scholarly journals Althusserian Reading of The Handmaid’s Tale

Author(s):  
Maryam Moradi ◽  
Fatemeh AzizMohammadi

Louis Althusser (1918-1990) builds on the work of Jacques Lacan to understand the way ideology functions in society. He thus moves away from the earlier Marxist understanding of ideology. In the earlier model, ideology was believed to create what was termed ‘false consciousness’, a false understanding of the way the world functioned. Althusser explains that for Marx “Ideology is [...] thought as an imaginary construction whose status is exactly like the theoretical status of the dream among writers before Freud. For those writers, the dream was the purely imaginary, i.e. null, result of the 'day's residues” (1971:108). Althusser, by contrast, approximates ideology to Lacan's understanding of reality, the world we construct around us after our entrance into the symbolic order. For Althusser, as for Lacan, it is impossible to access the real conditions of existence due to our reliance on language. This could be seen throughout the novel by Margaret Atwood who writes The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) based on the concept of ideology. This is about how the heroine of the story and other women in the society are manipulated by the ideology of ruling class through a communist society. In such a world nothing is real and everything is just an illusion that is made by ruling class. The subjects trapped or forced to believe such misconceptions and unreality through different techniques that are employed by the rulers. The dominant forces and ideology are so strong that the subject at the end gets a new identity since she is required unconsciously without her knowing. The other aspect shown by this novel is the failure of revolution and communism in this society and persistence of capitalism that it never disappears.

1970 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph C. Hermanowicz Joseph C. Hermanowicz

The present work represents an extrapolation of Wiliam I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki’s study, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, on behalf of the development of sociological theory. The subject consists of careers and institutions in higher education. The curriculum vitae serves as the novel human document by which to investigate both social and personal change. Academic careers are studied by virtue of their objective and subjective dimensions. Objectively, the institution of education is revealed for the shifting expectations that govern work in academia in specific historical times (indicated by the cohort in which academics earned their Ph.D.s) and in specific socially bound places (indicated by the type of university in which academics work). Major social change in education likely spells personal change for the way in which people subjectively experience the contemporary academic career. The data come from U.S.-based academics; parallel transformational changes are observable globally. The global change discussed in the work centers on diffusion and institutionalization of the research role. The sources and consequences of this change are problematic. Akin to Thomas and Znaniecki’s larger analytic aims, patterns of change are used inductively to formulate theory: the paper culminates by postulating a theory of increasing tendencies in the way knowledge is produced in higher education institutions throughout the world.


2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chase Pielak

In George Eliot'sDanielDeronda, animal vitality figures prominently in shaping the human shell, to use an opening animal metaphor. Approaching the significance of the animal leads to a reading of Gwendolen Grandcourt's character as a responsible creature. Gwendolen is Eliot's heroine, one half of the pair of protagonists around whom the novel revolves. Eliot's fantastic character takes shape in three movements, each punctuated by its own animal metaphor: Gwendolen morphs from Lamia to mastered-animal to white doe. Animal imagery appears at the edge of the human, the point at which humanity gains and loses subjectivity, and Gwendolen's novel is fundamentally one of finding her place in the world, her singularity, her responsibility. Images of animals stand in the linguistic gaps – in the places words fail – to figure the subject.1Animals appear at the end of the ability of language to mean. Nevertheless, this analysis is not intended to encompass the complex range of animal representations in George's Eliot's oeuvre, or even to catalog every example inDaniel Deronda. Instead, it suggests the possibility of using animal metaphor as a map for reading a Victorian heroine.


Author(s):  
Hartini Selian ◽  
Jumino Suhadi ◽  
M. Manugeren

Abstract This study is about heroism in the novel The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling. There are three points of discussion under this title: giving protection, defending rights and gratitude. Defending rights is associated with heroic deeds. A hero is a random citizen that rises to an occasion and performs an action of superhero proportions. Gratitude implies thankfulness or an appreciation of benefits conferred together with a desire, when practicable, to return those benefits. Defending rights is tied to human rights which are universally applicable to one and all. These are the significant components of heroism. One of the relevant and outstanding modern theories of heroism applied here is proposed by Gibbon (2009) stating that hero is just an average man who fights to solve a common problem in today’s society. The study is conducted with Descriptive Qualitative Method proposed by Haughman (2009) in which he states that Qualitative research is a form of social inquiry that focuses on the way people interpret and make sense of their experiences and the world in which they live. Kipling leads children down the jungle path into adventures beyond their day to day imagining and along the way he shows the value of ‘doing for yourself', of 'learning who to trust'. The result shows that heroism is highlighted through the major characters and the conclusive points are some of the significant characters such as Mowgli, Father Wolf, Mother Wolf, Hathi, and Bagheera have done heroic deeds. Their heroism is presented in the forms of giving protection, defending rights and gratitude. Keywords: heroism, human rights, gratitude


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-33
Author(s):  
Verónica Heredia Ruiz

Netflix, a platform with more than 100 million users in the world, has forever changed the way television is produced and consumed. This article analyzes how this new television model convergent with Internet has transformed the concept of programming and teleclairvoyance through intensified viewing or binge watching. A conceptual review identifies the main theoretical displacements on television, programming and audiences generated by the platform, as well as a documentary analysis of news articles on the subject, and the visualization of the Original contents published until May 2017.Netflix, una plataforma con más de 100 millones de usuarios en el mundo, ha cambiado para siempre la forma como se produce y se consume la televisión. Este artículo analiza como este nuevo modelo de televisión convergente con internet ha transformado el concepto de programación y televidencias a través del visionado intensificado o binge watching. A través de una revisión conceptual se identifican los principales desplazamientos teóricos sobre televisión, programación y audiencias generadas por la plataforma, además de un análisis documental de artículos noticiosos sobre el tema, y la visualización de los contenidos originales publicados hasta mayo de 2017.


Author(s):  
Mirjam Anugerahwati

This article discusses the novel Pygmalionby George Bernard Shaw (1957) which depicts Eliza, a flower girl from East London, who became the subject of an “experiment” by a Professor of Phonetics who vowed to change the way she spoke. The story is an excellent example of a very real and contextual portrait of how language, particularly socio-semantics, play a role in the achievement of communicative competence.


Author(s):  
Brian Barry

This chapter argues that in the study of politics, numbers make a difference: a discipline with a hundred or so members must behave in a different way from one with over a thousand. It divides the century in the middle, in 1950, the date of the PSA’s founding. The first period, then, is one of gradual expansion to the small base from which the massive expansion of the second period was launched. The chapter traces through the implications of professionalization for the way in which politics is studied, looking at the relations among subdisciplines within the subject and relations between the discipline in Britain and in the rest of the world. Britain has scarcely embraced the project of modernism with enthusiasm, so there is less provocation to fuel postmodernism. Perhaps resistance to intellectual fashion will continue to be the distinctive British trait – for better and for worse.


Author(s):  
Neal Robinson

Ibn al-‘Arabi was a mystic who drew on the writings of Sufis, Islamic theologians and philosophers in order to elaborate a complex theosophical system akin to that of Plotinus. He was born in Murcia (in southeast Spain) in AH 560/ad 1164, and died in Damascus in AH 638/ad 1240. Of several hundred works attributed to him the most famous are al-Futuhat al-makkiyya (The Meccan Illuminations) and Fusus al-hikam (The Bezels of Wisdom). The Futuhat is an encyclopedic discussion of Islamic lore viewed from the perspective of the stages of the mystic path. It exists in two editions, both completed in Damascus – one in AH 629/ad 1231 and the other in AH 636/ad 1238 – but the work was conceived in Mecca many years earlier, in the course of a vision which Ibn al-‘Arabi experienced near the Kaaba, the cube-shaped House of God which Muslims visit on pilgrimage. Because of its length, this work has been relatively neglected. The Fusus, which is much shorter, comprises twenty-seven chapters named after prophets who epitomize different spiritual types. Ibn al-‘Arabi claimed that he received it directly from Muhammad, who appeared to him in Damascus in AH 627/ad 1229. It has been the subject of over forty commentaries. Although Ibn al-‘Arabi was primarily a mystic who believed that he possessed superior divinely-bestowed knowledge, his work is of interest to the philosopher because of the way in which he used philosophical terminology in an attempt to explain his inner experience. He held that whereas the divine Essence is absolutely unknowable, the cosmos as a whole is the locus of manifestation of all God’s attributes. Moreover, since these attributes require the creation for their expression, the One is continually driven to transform itself into Many. The goal of spiritual realization is therefore to penetrate beyond the exterior multiplicity of phenomena to a consciousness of what subsequent writers have termed the ‘unity of existence’. This entails the abolition of the ego or ‘passing away from self’ (fana’) in which one becomes aware of absolute unity, followed by ‘perpetuation’ (baqa’) in which one sees the world as at once One and Many, and one is able to see God in the creature and the creature in God.


2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 97-102
Author(s):  
Luke Tredinnick ◽  
Claire Laybats

This paper compiles a series of responses from key information professionals to the novel coronavirus pandemic of 2020. Respondents were invited to answer the questions how the pandemic has impacted on their work, and how it might change the way of working in the future. Contributors to the article include Scott Brown, Steve Dale, Denise Carter, Alison Day, Hal Kirkwood and Emily Hopkins.


2010 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
pp. 374-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
Owen Clayton

Owen Clayton, "London Eyes: William Dean Howells and the Shift to Instant Photography"(pp. 374––394) Toward the end of the nineteenth century, one of William Dean Howells's many avid readers, finally meeting him in the flesh, expressed surprise that the famed writer was not dead. Although he had not actually departed from the world, it was true that by this time the venerable "Dean"was at a low ebb. While younger authors were taking the novel in directions about which he was, at the least, ambivalent, Howells was aware that his own best work was behind him. Yet, throughout his career, he maintained a desire to test different literary approaches. In England in 1904, Howells tested a conceit that would allow him to keep pace with the literary movements of the day. This consisted of an extended photographic metaphor: an association of himself with the Kodak camera. He used this figuration to move beyond the philosophical foundations of his previous work. Criticism has largely overlooked this endeavor, which Howells buried away in the somewhat obscure travelogue London Films (1905). This essay shows how London Films used its photographic metaphor to question positivistic observational assumptions, the way in which this was a response to William James's Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912), and, finally, why Howells ultimately went back on his attempt to create a Kodak school in fiction.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 121-136
Author(s):  
Paulina Olechowska ◽  
Marta Zambrzycka

The subject of the article is the analysis of post-Chernobyl themes in the novel by Oleksandr Irwaniec Ochamimriya and in Pawel Arje’s play At the beginning and end of time. The Chernobyl disaster played a key role in the development of contemporary Ukrainian literature and culture. Chernobyl very quickly became a universal metaphor that have gone far beyond ecology and into a cultural and political context. In both works, the atomic explosion (taken literally by Arje, as the explosion of the No. IV reactor in Chernobyl and by Irvacek more vaguely as an explosion) is a key element of the plot, aff ecting both the fate of the characters and the shape of the surrounding reality. Although these works belong to two diff erent literary genres and showcase two diff erent conventions of presenting reality, they are connected by a post-apocalyptic vision of the world and the concept of a looping time. The heroes of both texts live in a time after the catastrophe, deprived of civilized goods and isolated from the rest of the world. In the novel by Irwaniec, this time after the catastrophe is a sort of “new medieval” with a decidedly pessimistic expression while in Arje’s drama the return to the pre-industrial worldview contains hope for fi nding traditional values. Both texts also address issues relevant to the modern post-Soviet society, but they do so in very different ways. Irwaneć uses grotesque, to deprive his characters of complexity, while Arje makes his characters deeply tragic and psychologically probable.


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