Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Literature|Philosophy'

Current readings of existentialism are overly negative. It is not without reason that existentialism has a reputation of pessimism preceding it, to the point that the uninitiated cannot help but picture beatnik poets chain-smoking by the first syllable of the name "Sartre." Existentialism, while a movement over one hundred and fifty years old, is often characterized in the light of the media popularity it was given in the decade following the Second World War--although much of the spirit of what is supposedly existentialism came more as a response to the First. The Great War brought with it devastation across Europe that it instilled a sense of malaise in an entire generation of survivors. In the face of such violence, one of the common responses was to wonder if there could truly be any sense of meaning or purpose to life. This movement, philosophically, was existentialism.

Existentialism as a movement is not a denial of meaning. That is the role of nihilism. Existentialism simply says there is no sense of predetermined meaning, and that, in a particular formation, we are verbs before nouns: "to be" rather than a being thing in any real sense. Of course, there is an obvious pessimistic reading of any text that bases its thought on the foundation that humans are existent before their essence—if there is no predetermined meaning in the world, there certainly is a possibility that there does not have to be meaning in the world at all.

The future of the study of existential philosophy in part depends on its continuing attractiveness to a new generation of scholars. One of the things holding existentialism back is the alienating effect it can have on people—in large part because of its perceived concurrence with negativity. The aforementioned lack of a predetermined essence can cause anxiety, angst or anguish depending on whether you ask Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger or Jean-Paul Sartre.

Sartre explains anguish as the realization of the possibility of our own negation. If we imagine ourselves on the brink of a cliff or precipice, we can look down into the depth below and realize that, at that moment, there is nothing to prevent us from throwing ourselves over the precipice to our death. Freedom from meaning also implies there is a sense in which we do not have to live by any prescribed rules, or even at all. It can be intimidating.

A positive reading could bring stability to an otherwise dizzying discipline. Existential philosophy and literature both would benefit from a reimaging of certain thinkers' approaches. What is needed is not a new reading to replace the old, but to supplement the accepted framework of understanding with serious alternative possibilities. In this prospectus, I intend to expand the traditional reading of existentialism.

I will offer differing interpretations of familiar texts in an effort to breathe new life into the texts themselves along with the discipline more generally. Existentialism can be freed from its trappings of negativity and pessimism. It is with this goal of liberation in mind that I seek to offer a new interpretation of the existential movement. If existentialism is liberated from negativity, that does not mean that more traditional interpretations are not possible, but rather that these common readings of a complex system of thought cannot define it.

My reading will be an attempt at an existential reading of existentialism. At its heart, this is an existential idea. Labeling, along with the idea that a past interpretation dictates a present or future condition, is inherently essentialist. Existentialism has been, in effect, "playing at" existentialism for too long, to use a Sartrean formulation. There is a sense in which the prevailing interpretations of the prominent texts are so ingrained in the public consciousness that any new scholarship takes them for granted.

My existential reading will try to be consistent and liberating. Because much of existentialism is a philosophy of freedom, it only makes sense that providing alternative readings and interpretations is good. In fact, this may be the only way to prevent essentialism from overtaking existentialism and unfairly making it something it was never intended to be.

After explaining the roots of joy in Camus and Nietzsche, I will seek to find this same idea in other existentialist writers and show how this concept can be used to varying degrees in Sartre and Kierkegaard. Both of these authors, through their texts and styles, allow for the possibility of joy as Camus or Nietzsche do.

Despite these differences, there is an essential similarity amongst these authors that both qualifies them to be considered "existentialist" and preserves the possibility of joy. This similarity is the emphasis all of them place on freedom. The same freedom that characterized the post-war malaise as a freedom-from—freedom from meaning—can also be a freedom-to—freedom to act. That action, moreover, is entirely determined by the self, independent of the constraint of essence. While freedom can be terrifying, it can also be uplifting.

Pigs is Pigs: The Ideology of Violence aims first to establish a theoretical framework whereby a model of Ideology can be apprehended, a model through which the phenomenon of violence can be—as it were—filtered. Relying heavily on the work of both Classical and Post-Marxist philosophers—from Engels to Žižek—the text attempts to describe a model for understanding Ideology that is underlined by two critical distinctions: firstly, that Ideology should be understood to constitute one’s more or less spontaneous relationship with a culture’s Symbolic Order, and, secondly, that one of Ideology’s most critical functions is to behave as an apparatus whereby the very meaning of an event or image can be suddenly fixed (if only ephemerally) amid the experience of phenomena’s unravelling along a metonymic chain of many possible meanings.

Thereafter, the text endeavors to consider the origins of what human beings consider to constitute “violent behaviors,” exploring both the biological and socio-cultural roots of violent phenomena through the research of experts such as Richard Wrangham, Sara Mathew, Adrian Raine, and Steven Pinker. This exploration culminates in a defense of the importance of differentiating violence from power, concluding with an interrogation of the sophisticated ways in which these two phenomena overlap and interact—fixing violence as a phenomenon that can be understood in terms of an ideological category, an elaborate psychosocial apparatus whereby consent for the use of force is manufactured by quasi-Foucauldian “regimes of knowledge.”

In other words, how is it that one comes to differentiate between the “freedom fighter” and the “terrorist”? What ideological mechanisms are in action at those points where there emerge disagreements as to whether certain actions are heroic or barbaric? Pigs Is Pigs makes the claim that such distinctions are in large part manufactured in the workshops of our ideas.

The dissertation looks beyond the dominant frames of Western epistemology and philosophy that largely determine the ways revolution and revolutionaries are conceptualized and remembered in modern society. Rather than focusing on historically grounded political projects that conform to a particular revolutionary doctrine, our focus will be on common people whose praxis posed, and still poses, an alternative to a social order premised on the separation and stratification of the commons and its people. The revolutionaries we will meet in these pages see through what we will unravel as the myth of separateness. They see through a mythic reality that veils people’s interconnections with each other, with the commons, and with the cosmos from which all life emerges. Their praxis touches this deeper reality.

To ground our discussion, we will look deeply at three flashpoints of revolt against the myth as it manifested itself in the liberal capitalist regimes of the 19th and 20th centuries: The Paris Commune of 1871, the student protests of 1968 in Paris and Mexico, and a self-immolation in protest of the Vietnam War that occurred in 1970. We will thread these flashpoints together to see how, despite the distance that separates these revolts in time and space, they illuminate an alternative way of being that stands in contrast to the atomized, competitive, and militant existence that is formed in the crucible of liberal capitalist empire. Threading these flashpoints together, we will begin to reconceptualize what is meant by success and failure, beginnings and endings. Though these revolts may end with defeat and death, the way of being that they touched continues on past their historical or biographical endpoint. Like the light from a dead star or from an extinguished candle, their revolution travels across space and across time waiting for the right conditions to manifest itself again in renewed praxis. Cultural production, particularly art and literature, will serve as our vehicle for illuminating this revolution and its continuations.

In the mid 1920s, reflecting the concerns of the "Sprachkrise ", Ludwig Wittgenstein and Franz Kafka composed writings deeply concerned with language's ability to express human thought. In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein attempted to draw the boundary of meaningful language. During the same period, Kafka developed his thoughts on language and ethics in his Oktavhefte. I compare these works, showing that they share an understanding of language as a domain bound within the physical world and incapable of expressing our spiritual being. Presenting itself as rigorous philosophical writing, Wittgenstein's Tractatus constantly reminds its reader of the limitations of its own logical and philosophical language by claiming itself to be "nonsense" and only a ladder the reader should climb and get rid of. Kafka, without constructing rigorous logical arguments, composed a critique demonstrating the unnaturalness of natural language and showing that its poetic nature lets language transcend its own boundaries.

Antipoetry, a form of poetry developed by the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra, instances a privileged example of a self-regulatory trait of the poetic genre which responds to poetry’s need to destroy itself in order to renew itself. This need reveals a structural mechanism or a logic of autoimmunity, which informs the possibility of language and, moreover, of all living beings.

Antipoetry’s departure from the Nerudean poetic tradition justifies the use of a colloquial language that also preserves and continues Neruda’s interest in opening a space for the “popular” in poetry. Against Neruda, Antipoetry also consciously repels romantic and heroic aesthetic principles and ideas.

Parra’s aesthetic principles, however, do not result solely from avoidance. Parra is a realist poet heavily influenced by physics. His poetry needs to mirror reality. The principles of relativity and indetermination play major roles in his poetic experimentations, and will come to the aid of Antipoetry’s need to create in times of censorship. Parra’s experiments with language are in large measure interpretations of the laws of physics. In this regard, his scientific realism is related to Gertrude Stein’s work. The poetry and poetics of the latter provides a touchstone and a constant reference in Autoimmunity in Antipoetry.

Like all artistic expressions during the Chilean military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, Antipoetry was forced to negotiate what could be said with what the poet wanted to say. The necessary negotiation that Parra’s poetry needed to undergo gave rise to many experiments with language, including systematic ambiguity, contestation of the authority of the author, and of his own authorial control over his poetry. The use of masks, the multiplication of referents, and the systematic use of contradiction name some of Antipoetry’s tools for obstructing the univocal determination of meaning.

Antipoetry’s systematic explorations toward the creation of a poetry that attempts to fight all forms of dogmatism nevertheless reaches a limit in its figuration of gender. Antipoetry’s gender politics makes concessions to a type of gender dogmatism (sexism and homophobia) that contradicts the antipoetic program and reveals an inherent fear of gender contamination that jeopardizes Antipoetry’s most fortunate aspects.

This thesis explores Derrida’s engagement with Plato, primarily in the texts “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials” and On the Name. The themes of participation and performance are focused on through an analysis of the concepts of mystery and metaxy (μεταξν). The crucial performative aspects of Plato and Derrida’s texts are often under appreciated. Neither author simply says what he means; rather their texts are meant to do something to the reader that surpasses what could be accomplished through straightforward reading comprehension. This enacted dimension of the text underscores a participatory worldview that is not just intellectually formulated, but performed by the text in a way that draws the reader into an event of participation—instead of its mere contemplation. On this basis, I propose a closer alliance between these authors’ projects than has been traditionally considered.