Once more and for eternity? Facing the horror of cosmic recurrence in Southbound

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-82
Author(s):  
Brian Zager
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Orientation ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Eternal Recurrence ◽  
Experience Of Time ◽  
Time Loop ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

In this article, I examine how the use of repetition structures in the 2015 horror film Southbound accentuate the genre’s concern regarding the relationship between a peculiar experience of time and the emotion of fear. While analysis of the urge to repeat in horror texts can be examined through a psychoanalytic lens, I suggest that applying a Nietzschean perspective provides an equally helpful framework for reading these films at the levels of both form and content. Specifically, Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence offers us much in the way of understanding these films which use a time-loop device to disrupt the experience of both the characters and audience. After delineating how Nietzsche’s ideas can help guide analysis of such repeated action tropes in horror, I provide a close reading of Southbound in an attempt to flesh out this particular theoretical orientation.

‘It's all in Plato’: Platonism, Cambridge Platonism, and C.S. Lewis

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
James Bryson
Keyword(s):  
Doctoral Dissertation ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Spiritual Journey ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Cambridge Platonism ◽  
Henry More ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Crucial Part ◽  
The Way ◽  
Platonic Tradition

In 1924 C.S. Lewis began work on a doctoral dissertation, the subject of which was to be the Cambridge Platonist Henry More (1614–1687). A number of scholars gloss this important moment in Lewis's intellectual and spiritual journey, and some offer penetrating, if cursory, analysis of how Lewis's close reading of More would have helped to shape the young scholar's philosophical and theological imagination. These important contributions notwithstanding, the influence of More and, by extension, the Platonic tradition longue durée are not properly understood in Lewis scholarship. This article argues that Cambridge Platonism and Henry More in particular were a crucial part of Lewis's initiation into, and appropriation of, the Platonic tradition. The tradition of Platonism to which the Cambridge Platonists introduced Lewis shaped the way he thought about a number of topics central to his own moral, philosophical, and religious outlook, including the relationship between the moral and the numinous, and imagination and reality, but also pneumatology, angelology, and his understanding of the supernatural, miracles, prophetic wisdom, and, especially, the nature of love.

The Scroobious Traveller

Edward Lear ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 78-106
Author(s):  
James Williams
Keyword(s):  
Travel Writing ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

This chapter is about Lear’s experiences as a traveller, and how they shaped him as a writer. It considers the way his poems and paintings are animated by dramas of arrival, departure, and being left behind. It considers, using evidence from Lear’s travel writing, the relationship between the experience of being a foreigner, and hearing unfamiliar languages, and the creation of nonsense words. It concludes with an extended close reading of “The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò”.

The Ghostly Prelude to Deutero-Isaiah

2006 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 332-363 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis Landy
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Beginning ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Voice ◽  
The Way

AbstractThe article is a close reading of Isa. 40:1-11, which focuses on its function as a prologue to Deutero-Isaiah, and hence distinguished by its promise of a new beginning, and on its dependence on, and reversal of, the past, the spectral voices it seeks to repatriate. It is concerned with the secondariness of Deutero-Isaiah, and the consequent ambiguity of its messages. The voice of the poet/prophet is refracted through disembodied voices, which themselves cite other voices, before finally adopting that of the female herald, through whom the advent of God becomes manifest, only to be indefinitely deferred through metaphor and simile. In the background there is the frequently asserted relationship with Isaiah 6 as a metapoetic key to the book. Does its purview extend to Isaiah 40, and is the message of comfort conveyed by Deutero-Isaiah subverted by the incomprehensibility mandated by it? The complexities of the passage, and hence of the book as a whole, require attention to the detail of each its parts, but also to its fragmentariness, as it seeks to reconstruct a fractured reality. This is achieved in part through the emphasis on the materiality of the voice, as flesh (basar) and sonority, and as the matrix (mebasseret) of the future. The analysis proceeds from the voice of maternal comfort in vv. 1-2, to the announcement of the way and the universal theophany in vv. 3-5, to the pathos of transience in vv. 6-8, and finally to the deferred resolution in vv. 9-11. In the conclusion I discuss the relation of the text to the Freudian uncanny, the correspondence and non-correspondence with chapter 6, and the question of the relationship between historical and literary approaches.

scholarly journals H.D.’s Palimpsest and a weaving practice

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jordana Infeld
Keyword(s):  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Reading Methods ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way ◽  
Reading Texts

The relationship between text and textile is ancient and multi-faceted. This paper aims to extend this relationship by placing a weaving practice in dialogue with H.D.’s novel Palimpsest. Weaving has a distinctive relationship with time, and therefore provides fertile ground for thinking through the way time is depicted in literary fiction. Time operates in weaving at various scales and rhythms, and Palimpsest furthers this understanding of time through its own rhythms and invocations of the image of the palimpsest. Drawing on my own weaving practice, my aim is to provide an account of how a craft practice might enable a particular method of reading texts that extends beyond traditional close reading methods.

The Type of Temperament, Mood, and Strategies of Categorization

2012 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 227-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agata Wytykowska
Keyword(s):  
Information Processing ◽  
Negative Mood ◽  
Cognitive Activity ◽  
Processing Capacity ◽  
Affective Value ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

In Strelau’s theory of temperament (RTT), there are four types of temperament, differentiated according to low vs. high stimulation processing capacity and to the level of their internal harmonization. The type of temperament is considered harmonized when the constellation of all temperamental traits is internally matched to the need for stimulation, which is related to effectiveness of stimulation processing. In nonharmonized temperamental structure, an internal mismatch is observed which is linked to ineffectiveness of stimulation processing. The three studies presented here investigated the relationship between temperamental structures and the strategies of categorization. Results revealed that subjects with harmonized structures efficiently control the level of stimulation stemming from the cognitive activity, independent of the affective value of situation. The pattern of results attained for subjects with nonharmonized structures was more ambiguous: They were as good as subjects with harmonized structures at adjusting the way of information processing to their stimulation processing capacities, but they also proved to be more responsive to the affective character of stimulation (positive or negative mood).

Understanding prescription in language. A corpus-based approach

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 67-81
Author(s):  
Douglas A. Kibbee ◽  
Alan Craig
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
French Tradition ◽  
Linguistic Behavior ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

We define prescription as any intervention in the way another person speaks. Long excluded from linguistics as unscientific, prescription is in fact a natural part of linguistic behavior. We seek to understand the logic and method of prescriptivism through the study of usage manuals: their authors, sources and audience; their social context; the categories of “errors” targeted; the justification for correction; the phrasing of prescription; the relationship between demonstrated usage and the usage prescribed; the effect of the prescription. Our corpus is a collection of about 30 usage manuals in the French tradition. Eventually we hope to create a database permitting easy comparison of these features.

On (Not) Translating Lacan: Barbara Cassin's Sophistico-Analytical Performances

Paragraph ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-113
Author(s):  
Michael Syrotinski
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

Barbara Cassin's Jacques the Sophist: Lacan, Logos, and Psychoanalysis, recently translated into English, constitutes an important rereading of Lacan, and a sustained commentary not only on his interpretation of Greek philosophers, notably the Sophists, but more broadly the relationship between psychoanalysis and sophistry. In her study, Cassin draws out the sophistic elements of Lacan's own language, or the way that Lacan ‘philosophistizes’, as she puts it. This article focuses on the relation between Cassin's text and her better-known Dictionary of Untranslatables, and aims to show how and why both ‘untranslatability’ and ‘performativity’ become keys to understanding what this book is not only saying, but also doing. It ends with a series of reflections on machine translation, and how the intersubjective dynamic as theorized by Lacan might open up the possibility of what is here termed a ‘translatorly’ mode of reading and writing.

Bad Dreams and Secret Artists: Translating Freud into Literature

2002 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Patterson
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Careful Attention ◽  
Popular Approach ◽  
English Reader ◽  
Creative Writer ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Way

This article addresses the increasingly popular approach to Freud and his work which sees him primarily as a literary writer rather than a psychologist, and takes this as the context for an examination of Joyce Crick's recent translation of The Interpretation of Dreams. It claims that translation lies at the heart of psychoanalysis, and that the many interlocking and overlapping implications of the word need to be granted a greater degree of complexity. Those who argue that Freud is really a creative writer are themselves doing a work of translation, and one which fails to pay sufficiently careful attention to the role of translation in writing itself (including the notion of repression itself as a failure to translate). Lesley Chamberlain's The Secret Artist: A Close Reading of Sigmund Freud is taken as an example of the way Freud gets translated into a novelist or an artist, and her claims for his ‘bizarre poems' are criticized. The rest of the article looks closely at Crick's new translation and its claim to be restoring Freud the stylist, an ordinary language Freud, to the English reader. The experience of reading Crick's translation is compared with that of reading Strachey's, rather to the latter's advantage.

Klein with Lacan: A Study on the Reception of Lacanian Ideas in Uruguay and Its Effects on Clinical Practices (1955–82)

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 341-361
Author(s):  
Gonzalo Grau-Pérez ◽  
J. Guillermo Milán
Keyword(s):  
Clinical Practice ◽  
Clinical Material ◽  
Clinical Practices ◽  
Before And After ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Discursive Approach ◽  
The Way ◽  
Clinical Cases

In Uruguay, Lacanian ideas arrived in the 1960s, into a context of Kleinian hegemony. Adopting a discursive approach, this study researched the initial reception of these ideas and its effects on clinical practices. We gathered a corpus of discursive data from clinical cases and theoretical-doctrinal articles (from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s). In order to examine the effects of Lacanian ideas, we analysed the difference in the way of interpreting the clinical material before and after Lacan's reception. The results of this research illuminate some epistemological problems of psychoanalysis, especially the relationship between theory and clinical practice.

Un/re/production of Old Age inThe Taking of Deborah Logan

Somatechnics ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 178-194
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Kotwasińska
Keyword(s):  
Alzheimer’S Disease ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Loss Of Control ◽  
Found Footage ◽  
Progressive Loss ◽  
The Face ◽  
Female Embodiment ◽  
Main Protagonist

The article offers a re-examination of abjected femininity and old age through a close reading of The Taking of Deborah Logan (2015), a found footage horror movie centered on spectral possession. While to a large extent the movie replicates an infamous monstrous old woman trope, it also effectively questions typical Alzheimer's disease (AD) narratives, which tend to portray life with AD as a story of unmitigated loss and debility. In The Taking of Deborah Logan, potentially destabilizing moments occur when in the face of progressive loss of control, memory, and bodily functions, the main protagonist is momentarily experienced as resisting the dehumanisation and loss of agency conventionally associated with AD and possession alike. The aim of this article is thus three-fold. The first part sketches the processes through which possession narratives generate a highly ambivalent space for aging femininity in horror film, and how aging, disability, and AD intersect both in popular understanding and in film. In the second part, the author examines how The Taking of Deborah Logan, as a found footage horror, shapes a discussion about selfhood, agency, and monstrous embodiment. Finally, the author argues that it is through the concept of transaging that one can find ways to destabilise traditional understandings of old age, female embodiment, and AD, and offer new narratives that highlight monstrous, if ambivalent, agency.

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