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This thesis examines diseases of the mind and brain as they were understood in early modern England, with a focus on the condition known to contemporaries as 'frenzy'. Frenzy was an inflammation of the brain which caused dramatic changes to mood, speech, cognition, and behaviour. It was understood to be capable of spreading throughout the whole person, disordering the reason, will, memory, and passions, as well as the organs, humours, and spirits. This thesis argues that it was the disease's wide reach within the body and the mind which made it a focal point in some of the most pressing debates of the day: debates about the nature of personhood, survival after death, free will, knowledge acquisition, religious truth, and individual accountability. It takes frenzy as an entry-point into these early modern debates, and shows how the disease variously prompted, served, and hindered the search for answers. Keeping bodies situated in the discourses which made them intelligible, and ideas situated in the contexts of their application, this thesis sits at the crossroads of the histories of philosophy, medicine, and culture. It seeks to integrate the insights of the older history of 'madness' into an approach informed by recent historical writing on 'embodiment', the 'senses', and 'emotion'. As such, it makes a new contribution to an ongoing interdisciplinary conversation about the changing relations between 'psyche' and 'body' in Western culture, both in the past and in the present.

Aiming to make an intervention in both emerging Slow Cinema and classical Trauma Cinema scholarship, this thesis demonstrates the ways in which the post-trauma cinema of Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz merges aesthetics of cinematic slowness with narratives of post-trauma in his films Melancholia (2008), Death in the Land of Encantos (2007) and Florentina Hubaldo, CTE (2012). Diaz has been repeatedly considered as representative of what Jonathan Romney termed in 2004 “Slow Cinema”. The director uses cinematic slowness for an alternative approach to an on-screen representation of post-trauma. Contrary to popular trauma cinema, Diaz’s portrait of individual and collective trauma focuses not on the instantenaeity but on the duration of trauma. In considering trauma as a condition and not as an event, Diaz challenges the standard aesthetical techniques used in contemporary Trauma Cinema, as highlighted by Janet Walker (2001, 2005), Susannah Radstone (2001), Roger Luckhurst (2008) and others. Diaz’s films focus instead on trauma’s latency period, the depletion of a survivor’s resources, and a character’s slow psychological breakdown. Slow Cinema scholarship has so far focused largely on the films’ aesthetics and their alleged opposition to mainstream cinema. Little work has been done in connecting the films’ form to their content. Furthermore, Trauma Cinema scholarship, as trauma films themselves, has been based on the immediate and most radical signs of post-trauma, which are characterised by instantaneity; flashbacks, sudden fears of death and sensorial overstimulation. Following Lutz Koepnick’s argument that slowness offers “intriguing perspectives” (Koepnick, 2014: 191) on how trauma can be represented in art, this thesis seeks to consider the equally important aspects of trauma duration, trauma’s latency period and the slow development of characteristic symptoms. With the present work, I expand on current notions of Trauma Cinema, which places emphasis on speed and the unpredictability of intrusive memories. Furthermore, I aim to broaden the area of Slow Cinema studies, which has so far been largely focused on the films’ respective aesthetics, by bridging form and content of the films under investigation. Rather than seeing Diaz’s slow films in isolation as a phenomenon of Slow Cinema, I seek to connect them to the existing scholarship of Trauma Cinema studies, thereby opening up a reading of his films.

Scholars and storytellers alike have deemed George MacDonald a great mythopoeic writer, an exemplar of the art. Examination of this accolade by those who first applied it to him proves it profoundly theological: for them a mythopoeic tale was a relational medium through which transformation might occur, transcending boundaries of time and space. The implications challenge much contemporary critical study of MacDonald, for they demand that his literary life and his theological life cannot be divorced if either is to be adequately assessed. Yet they prove consistent with the critical methodology MacDonald himself models and promotes. Utilizing MacDonald’s relational methodology evinces his intentional facilitating of Mythopoesis. It also reveals how oversights have impeded critical readings both of MacDonald’s writing and of his character. It evokes a redressing of MacDonald’s relationship with his Scottish cultural, theological, and familial environment – of how his writing is a response that rises out of these, rather than, as has so often been asserted, a mere reaction against them. Consequently it becomes evident that key relationships, both literary and personal, have been neglected in MacDonald scholarship – relationships that confirm MacDonald’s convictions and inform his writing, and the examination of which restores his identity as a literature scholar. Of particular relational import in this reassessment is A.J. Scott, a Scottish visionary intentionally chosen by MacDonald to mentor him in a holistic Weltanschauung. Little has been written on Scott, yet not only was he MacDonald’s prime influence in adulthood, but he forged the literary vocation that became MacDonald’s own. Previously unexamined personal and textual engagement with John Ruskin enables entirely new readings of standard MacDonald texts, as does the textual engagement with Matthew Arnold and F.D. Maurice. These close readings, informed by the established context, demonstrate MacDonald’s emergence, practice, and intent as a mythopoeic writer.

A philosophical and philological commentary on Cicero, first book of the Tusculan Disputations.

The exhibition “Spirits in My Studio” unveils the inventories of elements in human relationships and connections through collecting and transforming remnants left behind—admiration of an object combined with a presentation format that creates an immersive three-dimensional field to traverse. An acknowledgment and celebration of entropy, the exchange in human experiences elevates the process to both content and medium. Moreover, it creates active entanglements with genuine physical relationships with the artist, the making, and the audience.

Although Till We Have Faces (1956) was written late in C.S. Lewis’s life (1898-1963), during the peak of his literary renown, the novel remains one of Lewis’s least known and least accessible works. Due to its relatively ancient and obscure source material, as well as its tendency towards the esoteric, a healthy interpretation of the novel necessitates a wider look at Lewis’s life-long body of work. By approaching Till We Have Faces through the framework of Lewis and the corpus of his work, the reader can see two principal conflicts that characterize the work as a whole, and, more specifically, the protagonist Orual’s attempts at reconciliation with the gods. The first is Orual’s tension between rationalism and romanticism, as seen through the framework of Lewis’s The Pilgrim’s Regress and Surprised by Joy; the second is Orual’s perverted sense of love, particularly her affection for her sister Psyche, as understood through Lewis’s The Four Loves and The Great Divorce. By analyzing Orual’s resolution of these two conflicts, illuminated through Lewis’s other books, the reader can see the deeper themes hiding within Lewis’s “myth retold,” namely, the finitude of man and the inexpressibility of the divine.

This dissertation attempts to develop the beginnings of a new approach to understanding the significance of modes of thought marginal and/or external to those of the modern West. I call this approach an "anthropology of concepts" because it examines concepts and themes belonging to scriptural, "philosophical," and poetic traditions as concepts rather than, as normally happens in anthropology, in the context of social practices, historical events, or everyday life. I also call it this because it accordingly involves the close reading and interpretation of the written or oral texts in which concepts are articulated. Concepts, when treated this way, retain their capacity to bring about novel understandings of the real, and to engender thereby theoretical perspectives not attainable through more conventional interpretive means. Such an approach may be necessary if the humanities and social sciences are to continue to hold a critical perspective on a world so enclosed that gaining any distance from its basic schemes of thought has become extremely difficult.The present dissertation undertakes such an "anthropology of concepts" in order to elaborate what I intend to be a new theory of the psyche and consciousness. Popularly regarded as one of the founders of the New Age spirituality of the United States, Jane Roberts (1925-1984) was a "channel" (a kind of spirit medium) and visionary mystic who published in the 1960's and 1970's over twenty books that she understood to have been dictated or written through her by different spiritual beings, including one she called "Seth." Although these texts were crucial to the popularization of Western occult ideas about reincarnation, magic, and health that were at the heart of the New Age, Roberts's intellectual curiosity and background as an author of science fiction give her writings a speculative, intellectually reflexive, and even manifestly ontological tone that is reminiscent of certain mystical thinkers and that sets them apart from popular religious discourse. My engagement with Roberts' writings focuses, first of all, on the concepts she and her cohort of personalities articulated in the course of addressing what was for her the most pressing question raised by the decades she spent channeling: how could her experience during her trances of being herself and another self in the same instant of time be possible? Her answer was that such an experience--what she called "other-consciousness"--occurs not through language but when the subject sees itself in the non-sensory, mental images of dreams and the imagination. She was right in the sense that such images, as Jean-Paul Sartre makes clear in Psychology of the Imagination, allow two aesthetic figures or persons to appear as one. My argument is that her claim is significant for showing, surprisingly enough, that contrary to what French philosophy claimed for decades, the other can be brought into and made part of consciousness without being appropriated and consciousness therefore takes a radically altered form. The baseline consciousness of oneself, that is, changes from apperception to a consciousness of oneself as both oneself and another--and even of oneself as a plurality of selves. To make this point, I read concurrently with Jane Roberts' texts the work of Deleuze, showing that she raised in her own fashion some of the same questions about being, time, and the subject as he did, but that the strange context in which she thought led her to furnish significantly different--and now for us, novel--responses to them. Given that a subject that would be at once itself and another would also be both what it actually is and what it otherwise only could have been, I furthermore show how Roberts' work allows one to rethink the Deleuzean (and by implication deconstructive) understandings of the categories of actuality and possibility and another concept--time--to which they are integrally tied. The fact that her writings provide a basis for recasting the thought of such a comprehensive philosopher on matters this fundamental is an indication, I think, of the broad value an anthropology of concepts could hold for humanistic research.

The comfortable thought is over in our psychical relation to Percy Shelley and Sigmund Freud because the line of reasoning it invokes is chaotic, if only because trying to define psyche and history leads to chaotic conclusions, especially at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Shelley and Freud recognized this and were able to channel it into their art, myth, fable, allegory. The events of their lives, their History, produces itself from chaos (Freud writes across two World Wars, Shelley under the shadow of the French Revolution, Jacobin massacres and Napoleonic wars), which means its producer is chaotic, Divine Chaos, Miltonic Chaos, but chaos it still remains. There is no systematic order to their thought except that systematic order escapes all Thought, true thought, at least. Please bear this in mind when you read the confused pages that follow, which seek to tether chaos to coherence. Above all, this is an attempt to separate the wheat from chaff in Shelley and in Freud. Percy Shelley's psychological poetry speaks a language less heard than read; the opposite holds true for Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory. I argue that in order to hear Shelley and read Freud, it is necessary to first discover and then impose a grammatical architecture already present in their writings. Such mental scaffoldings occupy what Shelley calls Love, Freud, Eros. Each conceptual term demonstrates within and without its boundaries the same radical rebellion of thought: the sum of duty enjoined and buttressed by the artist's mind must always ruin the imaginary landscape, across and from which the mind imagines.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the differences between the Cupid and Psyche tale found in Lucius Apuleius's The Golden Ass and C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces, with particular attention to how Lewis created a didactic non-allegorical mythopoeic Christian fantasy work from the original possibly allegorical pagan myth. The thesis focuses on the development of the Cupid and Psyche myth in Apuleius's work, then draws comparisons to the significant differences Lewis makes in his own novel. Lewis's basic Christian beliefs, specifically in relation to mythology, are discussed. This thesis was conceived as there is very little critical work that focuses on Till We Haves Faces and no in-depth research done comparing it to the second century story upon which it is based.

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In this paper I intend to classify the modes of temporality and to place History within the Sciences of Spirit according to Edith Stein’s thought. Its specific treatment refers temporality and History to lays of the person (body, psyche, spirit). While the passives associations of immanent time correspond to corporal and psychic levels of the person, the historical succession is made possible by the intentions which derive from the spirit. And thus as history consists of a unity not reducible to conscious intentions, so the person is also a unity not entirely transparent to itself.