Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Eliot's philosophy'

The thesis attempts to trace the evolution of some of T.S. Eliot's intellectual and religious preoccupations from 1911 to 1922. Eliot's unpublished philosophy notes and graduate papers from about 1911 to 1914, and his uncollected reviews on philosophy, sociology, and anthropology from 1916 to 1922, taken in conjunction with his literary interests, throw light on his state of mind as he worked his way towards defining his convictions. Eliot's explorations are to a large extent explicable in terms of his attempts to find a viable alternative between the extremes of rationalism and anti-rationalism. The works of such philosophers as William James, Henri Bergson, and F.H. Bradley, and of social scientists such as Lévy-Bruhl, represented for Eliot an important nexus of ideas, particularly in their implications for anti-rationalism, which he felt compelled to reject, but which nonetheless heightened his perception of mental processes and opened up new areas of experience. At the same time, he was distrustful of rational and scientific explanations of religious and mystical experience. Eliot's speculations are considered first in relation to his Unitarian background, and the efforts made by the Harvard philosophers to reconcile science and religion when he was a graduate student there. It is within the parameters of discussion set by the Harvard Philosophy Department that Eliot, as a graduate student, questioned the attempts of anthropologists and sociologists to establish a scientific basis for the study of religion, and the claims of psychology to explain mystical and visionary experience. Later, from 1916, the configuration of the ideas of Irving Babbitt, T.E. Hulme, and F.H. Bradley provides an important context for Eliot's speculations, as he tested different lines of thought in his critical journalism in search of a defining belief, in the years prior to the publication of The Waste Land.

L'aventure intellectuelle de T. S. Eliot offre une perspective double dans l'histoire des idees au vingtième siècle. Elle révèle une réaction parmi tant d'autres sur fond de ce qu'il est convenu d'appeler "la crise des valeurs", et elle fait remonter à la surface un développement type de la pensée occidentale, que nous avons désigné sous le terme de poète-philosophe. Cette thèse est une étude de typologie génétique dont le but est d'expliquer à la fois la vie et l'oeuvre de T. S. Eliot et les raisons et le sens de la convergence de la poésie et de la philosophie à l'époque moderne
T. S. Eliot's intellectual quest shows two major tendencies of western thought in the twentieth century. It articulates a reaction to the so-called "crisis of values" and reveals a development of western thought, incarnated in a type which has been termed the poet-philosopher. This dissertation is a study in typology aiming at an understanding of T. S. Eliot's life and works, and also exploring the reasons and the meaning of the modern convergence of poetry and philosophy

This is a study of the relationship between the philosophy of Charles Peirce and the philosophy, criticism and poetic methodology of T.S. Eliot. I begin by considering Peirce's connections with Harvard University, and the effects of Peircean philosophy on the ideas and teaching methods of the philosophers who taught Eliot at Harvard between 1907 and 1914. I discuss Peirce's sign-theory of cognition, and consider ho~ this theory may have influenced Eliot's choice of a poetic method - his choice, that is, to write a poetry of 'signification'. I argue that the choice of such a method by Eliot evidences a Peircean conception of reality. I consider the Pragmatism of Peirce, and argue that Eliot' ~ poems consistently present a 'pragmatistic' view of reality, a Vl~ of reality as dependent upon, or identifiable with, actio] ('practice'). Conversely, ~eality in the poetry of Eliot i: frequently represented in terms of a failure of practice, the fail ure to act. Central to Peirce's Pragmatism is the theory that a experience of the world as 'real' requires the sense of continuit in experience. I discuss this theory as it is found in the work 0 Peirce and William James, and argue that in the poems and plays c Eliot reality is consistently represented as directly dependent upc continuity and coherence in experience. Associated with the Pragmatism of William James is the VlE that our 'habits' of perception and behaviour are what literal] determine the identity (and thus the reality) of objects. I discu~ the extent to which 'habits' of various kinds (including Freudic , ceremonials') are represented in Eliot's poems as that In which reality in same sense inheres. I discuss finally Peirce's conception of the crucial function of 'Doubt' in the quest for knowledge specifically in the 'scientific method' of inquiry. I argue that doubt plays a crucial role in Eliot's poetry, and performs an essentially Peircean function in Eliot's quest for reality and truth.

The search for happiness is a vital theme in George Eliot's fiction. Eliot's treatment of this theme owes much to nineteenth-century utilitarianism, which stemmed from Jeremy Bentham's "greatest happiness principle," and the religious demythologization of the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, who interpreted Christianity in terms of human consciousness. In 1854, Eliot translated Feuerbach's Das Wesen des Christenthums, in which Feuerbach describes the components of man's being as feeling, thinking, and willing. George Eliot saw an opposition between utilitarianism and Feuerbach's humanism. This fact is fundamental for our understanding of the rhetorical structure of Eliot's moral universe. In her fiction, utilitarianism as utility, the pursuit of pleasure, utility, avoidance of pain, and calculation of pleasure over pain (the "felicific calculus") is shown by her, paradoxically, often to lead to wrongdoing, suffering, and even crime. For some of her protagonists, however, it contributes to a primary stage of their development, since their consequent suffering may lead to a greater awareness. The movement from suffering to sympathy in Eliot's novels is profoundly Feuerbachian, for it involves the "essence" of Christianity which he described as man's essential nature. Despite her scepticism as to the efficacy of Bentham's principle of utility, Eliot endorsed the utilitarian principle of consequences as a fundamental aspect of her ethic. A detailed analysis of the way in which Eliot counterpoints utilitarianism with Feuerbach's ethic in Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, "The Lifted Veil," The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, "Brother Jacob," Romola, Felix Holt, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda demonstrates that, in Eliot's fiction, true self-fulfilment, involving moral freedom, is consistently derived from adherence to the fundamental laws of human nature, as embodied in Feuerbach's particular description of the human "essence." Although other philosophical and psychological influences can be discerned, certain characteristics of Eliot's fiction, such as the melange of idealism and an abiding sense of human limitation and alienation, may be traced to her confrontation with utilitarianism through a Feuerbachian morality.

This dissertation argues that the political, philosophical, and aesthetic theories developed in The New Age, edited by A. R. Orage, provided a crucial foundation for modernist poetry. By situating the modernist aesthetics of Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and T. S. Eliot in tenris of the complex scene of 19 10s and early 1920s London radicalism, this study develops historically local theoretical terms to read modernist poetry and also suggests the continued relevance of modernist political questions when viewed frorri this perspective. The first chapter analyzes Orage's early political and theosophical writings, demonstrating how these sources informed the journal's interconnected concerns with print culture, radical politics and literature. The second chapter analyzes Ezra Pound's entr6e into the NeIv Age scene in late 1911, situating the criticism and poetry of I Gather the Limbs of Osiris as an important ideological contribution to The New Age's Guild Socialism movement. The third chapter argues that Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound's Vorticist movement was organized as a radical mode of production along New Age lines and that Vorticism's aesthetic products are politically positioned against capitalist production. The fourth and fifth chapters trace The New Age's engagement with orthodox economic theory and Pound and Eliot's interest in radical economics, particularly as they connected to epistemology, money and representation, value, corporate organization, consumption and scarcity. In the final chapter, this analysis of Social Credit is used to arguet.h at the developmento f The Cawos and The WasteL aiid are fundamentally connected to the New Age's radical economic epistemology. As a whole, this dissertationa rguest hat the idiosyncratic political theory of T11eN ew Age shaped the production and consumption of crucial modernist poetic strategies.

This thesis focuses on the impact of translating as experience, metaphor and influence for the two writers featured in this study, George Eliot and Mary (Mrs Humphry) Ward. I argue that the emotional and intellectual requirements for translation, sympathetic identification and critical judgement, are significant and under-investigated influences on their creative practice. Although it is well known that both writers translated works which challenged prevailing religious understandings, I emphasise that their approach to their translations was itself one of hermeneutic and stylistic fidelity, and explore the process of translation conceived as a series of human relationships. I argue that both women explored the capacity of the ideas and language of their translations to provide conceptualisations of human relationship as the fulcrum and guarantor of emotional value in a Godless world. The considerable critical interest in Feuerbach’s influence on Eliot has focused mainly on subjectivity and the duty of understanding others, but I consider her emphasis on human relationships as acts of faith. Critical interest in Spinoza has been far more limited, and this thesis champions the importance of this relationship for Eliot’s writing in relation to the process of psychological change, the role of intuitive knowledge, and the subjectivity of ethical understanding. The influence of Amiel’s portrayal of the intellectual and psychological experience of losing faith on Ward’s fiction has been largely unexplored in criticism, an oversight this thesis is intended to correct. Chapter 1 contextualizes Ward and Eliot in relation to Victorian conceptualisations of translation more widely, and stresses the context of nineteenth-century translation conceived as a search for fidelity, (in distinction from more recent critical models imposing currents of conflict and mastery). Chapter 2 examines the impact of Eliot’s translation of Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity on ideas around the sacred nature of human relationships, and in particular the influence of Feuerbach’s metaphor of translation on Eliot’s narration. Chapter 3 considers Eliot’s translation of Spinoza’s Ethics, arguing that Spinoza’s ideas about processes of psychological change and the subjectivity of good and evil are more fully integrated into Eliot’s fiction than has traditionally been thought. Chapter 4 considers Mary Ward’s translation of Amiel’s Journal Intime in relation to her most famous novel, Robert Elsmere, tracing how Amiel’s sense of multiple psychologies and his own analyses of other philosophers contribute to Ward’s delineation of the loss of faith. Chapter 5 considers his influence on Helbeck of Bannisdale and Eleanor, and how those novels use metaphors related to translation to consider the gaps between the languages of individuals, and between emotion and its recognition. Ward’s role as translator is examined with reference to hitherto unpublished letters to her father during the final editing of Helbeck of Bannisdale, along with the significance for Eleanor of Ward’s introduction to Joubert’s Pensées and her collaboration with Katharine Lyttelton on its translation.

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.

Instead of exploring explicit textual or ideological influences of the philosophy of F.W. Nietzsche on Modernist literary writers, this thesis analyses the points at which works such as James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets bear an implicit relationship to an aesthetic theory for which the notion of representation (artistic or philosophical) and that of sacredness must be thought together. Such a theory is to be found most explicitly in Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, although some of his earlier and later writings engage with it too. Thus, from the points of convergence of the sacred and the aesthetic that appear in The Birth of Tragedy, I extract the keys for a theory of representation at large, of Nietzschean import, in order to contrast the notion of philosophical representation (Vorstellung) with the activities and discourses which philosophy has traditionally tried to avoid: rituals and myths. Out of this contrast, the conclusion emerges that there is a genealogical progression from ritual (specifically sacrifice) to myth, and from this to philosophical and artistic representation; that is to say, that only after a myth (whose root was a ritual) has lost its religious value, can philosophy and art (and literature in particular) enjoy a fully separate existence, as the secularised discourses that characterise our Modernity: (here modern science is included as a development and continuation of the philosophical discourse). What makes Modernist writers play an essential role in this respect is their tacit awareness of this genealogy, which is manifested in their aesthetic practice. Two instances of this practice are analysed here, in their mythopoeic character (mainly derived from the mythic possibilities of Christianity), and their questioning of modern notions (selfhood, identity, individuality). They re-enact the original sacred speech previous to our secularised modern aesthetics.

This thesis describes how Eliot's concern for language and form finds roots in early twentieth century language philosophy. It also explores the way Eliot's early philosophical themes concerning language and meaning reemerge in his literary criticism and philosophical poetry during the 1920s and 1930s, and in his more explicitly philosophical Four Quartets. More significantly, this thesis historically elucidates Eliot's debt to the philosophies of Edmund Husserl and Bertrand Russell, reframing his philosophy within the two poles of the "Linguistic Turn". By closely examining Eliot's unpublished and only recently published essays and notes, the thesis unearths probable connections between Eliot's own philosophical interests and his later poetics, redefining his legacy as a prototypical modernist poet, and suggesting a new framework of study for scholars and students of literary modernism.

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.

Middlemarch is the novel at the centre of this thesis. George Eliot's writing, and Middlemarch in particular, is the paradigm of what has come to be known as Classic Realist fiction. In reading Middlemarch, it seems, one is introduced to a fictional world. The characters are psychologically complex, and they are presented with moral and social problems which are created and discussed with subtlety and intelligence. Until recently, critical assessment of Middlemarch has focussed on evaluation of Eliot's achievement in just these terms. The thesis begins with a question, how, and indeed is it possible for a novel to depict a fiction in this way? The introductory chapter proposes an answer to this question which opens the way to a radical critical appraisal of the status of Middlemarch as a psychologically realistic novel. The scope of the thesis is in one sense very narrow: it is on the ways in which George Eliot creates the moral psychology of her characters, and the ways in which she develops and sustains our interest in their motives, their emotions and in general their mental states and processes. My suggestion is that the language Eliot uses is deeply coloured by her commitments in the Philosophy of Mind. The argument will be that in order to take Eliot's fiction to be psychologically realistic, we are committed to sharing her unacceptable philosophical presuppositions. The second chapter of the thesis is a discussion of Eliot's novella The Lifted Veil. This is an odd piece of fiction, both technically and in subject matter. It does not fit easily into the Eliot canon, and until recently it has received little attention. The purpose of Chapter Two is partly to redress that balance but more to diagnose Eliot's philosophical commitments. The eerie fantasy of unnatural mind-reading reveals Eliot's ideas in a very explicit way. My suggestion is that in the struggle to make this fantasy coherent, a picture of the mind emerges which is both seductive and ultimately nonsensical. Narrow as the focus is, the arguments to establish my point take us deep into Wittgenstein's later Philosophy. The fundamental insight of Wittgenstein's work on the philosophy of mind was that in order to understand how it is possible to talk meaningfully about mental states and processes, we must resist the seductive, ultimately nonsensical picture seemingly imposed upon us by the grammar of ordinary psychological remarks. And if those arguments are thought to be convincing, the thesis has important negative implications for at least one important perennial question in the philosophy of aesthetics. The starting point of this thesis takes seriously the idea that novelists can, and ought to, examine themes of deep human significance. The larger goal of this piece of work has been to open up a line of enquiry which might examine, from within the Analytic tradition in philosophy, the extent to which that task is feasible. I have sought to establish an important connection between the creation of the moral psychology of fictional characters, and Wittgenstein's later work in the philosophy of mind. I believe that the examination I have conducted of the way issues in the philosophy of mind, especially those treated in the Philosophical Investigations, bear on the way Eliot writes places much of the psychological language of Middlemarch in a new light, and discloses certain quite general limits on what is possible in creating fictional minds.

Ce travail est un condensé d'une dizaine d'années de recherches dont le dénominateur commun a été l'histoire des idées en Grande Bretagne au moment où la modernité s'éprouve dans le modèle de la société industrielle et où des tentatives se sont ébauchées pour sortir du relativisme et du matérialisme ambiants. Son objectif principal, outre la synthèse de mes travaux, a été de formaliser certaines recherches et de poursuivre une interrogation originale sur le sens de l'idéalisme britannique. J'ai distingué trois grandes parties dans ce document qui recouvrent peu ou prou une exposition chronologique de mes travaux; mais ces parties ont également été construites avec le souci de mettre en évidence mon intérêt pour l'idéalisme britannique et l'impact de l'élaboration des théories de la connaissance. Le fil conducteur en a été l'évolution de mes idées concernant la discipline de l'histoire des idées.

Afin de mieux cerner les mécanismes qui régissent la pensée et l'acte, George Eliot donne naissance dans ses romans à des personnages qui semblent dans un premier temps préservés des aléas du hasard et de l'imprévu. A la suite de multiples éléments imprévisibles de changement, les personnages se retrouvent contrariés dans leur quiétude habituelle. Qu'ils l'approuvent ou non les personnages sont contraints d'agir. Ce n'est qu'à ce prix qu'ils parviennent à se démarquer de la société à laquelle ils appartiennent. Leurs actes sont déterminés par le hasard, l'hérédité, leur milieu social mais aussi leur libre arbitre. Les personnages s'interrogent ensuite sur leur responsabilité quant à ce qu'ils ont volontairement ou involontairement entrepris. Ce sont précisément les conséquences de leurs actes qui confirment soit leur responsabilité ou leurs absence de reponsabilité. .
In order to reveal the mechanisms directing thoughts and acts, George Eliot presents characters in her novel which seem at first sight to be sheltered from the misfortunes of chance and the unexpected. Owing to numerous unpredictable causes of change, the peacefulness of the caracters'lives is disturbed. Whether they like it or not, they are forced to act. It is only at this cost that they are able to mark themselves out from the society they belong to. Their acts are shaped by chance, heredity, their social milieu and also their free will. Then comes the questioning of their responsibility with regard to what they have undertaken, deliberately or not. It is precisely the consequences of their acts which confirm t eir responsibility. .

Le problème de la relation a souvent été perçu par les lecteurs d’Eliot comme un manque de relations logiques, grammaticales, chronologiques, entraînant une difficulté à faire sens des poèmes. Ce manque perçu entraîne le lecteur à rechercher des relations dans la structure interne du poème ou dans le matériau intertextuel ou symbolique qu’il convoque. Il se confronte alors à une pratique intertextuelle bien particulière, non exempte d’une certaine forme de tromperie. La poésie d’Eliot fait jouer les relations syntaxiques, logiques et temporelles attendues. Cette poétique de l’indétermination met en déroute les tentatives de mise en relation logique. C’est pourtant l’ambiguïté de la syntaxe et cette poétique dialectique du paradoxe et de la non exclusion, qui rendent la lecture inépuisable. Le poète ne cesse de « parler » du problème de la relation. Il le met en œuvre et le travaille, instaurant une tension entre des dynamiques relationnelles qui s’opposent. La relation devient choc, collision. La logique du poème se fait autre, en appelle à la sensation autant qu’à la pensée. La relation déconstruit, elle devient porteuse tout en restant sous-entendue. T.S. Eliot n’a cessé, à travers sa poésie, de problématiser l’acte d’écriture lui-même. Il y apparaît comme un acte décisif, comme une mise en relation qui offre la possibilité d’une continuité tout en marquant une rupture. En donnant lieu au poème, le poète le relie à son extériorité même. Mais cette relation réinscrit en même temps la division au cœur du langage. La problématisation de ce rapport ambigu à l’écriture trouve à s’exprimer dans les relations établies entre des voix discordantes, entre le sujet et ses autres, et dans cette oscillation continue entre des positions discursives et métaphysiques en conflit. La construction du poème éliotien se fonde ainsi sur la possibilité même de sa déconstruction. Le poète offre des poèmes en déconstruction dans lesquels s’inscrit un sujet lui-même en perpétuelle dépossession de soi. Il ne s’agit pas, pour Eliot, de penser l’écriture, mais de se penser à partir de l’écriture. L’écriture est première. Elle est la condition même de la pensée de la relation qui s’élabore dans son œuvre
The problem of relation has often been perceived by readers of Eliot as a lack of logical or grammatical relations, which makes it difficult to understand his poems. This perceived deficiency causes the reader to look for relations in the very structure of the poem, in the texts the poem alludes to, or in the mythical structures it relies upon. The reader becomes aware of the singularity of Eliot’s sometimes misleading intertextual practice. The poetry of T.S. Eliot plays with and distorts syntactic, logical and temporal relations. His poetics of indeterminacy precludes any attempt to establish logical relations within the poems. Yet the very ambiguity of Eliot’s syntax and the paradoxical nature of his dialectical poetics make of reading itself an unlimited and unrestrained process. The poet constantly addresses the problem of relation. The problem itself is inseparable from the poetic idiom which gives it voice. It is explored along the lines of a tension between conflicting relational dynamics, creating a new logic which relies on sensibility as well as on thought and rationality. Relations deconstruct the poem; they are pregnant while remaining “hints half guessed”. Through his poetry, T.S. Eliot never stopped questioning writing itself. The act of writing results from a decision; it is an articulation offering the possibility of continuity while marking a rupture at the same time. By giving birth to the poem, the poet links it to its own exteriority. But such linkage also reiterates the division inherent to language itself. The problem of this ambiguous relation to writing is expressed through the relations established, within the poems, between discordant voices, between the subject and its masks, and through a constant oscillation between conflicting discursive and metaphysical stances. The construction of the poem thus relies on the very possibility of its deconstruction. Eliot offers poems in deconstruction in which the subject itself can only emerge through an act of self-dispossession. Eliot does not merely reflect upon writing through his poetry. Writing itself becomes the means of his own definition as a poet. Writing comes first. It is the condition of Eliot’s poetic exploration of relation

This thesis examines the traces of theological and broader religious discourses in selected works of three major twentieth-century poets. Each of the texts examined in this thesis encodes within its poetics a distinct, theologically derived conception of the ontological status of the self in relation to the Absolute. Yeats primarily envisions the relation as one of essential identity, Jones regards it as defined by alterity, and Eliot depicts it as dialectical and paradoxical. Critics have underestimated the impact on Yeats’s late work of his final and most sustained engagement with Indic traditions, which issued from his friendship and collaboration with Shri Purohit Swami. Though Yeats projected Theosophical notions on the Indic texts and traditions he studied with Purohit, he successfully incorporated principles of Classical Yoga and Tantra into his later poetry. Much of Yeats’s late poetics reflects his struggle to situate the individuated self ontologically in light of traditions that devalue that self in favor of an impersonal, cosmic subjectivity. David Jones’s The Anathemata encodes a religious position opposed to that of Yeats. For Jones, a devout Roman Catholic committed to the bodily, God is Wholly Other. The self is fallen and circumscribed, and must connect with the divine chiefly through the mediation of the sacraments. In The Anathemata, the poet functions as a kind of lay priest attempting sacramentally to recuperate sacred signs. Because, according to Jones’s exoteric theology, the self must love God through fellow creatures, The Anathemata is not only circular, forming a verbal templum around the Cross; it is also built of massive, rich elaborations of creaturely detail, including highly embroidered and historicized voices and discourses. Critics have long noted the influence of Christian mystical texts on Eliot’s Four Quartets, but some have also detected a countercurrent within the later three Quartets, one that resists the timeless even as the poem valorizes transcending time. This tension, central to Four Quartets, reflects Eliot’s engagement with the dialectical theology of Karl Barth. Eliot’s deployment of paradox and negation does not merely echo the apophatic theology of the mystical texts that figure in the poem; it also reflects the discursive strategies of Barth’s theology. The self in Four Quartets is dialectical and paradoxical: suspended between time and eternity, it can transcend its own finitude only by embracing it.

Les poètes du début du vingtième siècle sont inquiets : hésitant entre idéalisme et matérialisme, liberté et déterminisme, création et évolution, ils errent dans une « zone » idéologique. Dans les premiers textes de Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961), T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) et Hart Crane (1899-1932), le désarroi est permanent. Il s’incarne sous différentes formes, du dédoublement de personnalité à l’extrême lassitude, tandis que l’ombre et un vent de fin du monde envahissent les poèmes. Les positions des poètes varient entre nihilisme, incertaines tentatives de syncrétisme et ironie mordante. Pourtant, passé leur première jeunesse, ils reconnaissent que leur inquiétude n’est pas une donnée personnelle mais un fait d’époque, peut-être même le fait essentiel, sur le plan de la pensée, de l’époque dite moderne : c’est « l’âge de la comparaison », selon les mots de Nietzsche. Ils renoncent alors à exprimer la singularité d’une vision individuelle, originale, voire bizarre, pour « rentrer dans le monde ». Rompant nettement avec les objectifs littéraires du symbolisme, ils entendent désormais devenir « la conscience de l’époque », exposer les idéologies incompatibles qui s’y côtoient, faire l’inventaire de ses contrastes. Dans le premier tiers du vingtième siècle, l’inquiétude idéologique est le mobile qui engage les poètes à redéfinir leur fonction dans la cité et l’un des grands moteurs de l’innovation esthétique : cubisme, simultanéisme, dialogisme et lyrisme épique. C’est ce parcours dont nous espérons dégager la cohérence et les principales étapes
At the beginning of the XXth century poets were unsettled : hesitating between idealism and materialism, freedom and determinism, creation and evolution, they wandered in an ideological « waste land ». In the early works of Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961), T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) and Hart Crane (1899-1932), distress assumed different forms: from split personality to extreme weariness. The poets’ positions bounced between nihilism, half-hearted attempts at syncretism and bitter irony. As they matured, they recognized however that their restlessness was not a personal matter but a product of the times, perhaps even the main feature, on the level of thought, of the so-called modern times : “the age of comparison”, in Nietzsche’s words. They then renounced to express the singularity of an individual, original, even bizarre vision, and chose to “go back to the world”. Breaking with the literary goals of symbolism, they aimed at becoming the “conscience of the times”, at exposing their conflicting ideologies, and at listing their contrasts. In the first third of the twentieth century, this ideological restlessness pushed poets to redefine their role in the city. It was one of the most powerful forces behind aesthetic innovation: cubism, simultaneism, dialogism and epic lyricism. In this study, we will examine the coherence and main stages of this process

Connections between George Eliot and Immanuel Kant have been, for the most part, neglected. However, we have good reason to believe that Eliot not only read Kant (as well as many who were directly influenced by Kant), but substantially agreed with him on critical and moral issues. This thesis investigates one of the issues on which Kant and Eliot were most closely aligned, the need for duty in morality. Both the English novelist and the German philosopher upheld a vision of duty that could command absolutely while remaining consonant with human freedom and grounding a sense of moral dignity. This vision runs throughout the works of both writers, but is first developed and takes on a particular urgency in the works examined in this thesis, ranging from some of their early publications to Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and Eliot’s Romola. The first chapter discusses duty in the wider context of debates about Divine Command Morality, in which the good is defined by its accord with the will or command of God, and which both Kant and Eliot resisted in formulating their own moral visions (while maintaining the language of law and command). This chapter also discusses evidence we have for Eliot’s familiarity with Kant and establishes critical context for this paper. The second chapter discusses religion – in particular, religious enthusiasm – as a necessary background for duty, which exists in the absence of theological certitude, even as it seeks to preserve something of religion’s capacity to command and its popular scope. Kant’s path to the first Critique led through works foundational for, but also sometimes at odds with the priorities and conclusions of critical science, and Eliot’s first novel was preceded by a critical career that paints a quite different picture of religion than the sympathetic portrait of Dinah Morris. The third chapter deals with three dimensions of duty in Kant and Eliot, autonomy, reflection and respect, primarily through Kant’s second Critique and The Mill on the Floss. In the conclusion, I turn to Romola to illustrate the conflict and indeterminative power inherent in this conception of duty.

Ng, Chak Kwan.
Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2009.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 132-136).
Abstract also in Chinese.
INTRODUCTION
The Necessity of Being Performative:
the Cases of William Wordsworth and T. S. Eliot --- p.1
Chapter CHAPTER ONE --- "Context, Literary Events and the Institution of Literature" --- p.12
Chapter CHAPTER TWO --- Individualism: the Invention of Romantic Subjectivity in William Wordsworth --- p.50
Chapter CHAPTER THREE --- Subjectivity in Crisis: the Invention of Modern Subjectivity in T. S. Eliot --- p.90
"Conclusion ""Change More Than Language"": The Acts of Poetry" --- p.127
WORKS CITED AND BIBLIOGRAPHY --- p.132