I den här uppsatsen ämnar jag att undersöka retoriken i ordet farmakon så som det behandlats av Jacques Derrida. Genom en nära läsning av Derridas texter identifieras farmakon först som ett ogripbart koncept och sedan som en typ av paradox. Funktionen av denna paradox beskrivs först ur en derrideansk kontext och senare i en mer klassisk retorisk sådan. I den här uppsatsen visas farmakon fungera som något som låter oss inse tänkandets gränser, samtidigt som vi ges en förklaring på vad som utgör dessa gränser. Farmakon visas också förlänas en större retorisk effekt på grund av Derridas dubbla läsning, medan retoriken i farmakon visas vara beroende av ett kunskapssökande hos publiken.

Doctoral dissertation: Panoptical tropes and negotiations between art and politics in Charles Johnson's short fiction Abstract The dissertation traces the uneasy marriage between ideology and aesthetics in African American literature, and its reflections in Charles Johnson's short fiction. The historical introduction is an attempt to reevaluate the tradition of ideological self-policing in African American literature. Its central thesis resides in the claim that African American literature and its critical reception has still retained some of this ideological template, in a manner and degree that throws it out of sync with the mainstream trajectory of American literature. This lingering anachronism cannot be legitimately attributed to a single causative circumstance, yet one of the more obvious explanations for this residual trend is the living memory of overt discriminatory practices in many parts of the United States, which is why the centrifugal literary discourses of assimilationism and protest fiction are still very vibrant. This simple argument alone provides a sufficient basis for contextualizing and understanding the thesis that ideological writing still inadvertently manages to find its way into African American fictional pursuits. This is also underscored by the observable fact that even the...