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Thesis (PH. D.)--New York University. / Bibliography: 2 p. at end. Also available in digital form on the Internet Archive Web site.

Image-based humanities computing, the computer-assisted study of digitallyrepresented “objects or artifacts of cultural heritage,” is an increasingly popular yet “established practice” located at the most recent intersections of humanities scholarship and “digital imaging technologies,” as Matthew Kirschenbaum has pointed out. Many exciting things have been and are being done in this field, as multifaceted multimedia projects and “advanced visual and visualization tools” continue to be produced and used; but it also seems to lack definition and seems unnecessarily limited in its critical approach to digital images. That is, the textual mediation required to make images usable or knowable, and the kinds of knowledge images offer, often goes unexamined, and the value of creative or deformative responses to images overlooked. This thesis will suggest Blake’s production of the Laoco¨on as a model for a more open and relevant approach to images, will analyze what image-based humanities computing does and how Blake’s engraving recapitulates these actions, and will describe how acritical approaches to image description could be integrated and used, and how images could function as graphic mediation for other materials, in this field. Blake’s idiosyncratic Laoco¨on exemplifies the ways that creators or editors respond to and describe images and the ways they use images to illuminate text. In entitling his plate “[Jah] & his two Sons [. . . ]” and filling it with descriptive text, Blake shares the focus of image-based humanities computing on images as things to be broken down, described, and understood. But Blake’s classification and description, deformative in misreading the image, reveals the true nature of such mediation and the need for a more open system, one which allows observers to record how they interpret an image, perhaps best accomplished in image-based humanities computing through semantic web technologies like folksonomy tagging or collaborative wiki formats. And Blake’s act of pulling a pre-existing image out of context and applying it to a new textual work suggests a new function for images and the highly structured image databases of image-based humanities computing, to clarify or complicate textual works through graphic mediation.

Thèse - Bordeaux. / Bibliography: p. [263]-269.

There is no abstract available for this thesis.

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the philosophy of William Blake as it is expressedin his poetry and other works. The study shows Blake as a lucid and consistent thinker whose philosophy is a subjective idealism, not unlike Berkeley's, directed against British empiricism. The study is divided into an examination of his theory of gods, his theory of knowledge, his theory of what there is, his theory of man, and his ethics.Blake's theory of God is not unlike Spinoza's in that it is a pantheism which appears as atheism to those not thoroughly familiar with Blake's thought. God, according to Blake, is an all-penetrating life force evidenced by the universality of drives, instinctual behavior, and the collective unconscious on the level of dream and imagination.Imagination is also central to Blake's epistemology. This theory of knowledge is shown to relyon voluntarily changeable a priori structures of the mind. Blake calls these the imagination and explains them in terms of the fourfold vision. Dependent on poetic metaphor, man's imagination or the poetic genius in every man is able to create a world of appearance, a world which is, as any world, man's mental image.Based on this epistemology, Blake's cosmology indicates a noumenal world, which is pantheisticto the degree to which a theory of an all-penetrating life force can be considered a pantheistic one. The noumenal world is interpreted in accordance with the a priori structures of the mind, and the noumenon can appear, as a result of such interpretation, as phenomenon. While the phenomenon is held in being by the perceiver, the noumenon is metaphysical, static unity independent of perception.On that noumenal level, also time is static and structured. Man's perception causes it to appear as progressing, but the fact that certain elements of apparent reality are recurrent gives evidence of the static essence of time. The poetic genius supplies structure also to the human experience of time.The theory of man is dependent upon the same distinction between phenomenal and noumenal world. In reference to man, Blake distinguishes between phenomenal men (principio individuationis) and the noumenal Man (humanity as one Being). In respect to man in society, Blake has a very pessimistic view. Existential man is engaged in battle and mutual exploitation which he insufficiently seeks to control through the institution of religion and moralities. Such institutions (Urizen) have a repressive effect and serve to pervert the instinctual human self (Orc).Blake's ethics, then, seek to liberate the instinctual self and to defeat reason, the originator of morality and religion. The ultimate end of such a liberation is to overcome phenomenal objectness or fragmentation for the sake of a symbiotic unity of man with man and man with the world. An imaginative identification of man with man and a dropping of all ego-boundaries is essential to the symbiotic unity and the achievement of a universal self of mankind.Throughout the study, I attempted to cite parallel examples from other philosophers and philosophies, which examples were to help place Blake into perspective in terms of the development of occidental philosophy as well as to elucidate some of the key ideas in Blake's thought. Ultimately, what the study shows is that Blake is a philosopher who, like Nietzsche's Zarathustra, chose poetic language as the most meaningful and most effective vehicle for his philosophy.

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Thesis (Ph.D.)--McMaster University, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 276-292). Also available via World Wide Web.

Thesis (M.A.)--West Virginia University, 2008. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains ix, 147 p. : ill. (some col.). Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 78-84).