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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Transient Constellations: Adorno, Benjamin, And The Actuality Of Idealism, Jeremy Arnott Jun 2022

Transient Constellations: Adorno, Benjamin, And The Actuality Of Idealism, Jeremy Arnott

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines the thought of Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin in critical constellation with German Idealism, specifically G.W.F. Hegel and F.W.J. Schelling. I explore how Adorno and Benjamin deconstruct and refashion Idealist notions, while also providing the post-Idealist theoretical armature to read Idealism in speculative directions. Through this mosaic, I pose questions regarding the actuality of philosophy, considering how thought might open itself towards a fuller spectrum of experience, while nonetheless remaining systematic, creating new (inter)disciplinary models of philosophy which tarry with the para-philosophical domains of art and nature. In the first part of this project, I provide …


Bastard Reasoning: A "Preposterous" History Of Walter Benjamin's Ideas, Vladimir Cristache Dec 2018

Bastard Reasoning: A "Preposterous" History Of Walter Benjamin's Ideas, Vladimir Cristache

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation presents the theory of ideas developed by Walter Benjamin in the “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” of his Trauerspiel book and thereby seeks to fill an existing gap in English-language Benjamin literature. On the one hand, it performs its task by closely reading this thinker’s early, epistemo-linguistic writings up to and including the “Prologue”: most prominently, “On Language as Such,” “The Program of the Coming Philosophy,” “The Concept of Criticism,” and the theoretically inclined sections of “Goethe’s Elective Affinities.” On the other, it does so by positioning Benjamin’s theory of language within existentialist philosophy and by applying his theory of …


Unread: The (Un)Published Texts Of Romanticism, Marc D. Mazur Oct 2018

Unread: The (Un)Published Texts Of Romanticism, Marc D. Mazur

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation reads the unpublished texts of Romanticism not as fragments on the road to publication but as psychoanalytic “partial objects” that re-figure our understanding of the relationship between Romantic authors and publication. Against positivist interpretations of literary production that limit writing to the professionalization of the author and to a sociology of texts, Unread develops the concept of the (un)published whose parenthetical bracketing signals an unstable suspension of textual instability that is at once prior to and yet persistently remains a part of the writing of the published text. I argue that non-publication also arises from the author’s relation …


The Passing Away Of Nature: Two Essays On Natural History, Domenic Hutchins Jun 2018

The Passing Away Of Nature: Two Essays On Natural History, Domenic Hutchins

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis begins by examining the natural-historical character of Theodor Adorno’s thought and corpus, 1931–1969, by way of engaging the centennial of the October Russian Revolution. In the first three chapters we attempt to read Adorno’s corpus as écriture or writing whereupon unconscious writing of history is transcribed. This literary-driven approach to Adorno’s work highlights the primacy of history for his thought, whence his late-Marxism issues that culminates in what we call a politics of experience. Given the historical experience we seek to make legible heretofore, in chapter four we briefly turn to the hyper-object of ongoing and future anthropogenic …


Saturnine Constellations: Melancholy In Literary History And In The Works Of Baudelaire And Benjamin, Kevin Godbout Oct 2016

Saturnine Constellations: Melancholy In Literary History And In The Works Of Baudelaire And Benjamin, Kevin Godbout

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Aristotle famously asked the question: why are extraordinary people so often melancholics? “Problem XXX,” written by Aristotle or one of his disciples, speculates that black bile, the humour once believed to cause melancholy, can promote a form of genius, a profound intellectual power. Walter Benjamin and Charles Baudelaire are two writers for whom this theory was true: though they suffered from gloominess and despondency, they also recognized that in the interior of sadness, and even madness, is a kernel of aesthetic, artistic, and philosophical truth. Melencolia illa heroica – whose theory was authoritatively formulated by Ficino, taking after Aristotle’s Problems …


The Correspondence(S) Of Benjamin And Adorno, Jeremy W. Arnott Sep 2016

The Correspondence(S) Of Benjamin And Adorno, Jeremy W. Arnott

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis develops the concept of ‘correspondence’ as a means by which to read the work of Benjamin and Adorno. The term will be taken to entail at once explicit correspondence, in the sense of the letters written to each other (1928-1940), alongside the implicit constellations structuring their relationship. Beginning with Benjamin’s early writings (-1924), I will trace the development of Benjamin’s immanent method of criticism, followed by Adorno’s re-direction (or appropriation) of this method towards his own Marxist concerns, and notions of ‘critical theory.’ This will be shown as a ‘translation’ of Benjamin’s early work, in which Adorno’s re-direction …


Magic(Infra)Realism: Jetztzeiten Of Believability And Latin American History In García Márquez’S Cien Años De Soledad And Otoño Del Patriarca., Katarzyna Jasinski Sep 2013

Magic(Infra)Realism: Jetztzeiten Of Believability And Latin American History In García Márquez’S Cien Años De Soledad And Otoño Del Patriarca., Katarzyna Jasinski

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines the idea of Colombian history as ‘random coincidence’ in Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad and El otoño del patriarca. Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History and Michel Foucault’s Nietzsche, Genealogy, History provide the theoretical framework for the research. This thesis examines magic realism as a way of representing the true invisible past of Latin America. The combination of Foucault’s concept of genealogy, Walter Benjamin’s ‘messianic historical materialism’ and García Márquez’s ‘magic realism’ demonstrates that the combination of living and telling produce a Jetztzeit of believability that redeems Latin American history from historicism. …