scholarly journals The Oil-Flower Unfurling Its Petals The Phenomenological Aesthetics of Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island

Author(s):  
Joakim Hans Wrethed

The article analyses Tom McCarthy’s novel Satin Island as giving literary form to the aesthetics of materiality. Acknowledging the work’s function as philosophical cognition, the investigation utilises the concept of Einfühlung (empathy) as the ‘feeling-into’ of aesthetic experience, while concomitantly determining that ordinary empathy as fellow-feeling is lacking. Combining that ahuman aspect with Husserlian time constituting flow, underlying time consciousness, as another aspect of the ahuman, the thesis argues that the novel stages the mattering of matter and the patterning of patterns as surface phenomena that constitute the aesthetics of this particular fictional world. The aesthetics appears as a near-metaphysical phenomenon in manifesting an instantiation of Nietzsche’s concept of the human only being eternally justified as an aesthetic phenomenon. As such a phenomenon, the human amalgamates with matter and is dead. However, the world can be said to harbour ‘A LIFE’ in the sense of the Deleuzean concept of pure immanence. Moreover, as an avant-gardist artwork, the novel may provoke an ethical counter-reaction in the reader, inducing an ecocritically grounded ethics that would empathise with the planet earth as a manifestation of life itself.

Author(s):  
Clara Fernandez-Vara

The video game adaptation of Blade Runner (1997) exemplifies the challenges of adapting narrative from traditional media into digital games. The key to the process of adaptation is the fictional world, which it borrows both from Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner (1982). Each of these works provides different access points to the world, creating an intertextual relationship that can be qualified as transmedia storytelling, as defined by Jenkins (2006). The game utilizes the properties of digital environments (Murray, 2001) in order to create a world that the player can explore and participate in; for this world to have the sort of complexity and richness that gives way to engaging interactions, the game resorts to the film to create a visual representation, and to the themes of the novel. Thus the game is inescapably intertextual, since it needs of both source materials in order to make the best of the medium of the video game.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 14
Author(s):  
Gora Chand Das

V.S.Naipaul expertly exhibited a great craftsmanship in literary pieces like fiction, travel and journalistic writing. His fictional world reveals a critical look on the world and also utilizes its traditions, customs and cultures. Naipaul’s writing express the ambivalence of the exile, a feature of his own experience as an Indian in the West Indies, a West Indies in England, and a nomadic intellectual in a post colonial world. Naipaul adhered to the form of the traditional narrative, and by doing away with the technical devices of the stream of consciousness; he exhibits his power of writing by making his readers share the inevitable irony and paradox of modern life form by its quintessential self-division and inner conflict. The protagonist of Naipaul’s fiction may be different persons but there may be sensed a thread of continuity in their fate and there “limbotic” status. He has described the theme of a quest for identity, a sense of displacement, alienation, exile of an individual in the backdrop of colonial and postcolonial period. The act of displacement, his trying efforts to organize his experience, and his gazing back to know about his roots and his continuing search for the desirable self can be clearly stated in his novel Half A Life (2001). In the novel Half A Life, Willie Chandran is a migrant from one place to another and then to another. And he keeps on doing that through both Half A Life, and its sequel Magic Seeds (2004).  


2017 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 69-82
Author(s):  
Bożena Kucała

This article analyses the ontological status of the characters who inhabit the world of John Banville’s novel Ghosts. While the problem of volatile selfhood recurs in Banville’s fiction, in this novel the very existence of the characters within the fictional world remains doubtful. It is argued here that the numerous metafictional elements in the text are central to its interpretation. The novel itself should be treated as a work in progress or a design for a novel rather than a completed project. The narrative initiates and ultimately resists familiar patterns; the characters’ peculiar way of being alive seems to stem from an intersection of empirical reality and an obscure realm of fantasy, imagination as well as textual and artistic allusions. Correspondingly, the narrator’s status as a literary character is ambiguous. The article suggests that the narrator is the most likely creator of the characters within the fictional world and is himself a playful author-substitute in the novel. In conclusion, a reading that treats Ghosts as a postmodern artefact appears to provide a viable framework for resolving the apparent contradictions and ambiguities in the status of the characters.


Author(s):  
Р.Я. Фидарова ◽  
И.А. Кайтова

Критический реализм художественный метод, с помощью которого осетинская литература отражает жизнь в формах самой жизни, в образах, создаваемых посредством специфических приемов типизации различных явлений и фактов действительности. Именно он дает возможность литературе стать важнейшим средством познания мира и человека, раскрыть порой противоречивую сущность жизни, процессуально показать взаимодействие героя и действительности, влияние социально-исторических обстоятельств на формирование личности человека. Одной из важнейших функций осетинского искусства критического реализма является художественное исследование социальной действительности в поступательном ходе ее развития, т.е. изучение и анализ не только уже существующих в обществе форм взаимоотношений людей между собой, но и процесс вызревания также и новых типов людей, характеров и обстоятельств. В целом это существенно меняет характер и сущность осетинской литературы. Критический реализм в осетинской литературе воплощает принципы жизненно-правдивого изображения действительности, целью которых является глубокое, последовательное и осмысленное познание человека и окружающего его мира во всей их противоречивой сути. Как форма общественного сознания, осетинская литература критического реализма отражает сущность объективного мира осетин, но не пассивно и зеркально. Осмысление гносеологических основ ленинской теории отражения приводит к пониманию важности и необходимости постановки вопроса о философских основах критического реализма в осетинской литературе. В целом это дает возможность исследования сложной диалектики ее отношения к действительности. Критический реализм ставит и решает в осетинской литературе сложные философские проблемы, исследуя структуру буржуазного общества на стыке XIX и ХХ вв., т.е. на стыке эпох: своеобразие и сущность труда, собственности, морали, семьи, человека, народа, классов, специфики системы общественного управления, эволюции общественного и индивидуального сознания, духовности осетинского общества и т.д. Таким образом, критический реализм дает возможность глубоко и многоаспектно проанализировать анатомию осетинского общества и в целом общественного бытия осетин. Благодаря критическому реализму осетинская литература сформировала универсально-целостный философский взгляд на общественную жизнь, на взаимосвязи общества и человека накопила большой художественно-эстетический опыт осмысления проблем общества и человека. Critical realism is an artistic method by which Ossetian literature reflects life in the forms of life itself in images created through specific techniques of typifying various phenomena and facts of reality. It is this very method which makes it possible for literature to become the most important means of understanding the world and a man, to reveal the sometimes contradictory essence of life, to procedurally show the interaction of the hero and reality, the influence of socio-historical circumstances on the formation of ones personality. One of the most important functions of the Ossetian art of critical realism is an artistic study of social reality in the progressive course of its development, i.e. the study and analysis of not only forms of relationships between people among themselves existing in the society, but also of the process of maturing of completely new types of people, characters and circumstances. In general, this significantly changes the nature and essence of the Ossetian literature. Critical realism in the Ossetian literature embodies the principles of a life-truthful depiction of the reality, the purpose of which is deep, consistent and meaningful knowledge of a person and the world around him in all their contradictory essence. As a form of public consciousness, the Ossetian literature of critical realism reflects the essence of the objective world of the Ossetians, but not passively and speculatively. Understanding the epistemological foundations of the Leninist theory of reflection leads to an understanding of the importance and necessity of raising the question of the philosophical foundations of critical realism in the Ossetian literature. In general, this makes it possible to study the complex dialectics of its relationship to reality. Critical realism poses and solves complex philosophical problems in the Ossetian literature, exploring the structure of bourgeois society at the turn of the XIXth and XXth centuries, i.e. at the intersection of eras, the uniqueness and essence of labor, property, morality, family, man, people, classes, the specifics of the system of public administration, the evolution of social and individual consciousness, the spirituality of Ossetian society, etc. Critical realism makes it possible to deeply and multifacetedly analyze the anatomy of Ossetian society and the general social life of Ossetians. So, thanks to critical realism, Ossetian literature has formed a universally-integrated philosophical view of the social life, of the relationship between society and man accumulated a great artistic and aesthetic experience in understanding the problems of the society and a man.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-63
Author(s):  
Noémi Albert

Abstract David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) presents its readers with a “borderless world.” This borderlessness concerns space and time, with complex and interweaving spatiotemporal planes. In this fictional world, the subject will serve as an entity that brings together disparate spatialities and temporalities through an intricate symbolic web that connects the subject’s body to the world it inhabits. Numerous versions of past, present, and future run in parallel, the actual and the virtual coexist, and the text folds upon itself. The novel operates a constant state of liminality, a state that will be embodied by the subject. Seemingly in a paradoxical way, the multiple liminal states identifiable in the novel convey the ultimate sense of borderlessness. It is exactly the work’s heterogeneity, its jumps through time and space, its interrupted chapter structure that lend it a special unity and coherence that erases both geographical and temporal borders. The novel’s structure goes into thematic depths and creates a bridge, a constant interplay between form and content, captured in the metaphor of the concertina. Consequently, Cloud Atlas creates a constantly shifting world where the only fixed entity is the subject and its comet-shaped birthmark.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 320-337
Author(s):  
Margarita S. Dedina

The fictional world in A.O. Adarov’s novels corresponds to several levels of narration. First, there is the “real” time of the novel’s events; second, historical reconstruction given through subjective focalization; third, the realm of the unreal conveyed by visions and dreams. The novel shows the modeled reality from the perspective of a particular person, a survivor of political repressions. Through the categories of life and death, love and fate, honor and dignity, the novel speaks of the eternal ontological values and the importance of self-identification in a very difficult time, a time of re-evaluation of old values and the search for moral guidelines. According to the author’s concept, traditional folk constants play a crucial role in the worldview and perception of the world and turn out to be crucial for individual choice. The sacralization of space and the presence of a symbolically charged topos in the center of the fictional world, itself an infinite mosaic of various local territories, supports the idea of the spatial structure of the novel as a single cosmic whole. Conventional chronotopic boundaries as well as the theme of death as a pass to the other world present in all the novels of this author, together with the motif of the “eternal return,” support his conception of the soul’s immortality.


Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter

Hieroglyphs have persisted for so long in the Western imagination because of the malleability of their metaphorical meanings. Emblems of readability and unreadability, universality and difference, writing and film, writing and digital media, hieroglyphs serve to encompass many of the central tensions in understandings of race, nation, language and media in the twentieth century. For Pound and Lindsay, they served as inspirations for a more direct and universal form of writing; for Woolf, as a way of treating the new medium of film and our perceptions of the world as a kind of language. For Conrad and Welles, they embodied the hybridity of writing or the images of film; for al-Hakim and Mahfouz, the persistence of links between ancient Pharaonic civilisation and a newly independent Egypt. For Joyce, hieroglyphs symbolised the origin point for the world’s cultures and nations; for Pynchon, the connection between digital code and the novel. In their modernist interpretations and applications, hieroglyphs bring together writing and new media technologies, language and the material world, and all the nations and languages of the globe....


2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 350-356
Author(s):  
Anca Sîrbu

AbstractWith the rapid onset of an unprecedented lifestyle due to the new coronavirus COVID-19 the world academic scene was forced to reform and adapt to the novel circumstances. Although online education cannot be regarded as a groundbreaking endeavour anymore in the21st century, its current character of exclusivity calls for deeper understanding of, and a sharper focus on the “end-consumer” thereof as well as more cautious procedures to be exercised while teaching. While millennials are no longer thought of as being born with a silver spoon in their mouth but with an iPad or any sort of device in their hand (irrespective of their social status), adults are more hesitant when coerced to alter course unexpectedly and turn to new methods of attaining their learning goals. This is why proper communicative approaches need to be thoroughly considered by online instructors. This article aims at presenting teachers with a set of strategies to employ when the beneficiaries of online academic education are adult learners.


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 141
Author(s):  
Rana Sağıroğlu

Margaret Atwood, one of the most spectacular authors of postmodern movement, achieved to unite debatable and in demand critical points of 21st century such as science fiction, postmodernism and ecocriticism in the novel The Year of The Flood written in 2009. The novel could be regarded as an ecocritical manifesto and a dystopic mirror against today’s degenerated world, tending to a superficial base to keep the already order in use, by moving away from the fundamental solution of all humanity: nature. Although Atwood does not want her works to be called science fiction, it is obvious that science fiction plays an introductory role and gives the novel a ground explaining all ‘why’ questions of the novel. However, Atwood is not unjust while claiming that her works are not science fiction because of the inevitable rapid change of 21st century world becoming addicted to technology, especially Internet. It is easily observed by the reader that what she fictionalises throughout the novel is quite close to possibility, and the world may witness in the near future what she creates in the novel as science fiction. Additionally, postmodernism serves to the novel as the answerer of ‘how’ questions: How the world embraces pluralities, how heterogeneous social order is needed, and how impossible to run the world by dichotomies of patriarchal social order anymore. And lastly, ecocriticism gives the answers of ‘why’ questions of the novel: Why humanity is in chaos, why humanity has organized the world according to its own needs as if there were no living creatures apart from humanity. Therefore, The Year of The Flood meets the reader as a compact embodiment of science fiction, postmodernism and ecocriticism not only with its theme, but also with its narrative techniques.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Micael Davi Lima de Oliveira ◽  
Kelson Mota Teixeira de Oliveira

According to the World Health Organisation, until 16 June, 2020, the number of confirmed and notified cases of COVID-19 has already exceeded 7.9 million with approximately 434 thousand deaths worldwide. This research aimed to find repurposing antagonists, that may inhibit the activity of the main protease (Mpro) of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, as well as partially modulate the ACE2 receptors largely found in lung cells, and reduce viral replication by inhibiting Nsp12 RNA polymerase. Docking molecular simulations were performed among a total of 60 structures, most of all, published in the literature against the novel coronavirus. The theoretical results indicated that, in comparative terms, paritaprevir, ivermectin, ledipasvir, and simeprevir, are among the most theoretical promising drugs in remission of symptoms from the disease. Furthermore, also corroborate indinavir to the high modulation in viral receptors. The second group of promising drugs includes remdesivir and azithromycin. The repurposing drugs HCQ and chloroquine were not effective in comparative terms to other drugs, as monotherapies, against SARS-CoV-2 infection.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document