No description available.

No description available.

Written in different time periods but set in the time of imperial expansion, E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) offer a critical exploration of British imperialism and its aftermath. What similarities and what differences do these novels have in portraying imperialism? More specifically, do they portray modern imperialism in radically different and mutually exclusive ways since one is set in the center of the British Empire and the other in a peripheral colony? The essay draws on Frederic Jameson’s argument about modernism, and Howards End in particular, that the center representatively excludes the periphery in its literary works. By comparing the two novels, the essay explores these issues and asks whether the British Empire is structurally incomplete in its representation in early twentieth century canonical modernist novels? Moreover, does this theory of exclusivity extend to include modern canonical African novels written a few decades later? By analyzing Howards End and Things Fall Apart, the essay examines the hypothesis that the center and the periphery are indeed mutually exclusive in their literary productions. The conclusions reached require some significant modifications to Jameson’s theory. It was found that Howards End does indeed structurally exclude the periphery. However, the same cannot be said for Things Fall Apart, which structurally incorporates the center. Thus, Jameson’s theory does not extend beyond early twentieth century modernist novels. Moreover, Forster’s novel, although it does suffer from Jameson’s criticism, shows critical awareness of this disabling disconnection from the periphery.

I have examined Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited by reading it as a tragedy and looking at the motif of the tragic fall of the Marchmain family as a response to the challenges of modernity. Most academic works on Brideshead Revisited are religious readings that focus on the role of Catholicism in the narrative. I argue that the novel portrays modernity and as such, calls for the necessity of being able to change with the times. Approaching the narrative as a tragedy highlights this interpretation and allows for an exploration of the characters’ attitudes to modernity through their tragic fall. I have investigated the role and implications of tragedy in modern secular times and applied it to Brideshead Revisited, focusing on the Aristotelian theory of tragedy and employing Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s understanding of tragic action to explain the effect of the tragic fall on the spectator or reader. The Marchmains can be seen as Aristotelian tragic heroes that experience a fall due to their mistaken views that are founded on tradition and thus distance them from the modern world. The fall of the Marchmains and the looming disintegration of their social stratum are indicative of broader social change in interwar. For Charles Ryder, the narrator of Brideshead Revisited, the Marchmains’ tragic fall serves as a tool that allows him to see life from a different perspective and reconcile nostalgia and modernity. Brideshead Revisited is therefore not only a Catholic novel, but also a detailed image of interwar England, the shifts in its social structure, and the importance of accepting change.

Reason, material objects, God, mind and body are all interrelated in Descartes' philosophy. The misapprehension of one will lead to misunderstandings in all of them. They are bound together by being part of the one God given secure universe. This allows Descartes to put forward the understanding of the universe as being one in which rational science was possible and indubitable certainty achievable. Because they are all organically related in the one meaningful system, the essential natures of these things which Descartes discovers flow into one another in their actual existence in the world. Accepting the picture of the universe as a rational place where certainty is possible, is part of what defines much of modernity as modernity. Since this is one way of ensuring certainty, modernity demands that a thing's essence should reflect its manner of existence. However this leads to modernity demanding of Descartes' philosophy that it reflect this same structure. Modernity then reads Descartes as trying to present such a picture, and consequently finds that Descartes' arguments do not work. Because Descartes' universe is God's universe, he is able to offer to humanity a very strong form of autonomy. But modernity prefers to have a less powerful form of autonomy which is independent of God, but which makes itself a servant to nature and the community of reason. This is a result of the price of entry into the rational universe through Descartes' method of doubt. As a consequence of modernity's reworking of Descartes' understanding of autonomy, and their demand that a thing's essence should exactly reflect its mode of existence, irreducible tensions develop in modernity. These are particularly obvious in the case of the relationship between science, reason and God, and between the mind and the body. This thesis addresses these tensions / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

No description available.

No description available.

Sovereignty has long been deemed an unchallengeable concept. However, starting from end of twentieth century, this concept is severely impacted by the trend of Globalization. And now, it becomes a debatable issue that whether or not the core characters of the traditional Sovereignty theory: i.e. supremacy, inalienability and indivisibility remain. By way of methodologies of documentary analysis and comparative analysis, I intend to start with introducing the traditional Sovereignty theory, examining how this Sovereignty socio-science was structured by the traditional Sovereignty theory, which includes how the core concept, ie. Freedom, Capitalism and modernity impacted the traditional Sovereignty theory. Then, I would like to introduce Zygmunt Bauman¡¦s view, who is one of the contemporary socio-science masters, toward Freedom, Capitalism and Modernity, and to compare the difference implied between these two views. And last, I tried to critique this artificial Sovereignty concept, although it long been adopted, with Bauman¡¦s view from the following dimensions: (a) the structural error of Sovereignty theory; and (b) in reality, the collapse led by modernity of the 3 pillars, ie. Economy, Culture and Military of Sovereignty theory.

none

The conflicts happening around the Territorio Indígena Parque Nacional Isiboro­ Sécure (TIPNIS) in Bolivia among the multiple and diverse stakeholders within it, cannot be reduced to a simple confrontation between conflicting interests regarding a highway. A political analysis of the TIPNIS conflicts should be an analysis of how Modernity responds to different, opposed and complementary civilizational projects, stressing the relation between indigenous peoples, and the plurinational state in Bolivia; the present locus of the conflict. The plurinational state in Bolivia was formed with the express intention of dismantling the colonial and its civilizational order through the reformulation of the Bolivian State. By contrasting, comparing, dissecting and analyzing how notions of citizenship, nationhood, and civilization are deployed in Modernity, in one geographical place, the TIPNIS in Bolivia, and through different historical eras, we can elucidate how those notions were and are enforced. The civilization/nation/citizen membership and non-membership, who fits and who doesn’t fit those categories, and how the movement between them is managed, throw light on how Modernity’s project is carried away in everyday life, and under what costs. / text