This dissertation explores how the plot pattern intensifies the tragicomic effect by provoking the audience's creative response to the four absurdist plays: Eugene Ionesco's The Chairs (1950), Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1952), Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party (1957), and Edward Albee's The American Dream (1961). / The plot pattern of absurdist plays is characterized by contradictory and disjointed elements in the characters' verbal or non-verbal actions. This plot pattern engages the audience's detached, intellectual response to the characters' situation, in which a comic sense of deviation from normal human behavior and a tragic sense of disjointedness from meaningful human life combine to produce a tragicomic effect on the audience. When the four absurdist plays listed above present characters who are outsiders, the plot pattern intensifies the tragicomic effect because the outsiders negate the audience's expectations, activate its intellectual responses to, and deepen its tragicomic perceptions of the disjointed stage situation. / Chapter One begins with a brief explanation of essential elements of tragedy and comedy and shows how earlier tragicomedies combine the elements of the opposite dramatic genres. This exposition will help to clarify how the absurdist plot pattern distinctively combines tragic and comic elements through disjointed devices, uses outsiders to intensify the tragicomic effect produced by these devices, and invites the audience's intellectual catharsis by provoking its probable resolution of the play's unresolved ending. / In the later chapters, this dissertation analyzes each of the four absurdist plays, focusing on how the distinctive plot pattern guides the audience's creative participation in giving tragicomic significance to the play. In doing so, this dissertation unfolds each analysis within the general framework of Wolfgang Iser's response theory which is useful for the systematic development of the analysis. According to Iser, the audience, through hermeneutic responses of expectation, frustration, retrospection, and reconstruction, fills in the indeterminate elements of the character's inconsequential behaviors and considers the unstated meaning of the play. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 51-04, Section: A, page: 1240. / Major Professor: Karen L. Laughlin. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1990.

Friedrich von Schiller's aesthetic idealism was a significant influence on the literary community of nineteenth century Russia. Fyodor Dostoevsky's appreciation of Schiller caused him to organize his writings according to the German author's paradigm of beauty, nature, and reason. Schiller's secularized concept of aesthetics relied on art as the medium for the education and refinement of the mind. Dostoevsky christianized Schiller's ideas by assigning Christ the function of beauty. In Schiller's view, people who succeed in integrating nature and reason through the ability to perceive beauty rise to the ideal condition of human existence which he called the "beautiful soul." For Dostoevsky, those who unify nature and reason within themselves through an appreciation for the ideal beauty of Christ become the "higher man." For both authors, the failure to harmonize nature and reason is the cause of suffering. The purpose of the present study is to show how Schiller's aesthetics influenced the Russian author. Contrary to the view in contemporary scholarship that the affect of Schiller's ideas varies in the course of Dostoevsky's literary development, this study shows that Schiller's influence is strong and continual throughout Dostoevsky's major fiction. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 48-07, Section: A, page: 1762. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1987.

Literary circles in Russia have traditionally placed Platonov's works under the category of realism. In the West, he is considered a modernist by most literary scholars. This study proves, however, that both of these approaches to Platonov's works are misguided. Through careful analysis and comparison between Platonov's novels and those of Bellamy, Wells, Huxley, and Orwell, this study definitively places Platonov's novels within the framework of the Western utopian tradition. / Significantly, Platonov's prose shares with the above mentioned authors the following main themes: scientific and technological progress, the mentality of a new man, individualism versus collectivism, equality, and the effects of ideology on the collective consciousness. The study argues that the utopian dreams and visions of Platonov's early works derive from his critical reception of the most important motifs and concepts in the works by Bellamy and Wells. It also demonstrates how the author's early optimism, in the face of the tragic historical events of post-Revolutionary Russia, gradually transformed into the same disillusionment that characterizes the works of anti-utopian writers such as Orwell and Huxley. Tracing the parallel dystopian themes and techniques in the works of Platonov, Orwell, and Huxley, this study attempts to lay the foundation for a new interpretation of Platonov's art. / Using a comparative approach, this study not only shows the similarity between Platonov's imagery, conceptualization, and motifs and those of other writers in the utopian tradition, but also demonstrates how Platonov developed and enriched the ideas and literary style within it. / The study concludes that, while Platonov's early works illuminate the existing state of affairs in post-Revolutionary Russia and provide a utopian escape from history, it is his later work which establishes him as an essentially anti-utopian writer, under the strong influence of the novels of Orwell and Huxley. The profound difference between Platonov and his anti-utopian contemporaries, however, is that the Russian writer wrote with the knowledge and experience of having actually lived within the limits of a realized fantasy, that is, in communist Russia. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-08, Section: A, page: 3152. / Major Professor: Nina Efimov. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1995.

Going beyond the surveys and descriptions of institutions and policies that today often define the study of politics, the present study will analyze the political problem of order in light of humanity's basic experience of historical reality, which expresses itself through the perennial need for a sense truth, meaning, fulfillment, completion and wholeness. Using Plato's Gorgias and Symposium and Fyodor M. Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (Books V and VI in particular) as references and attempting to establish equivalences between the two thinker's diagnoses of political reality, I will argue that the fundamental human need for a sense of existential satisfaction (or, in other words, an existentially satisfactory order) is the root cause of all political phenomena and therefore is the interpretive key to any compelling and complete analysis of political reality in both its ordered and disordered forms. In the end, after a close assessment of the works cited above, it will be determined that Plato and Dostoevsky held the common assumption that threats to political order, and thus the emergence of political disorders, result when man, in search for the source true order, denies the notion of eternal transcendence (labeled as either God or the good) and embraces secular, tyrannical, power.

<p> Theorists of the sublime have struggled to make the category coherent because they have collapsed its causes, the experience of the event itself, its subsequent effects on a subject, the symptomatic appearance of those effects in written texts, and the effects such texts have on a readership or audience, all into one concept: "the sublime." However, by slowing down the sublime event, parsing out its stages temporally, and drawing out their distinctive qualities, we not only can make some parts of the total sublime experience effable and coherent, but also we can discover meaning and significance in texts, such as strange or difficult poems, that may otherwise seem to be incomprehensible, irrational, or irresponsible uses of language. In turn, because such sublime texts refer both to experiences and to the subject that has them, such readings invite expanded understandings of human being (noun) and human being (gerund). This hypothesis is not new, but I complicate it by understanding human being through not one but at least three interrelated lenses: existential/experiential, biological/embodied, and social/civilizational. Therefore, to show adequately the sublime event's reputed "interruption of being", its continued relevance to the study of being, and what it reveals about human being, I analyze three types of poetries interested in these three aspects of human being. </p><p> In my introductory chapter, I critically review arguments made about the sublime in literary history, both canonical &ndash; such as Longinus's, Burke's, and Kant's &ndash; and more recent, such as Suzanne Guerlac's, Francis Ferguson's, and Neil Hertz's. I attend to the sublime's delineations as well as its rewards and risks. I differ, however, when I conclude that the cause is a perception that interrupts meaning-making and self-making cognitive processes. I clarify why the experience of the event is reputably private, contingent, and virtually ineffable. I argue that the sublime can only enter public discourse through the logic of symptom, of which poems can be examples. In other words, because poems are in and of language, they show a recovery from the sublime event, to which they can refer but which they cannot represent. I read Sappho's Ode and a section of Wordsworth's "Prelude" to demonstrate the effectiveness of reading poems in this way. </p><p> In each of the chapters that follow, I read both typical poems and sublime recovery poems, highlighting the qualities that make a sublime recovery poem recognizable within the context of its respective poet's work. Thereafter, I discuss the consequences of the meaning these poems make. In my analysis, I remain faithful to the terms the poet develops across his body of work. </p><p> I introduce the existential sublime event through Zagajewski's poetry. I build the contextual background that the sublime event interrupts through an overview of Zagajewski's more typical Dasein poems. Against this background, his sublime recovery poems emerge. They expand the meaning of human being (gerund) to include atemporal experiences &ndash; a virtual contradiction in terms considering that being happens in time and that time plays a strong role in Zagajewski's poetics. As a consequence, I argue, his sublime poems propose to the reader possible being that is non-ethical, asocial, and transcendent and that contrasts with Zagajewski's speaker's more usual ethical stance of praise. They also invite important questions about human consciousness that can reinvigorate our understanding of Dasein. </p><p> In chapter three, I examine the biological sublime, an interruption in Holub's organic, empirical context that typically acknowledges both failure and paradox in science, thought, and art. In response, poems act as intensive care for being by holding off the encroachment of non-being, which threatens in moments of failure or paradox. In "Transplantace Srdce," however, Holub's speaker adopts uncharacteristic language associated with sublime recovery and reaches unempirical, rational certainty about being's presence where non-being should be. This conclusion redefines the parameters of embodied being. </p><p> In chapter four, I begin with the civilizational sublime, to which Grossman's elaborate edifice of poetic theory and poems, on which he seeks to hang the value of persons, responds. The rupture in civilization is marked by Trinity, the first atomic explosion that entered social consciousness and ushered in the use of nuclear weapons and the ever-imminent threat to repeat sociability's utter failure. Grossman's search for a non-violent account of representation that protects sociability culminates in a collection of poems distinguished by their inclusion of others' speech, which I read as a poetics of courtesy that is not violent. Courtesy requires the simultaneous presence of both the speaker and the one who is offered a chance to speak; otherwise, it fails. </p><p> In the Coda, I discuss the relevance of my approach to other theories of the sublime, to the study of poetry, and to the philosophy of consciousness. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)</p>

Based on research conducted over a twenty-four month period in Ljubljana, Slovenia, this dissertation provides an ethnographic study of the role of economists in charting Slovenia's transition process. The project argues that economics as a science is not homogeneous across cultures but that its history and implementation are contingent upon the position of its producers. It examines the practices of economists and the roots of their cultural authority which allows them to occupy influential positions beyond the technical confines of a community of specialized knowledge. The chapters trace the relationship between the history of economics as a discipline and the events that led to Slovenia's process of independence. They focus particularly on the emergence of depoliticized economic discourse as a legitimate critical strategy and track the way that this continued neutralization informed Slovenia's broader processes of change. Finally, this study questions the naturalness of the concept of transition presumed by the depoliticization of economic discourse through an analysis of discourses that contest or subvert it.

The glorification of war and the thoughtless use of "national" stereotypes characteristic of 19th century literature have broken down in the later 20th century after World War II and the end of the Cold War in 1991. German-speaking authors from various parts of Europe have participated in this dismantling through their creation of engaging fictions related to the war experience that contain critical reexaminations of relationships between the German and Slavic peoples of Europe at an individual, existential level. They have proven that "national" stereotypes perish when individuals are presented with real human beings. The works examined are Siegfried von Vegesack's Tanja: Eine Erzahlung aus dem Kaukasus, Heinrich Boll's Der Zug war punktlich and Gruppenbild mit Dame, Max Frisch's Als der Krieg zu Ende war, Herbert Eisenreich's Tiere von ganz naturlicher Grausamkeit, and Christa Wolfs Moskauer Novelle. Thus, the phenomenon is a Europe-wide development and not an isolated incident.

<p> The creative content contained within this thesis is comprised of two collections of short stories: <u>The Death of an Escargot (or Strange Feelings of Petrov)</u> and <u>&amp; Stories.</u> Together, these story collections represent the fruits of my labors as a student of the M.F.A. program at California State University at Long Beach. <u> The Death of an Escargot (or Strange Feelings of Petrov)</u> is a story cycle that places emphasis on experimentation and creative possibility. The second section, <u>&amp; Stories,</u> represents my engagement with more traditional methods, as well as an earnest attempt at giving voice to distinct communities that are often under-represented within the literary cannon. It is my intention that these stories be understood as representations of my interests as a writer, as well as artifacts to be considered as aides in the formation of my own creative identity.</p>

<p> "Historicity and the Romantic Novel in Britain and Russia" explores the engagement of early nineteenth-century Russian writers with contemporary British novels. Most studies of Russian fiction emphasize Russia's reliance on French models. Due to the profound shift in the understanding of history that occurred in Great Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, the less studied and underappreciated British connection also played a formative role in the development of the Russian novel. During those years, the definition of history was broadened to include the previously excluded areas of social experience and private life. Imbued with a reflexive awareness of its task, British Romantic historicism purported not only to place the objects of study within their actual settings but also to invent situations in which historical events might have occurred. This general boost in historicist sensibility affected not only the development of the English-language novel, but also the emerging tradition of Russian fiction. The two parts of my dissertation each focus on two exemplary novels: in the first part, The Bride of Lammermoor by Walter Scott and Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol; in the second, The Last Man by Mary Shelley and Russian Nights by Vladimir Odoevsky. In each case, I consider the mechanisms of self-renewal that allow the Romantic novel to depict historical pressures and adapt to them. Drawing on German idealist philosophy and Scottish Enlightenment historiographical models, I study the use of metaphor and allegory and the relation between such sub-genres as the gothic and grotesque, showing how they contributed to a reimagining of the role of history in Britain. In more extreme and fragmented forms, this new view of history then became the basis for a similarly radical recasting of history in Russia. Ultimately, I demonstrate how the prose of the Romantic novel in its rhetorical extravagance offered ways to enrich, redeem, and reimagine history.</p>

<p> This dissertation aims in part to redress the shortage of close readings of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Aleksandr Rodchenko's joint project, the book <i> Pro Eto.</i> It explores the relationship between the book's visual and verbal aspects, treating the book and its images as objects that repay attentive looking and careful analysis. By these means this dissertation finds that the images do not simply illustrate the text, but have an intertextual relationship with it: sometimes the images suggest their own, alternative narrative, offering scenes that do not exist in the poem; sometimes they act as literary criticism, suggesting interpretations, supplying biographical information, and highlighting with their own form aspects of the poem's. </p><p> This analysis reveals <i>Pro Eto</i>'s strong links with distant forms of art and literature. The poem's intricate ties to the book of Genesis and Victor Shklovsky's novel <i>Zoo,</i> written while the former literary critic was in exile in Berlin, evince an ambivalence about the manifestations of socialism in early-1920s Russia that is missing from much of Mayakovsky's work. At the same time Rodchenko's images, with their repeated references to Byzantine icons and Dadaist photomontage, expand the poem's scope and its concerns far beyond NEP-era Moscow. Thus my analysis finds that although <i> Pro Eto</i> is considered to be an emblematic Constructivist work, many of the received ideas about Russian Constructivism&mdash;the unswerving zeal of its practitioners, the utility of its production, and in particular the ideology-driven, <i>sui-generis</i> nature of the movement itself&mdash;are not supported by the book. <i>Pro Eto</i>'s deep connections with art and literature outside of Bolshevik Russia contradict the idea&mdash;first set out by the Constructivists themselves and widely accepted by subsequent scholars&mdash;of Constructivism as an autochthonous movement, born of theory, and indebted neither to historical art movements nor to contemporary western ones. My analysis suggests that reading Pro Eto through the lens of Constructivist theory denies the work the richness, ambivalence and humor it gains when that theory is understood as being in conversation with artistic practice, rather than defining it.</p>