Kierkegaard and the Self-Conscious Literary Tradition: An Interpretation of the Ludic Aspects of Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship from a Literary-Historical Perspective

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Julio Jensen
Keyword(s):  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
The Self ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Present Contribution ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Literary Techniques ◽  
Metaphysical Principle ◽  
The Way

AbstractKierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship is characterized by a profusion of literary techniques that belong to the tradition of the ludic or selfconscious novel (the fiction that makes its fictionality manifest). In the present contribution the self-conscious literary plays carried out by Kierkegaard will be interpreted from the perspective of the philosophy of the subject, since both the self-conscious novel and Kierkegaard’s production can be related to this philosophical tradition. The article is organized as follows: first appears a very brief sketch of the way in which self-conscious literature and the philosophy of the subject are related. After this, follows a commentary on the notion of individuality in On the Concept of Irony. Kierkegaard’s dissertation is read as a work in the tradition of the philosophy of the subject that, at the same time, surpasses the idea of subjectivity as metaphysical principle. Finally, a close reading of Either/Or intends to show how Kierkegaard develops his ideas about subjectivity in a literary frame-that of the self-conscious novel

scholarly journals David Jones and the Self-Conscious Uses of Tradition

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 263-270
Author(s):  
Martin Potter
Keyword(s):  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Thomas Mann ◽  
Alasdair Macintyre ◽  
The Self ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
John Henry Newman ◽  
The Way

Abstract This paper will explore the way that the poetry of David Jones, while generally recognised as being modernist, nevertheless promotes a continuation of the Western literary tradition (as opposed to more revolutionary strands of modernism), but does this while introducing a self-conscious understanding of the role and workings of tradition, an element lacking in pre-modern traditional literature. Other figures with a similar interest in the viability of a self-consciously understood practice of (literary or philosophical) tradition, in continuity with pre-modern tradition, but in modern conditions (Thomas Mann, John Henry Newman, Alasdair MacIntyre), will also be discussed.

scholarly journals Ruin philosophy, poetic discourse and the collapse of meta-narratives in Aleksandr Kushner's poetry of the 1970s

Nordlit ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Schönle
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Poetic Discourse ◽  
Philosophical Background ◽  
The Face ◽  
Creative Forces ◽  
Bear Witness ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
The Way

This article offers an analysis of the trope of ruin in the poetry of Aleksandr Kushner (born 1936), in particular through a close reading of two of his poems: “In a slippery graveyard, alone” and “Ruins”. The analysis of these poems is preceded by an overview of ruin philosophy from Burke and Diderot to Simmel and Benjamin, with particular emphasis on the way the trope of ruin contemplation stages a confrontation between the self and what transcends it (death, history, nature, etc.). This philosophical background serves as a heuristic tool to shed light on the poetry of Kushner. Through the trope of ruin, Kushner explores the legitimacy of poetic speech after the collapse of all meta-narratives. Kushner has no truck with Diderot's solipsism, nor with Hegel's bold narrative of progress, nor with Simmel's peaceful reconciliation with the creative forces of nature. Nor, really, does he intend to bear witness to history, the way Benjamin does in the faint anticipation of some miracle. Instead, Kushner posits the endurance of a community united not around a grand project, but around the idea of carrying on in the face of everything, muddling through despite the lack of hopes for a transformational future and making the most of fleeting moments of positivity that emerge out of the fundamental serendipity of history.

Alternative Literary Modernities: A Voice from Colonial Punjab

2018 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-48
Author(s):  
Arti Minocha
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
The Self ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Discursive Space ◽  
Political Subject ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Language Content

Abstract This paper looks at the formation of colonial print publics in Punjab, the gendered subjectivities that emerged in this new discursive space, and middle-class women’s deployment of print to articulate the self. This will be done through a close reading of one of the first novels in English, Cosmopolitan Hinduani, which was published in Lahore, Punjab, by a woman in 1902. The essay examines the narrator’s notion of a gendered cosmopolitanism and the subject position that it affords, her attempt at going beyond the fault lines of religion to articulate a liberal and modern political subject, while reworking the cosmopolitan/local binary. How does her insertion of herself as a gendered subject in the provincial, national, cosmopolitan imaginary reflect in the author’s choice of language and genre? My attempt will be to see the novel and its author as part of a literary culture in which she made certain choices about the form, language, content, and audience.

scholarly journals A espiritualidade ontem e hoje: Foucault e a hermenêutica de si

2008 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-212
Author(s):  
Eduardo SUGIZAKI ◽  
Mário F. F. ROSA
Keyword(s):  
Long Range ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modus Operandi ◽  
Imperial Rome ◽  
Collège De France ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Xix Century

The purpose of this article presents the concept of hermeneutics of the self or spirituality that appears in the ’80s Foucault’s work in a course called A hermeneutic of the subject (L’herméneutique du sujet), given in 1982 at the College de France. In order to understand the presentation of this concept as rooted philosophically in his work, I have attempted to situate the way he perceived the birth and flourishing of the hermeneutic of the self during the period of Imperial Rome, its disappearance, in the Classics Age, and its resurrection in the XIX century. I attempted to explain the meaning of this historical perspective on a long range level, on a philosophical and historical horizon. I have henceforth attempted to articulate the ‘modus operandi’ called the ‘history of the modes of subjectiveness’, that characterizes his endeavour of the 1980s with the archaeology of knowing and the geneology of power that characterizes his research during the two previous decades. Thus I have attempted, properly speaking, to characterize spirituality as a form of the constitution of the self in itself as a parallel to the fabrication of the subject by the other in the formation of the subject as subjected.

scholarly journals The Discursive Problematization of Death, Dehumanization and Sociocultural identity: An Analysis of 'The Walking Dead'

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Victoria Skye
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Major Site ◽  
The Walking Dead ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Discourses ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Way ◽  
Walking Dead

<p>The zombie is a significant cultural figure which is represented and produced as being symptomatic of and relevant to contemporary concerns about death and dehumanization. This thesis will focus on the ways that death and dehumanization are changing and being negotiated within popular cultural representations and discourses regarding zombies, particularly in Frank Darabont’s television series The Walking Dead. The thesis will consider the way in which the figure of the zombie is representative of issues and discourses that are indicative of a problematization of the category of the human, and the notion of the transcendental. This will involve an examination of the changing narratives of the body, with particular regard to consumerism and the insistence of the body as a major site of the truth and value of the self, in contrast to the horrifying bodily form of the zombie. The thesis will also examine the way that dehumanization is problematized in The Walking Dead, where the human/non-human distinction is shown to be increasingly precarious and difficult to sustain. Further, the thesis will examine how the zombie is represented as manifesting the collapse of identity, as agents become alienated from the social discourses, narratives and values which constitute and categorize the subject.</p>

Notes on the Philosophy of Childhood and the Politics of Subjectivity

1998 ◽  
pp. 12-19
Author(s):  
David Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Way

The Western onto-theological tradition has long been preoccupied with two symbolizations of childhood. One conceives of it as an original unity of being and knowing, an exemplar of completed identity. The other conceives of childhood as deficit and danger, an exemplar of the untamed appetite and the uncontrolled will. In the economy of Plato and Aristotle’s tripartite self, the child is ontogenetically out of balance. She is incapable of bringing the three parts of the self into a right hierarchal relation based on the domination of reason. In other words, attaining adulthood means eradicating the child. Freud’s reformulation of the Platonic community of self combines the two symbolizations. His model creates an opening for shifting power relations between the elements of the self. He opens the way toward what Kristeva calls the "subject-in-process," a pluralism of relationships rather than an organization constituted by exclusions and hierarchies. After Freud, the child comes to stand for the inexpugnable demands of desire. Through dialogue with this child, the postmodern adult undergoes the dismantling of the notion of subjectivity based on domination, and moves toward the continuous reconstruction of the subject-in-process.

‘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.

Alain Badiou’s Mallarmé: From the Structural Dialectic to the Poetry of the Event

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Boncardo
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Czeslaw Milosz ◽  
Second Stage ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Way

This third chapter tracks Alain Badiou’s reading of Mallarmé, beginning with his extensive treatment of the poet in his first and most politically-committed work, Theory of the Subject, where Mallarmé figures as a liminal figure: an ingenious political conservative whose insights need to be integrated yet surpassed by Badiou, the political radical. The chapter then turns to Badiou’s post-Being and Event work and offers a close reading of the latter book’s treatment of Mallarmé before investigating Mallarmé’s political significance for Badiou in this second stage of his philosophical career. Through a reading of Badiou’s polemic with Czeslaw Milosz in Handbook of Inaesthetics, the chapter argues that Mallarmé becomes an unequivocal comrade for Badiou in his post-Being and Event period: a resolute egalitarian who points the way towards the advent of a generic humanity.

scholarly journals Plotinus on the Soul's Omnipresence in Body

2008 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Gurtler, S.J.
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Unity Of The Self ◽  
The Way

AbstractIn examining Ennead VI 4[22], we find Plotinus in conflict with modern, i.e., Cartesian or Kantian, assumptions about the relation of soul and body and the identification of the self with the subject. Curiously, his images and exposition are more in tune with Twentieth Century notions such as wave and field. With these as keys, we are in a position to unlock the subtlety of Plotinus' analysis of the way soul and body are present together, with sensation structured through the body and judgment coming from the soul. The problem of the self concerns not only the unity of the self in terms of body and soul, but also how the self is constituted in relation to other selves, both keeping its individuality and sharing its experiences at the same time.

scholarly journals Phenomenology and the Possibility of Religious Experience

Open Theology ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald L. Mercer
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Language ◽  
The Self ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Theological Turn ◽  
Human Situation ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Way ◽  
Idea Of God

AbstractWork in what has been known as the theological turn in French phenomenology describes the way in which human beings are always, already open to a religious encounter. This paper will focus on Levinas as a proper transcendental phenomenologist as would be characterized by parts of Husserl and Husserl’s last assistant Eugen Fink. What Levinas does in his phenomenology of the face/other (which gets tied up in religious language) is to describe an absolute origin out of which the subject arises. This point of origin structures the self in such a way as to always, already be open to that which overflows experience and, thus, makes possible the very experience of an encounter with the numinous. Such an approach to religious experience for which I am arguing simply takes Levinas at his word when he declares “The idea of God is an idea that cannot clarify a human situation. It is the inverse that is true.” (“Transcendence and Height”) Understanding the structure of the subject as open to that which cannot be reduced/totalized/ encapsulated is to recognize that the human situation is ready for the possibility of religious experience.

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