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English Language and Literature

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University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Masters Theses

Philosophy

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Evoking Unity: Toward A Communal Phenomenology In Virginia Woolf And William Faulkner, Phillip Douglas Bandy May 2012

Evoking Unity: Toward A Communal Phenomenology In Virginia Woolf And William Faulkner, Phillip Douglas Bandy

Masters Theses

Contemporary readings of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf typically situate these canonical authors within their historical contexts as exponents of the material conditions of modernity or as the literary precursors of postmodernism, as writers of indeterminacy and linguistic play. In this thesis, I argue for a mode of reading Woolf and Faulkner grounded not in history or language, but in consciousness as the irreducible basis of human experience. That is, by invoking the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, I claim that both authors attempted to engage more fully with not simply a historical moment called “modernity,” but a human reality characterized …


The Therapy Of Humiliation: Towards An Ethics Of Humility In The Works Of J.M. Coetzee, Ajitpaul Singh Mangat May 2011

The Therapy Of Humiliation: Towards An Ethics Of Humility In The Works Of J.M. Coetzee, Ajitpaul Singh Mangat

Masters Theses

This work asks how and for whom humiliation can be therapeutic. J. M. Coetzee, in his works Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K and Disgrace, does not simply critique the mentality of Empire, an “Enlightenment” or colonialist mode of knowing that knows no bounds to reason, but offers an alternative through the Magistrate, Michael K and David Lurie, all of whom are brutally shamed and “abjected”. Each character, I propose, experiences a Lacanian “therapy of humiliation” resulting in a subversion of their egos, which they come to understand as antagonistic, a site of …