This essay explores what it means to reject Frege's distinction of force and content: the rejection completes Frege's anti-psychologism as it leaves no space for a psychological concept of judgment distinct from the logical concept, which is the concern of no empirical science, but of logic. It emerges that logic, as the science of judgement, is — not a metaphysics of judgement, but — metaphysics. And it emerges that the opposition of subject to subject — the elementary nexus of thinker to thinker in dialogue — is contained within the logical concept of judgment.

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In his essay collection Another Future, Alan Gilbert argues that culture, at it’s best, “interrogates the gap between the ideal and the real.” Ad copy, public text, Hallmark cards, narrative film, etc flood ‘the masses’ with the ideal: the dream of love, the dream of the new, happiness, happiness, happiness, while it purports to be ‘real.’ Conversely, a fair portion of art positions itself staunchly against the marketplace, it too claiming ‘realness,’ a superiority to ‘representation,’ a championing of ‘authenticity’ and ‘the individual experience.’ Art and poetry can be a venue to complicate this dichotomy, demystify all cultural products, and question the usage of massive words such as ‘real,’ ‘dream,’ ‘new,’ love.’ Maybe the most effective way to interrogate the gap between ‘ideal’ and ‘real’ is to read “the social poetically and poetry socially.” While post-modernism concentrated on experimentation with form and bridging a ‘high’ and ‘low’ divide, Gilbert argues that what comes next is an emphasis on the “social ramifications of cultural products.” As Kenneth Goldsmith says, “Context is the new content.” But I’m not interested in simplistic Conceptualist copy and paste. The function of art shifts to an aggregation and recontextualization of information: how ‘ideal’ and ‘real’ are represented, implemented, and manipulated across various social contexts. Artist John Baldessari asks: “Where does art reside? Is it physically there in that painting? Is it in my head? Could it be a trace memory? Could it be a photo? What is necessary for it? Can you just talk about it?” For me, there’s little difference between creating a cultural product, writing ‘about’ someone else’s cultural product, or interviewing artists about cultural products they made. Warhol thought of his body of work as equally visual and vocal: Andy is not Andy without his interviews. Conversation as poem. The conversation in the media around a poem as poem. Example: a poem by Kristen Stewart, a Hollywood actress, cannot be divorced from the reactions and retaliations it spawned. The content of Stewart’s poem, her word choice or where she broke the line fades to the background as voices across the Internet use the poem as an opportunity to judge and humiliate her. I’m concerned with how capital P Poetry is represented in the mainstream, how people experience poetry outside the context of the small press world, and reclaiming such experiences as Poetry. Can a commercial that features Whitman be labelled as a poem? Can my writing about how Whitman is represented in an iPad commercial be a poem? Or, how does listening to a poem while observing one’s surroundings influence one’s experience of the poem? In the ‘I listen’ series, I try to acknowledge that poems do not create a world, but exist within one. And I think of this book as lyric poetry, but my ‘lyric I’ must account for itself and its contexts. It must interview and interrogate itself. Even knowing what the lyric I is requires a privileged position. This must be acknowledged, and leads to a reckoning with former selves, former heroes. The ‘multitudes’ I contain are not my fellow citizens, but all the cultural products I’ve consumed in thirty years and how those products and individuals have changed me. I’m approaching cultural products and their contexts from a subjective, lyric, populist lens, trying to articulate each subject’s intention, because for me it’s in the absurdity of intention where the humor, or the poetry, or the ‘real,’ or ‘profound experience of art’ resides.

This thesis puts forward a theory for a new basis of the rights and dignities of animals. The first chapter explains how the neurobiological output / input model can be applied to animal behavior, and suggests that animals—from fruit flies to chimpanzees—and humans are most similar in their desire to experiment with the world around them. The remaining chapters explore the practical implications of considering animals through the output / input model, using literature, the author’s personal experience, biological observations, and historical anecdotes. These chapters seek to prove that animals have much more to offer us than milk and meat. / Master of Arts / This is a draft of a book that lays down a new basis for the rights and dignities of animals. Rather than emphasizing the intelligence of various species, their communication abilities, or capacity to feel pain, the author emphasizes the impulse to experiment, which new research suggests may be a universal characteristic of the animal kingdom. The second half of the book is a series of essays that attempts to show how this new model might change human relations with various animals.

The Bass & The Boogeyman is a manuscript of poems that explores issues of sexuality, gender, and identity. The poems also attempt to reach an understanding of what it means to be a member of a largely marginalized social group (homosexuals). In this explorations and a attempts the poems are also engaged in finding the origins of fear. The poems follow one narrator from childhood into adulthood. While the poems do not provide the type of clear narrative and story arc one would expect from a novel, they do offer a sense of trajectory and reward the reader for reading from cover to cover. This manuscript is very aware of itself as a book and strives to exist as such (rather than as a stack of poems who happen to be in the same place at the same time). The manuscript features several connected poem series that work to provide cohesion to the collection. The poems Boys, Men, and Fags are an example of this connection between poems. Each of these three poems can be read as individual pieces, but when taken together they offer a commentary on all three groups that cannot be gained by reading them separately. The manuscript also employers a cast of repeating characters (the boy & the boogeyman among them) to give the collection the sense of narrative trajectory mention above. Lastly, the manuscript combines numerous traditional poetic forms with a wild and unruly use of pop culture and humor. The end result is proof that funny and serious are not always contradictory terms. / Master of Fine Arts

Where Light Is and The Definition of Snow are linked manuscripts in which a world is held in lyrical suspension. In the process of speaking alongside one another, the stories and poems in these collections explore the repercussions of grief, loss, and loneliness and how these are affected by relationships and gender dynamics. “A Feeling" gives voice to the female narrator’s sense of disembodiment in “Series of Doors." “Fishtails" and “At Watch" probe into the kind of complex familial relationships brought about through addiction and loss, just like the young girls’ relationships with their parents in “All Around Us" and “Vesuvian Summer." Throughout these collections, the genres are connected by form. Modes overlap, allowing lyric stories to speak alongside narrative poems. There is an attempt to fuse interior and exterior landscapes, a desire to rework memory, to hold on to something already acknowledged as being lost. These stories and poems meet in a space of simultaneous loneliness and illumination: where bad things are about to happen, but beauty is still insistent. / Master of Fine Arts

The following essay discusses Herman Melville’s “I and My Chimney” (1856) as a text that engages architecture and writing as interrelated systems of signification. Fueled by a variety of historical developments, domestic architecture emerges as a powerful purveyor of meaning in the antebellum decades. Architecture, in this cultural context, is construed in analogy to writing (and, to some extent, vice versa), as creating houses-as-texts that tell stories about their inhabitants in terms of their individual, familial, and national identities. Thus conceived, domestic architecture is characteristically enlisted in the articulation and stabilization of hegemonic narratives of, e. g., gender and nationhood. Melville’s text invokes this cultural convention to cast the signifying function that architecture and writing perform as being vulnerable and in crisis. This crisis is narrated by an idiosyncratic narrator for whom the semiotic instability documented by his narrative resonates with the social and cultural vulnerability that he experiences—his authority as master of his house and family is challenged in the course of the tale, along with the structural integrity of his chimney with which he wants to symbolically reinforce his authority. I argue that this crisis of signification performs double work in the text. On the one hand, it serves to articulate the anxiety of mid-nineteenth-century cultural elites about what they perceive as a cultural decline. On the other hand, allegedly dysfunctional signification unfolds a critical potential, bringing to light things which ‘functional’ signification had worked to conceal and thereby unlocking hermetic narratives of self, family, and nation.

Ao término da Educação Básica, espera-se que um indivíduo esteja habilitado a redigir adequadamente em qualquer situação, que saiba interagir com a palavra para a produção escrita nos diversos gêneros textuais em circulação. Embora tais expectativas se realizem em alguns casos, em geral, a realidade vivenciada é diversa: mesmo após completarem os ensinos Fundamental e Médio, muitos sujeitos elaboram textos repletos de desvios, marcas que expõem as muitas dificuldades com a produção escrita, as quais revelam uma língua cindida entre um saber-dizer e um dever-dizer. Questionamentos sobre o que leva a essa cisão motivaram esta pesquisa. Considerando-se a perspectiva sócio-histórica, os conceitos bakhtinianos de gênero, dialogismo e polifonia, bem como preceitos da Lingüísitca Textual, o trabalho consistiu na análise de elementos composicionais da redação dissertativa de vestibular, gênero que desafia estudantes interessados em ingressar no Ensino Superior. Mais especificamente, foram analisados: (a) a norma lingüística, (b) os índices de pessoalidade e (c) a macroarticulação em uma amostra de 374 redações (1% do total) produzidas por candidatos inscritos no Vestibular-2007 promovido pela FUVEST (Fundação Universitária para o Vestibular) São Paulo, Brasil. Foram analisadas, também, algumas relações entre o perfil sócio-histórico dos candidatos e os perfis de escrita verificados nos textos. Depreendeu-se, das observações realizadas, que a excessiva preocupação com o outro, com o molde e com a demonstração do saber-fazer interfere no movimento de exteriorização do discurso: em vez de tentar levar ao texto seu universo e sua idéia, o estudante se propõe à tarefa de levar, para o papel, mundo e idéias presumidos do interlocutor e da interlocução, vivencia um confronto - e não uma negociação - entre um saber-dizer que se esvaece diante de um dever-dizer e cinde a língua. As observações realizadas revelaram, ainda uma escolarização que, no âmbito de sua atuação, parece não promover satisfatoriamente condições para o desenvolvimento de estratégias para o diálogo entre os saberes, parece não promover satisfatoriamente a possibilidade de escrever com autonomia. / After concluding high school, students are expected to be able to write proficiently in any situation. They are supposed to interact with words in order to produce texts in the diverse genres currently circulating. Although some of these expectations are sometimes met, in general, the reality is different. Even after having fulfilled the academic requirements of high school, many students produce texts with several deviations, which signal difficulties with writing. This also reveals a schism between knowing-how-to-say-it and should-say. Questioning the reasons for this schism was the starting point for research. Based on sociohistorical patterns, bakhtinian concepts for genres of discourse, dialogism, and polyphony, as well as the Textual Linguistics precepts, this work consisted in analyzing the elements found in the Writing Essays from students participating in Standardized College Entrance Exams for the public universities in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. This is a genre of text which challenges students who want to enter into a college career. Specifically, the topics analyzed were: (a) proficiency in standard Portuguese , (b) personal input and (c) macroarticulation in a sample of 374 essays (1% of the total) from the entrance exam that was ministered through FUVEST (Foundation for College Entrance Exams), São Paulo, Brazil, from the year 2007. The analysis included also the relationship between the candidates socio-historic profile and the writing patterns found in their work. Through this analysis I could detect an exaggerated concern with the other one, with following a model, and with a concern in demonstrating the knowing-how-to-say-it. These concerns interfere with the movement of the discourse exteriorization: instead of putting in the text their own world view and their own ideas, students try to present a perspective that agrees with a presumed readers world view and ideas foreign to themselves: a confrontation and not an exchange between the knowhow- to-say-it and the should-say that schisms the language. My observations revealed also a schooling process that does not seem to promote satisfactory conditions to develop strategies that foster the dialogue among the diverse facets of knowledge, and does not promote the individuals self-reliance in their own writing.