Browsing by Subject "Friendship."
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Item American modernism's fading flowers of friendship.(2013-09-24) Beck, Zachary.; Ferretter, Luke, 1970-; English.; Baylor University. Dept. of English.I examine friendships between major characters in modernist novels written by four American writers: Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway. My examination will reveal that the friendships they portray largely fail due to a symptom of modernism, namely that people cannot agree upon the purpose of a human being’s existence. If the purpose for human life, and therefore the criteria by which to judge whether a human life is lived well, are uncertain, then people cannot selflessly assist one another to live life well; this assistance lies at the heart of my definition of friendship, which I have adopted from Aristotle. The depiction of friendship by these four novelists indicate the immense difficulty of individuals living in the culture of modernism to look past themselves and help those closest to them progress toward a fulfilling, meaningful way of life. My concern with friendship in modernist novels is cultural and philosophical. I approach the novels as artifacts of the modernist culture in which they were created to see how these writers artistically perceive friendship. This emphasis implies that broad, philosophical trends infiltrated the communities of which these writers were members and affected their perceptions of friendship, both in their personal lives and in their art; my focus for this project happens to be the latter, rather than the former. I then want to compare the writers’ modernist-steeped view to a philosophical notion of friendship that was understood in Western thought for two thousand years but that until recently was almost completely forgotten—Aristotle’s conception of friendship and its role in a flourishing, communal life. Through this comparison, I will show that the cultural forces of modernism prompted these authors to create both enfeebled friendships and, on occasion, hopeful ideals of friendship that one might pursue against the alienating forces of modern life. The goal of my study is to reveal that the modernist period is a rich source for understanding the dynamics of and human need for friendship.Item Closeness in the same-sex friendships of men in long-distance and geographically close platonic relationships.(2011-05-12T15:51:45Z) Tornes, Michael.; Morman, Mark T.; Communication Studies.; Baylor University. Dept. of Communication Studies.The present study sought to find how men negotiate closeness in their same-sex long-distance friendships. Findings from Fehr (2004) were used to guide the hypotheses. Men were believed to prefer the use of shared activity to build closeness even though they regard self-disclosure as the primary pathway to closeness in their same-sex friendships. Self-disclosure, closeness, satisfaction, and commitment were each measured in regards to men's best geographically close or long-distance friendship. The relationship of gender orientation and homophobia to these variables was also tested. The results showed that men were more satisfied with their geographically close friendships than men in their long-distance friendships. Feminine gender orientation was found to be positively related to self-disclosure, closeness, and commitment. Homophobia was found to be negatively correlated with self-disclosure.Item The other as friend : a platonic response to the political thought of Jacques Derrida.(2012-08-08) Dinan, Matthew D.; Nichols, Mary P.; Political Science.; Baylor University. Dept. of Political Science.This dissertation presents a critical examination of the political thought of Jacques Derrida, suggesting that some of its aims are better realized by Plato. I argue that Derrida's late political works respond to a concern expressed in his early essay, "Plato's Pharmacy," where he suggests that Plato suppressed the subversive insights of philosophy, merely "deciding" to preserve the possibility of hierarchical order in politics. Derrida's explicitly political works identify the same Platonic logic of "closure" in Western political thought's prioritization of the "self" or "commensurability" to the other or "incommensurability." Such closure runs the risk of a nihilistic denial of the ultimate incommensurability: future time. Derrida responds to this politico-philosophical crisis through his notion of "democracy to come," in which he argues that democracy is never fully present, because it alternates between its irreconcilable principles of equality and freedom, in turn. Democracy is thus the one regime receptive to the radically incommensurable future or "to come." While Derrida's efforts to disrupt the nihilistic denial of the future in his political thought are admirable, his account relies heavily on a problematic conception of the self, assumes receptivity to the other to be incompatible with meaningful political limitations, and oversimplifies the Western tradition of political thought in both of these regards. In response, I return to the origin of Derrida's political interventions: the dialogues of Plato. I first examine the Sophist, arguing that Plato preempts Derrida's suggestion that he suppresses philosophy in the name of political order by criticizing the Eleatic Stranger's diacritical ontology for its inability to censure sophistry without recourse to the very decisionism Derrida supposes Plato to recommend. Turning to the Phaedrus I argue that Plato demonstrates Socrates' superiority to the Stranger in the Athenian's recognition of the human context in which thought occurs. Furthermore, Socrates models a type of friendly openness to Phaedrus that mitigates the neutralization of the incommensurable other feared by Derrida, while at the same time providing a foundation for meaningful politico-philosophical limitations. Plato thus offers a model of politico-philosophical openness through which it is possible to better obtain the political goals of Derrida.