Browsing by Subject "Subjectivity"
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Item Open Access "Am not I your Rosalind?": Ovidian Identity and Transformation in Shakespeare's "As You Like It"(2008-12-01) Liu, Aileen"'Am not I your Rosalind?': Negotiating Ovidian Identity and Transformation in Shakespeare's As You Like It" argues that the theatrical self-masquerade, that rare and uniquely Shakespearean moment in which a character explicitly plays a version of him or herself onstage, is an ideal site to explore the intersection of language, identity, and transformation. The self-masquerade foregrounds the intimate relationship between language and subjectivity, by enabling characters to fruitfully exploit language in order to imagine, stage, and enact their own identity constitution and transformation. Although many Shakespearean characters participate in disguise-making, only Rosalind (As You Like It) and Prince Hal (1 Henry IV) have the linguistic and imaginative capabilities to perform a self-masquerade. While the disguise relies upon overtly donning a costume or otherwise changing one's appearance to conceal a "true" identity, the self-masquerade does not feed off of the ignorance of others to generate the power and persuasiveness of its fiction. Just as the audience must participate in the fiction-making that occurs whenever they enter the space of the theater, the self-masquerade draws other characters onstage into its imaginative circle as active participants. The self-masquerade is not initiated by a simple announcement, nor indicated by a mere change in clothes, but instead must be perpetually enacted through language. Engaging with Jacques Lacan, Lynn Enterline, Stephen Greenblatt, Stanley Cavell, Valeria Finucci, Stuart Hall, Garrett Sullivan, Jean-François Lyotard and others, I argue that As You Like It goes beyond Shakespeare's earlier work to suggest that everyone has the capacity, via the self-transformative and self-constitutive power of speech, to enact genuine agency over their self-constitution and self-transformation as they like it.Item Open Access Beautiful Annoyance: Reading the Subject(2011) Ozierski, Margaret AliceThis dissertation examines the pair subject-subjectivity embedded in the problematic of the end of art, as it is figured in exemplary fashion by film and literature. The analysis examines critically the problem of the subject vis-à-vis subjectivity by opening a dialogue that allows the necessary double terms of this discussion to emerge in the first place from the encounter with selected filmic and literary texts: Jacques Rivette's La belle noiseuse and Samuel Beckett's Film, The Unnamable and The Lost Ones. These texts are analyzed on an equal footing with the thought of Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Gianni Vattimo, Giorgio Agamben, and Gilles Deleuze who have written on both subjectivity and art. The study thus proposes a real movement - in terms and through art - that treats the metaphor of anamorphosis on the level of praxis: the image of subjectivity appears on the screen that is the filmic or literary text as the result of a passage in terms. The subject that emerges at the end of the analysis puts in perspective a certain practice of metonymic reading as renewed political potential of subjectivity.
Item Open Access Contemporary Hermeneutic Philosophy and Theological Studies.(Religious Studies, 1985-12-01) Maddox, RLItem Embargo Haunted by the Other Life: Choice and Subjectivity in U.S. Economics and Fiction, 1870-1920(2023) Benack, CarolinThis dissertation argues that the American conception of individuality underwent a significant cultural and intellectual revision between the 1870s and 1910s, which laid the groundwork for what would eventually become the neoliberal individual. Where the individual of liberalism was primarily characterized by Property ownership, the last few decades of the 1800s witnessed an increase in efforts to tie individuality to choice-making. The narrative that began to gain prominence in the 1870s was the story of an individual carefully assessing its desires and, through its choices, directly expressing these wishes to the world. This association between choice and the individual did not mean that Property ceased to matter as a category; rather, Property became so fundamental an assumption that its origins––at least to some parts of the population––ceased to require an explanation.I trace this shift from property-owning to choice-making individuality through the two genres of writing that, since the advent of modernity, have consistently articulated what it means to be the subject of capitalism: economics and the novel. Neoclassical economics famously introduced the rational, utility-maximizing individual to the discipline in the 1870s, which would come to be a highly influential narrative in the quantitative social sciences of the twentieth century. As Chapter One shows, this development in economics was paralleled by an increase in novelistic depictions of self-interested decision making as ethical, which constitutes a marked departure from the sentimental logic of earlier nineteenth-century literature. This narrative did not go unchallenged, however: Economists and novelists from Thorstein Veblen to W.E.B. Du Bois pointed out that choice-making individuality is only a believable narrative for those who fit the White middle-class mold. As I show in Chapter Two, “The Conditioned Individual,” novelists like Theodore Dreiser and Edith Wharton, as well as Veblen and the institutional economists he inspired, depicted social milieu is the primary determinant of tastes and desires. As such, they argued, what one ostensibly wants does not amount to an authentic expression of self. Du Bois and his fellow African American novelists, we see in Chapter Three, mount an even more fundamental critique: the Property presupposed by the choice-making individual, they demonstrate, relies on a long-standing practice of expropriating a racial Other. Along with Pauline Hopkins and Sutton Griggs, Du Bois shows that sharecropping and Jim Crow legislation established a social order in which Black self-ownership remained tenuous, thus reinforcing a dividing line crucial to White identity, namely the one between the Propertied and the Unpropertied. Hopkins’s, Griggs’s, and Du Bois’s insistence on the importance of Property in the White imaginary suggests that at least one reason for the rising popularity of the choice narrative in the late nineteenth century was that it served to conceal the deep reliance of Whiteness on Property and its racial Other––a project particularly urgent in the wake of the abolition of slavery.
Item Open Access Stevens After Deleuze: The Effects of a New Ontology on the Problems of Poetics(2010) Eken, BülentGilles Deleuze's definition of the other as the expression of a possible world has introduced a novel ontological organization into philosophy. It makes possible the conception of a singular being which may be expressed by a potentially infinite number of possible worlds. This, in turn, has lead Deleuze to propound the idea of "a life," immanent and impersonal but singularly determinate, as different from the universe of subjects, objects, and the transcendence that appears as their concomitant. This study resituates Wallace Stevens in the ontological universe of "a life" as opposed to the common practice of associating him with the questions of subject, object, and transcendence. It observes that Stevens's poetry primarily invests the field of the other, which functions as the structure of the perceptible. The result is a poetry predominated by a yearning for the immanence of "a life," an outside, that escapes the limits of the subject and is "disappointed" with the function of transcendence, rather than being explained by them. The study argues that Stevens's poetry can be read as a dramatization, itself regulated by an affective charge, of the passion for an outside, which goes beyond the framework of subjectivity and "feels" the inhuman stirring beneath the human.