Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Primitivismo Y Poesía Femenina En El Cono Sur: Gabriela Mistral, Alfonsina Storni Y Juana De Ibarbourou, Ramon Muniz

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Primitivism is a philosophical attitude and artistic view based on the search for origins. It is linked to a simpler conception of life and has been used as a strategy to critique modernity through literature and art, as well as a means to subvert traditional and academicist paradigms in cultural production. Although most scholars have considered Primitivism as a problem of Western ideology, Erik Camayd-Freixas, Marianna Torgovnick, and Ben Etherington have shown that Primitivism is present in all cultures and that its strategies have been deployed to deal with racial, ecological, economic, artistic, and gender issues.

My dissertation analyzes the …

American Absurdity: Reconciling Conceptions Of The Absurd In European And American Literature, Benjamin Spencer

Senior Theses

This thesis aims to examine the development of the concept of the absurd in literature across different time periods and cultural contexts. The absurd, as defined by Camus, is the gap between humanity’s desire to understand the world and the impossibility of doing so.

However, the ways in which the absurd is recognized as an aspect of existence depends heavily on the sociological contexts in which an individual lives. By analyzing the works of absurdist authors, filmmakers, and artists across time, we can track the development of these absurdist conceptions in both Europe and American literary movements.

Looking at these …

Éric Touya De Marenne. Simone De Beauvoir: Le Combat Au Féminin. Presses Universitaires De France, 2019., Tessa Ashlin Nunn

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Éric Touya de Marenne. Simone de Beauvoir: Le combat au féminin. Presses Universitaires de France, 2019. pp. 128.

Post Colonial Studies, Nashieli Marcano, Kyle Brooks

Research Guides & Subject Bibliographies

No abstract provided.

Humanity On The Verge Of Insanity: Maintaining Cultural Identity Against Oppressive Rule, Danica Katarina Skoric

Senior Theses

Ubuntu is a South African term in the Bantu language that translates to “human kindness.” This essay discusses the present-day impact of the South African philosophical concept of Ubuntu in light of the dehumanization, which Aboriginal Australians and Black South Africans faced, specifically during the period of 1960-1985. How has humanity been enslaved and degraded by assimilation and a cruel division of races, yet positively evolved and progressed due to the efforts of both female and male activists--in particular literary figure Oodgeroo Noonuccal and political leader Nelson Mandela? A lack of respect and tolerance as a result of colonialism has …

Think, Pig! Beckett At The Limit Of The Human [Table Of Contents], Jean-Michel Rabate

Literature

“Very few critics have all the qualities and competencies required to engage fully with the entirety of Beckett’s work in all genres: a detailed familiarity with Beckett’s texts in both English and French; a sensitivity to his linguistic, stylistic, and thematic maneuvers; an encyclopedic knowledge of his intellectual context; an awareness of the range and detail of Beckett studies; and an ability to write with refinement and wit. It is clear from this remarkable book that Jean-Michel Rabaté is one of those few.” —Derek Attridge, University of York

Beginning In Heidegger, Nietzsche, And Mallarmé, Austen H. Hinkley

Senior Projects Spring 2016

This project is focused on the theme of beginning. The first chapter is a reading of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time as an attempt at beginning a new ontology that understands itself as a construct that must be, to quote Heidegger, “critical against itself.” The second chapter is a reading of three of Nietzsche's metaphors as a way of both examining and enacting a beginning. The third chapter is concerned with Mallarmé’s revolution of poetic form in Un coup de Dés, which enacts a new beginning on which the poem reflects through its images and form. Through an understanding of …

The Technological Singularity: An Ideological Critique, Phillip Stephens

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Technological Singularity represents a confluence of techno-cultural narratives of progress in which the projected exponential growth of artificial intelligence and nanotechnology will usher in a moment of irrevocable change for the human race – a change that many claim is scant decades away. Although the concept saw its modern clarification by science fiction author Vernor Vinge, the Singularity sits astride both fictional and nonfictional narratives of the future. It is the aim of this study to explore the ideological discourses that emerge from texts on the Singularity and the unfathomable posthuman future it ushers in. Doing so reveals how …

Auctor In Fabula: Umberto Eco And The Intentio Of Foucault's Pendulum, Douglas Stephens Iv

Senior Honors Theses

Umberto Eco’s 1988 novel Foucault’s Pendulum weaves together a wide range of philosophical and literary threads. Many of these threads find their other ends in Eco’s nonfiction works, which focus primarily on the question of interpretation and the source of meaning. The novel, which follows three distinctly overinterpretive characters as they descend into ruin, has been read by some as a retraction or parody of Eco’s own position. However, if Foucault’s Pendulum is indeed polemical, it must be taken as an argument against the mindset which Eco has termed the “hermetic”. Through an examination of his larger theoretical body, including …

Ars Moriendi: A Selection Of Texts Concerning The Phenomenon Of Death, Andrew Osborne

Book Collecting Contest Essays

Ars Moriendi: A Selection of Texts Concerning the Phenomenon of Death was an entry in the 2013 Collins Memorial Library Book Collecting Contest. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

This book collection takes its title, Ars Moriendi (Latin for ‘the art of dying’), from a late medieval literary tradition consisting of texts that ‘guide’ readers through a rigorous programme that teaches the art of ‘dying well.’ (As the lore has it, if one were to follow the instructive dictates of an ars moriendi text verbatim, then one’s soul would be guaranteed salvation from …

Ecce Homo: Fully Loaded, Wyatt Anthony Bertz

Senior Projects Spring 2013

After spending the year writing terribly boring shit about classic cars, I began writing this piece on April 20th thanks to the inspiration of Marina van Zuylen.

After Utopia: Three Post-Personal Subjects Consider The Possibilities, Jeffrey P. Cain

English Faculty Publications

Review essay.

The task for those exploring the relationship of Deleuze to cultural issues is not to extend his thought in a straight line, but to swerve or veer into thinking a productive approach to the cultural events that actualise themselves in our time. Cain states that the virtue of these three books is that they do not simply go back to the same old questions; all of them represent departures in thinking in the best sense of the word.

William E. Connolly (2008). Capitalism and Christianity, American Style. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Alexander García Düttmann (2007). …

Wallace Stevens' Philosophical Evasions, Gregory Brazeal

Gregory Brazeal

How could thought ever benefit from being formed in poetic language rather than philosophical prose? This essay attempts to clarify a single, relatively narrow respect in which poetry can perform philosophical work that prose, as such, cannot: the evasion of philosophical dogmatism through Stevensian qualification. What Helen Vendler in an early essay calls Stevens’ “qualified assertions,” and what Marjorie Perloff calls Stevens’ “ironic modes," are the basic techniques of Wallace Stevens' anti-dogmatic art.

Modernity, Postmodernity, And Transgression In Sábato's Esthetics: Poetic Dissemination, Defeat Of Utopias, Returning Bodies , María Rosa Lojo

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

After defining the problematic term "Postmodernity" and its possible application to Latin America, the position of Ernesto Sábato as an essayist and narrator is discussed in light of Modernity (questioned by him as the rationalist and enlightened canon, but applauded as romantic and surrealistic rebellion), and Postmodernity with which it connects from diverse axis: the poetic of desire and that of transgression (vanguard movements related to Foucault, Bataille and Derrida), the theory of reality as "fragment" and "simulacrum" and the suppression of oppositions in the paroxysm of "symbolic exchange." Sábato would transcend from the central proposition of his writing, the …

Interview, Ghada Amer, French,, Fuencisla Zomeño

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This paper analyzes the influence of postmodernism in Paloma Díaz-Mas's feminist approach through two short stories, "The World According to Valdés," and "In Search of a Portrait." The political situation after Franco's death embraced democracy which allowed writers to pay more attention to intellectual concerns. Women writers steered the radical positions of the 1970s toward a more philosophical and intellectual analysis of reality and artistic expression during the eighties. In these two short stories, Díaz-Mas addresses women's issues by questioning the scope of modernist and humanist views. She criticizes the modernist concept of unity (text/identity) pointing out the discrimination that …

The Oldest Trick In The Book: Borges And The "Rhetoric Of Immediacy'', James Winchell

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In his most "philosophical'' texts, Jorge Luis Borges paradoxically posits the act of reading as the scene of affectively "immediate" experience: his reader reads a reader reading (ad infinitum). This sort of hyper-meditated, specular imitation actually comes to mirror the substantive preoccupation of the "philosophical" text itself. Borges thereby breaks down what Theodor Adorno calls "concept fetishism'' by making mimesis his textual concept. Given Italo Calvino's claim for the novelty of "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" in relation to modern genres, I propose a two-fold thesis: first, that this typically Borgesian narrative juxtaposes concept and mimesis (a traditional …

Snares: Pere Gimferrer's Los Espejos/ Els Miralls, Margaret Persin

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

With the publication of Els miralls, Pere Gimferrer effected a major shift in philosophical and linguistic perspective. It is the first collection to be published in Catalan, and thus represents for the well-known writer a change in direction for him as a poet and spokesperson of his culture and his generation. But the change is more than one of mere language coding. For in this collection, the Catalan poet confronts all the snares of language which he views as limiting of creativity and originality. He adopts a variety of poetic strategies and voices in an attempt to come to …

Voices Of Authority And Linguistic Autonomy In Niebla , Mary Lee Bretz

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Miguel de Unamuno's works have often been studied as expressions of his philosophy or life experience. More recent literary theory has eschewed approaches that foreground the author, preferring to focus primarily on the text or the reader. Utilizing Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the novel, this paper analyzes Niebla, one of Unamuno's most frequently studied works, to illustrate that new literary theories can enrich our reading of the text. Bakhtin argues that the novel is characterized by many voices or styles which the novelist welcomes and exploits. The novel should not be viewed as having a single style but as …

The Order Of Bourgeois Protest, Geoffey Waite

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Relatively little theoretical work is currently being produced by Western "Leftists" on committed protest culture. Simultaneously and not by chance, Western Marxism has drifted increasingly away from solidarity with the concept and practice of the vanguard party and toward a more or less easy compact with the problematic of poststructuralism and postmodernity. This relative paucity of discussion of commitment and protest stands in significant relationship to two critical moments: first, a powerful, overtheorized tradition of Western Marxist debate about commitment and protest (Benjamin, Sartre, Barthes, Marcuse, Adorno, among others); second, a wide-spread, undertheorized work-a-day practice of "traditional" liberal …

Eco's Echoes: Fictional Theory And Detective Practice In The Name Of The Rose, David H. Richter

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose is a serio-comic pastiche of the detective story set in the middle ages, which uses history as "a distant mirror" to comment, from a Western Marxist perspective, on contemporary political issues. Structurally, however, The Name of the Rose is a fictional enactment of many of the semiotician's recent critical and philosophical ideas. ( 1) Eco's discussion of "abductive" reasoning in C. S. Peirce and Aristotle appears in a detective not only more fallible than Sherlock Holmes but more aware of what his powers consist of and why they work and fail. (2) Eco's …

Forgetting To Remember: Anamnesis And History In J. M. G. Le Clézio's Desert, Kathleen White Smith

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Unlike most of Le Clezio's previous works. Desert has a specific historical framework. The story of the young boy Nour records the struggle of the Saharaoui people of the western Sahara to claim their land from the French invaders of the early twentieth century. A second narrative, set in the present, continues that story through the experiences of Lalla: unlike the story of her predecessor, the narrative in which she figures has no clear reference to the current, militant political situation established in the western Sahara by the independence movement known as Polisario. Containing both story and document, text and …

Bakhtin And Buber: Problems Of Dialogic Imagination, Nina Perlina

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Recent publications of biographical materials on Mikhail Bakhtin demonstrate that he was familiar with the writings of Martin Buber. The philosophical and aesthetic verbal expression of Buber's ideas within the time-spatial universe of Bakhtin's own awareness allows us to discuss this obvious biographical evidence in a wider cultural context. The central opposition of Buber's and Bakhtin's systems is the dialogic dichotomous pair: "Ich und Du" (I and Thou), or "myself and another." Bakhtin's dialogic imagination is rooted in the binaries of the subject-object relations which he initially formulated as "responsibility" and "addressivity," that is to say, as individual awareness and …

Circumscription: Proust's The Captive And The Problem Of Other Minds, Carol De Dobay Rifelj

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Central to Proust's Remembrance as a whole and to The Captive in particular is Marcel's attempt to discover what other people think and feel. But, as reading the work in the light of modern analytic philosophy shows, his efforts are thwarted by the deceptions of others and by his own irreconcilable views. The other is radically inaccessible, yet the object of our search; the self is a stable entity, yet multiple, changing, and a fiction constituted by language; language is communication, yet the source of error. These are the problems which confront philosophy and literature when they try to come …

The Doubles In Julien Gracq's Au Château D'Argol, Andrée Douchin-Shahin

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In Julien Gracq's Au Château d'Argol, the resolution of a psychological double (as in the Doppelgänger novels) opens onto a metaphysical quest. In the process, doubling becomes so compounded that the narrative resembles a kaleidoscopic pattern of multiple reflections. Gracq's personal search into the nature of man is set against other hypotheses and formulations such as philosophical systems, religion, psychoanalysis, literature, music, etc. In the novel, man's dualism is viewed as an inescapable fact. However, even though the dogma of the Redemption is rejected, man, in spite of his "flaw," is held responsible for the acts he wills.

Juan Ramón Jiménez And Nietzsche, John P. Devlin

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The young Juan Ramón Jiménez shared the enthusiasm for the writings of Nietzsche prevalent among his contemporaries. More significant are the interest in and affinity with Nietzsche which persisted into the poet's maturity. Jiménez found in Nietzsche not only a man of ideas but a poet who claimed to be a potent spiritual force. Both writers held that the modern age could recover a sense of spiritual integrity through the will of the individual to live and interpret human existence as an aesthetic phenomenon. Nietzsche's views on the nature of art and the role of the artist helped to sustain …

"The Universal Andalusian," "The Zealous Andalusian," And The "Andalusian Elegy.", Richard A. Cardwell

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Biographers and critics have been content to repeat Juan Ramón Jiménez' own comments concerning the influence upon him of Krausism, the Institución Libre de Enseñanza and the personality and model of Francisco Giner de los Ríos. In general, little discussion of the nature of that contact and virtually no evidence for arguing the importance or the shape of Krausist ethos on Jiménez' intellectual formation have been adduced. In previous studies I have considered Jiménez' literary apprenticeship in the light of the Krausist contacts. In the present study I further contend that Platero у уо, arguably his best known work, …

Semiotic Consequences, Jonathan Culler

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This paper outlines the semiotic perspectives of Saussure and Peirce and the points at which these quite different theories intersect. It considers the implications of these points of intersection for literary studies and uses the example of Oedipus Rex to illustrate the semiotic character of acts and facts.

Affective Consciousness In La Nausée, Benjamin Suhl

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

La Nausée, a key to Sartre's work, centers on an affective comprehension of the world, which becomes cognitive in the author's philosophy. Nausea is the affective equivalent of Descartes's systematic doubt and of Husserl's reduction. The recent publication of Sartre's earliest writings permits us to isolate his fundamental concerns, later to be developed in the novel: contingency and its evasion in bad faith. A certain Antoine Roquentin is shaken by the fear of becoming submerged in Bouville, physically and socially. He passes through an acute crisis, recorded blow by blow in his diary. It leads to a radical change …