1,721,026 research outputs found
Richard Kandts Reisebericht "Caput Nili". Die Konstruktion moderner Identität im Raum des Anderen
No full textVocal Texts: Voice as productive obstruction in the early prose of Thomas Bernhard
No full textCan Thomas Bernhard’s prose be considered a contribution to the philosophy of the subject? In this thesis I consider whether the seductive power of Bernhard’s literary voice – its “Sprachsog” (Eyckler, 1995) – is also the cause of the texts’ interpretive difficulties. I explore how the desire for a voice can be produced by its recalcitrance, and whether “voice” marks a point of necessary failure for both the subject and interpretive reasoning.
In the title story of Thomas Bernhard’s 1978 collection of narrative fragments, Der Stimmenimitator, an impersonator is asked to give an imitation of his own voice. It is a challenge that defeats him and which brings the brief tale to an abrupt conclusion: “Als wir den Vorschlag gemacht hatten, er solle am Ende seine eigene Stimme imitieren, sagte er, das könne er nicht.” (S, 10) This self-reflexive catastrophe in which a voice speaks in order to acknowledge its failure to represent itself is the fundamental philosophical and literary problem of Bernhard’s prose. If speech is made possible by the rule-bound system of language, what it can never enunciate is its sonorous alterity – the necessary domain of non-meaning outside and prior to its own rational structure. The voice may provide the grounds for speech, but can itself never be adequately articulated.
“Voice”, therefore, can be thought of as the phenomenon that at once enables a representation yet also prevents it from achieving completion, since it is what can never be narrated by narrative. This self-obstructing but productive poetology of voice is crucial to an understanding of Bernhard’s development as a prose author in the 1960s and early 1970s. In close readings of Frost (1963), Verstörung (1967) and Das Kalkwerk (1970) I will explore the way Bernhard contests the knowledge claims of visually privileged reasoning – embodied by the narrators – by confronting them with the irrational excesses of voice, operative in his texts at the level of both form and content.
My analysis draws on three main theoretical bodies of work. First, I reference certain aspects of the debates on subjectivity and representation from early Romantic philosophy. Specifically, I see the Romantic concept of an Absolute produced by the positing action of articulation – a transcendent entity that can be spoken of but never spoken in language – as cognate with the pure surplus of the voice. Second, I draw heavily on Jacques Lacan’s concept of the “object voice”. For Lacan, voice is a partial aspect of the total sexual drive: it is productive of subjectivity precisely because it is detached from the subject, resonating as the promise of meaning in the objective terrain of the Other’s speech. Third, I make extensive use of Slavoj Žižek’s work which synthesises Lacan’s insights with the thought of certain German Romantic and Idealist philosophers.
My conclusions point towards a poetology of self-negation in Bernhard’s work driven by the constitutive impossibilities of the voice. It is in these negativities that I locate Bernhard’s early Romantic affinities, both aesthetic and philosophical: it is the doomed attempt of the voice to speak the Absolute as anything but partial that yet produces the Absolute in its negative mode as failure. I see this commitment to negativity and limitation as the paradoxical source of Bernhard’s boundless productivity
'Je pense, donc je suis les traces' : a literary and historical analysis of the enlightenment, modernity and detective fiction in French
No full textii, 25 leaves ; 29 cm. Bibliography: leaves 19-20. University of Otago department: French. "October 2006.
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Articulaciones de la Otredad: una Convergencia en la Obra de Neruda y Mistral
No full textThis thesis is mainly concerned with the cultural discourses in the literary works of two winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature: Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral. Their discourses are studied from the perspective of their articulation of “Otherness”, that is, women, nature and the ethnic subject. These are three elements that make up Latin American culture that speak from the margins. Using this perspective, it is possible, then, to redefine the relationship between these two poets and to identify the way in which they converge in their search for the Latin-American identity.
This study seeks to demonstrate that these two poets shared and defended an easily recognisable Hispanic American cultural discourse- a discourse that attempts to define Hispanic-American identity as a cultural phenomenon that is inherently different from those of Anglo America and Europe. This shared vision of culture occurred thanks to the socio-aesthetic trend offered by Modernismo, which led Mistral and Neruda to become conscious of their mission as Hispanic Americans, that is to say, to become artists from and within their own cultural backgrounds.
This notion of a characteristic Hispanic-American cultural discourse would continue until its consolidation in the Latin-American Boom.
Both Mistral and Neruda demonstrate that in Latina America the imposition of European culture resulted in the degradation of the Pre-Columbian culture. Furthermore, they maintain that the subjugation of Native-Latin-American cultures has been a conscious action by the dominant groups, first the Europeans and then the Mestizos. Nature is also presented as a victim of the same socio-political and cultural order. A third subaltern element emerges in their work: women. As a subject inserted in an overwhelmingly male-dominated society, the female individual has historically been at a disadvantage vis-à-vis men. Nonetheless and, because of the conjoining and dialogical relationship between these three elements, where subordination does not exist; a decentralization of androcentric Latina America societies takes place. Thus, an alternative discourse arises within the poets’ work.
When reconstructing the cultural practice of the subordinated subjects in the historic present, the poets arrive at a different way of positioning their discourse within the geopolitical- cultural space that is Hispanic America. This is an alternative discourse that emanates from a rationality that is different from the Western one, which gives shape to a “border thinking”.
The theoretical apparatus used in this investigation employs tools from different traditions: Cultural Semiotics, New Historicism, Ecocriticism, Post-Colonialism and Women’s Studies. Special emphasis will be given to the theoretical inputs of Latin American historians and philosophers such as Arturo Roig (Intercultural Philosophy), Enrique Dussel (Philosophy of Liberation), ("geopolitics"), Humberto Maturana and Walter Mignolo ("Border Gnosis").
The thesis is divided into three parts, each part comprises of two chapters:
First part: The presence of the Native people in Mistral and Neruda’s poetic works. Chapters I and II are concerned with the poets’ esthetic- ethical project through which they seek to legitimize the discourse of the ethnic subject in Hispanic America, and to position it in a dialogue of equality with the dominant Eurocentric discourses.
Second part: The legacy of the Native people: an alternative view of Nature in the poetry of Mistral and Neruda. Chapters III and IV deal with the manner in which Mistral and Neruda relate to the Latin American environment. Here I propose that the two poets reveal an ecological awareness emanating from their inherited Pre-Columbian cultural practice. They propose rescuing Nature, victimized by five centuries of Eurocentric ideology.
Third part: Deconstructing the colonial inheritance: the monolithic woman. A dialogue Neruda– Mistral. Chapters V and VI explore the different images of women that both Neruda and Mistral represent in their work, and the “articulation” of the female subject with the other subaltern subjects: Nature and Ethnic subject. The poets propose that women can and should be agents of their own speech, thus deconstructing the entire order imposed by a phallocentric ideology.
In conclusion, Neruda and Mistral’s holistic and socio-aesthetic discourse opens the horizon to multiple local stories, deconstructing the oneness of historiography’s meta-narrative, and the centrality of the European discourse and its hegemonic power. Therefore, the cultural, economic and political Hispanic American subordinated status, imposed by the West and the USA, counteracts with a Hispanic American “heterogeneous unity", a unity based on "intercultural dialogue" that takes place in this geo-cultural area. This entire project is consolidated during the Latin American literary movement called the Boom, when the Eurocentric discourse was fully decentralized and the Boom proclaimed the universality of every local narrative. During this period, Latin America emerges as a great geo-political-cultural “locus of enunciation”, with the tree of liberty and corn as its symbols
The Spectacle and the Witness: an Historical and Critical Study of Surveillance in Visual Culture from 1920 to 2008
Full text linkThis thesis engages with surveillance as a pervasive theme presented in several modes of modern visual culture and is approached with particular reference to Guy Debord’s theory of the spectacle. Through an historically contextualized analysis, I locate the centrality of surveillance in Western culture as a visual regime that institutionalizes spectacle. This is revealed in a number of prominent events between 1920 and 2008 that illustrate ethical shifts in the historical subject in which the presence or the absence of the witness becomes a meaningful consideration. Surveillance is thus linked inextricably to two main discourses regarding the spectacle and the witness, a theme that is expanded upon through the analysis of specific films and other representations of modern visual culture, including painting and television. The spectacle within our ocularcentric society has, as I see it, not enhanced the world so much as it has separated us from it, and has thus consistently obscured instances of moral reflection by the individual in the form of witness. I link this concept to the thinking of Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger and others.
Starting with the 1920’s, the progressive destruction of the witness has been exemplified in Western visual culture. The problems of detachment are derived in part from Anton Kaes’ reading of Ernst Jünger’s theoretical concepts of the development of a “second consciousness” produced by the camera, the new technical “evil eye”, and Michel Foucault’s reading of the “panopticon”. The thesis draws on Thomas Mathiesen's expansion on Foucault by revisiting “the viewer society”, further addressing the distancing effects of surveillance. The second section is devoted specifically to a discussion of the Holocaust through the analysis of selected “Holocaust films”. My analysis of these films centres on their relation to memory, representation and the distinction of the embodiment of pain beginning with the witness/ survivor. The over-arching concern of the final section of this thesis is with the digital transition in visual culture and the shift away from its tradition of conceptual and contextual materiality to what is now a predominantly Internet-based digital mode, conceptualized by Katherine Hayles' work on the “post-human”. As a result, I argue that this produces further distancing between the witness and the subject. From this I conclude that the further distancing between the witness and the subject has enabled the facilitation of what appears to be a society of surveillance, a society which, for ethical reasons, needs to reinstate the witness
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