Global ETD Search

211	The Valuation of Literature: Triangulating the Rhetorical with the Economic Metaphor Gustafson, Melissa Brown 16 July 2004 (has links) (PDF) Several theorists, including the Marxist theorists Trevor Ross, Walter Benjamin, and M.H. Abrams, have proposed theories to explain the eighteenth-century shift from functional to aesthetic conceptions of literature. Their explanations attribute the change to an increasingly consumer-based society (and the resulting commoditization of books), the development of the press, the rise of the middle class, and increased access to books. When we apply the cause-effect relationships which these theorists propose to the contexts of nineteenth-century America, Communist East Germany, WWII America, and 9/11 America, however, the causes don't correlate with the effects they theoretically predict. This disjunction suggests a re-examination of these three theories and possibly the Marxist basis which they share. I suggest that by triangulating rhetorical theory with Marxist theory we will gain a more comprehensive understanding of society's valuation of literature. theory theorist Marxism Marxist Trevor Ross Walter Benjamin M. H. Abrams nineteenth-century America WWII East Germany GDR war communist 9/11 September 11th rhetoric rhetorical theory Kenneth Burke literature literariness valuation aesthetic eighteenth-century England English Language and Literature
212	Telling History Through the Stories of Women: Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies and In the Name of Salomé Carlson, Nicole Marie 15 July 2006 (has links) (PDF) My thesis discusses the ways in which Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies (1994) and In the Name of Salomé (2000) are revolutionary texts contesting traditional, male dominated history and redirecting historical and communal foci to the lives of Dominican women. I employ Walter Benjamin's theories found in his essays "The Storyteller" (1936) and "On the Concept of History" (1940) to assist my exploration of Alvarez's questions concerning the power and effect of storytelling, and the importance of reconstructing various historical voices and images, specifically, the importance of reconstructing female voices in male dominated cultures. I discuss the female-narrated component to Dominican history which Alvarez creates in her reconstruction of the lives of these women. Alvarez confronts the challenge of breaking these women out of their marginalized status by combining fiction with history in her reconstruction of their lives. Alvarez assumes the multifaceted role of mediator, story-teller, and historian as she remembers and re-presents Dominican history through the eyes of women who lived, experienced, and affected change within the Dominican Republic. Without merely act as a reporter of historical "facts," Alvarez reconstructs the lives of these women fictionally, applying her impressions and ideas about the personalities, feelings, and thoughts of these women, and historically, utilizing first and secondhand accounts and information about the women. Ultimately, the women are presented as individuals but are also connected to a collective memory and history. As individuals with human characteristics, the women are no longer inaccessible legends. As members of a collective memory and history, the women are redeemed from the isolating effect of their patriarchal society which would have women remain silent. Due to Alvarez's reconstruction, their stories finally have the potential for further dissemination in the future with the possibility to affect other oppressed peoples. Thus, Alvarez's reconstruction of the resistance of a few women in Dominican history produces the capacity for additional resistance by Alvarez's audience to the same forces that these women were combating which continue to exist today — forces such as patriarchy, dictatorial governments, fascism, and economic disparity. Julia Alvarez In the Time of the Butterflies In the Name of Salomé Dominican Republic women Walter Benjamin The Storyteller On the Concept of History storytelling reconstructing history reconstruction history story-teller historian Dominican history collective memory collective history patriarchy English Language and Literature
213	Catastrophe in Permanence: Benjamin's Natural History of Environmental Crisis Bower, Matthew S. 05 1900 (has links) Walter Benjamin warned in 1940 of a certain inconspicuous threat to political thinking, not least of all to materialism, that takes progress as an historical norm. Implicit in this conception is what he describes as an empty continuum of time along which the prevailing tradition chronicles its own mythic development and drains everyday life of genuine historical experience. The myth of progressive history advances insidiously today in consumeristic and technocratic attempts at reconciling cultural imagery with organic nature. In this dissertation, I pursue the contradictions of such images as they crystallize around the natural history of twenty-first century commodity society, where promises of ecological remediation, sustainable urban development, and climate change mitigation have yet to introduce a true crisis of historical experience to the ongoing environmental crisis of capitalism. A more radical way of seeing the cultural representation of nature would, I argue, penetrate its mythic determination by market forces and bear witness to the natural-historical ruins and traces that constitute, in Benjamin's terms, a single "catastrophe" where others perceive historical continuity. I argue that Benjamin's critique of progress is instructive to interpreting those utopian dreams, ablaze in consumer life and technological fantasy, that recent decades of growing environmental concern have channeled into the recovery of an experience of the natural world. His dialectics of nature and alienated history confront the wish-image of organic abundance with the transience of its appropriated expression in the commodity-form. Drawing together this confrontation with a varied literature on collective memory, nature, and the city, I suggest that our poverty of experience is more than simply a technical, economic, or even ecological problem, but rather follows from the commodification of history itself. The goal of this work is to reflect upon the potentiality of communal politics that subsist not in rushing headlong into a progressive future but, as Benjamin urges, in reaching for the emergency brake on the runaway train of progress. walter benjamin philosophy of history environmental philosophy critical theory Frankfurt school aesthetics culture criticism marxism historical materialism dialectical image, cultural theory architecture production aesthetics modernism Philosophy Environmentalism -- Philosophy. Environmental sciences -- Philosophy.
214	Tartuffe: A Modern Adaptation Benjamin, Stephen 12 September 2013 (has links) No description available. Theater Theater History Theater Studies Literature Tartuffe Moliere translation adaptation Garfield Heights Richard Wilbur rhyming Cleante Donald Frame Ranjit Bolt Christopher Hampton Morris Bishop Prudence Steiner Panulphe Cairncross Walter Benjamin Stephen Benjamin Malleson raisonneur
215	Walter Benjamin und die Kunst des Graphischen / Photo-Graphie, Malerei, Graphik Matsui, Takaoki 16 June 2008 (has links) Als Bild- und Medientheoretiker hinterließ Walter Benjamin nicht nur die berühmte „materialistische“ Auratheorie, sondern auch scheinbar esoterische Theorien der bildenden Kunst. Der Zusammenhang und Inhalt der beiden Theorien können erhellt werden, wenn wir genauer sehen, wie er sich dort mit der Beschreibung der Kindheit beschäftigte. Der Ursprung seiner Auratheorie liegt in seiner „Tagebuch“-Literatur, wo er in die melancholisch gefärbten Visionen der „Jugend“ zu versinken pflegte. Der topologische Aufbau dieser Visionen – ihre eigenartig „photo-graphische“ Struktur – soll mithilfe der Zweiten Topik Freuds analysiert werden. Und aufgrund dieser Analyse werden wir eine Revision der üblichen (übersimplifizierten) Gegenüberstellung von seinem historischen Materislismus und dem „apolitischen Formalismus“ Clement Greenbergs vornehmen. Greenbergs Kunstkritik dient aber auch zur Entschlüsselung der „esoterischen“ Bildtheorien Benjamins. Die letzteren verwirren uns vor allem deshalb, weil dort das Sehen der Kinder zuerst (um 1915) irreführender Weise nach den üblichen Dichotomien der Romantik (Linie / Farbe; männlich / weiblich; erwachsen / kindlich…) beschrieben worden war; ihren eigentlichen Inhalt konnte Benjamin erst präzisieren, als er – anhand seiner Betrachtungen der graphischen „Horizontalität“ und nach seinen Spekulationen über das magische Wesen von „Zeichen“ und „Mal“ (1917) – eine Trichotomie der Bildgattungen (Malerei / Graphik / getuschtes Bild) aufgestellt hatte. Wir rekonstruieren diese Theorieentwicklungen nicht nur durch detaillierte Bild- und Textanalysen, sondern auch unter Heranziehung seines „materialistischen“ Spätwerks (der Passagenarbeit und der „Berliner Kindheit“), da erst im letzteren der einzigartige Zusammenhang zwischen seinen frühen Bildtheorien und seiner Geldtheorie als „Konstellation“ sichtbar werden sollte. / Walter Benjamin’s writings on visual arts include not only the famous „materialistic“ essays on aura but also seemingly esoteric notes on painting and the graphic arts. The content and correlation of all these writings become clear once we grasp how they perform the task of describing childhood experience. His theory of aura was prefigured in his philosophical „Diaries“ where his struggle with his depression was often followed (or interrupted) by dreamlike visions of "youth". The discursive structure of these visions – which will prove to be a strangely „photo-graphic“ one – is to be analyzed by using the second Freudian topology as a comparison. Through this analysis we will be able to reconsider the well-known (oversimplified) antagonism between his historical materialism and the „apolitical formalism“ of Clement Greenberg from a new viewpoint. Greenberg’s criticism helps us also to decipher the „esoteric“ texts of Benjamin. They puzzled scholars especially because they described children’s vision at first (about 1915) misleadingly in accordance with the conventional dichotomies of Romanticism (line / color; masculine / feminine; adult / child…); Benjamin could specify their original implication only after he had set up – based on his reflexions on the „horizontality“ of the graphic arts, and by speculating further on the magic nature of „Zeichen“ and „Mal“ (1917) – a trichotomy of genres (painting / the graphic arts / ink and watercolor illustrations). We will reconstruct this development of his theory not only through detailed analyses of related works of art but also in view of his „materialistic“ late writings (the Arcades Project and „Berlin Childhood“), for it is only there that we find out an essential relation – a singular „constellation“ – of his early art theory and his theory of money. Aura Eugène Atget Walter Benjamin Rudolf Borchardt Cézanne Goya Grandville Kafka Kandinsky Paul Klee Laurel & Hardy August Macke Manet Charles Meryon Picasso Raffael Odilon Redon Rembrandt August Sander Paul Scheerbart Wilhelm Worringer Antinomie des Geschmacks ästhetische Idee Drogen Farbkonstanz Geldschleierthese Horizontalität Humor Mal Melancholie Tiergarten Todestrieb Urphänomen aura Eugène Atget Walter Benjamin Rudolf Borchardt Cézanne Goya Grandville Kafka Kandinsky Klee Laurel & Hardy August Macke Manet Charles Meryon Picasso Raphael Odilon Redon Rembrandt August Sander Paul Scheerbart Wilhelm Worringer aesthetic idea antinomy of taste color constancy death drive drugs goethean phenomenology horizontality humour „Mal“ melancholy veil of money zoo 750 Malerei und Gemälde 47 Photographie CI 1397 ddc:750
216	Angels In-between. The Poetics of Excess and the Crisis of Representation Cosma, Ioana 07 March 2011 (has links) This dissertation examines the reconfiguration of the limits of representation in reference to the intermediary function of angels. The Modernist engagement with the figure of the angel entailed, primarily, a reconsideration of the problem of representation as well as an attempt to trace the contours of a poetics that plays itself outside the mimetic understanding of representation. My contention is that this transformation of literary referentiality was not simply a disengagement of art from reality but, rather, from the truthfalsity, reality-fiction, subject-object dichotomies. The angel, defined as the figure of passage par excellence, but also as the agency that induces the transformation of the visible in the invisible and vice versa, appears both as a model/archetype and as a guide towards the illumination of this intermediary aesthetic. Working with the joined perspectives from angelology, contemporary phenomenology, and poetics, this dissertation is an extended overview of the notion of intermediary spaces, as well as an attempt to probe the relevance of this concept for the field of literary studies. In the first case, this dissertation offers a theoretical background to the concept of intermediality, seen in its theological, phenomenological, aesthetic and ethical significances. In the second case, it presents the reader with a heuristic apparatus for approaching this problematic in the field of literary interpretation and provides examples of ways in which such an analysis can become relevant. The primary texts discussed here are all examples of attempts to redefine the notion of representation away from the truth-falsity or subject-object oppositions, as well as to create an aesthetic space with its own particularities, at the limit between visibility and invisibility, excessive presence and absence. Nicholas of Cusa’s “Preface” to The Vision of God proposes an ethics of reading defined by admiratio (the consubstantiation of immediacy and distance) under the aegis of the all-seeing icon of God. Louis Marin’s reading of the episode of the Resurrection reveals that history and narrative arise from the conjunction of the excessive absence of the empty tomb of Jesus and the excessive presence announcing the resurrection of Christ. Sohravardî’s “Recital of the Crimson Angel” is a presentation of the space-between of revelation, between cognitio matutina and cognitio vespertina. Walter Benjamin’s “Agesilaus Santander” restores the connections between the exoteric and the esoteric under the patient gaze of “Angelus Novus”. Paul Valéry’s Eupalinos, ou l’Architecte explores the aesthetic of “real appearance” in the space-between the image and the perceiving eye. Poe and Malamud’s short stories reveal the affinities between poetic language and angelophany. Elie Wiesel’s Les portes de la forêt expands the apophatic itinerary from the self to the radically other in a hermeneutical gesture which has the angel as its initial and final guide. Finally, Rafael Alberti’s Sobre los ángeles shows that the aphaeretic function of poetic language is very similar to the apophatic treatment of the world as representation; in this last sense too, the angels are indispensible guides. Angel angelophany revelation representation presence absence excess the space-between intermediary kataphasis apophasis limit liminal visible invisible admiratio attention patience constituted reader appearance imaginal creative imagination symbol adherence denegation de-nomination icon iconostasis ta’ wîl Nicholas of Cusa Sohravardî Walter Benjamin Paul Valéry 0295
217	Tingens lydnad och människans väntan : Nödvändighet, nåd, handling och tänkande i Simone Weils filosofi / The obedience of things and the waiting of man : Necessity, grace, action and thinking in Simone Weils philosophy Christola, Victor January 2017 (has links) This bachelor thesis engages in a quest to understand the concepts of necessity and grace in Simone Weils thinking. The question in play, in which many more questions lie hidden, reads as follows: How does Weil understand the operations of grace in relation to the ”blind necessity” of the natural world, and what are the philosophical implications of this concept of grace? What are, for instance, given her understanding of the world as God’s creation, the metaphysical grounds for a basic human activitiy such as thinking or reflexion? A reading of Simone Weils works on necessity, grace, affliction and attention is contrasted with her thoughts on science, method and truth. The concept of necessity is compared to the one of Spinoza, especially on the subject of how the good or the just relates to the true and the necessary: it shows there are interesting similarities and illuminating differences between the two philosophers’ lines of thought. Here, the concept of attention becomes central to the image: the idea of a cultivated mode of reception of the world and of the Other. Attention is analogously understood as a method of prayer and a cultivated ethical attitude towards other human beings – and an ideal scientific state of mind. In the final chapter of the analytic part of the composition, Weils concept of grace is investigated in regard to concepts of thinking and understanding. Here, Leibniz idea of the divine world and the divine mind plays a concise but important role on the matter of a tentative metaphysical grounding of thinking as such – how this can be thought and how it reflects and deepens Simone Weils metaphysics, especially her understanding of the highest states of insight into the nature of the world as partly a work of divine grace. In the last chapter Walter Benjamins vision of the coming philosophy as a consolidation between Immanuel Kants transcendental philosophy and religious experience – and religious thought – show the way for further investigation into the field, a field that the thesis has outlined at the same time as it has attempted to answer some specific questions that seems to be the most urgent ones. Weil Simone Weil nödvändighet nåd handling tänkande amor fati uppmärksamhet kärlek rättvisa etik moral epistemologi vetenskapsteori vetenskap empiri deduktion analogi matematik ödet tyngden tyngdlagen insikt styrka Homeros Galilei Newton Spinoza Winch Leibniz Nietzsche Cockburn Kate Larson Rhees Herakleitos Parmenides Lacan Boethius Jesus Platon Walter Benjamin Philosophy Filosofi
218	Dissensus and Poetry: The Poet as Activist in Experimental English-Canadian Poetry Leduc, Natalie 28 January 2019 (has links) Many of us believe that poetry, specifically activist and experimental poetry, is capable of intervening in our society, as though the right words will call people to action, give the voiceless a voice, and reorder the systems that perpetuate oppression, even if there are few examples of such instances. Nevertheless, my project looks at these very moments, when poetry alters the fabric of our real, to explore the ways these poetical interventions are, in effect, instances of what I have come to call “dissensual” poetry. Using Jacques Rancière’s concept of dissensus and the distribution of the sensible, my project investigates the ways in which dissensual poetry ruptures the distribution of the sensible—“our definite configurations of what is given as our real, as the object of our perceptions and the field of our interventions”—to look at the ways poetry actually does politics (Dissensus 156). I look at three different types of dissensual poetry: concrete poetry, sound poetry, and instapoetry. I argue that these poetic practices prompt a reordering of our society, of what is countable and unaccountable, and of how bodies, capacities, and systems operate. They allow for those whom Rancière calls the anonymous, and whom we might call the oppressed or marginalized, to become known. I argue that bpNichol’s, Judith Copithorne’s, and Steve McCaffery’s concrete poems; the Four Horsemen’s, Penn Kemp’s, and Christian Bök’s sound poems; and rupi kaur’s instapoems are examples of dissensual poetry. Canadian literature Canadian poetry Experimental poetry Concrete poetry Visual poetry Sound poetry Instagram poetry Instapoetry bpNichol Steve McCaffery Judith Copithorne The Four Horsemen Penn Kemp Christian Bök rupi kaur instapoet Stephen Collis Sina Queyras Jacques Rancière Dissensus Activism Activist Walter Benjamin Michael Warner
219	Allegory and the Transnational Affective Field in the Contemporary Mexican Novel (1993-2013) Bernal Rodríguez, Alejandra 08 October 2019 (has links) This thesis identifies continuities and disruptions within the tradition of literary allegory in Latin America and critically revisits the category of “national allegory” (Jameson 1986) in order to articulate an interpretative model suited to contemporary “transnational allegorical fiction”. Based on the analysis of seven Mexican novels that register the transition of neoliberalism from the political-economic order to a form of biopolitical control (Althusser, Foucault, Žižek), I identify the emergence of what I call a “transnational affective field”: a symbolic horizon, alternative to the nation, where the prospective function of foundational romances (Sommer) and the retrospective function of mourning akin to postdictatorial fiction (Avelar), converge. This ideological device negotiates power relations, facilitates the transfer of local/global meaning, promotes intercultural empathy and compromise, and denounces mechanisms of exclusion; thereby, reconfiguring the affective and political functions of allegory in Latin American fiction. Part One discusses critical approaches to allegorical fiction in both Latin American and World literatures. Part Two compares the representation of the binomial nation/world in three historiographic metafictions by Carmen Boullosa, Francisco Rebolledo and J.E. Pacheco through recent approaches in post-/de-colonial and memory studies. Part Three examines the depiction of the nation as simulacrum and the figuration of postmodern subjectivities in Jorge Volpi and Juan Villoro from a poststructuralist perspective. It also contends that Álvaro Enrigue’s and Valeria Luiselli’s novels are representative of an emergent meta-allegorical imagination that, in an ironic reversal of allegory (de Man), simultaneously constructs it as a mechanism of ideological control as well as a conscious strategy to resist commodification and symbolic violence (Bourdieu) in the contemporary world. The analysis demonstrates the vitality of Mexican transnational allegorical fiction as a socio-political and affective counter-hegemonic discourse that also functions as an effective strategy of recognition in the international literary field. Allegory Transnationalism Contemporary Literature Mexico Transnational literature Global novel Affective Field Nationalism Cosmopolitanism Mexican Literature Postnationalism Romance Mourning Postmodernism Affect Cosmopolitan memory Carmen Boullosa Cielos de la Tierra Francisco Rebolledo Rasero José Emilio Pacheco Morirás lejos Jorge Volpi El fin de la locura Juan Villoro Arrecife Alvaro Enrigue Vidas perpendiculares Valeria Luiselli La historia de mis dientes Neoliberalism in literature Walter Benjamin and allegory Paul de Man and allegory Mexican World Literature
220	Angels In-between. The Poetics of Excess and the Crisis of Representation Cosma, Ioana 07 March 2011 (has links) This dissertation examines the reconfiguration of the limits of representation in reference to the intermediary function of angels. The Modernist engagement with the figure of the angel entailed, primarily, a reconsideration of the problem of representation as well as an attempt to trace the contours of a poetics that plays itself outside the mimetic understanding of representation. My contention is that this transformation of literary referentiality was not simply a disengagement of art from reality but, rather, from the truthfalsity, reality-fiction, subject-object dichotomies. The angel, defined as the figure of passage par excellence, but also as the agency that induces the transformation of the visible in the invisible and vice versa, appears both as a model/archetype and as a guide towards the illumination of this intermediary aesthetic. Working with the joined perspectives from angelology, contemporary phenomenology, and poetics, this dissertation is an extended overview of the notion of intermediary spaces, as well as an attempt to probe the relevance of this concept for the field of literary studies. In the first case, this dissertation offers a theoretical background to the concept of intermediality, seen in its theological, phenomenological, aesthetic and ethical significances. In the second case, it presents the reader with a heuristic apparatus for approaching this problematic in the field of literary interpretation and provides examples of ways in which such an analysis can become relevant. The primary texts discussed here are all examples of attempts to redefine the notion of representation away from the truth-falsity or subject-object oppositions, as well as to create an aesthetic space with its own particularities, at the limit between visibility and invisibility, excessive presence and absence. Nicholas of Cusa’s “Preface” to The Vision of God proposes an ethics of reading defined by admiratio (the consubstantiation of immediacy and distance) under the aegis of the all-seeing icon of God. Louis Marin’s reading of the episode of the Resurrection reveals that history and narrative arise from the conjunction of the excessive absence of the empty tomb of Jesus and the excessive presence announcing the resurrection of Christ. Sohravardî’s “Recital of the Crimson Angel” is a presentation of the space-between of revelation, between cognitio matutina and cognitio vespertina. Walter Benjamin’s “Agesilaus Santander” restores the connections between the exoteric and the esoteric under the patient gaze of “Angelus Novus”. Paul Valéry’s Eupalinos, ou l’Architecte explores the aesthetic of “real appearance” in the space-between the image and the perceiving eye. Poe and Malamud’s short stories reveal the affinities between poetic language and angelophany. Elie Wiesel’s Les portes de la forêt expands the apophatic itinerary from the self to the radically other in a hermeneutical gesture which has the angel as its initial and final guide. Finally, Rafael Alberti’s Sobre los ángeles shows that the aphaeretic function of poetic language is very similar to the apophatic treatment of the world as representation; in this last sense too, the angels are indispensible guides. Angel angelophany revelation representation presence absence excess the space-between intermediary kataphasis apophasis limit liminal visible invisible admiratio attention patience constituted reader appearance imaginal creative imagination symbol adherence denegation de-nomination icon iconostasis ta’ wîl Nicholas of Cusa Sohravardî Walter Benjamin Paul Valéry 0295

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