Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Literature of Derrida and Davidson'

This thesis argues that all literature is subject to ‘afterlife,’ a continual process of translation. From this starting point, this thesis seeks to answer two questions. Firstly, how texts demonstrate this continual translation; secondly, how texts should be read if they are understood as constantly within translation. To answer these questions, this thesis seeks to develop a model of textuality that holds afterlife as central, and a model of reading based on this concept of textuality. Chapter One explores how following through the implications of Walter Benjamin’s and Jacques Derrida’s usages of the term ‘afterlife’ in their writings on translation, language and history necessarily implies a model of textuality. The model of reading that this thesis seeks to develop focuses on language and history, as Benjamin and Derrida define these as the parameters within which translation takes place. This study emphasises textuality itself as a third parameter. Chapter One also describes how, following Benjamin and Derrida, language and history are conceived as inescapable, repressive systems. This, paradoxically, allows for the concept of ‘messianicity’ – the idea that all language, and every historical event, has the potential to herald an escape from language or history. By definition, because language and history are all-encompassing, this potential cannot be enacted, and remains potential. An innovation of this thesis is to understand textuality itself as having ‘messianic potential’; all texts have the potential to escape textuality and afterlife, by reaching a point where they could no longer be translated. Understanding texts as having messianic potential, but always being subject to afterlife, is the basis of the model of reading described at the end of this chapter. Due to the ways Benjamin and Derrida suggest we recognise messianic potential, texts are read with a dual focus on their singularity and their connections to other texts. This is achieved through the ‘text-in-afterlife,’ a concept this thesis develops that understands texts as inextricable from the texts they translate and the texts that translate them. Chapters Two, Three and Four test and complicate this model of reading in response to texts by James Joyce, Aimé Césaire and Jorge Luis Borges. Concepts of textuality and reading are therefore developed throughout the thesis. The three key texts are read with focus on their individual relationships with language, history and textuality, and their connections to the texts they translate. Critics have linked Joyce’s Ulysses to multiple other texts, making it seem exceptional. However, the concept of messianicity shows that Ulysses is important precisely because it is not exceptional. Césaire’s Une Tempête demonstrates how a text can interact with several translations of ‘the same’ text simultaneously, and also that, although language and history are structured by colonialism and are inescapable, there is a huge potential for translation within these terms. Borges’ ‘Pierre Menard, Autor del Quijote’ demonstrates the form of texts’ continual translation in afterlife by describing a text that is verbally identical to the text it ‘translates,’ yet is nevertheless different in ‘meaning’ from its original. Borges’ fiction also highlights the endless potential for translation that is inherent to all texts. Through four chapters, this thesis develops a model of textuality that understands literature as defined by an almost endless potential for translation. The value of reading texts in the terms of ‘afterlife’ is to emphasise literature’s immense potential: all texts are continually translated in relation to language, history and textuality, and continually reveal further texts.

James Joyce remains a logocentric figure, a position confirmed in his perceived relation to Dante within a patriarchal canonical lineage and its philosophical implications. Joyce also occupies this position within the writing and thought of Jacques Derrida, for whom his work then represents both the logos and its own deconstruction. In contrast, this thesis proposes that Joyce in fact is not a logocentric author, and that his writing is explicitly directed towards a deconstruction of the idea of the logos. This claim is advanced through the suggestion that there is in Joyce a deconstruction rather than a validation of the phonocentric linguistic theory and practice of Dante, and concomitantly of a patriarchal Joyce construed through that Dante. In this interrogation of the Dantean logos by Joyce’s writing the thesis then reads the Derridean view on Joyce and examines its investments, proposing that in it there are wider implications for a critical reading of Derrida’s work and for an understanding of his grammatology. It does so in three imagined papers on Joyce and Dante, an insert, a lecture and an essay. They constitute phantom artefacts in which to read deconstructively, and to read deconstruction, by unbinding Derrida’s Joyce. The first chapter is an imagined insert from Joyce and Dante into Of Grammatology and its first chapter, ‘The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing’. In the folds of the insert it is proposed that Derrida cleaves to the idea of the book and is bound to it in Joyce. This binding initiates a retrospective reading of ‘The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing’ and of the wider grammatological opening; its implications are unfolded in the insert. By then unbinding the thread of a logocentric Dante in Joyce, the insert unbinds Joyce from the Derridean idea of the book and furthermore suggests that Joyce, read in the deconstruction of Dante, represents the closure of the book as imagined in that essay. Building upon the proposal of a Joycean closure of the book as unfolded in chapter one, the second chapter advances and outlines the shape of that closure in an imagined lecture by Joyce. The chapter follows the displaced letter a in Ulysses as it interrogates mimesis, tracing the development of a subject in différance. The lecture performs that deconstruction of mimesis and, in doing so, announces not the apotheosis but the death of the realist novel in Ulysses. The final chapter draws together the conclusions of the previous two chapters in an imagined essay that arche-writes ‘Two Words for Joyce’ as an example of its own thesis. It does so in a previously untraced Dantean connection, through a conversation between Joyce and Beckett on Dante that finds its way into Finnegans Wake and is archived in the two words Derrida extracts as the spur for his essay. The imagined essay brings together Derrida, Beckett and Joyce in Dante as a concatenation of pairs within the pair of essays; it also shadows another pair, the Derridean Joyce and his other from whom the imagined essay comes. It both performs a deconstructive reading of Derrida in ‘Two Words for Joyce’ and then, through that reading, more widely affirms a Derridean grammatology. The argument of the thesis as it has advanced through the three chapters is here brought to a conclusion, suggesting that in Joyce’s writing it can be proposed that the relationship of deconstructive reading to its own practice is mediated through literature; it also proposes what might be a relationship between deconstructive reading and literature beyond those consequences.

Orientador: Paulo Roberto Ottoni
Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem
Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-06T10:18:38Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Silva_FranciscodeFatimada_D.pdf: 765309 bytes, checksum: 13860ee23eb6c404f7c312470711b502 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2006
Resumo: Nosso objetivo foi caracterizar um tipo de tradução observada nos textos de Derrida. O foco de nosso empreendimento foi o ensaio de intitulado ¿Des tours de Babel¿ (¿Às voltas com Babel¿) que teve sua publicação em livro numa situação de tradução, traduzido para o inglês, em Difference in translation (Ed. Graham), traz como apêndice sua versão em francês que seria republicada dois anos mais tarde em Psyché: inventions de l¿autre I. Além dessa tradução, foi ainda vertido para o espanhol, por Olmedo e Peñalver, para o italiano, por Rosso e para o português brasileiro, por Barreto. Mesmo com a existência de sua tradução em português, a decisão de retraduzi-lo foi possibilitar uma leitura crítica fundamental para o nosso trabalho de análise. Para tanto, tomamos de empréstimo as figuras da retórica, em especial, a catacrese para falar da tradução em Derrida. O interesse pelo tema geral da tradução em Derrida se justifica por seu caráter praticamente inédito no âmbito das reflexões realizadas no Brasil, não fosse o empenho do grupo de pesquisa, intitulado Traduzir Derrida: políticas e desconstruções, que procura preencher essa lacuna, na qual se insere a presente pesquisa. Após ter justificado a escolha do tema, passamos a esboçar a problemática que guiou essa pesquisa. Derrida lança mão de mecanismos retóricos, tais como os tropos, com o intuito de refletir sobre a tradução, sempre dentro de uma linguagem filosófica, tendo como pando de fundo, o texto de Benjamin, ¿A tarefa do tradutor¿, procurando suplementar Benjamin de várias formas. Explorando, principalmente as antinomias do discurso benjaminiano sobre a tradução, Derrida constrói um discurso no qual surge a questão do nome próprio, sua quase intraduzibilidade, problematizando definições de tradução como a de Jakobson; discorre sobre a questão da dívida a que se submete o tradutor e interpreta as metáforas benjaminianas, por meio das quais comenta noções como direito de autoria, verdade, código religioso e assinatura. A dificuldade maior de nossa tese está em construir um discurso sobre a tradução, em Derrida, que leve, em conta seus múltiplos aspectos, suas muitas metáforas, bem como lidar com a impossibilidade de reduzir um texto como tal a seus efeitos de sentidos, de conteúdo, de tese ou de tema. A hipótese diretiva de nossa pesquisa é a de que a boa tradução deve abusar, como num efeito de torção do sentido. O ato tradutório se encontra sempre em uma situação aporética, num interminável doublé bind. A tese se estrutura em partes assim denominadas: ¿Observações introdutivas¿ procura refletir de forma geral sobre a tradução do ensaio, discutindo ainda a questão do método, questionando se haveria um método da desconstrução, e por conseqüência, da tese que trata da desconstrução em tradução. ¿A este título intraduzível: observações sobre a homofonia em Des tours de Babel¿ trata da intraduzibilidade e as conseqüências de se traduzir o título do ensaio de Derrida. Partindo de uma discussão sobre a homofonia, fala-se sobre o jogo de palavras que se perde ou se ganha na tradução para remeter finalmente à questão do abuso na e da tradução. A análise se concentra principalmente nas notas das traduções do ensaio que procuram justificar a tradução ou a não tradução do título. ¿Da tradução catacréstica em Derrida: a retórica da invenção¿, destaca-se uma postura freqüente nos textos de Derrida: o recurso à aposição de notas e a inserção de palavras na língua de origem do texto analisado. Um tipo de tradução que denominamos de catacréstica. Trata-se ainda da questão da fetichização, da metáfora no ato tradutório e da conceituação no interior do discurso da tradução em especial em Derrida. ¿Os nós do intraduzível: indecidibilidade¿ focaliza a indecibilidade do sentido, da significação. Partindo da noção de que há uma produção de sentido, desconstroi-se o argumento que haja um significado intrínseco. propõe ainda o questionamento sobre a crença geral dos críticos na possibilidade da existência de um significado imanente ao dito original, fazendo-nos refletir sobre ¿essência do significado¿ e suas implicações para a tradução. O que nos interessa particularmente aqui é a hipótese de Derrida sobre a instabilidade do significado de qualquer texto, um pressuposto que se revela nos posicionamentos em relação à tradução que serão abordadas nessa tese.¿Desconstruções ou Retórica do Canibalismo?¿ teve como objetivo provocar o leitor em relação ao que seria mais típico em termos de desconstrução no Brasil, fazendo uma possível relação com o canibalismo. A denominação ¿tradução catacréstica¿ surge de uma catacrese, a torre de Babel, que Derrida utiliza para pensar e traduzir a própria tradução, que neste caso, caracterizar-se-ia pela questão do comentário, da aposição de notas e da propensão ao uso de palavras estrangeiras, sempre em situação parentética. Se não é um caráter exclusivo, são essas características que a definem, conquanto que ela esteja dissolvida dentro de um comentário mais geral, de caráter mais filosófico, como se quer demonstrar neste trabalho
Abstract: Our aim was to characterize a kind of translation seen into the Derrida¿s texts. The focus of our task was the essay titled ¿Des tours de Babel¿ (¿Às voltas com Babel¿). The Derrida¿s essay had its edition in a translation situation, translated into the English, in Difference in translation (Ed. Graham), it brings as appendix its French version reedited two years later in Psyché: inventions de l¿autre I. Besides that translation, it has been translated into the Spanish, by Olmedo and Peñalver, into the Italian, by Rosso and into the Brazilian portuguese, by Barreto. Even with the existence of the translation into the Portuguese language of this essay, the decision of translating it again is due to the possibility of a critical reading very important to our analysis work. What we dare to do has been to borrow the rhetoric figures, specially, the catachresis to speak of translation in Derrida. The interesting by the general theme of translation in Derrida justifies itself through the practically unpublished character into the domain of the reflections made in Brazil, exception made to the research group called Traduzir Derrida: políticas e desconstruções, which looks for to fulfill this gap, into which the present research comes into. After we have justified the choice of our theme, we begin to expose our problematic issue that guided this research. Derrida makes uses of the rhetorical devices, such as the tropes, with the aim to reflect about the translation, always into a philosophical language, with the Benjamin¿ text, ¿The task of translator¿, as background, searching for supplementing Benjamin in many ways. Exploring, mainly the antinomies of his discourse about the translation, Derrida builds a discourse into which the question of the proper name, its almost untranslatability, arises. It also rises questions about the translation definitions as the Jakobson¿s ones; he discourses about the question of the debt to which the translator submit himself and interprets the benjaminian metaphors, through which he comments notions as author right, truth, religious code, and signature. The greatest difficulty of our thesis is to build a discourse about translation in Derrida that consider its multiples aspects, its many metaphors. The difficulty is also to handle with the impossibility of reducing a text as such to its effects of senses, of contents, of thesis or theme. The directional hypothesis of our research is that the good translation should abuse, like in a torsion effect of the sense. The translatory act is always in an aporetical situation, in an endless double bind situation. The thesis is structured in parts called as: ¿Observações introdutivas¿ looks for to reflect in a general way about the essay translation, discussing still the method question, questioning if there would be a deconstruction method, and consequently, of the thesis that treats the deconstruction in translation. ¿A este título intraduzível: observações sobre a homofonia em Des tours de Babel¿ treats the untranslatability and the consequences of translating the essay title of the Derrida¿s essay. From a discussion about the homophony, one speaks about words play that one loses or wins into the translation to refer finally to the question of abuse into and of the translation. The analysis concentrates mainly into the translation notes of the essay that search to justify the translation or not of the title. ¿Da tradução catacréstica em Derrida: a retórica da invenção¿, one shows a usual posture into the Derrida¿s text: the resource to the apposition of notes and the insertion of words in the source language of analyzed text. A kind of translation one calls catachrestical. It treats also of the question of fetishism, of metaphor into the translatory act and the conceptualization into the discourse of translation especially in Derrida. ¿Os nós do intraduzível: indecidibilidade¿ focalizes the indecibility of sense, of signification. From the notion that there is a production of sense, one deconstructs the argument that there is an intrinsecal signified. It proposes the questioning about the general belief of the critics in the possibility of the existence of an immanent signified to the called original, making us to reflect about the ¿essence of signified¿ and its implications to the translation. What interests us particularly here is the Derrida¿s hypothesis about the instability of the signified of any text, a presupposition that reveals into the positions in relation to the translation that are written in this thesis. ¿Desconstruções ou Retórica do Canibalismo?¿ has as objectif to provoque the reader concerning to what would be more tipical in terms of deconstruction in Brazil, making a possible relation to the canibalism. The denomination ¿catachrestical translation¿ rises from a catachresis, the Babel tower, that Derrida utilizes to think and translate the translation itself, that in this case, characterizes through the commentaries question, the notes apposition and the tendency to the use of foreign words, always in parenthetical situation. If it is not an exclusive character, theses characteristics define it, even it is dissolved inside a more general commentary of a more philosophical character, as one intends to demonstrate in this work
Doutorado
Doutor em Linguística Aplicada

This thesis makes the claim that there is an important correlation between the poetic and the ethical in the work of Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous and Paul Celan. Taking its cue from Derrida’s 1988 ‘Che cos’è la poesia?’, it proposes that what he calls the ‘poematic’ entails an ethical experience. It seeks to show that the underlying link between the poetic and the ethical as it emerges in Derrida’s text calls for a reconsideration of the relation between the literary and the ethical. Rather than merely describe ethical situations or prescribe ethical behaviour, the poetic involves an ethical experience of the arrival or ‘invention’ (from the Latin invenire: to come upon) of the other. Focusing on Derrida’s notions of responsibility and hospitality in turn, it argues that the interruption at the heart of Derrida’s ethical event is what characterises poetic force. Chapter 1 presents a reading of Derrida’s notion of the poetic as an instance of ethical responsibility. It begins with a discussion of Derrida’s understanding of responsibility that underlines the importance of the interrelation between the secret, the call and the response. It subsequently argues that the poetic dictate, like responsibility, also involves an interruptive call or apostrophe that demands a response. Referring closely to the biblical narrative of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac as well as Derrida’s notions of the ‘double yes’ and the countersignature, it finally considers the ethics of poetic response. Chapter 2 claims that the force of Hélène Cixous’s work is intricately bound to the Derridean ethical imperative of responsibility as explored in Chapter 1. It begins by showing the parallels between Cixous’s ‘coming to writing’ and the Derridean notion of the poetic dictate. It maintains that the complex question of genre in Cixous’s work is related to her writing practice as an instance of submitting to the call of the other. Finally, it argues that the ethical import of her work is to be found in what Derrida has described in terms of a monstrous force. Turning its attention primarily to Derrida’s seminars around the subject of hospitality, Chapter 3 begins by focusing on the inherent violence in hospitality through an analysis of the etymological root of the word ‘hospitality’ and Derrida’s neologism ‘hostipitality’. It then addresses Derrida’s aphoristic claim that an ‘act of hospitality can only be poetic’. Relating this assertion to his understanding of invention as the instance of the coming of the other, it argues that the poetic is ethical at its core because it invents the impossible. Finally, drawing out the implications of Derridean hospitality for a reading of Sophocles’ play ‘Antigone’, it demonstrates that the eponymous character enacts the poetic experience at the centre of the discussion. In an extended analysis of the notion poetic hospitality, Chapter 4 takes the concept of the uncanny in Paul Celan’s ‘Der Meridian’ speech as its foremost concern. It makes the claim that the ethical force in Celan’s oeuvre lies in its power to overcome the uncanny automaticity of art. It then turns to ‘Die Niemandsrose’ to explore the uncanny in relation to what Celan calls the ‘groundlessness’ of the poem. Finally, it suggests that the uncanny in Celan’s oeuvre can be seen as the ethical counterpart to the aesthetic of the Romantic sublime that is arguably no longer possible today.

The purpose of this study was to analyze the way in which multicultural studies and theory, two academic areas that traditionally have been at odds, both manifest a distinctly similar stance on the constructedness of identity in Western society and how it affects intercultural relations. Jacques Derrida’s The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe and Edwidge Danticat’s The Book of the Dead both influence the way being is perceived in society. The first is a political speech intended to open the minds of Europe’s political elite to what is perhaps the root of intercultural straggle in Europe. The second is a short story intended to shed light on the trials of a Haitian-American immigrant family as they come to terms with their homeland’s sociopolitical unrest and try to integrate into a new cultural environment. Together, these texts facilitate a protean examination of the rhetoric of the essential that permeates Western culture, and provide insight into a way of conceiving of being that is both dynamic and prismatic.

This thesis explores Derrida’s engagement with Plato, primarily in the texts “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials” and On the Name. The themes of participation and performance are focused on through an analysis of the concepts of mystery and metaxy (μεταξν). The crucial performative aspects of Plato and Derrida’s texts are often under appreciated. Neither author simply says what he means; rather their texts are meant to do something to the reader that surpasses what could be accomplished through straightforward reading comprehension. This enacted dimension of the text underscores a participatory worldview that is not just intellectually formulated, but performed by the text in a way that draws the reader into an event of participation—instead of its mere contemplation. On this basis, I propose a closer alliance between these authors’ projects than has been traditionally considered.

The thesis critically evaluates Jacques Derrida's conferral of the rights of reality on writing, focussing on his theory of an arche-text in light of the speculative nature of this theory. The theory is initially considered in the context of Derrida's elucidation of the usurpatory status of writing within the Platonic and Nietzschean texts. This consideration reveals an admission of writing's usurpatory status by both writers while at the same time demonstrating their awareness of the intrinsically speculative nature of this view, the significance of writing lying in its ability to exteriorise the radically indeterminate status of consciousness m relation to reality rather than its ability to displace consciousness or reality The analyses, therefore, not only bring the Derridean hypothesis of a repressive or phonocentric metaphysical episteme into question but also exhibit the historical and philosophical role of potentiality in relation to writing, writing's ultimate significance lying in its capacity to exteriorise our existence as a mode of potentiality. Accordingly, in the second half of the thesis the Derridean theory of writing is countered with a specifically Aristotelian theory of the text as it is exhibited in the prose of Samuel Beckett, an author whose significance lies in his close alignment with Derridean theory within contemporary criticism. It is demonstrated that this identification has obviated an awareness of the significance of potentiality within the Beckettian text, his work consequently being appraised in the previously neglected context of Aristotelian metaphysics.

English
Ph.D.
Despite recent scholarship, critics have yet to offer a sustained, interdisciplinary interpretation of John Milton's engagement with millennial ideas that takes into equal account the historical context of seventeenth-century religious and political controversy, the ways in which the pending apocalypse transformed how people imagined and experienced time, and how we see evidence of this cultural shift in Milton's poetry. This dissertation opens new possibilities of understanding Milton's relation to apocalyptic belief in the Revolutionary and Restoration era through an investigation of how millennial thinking cut across a variety of discourses including theology, politics, and science. At its most basic level, my dissertation argues the seventeenth-century anticipation of the apocalypse fundamentally altered the way people imagined time; this new way of conceptualizing temporality changed early modern religious beliefs, conceptions of history, the scientific imagination, and practices of reading philosophy, politics, and literature. My project proposes that the poetry of Milton helps us better understand these extensive cultural transformations. I explore this new understanding of time that is both reflective of discursive changes in the seventeenth century as well as characteristic of Milton's aesthetics, by offering an understanding of Milton's relationship with millennial ideas and their constitutive temporal structure. I argue that, in response to the inevitable and immanent "end of time" suggested by seventeenth-century apocalyptic temporality, Milton's poetry creates an alternative temporality, opening up an experience of time that is not necessarily unidirectional, closed, and speeding towards its end. I suggest that this different experience of time can best be understood through the framework of a temporality explored by contemporary philosophers Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben--messianic time. Put in its most basic terms, messianic time is a way of thinking about temporality differently, of calling into question our narratives of how time and history function. The messianic invites us to interrogate the notions of closure, certainty, and inevitability that are implicit in our linear, apocalyptic notion of time. Milton's texts continually constitute the possibility of a messianic temporality that can be read as a response to changing conceptions of time in the seventeenth century, millennial anticipation, and the belief that the apocalypse was close at hand. Entering a recent critical conversation regarding Milton's engagement with millennial and apocalyptic thinking, I suggest that we can understand this involvement through the alternative temporality his poetry creates. Each chapter of this dissertation fuses a formalist close reading of the temporality and uncertainties opened up by generic revisions, literary allusions, and rhetorical devices in Milton's poetry with a reading of how ideologically-conflicting interpretations of millennial time are articulated in the text and are reflective of contemporary discourse. I demonstrate how messianic time functions in each text and I prove the importance of this experience as it relates to historical and ideological questions about the millennium. This dissertation contributes to an ongoing conversation regarding how political, religious, scientific, and aesthetic texts are interconnected, and explores the plurality of Milton's ideological positions as they emerge out of the ambivalence and tension in the language of his poetry. In my reading, Milton's texts articulate a way of being in the world--both structural (created through language) and historical (tied to seventeenth-century millennial thinking)--that suggests uncertainty is the condition of knowledge and truth.
Temple University--Theses

Esta tese busca pensar o desfuncional latente em toda escritura, linguagem e vida: suas potências não dominadas, nem domináveis, pelo corte finalista, utilitarista, entre funcional e disfuncional, e o devir-poesia destes interditos quando revertidos em afirmação de possibilidades para além das determinadas pelos códigos fixados e modelos de composição existentes. As obras de Jacques Derrida e Gilles Deleuze (parte com Felix Guattari) são as referências centrais para a constituição deste pensamento, que constantemente se volta ao fazer poético. O trabalho, porém, é conduzido pela extravagante figura que ele livremente se cria do engenhoso fidalgo e cavaleiro Dom Quixote de la Mancha, por seu modo errante de atuar, sua andante poesia. Sua relação com a morte iminente; o papel da leitura em sua fantasia, cuja extensão se mostra incontornável a quem quer que se aproxime; sua irredutibilidade a qualquer juízo que se possa tentar de sua sanidade mental; sua constante construção de uma equívoca e fugidia identidade; e seu permanente e delirante improviso no teatro do mundo configuram uma escritura lúdica, inventiva, aberta, consciente de sua formação, de seu contexto e de seus percursos, o que possibilita a construção da noção de uma poética da existência, sugerida pelas especulações teóricas preliminares.
This thesis seeks to think the latent defunctional in every writing, as language and life: its potencies not dominated by the finalist and utilitarian cut between functional and dysfunctional, and the becoming-poetry of this interdicts when reversed in the affirmation of possibilities beyond those determined by fixed codes and existing composition models. The works of Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze (part with Felix Guattari) are the central references to the constitution of this thought, constantly turned to the poetic making. The work, however, is conducted by the extravagant figure that it freely creates of the ingenious gentleman and knight Don Quixote of la Mancha, by his errant acting mode, his walking poetry. His relationship with imminent death; the role of reading in his fantasy, which extension shows up inescapable to whoever gets close to it; his irreducibility to any judgment that could be tried on his mental sanity; his constant construction of an equivocal and elusive identity; and his permanent and delirious improvisation in the theatre of the world configure a ludic, inventive and open writing, aware of its formation, its context and its routes, which enables the construction of the notion of a poetics of existence, suggested by preliminary theoretical speculations.

Ce travail de recherche propose une étude de l’œuvre intégrale, en vers et en prose, de Fred D'Aguiar, à travers le prisme du mythe, de la métaphore et de la mémoire, et dans le cadre d'une définition large, inclusive et interculturelle de la littérature caraïbe. A partir de la mise en lumière de la relation hypomnésique de la métaphore à la mythologie et à la métaphysique occidentale, l'argumentation s'étend sur des questions telles que celle du lien entre référent et monde et élabore une vision à la fois interculturelle et géographique de la métaphore en tant que tropicalité. La tropicalité donne, à son tour, son élan à l'argumentation, en permettant, pour la première moitié de ce travail de recherche, la production d'une lecture singulière de la poésie de Fred D'Aguiar, qui s'avère aussi liée à un vaste corpus littéraire, s'étendant de l'Antiquité romaine au réalisme magique américain et caraïbe, du romantisme britannique à la philosophie de Jacques Derrida. La deuxième moitié de ce travail explore la prose de Fred D'Aguiar à travers le thème de l'orphelinat, car tous les protagonistes de ses romans sont des orphelins – et, qui plus est, parce-que le roman est aussi, par définition, le genre qui nie toute filiation. Divisée en deux chapitres, cette deuxième partie de l'étude commence par une problématisation des liens qui opèrent entre textualité et orphelinat ainsi qu'entre orphelinat et esclavage, mais aussi entre esclavage et illettrisme, afin d'étudier la représentation de l'esclavage dans les romans de Fred D'Aguiar. Cette deuxième moitié progresse ensuite vers une réflexion sur les qualités surnaturelles, voire orphiques des orphelins de la prose d'aguiarienne, ainsi que sur leur relation, tout autant orphique, à l'environnement. En conséquence, le présent travail de recherche se clôt sur deux questions : celle de la tradition orphique qui sous-tend l'histoire de la littérature, de l'antiquité jusqu'à présent, et celle de la dimension écocritique de la littérature contemporaine, que l'on proposera de défendre pour certains cas, en tant qu'environnementalisme vatique
The present dissertation proposes a study of Fred D'Aguiar's complete verse and prose works, through the triple lens of myth, metaphor and memory, and from within a broad, inclusive, and cross-cultural understanding of Caribbean literature. Beginning with an exacerbation of metaphor's hypomnesic relationship to mythology and Western metaphysics, the argument expands to address issues such as that of the relationship between word and world, and elaborates a cross-cultural, and geographically-based understanding of metaphor as tropicality. Tropicality in turn gives the argument its thrust, as it allows, in the first half of the dissertation, for a singular reading of Fred D'Aguiar's entire verse corpus, which is also shown, in the process, to intersect with a vast body of literature, ranging from Roman antiquity to American-Caribbean magic(al) realism and from British romanticism to the philosophy of Jacques Derrida. The second half of this research work explores D'Aguiar's novels in terms of orphanhood, as all the protagonists of his six novels – itself a genre which, presenting itself as newness, denies filiation – are orphans. Divided in two chapters, the second half of this dissertation begins with a problematization of the links that relate textuality to orphanhood and orphanhood to slavery, but also slavery to literacy, in order to study Fred D'Aguiar's novelistic accounts of slavery. It then proposes a reflection on the supernatural, Orphic qualities of D'Aguiar's orphan characters, and of their relation to the environment, which leads, in turn, to reflections on the Orphic traditions pervading literary history, and opens up onto the ecocritical dimensions of contemporary literature, through the tentative coinage of the notion of vatic environmentalism

Den allvarsamma leken (1912) by Hjalmar Söderberg has been regarded as one of the greatest love novels of Swedish literature. The story about Arvid Stjärnblom and Lydia Stille and their extramarital love is marked by timeless universality.

In this essay, I will examine this notion of love as a prediscursive value, by means pro¬vided by foremost poststructuralist theory. With Derrida’s conception of deconstruction, the analysis will reveal the constructedness of the true love in Söderbergs novel. Examinating typi¬cal logocentric binarisms the essay will show that the notion of true love is constituting a term in an oppositional relation with, in this specific case, the marriage sanctioned by society. This binarism is itself founded with the same principles as the by Derrida much disputed opposi¬tional pair of the spoken and written word.

Further, with true love understood as a discursive construction, the inquiry will show that this construction presuppose the notion of the public and private spheres of bourgeois society, where the public is reserved for the male and the private for the female. This will lead to a discussion of the constructedness status of sex and gender, which will show that the love ex¬pressed in the relationship of Arvid and Lydia is to be understood as a considerable part of heterosexual matrix, that is, the regulative framework which, according to Judith Butler, consti¬tute the rules for how intelligible sex and gender is to be produced.

This paper aims to investigate the possible connection between specters and silence in Graham Swift’s Tomorrow (2007) and Mothering Sunday (2016). In both novels, the protagonists predominantly speak in interior monologues, recounting the memories and secrets that haunt them, in what could be construed as an attempt to exorcise the ghosts of their past. The paper’s understanding of specters is based on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993), and the idea that specters - as figures that exist in states of in-between - disrupt not only temporality, but what we know to be true. Much like specters, the protagonists vacillate between states, neither speaking nor remaining silent, as they address absent or imagined listeners. This undecidability leaves one to wonder if their ghosts are - or ever can be - truly exorcised.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-17T15:07:12Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 AntonioLVBJ_DISSERT.pdf: 779211 bytes, checksum: 54fefe5a04bf7b4b0a7147da442785be (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-05-14
Coordena??o de Aperfei?oamento de Pessoal de N?vel Superior
Brazilian humorist Mill?r Fernandes has a widespread work, from literature to visual arts and journalism. Yet there is the indelible mark of humor, wherever it is. In this dissertation, I propose a reading of his work by deploying French philosopher Jacques Derrida, emphasizing how the construction of the other happens. I aim at Mill?r Definitivo: A B?blia do Caos, but other works will be contemplated when necessary. In order to carry out the analysis, I will offer a general exposition of Millorian work (especially Mill?r Definitivo:A B?blia do Caos) and a general sketch of Derridian philosophy, centered on his discussion on Western philosophy, literature and alterity. At the analysis itself, I will set the methodological axis on the quasi-concept of invention. The analysis shall stress the hypothesis of humor as the experience of alterity and impossible, showing off the humorist as the totally other. In the Millorian text, that experience is characterized by conflictivity, without possibility of resolution
O humorista brasileiro Mill?r Fernandes teve uma produ??o distribu?da em v?rios campos, desde a literatura at? as artes visuais e o jornalismo. Em qualquer delas, no entanto, havia a marca indel?vel do humor. Nesta disserta??o, proponho uma leitura de sua obra a partir de Jacques Derrida, enfatizando como se d? a constru??o do outro. O foco recair? sobre Mill?r Definitivo:A B?blia do Caos, mas outros textos tamb?m ser?o contemplados. Para empreender a an?lise, farei uma exposi??o geral da obra milloriana (especialmente Mill?r Definitivo:A B?blia do Caos) e esbo?arei, em linhas gerais, a filosofia derridiana, centrando-me em sua discuss?o sobre a filosofia ocidental, a literatura e a alteridade. No momento da an?lise propriamente dita, situarei o eixo metodol?gico no quase-conceito de inven??o. A an?lise dever? fazer emergir a hip?tese do humor enquanto experi?ncia da alteridade e do imposs?vel, situando o humorista enquanto totalmente outro. No texto milloriano, essa experi?ncia ? marcada pelo conflito, sem possibilidade de resolu??o

This paper examines certain theoretical underpinnings of the historical processes by which Shakespeare's history plays became the de facto collective memory of the events they depict, even when those events are misrepresented. The scholarly conversation about this misrepresentation has heretofore centered on Shakespeare's potential political motivations. I argue that this focus on a political, authorial intent has largely ignored the impact these historical distortions have had over the subsequent 400 years. I propose that, due to Shakespeare's unique place in the historical timeline of the development of collective memory, Shakespeare's historical misrepresentation in the history plays is a byproduct of the emerging ability to access historical sources while also shaping the nascent collective memory. Shakespeare became an archon, in the Derridian sense, of English history. As such he exercised the archon's hermeneutic right to interpret English history. Tracing the methods by which the public experienced Shakespeare's plays, this project shows that in the 20th century film became the dominant medium by which audiences experienced Shakespeare for the first time. Using Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight as the principle example, I show that the hermeneutic right shifted away from Shakespeare and was instead taken on by directors reinterpreting Shakespeare's version of history. Welles' knowing manipulation of the archontic function empowers his film, affecting subsequent interpretation and placing it squarely in the Shakespearean film canon.

Dag Wellander: Meaning – memory: oblivion. A reading of Birgitta Trotzig’s The mud kings daughter. Master of Arts paper. Written in Swedish. 115 pp. Department of Literature and History of Ideas, Stockholm University, SE – 106 91 Stockholm

The purpose of the paper is to treat one question, including the consequences of it’s answer, the question if The mud kings daughter is a text that has meaning. The question is in a first series of steps being approached by the way of scrutinizing the meaning found in the text in accordance with the methodology applied by those four dissertations that are available on the subject, i.e. on The mud kings daughter. These examinations do not find that the alleged forms of meaning stated by the dissertations is being produced by the text. On the contrary striking similarities is being found between these alleged forms of meaning on the one hand, and on the other the unfounded, disambiguated meaning that, according to Shoshana Felman, Freudian and anti-Freudian critics alike, have said is to be found in Henry James’ short novel The Turn of the Screw. In a following series of steps – some of which are being taken on Jacques Derrida’s advice – the rhetorical functioning of the textual ambiguity is observed and often found to be enchanting, whereupon the rhetorical necessity of the textual ambiguity is found to be affliction.

This split between the rhetorical functioning of the textual ambiguity as rather enchanting, and the rhetorical necessity of the textual ambiguity being affliction, is then treated as something that hardly could be understood, and, accordingly, as something that might be understood as something that could not be understood. The idea is being put in that this split could be thought of as an inversion of oblivion into a living memory of a forgotten reading impression, an idea that is being inspired by the inversion of oblivion into a living memory in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

Keywords: Birgitta Trotzig, Shoshana Felman, Jacques Derrida, Marcel Proust, meaning, ambiguity, memory, oblivion.

George MacDonald's novel Lilith relates the story of a young man inheriting his deceased father's estate and coming in contact with its remarkable library and mysterious librarian. The protagonist's subsequent adventures in a fantastical world prepare the young Mr. Vane to assume authority over his inherited archive and become an archon. Jacques Derrida's exposition of the responsibilities of the archon including archival authority, domiciliation, and consignation illuminate the mentoring role of the elusive librarian Mr. Raven in Vane's adventures. By using Derrida's deconstruction of archives to unpack the intricacies of knowledge transfer in MacDonald's novel, the lasting impact of the archon on the archive and the individuals in Lilith, as well as the importance of the archon in the transfer of knowledge between individuals facilitated through relationships, becomes apparent. The archon, acting as a gatherer, organizer, and shaper of texts, uses the materials within the archive to exercise power and to bequeath power upon other individuals, as seen in the character Mr. Raven's actions. Lilith illustrates the necessity of the archon as he shapes the archive's contents and governs the interactions between book and reader, ultimately allowing the archive to become a place where knowledge is heritable.

In this thesis, I argue that identity construction is a postal effect: it results from a transmission of some sort, received or sent. I examine three instances of postal effect. In a chapter on Jacques Derrida's "Envois," a collection of fragments presented as if transcribed from a one-way love letter correspondence, I explore the performative force of relayed address. Working from Derrida's account of the literary performative, I point out that the "Envois" letters are addressed to "you" in the singular, which implies an address reserved for a particular subject, but that the postal relay of the collection enacts a repetition of their address. For the reader of the book, this repetition has evocative force which I compare with the force of transference in the context of the psychoanalytic situation. In a second chapter on the "Envois" letters, I examine their haunting effect. The "Envois" letters have an I/we signature that intimates pluralities in the writing subject. I argue that this signature is the effect of a postal relay of another order: a phantom, which Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok define as a gap in the psychic topography of the subject caused by a secret unwittingly received along with a legacy. To a certain extent, the "Envois" letters are written by Plato's "in-voices." In a chapter on J. M. Coetzee's epistolary novel Age of Iron, I explore the gift effects of a posthumous letter. Age of Iron is an epistolary novel consisting exclusively of a single letter written by a dying South African woman, Mrs. Curren, to her daughter, a political objector who has emigrated to the United States. Writing her letter in the knowledge that her death is imminent, Mrs. Curren anticipates her daughter's mourning. Working with J. L. Austin's doctrine of illocutionary forces and Derrida's analysis of the gift event, I postulate two effects of Mrs. Curren's letter, one that annuls the gift in a circular return and another that surpasses this circuit with textual diss

Julio Cortázar è autore che in Italia tutti leggono e pochissimi davvero conoscono. Il presente lavoro di ricerca nasce dal desiderio di redigere uno studio esaustivo sull’autore argentino. Uno degli elementi di novità è senz’altro la volontà di non soffermarsi unicamente sull’opera in prosa, quei racconti e romanzi per i quali lo scrittore è riconosciuto a livello mondiale, procedendo piuttosto con uno scavo ulteriore ed anteriore che tenga conto anche (e soprattutto) della poco conosciuta opera in versi e dei primi scritti critici.

Julio Cortázar è autore che in Italia tutti leggono e pochissimi davvero conoscono. Il presente lavoro di ricerca nasce dal desiderio di redigere uno studio esaustivo sull’autore argentino. Uno degli elementi di novità è senz’altro la volontà di non soffermarsi unicamente sull’opera in prosa, quei racconti e romanzi per i quali lo scrittore è riconosciuto a livello mondiale, procedendo piuttosto con uno scavo ulteriore ed anteriore che tenga conto anche (e soprattutto) della poco conosciuta opera in versi e dei primi scritti critici.

This paper utilizes poststructuralist theory to investigate the polysemic nature of the eponymous character Beloved in Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved. The ghostly, anachronistic presence of Beloved renders the text open to multiple interpretations and this essay sets out to explore the ways in which meaning is created and communicated. From a poststructuralist perspective, considering that the meaning is in a state of flux, a text weaves its system of meaning around an assumed center in order to provide so-called stability. Peripheral meanings are repressed by the center to secure the meaning system. However, the periphery, which has a constructive function in the organization of the text, also has the deconstructive potential. Hence, the deconstructive dynamics are already inherent in the text. In Beloved, Toni Morrison addresses, among other things, the act of speaking the unspeakable and the process of constructing a new subjectivity out of the ghost of the past. Her text deconstructs the dominant narratives that have marginalized the black motherhood experience, explores the horrors of slavery through horror elements, and eventually exposes the inadequacy of language to depict such horrors. While the textual periphery is enabled to speak louder than the center, the textual subconscious flows freely. The reader is forced to participate actively in meaning-making in order to make sense of the fragmented narrative imbued with deliberate ambiguity. Beloved, as the abject other, defies the phallogocentric symbolic order. A counter-discourse emerges from the maternal, semiotic chora and empowers the otherized heroine Sethe to construct her subjectivity. Delving into the interrelationship between traumatic memory and the act of creating one’s own narrative, the text finds reparative elements in ancestral connection and thereby blends the psychological with the historical and the micro-level with the macro-level of meaning. This paper employs deconstructive key concepts from Jacques Derrida, psychoanalytic key concepts from Julia Kristeva, and seeks to unravel the dynamics in Morrison’s text that enable Beloved to be read polysemically.

This work attempts an answer to two questions. Firstly, is it possible to experience meaning when everything is transient? And secondly, in what way is objectivity possible when it comes to such phenomena as existential meaning? The questions originate from our insideperspective, and it is from what we have experienced ourselves that we try to make intelligible existential meaning. We are to a great extent part of the context in which we live. Our ability to contemplate our situation and our own contemplation is taking place in interplay with others. To make room for the small things meaningful in life, the expression existential meaning is used. In this expression both the meaningless and the meaningful are included, since both are needed for our understanding of meaning. Without the Other and that which is different, the individual person’s formation of existential meaning becomes just more of the same, it becomes an enclosure in the present. The encounter with the Other makes room for that which is different to break through.

Objectivity is possible when it comes to existential meaning, if one views objectivity as a process between people. It is performed in conversation. Those who converse, refer to their bodily experiences of the Time that remains and help each other, using language as the tool, to formulate their experiences. They compare each others’ manifestations of existential meaning,

and with the help of language they go further in the formation of what is meaningless and meaningful. Their conversations imply a normative presupposition that they can justify the claims that they make. Because it is actually not possible to make intelligible existential meaning in words other than by doing it as a mix of descriptions of that which is manifesting itself and linguistic rewritings in the form of stories. This expression of objectivity has a normative aspect, namely in relation to the possibility that we can be wrong. Therefore, we need each other in the act of judging, and together we are guided by the fact that it later on can emerge things that show that our judgment has not been fully correct.

Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2006.
Title from title screen. Audrey Goodman, committee chair; Pearl Mchaney, Christopher Kocela, committee members. Electronic text (99 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Apr. 25, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p. 95-99).

The inability of language to convey complete meaning and truth is a central point of address for much post-structuralist literary theory and criticism. When these theories are applied to a first-person narrative structure, whether it is a work of fiction or non-fiction, certain specific incongruities arise. When a narrative seeks to recall certain events, a presupposed reexamination takes place as the narrative unfolds text comes into being. If a narractice is contructed in this way then the intent of the text then is to convey comprehensive meanings or truths of those cataloged experiences. According Deconstructive Theory, it is language's inherent nature to resist ultimate meaning. This focus on the articulation of truth is futile because meaning, like language, is always already in a state of fragmentation. This project explores five individual works from different literary traditions-ranging from the canonical to the relatively obscure. The works exhibit various approaches to articulation; including varying degrees of self-definition, personal fiction, and narrative movement toward inarticulation.

In reading the literary criticism on Janet Frame's work it soon turns out that Frame was deconstructive before the concept was even invented. Thus, deconstruction is used in this essay to close-read a passage in the title story of her collection of short stories, The Lagoon (1951). The main hierarchical dichotomy of the passage is found to be the one between "the sea" and "the lagoon," in which the sea is proven to hold supremacy. "The sea" is read as an image of the great sea of English literary/cultural reference whereas "the lagoon" is read as an image of the vulnerably interdependent, peripheral pool of it, in the form of New Zealand literary/cultural reference. Through this symbolic and post-colonial reading the hierarchical dichotomy between "the sea" and "the lagoon" is deconstrued and reversed. In the conclusion, a post-colonial trace of Maori influence displaces the oppositional relation between "the sea" and "the lagoon."

In the first chapter of Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Gilbert Markham invites his reader to join him as he attempts to recall the past. Because Gilbert uses the journal of another to supplement his own memories, the novel's frame narrative structure becomes saturated with complex memory-based issues and problems. Thus, the complicated frame narrative provides fertile ground for exploring the novel through memory. In studying the frame narrative, scholars have typically devoted their criticism to Gilbert and how he shapes the frame. Few scholars afford the other primary narrator of the novel, Helen, any power in shaping that frame. However, both Gilbert's and Helen's narratives exist separately yet function codependently. Using recent studies in memory as well as Derridean and Foucaultian archive theory as a lens, I will explore how Tenant presents an anarchic narrative structure that simultaneously gives its own semblance of power and order without assigning complete narrative power to one person or to one gender.

This study explores formal and thematic representations of ruins in twentieth century literary texts, including James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, and Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck.” Analyzing these texts and concepts of ruins in the theoretical work of Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin, and Julia Kristeva, I argue that ruins underscore the arbitrariness—and, thus, the fragility—of symbolic systems of signification. Ruins, by virtue of their fragmentation, invite nostalgic projections of totality only to betray totality as an illusion. Thus, the imagination of wholeness that the ruin incites allows—only to disallow—meaning. Modernity and language also initiate an allegorical process by which representation is made possible and impossible. Proclaiming an alliance (based on a contrast) between the past and the present, signifiers and signifieds, modernity and language likewise betray that representation, by invoking a radical alterity, is ruined from inception.

Within the field of Disability Studies, research on cognitive and developmental disabilities is relatively rare in comparison to other types of disabilities. Using Clifford Geertz's anthropological approach, "thick description," autism can be better understood by placing both fiction and non-fiction accounts of the disorder into a larger theoretical context. Applying concepts from existing works in Disability Studies to the major writings of Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, and Donna Haraway also proves to be mutually enlightening. This ethnographic approach within the context of analysis of literary texts provides a model by which representations of individuals who are cognitively or developmentally disabled can be included in the academy.

This thesis identifies and explores a ‘return to Freud’ in the work of Jacques Derrida. Resemblances between Derrida’s method of deconstruction and the therapeutic procedure of psychoanalysis have long been a source of debate among critics. Is deconstruction little more than a psychoanalytic reading of the history of philosophy, or is Freud a Derridean avant la lettre? Revealing this dilemma to be a false one, this thesis challenges major interpreters of Derrida such as Jonathan Culler and Gayatari Chakravorty Spivak. By developing Derrida’s well-known yet little understood concept of différance, it argues that this dilemma stems from an inadequate understanding of Derrida’s treatment of time. The structure of temporality implied by différance entails that the meaning of the past is continually reconstituted in its relationship to an ever-evolving present. Far from dissolving the importance of Freud’s contribution, this structure allows Derrida to circumvent nebulous notions of ‘influence’ and ‘indebtedness’ while still engaging psychoanalysis as a key theoretical resource in his own project of deconstruction. A productive engagement with psychoanalytic theory is shown to inform every major stage of the philosopher’s career, from his early phenomenological work to his later reflections on the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Derrida repeatedly turns to Freud as a crucial interlocutor in interrogating a number of philosophical problems encountered in his own work. These problems include the nature of time, space, and memory; the role of the fictive in scientific discourse; the question of the archive; the interdependence of the psyche and technology; and the relationship between politics and the unconscious. At a theoretical level, this thesis provides a detailed account of Derrida’s notion of spacing, arguing that the unconditional belatedness entailed by différance calls us to a difficult, dual responsibility: both towards the legator of an inheritance (that is, towards the textual legacy Freud has bequeathed to us) and towards the unforeseeable future contexts in which this inheritance will require transformation. The discourse of deconstruction, it concludes, enacts a careful negotiation of these two demands.