Selected Tales

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edgar Allan Poe
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Critical Edition ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Horror Fiction ◽  
Political Dimensions

Since their first publication in the 1830s and 1840s, Edgar Allan Poe's extraordinary Gothic tales have established themselves as classics of horror fiction and have also created many of the conventions which still dominate the genre of detective fiction. Yet, as well as being highly enjoyable, Poe's tales are works of very real intellectual exploration. Abandoning the criteria of characterization and plotting in favour of blurred boundaries between self and other, will and morality, identity and memory, Poe uses the Gothic to question the integrity of human existence. Indeed, Poe is less interested in solving puzzles or in moral retribution than in exposing the misconceptions that make things seem ‘mysterious’ in the first place. Attentive to the historical and political dimensions of these very American tales, this new critical edition selects twenty-four tales and places the most popular - ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, The Murders in the Rue Morgue; and ‘The Purloined Letter’ - alongside less well-known travel narratives, metaphysical essays and political satires.

Some Political Origins of the Denial of Death

1977 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 205-214 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfred G. Killilea
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
The Political ◽  
Denial Of Death ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
Political Origins

Although the political dimensions of the attempt to deny death in our culture have been largely neglected, this denial is positively required by the assumptions and incentives of our political ideology. An examination of the political theory of John Locke, the philosopher who has had the largest impact upon American institutions and ideology, reveals how central to his thought were assumptions about the lure of unlimited acquisition, the inevitability of human estrangement and the significance of achievement. All three of these assumptions survive today encased in Locke's widely accepted doctrine on property and all three are undermined by the movement to treat death more openly and humanly. In particular, the recognition of the limits of human existence allows for a perspective on life's activities that threatens the Lockean inspired politics of growth for the sake of growth. The force of this collision reveals both the contemporary prevalence of Locke's ideas and the potential for significant political repercussions in the insights gained from facing death.

scholarly journals Into the Centre of Things: Poetic Travel Narratives in the Work of Kathleen Jamie and Nan Shepherd

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleanor Bell
Keyword(s):  
Travel Writing ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Social ◽  
Travel Writings ◽  
Travel Writers ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
Selection Of

Reflecting on her experiences of the Cairngorms in The Living Mountain (written 1940s, published 1977), Nan Shepherd writes, 'Here then may be lived a life … so untouched by any mode of apprehension but their own, that the body may be said to think. Each sense heightened to its most exquisite awareness, is in itself total experience.' For Shepherd, the ‘total experience’ offered by the mountains opened up deeper channels of the self. This chapter reflects on certain aspects of the gendered nature of the genre. In doing so, it will make specific parallels between the work of Shepherd and Kathleen Jamie, both travel writers and Scottish poets, whose texts although produced over half a century apart, are united in their questioning of their natural entitlement to place. Yet Jamie has also been very realistic about the genre, critical of its inherent masculine bias. For Jamie, the spiritual aspects of travel writing have to be continually renegotiated, their cultural, social and political dimensions taken into account. In comparing Shepherd’s The Living Mountain and a selection of Jamie’s travel writings, this chapter examines the social and cultural context of each writer’s spiritual and feminist quest, illuminating, in turn, their own particular ‘findings’.

Provincialising International Relations through a reading of dharma

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Giorgio Shani ◽  
Navnita Chadha Behera
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
The State ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Cosmic Order ◽  
The World ◽  
Inside Out

Abstract This article will attempt to ‘provincialise’ (Chakrabarty, 2000) the ‘secular cosmology’ of International Relations (IR) through an examination of the relational cosmology of dharma. We argue that IR is grounded in ‘secularised’ Judaeo-Christian assumptions concerning time, relations between self and other, order, and the sovereign state that set the epistemic limits of the discipline. These assumptions will be ‘provincialised’ through an engagement with dharma based on a reading of The Mahābharāta, one of the oldest recorded texts in the world. We argue that the concept of dharma offers a mode of understanding the multidimensionality of human existence without negating any of its varied, contradictory expressions. By deconstructing notions of self and other, dharma illustrates how all beings are related to one another in a moral, social, and cosmic order premised on human agency, which flows from ‘inside-out’ rather than ‘outside-in’ and that is governed by a heterogenous understanding of time. This order places limits on the state's exercise of power in a given territory by making the state responsible for creating social conditions that would enable all beings to realise their potential, thus qualifying the principle of state sovereignty that remains the foundation of the ‘secular cosmology of IR’.

Relation Shapes: Intimate Constructions of Self and Other

PsycCRITIQUES ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 53 (17) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jefferson A. Singer
Keyword(s):  
Self And Other
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