Processing Information: Rhymes and Reasons

Although F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby has received extensive critical attention since the middle of the century, there remains an unaddressed and unanswered question that demands further exploration: what makes Gatsby "great?" It seems that the source of Gatsby's greatness, for narrator Nick Carraway, is that Gatsby has a quality that sets him apart from others: it is not a "flabby impressionability," but a "heightened sensitivity to the promises of life" and "an extraordinary gift for hope" that Nick has never seen before, nor does he expect to see again (6). I contend that what Nick sees as Gatsby's belief and hope in the possibilities of life are embodied in what Kierkegaard discusses in his works Either/Or and Fear and Trembling as choosing to live an ethical existence free from the pain of the material world. Gatsby makes this choice (of living ethically) when the young James Gatz chooses to become Jay Gatsby and free himself from the pain of losing Daisy. Through this choice, according to Kierkegaard, the ethical individual is inducted into the knighthood as a knight of infinity. If the knight makes one more movement, he becomes a knight of faith who believes, "Nevertheless I have faith that I will get her--that is, by virtue of the absurd, by virtue of the fact that for God all things are possible" (Fear and Trembling 46). Gatsby is a "son of God" that "sprang from his Platonic conception of himself"; he is a Kierkegaardian knight who has chosen an ethical existence; he is a knight who has the ability to look impossibility in the eye and still have faith to the point of absurdity, even if a reunion with his love (Daisy) is not possible. This is Gatsby's "extraordinary gift for hope," which Kierkegaard attributes to "the only great one," the knight of faith. Thus, Nick's narrative is not only a canonization of his "great" knight, but an imaginative recollection that traces the movements of his knight, Gatsby, down the same path Kierkegaard imaginatively follows and observes his great knight of faith in Fear and Trembling.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a phenomenological examination of Otherness as it relates to the experience of being black in the America. The project begins with a summary of the Otherness theories of Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir. I then compare these accounts to "Black Consciousness" with a criticism of Sartre from Frantz Fanon. I use this criticism to construct new concepts that will help to better understand the experience of blackness.

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My thesis examines existential questioning as a method towards becoming pedagogical. I argue that a pedagogy of existential questioning, as an experience of a distinctive moment characterized by growing uncertainty, is the complete opposite of what we understand the role of pedagogy in the culture of learning to be. As a result, existential questioning is uncomfortable and often unbearable. I argue through Heideggerean and Sartrean questioning, that it is precisely this feeling of discomfort that signals the beginning of becoming pedagogical. I then proceed to articulate the process of existential questioning as hopeful, developing my concept of “hopeful despair” and “desperate hope” to argue for the ambiguous and pedagogical nature of hope. I proceed to look at ways in which existential questioning can be “played” in higher education, and the ways in which the uncomfortable work of becoming pedagogical can in fact be full of wonder, gratification and utter delight.

This thesis carries out an analysis of the plays by Samuel Beckett, Endgame and Happy Days. It achieves this by exploring how the playwright&rsquo / s characterization, setting and use of language in these plays display his tendency to employ some existentialist concepts such as despair, anxiety and thrownness on the way to authenticity. This study argues that there are some similarities between Beckett&rsquo / s two plays and Existentialism, and some characters in both plays display the existentialist man who is looking for becoming an authentic man. In other words, although there are some differences, these plays show that Samuel Beckett&rsquo / s view of Existentialism is quite similar to the Sartrean view.

Issued also as thesis, Paris. / Bibliography: p. [349]-356.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Queensland, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references.

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This thesis examines the literary representations of feminist and nationalist struggles in the Middle East particularly in Lebanon and Palestine. It aims to explore the simultaneous articulation of these two pivotal concerns in contemporary Arabic literature written by Arab women, from the 1960s to the present. One of the primary goals of this thesis is to explore how contemporary feminist literature reflects the effects of national crises in the Middle East on women’s status. To this end, this thesis reads closely a number of the novels of two contemporary Arab women writers: Ghādah al‐Sammān and Sah|ar Khalīfah whose work engages in this literary interrelationship of nationalist and feminist struggles in Lebanon and Palestine, respectively. Through the close analyses of these authors’ novels, this thesis explores how, in their response to the political turmoil in the Middle East, contemporary Arab women writers render reality in creative forms: al‐Sammān cries for freedom by exploiting literary existentialism to reflect the human struggle against the backdrop of the Lebanese civil war, while Khalīfah employs critical realism in her portrayal of the human pain during the Palestinian‐Israeli conflict. This thesis argues that both writers challenge long‐established literary traditions by advancing these themes in new artistic styles: literary existentialism and realism, and, therefore, considers this a manifestation of the avant‐gardism of both writers for they move the writings of Levantine women to a higher level by adding these literary forms to the repertoire of contemporary Arab women’s literature. The contribution of this thesis lies in its investigation of the innovative literary styles of these two authors and their place in the writings of contemporary Arab women. Thus, this thesis aims to remedy the neglect of the writings of these authors by presenting close analyses of some of the works of al‐Sammān and Khalīfah with a view to understanding their use of literary existentialism and critical realism.