A Journey of Spectacle between London and Shanghai: (An)Other Hermeneutics of Spectacle

This thesis is aimed at exploring a different interpretation of the spectacle. The existing literature is based on Situationism and the Frankfurt School’s interpretation within which the society of spectacle is demonstrated to not only visually encapsulate the subjects in an enchanting commodification but also restrict the perceptual experiences to regular boredom through such repetitive and exclusive rendition. This criticism rests on a Hegelian and Marxist reading and suggests that the alienating and un-lifelike phantasmagoria of commodification haunts people's daily lives and subjugates the personal struggle that emancipates the subject from being reified in alienation to being unitary in intimacy. The dialectical negation imposed upon the spectacle is challenged in this work by a divergent hermeneutics, which relocates the spectacle in an epistemological complex drawing inspiration from Bataille’s general economy of excess expenditure, Foucault/Deleuze's genealogy, Benjamin's historiography, Barthesian semiological analysis, and Baudrillard’s hyperreal simulacra. Illuminated by this different hermeneutics, the spectacle is rather a kind of unproductive expenditure, which is heterogeneous to dissipate the excess restrictively exuded from the homogeneous mechanism of production in utility as irreducible to realistic production. Thus, the society of spectacle is not negative to the productive mechanism but inhabits it to have incapacity wherein an unreserved play of images is restricted by utility and territorialised fragmentarily by different political-sociological milieus to prohibit the channel of excess towards an unconditional expenditure as an unruly and destructive torrent. The solution is to blur and transgress the restriction, rather than negate it, whereby to fuse the prohibited and the allowed in restriction as a visual hybridity of incompatibilities. Then, a journey of spectacle between London and Shanghai is a concrete method of substantiating this visual fusion as an experiential and incommensurable distribution that drifts between different spatiotemporal fragments on the surface of multiple images. This optical disparity is not restricted to a bourgeois-ruled phantasmagoria but transgressive to uncover time flow to recollect and merge the hidden and accursed heterogeneities outpoured from revolution

Oppositions in Arabic proverbs : a lexicosyntactic perspective

Human beings are claimed to have a strong tendency for structuring their thoughts in terms of binary oppositions (Lyons, 1977). Binary oppositions, both canonical and non-canonical, have cross-linguistically been shown to perform textual functions in language and discourse (Jones, 2002; Davies, 2012; Hsu, 2015; Akşehirli, 2018, among many others). This study examines the discourse functions of oppositions in a dataset of oppositional pairs extracted from a collection of Arabic proverbs. Drawing on a synergy of Jones’s (2002), Davies’s (2012), and Hassanein’s (2018) syntagmatic typologies of antonymy and opposition, it tests the synergised typology on the dataset to quantify and exemplify the discourse functions of opposition therein and prove the interactivity of the syntactic environments. The study has shown ancillary opposition to be the preponderant function with far higher frequency distributions than the remaining ones. Two functions logged in Classical Arabic discourse (Hassanein, 2018) have also been logged in proverbial discourse. One function is subordination (one opposite is hypotactically appended to another) and the other is case-marking (both lexemes play oppositional case roles at syntactic and semantic levels). The analysis has also shown that the syntagmatic classification replicated in this study validates former classifications across languages, most notably English, Swedish, Japanese, Chinese, Serbian, Romanian, Turkish, and Persian. It has also been revealed that the syntactic frames of co-occurring oppositions play significant roles in proverbial categorisation and conceptualisation and support the argument that proverbs tend to pattern cultural units and schemas into parallel structural frames

Hostility or tolerance? Philosophy, polyphony and the novels of Thomas Pynchon

This thesis undertakes a systematic, tripartite analysis of the interactions between the fiction and essays of Thomas Pynchon and the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault and Theodor W. Adorno, resulting in a solid set of original reference-material for those undertaking work on Pynchon and philosophy, or more generally on philosophico-literary intersections. Premised upon the notion that Pynchon's literature harbours a fundamental hostility to much systematizing philosophical thought, this work avoids a dominating imposition of philosophy, or an application of philosophical thought as a validating Other, by examining those aspects of Pynchon's work that seem ill at ease with, or aggressive towards, aspects of each philosopher's thought. This is explored through the concept of an intra-textual polyvocality and relational situation of philosophical intersection; when Wittgenstein is cited, for instance, who is speaking and what are the connotations of that placement? I do not propose, therefore, a Wittgensteinian / Foucauldian / Adornian Pynchon, but rather explicitly highlight excluded aspects of thought to instead develop a complementary reading; a form of intersubjective triangulation. This polyvocality is examined from a univocal perspective. The specific conclusions of this work re-situate Pynchon, in many cases against forty years of critical consensus, as a quasi-materialist or at least anti-idealist, a regulative utopist and a practitioner of an anti-synthetic style akin to Adorno's model of negative dialectics. In a broader sense, it answers the questions regarding hostility towards philosophical thought in Pynchon's work by demonstrating that no single philosophical standpoint has yet to totally resonate with even one of his novels. Simultaneously, it also shows that a profitable approach can be found in the spaces of philosophical overlap and divergence

An outline of English lexicology

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Reconstructing word order in Proto-Germanic: A comparative Branching Direction Theory (BDT) analysis of Old Saxon

286 p.Tesi honen helburua germaniar hizkuntza guztiek amankomunean daukaten arbasoaren hitzordenaberreraikitzea da. Horretarako orain arte egin diren saiakerekin zerikusia duen eta aldiberean berritzailea den hurbilpena egiten du autoreak: Adarkatze Norabide Teorian (BranchingDirection Theory) (Dryer, 1992) oinarritutako ikerketa da. Teoria hau hitz-ordenaren unibertsaltipologikoen inguruan egindako ikerketaren ondorioa da. Gainera, erabiltzen diren datuetatikasko oso gutxi aztertutako germaniar hizkuntza batetik atereak dira, sajoiera zaharretik, hainzuzen ere. Emaitzek orain arteko ikerketaren aurkikuntzak hobetzen dituzte

Pynchon and Philosophy

Pynchon and Philosophy radically reworks our readings of Thomas Pynchon alongside the theoretical perspectives of Wittgenstein, Foucault and Adorno. Rigorous yet readable, Pynchon and Philosophy seeks to recover philosophical readings of Pynchon that work harmoniously, rather than antagonistically, resulting in a wholly fresh approach. Dr. Martin Paul Eve is a lecturer in literature at the University of Lincoln, UK. In addition to editing the open access journal of Pynchon Studies, Orbit, he has work published or forthcoming in Textual Practise, Neo-Victorian Studies, C21, Pynchon Notes and several edited collections. This book was originally published with exclusive rights reserved by the Publisher in (2014) and was licensed as an open access publication in [SEPTEMBER 2021] under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license if changes were made. This is an open access book

Nature in the books of seven metals – Ǧābirian corpus in dialogue with ancient Greek philosophy and Byzantine alchemy –

The Ǧābirian corpus was a receiver of ancient Greek ideas and, at the same time, a source of knowledge for the later Greek-speaking world, in particular for medieval Byzantine alchemy. Both aspects are explored in the dissertation with respect to the notion of nature. After a general introduction to the Corpus and the sciences described in it, particular attention is devoted to a Byzantine anonymous text, The Work of Four Elements, which was probably influenced by the Ǧābirian Books of Seventy. These texts exemplify how, in the theory of the Ǧābirian science, things are constructed from four natures (hot, cold, moist and dry), the balance of which defines what a thing is. By changing the balance of natures, one can transmute any metals into gold that is perfectly proportioned in terms of natures. Ǧābir presents the art of dyeing metals gold in the Books of Seven Metals which, along with chrysopoetic recipes, also include medical recipes and theoretical contents such as the theories of four humours, properties, and talismans. Moreover, Ǧābir postulated a substrate that does not change in itself and continues to exist when natures move in and out of things. Such primary existence is called the fifth nature as an additional principle to the four natures. This key concept for the Ǧābirian theory, which has been underexplored so far, is discussed through the textual and critical analysis of various unedited sources: the Books of Seven Metals and the Book of the Fifth Nature. This study confirms that the fifth nature was probably derived from ancient Greek philosophical concepts such as the Empedoclean particles, the Aristotelian fifth element and the Stoic pneuma. Thus, this research indicates the importance of the Ǧābirian corpus both in the history of alchemy and the history of philosophy

Oppositions in News Discourse: the ideological construction of us and them in the British press

This thesis seeks to explore textually instantiated oppositions and their contribution to the construction of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in specific news texts. The data consists of reports of two major protest marches taken from news articles in UK national daily newspapers. The aim of the thesis is to review and contribute to the development of existing theories of oppositions (often known as ‘antonyms’), in order to investigate the potential effects of their systematic usage in news texts and add an additional method of analysis to the linguistic toolkit utilised by critical discourse analysts. The thesis reviews a number of traditional theories of opposition and questions the assumption that oppositions are mainly lexical phenomena i.e. that only those codified in lexical authorities such as thesauruses can be classed as true opposites. The hypothesis draws on Murphy (2003) to argue that opposition is primarily conceptual, evidence being that new ones can be derived from principles on which opposition is based. The dialectic between ‘canonical’ and ‘noncanonical’ oppositions allows addressees to process and understand a potentially infinite number of new oppositions via cognitive reference to existing ones. Fundamental to the discovery of co-occurring textually-constructed oppositions are the syntactic frames commonly used to house canonical oppositions, which, this thesis argues, can trigger new instances of oppositions when used in these frames. I conduct a detailed qualitative analysis of textually constructed oppositions in three news articles, and show how they are used by journalists to positively and negatively represent groups and individuals as mutually exclusive binaries, in order to perpetuate a particular ideological point of view. The final section is an examination of how critical discourse analysis studies into the construction of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in news texts can be enhanced by a consideration of constructed oppositions like those explored in the thesis