FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts
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Molly Bloom and the Comedy of Remarriage
Get PDFDrawing upon Stanley Cavell’s concept of the comedy of remarriage and Alain Badiou’s event theory, this essay argues that, in James Joyce’s Ulysses, Molly Bloom’s love-event is necessarily missed the first time, but it is reasserted in a final repetition, after the initial misrecognition of infidelity
Angels of Punishment and the Sword of God: Symbols of Justice or Tyranny?
Get PDFIt is the inherent ambiguity of the imagery in Genesis 3.24 and Matthew 10.34 that provides the focus of this article, addressing the theme of Sacred and Sacrilegious by investigating how these biblical passages were used to express negative apprehensions of God and Christianity. The poets Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Thomas Love Peacock, along with the artist J.M.W. Turner, take the sacred images of the Sword of God and the avenging angel, literal representations of the Glory of God, and reinterpret them in a sacrilegious manner.
From a Misfire to an Open Future: Repetition, Performativity and the Promise of the Metaphor
Get PDFThis article deals with the notion of performativity through the work of J.L. Austin, Shoshana Felman, and, most significantly, Judith Butler. It examines the intertextual references of the work of the mentioned theorists mainly through the notion of promise which is used as an example, a metaphor, but also as an organizing principle of the performative logic of their texts
The Archontic Holmes: Understanding adaptations of Arthur Conan Doyle\u27s Sherlock Holmes stories in the context of Jacques Derrida\u27s “Archive”
Get PDFA consideration of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle\u27s Sherlock Holmes detective stories and their subsequent adaptations reveals a complex web of interdependency, which is in keeping with Jacques Derrida\u27s concept of the archive, and can be extended to describe the functions and relations of all texts, not just those that claim explicit inter-relations
Exploring How William Blake Views The Sacred ‘Fall’ Of Judeo-Christianity As Triggering A Sacrilegious ‘Fall Of Man’, Utilising The Ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche
Get PDFTo make use of the term ‘fall of man’ is perhaps ironic; it is associated with a Miltonic, Judeo-Christian ‘fall’, which has a semantic implication of the sort against which Nietzsche battles when he begs for the ‘death of God’ to be absorbed into society’s reasoning. The sacred theological ‘fall’ of man from the faultless prelapsarian Eden to the fallible realism of Earth is far from how Blake, and indeed Nietzsche, understands man’s sacrilegious ‘fall’ to his present state. Within this essay, Blake will take centre stage, as his poetry and prose imaginatively envisions and explores this ‘fall; most of my conclusions will be drawn from examination of his work. Nietzsche, although immeasurably valuable in his own right, will be used within this essay as a useful counterpart to clarify and assess Blake’s ideas; in some cases he will take Blake’s ideas further
Imitation, Repetition, Tradition: Some Reflections on the Poetry of Ian Hamilton Finlay
Get PDFThis paper examines a selection of Finlay’s concrete poetry which uses imitation and repetition as both method and raw material. I suggest that the poems’ evident pastiche of particular works and iteration of word units create a context whereby a pattern of human behaviour unfolds in whimsical and startling ways
“Trust me, I’m telling you my life story”: Queer Return in the memoirs of Jeanette Winterson and Jackie Kay
Get PDFThis essay will consider the notion of ‘queer return’ through examining the experience of adoption in Jeanette Winterson’s Why be happy when you could be normal (2011) and Jackie Kay’s Red Dust Road (2010). I will use definitions of Derrida’s ‘eccentricity’ to expand the remit of the word queer
Investigating Claims of Eroticism in Images of the Annunciation
Get PDFThe usefulness of religious images to the Christian Church in late-medieval Europe had long been appreciated, but their function was most clearly expressed from the time of Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) onwards. Images were to instruct the illiterate and the ignorant, to remind devotees about the mysteries of the faith by reference to the exemplary lives of the saints, and to stimulate devotion (Welch 137). Naturalism, which began to emerge in the early fourteenth century, can be seen as a logical extension of these aims
The Sacred Dragon in the Woods: on Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem
Get PDFThis article will trace how Jez Butterworht\u27s play Jerusalem (2009) portrays, in Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron, the figure of what Giorgio Agamben calls the homo sacer, the bare life, as a character that encapsulates both the scapegoat and the monster, and on which the dreams and the fears of the community equally settle (Agamben, passim). His liminal state of being signifies the watershed between accepted and unaccepted, desired and undesired, and ultimately between disenfranchised and free. In this way, the play is revealed as a depiction not only of the state of England, but of how contemporary societies treat their outcasts
The Sacred, the Sacrilegious, and the Elegiac in Dennis O’Driscoll’s Poetry: “Missing God” and Other Poems
Get PDFContemporary Irish poet Dennis O’Driscoll’s poetry has often been linked with Philip Larkin’s work in its general outlines and themes. As George Szirtes points out, O’Driscoll’s literary territory “is a place that at first sight appears to be bordering on Larkin country. . . Like Larkin he generally addresses himself to ordinary lives, to their ambit of hopes and disappointments.” O’Driscoll’s poetry seeks, as Szirtes has it, “not . . . to tell people how they should feel but to try to understand, to share and to give shape to [peoples’] feeling” (Szirtes, “Business of Being”). Notably, much of O’Driscoll’s poetry makes explicit rational and emotional connections between human beings in a world marked by personal disconnection, loss of belief in God and God’s presence, and the repetition of impersonal, bureaucratic experiences. Through its plain yet eloquent discursive style, O’Driscoll’s poetry addresses themes of love and separation, life and death, and the sacred and the sacrilegious in a colloquial manner and with an understated tone that together invite his readers to examine central moral, spiritual, and intellectual concerns