Abstract

The sudden birth of Mormonism in the midst of modern America is a phenomenon hard to explain by Structuralist anthropology. But if we regard its founder, Joseph Smith , as a poet, we can explain its mythology and kinship system as a product of two sides of one coin, JS's "desire in language" in Julia Kristeva's sense. The purpose of this dissertation is to show that JS was a poet, and his scriptures were poetry. For that purpose, we analyze The Book of Abraham, his only scripture containing pictures from the beginning. ;The analyses are pursued from the perspectives of semiotic phenomenology. Jacques Derrida's theory of "arche-trace" and "rebus" in Of Grammatology is utilized to show that Egyptian papyrus appeared in JS's mind as a Hebraic writing of Abraham. Pictures in the papyrus themselves are analyzed as representing van Gennep/Victor Turner type of "ritual process," and are shown how JS creatively misread the structure of this process, and how he wrote a new story out of it. Applying Bloom's theory of poetics of anxiety and influence, JS's ontological status is analyzed, and his invention of a new concept of Adam is explained as JS's "metalepsis." Then we consider whether this entire phenomenon of JS's writing is within what Derrida called "the closure" of "the logo-phonocentrism" of "the metaphysics of presence," and is answered as positive. ;We conclude that The Book of Abraham is poetry in Derrida's sense of "espacement" and in Umbreto Eco's sense of "Kabbalah," and thus JS is a poet. This conclusion is applied to the analysis of The Book of Mormon, and is shown that it is neither a gift of God nor a plagiarism, but a product of an authentic poetic phenomenon