Browsing by Subject "epistemology"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
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    I'Ve Got A Bad, Bad Feeling: Epistemology And Affect In Literary Studies
    (2020-04) Fairgrieve, Amy
    This dissertation intervenes on an ongoing conversation in literary studies about the connection between literary-critical epistemology—what constitutes knowledge in literary studies?—and literary-critical affect—what subjective emotional experiences do our interpretations produce? Starting from the work of critics like Rita Felski, Lisa Ruddick, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, all of whom take one particular epistemological assumption—the assumption that texts harbor ideological underpinnings that must be exposed—and connect it with a set of similar affective outcomes—paranoia, suspicion, etc.—I intervene on the critical conversation by moving beyond a focus on ideological critique. Literary criticism is broader and more varied than critique, and the many types of assumptions we find there about literary knowledge help shape the affective possibilities of the field. Using the work of Ann Radcliffe, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, and Thomas Carlyle, I consider connections between objectivity and certainty, social critique and pleasure, intellectual rigor and nostalgia, and accumulated knowledge and neurosis. This dissertation proceeds from the assumption that literary texts meaningfully theorize about what literature is and how we should read and interpret it, and therefore brings major works by each of the above-cited authors to bear on a contemporary critical conversation. In taking on a broader range of epistemological assumptions and their counterparts in primary literature, I both include more of the kinds of work being done in literary studies today and push against the assumption that a simple modification of literary studies’ central methodological practices will necessarily solve problems of negative affect.
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    Things Fall Apart: Decapitation and the Quest for Certainty in Early Modern English Literature
    (2022-05) Price, Laura
    This project considers the motif of decapitation in Early Modern English literature as an embodied metaphor for the quest for certainty. By investigating decapitation as a physical manifestation of the disintegrative and reintegrative process of the quest’s narrative structure, this project examines how Early Modern authors use the motif of decapitation as a way to work out, through an embodied metaphor, what it means to face, wrestle with, and ultimately come to terms with uncertainty. The texts that form the basis for this study include: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Sir Philip Sidney’s Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, and William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. The recurrence of decapitation in these texts emphasizes the physicality of the knower and the physical dimension of the effect that knowing has on the knower. By associating the disintegrative and reintegrative nature of the quest for certainty with decapitation, these authors insist on an intimate relationship between the physical and the intellectual, the embodied experience and the epistemological process. Ultimately, this project contends that the consistent restoration of head and body is indicative of an Early Modern desire to find stability in the midst of upheaval, while remaining honest about the limitations of that stability.