Thomas, Naomi.

In the fall of 1973, Leonard Bernstein assumed the Poetic Chair of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures and presented The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard in which he extended Noam Chomsky's linguistic theory of deep structure and transformational grammar to encompass not only musico-linguistic analogues, but also the deeper abstract concepts these forms of communication share. Most importantly, he explored beyond this conceptual domain to an even more essential source of creative expression---the realm of the ineffable. Bernstein's circle metaphor represents this paradoxical, transcendental sphere. This thesis extrapolates the profound philosophic threads inferred by Bernstein's lectures, and analyzes the developing logic of his metaphysical-aesthetic Weltanschauung.