Browsing by Subject "philosophy"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Imagining the Mediterranean: Disruption and Connectivity in Medieval Iberian Tales of the Sea
    (2013-06) Parmley, Nicholas
    Despite the importance of the Mediterranean Sea, much literary scholarship of the twentieth century has fixed its gaze on the ports and hinterlands that mark only the beginning and end of maritime travel. My research responds to this lacuna by investigating medieval tales of the sea and seafaring produced by authors of the diverse linguistic and confessional communities that inhabited the Iberian Peninsula in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. These historical groups not only thrived on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, but many of them braved its depths, in turn creating complex networks of cultural exchange. And as the authors and subjects of these texts adhered to different faiths and wrote in several languages, the tales they tell reveal not only the rich cultural heritage of the Mediterranean, but a complex space of cross-cultural contact and exchange. Real or imagined, the tales these authors tell are of importance to our understanding of a diverse people and a rich cultural heritage of the Mediterranean. Written in Hebrew, Arabic, and Romance, by and for kings, clerics and exiles, the authors whose work I explore reveal a space of constantly shifting geographical boundaries, political frontiers, and religious identities. But before the protagonists of their tales arrive at port, wreck into land, or are swallowed by the sea, each entices us to consider their point of view, a perspective from amidst the tumultuous waves. I hope to demonstrate through a reading and examination of these texts, both individually and together, how the Mediterranean offers us a reorientation of critical perspective which expands the traditional national literature approach of Spanish Studies to include aspects of Jewish and Arabic history and literature, as well as the contingency of discrete cultural production that cannot be erased by an overgeneralized category of "the Mediterranean." A such, I hope to show how Iberia, as a space of multiplicity, may be viewed as emblematic of Mediterranean Studies as currently articulated. Thus we may explore how Iberian cultural production participates in--and is a product of--a more broadly conceived and shared Mediterranean space of cross-cultural contact and intellectual exchange.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Res Oralis: Mouths of Philosophy
    (2018-05) Gyenge, Andrea
    This dissertation returns to Jacques Derrida’s 1975 essay, “Economimesis,” to rethink the place of the mouth in modern philosophy. In contrast to existing scholarship, which links the mouth to the corporeal challenge of the body (either as a symbol for the feminine or the vessel for the voice), my research proposes that the mouth is fundamental to the legacy of humanism in continental thought. Retrieving Derrida’s early interest in the mouth, my project argues that “Economimesis” situates the mouth as absolutely unique, which is to say, the revelation of Kantian aesthetics is that the mouth occupies a fundamentally different place in Western metaphysics, a place that is not subject to the logic of either anatomy or metaphoric substitution. In retrieving this insight, my dissertation argues that “Economimesis” delivers a rather devastating diagnosis—that the mouth is the accomplice of a humanist philosophy born of the logocentrism bolstered by Kant’s aesthetics, a legacy I trace from Kant to Marx to Freud to stake a claim for its extraordinary longevity. In tracking this trajectory, I argue that the mouth operates as the primary figure through which modern philosophy makes a claim about the ontology of the human, a being rendered distinct from the animal on the grounds of its capacity to take its own life as the object of its productive (i.e., aesthetic) work. Rather than concluding, however, that the mouth is irretrievable, I pursue the thread of ‘other’ mouths—mouths not subject to this logic— in the work of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Jean-Luc Nancy and Luce Irigaray in order to begin challenging the humanist oralities of Western metaphysics.