Feeling Better: The Therapeutic Drug in Modernism

This project argues that by reading first-person accounts of drug intoxication in European modernism, one can uncover qualitative structures that broadly inform the modernist experience of space, time, language, desire, and embodiment. Evidence for this systematization of subjective experience appears in the early twentieth-century movements of phenomenology, existentialism, psychoanalysis, and even structural linguistics. In addition to their systemic approach to subjective experience, however, these movements also insist that some form of psychic or existential discomfort is inherent to modern experience, and all of them engage in a marked attempt to address this pain therapeutically. Thus while modernist thought conceives of experience within a certain set of qualitative structures, it also aims to alleviate the pain that these structures conversely make possible. By reading the first-person accounts of Jean Cocteau, Aldous Huxley, and Walter Benjamin, I argue that representations of drug intoxication reveal the extent to which European modernists draw upon similar qualitative structures when giving form to their experiences. More specifically, I argue that it is by moving incrementally toward death while stopping short of it that the modernist subject achieves a therapeutic experience through drug intoxication. This method of palliation ultimately reveals that in modernist thought, the subject is located on an experiential spectrum spreading from the pole of discrete, reflexive consciousness to the utter non-being of death. In the interest of exploring this spectrum, I read Cocteau, Huxley, and Benjamin’s work through the theory of Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Martin Heidegger

ON THE EXISTENCE OF BRUNO LATOUR'S MODES

In this article I take a critical look at the origins and sources of Bruno Latour's pluralism as it is expressed in his book AN INQUIRY INTO MODES OF EXISTENCE, and compare it to other similar projects (Wittgenstein, Feyerabend, Badiou). I consider the accusations of reductionism and of relativism, and demonstrate that Latour's «empirical metaphysics» is not an ontological reductionism but a pluralist ontology recognising the existence of a plurality of entities and of types of entities. Nor is it an epistemological relativism but an ontological pluralism affirming the existence of a plurality of types of existence. These two strands, pluralist ontology and ontological pluralism, mutually reinforce each other to produce at least the outlines of a robust pluralist realism

Objectless sleep experiences. A phenomenological investigation of a rare group of conscious experiences

In this thesis, I investigate a cluster of sleep phenomena that I classify under the name of “objectless sleep experiences”. By drawing upon descriptions from Indo-Tibetan philosophical traditions, I examine a subgroup of conscious sleep states characterised by the apparent absence of an object of awareness. Some authors describe these experiences as “objectless” or “contentless” inasmuch as they lack awareness of anything; they are states of just consciousness. Here, I consider the construct of objectless sleep awareness to involve a broader range of experiences characterised by the absence of a distinct object of awareness. While they may appear to lack content to the subject, they are not completely devoid of representational content. Despite the growing interest in these states within philosophy of mind, dream and sleep research, there is a significant lack of theoretical work examining this experience. Additionally, most of the descriptions of such a state found in the literature rely highly on anecdotal reports or second-hand sources. This thesis aims to address this gap by presenting the results of two empirical studies that systematically and rigorously collect subjective reports of objectless sleep awareness. Furthermore, I examine current proposals found in the literature characterising a subset of objectless sleep awareness as “lucid”. Lastly, I propose a framework to guide future research on objectless sleep experiences, linking them to associated experiences during both sleep and wakefulness. This framework aims to articulate the similarities and differences among various sleep and waking phenomena, including objectless sleep awareness

Extreme narration in Mahler’s late adagios

The symphonies of Gustav Mahler continually inspire analyses that invoke terms and concepts from narrative theory. Yet little work has been done on the particularities of Mahler’s narrative idiom. Instead, analysts tend to use narrative theory for interpretation of individual movements, or to situate Mahler’s works within a particular historical context. Seth Monahan’s (2015) recent work on narrative and sonata form in Mahler’s earlier symphonies represents one counterexample, but only addresses a small portion of Mahler’s entire output. Mahler’s Adagio movements remain a particularly noticeable gap in the literature. This dissertation offers an examination of Mahler’s Adagio narratives, with particular emphasis on his late stylistic period (1908-1911). As Mahler’s music moved from a reliance on codified formal schemes towards a more discursive style in his late music, the Adagio took on greater importance within his symphonies. But these less clearly defined movements challenge traditional notions of narrative. I view Mahler’s late Adagios through the lens of unnatural narratology, a strand of literary theory that focuses on strange or aberrant texts, and articulates narrative strategies that go beyond realist or mimetic norms. Chapter 1 positions musical narrative as an intersubjective phenomenon through three theses and a brief analysis of Mahler’s song “Der Einsame im Herbst.” Chapter 2 articulates a theory of extreme narration in music by adapting ideas from unnatural narratology to the analysis of music. Chapter 3 outlines prototypical narrative strategies in what Margaret Notley (1999, 2007) has called the Adagio genre—as Mahler inherited it. The final two chapters each present an analytical essay on one of Mahler’s late Adagios. Chapter 4 analyzes the finale of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony as an example of what Byron Almén and Robert Hatten call tropological narrative (2013). Finally, Chapter 5 analyzes the first movement of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony as an example of what narratologist Brian Richardson calls denarration (2006).Musi

Linguistic change in a nonstandard dialect: phonological studies in the history of English in Ireland

It is not my aim to write a unified history of the English language an Ireland, since this has already been undertaken elsewhere (e.g. Hogan 1927; Bliss 1977,1979; Barry 1982). Rather I wish to concentrate on several specifically phonological developments which allow us to disentangle the competing but sometimes complementary influences exerted by Irish, English and Scots on Hiberno-English (henceforth HE). This emphasis reflects an attempt not only to chart the historical developments in greater detail than has been done hitherto but also to contribute to our theoretical understanding of phonological change. For various reasons the focus is for the most part on northern HE. For one thing, a detailed history of southern HE is already available (Bliss 1979). Secondly, much of my own research has been undertaken in the north, particularly while I was working on the project Sociolinguistic variation and linguistic change in Belfast M Milroy et al 1983). Most importantly, however, northern HE with its mixed linguistic heritage offers a rich and relatively untapped source of data for investigating the extent to which dialect contact may be implicated in phonological change. Despite the emphasis on northern HE, I draw on comparative material from southern dialects throughout the following pages. It is often remarked that, in contrast to the relative homogeneity of southern BE, the linguistic situation in the north of Ireland is quite varied (e. g. Adams 1977: 56). In fact Adam (1973) finds it convenient to recognise at least seven basic northern varieties spoken in an area with a population of just under two million. This diversity is in part a reflection of the complex interaction of Scots and English influences in the north, in addition to the contribution of Irish which has left its mark to varying degrees on all types of HE. It is the Scots element in particular that distinguishes much of northern from southern BE. Almost everything that has ever been written on HE stresses the supposed effects of Irish Gaelic contact with English on its development. I take up this issue in a treatment of HE consonant phonology in Chapter 3 and give it more detailed attention elsewhere in a discussion of the growth and structure of the HE verb phrase (Harris 1982). Although this is clearly an important area, it has been much discussed and it is not my intention to go over the sane ground here. Rather the focus in this thesis is on two other aspects of language contact in the north of Ireland. Firstly, I examine the linguistic developments that have arisen from contact between the typologically divergent phonological systems of English and Scots dialects. Secondly, I attempt to isolate several changes which reflect contact between nonstandard HE and modern standard British varieties. In Chapter 1 I describe the main types of northern HE that can be identified according to the different ways in which the tensions between English and Scots influences have been resolved. The conditions of contact are in many ways similar to those that obtained in the early stages of British settlement in North America. It therefore comes as no surprise to discover close linguistic parallels between certain United States and Canadian dialects on the one hand and northern HE on the other. These similarities also reflect the fact that the major British colonisation of Ireland was roughly contemporary with that of. North America. Hibernian and American dialects of English display many common seventeenth-century features which have since been lost from standard British varieties. The tension between Scots and English influences in northern HE manifests itself most clearly in the area of vowel phonology. Some dialects display a typically English system in which vowel length is phonemic. That is, in these varieties it is possible to identify one subsystem of inherently long vowels and another of inherently short vowels. In characteristically Scots dialects, on the other hand, vowel length is to a large extent phonetically conditioned. Between these two types lies a range of 'mixed' dialects which show varying degrees of compromise between phonemic and positional length. The diffusion of the English and Scots length patterns across different dialects, vowels and phonological environments can be expressed in term of implicational hierarchies which I set up in Chapter 2.I also examine the phonetic facts which can plausibly be said to deternine the order of segment-types on the hierarchies. In Chapter 3, Iattempt a partial. reconstruction of the internal history of the urban HE vernacular spoken in Belfast. By inspecting present-day sociolinguistic variation for signs of change in progress and checking the results against historical records, it is possible to identify the main phonological developments that have occurred over the last century or so. Comparative material from the city's rural hinterland dialects and from the descendants of the original British source dialects allows us to chart the continuing competition between English and Scots linguistic features. It is also possible to offer a fairly clear picture of the sorts of adaptive change that have been taking place in the vernacular as a result of contact with external standard norms. Thanks to its conservative nature, HE provides the historical phonologist with an invaluable store of archaic patterns of distribution which were once current in Early Modern English but which have since disappeared from standard varieties. Through direct observation of this material it is possible to gain new insights into some of the well-known problematical issues of English historical phonology. One of these, which I take up in Chapter 4, concerns the fate of Middle English (ME) /6: / (as in meat) in Southern Standard English. According to some interpretations, it merged with ME /a: / (as in mate), only to reseparate and undergo merger with ME /e: / (as in meet). Belfast Vernacular is one of several modern dialects in which these vowels remain three-way distinct. Comparative reconstruction of the changes that have produced the current reflexes in these dialects contributes to our understanding of what might have happened to M /ɛ:/ in the Southern Standard. In addition, the results have a bearing on the wider issue of the sorts of strategy that can be : implemented to avoid merger during chain-shifting. In Chapter 5,1 examine the other side of the coin. I identify different ways in which phonological merger is achieved and suggest how these might be modelled in terms of rules and representations. I take up the issue of falsely reported mergers and discuss some of the theoretical and methodological implications. It is a commonly held belief that there is a general trend towards dialect convergence in English as a result of the standardising pressures exerted by universal education and the media. However, recent sociolinguistic work suggests that, while old rural dialects may be in decline, diversification is continuing in recently evolved urban vernaculars (see Labov 1972a: 324; 1980a: 252). A survey of the changes that have affected Belfast Vernacular over the last 120 years or so does indeed confirm that a degree of standardisation has taken place. However, this has been restricted for the most part to the lexical incidence of phonemes. At the phonological level, almost no major structural alignment with Southern Standard English has taken place. Indeed, evidence from change in progress suggests that sane internal innovations are actually moving in directions which run counter to standard norm

Bakhtin’s theory of the literary chronotope: reflections, applications, perspectives

This edited volume is the first scholarly tome exclusively dedicated to Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the literary chronotope. This concept, initially developed in the 1930s and used as a frame of reference throughout Bakhtin’s own writings, has been highly influential in literary studies. After an extensive introduction that serves as a ‘state of the art’, the volume is divided into four main parts: Philosophical Reflections, Relevance of the Chronotope for Literary History, Chronotopical Readings and Some Perspectives for Literary Theory. These thematic categories contain contributions by well-established Bakhtin specialists such as Gary Saul Morson and Michael Holquist, as well as a number of essays by scholars who have published on this subject before. Together the papers in this volume explore the implications of Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope for a variety of theoretical topics such as literary imagination, polysystem theory and literary adaptation; for modern views on literary history ranging from the hellenistic romance to nineteenth-century realism; and for analyses of well-known novelists and poets as diverse as Milton, Fielding, Dickinson, Dostoevsky, Papadiamandis and DeLill

The development of phrasal verbs in British English from 1650 to 1990: A corpus-based study

Phrasal verbs or particle verbs are one of the most idiosyncratic features of the English language, as well as of other Germanic languages, such as German or Dutch. They pose many problems for non-native speakers, because their meanings have to be learned separately from the meanings of their verbal bases (give vs. give up), given that the union of the two elements of the compound (the verb and the particle) very often gives rise to new non-compositional forms very similar to idioms. This dissertation tackles some of the questions concerning the nature of phrasal verbs. First, I intend to delimit the concept of phrasal verb as conceived of in Present-day English. One of the topics often discussed in relation to this category is precisely that of the difficulty of establishing the boundaries between phrasal verbs and other related categories. Second, I aim at filling a gap in the literature of phrasal verbs by carrying out a corpus analysis of the development of these structures in the recent history of English, more precisely between 1650 and 1990. After comparing the recent history of phrasal verbs with their status in earlier stages of the language as described in the literature, a third aim of the present dissertation is to establish a relationship between these structures and the processes of grammaticalization, lexicalization and idiomatization. For these purposes, data have been extracted from several sources, in particular from ARCHER 3.1 (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers), although many illustrative examples, especially those involving Present-day English combinations, have also been obtained from the BNC (British National Corpus) or the Internet. Recurrent use has also been made of several dictionaries of English, most notably the Oxford English Dictionary, as well as dictionaries specialized in phrasal verbs and related structures

Lost Languages of the Peruvian North Coast

This book is about the original indigenous languages of the Peruvian North Coast, likely associated with the important pre-Columbian societies of the coastal deserts, but poorly documented and now irrevocably lost Sechura and Tallán in Piura, Mochica in Lambayeque and La Libertad, and further south Quingnam, perhaps spoken as far south as the Central Coast. The book presents the original distribution of these languages in early colonial times, discusses available and lost sources, and traces their demise as speakers switched to Spanish at different points of time after conquest. To the extent possible, the book also explores what can be learned about the sound system, grammar, and lexicon of the North Coast languages from the available materials. It explores what can be said on past language contacts and the linguistic areality of the North Coast and Northern Peru as a whole, and asks to what extent linguistic boundaries on the North Coast can be projected into the pre-Columbian past