This thesis considers silence as a problem that is felt particularly acutely in the modern period. The focus is on the silence caused by a general distrust of the representational ability of language, which has manifold manifestations in modern writings. From the existential turn that implies self-cancellation to the symbolist project to create new symbols, modernist writers display an anxiety to speak the unspeakable. This paper’s approach is to offer a metaphoric reading of the role of the Muse as the giver of knowledge and voice in writing practices, and to identify the cause of silence in the confusion over the two distinctive ideas about the goddess. The roots of such confusion are traced to Plato’s epistemological treatises and his exposition of love, as encapsulated in Phaedrus, in which the superimposition of metaphysical knowledge over physical love introduces the aporia into poetry, or literary writing. Subsequent developments of literature, including that of the modernists’, are subject to this aporetic silence. By tracing the trajectories of epistemology and the representation of love up to the eighteenth century, the work shows how the modern problem of silence is triggered by the duality in Kantian epistemology, which is itself a legacy of Platonic metaphysics. Modern silence, therefore, is studied within the critical framework of such metaphysical background, against the metaphoric representation of transcendental imagination as Mother Wit, and its application to the matter of love. The second half of the paper discusses the various responses to this duality found in the ‘transcendental power of imagination’. In the existential writings that defy analytical reason, and the symbolist writings that react against Romanticism, writers struggle to overcome the gap between subjective and objective realities. They therefore fail to give voice to things and feelings without falling back to obscurity or self-erasure – both producing silence on a semantic level. The paper studies works of Hermann Broch and Samuel Beckett to demonstrate the arrival at this great silence, which, though reached via different paths, is the same aporetic silence contained in Platonic epistemology. By examining two works of J.M. Coetzee, this paper also aims to explore the possibility of breaking this silence by going beyond knowledge, and reengaging the service of another Muse her power of love, physicality, and presence. / published_or_final_version / English / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

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This study explores how we may read silence in dramatic works as a rhetorical strategy. Silence is usually equated with absence, oppression, or passivity. Speech is usually equated with presence, expression, and action. While silence can be imposed to prevent articulation, my study suggests that we re-read women's discourse, including their use of silence, as an empowering tool. By examining silence as strategic we allow for individual agency. Part One of the thesis demonstrates how the rhetoric of silence functions as a tool to communicate, persuade, and generate knowledge for women protagonists. The study of silence on the stage explores how choosing to employ a non-verbal form of communication challenges the logocentric tendency that privileges assertation and speech over silence. For this reason, Shakespeare's Cordelia serves as the paradigmatic silent rhetor. Cordelia demonstrates how silence, employed by choice, affirms authenticity. In Part Two, twentieth-century interpretations of female protagonists---Salome, Antigone and Philomele---are examined to show how we may read them as strategic rhetors who employ silence in order to recreate themselves as agents.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Salzburg, 1982. / Vita. Added thesis t.p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 259-284).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 1998. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [175]-196). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 1998. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [175]-196). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (B.A.)--Haverford College, Dept. of English, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references.

Part one of the thesis. She's leaving. She's running away. Everything goes too fast. If she doesn't, the emptiness in her life will destroy her. There, in Africa, nothing happens. Nothing but sight, silence, space and time. There, she finds another way of living. There, everything happens. Everything that has anything to do with essence. Only then can Gisella, 30, come back. / Part two. How can one tell of silence with words? How can silence be what makes not only the style and themes of a fiction, but the whole fiction, resonate, vibrate? In the fiction of Marguerite Duras, more specifically in Aurelia Steiner (Melbourne) and L'amour, the obsession of silence is what modulates the representation of time and space, be it corporal, geographical or domestic, and what transforms reality in an attempt to open the heart of things, beings and time on the infinite, the invisible, the sacred.

Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio University, August, 2007. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references.

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