No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1983. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 266-274).

Thèse--Univ. de Lausanne. / "Principaux ouvrages consultés": p. [119].

These--Universit́e de Paris. Faculté des lettres. / "Bibliographie": p. [273]-278.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2008. / Title from title screen (site viewed Aug. 14, 2008). PDF text: 354 p. ; 1 Mb. UMI publication number: AAT 3297817. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in microfilm and microfiche formats.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1931. / Vita. Published also without thesis note. Bibliography: p. [239]-242.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1931. / Vita. Published also without thesis note. Bibliography: p. [239]-242.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1943. / Vita. Bibliography: p. 105-107.

Scientific progress has historically increased anxiety in society about man's relationship with nature. In vitro fertilisation, cloning and regenerative stem-cell-based therapies have raised fears about transgressive raids on the boundaries which secure human identity. This thesis seeks to explore the power of realist fiction to respond to both the process and ethics of scientific endeavour in a contemporary setting. Breath on Glass, a novel, follows the lives of two young researchers and their family relationships, both inside and outside of the laboratory, exploring the ways in which scientific tensions might give rise to personal ones. In parallel, it considers the ways in which the need for the advanced technology of fertility treatment impacts on their non-scientific relative. In the accompanying essay, the requirement for, and the use of literature to act as a conciliator between science and humanity is discussed and the narrative of science and the narratives of the individual scientists are compared.

One of the questions at stake in contemporary theoretical debates over the legacy of the Enlightenment is whether the political violence that has been carried out over the last two centuries is inextricably linked to the rationalist values promoted by the Enlightenment. This critique of the political and social legacy of the Enlightenment challenges us to consider how Montesquieu's writings may inform our understanding of the disintegration and formation of social-political bonds and identities. Drawing on Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theories, this dissertation explores how Julia Kristeva's theory of the "demarcating imperative" of abjection illuminates both her claim for the critical significance of Montesquieu's Persian Letters and her argument for a cosmopolitanism based on an "ethics of psychoanalysis." The chapters that follow examine how the differences that produce the meaning of the subject and the symbolic order in the text—nature and culture; the pure and the impure; man and woman; human and nonhuman; violence and nonviolence; life and death—are articulated in relation to the figuration of the abject. Chapter one begins an exploration of two movements of the epistolary journey of the fictional foreigner. During one movement of the epistolary journey, the production of critical knowledge has the effect of destabilizing the subject and the symbolic order. In a second movement, the articulation of knowledge functions to contain the uncanny strangeness of the enlightened subject. Through a reading of the myth of the Troglodytes and the story of Apheridon, chapter two addresses how the signification of violence functions in the production and destruction of a symbolic order and how monetary exchanges offer the abject cosmopolitan an imaginary refuge from violent nondifferentiation. Chapter three begins with an analysis of how rhetorical figures operate in the epistolary exchanges to both produce the meaning of the symbolic order of France and signify a crisis of political signification. This examination of how signifying practices function as sacrificial rites presents the paradox that the Persian Letters both allows for a critical analysis of abjection and participates in the demarcation of a symbolic order that functions to deny consciousness of our uncanny strangeness.