Browsing by Author "Hall, Mark Webster"

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    "Repetition to the life" : liminality, subjectivity, and speech acts in Shakespearean late romance : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2008) Hall, Mark Webster
    One key debate in the critical reception of Shakespearean late romance concerns how best to approach the functionality of the dramatised worlds that constitute it. What I call ‘containment’ readings of late romance argue that the alternative realities explored in the plays – realities of miraculous revivals, pastoral escapes and divine interventions, – serve to affirm the inevitable return of extant power structures. Utopian readings dispute this, making the case that the political and existential destructurations exposed in these plays point toward a new orientation for the dramatic subjects they produce. With the aim of contributing to the debate between containment and utopian readings, I explore in this thesis how late romance produces its subjects. I interrogate the plays’ structures with the help of the anthropological model of the limen, which is shown to be a useful category through which to educe the meaningfulness of certain ritual sequences. The limen’s three phases – separation; limen; aggregation – are employed to make sense of the transitions that subjects undergo in the four plays studied: Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. To study the liminality of these plays is, I argue, to study how dramatic subjects are produced therein, guided by the fact that their language shares properties with ritual discourse. When studying this discourse the focus falls on that class of language which impinges most lastingly on subjects: performatives. How performatives function in late romance will show us how real the changes induced in liminal subjects are. I examine the four plays in turn and find that their performative language produces subjects in a limen-consistent fashion. Aristocratic subjects are first of all estranged from those discursive practices that nourish their identity; their subjectivities are then glued back together in the ritualised, emblematising language of the limen. The conclusion I draw from my interrogation of the liminal patterns uncovered is that the functionality of late romance is broadly consistent with containment readings; I claim to have extended such readings, however, in showing that Shakespeare’s dramatisation of the state’s return to power usefully exposes its logic and symbolic grammar.
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    To cognize X is to be X : predication, surrogacy, & the adoption of a truly sufficient ontic stance : a study in the metaphysics of various empiricist accounts of cognition, a tradition which includes Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, John Locke and (among others) Charles Dunbar Broad : a thesis ... presented to partially fulfill the requirements of a Master of Arts degree in Philosophy at Massey University
    (Massey University, 2003) Hall, Mark Webster
    When I cognize a substance do I thereby enter into a special relationship with this substance? It is tempting to say that I do. When I stone-cognize, for example, I seem to be related to the stone in a special way. But how do I best characterize this relationship? Do I cognize the stone directly? Is it given to me as it exists in the paddock? Can I be mistaken about this stone? Many philosophers are reluctant to say that the stone is available to me directly. They find that paddock-stones (and the like) are not the sort of things which comfortably (reliably) accrue to souls or minds. They bruit some third thing. This third thing stands between the cognizer and the mediate cognizeable. Aristotle, for example, suggests that when I stone-cognize it is not the stone itself in my soul, but rather the form of the stone. He proposes a sufficient condition for cognition which exploits immaterial form (thus): to cognize X is to have the form of X (devoid of its matter component) accrue to the soul. This model purports to uniquely characterize a cognitive episode. We vet the model. And, reaching aporia – given the rather blunt metaphysical resources endorsed by the Stagirite – ask for refinement. Thomas Aquinas superadds to the model. His cognitive sentences invoke esse intentionale forms. For Aquinas world items come in two flavours: natural and intentional. A natural stone is answered by the lapidary object sitting in the paddock. An intentional stone, however, is the stone which accrues to my soul whenever I cognize the lapidary object. Are the two stones stones? Yes, but clearly one of the stones is a stone in some nonstandard way. Does this not undermine the special connection? We next discuss early-modern empiricism. John Locke's surrogates are mental ideas. STONE* flags a Lockean idea. But it is not a simple. It should properly reduce to the likes of, say, ROUND* and WHITE*. Ontological problems however, linger. Is ROUND* round (WHITE* white)? Yes (and no). But how can a mental item be round? We ask the idea to reveal something of its simple cause. And move forward to a reasonably contemporary strain of empiricism, viz., sense-datum theory. This theory identifies immediate cognitive objects with appearances. I never cognize substances directly. I only cognize sense-data. I cannot be mistaken about these items. They are single-propertied logical objects. Theory, under close analysis, terminates in monism. Which result, we proffer, illuminates the paradoxical nature of cognitive surrogacy. Cognizeables must be their mother objects in a way which undermines standard reality. Cognition seems inextricably linked with predication.