Exposing romanticism : philosophy, literature, and the incomplete absolute

The aim of this thesis is to present the fundamental philosophical positions of Early German Romanticism, focusing on the three following writers: J. C. F. Holderlin, Novalis, and F. Schlegel. Chapter 1 begins with an examination of the first-philosophical, or ontological foundations of Romanticism and discusses its appropriation and critique of the work of Fichte, arriving at an elucidation of Romantic ontology as an ontology of differencing and production. The second chapter looks at how epistemology is transformed, in the hands of the Romantics, and due to the attention they paid to language, semiotic theory, and the operations of irony in discourse, into poetology - a theory of knowledge, into a theory of poetic production. In the third chapter a confrontation between the philosophical positions of Romanticism and those of the main currents of German Idealism (Schelling, Hegel) is undertaken; through this confrontation, the essential trait of Romantic thought is arrived at, namely the thought of an incomplete Absolute, as opposed to the absolute as totality in Idealism. The final chapter considers the avenue left open by the notion of the incomplete Absolute, and the Romantics' chief legacy, namely the theory of literature; literature is thus seen as coextensive with philosophy, and analysed under three conceptual categories (the theory of genre, the fragment, criticism) which all betray their provenance from the thought lying at the core of Romanticism: the incomplete Absolute. Finally, in the conclusion a summation of this exposition of romanticism is presented, alongside a brief consideration of the relevance of the Romantic project in contemporary critical/philosophical debates

Der Zauberberg in philosophical, psychological and sociological contexts: an intertextual reading of Thomas Mann

Life, death, disease and Eros are themes of universal relevance that have been addressed in works of science, philosophy, literature and art throughout recorded human history. In the early 20th century, the unprecedented scale of human extermination during World War I necessitated the adaptation of old ideas to a new reality. This is manifest in the work of the German author Thomas Mann, whose developing ideas on life, death, disease and Eros are clearly apparent in his novel Der Zauberberg (1913-1924). Der Zauberberg is set at a Swiss tuberculosis sanatorium in the years leading up to World War I. The main protagonist, Hans Castorp, arrives at the sanatorium as a visitor and is subsequently diagnosed with tuberculosis. During his sanatorium stay, Castorp comes into contact with three pedagogic figures: Ludovico Settembrini, Leo Naphta and Mynheer Peeperkorn. These men represent various attitudes towards life, death, disease and Eros. The humanist Settembrini, for example, affirms life but is repulsed by Eros, disease and death; the Jesuit ascetic Naphta glorifies erotic suffering and death while denying life, and the coffee magnate Peeperkorn celebrates life and Eros – yet to a pathological extent. My thesis follows the dialogic clash between the views of these pedagogues, as well as their influence on Hans Castorp, and is divided into sections that relate these views to their sociological implications. After examining the nature of death, life and disease within the novel, I relate these to the novel’s portrayal of society. I follow this with an investigation of the connection between death, life, disease and Eros, and conclude by examining these themes within their sociological context in Der Zauberberg. The conceptions of life, death, disease and Eros in Der Zauberberg are largely borrowed, following Thomas Mann’s creative technique of “Montage”, which allowed him to incorporate themes, concepts, paraphrased passages and quotations from other thinkers into his own work. These borrowed ideas create a complexity of textual relationships that corresponds to the theory of intertextuality; accordingly, my thesis examines Thomas Mann’s novel from an intertextual angle. Although Der Zauberberg has been the subject of intensive, source-critical study, the newer field of intertextual theory has largely been ignored, notable exceptions being the analyses of Thomas Mann’s works by Barbara Beßlich, Claudia Gremler, Michael Maar and Franziska Schößler. These scholars have narrowed the original, prohibitively wide scope of intertextual theory to enable intertextual analysis of individual texts. Following their example, I limit my definition of the intertext to philosophy, sociology and psychology, specifically to the works of the philosopher-poet Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), of the philosophers and sociologists Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, and of the psychologist and sociologist Sigmund Freud. My analysis of Der Zauberberg identifies connections to the intertexts within the novel, and examines how clearly these are presented and what form they take. Most importantly, I investigate the heuristic impact of the novel’s intertextuality, that is, how the intertextual relationships in Der Zauberberg influence the reader’s interpretation of both the nature of life, death, disease and Eros, and their effect on culture in the novel

Theological Plunderphonics: Public Theology and the Fragment

In response to methodological vagueness in public theology, I construct a theory of the fragment that enables the public theologian to respond adequately to contemporary exigencies and appropriately to traditional self-understandings. After surveying four streams of public-theological thought (chapter one), I consider the debate between David Tracy (chapter two) and George Lindbeck (chapter three). The various observations of these three chapters give way to a suggested criteriology for public theology. I then turn to Paul Ricoeur (chapter four) and Walter Benjamin (chapter five) to assist in constructing a theory of the fragment (chapter six). The thesis defended by this dissertation runs as follows: by re-presenting the classics of their unique theological traditions as a montage-like collection of fragments, public theologians locate a means of navigating the various impasses in contemporary discussions of public theology

Model-Driven Engineering in the Large: Refactoring Techniques for Models and Model Transformation Systems

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is a software engineering paradigm that aims to increase the productivity of developers by raising the abstraction level of software development. It envisions the use of models as key artifacts during design, implementation and deployment. From the recent arrival of MDE in large-scale industrial software development – a trend we refer to as MDE in the large –, a set of challenges emerges: First, models are now developed at distributed locations, by teams of teams. In such highly collaborative settings, the presence of large monolithic models gives rise to certain issues, such as their proneness to editing conflicts. Second, in large-scale system development, models are created using various domain-specific modeling languages. Combining these models in a disciplined manner calls for adequate modularization mechanisms. Third, the development of models is handled systematically by expressing the involved operations using model transformation rules. Such rules are often created by cloning, a practice related to performance and maintainability issues. In this thesis, we contribute three refactoring techniques, each aiming to tackle one of these challenges. First, we propose a technique to split a large monolithic model into a set of sub-models. The aim of this technique is to enable a separation of concerns within models, promoting a concern-based collaboration style: Collaborators operate on the submodels relevant for their task at hand. Second, we suggest a technique to encapsulate model components by introducing modular interfaces in a set of related models. The goal of this technique is to establish modularity in these models. Third, we introduce a refactoring to merge a set of model transformation rules exhibiting a high degree of similarity. The aim of this technique is to improve maintainability and performance by eliminating the drawbacks associated with cloning. The refactoring creates variability-based rules, a novel type of rule allowing to capture variability by using annotations. The refactoring techniques contributed in this work help to reduce the manual effort during the refactoring of models and transformation rules to a large extent. As indicated in a series of realistic case studies, the output produced by the techniques is comparable or, in the case of transformation rules, partly even preferable to the result of manual refactoring, yielding a promising outlook on the applicability in real-world settings

What the Fuck is This?: Aesthetic Nature of Being or Ontology in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins

“What the Fuck is This?” examines the intersection of phenomenology and poetry arguing for an aesthetic nature of Being and focuses on how we know or experience the world instead of Cartesian absolutes. This subjective knowledge does not compete against objective knowledge but simply recognizes the use that poetic language has for communicating the subjective knowledge from experience of being as it unfolds for us. The major movements of the thesis focus on aesthetic objects, aesthetic intersubjectivity, and the aesthetic self. These are labeled “aesthetic” because a phenomenological methodology reveals a dialectic between that which is unfolding and that which is understanding such that the phenomenon is constructed as a unified and individual being. This construction is not a problem but is simply that which we have access to since we do not have immediate and absolute knowledge of a thing in itself as that would be a unification with said thing. Though this knowledge is not absolute, it is constructed from the unfolding of the thing itself and is therefore partial knowledge that builds to a more complete knowledge of the phenomenon. Whether the thing or being that is unfolding can be considered as an object, a subject, or even consciousness of a self, the aesthetic nature of being allows us to accept construction of being as an inevitable partial truth reflective of the way we exist in the world. This reality is further explained with Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poetry, notes, and letters as they shed light on the ability of poetry and language in general to communicate experiences and the partial truths of being that stem from them

A semiotic evaluation of musical meaning in the works of Igor Stravinsky : decoding syntax and markedness and prototypicality theory.

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN026379 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

The Persistence of Minimalism

The following work develops a new and general theory of minimalism – one addressing both its transhistorical and interdisciplinary dimensions, and capable of accounting for existing minimalism of every epoch and in every medium, while suitably open to embrace minimalist work yet to be created. To offer such a theory it is necessary not only to revisit the histories of minimalist practice and criticism, but also to consider its radical philosophical ground and implications. Hence its principal thesis – that minimalism exemplifies the persistence and facticity of the Real – grapples at once with the ontological heart of minimalist theory, and its practical instantiation through canonical as well as rarely considered examples. Divided into three parts, the first part addresses minimalism as the manifestation of particular aesthetic properties in relation to critical and theoretical trends. Since it becomes apparent that no single descriptive or theoretical account adequately frames minimalism, the discussion turns to the possibility of discovering a philosophical ground equally radical to the minimalist objects it addresses. The Real – an indifferent field of forces from which contingent entities are subtracted from within an irreversible temporal passage – offers precisely this radical continuum. Minimalism, by exposing the continuity between radical poiesis and an essentially quantitative understanding of Being, clarifies the indifferent persistence of the Real in every existential situation. Penetrating to the heart of this proposition, parts two and three respectively address minimalism in terms of its quantitative logic of Being – every exemplary subtraction from which is instantiated a type of existential calculation – and its exemplary aesthetic manifestation in terms of an existential transumption – a constructive poietic displacement by which minimalism renders itself maximally intelligible in terms of its objecthood and persistence. The work concludes with a typology which reorients and confirms the substance of the preceding argumentation