Olga Tokarczuk's masterpiece Flights highlights one of the most profound metaphysical, moral and religious conundrums - a tension, but also an intimate bond, between stability and structuredness, on ...the one hand, and the power of change, movement and transgression on the other. The paper is devoted to unveiling what I dub the paradox of embodied agency. In simple terms, structuredness makes the known world organized and predictable; yet, at the same time, these very structures are vehicles of change, movement, sometimes even destruction. I make the case that this profound aspect of Flights deserves more recognition.
Judah's speech at Genesis 44:18-34 prompts the climactic moment of the Jacob tôledôt (37:2-50:26): Joseph's self-revelation (45:1). Thereafter the plot-structure enters its denouement, with the ...reconciliation of the family (45:3, 10) and the blessing of Jacob's sons (48:15-16, 20; 49:3-27). Occupying such a pivotal place in the narrative, the question of efficacy becomes central: why was Judah's speech so powerful? Previous attempts to analyze the speech have employed various rubrics derived from the domain of literary criticism. However, none has properly acknowledged the salient feature of the speech: metadiegetic narrative. This article contends that through Judah's extensive use of this elevated narrative level, Judah creates a thematic correspondence with the prevailing context. Specifically, his speech forms a mirror image with Joseph's test. By unknowingly reciprocating the harsh treatment of his brother, Judah successfully prompts the end of the ordeal and Joseph's self-revelation. This overlooked aspect of Judah's speech serves to elucidate further both the theological themes of the Jacob tôledôt and the means by which plot-structures are construed within Hebrew narrative.
The infinitary function of the truth predicate consists in its ability to express infinite conjunctions and disjunctions. A transparency principle for truth states the equivalence between a sentence ...and its truth predication; it requires an introduction principle—which allows the inference from “snow is white” to “the sentence ‘snow is white’ is true”—and an elimination principle—which allows the inference from “the sentence ‘snow is white’ is true” to “snow is white”. It is commonly assumed that a theory of truth needs to satisfy a transparency principle to fulfil the infinitary function. Picollo and Schindler (Erkenntnis 83:899–928, 2017) argue against this idea. They prove that, given certain assumptions, an elimination principle is sufficient for the purpose. Then, they pose a challenge: to show why we should incorporate introduction principles to our theory of truth. In this essay I take on the challenge. I show that, given the authors’ assumptions, an introduction principle is also sufficient to perform the infinitary function.
This article analyses Lydia Syson's Mr Peacock's Possessions as a neo-Victorian Robinsonade. In order to assess the contemporary pertinence of the format, I organize my discussion around the notion ...of un/settlement, a concept which applies to both the frustrated process of colonial domestication of the island depicted in the novel and to the author's project of writing back to the narrative and ideological codes of the Victorian Robinsonade. The term "un/settlement" is also useful to explore the novel's engagement with the violent colonial history of the region, which resurfaces in the present forcing the characters (and the author) to recover and narrate those stories and thus settle their debt with that past. The article starts by contextualizing Syson's novel in relation to a long tradition of castaway narratives, and then moves on to discuss the novel in the light of neo-Victorian and postcolonial preoccupations with the possibilities and limitations of historical revision and reparation.
Clayton discusses the context of vertical filmmaking literature. Vertical filmmaking and vertical projections were not completely lost, they had continued in artistic contexts throughout the 20th ...century, not as long-form and professionally shot narrative productions on the scale of movies released by the commercial film industry, but instead as creative interventions in the art cinema scene. Filmmakers with an interest in formats like vertical, square and circular frames were supressed from cinemas and as such, vertical aesthetic experiments had to take place elsewhere. Verticality as an overarching concept of film esthetics provides the filmmaker with different possibilities for storytelling than horizontality (Eisenstein 1930) and it has been noted that in recent decades, vertical narrative themes within horizontally framed movies have become more evident.
This paper responds to two arguments that have been offered against the positing of ‘i-desires’, imaginative counterparts of desire supposedly involved in fiction, pretence, and mindreading. The ...Introspection Argument asks why, if there are both i-desires and desires, the distinction is so unfamiliar and hard to draw, unlike the relatively clear distinctions between perception and mental imagery, or belief and belief-like imagining. The Accountability Argument asks how it can make sense to treat merely imaginative states as revealing of someone’s psychology, the way we do with responses to fiction. I argue that carefully considering the relationship between other states and their imaginative counterparts sheds light on how we should expect i-desires to differ from desires, and suggests that we may often be in states that are
indeterminate
, in limbo between the two categories. This indeterminacy explains why the distinction is often hard to draw, and why these states can be revealing about us even without (determinately) being real desires.
Hemingway's novel, The Old Man and the Sea, employs a narrative strategy of paired oppositions. The book explores thematic and structural contrasts, such as youth and old age, pride and humility, and ...the individual vs the community. These oppositions are not only present at a macro level but also at a micro level, deeply ingrained in the text. The novel uses lexical and syntactic devices to constantly remind the reader of these oppositions. For example, the protagonist Santiago is described as old, except for his young and cheerful eyes. The narrative also contrasts Santiago's victory over the marlin with his defeat by the sharks. Additionally, the novel explores the contrast between Santiago's view of the sea as feminine and others' view of it as masculine. These paired oppositions contribute to the overall unity and thematic depth of the novel.
Fictional narratives on Chennai, after its official conversion from Madras in 1996, offer an intriguing register for exploring ways of belonging. Using a postcolonial framework, the paper closely ...scrutinizes T. S. Tirumurti’s Clive Avenue and Chennaivaasi (and some other authors invested in Chennai’s contemporary culture) and subjects them to critique as sites of meaning making. An effort is made to explore how these narratives respond to the new reality of Chennai, to what extent they see the city producing a standardized experience, and how the fictional characters corroborate or contest institutional change. In the process, the texts are brought to converse with the postcolonial desire for cultural autonomy, its mediation by a nativist agenda, as well as the ambivalence and contradictions inherent in such a desire. The texts betray the inadequacies of the new name as a stable container of cultural meanings and propose an idea of the city that is internally incoherent and multi-experiential.
This paper aims to analyze the impact of the traumatic experiences on the identity formation of Shaila Abdulla’s main character in Saffron Dreams and elaborates on how she manages to overcome her ...diverse emotional burdens. The author, who is concerned with Muslim women’s multiple identities and struggles in the American Diaspora, discusses the challenges of living in the increasing Islamophobic climate in the aftermath of 9/11 through the life of her heroine, Arissa Illahi, a Pakistani writer and artist, who loses her husband in the collapse of the World Trade Centre. Judith Herman’s conceptions of trauma and recovery are applied to discuss the impact of trauma on the identity formation of the character and how she succeeds to go through the process of healing. The paper also analyzes the literary strategies and narrative techniques in this feminist trauma narrative to indicate how the author has tried to represent what is originally marked by voicelessness. The results of the study demonstrates that although the traumatic event of 9/11 and its consequences has devastating effects on Arissa, she as an artist is able to utilize her psychological resources and to take advantage of familial ties to cope successfully with the traumatic experiences in her life, tolerate adversities, and even develop an optimistic view point about new possibilities for her future life. This paper supports the aim of contemporary feminist traumatology which is to make women’s trauma visible, give meaning to it, and ultimately create frameworks that promote the healing of trauma. Cathy Caruth, Judith Herman, and Laurie Vickroy are among the main theoreticians of the research.
On ‘Halt!’ and On ‘on’ Liska, Vivian; North, Paul
Performance research,
06/2021, Volume:
26, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
In this piece, two critics respond to each other about Kafka's brief tale Up in the Gallery. Vivian Liska explores several possible readings of the story correlated with the word ‘Halt!’—its key ...moment of interruption. She suggests that Kafka calls a halt to straightforwardly political and existentialist interpretations, based as they are on false antitheses, which, she claims, the story performatively undermines. She wonders if this necessarily ends up in a mere literature of intensities or if this subversive effect on thinking in dichotomies constitutes an intervention in the world. Paul North argues that the title, Auf der Galerie, should be read as a mode of being roughly equivalent to the spectator position. He suggests that the tale belongs to Kafka's critiques of the European onto-theological landscape, where the one continually spectates the suffering of the other.
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