Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-27T17:27:25Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Luis Manuel Malta de Alves Louceiro.pdf: 1818082 bytes, checksum: 8786aaf4801d1196495dedbefe6aea8d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008-11-11 / The main objective of this Master s Dissertation is to know in an unprecedented work to what extent the mystic of Nature, orador, poet, essayist and Transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) may have influenced Pragmaticist and Semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) through his poem, The Sphynx (1841; translated for the first time into Portuguese in Annex 1), which stimulated the latter to offer an answer to the Emersonian enigma in the essay, A Guess at the Riddle (1887-88; translated for the first time into Portuguese in Annex 2), something that, later, according to Nathan Houser & Christian Kloesel, led to the construction of his admirable Architectonic (The Essential Peirce - Volume 1, 245), about which Peirce himself wrote: this book, if ever written, as it soon will be if I am in a situation to do it, will be one of the births of time (Ibid, ibidem). Therefore, in Part I we will analyze Emerson s poem and will highlight his Main Ideas, those present in his own books, essays and poems - before and after the making of the poem (1841) -, so we can know his intellectual development, in his rich dialog with the Western, Middle-Eastern and Eastern philosophies (that influenced him tremendously) -, once the key-idea behind this Master s Dissertation is grounded on Peirce s other comment on The Sphynx - symbols grow in the essay What Is A Sign? (1894) until we get to Emerson s Epistemology of Moods, his Existential Ethics of Sel-Improvement and his Metaphysics of Process, according to Stanley Cavell, who is responsible for the renaissance of Emerson s philosophical studies in the US in the last three decades. In Part II we will make a structural analysis (Martial Guéroult) of the answer Peirce gave to the Emersonian enigma in his essay, A Guess at the Riddle (1887-88) / O principal objetivo desta Dissertação de Mestrado é saber em trabalho inédito - em que medida o místico da Natureza, orador, poeta, ensaísta, e filósofo transcendentalista norteamericano Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) pode ter influenciado o pragmaticista e semioticista norte-americano Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) através de seu poema The Sphynx (1841; A Esfinge ; com tradução inédita no Anexo 1), que teria motivado este a oferecer uma resposta ao enigma emersoniano no ensaio A Guess at the Riddle (1887-88; Uma Conjectura ao Enigma ; tradução inédita no Anexo 2), algo que levou Peirce, mais tarde, nas palavras de Nathan Houser & Christian Kloesel, à construção de sua admirável arquitetônica (The Essential Peirce - Volume 1, 245) e sobre o qual o próprio Peirce escreveu: este livro, se alguma vez for escrito, como será se eu estiver na condição de fazê-lo, será um dos acontecimentos da época (The Essential Peirce - Volume 1, p. 245). Assim, na Parte I faremos uma análise do poema emersoniano em que exporemos suas Principais Idéias, aquelas presentes em seus próprios livros, ensaios e poemas - antes e depois da feitura do poema (1841) -, para que possamos conhecer seu desenvolvimento intelectual, no rico diálogo com as tradições filosóficas Ocidental. Médio-Oriental e Oriental (que muito o influenciaram) -, uma vez que a idéia-chave por detrás desta Dissertação está fundada no outro comentário de Peirce ao enigma d A Esfinge - os símbolos crescem no ensaio What Is A Sign? (1894; O Que É Um Signo? ) até chegar à sua Epistemologia de Estados de Espírito, sua Ética Existencial de Auto- Melhoramento e sua Metafísica do Processo, de acordo com Stanley Cavell, que é responsável pelo renascimento dos estudos filosóficos emersonianos nos EUA nas últimas três décadas. Na Parte II faremos uma análise estrutural (Martial Guéroult) da resposta que Peirce forneceu ao enigma emersoniano com seu ensaio, Uma Conjectura ao Enigma (1887-88)

Les études d'associations en génome entier ("GWAS") ont récemment permis la découverte de nombreux polymorphismes génétiques impliqués dans la susceptibilité aux maladies multifactorielles. Cependant, ces polymorphismes n'expliquent qu'une faible part de l'héritabilité génétique de ces maladies, nous poussant ainsi à explorer de nouvelles pistes de recherche. Une des hypothèses envisagées serait qu'une partie de cette héritabilité manquante fasse intervenir des phénomènes d'interactions entre polymorphismes génétiques. L'objectif de cette thèse est d'explorer cette hypothèse en adoptant une stratégie de recherche d'interactions basée sur des critères statistiques et biologiques à partir de données issues de différentes études "GWAS". Ainsi, en utilisant différentes méthodes statistiques, nous avons commencé par rechercher des interactions entre polymorphismes qui pourraient influencer le risque de thrombose veineuse. Cette recherche n'a malheureusement pas abouti à l'identification de résultats robustes vis à vis du problème des tests multiples. Dans un deuxième temps, à partir d'hypothèses "plus biologiques", nous avons tenté de mettre en évidence des interactions entre polymorphismes impliqués dans les mécanismes de régulation de l'expression génique associés aux microARNs. Nous avons pu ainsi montrer de manière robuste dans deux populations indépendantes qu'un polymorphisme au sein de la séquence du microARN hsa-mir-219-1 interagissait avec un polymorphisme du gène HLA-DPB1 pour en moduler l'expression monocytaire. Nous avons également montré que l'expression monocytaire du gène H1F0 était influencée par un phénomène d'interaction impliquant un polymorphisme du microARN hsa-mir-659. En apportant sa propre contribution à l'engouement récent que suscite la recherche d'interactions entre polymorphismes dans les maladies dites complexes, ce travail de thèse illustre clairement la difficulté d'une telle tâche et l'importance de réfléchir à de nouvelles stratégies de recherches. / Recently, Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) have led to the discovery of numerous genetic polymorphisms involved in complex human diseases. However, these polymorphisms contribute only a little to the overall genetic variability of these diseases, suggesting the need for new kind of investigations in order to disentangle the so-called "missing heritability". The purpose of my PhD project was to investigate how different research strategies relying on statistical and biological considerations could help in determining whether part of this missing heritability could reside in interaction phenomena between genetic polymorphisms. Firstly, we applied different statistical methodologies and looked for interactions between polymorphisms that could influence the risk of venous thrombosis (VT). Even though this study was based on two large GWAS datasets, we were not able to identify pairwise interactions that survive multiple testing. This work suggests that strong interactive phenomena between common SNPs are unlikely to contribute much to the risk of VT. Second, by adopting a hypothesis-driven approach relying on biological arguments, we sought for interactions between microRNA related polymorphisms that could alter genetic expression. Using two large GWAS datasets in which genome-wide monocyte expression was also available, we were able to demonstrate the existence of two pairwise interaction phenomena on monocyte expression involving miRNAs polymorphisms: 1/ the expression of HLA-DPB1 was modulated by a polymorphism in its 3'UTR region with a polymorphism in the hsa-mir-219-1 microRNA sequence; 2/ similarly, the expression of H1F0 was influenced by a polymorphism in its 3'UTR region interacting with a polymorphism in the microRNA hsa-mir-659. Altogether, this project supports for the role of gene x gene interactions in the interindividual variability of biological processes but their identifications remain a tedious task requiring large samples and the development of new research strategies and methodologies.

Situated at the crossroads of literary studies, ecocriticism and political theory, Active Enchantments explores a strain of thought within American literature that understands life in all of its forms to be generated not by self determined identities, but by interconnectedness and self abandonment. I argue that this interest led American writers across the nineteenth century to develop theories of subjectivity and of politics that not only emphasize the entanglement of the self with its environment, but also view this relationship as structured by self overcoming. Thus, when Emerson calls such interconnectedness "active enchantment," he means to signal life's inherent ability to constantly surpass itself, to never fully be identical with itself. My dissertation brings to the fore the political and ecological stakes of this paradox: if our selves and communities are molded by self abandonment, then the standard scholarly account of how nineteenth century American literature conceptualized politics must be revised. Far from understanding community as an organic production, founded on a teleological and harmonizing principle, the writers I study reconceive it around a sense of a commonality irreducible to fixed identity. The politics emerging out of such redefinition disposes with the primacy of individual or human agency, and becomes ecological in that it renders inoperative the difference between the social and the natural, the human and the non human, ourselves and what comprises us. It is the ecological dimension of what seems like a properly political question that brings together writers as diverse as Emerson and Sarah Orne Jewett, Margaret Fuller and Henry and William James. I argue, for example, that in Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs, racial minorities emerge from geological strata as a kind of natural archive that complicates the nation's understanding of its communal origin. When she sets her romances on Native American shell mounds in Maine, or makes the health of a New England community depend on colonial pharmacopoeia and herbalist healing practices of the West Indies, Jewett excavates from history its silent associations and attunes us not only to the violent foundation of every communal identity, but to this identity's entanglement in a number of unacknowledged relations. Her work thus ultimately challenges the procedures of democratic inclusiveness that, however non violent, are nevertheless always organized around a particular notion of identity. The question of the self's constitutive interconnectedness with the world is as central to Margaret Fuller's work. Active Enchantments documents how Fuller's harrowing migraines enabled her to generate a peculiar conception of the "earthly mind," according to which the mind is material and decomposable, rather than spiritual, incorruptible or ideal. This notion eventually led her to devise a theory of the self that absolves persons from self possession and challenges the distinctiveness of personal identity. My concluding chapter argues that Henry James's transnational aesthetics was progressively politicized in the 1880s, and that what scholarship celebrates as the peak of his novelistic method develops, in fact, out of a network of surprising and heretofore unexplored influences, William James's concurrent theories of corporeal emotion, Mikhail Bakunin's anarchism, and Henry James's friendship with Ivan Turgenev, which inflamed James's interest in British politics, the Russo Turkish War, and the Balkan revolutions.

This dissertation explores the importance of the panorama for American Renaissance writers' participation in ideological formations in the antebellum period. I analyze how Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Wells Brown, Henry Box Brown, and Harriet Beecher Stowe use the panorama as a metaphorical site to contest their different positions on epistemological and sociopolitical agendas such as transcendentalism, masculinist expansionism, and radical abolitionism. Emerson uses the panorama as a key metaphor to underpin his transcendental idealism and situate it in contemporary debates on vision, gender, and race. Connecting the panorama with optical theories on light and color, Emerson appropriates them to theorize his transcendental optics and makes a hierarchical distinction between light/transparency/panorama as metaphors for spirit, masculinity, and race-neutral man versus color/opacity/myopic vision for body, femininity, and racial-colored skin. In his paean to the moving panorama, Thoreau expresses his desire for Emersonian correspondence between nature and the spirit through transcendental panoramic vision. However, Thoreau's esteem for nature's materiality causes his panoramic vision to be corporeal and empirical in its deviation from the decorporealized vision in Emerson?s notion of transparent eyeball. Hawthorne repudiates the Transcendentalists' and social reformers' totalizing and absolutist idealism through his critique of the panorama and the emphasis on opacity and ambiguity of the human mind and vision. Hawthorne reveals how the panorama satisfies the desire for visual and physical control over the rapidly expanding world and the fantasy of access to truth. Countering the dominant convention of the Mississippi panorama that objectifies slaves as a spectacle for romantic tourism, Box Brown and Wells Brown open up a new American subgenre of the moving panorama, the anti-slavery panorama. They reconstruct black masculinity by verbally and visually representing real-life stories of some male fugitive slaves and idealizing them as masculine heroes of the anti-slavery movement. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe criticizes how the favorable representation of slavery and the objectification of slaves in the Mississippi panorama and the picturesque help to construct her northern readers' uncompassionate and hard-hearted attitudes toward the cruel realities of slavery and presents Tom's sympathetic and humanized "eyes" as an alternative vision.

This dissertation tracks the literary afterlife of natural history in American literature, long past its term of relevance for scientific experts, and examines how natural history persists as idiom, cultural metaphor, and discursive framework in nineteenth-century literature in a way that informs poetic production. At the juncture of literary and cultural history, history of science, and environmental studies, I reconstruct the enduring literary rapport between poetry and natural history in US culture, showing how the aesthetic innovations of a wide current of poetic experimentalism variously draw upon natural history as a resource. I therefore push against major received narratives about natural history’s disappearance after the eighteenth century and the development of American poetry as a filiation of European Romanticism. As I read the texts of familiar literary figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Frances Watkins Harper, and Herman Melville, I recontextualize these figures into a shared poetic strain that reflexively develops upon natural history as a mode of thinking about the New World as a biophysical, social, and cultural habitat. My chapters analyze these writers’ accounts of poetry and their various experiments with not only the capacities of poetic genres—such as epic or elegy—but also the material production of their poems as objects in the world. In the process, I also show how the different poets of my dissertation confront the violent historical and social repercussions of scientific modernity, colonialism, enslavement and racism, mass extermination, or war, as they advance poetry as the fit vehicle for rethinking the grids of normativity and possibility in modern America.

Against the background of New Thought history in general, the dissertation researches the origins of the movement in South Africa. On the basis of primary documents, made available by leaders and other informants, questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and participant observation, the roots and history of New Thought in South Africa has been reconstructed. Aspects of New Thought belief, such as God, Jesus, Christ, the Bible, prayer, meditation, wealth, prosperity, death and reincarnation are discussed. It becomes apparent that, with its syncretistic, flexible and open structure, as well as the unique way in which services (weddings, christenings, funerals) are conducted, New Thought offers an alternative to spiritual and religiously minded people in South Africa, and shows potential to play a dynamic role in the cross-cultural bridging that is taking place in a changing South Africa. / Religious Studies and Arabic / M.A. (Religios Studies)

The purpose of this work is to detect a pattern: the concordance of Ethics and Aesthetics, Poetics and Politics in the most influential American thinker of the nineteenth century. It is an attempt to trace a basic concept of the Emersonian transcendentalist doctrine, its development, its philosophical meaning and practical implications. Emerson’s thought is analyzed genetically in search of the generating paradigm, or the set of axioms from which his aesthetic ideas as well as his political reasoning are derived. Such a basic structure, or point of convergence, is sought in the emergence of Emerson’s idea of universal laws that repeat themselves on all levels of reality. A general introduction is given in Part One, where the crisis in Emerson’s life is seen as representing and foreshadowing the deeper existential crisis of modern man. In Part 2 we follow the increasingly skeptical theologian’s turn to science, where he tries to secure a safe secular foundation for ethical good and right and to solve the problem of evil. Part 3 shows how Emerson’s conception of the laws of nature and ethics is applied in his political philosophy. In Part 4, Emerson’s ideas of the arts are seen as corresponding to his views of nature, morality, and individuality. Finally, in Part 5, the ancient and classical nature of Concord philosophy is brought into focus. The book concludes with a short summary.

This dissertation utilizes theories of deviance in conjunction with literary methods of reading and analyzing to study a range of deviant or transgressive characters in American literature of the 1840s and 50s. I justify this methodology on the basis of the intersecting and related histories of Emersonian self-reliance and deviance in American thought. I contend that each of the texts of self-reliance discussed by the dissertation – The National Police Gazette (1845-present), Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” (1849) and Walden (1854), and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The Blithedale Romance (1852) – actually sanctions deviance. Since deviance is endorsed by these texts in some shape or form, it is a critical component of American culture; consequently American culture is one that promotes deviance. My work on Douglass and Thoreau employs the sociological theories of Robert K. Merton (1949) to investigate the tensions between the culturally lauded goal of self-reliance and the legitimate means for securing this. I explore the importance of Transcendentalist self-reliance to the American Dream ethos and the ways in which it is valorized by each protagonist. The work on the National Police Gazette puts popular and elite forms of literary discourse into conversation with one another. My primary concern here is with explaining why and how specific self-reliant behaviours are deemed “deviant” in the literary context, but “criminal” by popular works. The chapters on female deviance elucidate the confines of women’s writing and writing about women as well as the acceptable female modes of conduct during the nineteenth century. They also focus on the ways female characters engaged in deviance from within these rigid frameworks. A functionalist interrogation of female deviance underscores the ways society is united against those women who are classed as unwomanly or unfeminine. My conclusion seeks to reinvigorate the conversation regarding the intersection between literature and the social sciences and suggests that literature in many ways often anticipates sociological theory. Ultimately, I conclude by broadening the category of the self-reliant individual to include, for instance, females and African-American slaves who were otherwise not imagined to possess such tendencies. Thus, this dissertation revises notions of Emerson’s concept of self-reliance by positioning it instead as a call to arms for all Americans to engage in deviant or socially transgressive behaviour.

This dissertation utilizes theories of deviance in conjunction with literary methods of reading and analyzing to study a range of deviant or transgressive characters in American literature of the 1840s and 50s. I justify this methodology on the basis of the intersecting and related histories of Emersonian self-reliance and deviance in American thought. I contend that each of the texts of self-reliance discussed by the dissertation – The National Police Gazette (1845-present), Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” (1849) and Walden (1854), and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The Blithedale Romance (1852) – actually sanctions deviance. Since deviance is endorsed by these texts in some shape or form, it is a critical component of American culture; consequently American culture is one that promotes deviance. My work on Douglass and Thoreau employs the sociological theories of Robert K. Merton (1949) to investigate the tensions between the culturally lauded goal of self-reliance and the legitimate means for securing this. I explore the importance of Transcendentalist self-reliance to the American Dream ethos and the ways in which it is valorized by each protagonist. The work on the National Police Gazette puts popular and elite forms of literary discourse into conversation with one another. My primary concern here is with explaining why and how specific self-reliant behaviours are deemed “deviant” in the literary context, but “criminal” by popular works. The chapters on female deviance elucidate the confines of women’s writing and writing about women as well as the acceptable female modes of conduct during the nineteenth century. They also focus on the ways female characters engaged in deviance from within these rigid frameworks. A functionalist interrogation of female deviance underscores the ways society is united against those women who are classed as unwomanly or unfeminine. My conclusion seeks to reinvigorate the conversation regarding the intersection between literature and the social sciences and suggests that literature in many ways often anticipates sociological theory. Ultimately, I conclude by broadening the category of the self-reliant individual to include, for instance, females and African-American slaves who were otherwise not imagined to possess such tendencies. Thus, this dissertation revises notions of Emerson’s concept of self-reliance by positioning it instead as a call to arms for all Americans to engage in deviant or socially transgressive behaviour.

Against the background of New Thought history in general, the dissertation researches the origins of the movement in South Africa. On the basis of primary documents, made available by leaders and other informants, questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and participant observation, the roots and history of New Thought in South Africa has been reconstructed. Aspects of New Thought belief, such as God, Jesus, Christ, the Bible, prayer, meditation, wealth, prosperity, death and reincarnation are discussed. It becomes apparent that, with its syncretistic, flexible and open structure, as well as the unique way in which services (weddings, christenings, funerals) are conducted, New Thought offers an alternative to spiritual and religiously minded people in South Africa, and shows potential to play a dynamic role in the cross-cultural bridging that is taking place in a changing South Africa. / Religious Studies and Arabic / M.A. (Religios Studies)