Thesis (M.A.)--Stony Brook University, 2008. / This official electronic copy is part of the DSpace Stony Brook theses & dissertations collection maintained by the University Libraries, Special Collections & University Archives on behalf of the Stony Brook Graduate School. It is stored in the SUNY Digital Institutional Repository and can be accessed through the website. Presented to the Stony Brook University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Philosophy; as recommended and accepted by the candidate's degree sponsor, the Dept. of Philosophy. Includes bibliographical references (p. 38-39).

This thesis provides a reading of Anita Rau Badami’s novels The Hero’s Walk and Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? The interpretive frame constructs a theory of affect to explore the human experience of beauty through a reading of Badami’s texts. This work’s approach to beauty is derived largely from Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just and from musings on beauty by Simone Weil. Following Weil, I understand beauty as the ascription of value or worth to various things, actions, or ideas, and I position beauty as an undergirding affective experience that is always present in the human encounter of the world. This thesis examines how Badami’s novels depict the ways in which a Weilian sense of beauty leads characters to develop affectual attachments to various ideologies and discourses represented in the diasporic landscape of the texts. Through a critical consideration of the depicted effects of such attachments on Badami’s characters’ lives, this study also locates potential instances of what Lauren Berlant calls cruel optimism. I contend that the novels often portray instances of cruel optimism to critique traditional practices and perspectives while ever working towards building their own pronouncement of what constitutes a more genuine, higher sense of the beautiful. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

Which conceptions of solidarity will help subjugated, oppressed groups pose liberatory challenges to the regimes under which they suffer? Activists and scholars concerned with liberation err by constraining solidarity to the parameters outlined in conventional moral and political theory and, therefore, by imagining solidarity as dependent on models of identity and shared interests. Organized movements may aim for expanded access to institutional claims and for cultural representation, and yet liberatory movements also have more specific objectives: to challenge the legitimacy of oppressive political and moral regimes, and to put those regimes in the obediential service of the vulnerable and oppressed. I critique notions of solidarity conceived in political philosophy as shared interests, and as a functions of identity in discourses about anti-racist, feminist, and pro-indigenous movements for social justice and cultural inclusion. Using the works of Enrique Dussel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Elaine Scarry, I argue that a notion of solidarity developed as a relational concept, primarily as a reference to the laborious activities of relating, can serve as a resource for liberatory projects once we describe the three main ideas as a coherent proposition: liberatory solidarity as relational. The concept refers to when individuals and groups continue to relate, to make one another, for the purposes of liberation despite countervailing exploitative power relations, incentives, and disincentives. Those seeking emancipatory change either labor to relate for the sake of liberation, or preserve the bigger-picture status quo in which disparate and episodic enclave movements rise and fall on the terms set by identity politics and fictive individualistic autonomy. / Ph. D.

A collection of poems that seeks the balance between imagination and reality that Wallace Stevens calls for in art, with a preface exploring Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just through the work of two contemporary poets.

Cléo from 5 to 7 is perhaps the most famous work of influential French filmmaker Agnès Varda, who is often called the "Grande Dame of the New Wave". The depth of symbolism, the richness of imagery, the beginnings of cinécriture (a Varda-ism describing cinema as a form of writing that uses all the tools available to a filmmaker, not just words), and the charm of the story have guaranteed Cléo's popularity with scholars and audiences alike. Current scholarship has tended to focus on a few aspects of Cléo, including her role as a flâneuse, the use of mirrors and the theme of gazing, time and the division of the film into chapters, the female gaze, and femininity. I will examine the thematic of decay, nature, and beauty in Cléo. Beginning by linking it to her more contemporary documentary The Gleaners and I, I will analyze how Varda undermines conventional ideas of health, youth, and beauty by deconstructing Cléo's world through the threat of disease, only to show how Cléo regains autonomy and control of herself by learning to embrace the inevitability of decay in nature, and in her own body. I will rely on the theories in Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain to show how Cléo's changing relationship to her body constitute the profound transformation mentioned at the beginning of the film. I will also examine Cléo's cancer in light of Susan Sontag's essay Illness as Metaphor. We will see how Varda uses cinécriture to express these ideas, especially in regards to the dialogue between characters, visual symbols, and the use of space.