FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts
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Terrorism and Its Metaphors
Get PDFI want to map out the metaphors of terrorism to critique how they are used in United States political rhetoric. These metaphors and their usage parallel United States history, cold war ideologies, and globalization. Central to this investigation is an analysis of how the hegemonic order appropriates the media and uses such metaphors to manufacture consent for supporting a vaguely defined “war on terror” indefinitely. Metaphors have been called “the dreamwork of language,” by Donald Davidson who writes also that “the interpretation of dreams requires collaboration between a dreamer and a waker” (29). But terrorism is not a dream. It is not a metaphor. My point is that by identifying the geography of terrorism as it is currently presented in our media, by interpreting these media “dreams” about terrorism, readers might awaken to a more sobering view of terrorism
"Dreaming While Awake": The Evolution of the Concept of Hallucination in the Nineteenth Century
Get PDFThis paper will show that the rationalist theory of "spectral illusions" which discounted the objective reality of ghost-seeing, was challenged during the rise of the spiritualist faith, which drew a huge amount of attention from the scientific and artistic community to the psychogenesis of hallucinations and the rich research possibilities to be found in studying the fallacies of perception. Coming in the wake of the establishment of spiritualism, it will be seen that the Society for Psychical Research proposed that a certain number of hallucinations were "veridical" in that they corresponded to a real and verifiable event in the world - such as the death of a loved one - and could be apprehended telepathically. Thus, hallucinations represent a key concept in nineteenth-century debates surrounding notions of psychological truth, spiritual revelation, and the vagaries of the human imagination
Desperado Literature: A Rewriting of Fear as Terror, as Illustrated by Ian Mc Ewan’s Saturday (2005)
Get PDFThere are two traditions, we might argue, in the history of literature: the fairy-tale tradition (as I call it) and its opposite. The fairy-tale tradition sees the world as making sense, as leading to the happy fulfillment of expectations. Boy meets girl, boy courts girl, wins girl, marries girl – in simple or complicated arrangements. The fairy-tale tradition hinges on a linear storyline which inevitably leads to a definite denouement. The modernist movement is the first attempt at opposing the fairy tale tradition, at proving that life is not a system (‘a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged’ – Virginia Woolf,The Common Reader), but chaos (‘a luminous halo surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end’ – Woolf again).
"Endless Forms" of Evolution? Heuristics in Darwin and Taine.
Get PDFMorse Peckham wrote in 1959 that rejection and misinterpretation had characterised the first one hundred years of Darwinism. After reviewing René Wellek\u27s 1956 survey of evolutionary ideas in literary history and Joseph Carroll\u27s 1995 discussion of Darwinism in Hippolyte Taine, I argue that Wellek and Carroll have failed to provide accurate accounts of Darwin\u27s influence. I suggest that methodological parallels must be found to make a claim for a theoretical approach being "Darwinian." I consider why The Origin of Species might have appealed methodologically to Taine by examining Darwin\u27s argument, and then suggest that there is a better evaluative criterion of influence—that of "heuristic support"—than those provided by Wellek or Carroll. I test the hypothesis that the "shape" of Taine\u27s theory in History of English Literature is the same as that of Darwin\u27s theory in the Origin. I summarise Taine\u27s theory in brief outline, counter Carroll\u27s claim that Taine was a "biological determinist," and show that Taine\u27s theory was congruent at the explanatory, methodological level with Darwin\u27s, finding that Taine used the same kind of heuristic support to overcome procedural problems similar to Darwin\u27s. I conclude that literary scholars must make better use of specialist scholarship in history and philosophy of science to answer Peckham\u27s charge
Poetry as Compass: Chaos, Complexity, and the Creative Voice
Get PDFIn the following article, I will relate poetry as a genre to complex systems and explain why this approach lends itself particularly well to a study about creativity. This will require us to alter our view and to move from a mechanistic model for explaining the emergence of life, to a systemic model. In other words, instead of reducing a phenomenon to a single object or concept in order to understand it, we will attempt to see it within its larger context by focusing on the lateral connections between its various parts
Butterfly and Bulkhead: Chance, Control, Conrad
Get PDF"What a chance missed! My God! What a chance missed"Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)Jim\u27s lament has intriguing implications for issues of chance and control in literature, perhaps also for literary history, and certainly for the act of reading itself. This article will explore such implications, from the obivous \u27moral identity\u27 of Jim himself to the complex way in which imagination incessantly and ingeniously strives to impose its orders and controls on experience
Re-reading Adorno: The \u27after-Auschwitz\u27 Aporia
Get PDFIt is difficult to think of another area of literary discourse in which a critic has brought such a profound influence to bear, as Theodor W. Adorno has, in the area of literature concerning the Shoah. It is also difficult to think of another area of literary discourse in which a critic’s pronouncements have been misinterpreted so often and to such a degree as have Adorno’s reflections concerning the status of art after the Shoah. Reference here is of course being made to Adorno’s (supposed) ‘dictum’ concerning the barbarity of poetry after Auschwitz. The principle aims of this paper are to restore his reflections to their argumentative context and to restore the dialectical tension conferred on them in the original text. I will examine what I have termed the “after-Auschwitz” aporia, so evident in Adorno’s reflections on post-Shoah art and yet overlooked all too frequently in the research literature. Defined as an irresolvable impasse as a result of equally plausible yet inconsistent premises the term “aporia” succinctly captures the essence of Adorno’s deliberations on post-Shoah art: the imperative to represent the egregious crimes and the impossibility of doing so. I will demonstrate that Adorno’s pronouncements were never meant as silence-inducing taboos, but rather as concrete theoretical reflections upon the moral status of art in the aftermath of the Shoah and as warnings of the moral peril involved in the artistic rendering of mass extermination
"The pleasure of fiends": Degenerate Laughter in Stoker\u27s Dracula
Get PDFI wish to suggest that in order to study laughter in horror fiction we must move beyond the paradigm that equates laughter with comedy. As humour critic Marcel Gutwirth notes, "laughter is not all bounty: it has its dark, its killing side... violence of some degree may well be of its essence, though held in check" (8). I hope to demonstrate that the horror of what I will term "monstrous laughter" in a text like Bram Stoker\u27s Dracula is that the violent "dark side" of laughter is very deliberately not held in check. Like a contagion, it is released indiscriminately upon the world, threatening to contaminate the hearers – and by extension the readers of the text – with the perverse perspective of the laughing villains who find humour in murder and mayhem
Homer takes the Streetcar – The Modernist Appropriation of the Epic and Alfred Döblin\u27s Berlin Alexanderplatz
Get PDFIn this article, I will show how Alfred Döblin is, on the one hand, captivated by the extensiveness of the traditional epic - a quality which Hegel in his Lectures on Fine Arts highlights and which is often terminologically expressed as \u27epic breadth\u27 - whilst on the other hand, Döblin is fascinated by the oral character of the antique genre. I will also explore how both these qualities are fundamentally altered in Döblin\u27s modernist appropriation of the epic. Since the heroic deeds, which the antique epic extensively addresses, are at odds with modern sensibilities, Döblin transforms the epic into a modernist encyclopaedia of ordinary practices.
The Marquis de Sade\u27s The 120 Days of Sodom: Revelling in the Natural Law of Libertinage
Get PDFLibertinage is as much a part of Nature as asceticism. This is fundamental to understanding de Sade\u27s The 120 Days of Sodom. What is documented in the text is not the extreme perversions of Nature, but rather the other side of Nature which civilization has caused the human individual to forget, or at least deny. As this article shall show, what de Sade offers in Sodom is an image of a society that has replaced civilized practices with libertinage, thus making it the dominant doctrine.