Dissertations / Theses: 'Metaphysics in literature'

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Holmes, Michael M. (Michael Morgan). "Unnatural desires : cultural dissidence in metaphysical literature." Thesis, McGill University, 1996. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=40139.

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Throughout much of the twentieth century, early modern metaphysical literature has been interpreted as an upholder of traditional morals and cosmic unity. By re-examining the early critical reception of these works in connection with current theories of cultural reproduction, we can develop a new understanding of how metaphysicality undermines, in particular, an ideology of "natural" desire and identity. Focussing on desire, metaphysical authors produce a dissident knowledge of the cultural contingencies of normative thought, identity, and behaviour. Taking a philosophical approach to the subject, Edward Herbert reveals the impact of personal desires on the development of mental concepts. Christopher Marlowe, meanwhile, demonstrates the way definitions of natural gender identity inhibit sexual expression between men. Elaborating on women's same-sex desire, John Donne and Andrew Marvell contest heteronormative narratives of growth, while Aemilia Lanyer offers a vision of love between women as a homoerotic state of grace and alternative to men's violence. In his thoughts on martyrdom and political allegiance, Donne denaturalizes absolute authority and carves a space for liberty of conscience, an endeavour that corresponds to the desire for personal freedom that each of the other writers also expresses.

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Powers, Patrick D. "Belief in the Unbelievable: Yakov Druskin and Chinari Metaphysics." Oberlin College Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 2021. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin1619455383434057.

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Plunges, Craig. "Vanishing Points: Perspectival Metaphysics in the English Renaissance." Thesis, Harvard University, 2016. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:26718764.

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Taking as its starting point the ut pictura poesis tradition of artistic theory, this dissertation examines how the poets and dramatists of the English Renaissance transformed mimetic strategies originally developed in the fields of art and architecture into unprecedented literary topoi and figures in their own right. The project focuses primarily on the practice of linear perspective, which simulates visual experience by subordinating abstract space to the artificial logic of the “vanishing point.” It demonstrates how English writers developed the initial idea of linear perspective as an artificially arranged, delimited point of view into a body of descriptive practices that constitute what I term “perspectival metaphysics.” Experiments in perspectival metaphysics in the works of Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Andrew Marvell reveal the assumptions that underlie normative vision, and vision’s relationship to subjective experience and its interpretation. Vanishing Points concludes that the rhetorical strategies of spatial description developed by early modern English writers are an integral part of the broader epistemological shift from renaissance humanism to the increasingly complex modes of scientific and philosophical rationalism that characterized the European seventeenth century.
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Nickels, Zachary. "The Art of Loneliness." Kent State University Honors College / OhioLINK, 2005. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ksuhonors1462549085.

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Mounsey, Chris. "William Blake's 'The Four Zoas' : a reassessment of its implied metaphysics." Thesis, University of Warwick, 1992. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/110358/.

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This thesis considers the attempts of various critics to read the work of William Blake as either part of the traditional canon or as excluded from it, because of suppositions made about Blake’s view of metaphysics. By means of careful analysis of these opposing views of Blake's poetry, this work finds that neither of these statements can be said to be entirely true because each group of critics, in reading Blake’s work, impose their own metaphysics of reading upon it. Therefore, it is shown that rather than discovering the metaphysics inherent in Blake's idiosyncratic writing, most readers of Blake have done no more than find their own metaphysical position reflected back at them by Blake's Contrary. In order to give some idea of the formulation of the Contrary, Blake’s poem Vala, with its additions which created The Four Zoas, is considered in detail. This section relies heavily upon the layering of new writing upon older work which remains legible beneath, and uses this systematic pattern of changes to explore Blake’s changing relationship with Platonic metaphysics. The taking up and then dropping of Platonism by Blake is seen alongside the development of his own metaphysical system of the Contrary, and this non-systematic system is in turn documented in a brief final section which considers the ambiguities on the poem Milton. The complexity and subtlety of the Contrary will thus be displayed as both fitting into the canonical framework of traditional metaphysics, in that it posits a type of return in the fullness of meaning. But it will also be shown to be outside the aegis of traditional metaphysics, in that the return functions in a temporality that is eternally present, rather than one which looks forwards and backwards. Thus Contrary metaphysics will be seen to be closed, and furnishing fullness of meaning, but also changeable, thus not fixing meaning.

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Natarajan, Uttara Valli. "Hazlitt and the reach of sense : criticism, morals and the metaphysics of power." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1995. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.308818.

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Hudson, Brenda Kay. "Vision of creation| A Jungian view of Hildegard's "On the Origin of Life" vision." Thesis, Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2015. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3716788.

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Hildegard von Bingen, a visionary abbess living in the tumultuous 12th century, recorded and interpreted three very powerful visions pertaining to Christianity. This dissertation is limited to the first image of Hildegard’s last vision called De Operatione Dei, the Works of God, a cosmological vision about creation. Hildegard named this image On the Origin of Life.

The thesis of this dissertation suggests the four main characters in the first image of Hildegard’s cosmological vision—the two-headed and four-winged red figure named Caritas standing on the serpent-wrapped monster—correspond to the four stages of Jung’s individuation—encounter with the shadow (serpent), encounter with the soulimage (monster as Adam), encounter with the god-image (Caritas), emergence of the Self (godhead). Each of these characters and stages represent a level in what has been called by perennial philosophy the Great Chain of Being. Hildegard’s vision represents the unfolding of Spirit into matter. Jung’s individuation process describes the soul’s journey back towards Spirit.

This work starts by introducing the vision and Hildegard’s interpretation. Next it moves to what other authors have written. Since the vision is about creation the interpretation starts with the literalists’ view of Genesis and moves to the mystical interpretations of Genesis. Other creation stories including a serpent and a goddess amplify the interpretation. Then, using Jungian and alchemical symbols the images of this iv vision are further elaborated. The research follows the logic of the axiom of Maria, from the uroboros, to the hermaphrodite, to the trinity and ending with the marriage quaternio—two pairs of hermaphrodites. Byington’s symbolic elaboration process is used to interpret the dramatic action of the vision thereby bringing the vision back to life as Hildegard might have experienced it. Finally, the parallel between Hildegard’s vision and Jung’s individuation process is explained in detail. The work ends with Hildegard’s interpretation of why god created the world showing how it aligns with the goal of individuation, and how both are critical for the life of the soul in the 21^st century.

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Ruiz-López, Agnes. "Hermetic Text and Subtext: Paranormal Phenomena in the Works of Alejandro Tapia y Rivera and Benito Pérez Galdós." FIU Digital Commons, 2013. http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/1037.

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This research seeks to establish a connection between the Hermetic tradition and the paranormal phenomena found in the works of Alejandro Tapia y Rivera --- “Un alma en pena” (1862), Póstumo el transmigrado (1872) and Póstumo el envirginado (1882) --- and Benito Pérez Galdós´s La sombra (1870) and “Celín” (1871). By establishing a Hegelian influence in their works, we uncover the possible origin of these paranormal events. German Idealism, so widespread during the first half of the 19th century, seems to have given both authors access to new currents of thought, allowing them to explore the union of art with the metaphysical. Thought is given precedence over sensation and Idealism prevails over Empiricism. Nature is now seen to be spiritual, as well as spatial, and among the major exponents of this movement is Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), whose philosophy states that human knowledge is based on the “Idea,” a concept in which nature and spirit fuse. Hegel holds the traditional hermetic conception of philosophia perennis that supposes a universal truth common to every culture, religious tradition, and belief upheld by humankind. By examining the Hegelian influence in the works of Alejandro Tapia y Rivera and Benito Pérez Galdós, and relating major passages of their works to the precepts contained in the Corpus Hermeticum, the Emerald Tablet, and the Kybalion (1908), we uncover a subtle, sometimes explicit, presence of this esoteric doctrine, which allows the authors to explore the metaphysical side of life.

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Menuez, Paolo Xavier Machado. "The Downward Spiral| Postmodern Consciousness as Buddhist Metaphysics in the Dark Souls Video Game Series." Thesis, Portland State University, 2018. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10637267.

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This paper is about locating the meaning of a series of games known as the Dark Souls series in relation to contemporary social conditions in Japan. I argue that the game should be thought of as an emblem of the current cultural zeitgeist, in a similar way one might identify something like Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums as an emblem of the counter cultural 60s. I argue that the Dark Souls series expresses in allegorical form an anxiety about living in a time where the meaning of our everyday actions and even society itself has become significantly destabilized. It does this through a fractured approach to story-telling, that is interspersed with Buddhist metaphysics and wrapped up in macabre, gothic aesthetic depicting the last gasping breath of a once great kingdom. This expression of contemporary social anxiety is connected to the discourse of postmodernity in Japan. Through looking at these games as a feedback loop between text, environment and ludic system, I connect the main conceptual motifs that structure the games as a whole with Osawa Masachi’s concept of the post-fictional era and Hiroki Azuma’s definition of the otaku.

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Tompsett, Daniel Charles. "The reduction of metaphysics and the play of violence in the poetry of Wallace Stevens." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2010. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/388.

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The thesis demonstrates how Wallace Stevens' poetry utilises pre-Socratic philosophy in overcoming post-Kantian dislocation from the 'thing-in-itself'. I initially consider Stevens’ poetry in terms of Hans-Georg Gadamer's ontological conception of the 'play' of art, an interactive existence overlooked by Kant. Through the ‘play’ of Stevens’ poems the reading audience are implicated in their reduction to being. The origin of this conception leads Gadamer back to Parmenides who Stevens had read. I argue that Stevens’ poetry ‘plays’ its audience into an ontological ground in an effort to show that his ‘reduction of metaphysics’ is not dry philosophical imposition, but is enacted by our encounter with the poems themselves. Through an analysis of how the language and form of Stevens’ poems attempt to reduce mind and world to concepts that parallel Parmenides’ poetic sense of being, and Heraclitus’ notion of becoming, the thesis uncovers the ground in which Stevens attempts a reconnection with the ‘thing-in-itself’. It is through the experience of reconnecting to an ontological centre, which his poetry presents as the human project, that Stevens’ poetry also presents itself as a means of replacing religion.From here we turn to Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida for an exposition of how such a reduction reduces the ‘Other’ to ‘otherness’ and their worry that this reduction legitimates violence within the thought of Martin Heidegger and Parmenides. From this I make a case for how such reductions are connected to what I refer to as 'the play of violence' in Stevens' poetry, and to refer this violence back to the mythology Stevens' poetry shares with certain pre-Socratics and with Greek tragedy. This shows how such mythic rhythms are apparent within the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Heidegger and Gadamer, and how these rhythms release a poetic understanding of the violence of a ‘reduction of metaphysics’.

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Wilson, Douglas 1965. "The ideology of despair : William Faulkner and the metaphysics of absence." Thesis, The University of Sydney, 1997. https://hdl.handle.net/2123/27635.

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Wilson, Mary E. "Gothic cathedral as theology and literature." [Tampa, Fla] : University of South Florida, 2009. http://purl.fcla.edu/usf/dc/et/SFE0002826.

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Vericat, Fabio L. "From physics to metaphysics : philosophy and style in the critical writings of T.S. Eliot (1913-1935)." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2002. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/7445/.

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This thesis considers Eliot's critical writing from the late 1910s till the mid-1930s, in the light of his PhD thesis - Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley - and a range of unpublished material: T S. Eliot's Philosophical Essays and Notes (1913- 4) in the Hayward Bequest (King's College, Cambridge University); T. S. Eliot's Family Papers in the T. S. Eliot Collection at the Houghton Library (Harvard University); and items from the Harvard University Archives at the Pusey Library. 'Me thesis offers a comprehensive view of Eliot's critical development throughout this important period. It starts by considering The Sacred Wood's ambivalence towards the metaphysical philosophy of F. H. Bradley and Eliot's apparent adoption of a scientific method, under the influence of Bertrand Russell. It will be argued that Eliot uses rhetorical strategies which simultaneously subvert the method he is propounding, and which set the tone for an assessment of his criticism throughout the 1920s. His indecision, in this period, about the label 'Metaphysical' for some poets of the seventeenth century, reveals the persistence of the philosophical thought he apparently rejects in 1916, when he chooses not to pursue a career in philosophy in Harvard. This rhetorical tactic achieves its fulfilment in Dante (1929), where Eliot finds a model in the medieval allegorical method and 'philosophical' poetry. Allegory is also examined in connection with the evaluation of Eliot's critical writings themselves to determine, for instance, the figurative dimension of his early scientific vocabulary and uncover metaphysical residues he had explicitly disowned but would later embrace. Finally, it is suggested that, the hermeneutics of allegory are historical and it is used here to test the relationship between Eliot's early and later critical writings, that is the early physics and the later metaphysics.

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White, Barbara A., and mikewood@deakin edu au. "'Beyond God the father' : The metaphysical in a physical world." Deakin University. School of Literary and Communication Studies, 2002. http://tux.lib.deakin.edu.au./adt-VDU/public/adt-VDU20050825.154051.

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Bandara, Dhanuka Mr. "T.S. Eliot and the Universality of Metaphysics; a Buddhist-Hegelian critique of post-structuralist and post-colonial theory through a reading of Eliot’s poetry and criticism." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1533313801703122.

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Lester, Mark Michael. "Readings of Leibniz : metaphysics in the writings of S.I. Witkiewicz, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1999. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9516.

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Kaplan, Sara Esther. "Magazine." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2004. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1086450926.

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Nicol, Timothy Keith. "Shaping Spirits, or, Imagination and "Abstruse Research": the perils of metaphysics and Coleridge's loss of form in the years of his philosophical accomplishment." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/12392.

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Includes bibliographical references (leaves 78-81).
The mystical nature of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poems, 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', 'Christabel' and 'Kubla Khan' has intrigued readers for over two centuries. Of these full poems only the "Rime" is complete and yet they all still enjoy the scrutiny of a wide audience. This thesis examines the circumstances surrounding Coleridge's inability to continue writing such poems of imaginative force.

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Smeriglio, Kristina. "Hallowed Be Thy Fall." NSUWorks, 2015. http://nsuworks.nova.edu/writing_etd/35.

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All Priella wanted was to find love. She roamed the fields of the Garden of Earthly Delights, day by day, in the hopes of finally attaining it. But, it wasn't that simple. In the midst of an existential crisis, unable to understand her difficulty in relating to others and achieving happiness, Priella meets the Archangel Michael who offers her a chance at salvation. Venturing into the unknown, Priella is forced to face the distorted ways of thinking that kept her hostage.

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Thompson, Alison. "The Higher Learning." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1452180306.

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Pei, Kong-ngai. "Fictional characters and their names a defense of the fact theory /." Click to view the E-thesis via HKUTO, 2007. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/b4020389x.

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Pei, Kong-ngai, and 貝剛毅. "Fictional characters and their names: a defense of the fact theory." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2007. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B4020389X.

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Getz, Evan Jay Donnelly Phillip J. "Analogy, causation, and beauty in the works of Lucy Hutchinson." Waco, Tex. : Baylor University, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/2104/5231.

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Neubauer, Deana. "The biosemiotic imagination in the Victorian frames of mind : Newman, Eliot and Welby." Thesis, London Metropolitan University, 2016. http://repository.londonmet.ac.uk/1142/.

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This thesis traces the development of thought in the philosophical and other writings of three nineteenth-century thinkers, whose work exemplifies that century’s attempts to think beyond the divisions of culture from nature and to reconcile empirical science with metaphysical truth. Drawing on nineteenth-century debates on the origin of language and evolutionary theory, the thesis argues that the ideas of John Henry Newman, George Eliot and Lady Victoria Welby were cultural precursors to the biosemiotic thought of the second half of the twentieth century and beyond, specifically in the way in which these three thinkers sought to find a ‘common grammar’ between natural and human practices. While only Lady Welby communicated with the scientist, logician and father of modern semiotics, Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914), all three contributed to the cultural sensibility that informed subsequent work in biology/ethology (Jakob von Uexküll (1864-1944), zoosemiotics (Thomas A. Sebeok (1920-2001), and the development of biosemiotics (Thomas A. Sebeok and Jesper Hoffmeyer (1943-present), Kalevi Kull (1952-present) among others. Each of these nineteenth-century writer’s intellectual development show strong parallels with the interdisciplinary endeavour of biosemiotics. The latter’s observation that biology is semiotics, its postulation of the continuity between the natural and cultural world through semiosis and evolutionary semiotic scaffolding its emphasis on the coordination of organic life processes on all levels, from simple cells to human beings, via semiotic interactions that depend on interpretation, communication and learning, and its consequent refusal of Cartesian divide, all find distinct resonances with these earlier thinkers. The thesis thus argues that Newman, Eliot and Welby all gave articulation to what the thesis identifies as the growth of a ‘biosemiotic imagination.’ It argues that Newman, Eliot and Lady Welby envisaged a unity, or a holistic understanding, of life based on a European developmental tradition of biology, philosophy and language which was familiar to Charles Darwin himself. This evolutionary ontology called forth a new epistemology grounded in a mode of unconscious creative inference (biosemiotic imagination) akin to Charles S. Peirce’s concept of abduction. Abduction is the logical operation which introduces a new idea and, as such, is the only source of adaptive and creative growth. For Peirce, it is closely tied to the growth of knowledge via the evolutionary action of sign relations. The thesis shows how these thinkers conceptualised their own version of what I suggest can be understood as this biosemiotic imagination and the implications this has for understanding creativity in nature and culture. For John Henry Newman, it was a common source of inspiration in religion and science. For George Eliot, it lay at the basis of any creative process, natural and cultural, between which it forged a link. Similarly to Eliot, Lady Victoria Welby saw abduction as a signifying process that subtends creativity both in nature and culture.

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Robjant, David. "The river as a guide to Iris Murdoch." Thesis, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.683256.

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Fajardo, Tiffany L. "The World in Singing Made: David Markson's "Wittgenstein's Mistress"." FIU Digital Commons, 2015. http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/1861.

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In line with Wittgenstein's axiom that "what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest," this thesis aims to demonstrate how the gulf between analytic and continental philosophy can best be bridged through the mediation of art. The present thesis brings attention to Markson's work, lauded in the tradition of Faulkner, Joyce, and Lowry, as exemplary of the shift from modernity to postmodernity, wherein the human heart is not only in conflict with itself, but with the language out of which it is necessarily constituted. Markson limns the paradoxical condition of the subject severed from intersubjectivity, and affected not only by the grief of bereavement, which can be defined in Heideggarian terms as anxiety for the ontic negation of a being (i.e., death), but by loss, which I assert is the ontological ground for how Dasein encounters the nothing in anxiety proper.

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Sanyal, Sudipto. "An Uncertain Poetics of the Intoxicated Narrative: Drugs, Detection, Denouement." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1367932599.

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Davidson, Joshua. ""And the Light Flood Over the Land": Reading Region in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead." Oberlin College Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin1337713763.

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Mfune, Damazio Laston. "My other - my self: post-Cartesian ontological possibilities in the fiction of J M Coetzee." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002289.

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The central argument of my study is that, among other matters, in his works, J.M. Coetzee could be said to demonstrate that the known Self is an embodied being and is not autonomous. With regard to the latter contention, Coetzee intimates that any two Subjects are implicated in each other’s subjectivities in a reciprocal process that involves what Derek Attridge has called “irruptions of otherness” (2005: xii) into the Subject’s subjectivity. These irruptions, which happen during the encounter, lead to a double loss of autonomy for each Subject and this phenomenon renders the relationship between Subjects non-dichotomus or non-binaric. In other words, the Subject does not produce the contents of his or her consciousness in a sui generis and ex nihilo fashion, and his or her ontological indebtedness to the Other constitutes his or her first loss of autonomy. As for those Others that do possess consciousness, the Subject is implicated in their consciousness and this constitutes the Subject’s second loss of autonomy. These losses counter the near solipsistic Nagelian neo-Cartesianism and paves the way for imagining both intra- and inter-species “intersubjectivity”. It is my view that this double loss of autonomy accounts for the sympathetic and empathetic imagination that we encounter in Coetzee’s fiction. Following Coetzee’s intimations of intersubjectivity through irruptions of otherness, what I see as my contribution to studies on this author’s work through this study is the link I have established between the physicalist strain within the philosophy of mind (whose central thesis is that consciousness is an embodied phenomenon) and a modified Kantian “metaphysics”, especially Immanuel Kant’s conception of concepts as comprising form and content. I have deployed this conception in demonstrating the Subject’s ontological indebtedness to external sources of the content part of consciousness. And, through the Husserlian concept of intentionality, and Kant’s (1929: 27) observation that we cannot have appearances without something that appears, I have linked the Subject to the sources of his or her content and thereby also demonstrated that the Subject is not eternally separated or alienated from those sources. Instead, the Subject is not simply contiguous but coterminous and co-extensive, albeit in a mediated way, with the external sources of the content part of his or her consciousness. Thus, while accepting the thesis of the Other’s radical otherness, I modify the thesis of the Other’s radical exteriority. Ultimately, then, ontologically speaking, the Coetzeean project could be described as one of embodying and grounding the supposedly autonomous, solipsistic and freefloating/disembodied Cartesian Subject. This he does by alerting this Subject, first and foremost, to its embodiedness and, further to that, pointing out its ontological indebtedness to its Others and its implication in the Others’s consciousnesses and so prevent it from continuing with its imperialistic and ecological barbarities. However, ethically speaking, beyond the reciprocal ethics that arises from mutual ontological indebtedness and implication, it is the selflessness that characterises a cruciform logic that comes across as the epitome of Coetzeean ethics.

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Keynes, Laura. "William Hazlitt : an aesthetics of embodiment." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2010. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.669977.

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Dittmer, Sienna Miquel Palmer. "Cross-Cultural Ecotheology in the Poetry of Li-Young Lee." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2011. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/3027.

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This thesis explores the cross-cultural ecotheology of contemporary American poet Li-Young Lee by looking at the intersection of the human, the natural, and the sacred in his poetry. Close readings of Lee's poetic encounters with roses, persimmons, trees, wind, and light through the lens of Christianity and Daoism illustrate the way Lee is able to merge the Eastern concepts of interconnection and mutual harmony with Western ideas of sacredness and divinity. This discussion places Lee in direct conversation with modern and contemporary ecopoets who use the creative energy of language to express our moral and ethical responsibility to the world around us. Lee's poetry explores an innately sacred and transcendent relationship with the natural world that suggests that our understanding of our human identity is intricately tied to our respect and reverence for our natural environment.

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Evans, David B. "Scepticism at sea : Herman Melville and philosophical doubt." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a842c507-0efc-4b73-9aaa-ccc36f54a7a5.

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This thesis explores Herman Melville’s relationship to sceptical philosophy. By reading Melville’s fictions of the 1840s and 1850s alongside the writings of Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, I seek to show that they manifest by turns expression, rebuttal, and mitigated acceptance of philosophical doubt. Melville was an attentive reader of philosophical texts, and he refers specifically to concepts such as Berkeleyan immaterialism and the Kantian “noumenon”. But Melville does not simply dramatise pre-existing theories; rather, in works such as Mardi, Moby-Dick, and Pierre he enacts sceptical and anti-sceptical ideas through his literary strategies, demonstrating their relevance in particular regions of human experience. In so doing he makes a substantive contribution to a philosophical discourse that has often been criticised – by commentators including Samuel Johnson and Jonathan Swift – for its tendency to abstraction. Melville’s interest in scepticism might be read as part of a wider cultural response to a period of unprecedented social and political change in antebellum America, and with this in mind I compare and contrast his work with that of Dickinson, Douglass, Emerson, and Thoreau. But in many respects Melville’s distinctive and original treatment of scepticism sets him apart from his contemporaries, and in order to fully make sense of it one must range more widely through the canons of philosophy and literature. His exploration of the ethical consequences of doubt in The Piazza Tales, for example, can be seen to anticipate with remarkable precision the theories of twentieth-century thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas and Stanley Cavell. I work chronologically though selected prose from the period 1849-1857, paying close attention to the textual effects and philosophical allusions in each work. In so doing I hope to offer fresh ways of looking at Melville’s handling of literary form and the wider shape of his career. I conclude with reflections on how Melville’s normative emphasis on the acknowledgement of epistemological limitation might inform the practice of literary criticism.

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Wheatley, Carmen. "Donne and Spanish literature." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1985. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.235777.

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Menezes, Rodrigo Inácio Ribeiro Sá. "Existência e escritura em Cioran." Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, 2016. https://tede2.pucsp.br/handle/handle/11705.

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Cioran (1911-1995) is a Romanian-French thinker who would not have the right to complain about being misunderstood or even ignored, inasmuch as he begged to turn marginality into a philosophical imperative and a lifestyle. Eleven years since his death, in Paris, and one hundred since his birth, in Transylvania, this one author, the perfect stranger in more than one sense, remains largely unknown by the Brazilian audience, scholarly or not, in such a way that his shady aura, so to speak, as well as countless legends and rumors prevail about his life, personality and thought. Having said that, and apart from his own will to marginality, Cioran is a thinker who just can t and will not remain as such for much longer ignored or spurned, be it by Academia as such or by particular intellectual milieus with varied ideological outlooks. All the more when it comes to reflect upon problems which happen to be just as prevailing as worrying, such as the rise of integralism and of fanaticism, be it religious or of any other kind, atheism, skepticism and nihilism in the XXth century, anguish, despair, the metaphysical need of mankind and the sense of ultimate transcendence, suffering, death, suicide, evil, finally, a wide range of questions which are all highly relevant from a philosophical standpoint and also that of human sciences. In the first part of this inquiry, we aim at showing that philosophical pessimism and apophatic dwell mix up in the existential metaphysics of Cioran, a religious philosophy of existence which, not being guided up by the faith in revealed truths and by the adhesion to external authorities, aims to think human existence and condition according to that which is most imperious and essential, in Cioran s view, when it comes to the metaphysical animal: wisdom rather than science, deliverance by disillusion rather than salvation by faith and knowledge, the need for the absolute to the detriment of the delusions of becoming, coping with the contingency inherent to existence, namely human existence, tragically gifted with reflexive consciousness, freedom, a destiny. Cioran s organically existential thought is inseparable from, as he puts it, from his own life experience, namely the insomnia to which he accredits the merit or the fault for his blessed, for his cursed lucidity: a state of mind incompatible with life, turning life into a state of non-suicide . If there is pessimism, skepticism, nihilism, mysticism within the sum of attitudes that composes the works of Cioran, such attitudes which might as well be modalized as reactions to the problem of evil, all these tendencies emanate from insomnia-bred lucidity. Secondly, we shall turn our attention to the topic of Cioran s écriture, with everything it implies, differently than his Romanian writing, as far as style, concern for expression and the aestheticizing of discourse are concerned. We aim at showing that the Farewell to philosophy enounced by the author in A short history of decay (Précis de decomposition), parallel to his literary turn and the radicalization of the fragmentary principle that precedes his French writing, is the paradoxical expression of a negation-driven thought which, by betraying Philosophy with Poetry, Music and Mysticism, cannot help but pay an unheard-of tribute to Human thought and to Philosophy itself. Finally, we argue that Cioran s French works represent, by its form and content, the necessary consequence and exact expression of a lucid, organic thought, which discovers in the écriture de soi the very destiny of Western Philosophy, and in Style as adventure the highest form of modern-thought heroism
Cioran (1911-1995) é um pensador romeno-francês que não teria o direito de reclamar por ser incompreendido e ignorado, pois ele mesmo fez da marginalidade um imperativo filosófico e um estilo de vida. Onze anos após o seu falecimento, em Paris, e cem anos após o seu nascimento, na Transilvânia, este autor, estrangeiro em mais de um sentido, permanece em grande medida desconhecido pelo público brasileiro, acadêmico ou não, fazendo prevalecer sua aura de obscuro e um sem-número de lendas e rumores sobre a sua vida, a sua personalidade, o seu pensamento. Dito isso, e vontade de marginalidade à parte, Cioran é um pensador que não pode ser e não permanecerá sendo por muito tempo ignorado ou desprezado, seja pela Academia como pelos círculos intelectuais com as mais diversas orientações ideológicas. Ainda mais quando se trata de pensar problemáticas, tão atuais quanto preocupantes, como a ascensão do fundamentalismo e do fanatismo, religioso ou de outra natureza, o ateísmo, o ceticismo e o niilismo no século XX, a angústia, o desespero, a necessidade metafísica do homem e o sentido da transcendência, o sofrimento, a morte, o suicídio, o mal, enfim, uma gama de questões altamente relevantes do ponto de vista da filosofia e também de outras disciplinas, como a psicologia e a história. Na primeira parte desta investigação, pessimismo filosófico e misticismo apofático convivem na metafísica existencial de Cioran, uma filosofia religiosa da existência que, sem se pautar pela fé em verdades relevadas e pela adesão a autoridades externas, busca pensar a condição e a existência humanas de acordo com aquilo que é mais urgente e essencial no animal metafísico, segundo o autor: a sabedoria antes que a ciência, a libertação pela desilusão e pelo não-saber antes que a salvação pela crença e pelo conhecimento, a necessidade de absoluto em detrimento da ilusão do devir, o enfrentamento da contingência inerente à existência, e particularmente à existência humana, tragicamente dotada de uma consciência, de uma liberdade, de um destino. O pensamento orgânico de Cioran é inseparável, como ele o reitera, de sua experiência de vida, notadamente a insônia à qual ele atribuiria, posteriormente, o mérito ou a culpa da sua bendita, maldita lucidez: um estado de espírito incompatível com a vida, tornando-a um estado de não-suicídio . Se há pessimismo, ceticismo, niilismo e misticismo na soma de atitudes que é a obra de Cioran, atitudes que podem ser justamente modalizadas como atitudes frente ao problema do mal, todas essas tendências emanam da lucidez gestada a partir de suas noites em branco. Em um segundo momento, nos voltaremos à questão da écriture cioraniana, com tudo o que ela implica, diferentemente da escrita romena, em termos de estilo, preocupação com a forma e estetização do discurso. Pretendemos mostrar como o Adeus à filosofia declarado por Cioran no Breviário de decomposição, concomitantemente à guinada literária e à acentuação do princípio fragmentário que precede sua obra francesa, é a expressão paradoxal de um pensamento da negação que, traindo a filosofia com a poesia, a música e a mística, não deixa de prestar uma homenagem inaudita ao pensamento e à própria Filosofia, doravante irreconhecível. Por fim, argumentamos que a obra francesa de Cioran representa, em forma e conteúdo, a consequência necessária e a expressão exata de um pensamento lúcido e orgânico que descobre na escritura de si o destino da filosofia e no estilo como aventura o grande heroísmo do escritor moderno. Em Cioran, Filosofia e Literatura se juntam numa fuga para dentro do niilismo, como forma de resistir às tentações do nada

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Williams, Heather Margaret. "Mallarme and the crisis of metaphysical language." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.267666.

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Grossmith, R. "Other states of being : Nabokov's two-world metaphysic." Thesis, Keele University, 1987. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.379420.

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Barthelmess, Eugenia. "Politics and metaphysics in three novels of Philip K. Dick." reponame:Repositório Institucional da UFPR, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1884/24340.

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Becket, Fiona. "Metaphor and "metaphysic" : the sense of language in D.H. Lawrence." Thesis, University of Warwick, 1992. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/36068/.

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This study contributes to the contemporary debate about the language of D. H. Lawrence concentrating on metaphor as the necessary vehicle of Lawrence's 'metaphysic'. The focus is on the different levels of attention to language in his work, and to Lawrence's responsiveness to the levels of metaphor within language. Lawrence is seen here as one who, in the Heideggerean sense, 'poetically thinks'. The texts outlined below are given special consideration, representing a particular body of language and thought within Lawrence's oeuvre Chapter 1 outlines the purpose of the study and establishes the Importance of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur on language, specifically metaphor, in setting up the necessary philosophical context for discussion of Lawrence. Chapter 2 addresses the selfconsciously metaphorical language of the nominally 'discursive' essays, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious, underlining Lawrence's alertness to the efficacy of metaphor rather than a referential or conceptual idiom. Fresh emphasis is given to Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious as a central text in the language debate. The insights afforded by these essays make it possible to move to the fiction and, in chapter 3, to Women in Love. Here the thesis builds on Lawrence's philosophical understanding of the concept 'metaphor': in this novel, principally through a consideration of 'love', Lawrence is seen to pull metaphor away from its merely rhetorical status. Chapter 4 examines the different mode and language of The Rainbow focusing on its more enveloping, less 'frictional', medium. By chapter 5, called 'Lawrence and Language', the philosophical questions which emerge from a reading of these texts can be addressed more explicitly. Finally, a conclusion underlines the difficulties of talking about language stressing the importance, implicit throughout, of reading Lawrence on his own terms. The conscious and subliminal levels of metaphor within Lawrence's language have been seen to bear his thought. What philosophy generally explains analytically, Lawrence's language communicates metaphorically.

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Williamson, Paul. "The metaphysical basis of mid eighteenth-century English poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1990. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.314489.

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Roane, Nancy Lee. "Misreading the River: Heraclitean Hope in Postmodern Texts." Oberlin College Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin1431966455.

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Wilson, Susan. "Beckett through Kant : a critique of metaphysical readings." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 1998. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/12952/.

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This thesis calls upon ideas from Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason to disrupt readings of the plays and prose of Samuel Beckett predicated upon metaphysical presuppositions. The Introduction focuses upon such presuppositions in the criticism of Martin Esslin. In Chapter one, substantial passages of Kantian exposition are given to prepare the ground for a parallel between Kant's critique of metaphysics and those Beckett texts examined through Chapters One, Two, Three and Four. In this first chapter, the limits which Kant places on possible knowledge are compared to the frustrations imposed upon the investigative duo of Beckett's Rough for Theatre II. Chapter Two considers Krapp's Last Tape as a parody of both Proustian and Manichaean metaphysical profundities. Chapter Three examines the consequences of staging the fabrication of a recognizably `Beckettian' image of the human condition in Catastrophe. Chapter Four engages with the textual specifications of The Lost Ones via an ‘immanent' method of analysis, in opposition to `transcendent' or allegorical readings capable of promoting themes of metaphysical import. Chapter Five marks a turning-point in the thesis. It investigates why analysis of The Lost ones should prove as troublesome as it does in Chapter Four. As a response, it details Beckett's efforts toward narrative ‘indetermination' and links this process to the equally troublesome `noumenon of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Chapter Six reassesses the parallels drawn between Beckett and Kant thus far. The paradoxes and flat contradictions contained in Chapters One to Four provide the materials for Chapters Six's re-appraisal of the main thesis pursued here, that a critique of metaphysics can be found in Beckett's works analogous to that supplied by Kant. A secondary thesis is that a tendency toward self-defeat during such an interpretation is inevitable. The Conclusion reassesses this contention.

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Barbour, Susan Jean. "Elegaic materialism : the poetry and art of Susan Howe." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4a0decd4-dec1-4f23-9457-d4d8b58c97c1.

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The American poet Susan Howe (1937-present) began her career as a visual artist, but owing to a dearth of information about her early collages it has been difficult to say anything substantive about how they might have shaped her poetic practice. In 2010, she placed her collages on archive. Along with a number of personal interviews with Howe, this heretofore unavailable material has enabled me to consider Howe's subsequent work in a new light and to establish significant links between her early visual aesthetics and the poetics of bibliography, historiography, and elegy for which she is now known. Howe's collages, like her poetry, focus on details that are at risk of vanishing from cultural memory and printed record. For this reason, I argue that her work evinces an 'elegaic materialism', or a way of reading, viewing, and thinking about texts that is attuned to loss. If “history is the record of the winners,” as Howe says, then one way of rescuing marginalized perspectives is by regarding manuscripts as drawings, thereby rescuing the concrete particulars deemed irrelevant by editors and historians. As Howe's late work turned increasingly toward elegy, her early aesthetic contributed to a nuanced poetics of personal loss and to a series of astonishing new formal tropes. The Introduction to this thesis discusses Howe's materialism in the context of current literary theory and textual scholarship. Chapter 1 concerns itself with Howe's art historical context. Chapter 2 analyses a selection of her word-drawings. Chapter 3 considers Howe's transition to poetry. Chapter 4 addresses her turn to archival documents in her middle period. Chapter 5 looks at the influence on Howe of documentary film, especially in connection with the task of representing a lost loved one, and Chapter 6 discusses her two most recent elegies, The Midnight and THAT THIS. A Coda completes the circle by once more considering Howe in the context of the visual arts at the moment she was selected to exhibit at the 2014 Whitney Biennial.

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Laws, Alexander S. "Setting the Stage and Building Homes: Architecture Metaphors and Space in Donne's First Caroline Sermon." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2019. https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/2671.

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Through his use of "foundation" and "house" metaphors in his "First Sermon Preached to King Charles at St. James, 3 April 1625," John Donne discreetly presents his ideologies and principles before the new king, while simultaneously criticizing his contemporaries' misguided bickering over religio-political factions. This essay seeks to unpack the history surrounding, as well as the casuistical logic found within Donne's first sermon preached during the Caroline period, which both explicitly and implicitly addresses the foremost anxieties of the people of the changing age.

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Phipps, Gregory. "Figures in American literary pragmatism: Henry James and the metaphysical club." Thesis, McGill University, 2011. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=96930.

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This dissertation explores the literary and philosophical intersections between Henry James's works of fiction and the writings of William James, Charles Peirce, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. The latter three were primary figures in the development of Pragmatism, a philosophical movement which emphasizes that the value of a belief or idea emerges through action and tangible, social consequences. Applying a Pragmatist approach to Henry James's fiction provides a basis for clarifying new readings of his narratives, but, at the same time, applying a literary approach to Pragmatism leads to new understandings of the philosophy. The main purpose of this project, then, is to articulate and examine the workings of a literary Pragmatism by tracing interrelated uses of metaphors and figurative language in the works of Peirce, Holmes, and William and Henry James. On the one hand, these literary components establish links between the fictional and philosophical writings by functioning as key rhetorical vehicles in interrelated constructions of subjectivity. On the other hand, this figurative language also connects the works of these four writers to their shared cultural environment by incorporating references to large-scale developments and transformations in late-nineteenth-century America – specifically, the Civil War, the expansion of a corporate capitalist economy, the growth of the railroad, and the ongoing resonances of the American Revolution. In this way, the Pragmatist approach to age-old philosophical issues is inflected by literary incorporations of major dynamics and tendencies central to the workings of late-nineteenth-century American culture, providing a uniquely American perspective on the relationship between individual subjectivity and the external environment. Henry James's fiction serves as the laboratory where the ramifications of Pragmatist representations of subjectivity play out through the relationships his characters negotiate between their private beliefs and ideas and the evaluations of these beliefs and ideas in their social spheres. Among other things, James's literary works reveal that the processes through which "Truth happens to an idea" are complex, multilayered, and often unexpected.
Cette thèse examine les intersections littéraires et philosophiques entre les œuvres de fiction d'Henry James et les écrits de William James, de Charles Peirce, et d'Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Ces trois derniers étaient des personnages clés dans le développement du pragmatisme, un mouvement philosophique qui met l'accent sur l'émergence de la valeur d'une croyance ou d'une idée à travers une action ou des conséquences sociales tangibles. Appliquer une approche pragmatiste à la fiction d'Henry James nous permet de clarifier de nouvelles interprétations de ses récits, tandis qu'en même temps le fait d'appliquer une approche littéraire au pragmatisme nous amène à des nouvelles compréhensions de cette philosophie. Le but principal de ce projet est donc d'articuler et d'examiner le fonctionnement d'un pragmatisme littéraire en traçant l'emploi des métaphores et du langage figuratif semblables dans les œuvres de Peirce, d'Holmes, et de William et Henry James. D'un côté, ces composants littéraires établissent des liens entre les écrits fictifs et philosophiques en faisant fonction de véhicule rhétorique important dans différentes constructions de la subjectivité qui sont étroitement liées. D'un autre côté, ce langage figuratif relie aussi les œuvres de ce quatre écrivains à un environnement culturel partagé en incluant des références à des développements et des transformations de grande échelle dans l'Amérique de la fin du dix-neuvième siècle, notamment, la guerre civile, l'expansion d'une économie capitaliste et corporative, l'expansion du chemin de fer, et les échos de la Révolution américaine. De cette façon, l'application de l'approche pragmatiste à des vieux problèmes philosophiques est infléchie par des intégrations littéraires des dynamiques et des tendances majeures qui sont primordiales au fonctionnement de la culture américaine de la fin du dix-neuvième siècle, ce qui donne une perspective exclusivement américaine sur la relation entre la subjectivité individuelle et l'environnement externe. La fiction d'Henry James sert de laboratoire où les ramifications des représentations pragmatistes de la subjectivité se jouent à travers les relations négociées par ses personnages entre leurs croyances et leurs idées privées et l'évaluation de celles-ci dans leurs domaines sociales. Entre autres, les œuvres littéraires de James démontrent que les processus à travers lesquels « la vérité arrive à une idée » sont complexes, multi-stratifiés, et souvent inattendus.

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Graziani, Lorenzo. "Un groviglio di mondi. Studio sul pluralismo fisico, metafisico e letterario postmoderno." Doctoral thesis, Università degli studi di Trento, 2020. http://hdl.handle.net/11572/260546.

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The main goal of this PhD dissertation is to explore the relation between postmodern poetics and some features of other theories developed at the same time in various areas of knowledge – mainly metaphysics, physics and sociology. If we can say that the modern paradigm was born with the question of how a multiplicity of different points of view could coexist, the postmodern paradigm seems to arise with the awareness that a systematic legitimation of differences cannot be based on a sole foundation that leads to a complete inclusion. For this reason, we argue that the concept of possible world is not only a useful heuristic metaphor adopted in different areas of the artistic and scientific postmodern culture, but it can put in constructive conversation different areas of knowledge which are usually thought to be more isolated and refractory to mutual influence than they actually are. Precisely because of the diverse usages and meanings that the term ‘world’ acquires in different contexts, the ontological commitment toward possible worlds varies significantly. They can be godly concepts, fictional scenarios, real sums of individuals that are isolated from each other, or ideal set of objects that are associated with different and mutually exclusive frames of reference and cultural coordinates. To shed a light on these matters is the main goal of the first book, entitled "What is a possible world?". The second book, entitled "Entangled worlds: the postmodernist literature", is committed to explore the topology of the possible worlds projected by postmodernist texts; in fact, the paradoxical topology that emerges from these texts appears to be inherently connected with a vast range of issues concerning our world.

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Jorsch-Peußner, Alexandra [Verfasser]. "Berlin Stories. Berlin as a Metaphysical City in English and American Literature / Alexandra Jorsch-Peußner." Aachen : Shaker, 2012. http://d-nb.info/1066196680/34.

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Swope, Richard A. "Metaphysical detectives and postmodern spaces, or the case of the missing boundaries." Morgantown, W. Va. : [West Virginia University Libraries], 2001. http://etd.wvu.edu/templates/showETD.cfm?recnum=1829.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--West Virginia University, 2001.
Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains iv, 241 p. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 235-241).

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Giddens, Thomas Philip. "Comics, crime, and the moral self : an interdisciplinary study of criminal identity." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10036/3622.

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An ethical understanding of responsibility should entail a richly qualitative comprehension of the links between embodied, unique individuals and their lived realities of behaviour. Criminal responsibility theory broadly adheres to ‘rational choice’ models of the moral self which subsume individuals’ emotionally embodied dimensions under the general direction of their rational will and abstracts their behaviour from corporeal reality. Linking individuals with their behaviour based only on such understandings of ‘rational choice’ and abstract descriptions of behaviour overlooks the phenomenological dimensions of that behaviour and thus its moral significance as a lived experience. To overcome this ethical shortcoming, engagement with the aesthetic as an alternative discourse can help articulate the ‘excessive’ nature of lived reality and its relationship with ‘orthodox’ knowledge; fittingly, the comics form involves interaction of rational, non-rational, linguistic, and non-linguistic dimensions, modelling the limits of conceptual thought in relation to complex reality. Rational choice is predicated upon a split between a contextually embedded self and an abstractly autonomous self. Analysis of the graphic novel Watchmen contends that prioritisation of rational autonomy over sensual experience is symptomatic of a ‘rational surface’ that turns away from the indeterminate ‘chaos’ of complex reality (the unstructured universe), instead maintaining the power of rational and linguistic concepts to order the world. This ‘rational surface’ is maintained by masking that which threatens its stability: the chaos of the infinite difference of living individuals. These epistemological foundations are reconfigured, via Watchmen, enabling engagement beyond the ‘rational surface’ by accepting the generative potential of this living chaos and calling for models of criminal identity that are ‘restless’, acknowledging the unique, shifting nature of individuals, and not tending towards ‘complete’ or stable concepts of the self-as-responsible. As part of the aesthetic methodology of this reconfiguration, a radical extension of legal theory’s analytical canon is developed.

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Yuan, Honggeng. "From conventional to experimental : the making of Chinese metaphysical detective fiction /." Hong Kong : University of Hong Kong, 1999. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record.jsp?B21556398.

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袁洪庚 and Honggeng Yuan. "From conventional to experimental: the makingof Chinese metaphysical detective fiction." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1999. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B43894422.

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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Metaphysics in literature'

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