FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts
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Genesis, the Origin, and Darwin\u27s autobiographies
Full text linkIn the first paragraph of his "Recollections", Charles Darwin explains, "I have attempted to write the following account of myself, as if I were a dead man in another world looking back at my own life" (6). As John Sturrock, George Levine, James Olney and Howard Helsinger have variously observed, Darwin\u27s self-construction here rhetorically asserts an objectivity and scientific authority that contradict the realities of autobiographical production (the temptation to fictionalize, the deceitfulness of memory, the absurdity of claiming pure empiricism in the interpretation of a life). More than that, in playing revenant, Darwin makes himself out as transcendental and metaphysical: an otherworldly retrospective narrator with a god\u27s-eye view of his life. He claims not just the authority of the uninvolved, but the authority of the immortal
Jean-Luc Godard and Roy Lichtenstein: Originality, Reflexivity, and the Re-Presented Image
Full text linkJean-Luc Godard\u27s incorporation of paintings, comic strip images, and print advertisements in two of his seminal 1960\u27s \u27collage\u27 films, Pierrot le fou (1965) and 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d\u27elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her, 1967), prompts a number of intriguing questions concerning the re-presentation and re-contextualization of pre-existing (in this case, mechanically reproduced) images in film and the plastic arts.
Lord Byron and George Eliot: Embracing National Identity in Daniel Deronda
Full text linkByron\u27s Hebrew Melodies, published in 1815, were written as part of his musical collaboration with the Jewish composer Isaac Nathan. Even though anti-Semitism ran rampant through England during the Romantic period, Byron\u27s Hebrew Melodies remain his most widely respected collection. Despite anti-Semitic prejudice in England during the nineteenth-century, Byron was not the only English writer to take up the Jewish plight as his subject matter. Almost sixty years later, George Eliot would take up a similar set of themes in her novel Daniel Deronda. Significantly, Eliot\u27s novel not only discusses the Jewish desire for a homeland in detail, it does so with numerous, specific references to Byron and his works. Eliot uses both the Jewish plot of Daniel Deronda and Byron as agents to discuss how Victorian England could revive its own national character
The Phantom Walking the Text: The Death of the Author Reconsidered.
Full text linkThe author was killed by Roland Barthes in 1968 in the essay "The Death of the Author". This was an act of euthanasia, forming part of a larger poststructuralist project of putting down obdurate rhetorical practices in literature, where the endorsement of myths like authenticity, the representational value of language, the idea of the final analysis, according to Barthes, had unreasonably governed the ways in which literature was written, read and understood. The author figured as a mark of power, as the authority of a closed sign-system, dictating, or centralising, the ways in which a text must be read. With the author over and done with and the general rhetorical ploys of narration demasked, stripping language to represent nothing but itself, the stage was set for a new understanding (and practice) of literature as a particularly decentred and liberating zone that would seize on any form of power discourse - history, anthropology, politics, religion, etc - still abusing the powers of deception in language in the interest of the speaker.
The Life and Death of the Avant-garde on the Battlefield of Rhetoric - and Beyond
Full text linkThe following article was originally conceived and presented as a contribution to the "Avant-garde Now?! Fourth Ghent Conference on Literary Theory" at the University of Ghent on March 17, 2005, which addressed the supposed "death of the avant-garde" in art and literary theory.
Myths of Origin and Myths of the Future in Larissa Lai\u27s Salt Fish Girl
Full text link"The present exists as a tension between the way things have always been and the way things ought to be. Myth . . . is all about this dialectic of past and future; it is a narrative whose beginning and ending always inform the middle". (Laurence Coupe on Paul Ricoeur, Myth 97