50 research outputs found

    Provably Secure Cryptographic Constructions

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    Beckett through Kant: a critique of metaphysical readings

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    This thesis calls upon ideas from Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason to disrupt readings of the plays and prose of Samuel Beckett predicated upon metaphysical presuppositions. The Introduction focuses upon such presuppositions in the criticism of Martin Esslin. In Chapter one, substantial passages of Kantian exposition are given to prepare the ground for a parallel between Kant's critique of metaphysics and those Beckett texts examined through Chapters One, Two, Three and Four. In this first chapter, the limits which Kant places on possible knowledge are compared to the frustrations imposed upon the investigative duo of Beckett's Rough for Theatre II. Chapter Two considers Krapp's Last Tape as a parody of both Proustian and Manichaean metaphysical profundities. Chapter Three examines the consequences of staging the fabrication of a recognizably `Beckettian' image of the human condition in Catastrophe. Chapter Four engages with the textual specifications of The Lost Ones via an ‘immanent' method of analysis, in opposition to `transcendent' or allegorical readings capable of promoting themes of metaphysical import. Chapter Five marks a turning-point in the thesis. It investigates why analysis of The Lost ones should prove as troublesome as it does in Chapter Four. As a response, it details Beckett's efforts toward narrative ‘indetermination' and links this process to the equally troublesome `noumenon of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Chapter Six reassesses the parallels drawn between Beckett and Kant thus far. The paradoxes and flat contradictions contained in Chapters One to Four provide the materials for Chapters Six's re-appraisal of the main thesis pursued here, that a critique of metaphysics can be found in Beckett's works analogous to that supplied by Kant. A secondary thesis is that a tendency toward self-defeat during such an interpretation is inevitable. The Conclusion reassesses this contention

    Samuel Beckett and the primacy of love

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    This study is about the central place of the emotional world in Beckett's writing. Stating that Beckett is 'primarily about love', Dr. Keller makes a radical re-assessment of his influence and immense popularity. The book examines numerous Beckettian texts, arguing that they embody a struggle to remain in contact with a primal sense of internal goodness, one founded on early experience with the mother. Writing itself becomes an internal dialogue, in which the reader is engaged, between a 'narrative-self' and a mother. Keller suggests that this is Beckett's greatest accomplishment as an artist: to document a universal struggle that allows for the birth of the mind, and to connect this struggle to the origin, and possibility of the creative act. This study integrates highly readable discussions of psychoanalytic theory, as well as clinical examples. It will be of value to scholars and readers of Beckett, and anyone interested in his place in literature and culture

    Samuel Beckett and the primacy of love

    Get PDF
    This study is about the central place of the emotional world in Beckett's writing. Stating that Beckett is 'primarily about love', Dr. Keller makes a radical re-assessment of his influence and immense popularity. The book examines numerous Beckettian texts, arguing that they embody a struggle to remain in contact with a primal sense of internal goodness, one founded on early experience with the mother. Writing itself becomes an internal dialogue, in which the reader is engaged, between a 'narrative-self' and a mother. Keller suggests that this is Beckett's greatest accomplishment as an artist: to document a universal struggle that allows for the birth of the mind, and to connect this struggle to the origin, and possibility of the creative act. This study integrates highly readable discussions of psychoanalytic theory, as well as clinical examples. It will be of value to scholars and readers of Beckett, and anyone interested in his place in literature and culture

    (En)gendering Romanticism: A Study of Charlotte Bronte\u27s Novels

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    Through her writing, Charlotte Bronte takes issue both with the masculinist assumption of Romanticism and the limitations of the conventional woman\u27s novel. Bronte was drawn to Romanticism for its elevation of subjectivity, the poet\u27s creative imagination, and emotional intensity, as well as its representation of the questing spirit in pursuit of self-definition and transcendence. She also appreciated the Romantics\u27 recognition of the limits of expression and the fields of interpretation opened up by the lack of fixity which is emphasized by Romantic irony. Yet, writing as a Romantic also presented an obstacle to Bronte as a woman writer, for the poets who shaped the literary movement wrote from a male perspective which excluded women from the center of the Romantic experience. Nevertheless, Bronte succeeded in synthesizing her Romanticism and her feminism, her individualistic spirit, and social conscience by infusing the Romantic spirit into the heroines of her novels. Tracing the development of her writing by marking the progression from the juvenilia to the novels demonstrates that Bronte advances as both a Romantic and a woman writer. The key to this double advancement is the evolution of the Bronte heroine. Women in Bronte\u27s novels are not the passive mirror image of the male found in Romantic poetry but a female version of the Romantic hero. Bronte\u27s feminized Romanticism emerges over the course of her writing. She commences with the assumption maintained by the literary attitude of the early nineteenth century, that only a male voice could articulate a Romantic perspective. Though, from the outset, she adopts a male guise for writing, her female voice is heard through her heroines, and the female point of view becomes more pronounced with each succeeding work. Ultimately, Bronte\u27s Romanticism and feminism merged in a synthesis that engendered a new range for the novel, as well as Romanticism

    "The Fashion of Playmaking": Cloth in Middleton's City Comedy

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    This thesis focuses on the dramatic uses of cloth within the works of the playwright Thomas Middleton (1580-1627). In a developing urban setting within which cloth enjoyed increasing cultural significance, the evolving London cloth trade augmented Jacobean dramatists’ material lexicon. The individual and collaborative efforts of Thomas Middleton reveal a particularly dense amount of references to foreign and domestic cloth, cloth merchants, and the overall cloth trade. This project examines in detail how cloth functioned as a tangible center around which Middleton could build a common frame of reference, creating a conduit for social content and commentary. Five Middleton city comedies are discussed (two are solely authored by Middleton, three are collaborative works), based on their density of cloth references, as detailed in an appendix. These plays are: The Patient Man and the Honest Whore (1604), Michaelmas Term (1606), Your Five Gallants (1608), The Roaring Girl (1611), and Anything for a Quiet Life (1621). This project works to demonstrate how a cloth-centered analysis allows for fruitful discussion of expectations, inconsistencies, tensions, and boundaries during the early modern period. This thesis explores the tension surrounding the expectations of patient masculinity in a commercial setting in Chapter One, the contradictory nature of a social system based on unreliable visual markers in Chapter Two, the inconsistency-generated identity of the prodigal gallant of display in Chapter Three, the tension generated by unconventional display and malleable gender expectations in Chapter Four, as well as the shifting perceptions of England’s cloth trade in a post-Cokayne climate in Chapter Five. This project endeavors to show how a focused literary analysis of cloth specifically can further advance current scholarship, allowing for increased insight into the early modern perspective in matters such as identity, gender, and commerce

    The Birth of Energy

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    In The Birth of Energy Cara New Daggett traces the genealogy of contemporary notions of energy back to the nineteenth-century science of thermodynamics to challenge the underlying logic that informs today's uses of energy. These early resource-based concepts of power first emerged during the Industrial Revolution and were tightly bound to Western capitalist domination and the politics of industrialized work. As Daggett shows, thermodynamics was deployed as an imperial science to govern fossil fuel use, labor, and colonial expansion, in part through a hierarchical ordering of humans and nonhumans. By systematically excavating the historical connection between energy and work, Daggett argues that only by transforming the politics of work—most notably, the veneration of waged work—will we be able to confront the Anthropocene's energy problem. Substituting one source of energy for another will not ensure a habitable planet; rather, the concepts of energy and work themselves must be decoupled

    Writing, Medium, Machine: Modern Technographies

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    Writing, Medium, Machine: Modern Technographies is a collection of thirteen essays by leading scholars which explores the mutual determination of forms of writing and forms of technology in modern literature. The essays unfold from a variety of historical and theoretical perspectives the proposition that literature is not less but more mechanical than other forms of writing: a transfigurative ideal machine. The collection breaks new ground archaeologically, unearthing representations in literature and film of a whole range of decisive technologies from the stereopticon through census-and slot-machines to the stock ticker, and from the Telex to the manipulation of genetic code and the screens which increasingly mediate our access to the world and to each other. It also contributes significantly to critical and cultural theory by investigating key concepts which articulate the relation between writing and technology: number, measure, encoding, encryption, the archive, the interface. Technography is not just a modern matter, a feature of texts that happen to arise in a world full of machinery and pay attention to that machinery in various ways. But the mediation of other machines has beyond doubt assisted literature to imagine and start to become the ideal machine it is always aspiring to be. Contributors: Ruth Abbott, John Attridge, Kasia Boddy, Mark Byron, Beci Carver, Steven Connor, Esther Leslie, Robbie Moore, Julian Murphet, James Purdon, Sean Pryor, Paul Sheehan, Kristen Treen
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