Cade M Olmstead

This thesis explores the relationship between philosophy and the gothic affect by examining the ways in which each handles conceptions of truth, identity, and visibility. While philosophy's idea of truth has traditionally been conceptualized through the metaphorics of light and its power of disclosure, this thesis argues that a distinctly gothic conception of truth emerges with the arrival of Kant's philosophy. Kant relies on a method and notion of truth which is not predicated on light but shadow and the constitutive function of illusion in knowledge. The thesis aims to demonstrate the shadowy and apparitional nature of the Kantian transcendental imagination and how the fully speculative consequences of this move are developed in Hegel's philosophy. Whereas philosophy traditionally sought to exorcize shadow and illusion from its vision of truth, to an-aestheticize the role of imagination, the works of Kant and Hegel put the shadow and illusion to productive use in the endeavor towards truth. In comparing their respective employments of the shadow (qua truth), it is argued that Kant's framework remains in a tragic gothic mode while in Hegel's emerges a more ludic gothic conceptuality-a move that is regarded as a shift from a theory of representation to presentation. In Hegel, imaginative or figurative activity becomes central to the conceptualization of truth itself, and reason takes the form of a shadow-work. Some implications for literary criticism are examined and a close reading of visibility and reasoning in Bram Stoker's Dracula is conducted.

This paper seeks to make an assessment of the current political landscape with regard to the way comedy gets deployed as a form of political rhetoric and action. It begins with Alenka Zupančič’s analysis in 'The Odd One In' (2008) of G.W.F. Hegel’s developmental account of ancient Greek theatrical forms. The conclusion of comedy as a concrete universal is then expanded through reference to the performance theory of JeffreyC. Alexander. Attention is given to ineffective forms of comedy as political action, namely irony. The potential for a subversive form of comedy is identified and explicated through the 2013 Gezi Park Protests in Turkey. Key to this analysis is the way in which protestors responded to ridicule by state actors and sought to take up the epithet of “çapulcu” (looter) through comedic songs and other protest action. It is argued that oppressed actors came to seriously identity with the epithet by becoming looters of public space thus enacting a kind of concrete universal. Ultimately, the paper makes a call for a more rigorous form of political comedy, one that comes under the heading of a “serious comedy” in opposition to prevailing forms of irony today.