes a form of travel in Herzog. This thesis further argues that Bellow???s travelling self is a critical response to two poles of modern subjectivity, structured by European mythologies of travel: Bellow???s fiction is critical, first, of a Hegelian, egoist mode of selfhood structured after the Odyssey; but equally critical of examples of Levinasian openness to the Other, patterned on Abraham???s exile. Bellow does not accept either the Odyssean or the Abrahamic mode of selfhood on its own, recognizing oppressive possibilities in both. Travelling selfhood in Bellow, initiated by conversation with others, both fuses and rereads Odyssean and Abrahamic constructs within a new, but perpetually unfinished American mode of selfperfection.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Full text release at OhioLINK's ETD Center delayed at author's request

In Speaker’s Reference and Semantic Reference, Saul Kripke posited two kinds of reference involved in every use of a designator—a semantic reference, to the object picked out by the meaning of the words used—and a speaker reference, to the object to which the speaker aimed to call attention by deploying the designator. Kripke tentatively defined the notion of the speaker’s referent as the object that (i) the speaker wishes to call attention to, on a given occasion, and (ii) that he believes fulfills the conditions for being the description’s semantic referent. Although offered as a definition, this account is best interpreted as a tentative statement of the normal success conditions of speaker reference. As such, it raises the question of how special a role semantic reference plays in successful speaker reference. This report addresses that question by evaluating Kripke’s tentative account in the light of an extended series of examples in which definite descriptions are used to speaker refer to objects other than the objects to which the descriptions uniquely semantically refer. The report concludes that words’ semantic characteristics are only one of several forms of evidence that audiences regularly rely on to discern what object a speaker intends to call attention to by a particular act of reference. / text

The rule-following problem can be condensed into the paradox that a rule cannot determine any course of action because every course of action can be made to accord with that rule. In his Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Saul Kripke sees this paradox as potentially leading to a radical semantic scepticism that renders meaning itself meaningless, and attributes a sceptical solution of the problem to Wittgenstein. After a critical examination of Kripke's work, I conclude that this solution fails on account of allowing neither for a normativity beyond the subjection of the individual to correction by others in her community, nor for a non-interpretive conception of the understanding. Finally, I propose an alternative solution that incorporates the notion of communal background understanding into that of a form of life and thus preserves the normativity of rule-following and of language.