Paul Auster's transcendentalism: Shifting postmodern sensibility in the new millennium

This article traces Paul Auster’s shift in sensibility after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. While his earlier novels where paradigmatic of postmodern self-referentiality, several critics have argued that his post-9/11 production has turned towards realism. This might be interpreted as subsidiary evidence in favor of the polemic debate around the death of postmodernism. However, the aim of this article is to outline the transformation of the writer and offer explanations as to why that change in sensibility does not respond to a divestiture of postmodernism, but to an intensification of it. I trace Auster’s alternative to postmodern relativism, that is, transcendentalism, to arrive at the conclusion that his stance towards it is the same in his later novels.

Femi Osofisan’s Evolving Global Consciousness in Four Adaptations

Femi Osofisan is one of contemporary theatre’s greatest adapters. His dramaturgy frequently intertwines European texts with Yoruba songs, dances, rituals, and other cultural elements to break down ostensible cultural barriers. This article interprets Osofisan’s career as a movement from domestic to international concerns, charting the evolution of his dramaturgical approach from his early to later works to demonstrate his expanding cosmopolitan and postcolonial engagements. I argue that four of his adaptations – Who’s Afraid of Solarin? (1978), Tegonni (1994), Wesoo, Hamlet! (2003), and Women of Owu (2004) – serve as an index of Osofisan’s artistic focus as it shifts from a concentration on Nigeria’s domestic problems to expressing a Nigerian perspective on global issues. The latter three plays rely on complex and dynamic intertextuality, reflecting a postmodern self-consciousness as Osofisan metatheatrically explores the processes of performance, theatre, and art through direct interplay between his own characters and those of his Greek or Shakespearean sources. This argument challenges accounts of Osofisan’s career that emphasize an exclusive interest in Nigeria’s domestic politics, arguing instead that his drama is involved in a longstanding project of intercultural adaptation as a means of addressing international political, economic, and security problems.

Seduzioni e scenari veneziani

This paper analyses the exploratory and evolutionary path of the protagonist Jules – i.e. all her perceptions in the relationships with men and women – in the light of the dissolution of the postmodern self and the nomadism as a phenomenon of change in terms of gender, role and behaviour. In this sense, the categories of masculine and feminine in their narrative figurations, the materiality of the body and the physical and sexual instincts of the young Jules are investigated, demonstrating how this 1964 novel by Milena Milani seems to implicitly anticipate the process of giving a new meaning to the feminine subjectivity that was to accelerate remarkably from the 1970s onwards.

Remembering for Self-portrayal. From Postmodern Absence of Canon to Genre Ambivalence and Decline

The phenomenon of self-portrayal resulting from accumulations and developments during the Italian Renaissance period is under discussion in this text through the optics of Postmodernity. Changes that have occurred with the progress of technique in mirror positioning – auxiliary equipment in self-portrayal – have led to a radical change in the ways of creating and perceiving ofself-portrait. Conditionally transmitted in self-portrayal, the “Casimir Effect” helps to understand the notion of self-portrayal decline. Postmodern self-portrayal represents not only the creator but paradoxically it includesthe viewer within itself too, in a more general sense, its potential audience as wellin one with the events in which it is encompassed as a phenomenon.

The Postmodern Self in Theological Perspective: A Communal, Narrative, and Ecclesial Approach

Drawing on the work of Stanley J. Grenz and Paul Ricoeur, this article proposes a communal, narrative, and ecclesial response to what Grenz calls ‘the dissipation of the self’ after modernity. Tracing briefly the rise of the self-sufficient self of modernity attention is then given to the deconstructed self of postmodernity. The article then utilizes the imago Dei as a theological resource, in conversation with Grenz and Ricoeur, for the reconstruction of the postmodern self along communal, narrative, and ecclesial lines. The final conclusion is that the postmodern self receives theological relief in the form of the ‘ecclesial self’ constituted in trinitarian community ‘in Christ’ and through the Spirit within Christ’s new humanity.