Thesis (doctoral)--Universität zu Köln. / Includes texts in French. Includes bibliographical references (p. 300-311).

Thesis (M.A. (English))--Rhodes University, 2006.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2000. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 251-262). Also available on the Internet.

During and after the First World War, English-language poets employed various ironic techniques to address war's dark absurdities. These methods, I argue, have various degrees of efficacy, depending upon the ethics of the poetry's approach to its reading audience. I judge these ethical discourses according to a poem's willingness to include its readers in the process of poetic construction, through a shared ironic connection. My central ethical test is Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative and Jurgen Habermas's conception of discourse ethics. I argue that without a sense of care and duty toward the reading other (figured in open-ended ironies over dogmatic rhetorics), there can be no social responsibility or reformation, thus testing modernist assumptions about the political usefulness of poetry. I begin with the trench poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, whose sarcastic and satirical ironies are constructed upon a problematic consequentialist ethos. Despite our sympathy for the poets' tragic positions as soldiers, their poems' rhetoric is ultimately coercive rather than politically progressive. It negates the social good it intends by nearly mimicking the unilateral rhetoric that gave rise to the war. The next chapter concerns Ezra Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, fundamental modernist poems defining the postwar Anglo-American era. In contrast to the trench poets, I argue these two poems at their best manage to create an irony of free play, inviting the audience's participation in meaning-making through the irony of self-parody. Traditional ethical critiques of these poets' troubling politics, I argue, do not negate the discourse ethics present in these texts. The final three chapters follow the wartime and postwar ironies of the American poets William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens. Williams, a medical doctor, makes use of the ironic grotesque in his poems to offer the voice of poetry to the disenfranchised, including individuals with disabilities. Moore, a modernist and early feminist, pairs her poems to decenter poetic authority, depicting possible ethical poetic conversations. Finally, Stevens's democratic, pragmatic ethics appears within poetry that continually invites its readers to fill in gaps of meaning about the war and beyond.

M.A. (Afrikaans-Nederlands) / Although critics are thoroughly aware of the ironical elements in the short prose work of Hennie Aucamp, these elements are rarely discussed in detail. The irony in his work displays an in frequency, importance and variety of categories. Therefore this study attempts to arrive at an effective description of an ironical code that is used in the prose work of Aucamp. The study that is attempted here relies heavily on the theoretical findings of J.H. Johl. A communicative model and the theory of speech acts are used. In this applied study the emphasis falls on the manifestations of the different categories, techniques and functions of irony. In conclusion Aucamp's manipulation of irony is evaluated. In this respect he appears to be an important exponent of irony in Afrikaans.

[pt] Esta tese tem um propósito estratégico e um tático. O estratégico diz respeito a propor uma leitura dos chamados primeiros diálogos socráticos, que leve, tanto quanto possível, a uma maior preocupação com o aspecto literário dos textos em sua indissolúvel ligação com o conteúdo filosófico, tentando encontrar temas , e estratagemas discursivos que consubstanciem , na inédita e irrepetível narratividade filosófica platônica, a inextricável relação entre forma e conteúdo, literatura e filosofia, mímesis e denuncia da mímesis, relação esta que não pode ser resumida ou banalizada em perspectivas interpretativas que apenas concedem à dramaturgia e narratividade platônicas papel secundário, instrumental, na composição do corpus platonicum, entendendo os diálogos como mera forma literária de se expressarem doutrinas ou pensamentos filosóficos. Dentro desse enquadramento geral, pretende-se apresentar como as chamadas eironeía socrática e a ironia platônica podem ter-se constituído no único (ou pelo menos o mais perfeito) elemento de aproximação ou mesmo de identificação entre a visão dualista de mundo platônica – com suas perplexidades e até ambiguidades teóricas – e a construção de sua literatura , onde sobressai o personagem Sócrates , enigmático, atópico, paradoxal, enfim, tão aparentemente dúplice quanto possível para um ser humano. E nada como um procedimento comumente associado à ordem da retórica, ou seja, da literatura, - a ironia- para unificar o dualismo platônico e as ambiguidades de seu protagonista, Sócrates. Nesse processo, se verá como essa ironia, retirada de seu âmbito do meramente linguístico e apresentada como o elemento –síntese dos sokratikoì lógoi, será corpo (literatura) e alma (filosofia) da mais bela construção literário-filosófica do Ocidente plasmada pelo gênio de Platão. Por outro lado, do ponto de vista tático, a tese aborda a importância da distinção entre o uso que Platão faz da eironeía na sua acepção mais antiga na língua grega, de viés pejorativo, como engano, trapaça, dolo etc e encarna tal noção em seu protagonista Sócrates, e a noção moderna de ironia, que hoje reduzimos a mera figura de estilo ou de linguagem, que indica elegância , bom gosto e sofisticação no falar. Para tanto, estabelecemos uma controvérsia com Gregory Vlastos, na esteira da polêmica provocada por esse ilustre comentador de Platão, de que apresentamos os principais críticos, a propósito de sua noção de ironia complexa para dar conta das perplexidades na leitura dos diálogos decorrentes do uso multifacetado e fascinante do recurso da ironia. Esse movimento tático do debate é importante por ser Vlastos uma referência desde o último lustro do século XX sobre temas socráticos, sobretudo o conceito de ironia complexa e conhecimento elênctico. Além disso, tento avançar a hipótese de que seria exatamente a tendência da leitura de Vlastos no sentido de subestimar o papel da literatura no modo dialético de Platão fazer filosofia, e o privilégio quase absoluto que deu a um exame dos textos do fundador da Academia recortando-lhe de preferência seu dizer apofântico, de modo obstinada e exclusivamente analítico, em detrimento de uma contextualização dramática, tudo isso, enfim, redundou em uma leitura profundamente descontextualizada e anti-literária da obra do filósofo. Esta seria, ao meu ver, também a raiz de sua equivocada e limitada compreensão do misterioso personagem Sócrates, que em sua explicação, no esforço de elucidá-lo em sua evasividade e astúcias discursivas, termina por sobrecarregá-lo ainda mais de perplexidades invencíveis. No afã assumido de salvar Sócrates (que ele praticamente toma como apenas retratado em sua historicidade por Platão) de qualquer acusação de conduta sofística ou de uso de expedientes enganadores, Vlastos talvez o tenha submerso em ainda mais aporias do que ele próprio teria criado nos diálogos que protagoniza, na consumação de seu método de pe / [en] This thesis has both an strategic and a tactical goal. The strategic goal has to do with proposing some reading of the so called early socratic dialogues that guides the reader, as much as possible, to a major concern with the dialogues literary aspects in its indissoluble connection with its philosophic contente, trying to find themes and discursive manoeuvres that may consubstantiate, in the unprecedented and unique platonic philosophic narrativity, the inextricable relation between form and content, literature and philosophy, mímesis and mimesis disruption at a time. This relation form/content in Plato shouldn t be abridged nor trivialized in interpretive views that just allow platonic dramaturgy and narrativity a secundary and instrumental role in the corpus platonicum composition, assuming the dialogues as a mere literary form for doctrines and philosophic thoughts being expressed. In this general frame, this thesis intends to show how the so called socratic eironeía and platonic irony may have beeen converted in the only (or t least the most perfect) element of approximation or even of identification between the Plato s dualistic view over the world – with all its puzzles and theoretical ambiguities – and the construction of his own literature, where his character Socrates stands out, as enigmatic, atopic, paradoxical, in a word, as dubious as possible for a human being. And there s nothing like a procedure commonly associated to rethoric field, that is, to literature, - irony – to unifiy the platonic dualism and the ambiguities of his protagonist, Sócrates. In this process, we ll see how this irony, withdrawn from its merely linguistic field and shown as the key-element of the sokratikoì lógoi, wil be body (literature) and soul (philosophy) for the most beautiful literary-philosophioc construction of western world, put together by Plato s genius. On the other hand, from tatics point of view, this thesis takes up the importance of the distinction between the use Plato gives to eironeía, in his most ancient meaning in greek, clearly derogatory, in a sense of trickery, deceit, fraud etc, and embody this connotation into his protagonits Socrates, and, in the other corner, the modern notion of irony, shrunken nowadays to mere tropos or figure of speech, something that depicts the tallker as someone elegant and refined with the words. In order to convey all that, I engaged myself into a controversy with Gregory Vlastos, putting myself in the middle of a well known polemic raised by this conspicuous commentator of Plato, whose most influent reviewers are presented here with respect to his notion of complex irony, in order to exhibit how many puzzlings the manifold use of the term eironeía could bring even to the best readers of the dialogues. This tactical moment of all that contention is relevant, once we know Vlastos to be a reference, since the last decades of twentieth century about socratic subjects, and mostly when it comes to his concepts of complex irony and elenctic knowledge. Furthermore, I try toi advance a hypothesis according to which it has been exactly the tendency of Vlastos to underestimate the role of literature in the dialectic manner of Plato deal with philosophy, and thealmost absolute priviledge given by Vlastos to comment on what is said by the characters in an apophantic way rather than taking heed to dramatic contextualization, all this, to my view,has resulted in a reading profoundly uncontextualized and not literary of the philosopher wrntings. That would be too the root of his misleading and limited comprehension of the isterious character Socrates, who in the Vlatos account, instead of clariflying and trying to expose the real motives for his evasiveness and discoursive trickeries, he finishes his analysis by overloadind Socrates with even more invencible puzzles. In Vlastos anxiety to save Socrates (who he takes to be the historic one) from any accusation of bewing sophistic or of using deceitful devcves in the elenchus, Vlastos perhaps had submerged the philosopher in

The construction of critically literate students must be paramount among goals in the freshman composition classroom. The approach for constructing critical readers positioned in this thesis employs conceptualizing both the complexity of a text and the importance of comprehending the context within which a text is both read and written. It utilizes the rhetorical feature of irony.

This approach to Unamuno does not propose to deny the fact that he was a polemicist, a poet, a teacher, and a philosopher more than he was a writer of fiction or an entertainer. What is intended is to point out to the average reader in simple terms something of the general signification and method in Unamuno's attempt at the art of prose fiction--at least as it appears in translation.

melodram

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