G. I. Gurdjieff: Textualizations of medieval storytelling and modern teachings on the soul

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منو

" G. I. Gurdjieff: Textualizations of medieval storytelling and modern teachings on the soul "
Michael Scott Pittman L. O. Vasvari

Document Type	:	Latin Dissertation
Language of Document	:	English
Record Number	:	53835
Doc. No	:	TL23789
Call number	:	‭3189357‬
Main Entry	:	Michael Scott Pittman
Title & Author	:	G. I. Gurdjieff: Textualizations of medieval storytelling and modern teachings on the soul\ Michael Scott Pittman
College	:	State University of New York at Stony Brook
Date	:	2005
Degree	:	Ph.D.
student score	:	2005
Page No	:	323
Abstract	:	In 1922 G. I. Gurdjieff (1872?--1949) arrived in Paris and began teaching a system of self-perfection gathered from the East and adapted for the West. Since his death in 1949 a growing body of secondary literature connected to his work has been proposed in fields as disparate as psychology, philosophy, literature, health, ecology, and religion. Nonetheless, Gurdjieff's legacy remains largely ignored. This work attempts to situate and analyze Gurdjieff's method of literary explication and his approach to esoteric philosophy and hermeneutics in his major work, Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson . In the first chapter I discuss some of the formal aspects of Beelzebub's Tales and analyze in broad strokes the reflection and residue in his work of oral and early literary cultures, via the work of, in particular Walter Ong and Mikhail Bakhtin. I also compare his work to examples of Medieval textualizations of oral stories, including The Arabian Nights and Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron. In the second chapter I extend the discussion of Bakhtin in his essay on François Rabelais in relation to Beelzebub's Tales, and introduce a mode of analysis in terms of a theory of "Gurdjieffian Laughter" as an overarching mode of presentation in Gurdjieff's work. In the third chapter, I discuss the presentation of the soul and its synonyms in the introduction and first chapters of the first book of Beelzebub's Tales. In particular I investigate his notion of the uncreated soul and his manner of presentation, via the destruction of all past notions of history in the reader. In the fourth chapter, I continue with a discussion of the presentation of the soul and conclude with a discussion of Gurdjieff's view of the soul as constructed and circulated in the religious discourse of the past and of his own time. The fifth chapter continues with an examination of the discussion of the soul as it is presented in the last chapters and the conclusion. Here I summarize the key points and methods of explication that Gurdjieff employs to clarify his view of the uncreated soul within a larger tradition of esoteric philosophy in the West.
Subject	:	Philosophy, religion and theology; Language, literature and linguistics; Gurdjieff, Georges Ivanovitch; Medieval; Soul; Storytelling; Textualizations; Religion; Literature; Middle Ages; Comparative literature; Philosophy; 0297:Literature; 0422:Philosophy; 0295:Comparative literature; 0297:Middle Ages; 0318:Religion
Added Entry	:	L. O. Vasvari
Added Entry	:	State University of New York at Stony Brook