The Self-Erasing Word

Poetics Today ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-139
Author(s):  
Michael LeMahieu
Keyword(s):  
Literary Form ◽  
Formal Logic ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Relationship

Don DeLillo’s early novels explore the relationship between formal logic and literary form. In End Zone, DeLillo uses tautology as a linguistic tactic of diminishment to advance a larger aesthetic strategy of repleteness. The novel says less to show more. As a result, End Zone, like many of DeLillo’s other early novels, frequently represents states of silence and unspeakability. DeLillo’s early fiction shares these concerns with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s early philosophy, particularly the remarks on tautology, silence, and the limits of language in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In their conclusions, End Zone and the Tractatus analogously seek to undo themselves to overcome the inherent limitations of logic and language.

EUGENICS AND PRAGMATISM: F. C. S. SCHILLER'S PHILOSOPHICAL POLITICS

2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 661-687 ◽  
Author(s):  
ADMIR SKODO
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Formal Logic ◽  
The Self ◽  
Common Theme ◽  
Psychical Research ◽  
Broad Scope ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Eugenics Movement ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
British Philosopher

The British philosopher F. C. S. Schiller (1864–1937) was a leading pragmatist in the early twentieth century. His critiques of formal logic and his attempts to construct a humanist logic, derived from an anti-foundationalist humanism, are recognized as lasting philosophical achievements. But scholars have failed to consider that Schiller was passionately committed to the British eugenics movement. This essay explores the relationship between Schiller's pragmatism and his eugenicism. It argues that Schiller represents the broad scope of pragmatism in the early twentieth century through his involvements not only with eugenics, but also with psychical research as well. Underneath Schiller's various undertakings lies a common theme: the self, conceived in voluntaristic, historicist, and concrete terms. By tracing the trajectory of this theme in Schiller's thought, this essay demonstrates that Schiller's eugenicism was confined to the presuppositions of his pragmatist logic, which steered Schiller's eugenicism toward a distinctively nondeterministic and non-social-Darwinist kind.

Investing in Fictions: Faith, Abstraction and Materiality in Paul Murray’s The Mark and the Void

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-281
Author(s):  
Eoin Flannery
Keyword(s):  
Financial Burden ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Credit Crisis ◽  
Celtic Tiger ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Finance Capitalism ◽  
The Relationship

One of the central contentions of this essay is that Paul Murray's novel, The Mark and the Void, addresses questions of faith, fictionality, literary form and the relationship between abstract finance and material sociality. The novel engages with and exposes the arcane vernaculars of finance capitalism, while at the same time registering the inalienable materiality of their effects in terms of impoverishment, displacement and terminal indebtedness. As we shall detail, for Murray, the purpose of ‘finance fiction’ is neither to confirm nor further mythologize the transcendental fictionality of high finance. In crafting such a literary critique of Celtic Tiger Ireland, Murray invokes an increasingly common trope – the zombie. In doing so, The Mark and The Void partakes of a figuration that acknowledges ‘the deadliness of financialized debt and credit crisis’. In a sense, enlisting the metonymic figure of the zombie speaks to the undead nature of indebtedness, and it is an apt figuration of the past that continues to haunt in the present and into the future. As the narrative suggests, debt is the financial burden that refuses to die, and the literary zombie represents communities of Celtic Tiger debtors metonymically.

Androgynous motives in the novel “Pobeg Kumaniki” (“Bramble Sprout”) by Lena Eltang

2021 ◽  
pp. 148-160
Author(s):  
E. A. Poleva ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
The Self ◽  
Central Character ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Capabilities ◽  
The World ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The novel “Pobeg Kumaniki” (“Bramble Sprout”) by Lena Eltang fits in with traditions of modernism, where the images of the androgyny are related to the problem of finding and obtaining “intelligible integrity.” The paper analyzes the methods of embodying androgynous motives (auto-associative intertextuality, temporal and gender variability of perception of re-ality, Moras’ representation of himself as a woman, the homosexual intention of the hero, the relationship of duality with different-sex characters, etc.). The novel reveals the androgyny semantics in the context of the split Self and the search for the fundamental basis that would unite the parts into a whole. Androgynous motives correlate with the themes of creativity and love. It is due to the desire to compensate for the brother’s dislike and parting with him that Moras creates the text. The absence of love is one of the novel’s central manifestations of the splinter motif (disintegration, separation) that is antonymous to androgyny. The storylines of the two characters (Forge and Moras) test different ways of achieving integrity. Two vectors of movement towards wholeness are revealed: one towards complexity, multidimensionality (combining the diversity of the world and the Self in consciousness and text) and one towards simplification (the disappearance of fragmentation in the state of the embryo, representing pure potency). However, all the methods only manifest the limitations of human capabilities. Androgyny is still an ideal not to be realized during earthly existence. Therefore, the Central character disappears in the finale.

scholarly journals THE AUTHORITY OF OTHER IN THE NARRATION OF SLAVERY TO: « SALAH BOJAH »

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 311-320
Author(s):  
Asma Aldjia BOUCHAIB ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The West ◽  
New Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
System Today ◽  
Hostile Attitude

The world has pictured in his vision, a very important,much discussed and researched topic under the names and concepts of the relationship between "the self" and "The other” or “the image of the other” which is one of the topics taken from the overall vision of the world ; since the topic of "the other" has become part of the global cultural system today, it is not possible to conceive of the self without conceiving the "other" in light of the relations established by globalization. Perhaps the most important literary genre that dealt with this problem is the novel, as it dominated the literary scene within the so-called new novel, so I saw the work on it, so my choice fell on the Moroccan novel, specifically the novel of "El Nekhas" by Salah El-Din Bouajah, as a Moroccan novelist with a modernist vision, and the aim of this study is to uncover the mystery that follow sit through a number of questions, which we formulate as follows: What is meant by the other? Can a Maghreb novelist ignore the other / the West in the exhibition of his speech and his identity? Why does his position on this other become tragic? Why does this other west take a hostile attitude towards the Arab ego? What is the vision or image that the Moroccan narration of this other and his authority presented to us? We have relied in our research on the psychological approach because it is concerned with studying the human being internally, mixed with description mechanisms in narrating the actions of "the I" and "the other".

The singular effect of brevity: Why Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Fly’ could not have been a novel

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Feklistova
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Symbolic Meaning ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Emotional Effect ◽  
The Relationship

It is noteworthy that critics who come to very different conclusions about the symbolic meaning of Katherine Mansfield’s 1922 short story ‘The Fly’ respond to the text in much the same way emotionally. In examining why exactly ‘The Fly’ is so disturbing, this article interrogates the relationship between feeling and literary form, arguing that the emotional effect of any work of prose fiction is decisively influenced by narrative length. Drawing upon the ideas of Edgar Allan Poe and Frank O’Connor, the article examines how the effect of elaborate description differs from the effect of summary and deliberate omission. Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Fly’ typifies how, due to its brevity, the short story as a literary form can present one single, minor incident as major, to great emotional effect and without recourse to symbolism, which is something that the longer prose form of the novel cannot do.

scholarly journals “Palavras suaves para os operários”: trabalho e trabalhadores no projeto literário de Carolina Maria de Jesus

2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-156
Author(s):  
Fernando Cauduro Pureza ◽  
Juliane Vargas Welter
Keyword(s):  
Central Element ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Poor Woman ◽  
Brazilian Literature ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Literature And Society ◽  
Carolina Maria De Jesus ◽  
The Relationship

Resumo: A partir das obras Quarto de despejo: diário de uma favelada (1960) e Diário de Bitita (1986), de Carolina Maria de Jesus, este artigo propõe uma leitura preliminar da categoria trabalho e seu duplo, trabalhador, tendo como pressuposto as relações entre literatura e sociedade (CANDIDO, 2006). Para tanto, entende-se a posição da escritora e sua autorrepresentação (DALCASTAGNÈ, 2007) como interseccional (DAVIS, 2016): mulher, negra e pobre; e parte de três eixos de análise: a representação do outro como trabalhador; a representação de si como trabalhadora; e a representação/formalização de si em relação à escrita. A hipótese explorada neste texto é que a categoria trabalho/trabalhador constitui dialeticamente as narrativas carolineanas, seja no conteúdo, seja na forma. Por este percurso, por sua vez, foi possível constatar que a ambiguidade com que o trabalho é tratado revela um movimento de síntese em torno de um projeto literário de Carolina Maria de Jesus, que tem como elemento central justamente pensar e representar o mundo do trabalho a partir de uma reflexão sobre si.Palavras-chave: literatura brasileira; trabalho; Carolina Maria de Jesus.Abstract: Departing from the literary pieces Quarto de despejo: diário de uma favelada (1960) and Diário de Bitita (1986), both written by Carolina Maria de Jesus, this paper proposes a preliminary reading of the labor category and its counterpart, the laborer, having as a backdrop the relationship between literature and society. For that matter, we take the writer’s position and her (DAVIS, 2016) self-representation (DALCASTAGNÈ, 2007) to be intersectional: a black and poor woman and part of a tripartite analytical axis - the representation of the other as working men and women; the self-representation as a working woman; and the representation/formalization of herself towards the act of writing. The hypothesis explored here is that the category of labor/laborer constitutes, in a dialectical way, Carolinean narratives, both in substance and in literary form. Following this idea, it was possible to conclude that the ambiguity in which labor is treated reveals a movement of synthesis around the literary project of Carolina Maria Jesus, whose central element is the thought and the representation of the labor world as a result of thinking about herself.Keywords: Brazilian literature; labor; Carolina Maria de Jesus.

From Container to Claustrum: Projective Identification in Couples

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara Feldman
Keyword(s):  
Psychological Health ◽  
Projective Identification ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Intimate Partners ◽  
And Control ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
As If

This paper is a contribution to the growing literature on the role of projective identification in understanding couples' dynamics. Projective identification as a defence is well suited to couples, as intimate partners provide an ideal location to deposit unwanted parts of the self. This paper illustrates how projective identification functions differently depending on the psychological health of the couple. It elucidates how healthier couples use projective identification more as a form of communication, whereas disturbed couples are inclined to employ it to invade and control the other, as captured by Meltzer's concept of "intrusive identification". These different uses of projective identification affect couples' capacities to provide what Bion called "containment". In disturbed couples, partners serve as what Meltzer termed "claustrums" whereby projections are not contained, but imprisoned or entombed in the other. Applying the concept of claustrum helps illuminate common feelings these couples express, such as feeling suffocated, stifled, trapped, held hostage, or feeling as if the relationship is killing them. Finally, this paper presents treatment challenges in working with more disturbed couples.

Persuasion: Fellow Creatures

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pam Morris
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Narrative Perspective ◽  
Class Hierarchies ◽  
A Chain ◽  
Porous Boundaries

Persuasion overtly foregrounds the self as embodied: physical accidents and sickness are recurrent. Sir Walter Eliot’s belief in the time-defying bodily grace of nobility is subject to Austen’s harshest irony. The transition from vertically ordered place to horizontal space in Persuasion is more extreme than in any other of the completed novels. Anne Elliot’s movement from social exclusiveness to socially inclusive possibility allows Austen to challenge gender and class hierarchies traditionally held to be inborn. Her writerly experimentation expands the possibilities of narrative perspective to encompass the porous boundaries of the physical, the emotional and the rational that constitute any moment of consciousness. Her focalisation techniques in the text look directly towards Woolf’s stylist innovations. A chain of references to guns and shooting gathers into the novel contentious contemporary discursive networks on class relations, notions of masculinity and the nature of creaturely life.

The Relationship between Seeker and Spiritual Guide as portrayed in contemporary Western Sufi Autobiographies

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-332
Author(s):  
Kate Zebiri
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
New Age ◽  
The Self ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Continuity And Discontinuity

This article aims to explore the Shaykh-mur?d (disciple) or teacher-pupil relationship as portrayed in Western Sufi life writing in recent decades, observing elements of continuity and discontinuity with classical Sufism. Additionally, it traces the influence on the texts of certain developments in religiosity in contemporary Western societies, especially New Age understandings of religious authority. Studying these works will provide an insight into the diversity of expressions of contemporary Sufism, while shedding light on a phenomenon which seems to fly in the face of contemporary social and religious trends which deemphasize external authority and promote the authority of the self or individual autonomy.

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