Myology

New York Trilogy: Author and Authorship

2010-05-02T23:34:00.000-07:00

The legacy of the author in the postmodern fiction has always been a controversial issue. Having subscribed to the genre of postmodern detective fiction, Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, likewise, appears to have destabilized, among other things, the ontological role of author through an endorsement of the anti-essentialist approach, formation of numerous doubles in the novel, and a cryptic act of breaking the frame of narrative by introducing the author as a fictional character.

Essentialism, in the first place, is defined upon a rigid pace of consistency of the essence, subsequently implying an origin out of which an essence emerges. The notion of essence that appears in the novel, however, hardly implies any origin, but rather betrays that there is no real out there. Authorial function, bearing on the same anti-essentialist paradigm, comes only to flicker an “illusion of presence” time and again in the novel, destabilizing the ontology of the Author in the text. The novel deconstructs the authorial function through oscillating it “between presence and absence”, so much so that “the author”, as it appears in case of Auster the author and Auster the character “is ‘dead, but still with us, still with us, but dead’” (PF 202).

Despite the reluctance to assume an ontologically stable essence for the author, the novel also destabilizes the role of author through displacing and distributing the “authorial role” among other figures in the novel, forming doubles that lead to confused identities in the novel, the most important of which is that of author. Paul Auster as the author of the work has many doubles within the novel. In City of Glass, for example, Auster’s authorial role is dispersed among different figures, from Daniel Quinn, taking up the role of the fictional detective, to Auster the character, who in turn plays the real detective, Auster the novelist, in solving the mystery around Peter Stillman. Inasmuch as the detective genre is concerned, the characters’ pursuit of criminals, in a larger scale, is the search for authority and establishing authorship which is constantly thwarted in the novel by doubling the identities and dismantling the power relation, hence destabilizing the role of author (Pace 8).

Following the formation of doubles in the novel, introducing “author into fiction” as a conspicuous presence seemingly breaks the frame of narrative – insofar as the fictional author retains a biographical quality in the novel – destabilizing the ontological structure of the authorship as merely fictional. Likewise, the “Paul Auster” to whom Quinn goes in City of Glass when discussing authorship in Don Quixote, is (to use Roland Barthes’ terminology) “the paper-author” who lives “as a guest in his own text”. His life, Barthes maintains, “is no longer the origin of his fictions but a fiction contributing to his work” Getting stripped of all his authorial, paternal legacy, Auster the novelist is inscribed in the novel “like one of his characters, figured in the carpet” that undermines and destabilizes the ontology further (qtd. In PF 205).

On the whole, the frame-breaking almost enacted as a result of anti-essentialism and formation of ‘doubles’ in the novel might have wider application regarding the notion of authorship, all rejecting the idea of authorial power and destabilizing its ontological structure. This achieves a personal touch in City of Glass where Paul Auster himself shows up with his son, asserting the legacy of the author in disguise.

Sources:

Auster, Paul. The New York Trilogy. New York: Penguin Classics, 1985.
McHale, Brian. Post modernist Fiction. London: Routledge, 1987.
Pace, Chris. “Escaping from the Locked Room: Overthrowing the Tyranny of Artifice in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy” April 2nd, 2010.

The Mark (of Narrative Digression) on the Wall

2010-03-04T23:17:00.000-08:00

Temporal succession in itself is a loose link. Defining time as the relations of chronology between story and text, Gerard Genette considers the experience of time represented in narrative text as constitutive both of the means of representation and of the object being represented, which might be viewed in three respects: order, duration, and frequency. Correspondingly, Virginia Woolf's The Mark on the Wall represents, among other things, a disturbing discrepancy between the story-time and the text-time through the tedium of several digressions that seemingly subscribe to a snap-shot description of the narrator's experience, a snail-like deceleration of narrative action, and above all a meta-narrative self-reflection within the story.

The narrator's detailed discovery of the mark is incessantly punctuated by a series of digressions on history, art, society and reality; giving rise to some snap-shot descriptions where the minimum speed of narration is manifested as a descriptive pause. The flux of images, ideas, and reminiscences between which the narrator is constantly shifting back and forth provide fairly a large quantity of narrative information that relatively effaces the narrator from the scenes being described, marking a multilinearity of the story-time and distorting the temporal succession of events.

Regarding the discrepancy further in terms of duration, there seems an infinity of possible paces on the theoretical level as the story, already fraught with a descriptive pause, produces multiple degrees of deceleration within the text. Similar to what Genette argues, the segment of the text in The Mark almost corresponds to the zero story duration building upon introspective monologues rather than articulating actions. The snail-like deceleration of narrative drive that is correspondingly connected with the unchanged, fixed mark on the wall gives way for a series of multi-linear digression to be prescribed on the possible linear figuration of events in the story. Nonetheless, the inherent paradox is hardly resolved in the story as the level of narrative digressions, brought forth by the degrees of deceleration; further substantiate the mark as a point of departure than as indication of centrality and importance in the story.

Apart from the noted discrepancies, The Mark aptly relates the narrative digression, on a meta-narrative level, with the self-reflexive subjectivism practiced in the story. The pause and deceleration of narrative information, whether descriptive or not, allows for a subjective reflection on how the narrator can pursue and connect the pattern of introspective train of thoughts with the observation of the mark on the wall. The method pursued in the story is almost similar to what the narrator states: "To steady myself, let me catch hold of the first idea that passes…" It seems the narrator is dissatisfied with the impediment of that "train of thoughts" and "shower of ideas", and their tyranny of demands that upon several points of digression prescribe a multi-directional figuration on the mode of narration.

On the whole, the abiding narrative digression seems to bound up the story in several respects, whereby the narrator's attempts to liberate the narrative from this constraint appear to destroy the subjectivism and intelligibility of the narrative. The digression seems to stop, however, as the identification of the snail closes the narrative, yet paradoxically leaving the end of the story open for another digression.

Sources:

McQuillan, Martin. Ed. The Narrative Reader. London: Routledge, 2000.

Rebeca, Matei. "Virginia Woolf's The Mark on the Wall." Nov. 14th 2009. http://www.scribd.com/doc/22146701/Virginia-Wolf-The-Mark-on-the-Wall

Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, 2nd Ed. London: Routledge, 2002.

Gender Ideology; Construction of Male Reading in Pope's Rape of the Lock

2010-01-23T14:26:00.000-08:00

Language, as a medium of semiotic representation, is informed with ideology and power. Experimentation on the language of Pope's Rape might betray an intricate gender ideology latent in the patriarchal reflection of eighteenth century society in that construction or assumption of the reader as male configures a patriarchal agenda that seems to reflect critically on the gender and gender-stereotype, reinforcing the phallogocentric view of female as preoccupied with the trivial, wanton in violation, and most importantly inferior to male imperatives within the representational categories defined by men.

Formation of a male reading in Rape is perhaps anticipated as early as Pope’s letter to Arabella Fermor sets out a gendered attitude towards the “nature” of “modern ladies” who are preoccupied with trivial things and equally with making trivia appear as of having “utmost importance.” Through the political semiotics of representation, Pope aptly seems to have defined the “otherness” early in the epigraph, consolidating the sexual difference(s) by naturalizing or mystifying the male reading of the poem. As Cassandra argues, Pope in his letter addresses Ms. Fermor that the poem was published at her request, although in actuality the writing of this poem was suggested by one of Pope’s male friends. As thus, Pope is making it seem “as though Ms. Fermor enjoyed and even asked to be mocked.”

Apart from the mythical preoccupation of women with trivia as represented in character of Blinda, Pope’s gendered language pictures femininity and womanhood as reductively wanton in character – the madwoman in the attic – that scarcely subscribes to the male dictated norms. As noted by Pollak, in describing Belinda’s anger, for example, “the author goes to great lengths to paint her as a witch with almost supernatural characteristics.” In the similar vein, representation of Thaletris as an Amazonian type of woman who is most feared and scorned by men since rejecting male imperatives also contributes to the construction of a male reading of the poem. Conversely, though, the male in the story is portrayed as being victim to the seductive spell of female characters (27).

Construction of male reading of the Rape seems also to build, most importantly, on the view of female as generally inferior and subordinate to male imperatives. As Ellen Pollack argues, in the poem “woman is made to function as the sign not of her own subjectivity but of a male desire of which she is the object” (23). Affirming the sexual myth of woman as inferior, Pope’s Rape uses woman to serve a function and to act out a particular part in the poem in which the male is excused for his violation and female is repudiated for her sly seductiveness and beauty.

On the whole, Pope’s Rape is mediated in the language inundated with gender ideologies that critically gives rise to assuming of the reader as male and thus forming a male reading of the poem in that a phallogocentric representation of female as obsessed with trivia, wanton in action, and inferior to male dominance is underscored.

Sources:

Sowerby, Robin. Alexander Pope: Selected Poetry and Prose. London: Routledge, 1998.

Pollak, Ellen. The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

Westfall, Cassandra. “The Negative Images of Women in Pope's The Rape of the Lock”. Knox College Common Room: Volume 2. Dec. 19^th, 2009.

Consciousness

2010-01-19T15:36:00.000-08:00

College is out again, and I lie crippled with a sense of guilt over the lack of drive to pen anything. Life goes on, yet mind lives back in the memories once gone away. I have started hating consciousness these days: that I think, feel, suffer, speak, and reason bother me and the entire universe. Wish I could fly the wings I have been denied and wag the tail I cannot see though learn that which makes me the subject of mockery.

2009-06-05T01:02:00.000-07:00

Cocoon

The blue has nothing to do with me anymore, nor can I afford a look up into it which less means that I am shameful of a misspent life than that life herself has forsaken me for good. The crawling days of season lags behind and I just feel battered and worn again, bemoaning to the thick of the hide that betrays me inch by inch, where the bashful man in me cries fear of a still love, festered down the rusty prison of blood. It has tales to tell, of pain that creeps and heals inside while you mantle a thought up in my thought. I know I must think of a way out as soon as the still fear is nursed to bloom.

2009-04-26T03:30:00.000-07:00

اري دلوكا نویسنده ایتالیایی ميگويد همه ما در درونمان شخصيتهاي متعددي هستیم كه ما آنها را به مرور زمان خفه كرده ايم. و نوشتن كمك مي كند تا آنها را بازيابيم. اين شخصيتها كه اند؟ چه حرفهايي براي گفتن دارند؟ آيا با مني كه من مي شناسم فرق دارند؟ نمي دانم. بايد قلم را روي سفيدي كاغذ بگذارم، نه انگشتانم را روي صفحه كليد بگذارم و اختيارشان واگذارم به آنهايي كه در درونم زندگي مي كنند. بگذارم بنويسند تا ببينم چه مي گويند. ببينم چه مي گويند تا بشناسمشان. اگر نوشتن تنها راه ارتباط با انهاست بگذارم آنها بنويسند تا با شناختن آنها شايد شناخت بهتري از خودم پيدا كنم

معرفی رشته زبان و ادبیات انگلیسی در مقطع کارشناسی ارشد

2009-01-03T10:07:00.000-08:00

انسان کیست؟ بعضی ها دارا بودن عواطف و احسسات قوی انسان را وجه تمایز او با موجودات دیگر می دانند. مسلماً همگی ما با تجربه هایی نظیر خشم، حسادت، طمع، نفرت، پوچی، آرمان گرایی، محبت، و عشق کم و بیش آشنا بوده ایم. ادبیات به نویسنده امکان می دهد تا چنین تجربه هایی را با خوانندگانش سهیم شود. ادبیات نه تنها با انتقال دادن تجربه انسانی بلکه با فراهم آوردن موقعیتی که به خواننده اجازه می دهد تا خودش شخصاً و به صورت تخیلی در آن تجربه خاص شرکت نماید سروکار دارد. ادبیات وسیله ای است که به خواننده امکان می دهد تا زندگی کامل تر، عمیق تر، غنی تر و آگاهانه تری داشته باشد. ادبیات ما را با تجربیاتی آشنا می کند که خودمان شخصاً نداشته ایم. به علاوه ادبیات می تواند تجربیاتی که خودمان از زندگی داشته ایم را عمیق تر و ژرف تر گرداند. ادبیات شامل مطالعات فلسفی، روان شناختی، بین فرهنگی و تاریخی نیز می شود. اصطلاح “ادبیات انگلیسی” به ادبیاتی که به زبان انگلیسی نوشته شده اشاره می کند. بنا براین نه تنها آثار نویسندگان انگلیسی بلکه آثار نویسندگان آمریکایی، استرلیایی، زلاند نویی، و کشورهایی که سابقاً مستعمره انگلیس بوده اند نیز جزء ادبیات انگلیسی به حساب می آید. ادبیات انگلیسی در دانشگاه های ایران رشته ای است جذاب، چالش انگیز و لذت بخش. ادبیات انگلیسی فرصت های جالبی برای مطالعه طیف وسیعی از آثار ادبی، نقد ادبی و گونه های ادبی به زبان انگلیسی از سراسر جهان را برای دانشجویان لیسانس و تحصیلات تکمیلی فراهم می آورد. دانشجویانی که در این رشته تحصیل می کنند این فرصت را دارند تا با جدید ترین تحولات سال های اخیر در زمینه نقد ادبی آشنا شده و به مهارت های نگارش انتقادی که نه فقط برای مطالعات دیگرشان که برای شغل های آینده اشان مفیدند نیز مجهز گردند. در گرایش زبان و ادبیات انگلیسی در مقطع کارشناسی طی سه ترم، دروس پایه که شامل خواندن، نگارش و مکالمه است، آموزش داده می‌شود تا دانشجو با مسائل اساسی زبان آشنا شده و آماده مطالعه‌ی دروس تخصصی خود شامل ادبیات انگلیسی، ترجمه، زبان شناسی و روش تدریس، آزمون سازی و نقد ادبی شود. در مقطع کارشناسی ارشد نیز این روال به گونه‌ای تخصصی‌تر ادامه پیدا می‌ کند

تخصص فارغ‌التحصیلان در هر گرایش

تحصیل در رشته ادبیات انگلیسی قابلیت‌ها و توانایی ما را برای دبیری زبان و ادبیات انگلیسی فراهم می‌نماید. تحصیلات دانشگاهی رشته زبان انگلیسی اگر همراه با تلاش و پیگیری‌های مستمر دانشجو صورت پذیرد و دانشجو در طول تحصیل خود همت خود را به صورت کامل بر مطالعه آثار خارجی قرار دهد امکان فعالیت در بخش‌های تخصصی‌تر مثل آموزش شعر، رمان و نمایش نامه انگلیسی را برای دانشجوی این رشته پدید می آورد.
همچنین تحصیل در این رشته امکان نقد و بررسی متون مختلف مثل شعر، رمان ، نمایش نامه و حتی فیلم چه از نقطه نظر اجتماعی، سیاسی، روان شناختی و غیره را برای فارغ التحصیل این رشته فراهم می آورد. در حقیقت پدید آوردن دید گاهی تحلیلی برای دانشجوی ادبیات انگلیسی از مهم ترین اهداف رشته ادبیات انگلیسی مخصوصاً در مقاطع کارشناسی ارشد و دکتری است. به علاوه مطالعه و تحلیل محتوی متون ادبی مختلف توانایی درک مطلب انگلیسی دانشجویان این رشته را به نحو قابل ملاحظه ای افزایش می دهد. برخی از مهم ترین تخصص هایی که دانشجوی گرایش ادبیات انگلیسی به دست می آورد از این قرار است: ۱- تاریخ ادبیات انگلیس: دانشجوی رشته ادبیات انگلیسی با دوره های مختلف ادبیات انگلیسی که شامل دوره های ادبیات دوره قدیم و میانه، دوره رنسانس، دوره بازگشت پادشاهی، دوره رومانتیک، دوره ملکه ویکتوریا و دوره مدرن و پست مدرن یا قرن بیستم می شود به خوبی آشنا می گردد. ۲- مکاتب ادبی: دانشجوی رشته ادبیات انگلیسی با مکاتب و جنبش های فکری مختلف که ادبیات را تحت تاثیر خود قرار داده اند به خوبی آشناست. ۳- اصول و روش نقد ادبی: همانطور که در بالا اشاره شد دانشجوی رشته ادبیات انگلیسی این توانایی را می یابد که نه تنها متون ادبی مختلف بلکه فیلم های سینمایی را به خوبی نقد و تحلیل نماید. ۴- شعر، رمان و نمایش نامه: دانشجوی رشته ادبیات انگلیسی با گونه های ادبی مختلف ادبیات انگلیسی مثل شعر، نثرو نمایش نامه به خوبی آشنا می شود. ۵- زبان فرانسه یا آلمانی به عنوان زبان دوم: دانشجوی رشته ادبیات انگلیسی علاوه برزبان انگلیسی با زبان فرانسه و یا آلمانی نیز آشنا می گردد

توانایی‌های لازم برای داوطلبان این رشته

ادامه تحصیل در هر رشته ای مقتضی دارا بودن توانا یی های ویژه ای در افراد است. رشته ادبیات انگلیسی نیز از این قاعده مستثنا نیست. رشته ادبیات انگلیسی همان گونه که از نامش پیداست با متون ادبی انگلیسی سروکار دارد و بر خلاف دوره کارشناسی که فقط در حدود یک چهارم واحدها به دروس ادبیات تعلق داشت، در دوره کارشناسی ارشد بیش از نود درصد واحدها به طور تخصصی به ادبیات انگلیسی تعلق دارد. دانشجویی که قصد ادامه تحصیل در رشته ادبیات انگلیسی را دارد می بایست توانایی مطالعه ای بالایی داشته باشد و بتواند ساعت های زیادی را به مطالعه اختصاص دهد چرا که ادبیات به مثابه ی دریایی است بی انتها پر از شعر، رمان و نمایش های متنوع. دارا بودن تخیلی پویا توانایی دیگری است که دانشجوی علاقه مند به رشته ادبیات می بایست بدان مجهز باشد چرا که ادبیات نه تنها با انتقال دادن تجربه انسانی بلکه با فراهم آوردن موقعیتی که به خواننده اجازه می دهد تا خودش شخصاً و به صورت تخیلی در آن تجربه خاص شرکت نماید سروکار دارد. ادبیات وسیله ای است که به خواننده امکان می دهد تا از طریق تخیل زندگی کامل تر، عمیق تر، غنی تر و آگاهانه تری داشته باشد. ادبیات این کار را از دو طریق انجام می دهد. با وسعت دادن به تجربه امان از زندگی (بدین معنی که ادبیات ما را با تجربیاتی آشنا می کند که خودمان به شخصه نداشته ایم) و با عمیق کردن تجربه هایی که خود در زندگی داشته ایم. بنا براین کسی که قصد دارد در رشته ادبیات انگلیسی موفق باشد می بایست تخیل پویایی داشته باشد تا بتواند این دو نقش ادبیات را درک نموده و تجربه ارائه شده توسط متن ادبی را به راحتی برای خود مجسم نماید. همچنین دارا بودن روحیه ای پژوهشی ویژگی دیگری است که دانشجوی علاقه مند به ادامه تحصیل در رشته ادبیات ادبیات انگلیسی باید بدان مجهز باشد چرا که این رشته به به عنوان یکی از زیر شاخه های علوم انسانی رشته ای است ذهنی و تفکری و نه عملی. بنابراین دانشجویان این رشته می بایست دائماً به تفکر، تحقیق و پژوهش بپردازند و دارا بودن چنین ویژگی از لازمه های تحصیل در این رشته به خصوص در مقاطع بالاتر است. هر چند توانایی مطالعه ای بالا، تخیل پویا و دارا بودن روحیه ای پژوهشی ویژگی ها و توانا یی های مهمی هستند که شخص علاقه مند به رشته ادبیات انگلیسی بدان ها نیاز دارد شاید مهم ترین مهارت و توانایی لازم برای ادامه تحصیل در این رشته مهارت در زبان انگلیسی عمومی است. نباید فراموش کرد که این رشته ادبیات “انگلیسی” است. بنابراین دانشجوی علاقه مند بدین رشته باید مهارت زیادی در گرامر، دامنه لغت و درک مطلب انگلیسی عمومی داشته باشد تا در مطالعه و درک متون ادبی که نسبت به متون غیر ادبی از نظر گرامر، دامنه لغت و درک مطلب توانایی بیشتری را از دانشجو می طلبند دچار مشکل نشود. به دیگر کلام دانشجوی ادبیات نباید دانشگاه را محلی برای آموزش ابتدایی زبان بداند بلکه باید پیش از ورود به دانشگاه با زبان انگلیسی آشنایی کامل داشته باشد

چه کسانی برای ادامه تحصیل در این رشته اقدام نکنند

دارا بودن توانایی مطالعه ای بالا، تخیل پویا، روحیه پژوهشی و مهارت بالا در انگلیسی عمومی لازمه ادامه تحصیل در رشته ادبیات انگلیسی هستند. بنابراین کسی که فاقد این توانایی هاست بهتر است برای ادامه تحصیل در این رشته اقدام نکند. همچنین دارا بودن علاقه زیاد به خواندن متون و نقد ادبی از دیگر فاکتور های ادامه تحصیل در رشته ادبیات انگلیسی است. بنابراین کسانی که فقط به خود زبان انگلیسی علاقه ویا در آن تبحر دارند و علاقه چندانی به خواندن متون و نقد ادبی ندارند بهتر است برای ادامه تحصیل در این رشته اقدام نکنند

زمینه‌های اشتغال

رشته زبان انگلیسی رشته ای است بسیار با اهمیت. بدین معنی که در حال حاضر زبان انگلیسی نه فقط به عنوان زبان بین المللی بلکه به عنوان زبان علمی دنیا شناخته می شود. بنابر این زبان انگلیسی در تمامی صنایع و دستگاه های دولتی و غیر دولتی کشور مورد نیاز است. البته باید این نکته را افزود که در ایران بیشتر در دانشگاه ها و مراکز آموزش عالی است که به گرایش ادبیات انگلیسی به طور تخصصی نیاز است. همچنین فارغ التحصیلان گرایش ادبیات انگلیسی می توانند در حوزه کاری خودشان یعنی ادبیات دست به ترجمه متون ادبی بزنند. ارتباط بین رشته ادبیات انگلیسی و صنعت چند سالی است که رو به بهبود گذاشته. آنچه در خصوص وضعیت شغلی رشته‌ زبان‌ انگلیسی قابل بیان است به این قرار است: - امکان دبیری و استادی در این رشته‌ در مراکز آموزش زبان و موسسات آموزش عالی. - کار مترجمی مخصوصاً ترجمه متون ادبی. -وزارت امور خارجه به عنوان اصلی‌ترین مرکز جذب دانشجویان فارغ‌التحصیل دانشکده‌های زبان سراسر کشور محسوب می‌شود و تعامل بین دانشکده زبان‌های خارجی با وزارت خارجه گرچه در شکل ایده‌آل خود قرار ندارد ولی به نظر می رسد در آینده نه چندان دور این ارتباط به نحو مطلوبی شکل خواهد گرفت. بازار کار رشته‌ زبان و ادبیات انگلیسی ارتباط مستقیمی با جهان خارج دارد و این ارتباط می‌تواند در این بخش‌ها صورت پذیرد: در بخش فرهنگ، ارتباطات و رفت و آمدهایی که در اثر برگزاری سمینارها و جشنواره‌ها و نمایشگاه‌ها و مانند آن برگزار می‌شود. رونق بازار ترجمه آثار خارجی در اثر حمایت‌های بخش دولتی و خصوصی می‌تواند اشتغال مناسبی برای تحصیل کردگان رشته ادبیات انگلیسی باشد. در بخش صنعت: رفت و آمد در بخش صنعت و بازرگانی و بطور عموم در حوزه اقتصاد بسیار گسترده است و حضور زبان‌دانان در کارخانه‌ها، ادارات و وزارتخانه‌ها برای ارتباط با بخش‌های خصوصی و دولتی کشورهای خارجی فرصت مناسبی است برای جذب دانش‌آموختگان رشته‌ زبان و ادبیات انگلیسی. استفاده از اینترنت و منابع خارجی در شرکت‌های خصوصی و ارتباط این شرکت‌ها با دنیای خارج بسیار گسترده شده و دانستن زبان خارجی و تسلط بر یک زبان به نحوی که بتوان مخاطب را جذب نمود موقعیت خوبی را فراهم نموده است. کلاس‌های خصوصی برای دانش‌آموزانی که در این درس ضعف دارند نیز بخشی از بازار کار این رشته‌ها را فراهم آورده. در پایان آنچه مهم است ذکر این نکته است که وسعت بازار کار برای دانش آموختگان رشته زبان و ادبیات انگلیسی به سبب فراگیری گسترده تر زبان انگلیسی نسبت به زبان های دیگر در جهان بسیار گسترده است و جای پیشرفت فراوانی دارد و داشتن شغلی مناسب برای فارغ التحصیل این رشته در دسترس‌تر است

برگرفته شده از سایت: شبانه

2008-10-22T02:33:00.000-07:00

Naipaul's Half A Life

The air was hot and stale inside. Looking out from the bedroom window, through wire netting and dead insects, at the rough garden and the tall paw-paw trees and the land falling away past groves of cashews and clusters of grass roofs to the rock cones which in the distance appeared to make a continuous low pale-blue range, Willie thought, 'I dont know where I am. I don't think I can pick up my way back. I don't ever want this view to become familiar. I must not unpack. I must never behave as though I am staying.'

2008-10-20T03:32:00.000-07:00

Even the impossible says:

" I' m possible"!

2008-08-14T01:58:00.000-07:00

Lost Me!

Again it is all a starving imagination that leads me on to write off my mind. Gone are those days I could put my naked thoughts in words, render them in a promiscuous passion of which I am still tainted in shame. Never again can tears ever bespeak my mind as I am just growing weary of lamenting and complaining in an abiding woe. Pray, fancy not about my willing words, nor ever do injustice to them through berating my rusty self, yet listen to my sketch of reason whose pangs of doubt has long scratched a fine heart which was a but a humble slave to all she decreed out of seeming rectitude and moral decency. Here is my desperate account of a typical day in a lonely house whose living sounds are but the tick-tuck of an old clock and the cacophony of a dying fridge. Yes, here, I am doing my MA thesis, with shattered hopes and great expectations, may one find enough reason to account for the agony long lodged deep down in my heart.

The angry glow of mourning sun just paints the room in a fierce orange, slyly revealing the darn patchworks of sorrow asleep on my bony face. Some unfinished sketches and university programs lie unkempt on the ground, more disturbingly perhaps than ever before. I should like to start over my thesis program, stitching the pieces together, supposedly to pander with an unknown desire who bid me to carry on in vain. Drained of any feasible impetus, I try to get up and to get dressed for another drag-out of a banal day. In a long minute, I am trying to bend over the sink to just wash away the belated skin of night, and there something grappled my hazy attention: The wild is creeping inside me, moving me with every stolen pulse of remembering the olden days. I try to stand up and inspect my entirety in the pale mirror whose front-door neighbor had never ceased seeing every corner of his fantasy. I look young enough, yet the child in me has long grown old for my age. A cryptic grip of cry takes over my all sensations, leaving me desperate for a hand to hide beneath. Aloof and adrift, I am searching down the depth of mirror for a face I used to know for long. I have lost me; I have lost the innocence of my youth, yet used to busy myself with an unknown fancy.

Days are not good enough to be committed to memory. Hours are lazy, my mind, hazy. Even the shadow creeps far away before it could be captured by sight. Waking up, I try walking back and forth in different corners of the house, measuring my troubled steps and at time recalling the last-night dream, if any, as a murky tale. Time to have a glorious breakfast at noon when the clock tells the time to pray, and I’m still lost in thought. A bit of leafing through books and papers makes me more curious to touch several buttons on my badly-positioned keyboard, and then erasing them all at once. It’s just called a revision, an endless one. Busy again in thoughts that take me away to the reign of boyhood, thinking of family again. Gone is time again, so I lie consumed and weary of doing nothing. Night falls; I have forgot to turn on the lamps. Fear stirs me up, prodding me to walk back and forth again in the house with a sense of anticipation, perhaps for a call or bell that may toll now and again.

I go by the mirror just to check out how much a day I have grown old. But I feel lost again. I have lost me….

2008-05-23T02:07:00.000-07:00

A Marxist-Feminist Critique of Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour and John Steinbeck’s The Chrysanthemums

By: M. S. Zarei

Introduction

To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man.
Simon de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949)

The historical usage of the word gender is rather as old as the feminists’ attempts to define women as having a gender identity in a patriarchal culture and society. As noted by Glover and Kaplan in Genders, the sixth edition of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language refers the word gender “either to the grammatical practice of classifying nouns as masculine, feminine, or neuter; or it could mean ‘a sex’” (x).

Gender Criticism, however, as a modern approach to literature, explores how ideas about men and women, masculinity and femininity, are socially constructed in a patriarchal culture. Likewise, feminist critics tend to insist on the notion of gender as a cultural and/or social construct that is quite different from sex as a biologically determined factor. Accordingly, most critics believe that feminist criticism is by definition gender criticism, thus cutting off the word ‘sexuality’ from its old and conventional associations. As Arnold Davidson states. "Sexual identity is no longer exclusively linked to the anatomical structure of the internal and external genital organs. It is now a matter of impulses, tastes, aptitudes, satisfactions, and the psychic traits" (qtd. in Genders xvi).

Therefore, when Simon de Beauvoir declared in her Second Sex in 1949 that, “one is not born a woman, one become one,” she was hinting at the way in which individuals of the female sex assume the feminine gender, that is, that elaborate set of restrictive, socially prescribed attitudes and behaviors we associate with femininity. Thus as the Freudian theory makes it clear, gender is not a unique property of bodies originally existent in human beings; it is “an outcome” not “an origin.”

Feminist criticism (used synonymously with Gender criticism) passed through different controversial factors and obstacles in its course of development. Rigidly periodized in three different phases or waves (to use Showalter’s categorization), the feminist criticism in its first wave mainly deals with the Woman’s right and Woman’s suffrage. The leading figure in this phase is Virginia Woolf whose ‘A Room of Ones Own’ contributed immensely to this wave apart from Simone de Beauvoir’s fundamental role which mostly appeared in her ceaseless cry to define women in her ‘Second Sex.’ Although the second wave of feminism continues to share the first wave’s fight for women’s rights, its focal emphasis shift to the politics of reproduction, to women’s ‘experience’, and to sexual ‘differences.’ In this wave, sexuality, as both a means of oppression and something to celebrate, becomes a key issue (The main principles of this wave will be later discussed in the two short stories assigned). The third wave of feminism, which started from 1970 up to this time, however, rejects the main principles of the first and second wave as giving minor roles to women. Borrowing the psychological ideas of Jacque Lacan and Julia Kristeva, this wave of feminism strives for creating a female framework and a female discourse based on the female experience and not according to male definitions, a process called gynocriticism by Elaine Showalter. Therefore, as Showalter argues, gynocritics try to “construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature, to develop new models based on the study of female experience, rather than to adapt to the male models and theories” (qtd. in Bressler 177). Finally, of the four models offered by gynocriticism for addressing the nature of women’s writing, Helen Cixous in her challenging works such as “Laugh of the Medusa” (1975) discusses “a particular kind of female writing that she calls l´écriture féminine, envisioned in terms of bisexuality” (Bressler 180).

The aim of this literary study is to explore the fight for women’s right as well as the women’s confinement in society and social institutions in Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour and John Steinbeck’s Chrysanthemums. These stories will be further discussed in the light of feminist criticism (gender role and identity) and certain features of second wave of feminism (Marxist feminism, in particular), that ultimately reveal the sexual differences and the social isolation of women in a patriarchal culture.

Feminine Self in “The Story of an Hour”

Critical readings of Kate Chopin’s works often note the tension between female characters and the so-called patriarchal society that surrounds them. Likewise, Chopin’s The Story of an Hour sketches the social restraints and tribulations a marriage can bring as a social institution. A relentless fight for freedom from the patriarchal dominance, as characterized by the second wave of feminism, is constantly emphasized throughout the work in order to abolish the ‘sexual’ differences existing between men and women.

Generally, women weren’t liberated during the 19th century and the female liberation wasn’t put on the agenda until the 1960’s. In case of Louise, Kate Chopin tries to depict at best how this female liberation is temporarily achieved, namely in an hour of utmost joy and exhilaration. It seems that Chopin in this story is mainly concerned with exploring the dynamic interrelation between women and men (Louise and Brenty), women and patriarchy (Louise and society), and even women and women (Louise and her sister). However, most critics focus on the importance of conflict in this work and the way in which Chopin uses gender constraints on two levels: to open an avenue for the discussion of feminine identity and, at the same time, to critique the patriarchal society that denies that identity. Accordingly, Peggy Skaggs suggests that “entrapment, not freedom, is the source of Chopin’s inspiration, for she is primarily concerned with exploring the way in which gender roles deny identity”; she continues: “yet without the entrapment, the question of identity, even the inspiration to write about identity, wouldn’t exist” (18). Thus the notion of social “entrapment” and that of “cageling self” are tragically dramatized early in the story, making freedom of a fluttering self seem aptly predictable throughout the story, even if it is to be reduced to a tragic death, that is, the freedom of one’s soul, "[...] But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome…“Free! Body and soul free!" she kept whispering" (Chopin 2).

Worth noting is also Kate Chopin’s acute style of representation of Louise entrapment in a patriarchal society. Having employed the free indirect discourse (the FID hypothesis) in rendering Louise speech and thoughts, the narrator has been able to move inside the character’s mind and thereby revealing her thoughts and her true feeling about institution of marriage as a confining force imposed by a patriarchal culture:

When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She
said it over and over under her breath: 'free, free, free!' The vacant stare and the look of
terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and bright. Her pulses
beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body.
(Chopin2)
Accordingly, most feminist critics believe that marriage is but a ‘legal prostitution’ that ultimately consolidates the difference between genders in society.

As feminist criticism in its second wave underwent a marked shift of perspective to view women in the light of the politics of reproduction (gender), a different version of feminism called ‘Marxist Feminism’ emerged in the period, which can partly be traced in Chopin’s stories. Marxist feminism tended to see women “as constituting a seriously underprivileged class” (103). Adopting many Marxist concepts redefined by Louis Althusser, Marxist feminism explores ideology as an ‘inescapable’ factor that “gives us what we experience as our individuality” (Bertens 103). Likewise, marriage institution can be almost taken as an ‘Ideological State Apparatus’ that interpellates women as subservient to men, hence denying their true identities and revealing their social differences consolidated in the act of marriage. Louise Mallard in Chopin’s story once tries to escape form the mythical role of Woman as subservient to men when she learns about her husband death, however, she fails to revel fully in one-hour freedom bestowed upon her as her husband reappears alive at the end, leading to a tragic erasure of her feminine self at the end:

There was a feverish triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a
goddess of Victory. She clasped her sister's waist, and together they descended the
stairs…. Some one was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard
who entered….When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease-- of joy
that kills.

The Chrysanthemums; The Fenced Femininity

John Steinbeck’s The Chrysanthemums depicts the trials of a woman, Elisa Allen, attempting to gain power in a man's world. She tries to define the boundaries of her role as a woman in such a closed society. While her environment is portrayed as a tool for social repression, it is through nature in her garden where Elisa gains and shows off her power. As like Chopin’s story, here Elisa Allen is trying her ‘fenced freedom’ momentarily. She constantly fights for an equal right with men, hence trying at best to imitate men’s mannerism in her gardening activity and personal contacts with the masculine world:

Her figure looked blocked and heavy in her gardening costume, a man's black hat pulled
low down over her eyes, clod-hopper shoes, a figured print dress almost completely
covered by a big corduroy apron with four big pockets to hold the snips, the trowel and
scratcher, the seeds and the knife she worked with. She wore heavy leather gloves to
protect her hands while she worked.
(The Chrysanthemums 2)

She even withholds to betray her feminine features to her masculine environment, lest it should deny her the limited power she possesses in the masculine world. Unconsciously, as she looks through her fence at the men talking business, she is trying to cover up her feminine qualities: “She brushed a cloud of hair out of her eyes with the back of her glove, and left a smudge of earth on her cheek in doing it”(1). She longs to be in their position and to possess their characteristics.

However, as the story progresses, Elisa has trouble extending this power outside of the fence that surrounds her garden. Elisa learns but does not readily accept, that she possesses a feminine power weak for the time, not the masculine one she had tried so hard to achieve through its imitation. Again like Louise in Chopin’s story, Elisa here is fenced in from the real world, as her fenced garden of chrysanthemums may clearly show. She is cut off from the rest of the world as the opening sentence of the story suggests: “The high gray-flannel fog of winter closed off the Salinas Valley from the sky and from all the rest of the world” (1).

The main principles of Marxist feminism can also be easily explored in this short story. The politics of production, emphasized by the second wave of feminism, redefines Elisa Allen as a product of the patriarchal society whereby she is constantly hailed in the masculine world as a strong gardener. Her misrecognition (what some Marxists dub as a ‘false consciousness’) finally leads her to a sexual frustration and repression mostly shown when she encounters the peddler who indirectly prods her to reveal some of her feminine qualities. The only outlet she discovers for her frustration is in a flower garden where she cultivates beautiful chrysanthemums which are both a symbol for her feminine features and her attempts to enter the masculine world. Elisa seems to be a victim of a ‘false ideology’ imposed upon her by a patriarchal culture. She has long lost her ‘gender role and identity’ in her futile quest for the masculine power. She tries to fill her fragmented personality with a portion of ideology that constantly hails her to gardening (what she revels in for most): “Her face was eager and mature and handsome; even her work with the scissors was over-eager, over-powerful. The chrysanthemum stems seemed too small and easy for her energy.”

Finally, ‘The Chrysanthemum’ as like the Chopin’s ‘The Story of an Hour’ tries to portray the women as totally isolated in a patriarchal culture that deems them as ‘Others’ while ironically hails them as an accepted party, however subdued, in the social community. The two authors, here dexterously weave a great deal of social commentary and feminist ideas through their works which may only be perceived if we consider the prevalent stereotypes and social expectations of women at their time, and the implications of such ideas.

Sources:

Bertens, Hans. Literary Theory: The Basics. London: Routledge, 2001.

Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice. 4th ed. New Jersey: Pearson, 2007.

Chopin, Kate. The Story of an Hour. Great Literature Online. 1997-2007
(2 July, 2007). <http://chopin.recentauthors.net./thestoryofanhour/.>

Glover, David, and Cora Kaplan. Genders. London: Routledge, 2000.

Skaggs, Peggy. Kate Chopin. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1985.

Steinbeck, John. The Chrysanthemums. Great Literature Online. 1997-2007
(2 July, 2007). <http://steinbeck.recentauthors.net./thechrysanthemums/.>

2007-10-11T02:08:00.000-07:00

Detecting Feminine Patterns in Shakespearean Tragedy: Macbeth (c.1606)

By: M. S. Zarei

Echoic Feminine Language

A tragic resonance reverberated throughout the Shakespearean plays has been long relegated to Greek physis [nature] that (to use Alice Jardine’s terminology) speaks almost in all the Shakespearean tragedies. This obscure vocality in the play, according to Martin Heidegger, reveals the alternating play of presence and absence within poetry. In the same respect, Jacques Derrida, having assumed a kind of materiality for the very poetic interplay of sounds, believes that these phon(em)ic resonances within the literary text are frequently personified as female. The idea of female-gendered resonances within the literary text along with the polysemy of the poetic language was later claimed by Julia Kristeva, too. Upon arguing the philosophical concept of chora, Kristeva acknowledges the continuing influence, within language (the symbolic), of a pre-oedipal stage (the semiotic) when the child is still dependant upon the mother’s body. Philappa Berry in her famous essay on Echoic Language argues that the “dynamic properties of language associated with the semiotic chora are manifested most notably in moments when sound takes precedence over sense.” And this phenomenon happens when we have a poetic recombining of language with musicality; the example of which can be found in Shakespearean plays- the tragedies in particular. Therefore, the feminine chora almost bases the Shakespearean plays in one way or another. Kristeva also compares chora to the chorus of Greek drama that reveals its connection with bodily expression and gesture. Below is an account taken from the play Macbeth

that at best shows the smooth and flowing rhythm of speech betraying the feminine tonality of the utterance.

All our service, In every point twice done and then done double,Were poor and single business to contendAgainst those honors deep and broad wherewithYour Majesty loads our house. For those of old,And the late dignities heaped upon them,We rest your hermits (I.vi 18-24).

Feminine Fate and Fortune

The belief in the existence and supernatural power of witches was widely claimed in the Shakespeare’s plays. The witches had supernatural dark influences over their subjects, including the capability to foretell the future events and to read the minds of the mortals with whom they could come into contact.

Likewise here in Macbeth, witches are presented as powerful figures who can exercise a great power over the hero Macbeth. Witches’ initial prophecies address him with titles, encouraging Macbeth’s ambition and craving for the crown. Besides, Lady Macbeth’s desire to see her husband crowned the king speeds up the tragic downfall of Macbeth and it thus effectively reveals Macbeth’s true side of evil. According to Berry, “In Shakespeare’s tragedies, the discovery of an identity with and in death is enforced by a feminine-gendered Fate or Fortune.” As mentioned before, the feminine trinity of the sisters (the witches), whose constant predictions of Macbeth’s future are made true in the course of the play, reveals in part a feminine driving force that is attributed to the

Fortune. Thus she takes Macbeth’s life in her hands, molds it in whatever shapes possible as though playing a puppet onstage with some invisible rods and strings. The personification of Fortune as three witches may almost reinforce this idea. Therefore, just as Seneca maintained that ‘Thou canst not wander from thy Fortune, she will besiege thee, and whether thou goest a great traine will follow thee’, so Macbeth is plagued with the tricky plays of Fortune.

The curious parallelism of the first and final acts also seems to draw on the very opposing forces of Fortune that reveal the mysterious affinity between Macbeth and the traitorous Cawdor. According to Berry, “Just as Macbeth had fought Macdonwald to secure Duncan’s throne, so Macduff is now fighting against Macbeth on behalf of Duncan’s son Malcolm.” And thus Macbeth’s head is fixed upon the battlement like the head of Macdonwald in the earlier act, at least to reveal this parallel structure more vividly. This parallelism and repetition of time, according to Kristeva, hint at a feminine temporality which is running throughout the play. Kristeva in her essay ‘Woman’s Time’, “explicitly associates woman with a differing of conventional temporality, arguing that she has a close connection both with cyclical time or temporal repetition (presumably because of the periodicity of her bodily cycles)…” (qtd. in Berry 106).

Thus the Fortune’s partial embodiment as three witches along with the idea of parallelism and feminine temporality may at best establish a feminine foundation for the overall structure of the play.

Feminine Temptation: Lady Macbeth

Lady Macbeth plays a major role in influencing her husband to fulfill the prophecies. The reader first meets Lady Macbeth as she reads the news of the witches’ salutations

and prophecies. She determines to make the promises of the black sisters come true but her concern is clearly her husband’s hesitant nature. She says:

Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be
What thou art promised: _You do I fear thy nature:
It is too full o’ the milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way.
(1,5,17)

Lack of imagination helps Lady Macbeth to be strong for taking immediate action. She does not feel the cruelty of Duncan’s murder because she hardly imagines the deed .Her plan to kill Duncan and to put the dagger on the guards’ hand while they are asleep show that she can not even foresee the outcome of her own deed; If the guardians are murderers, then why are they sleeping after the murder with a bloody dagger? Lady Macbeth seems to be the agent of those witches; perhaps the fourth sister, who eventually fulfills and accomplishes their prophecies.

The greatness of Lady Macbeth lies almost wholly in courage and force of will; to her there is no separation between will and deed. Cleanth Brooks says, “She knows what she wants; and she is ruthless in her consideration of means. She will always ‘catch the nearest way’….” She never wavers about what she is about to do, and so stoically undergoes any difficulty that might stop her. When Macbeth hesitates to kill Duncan she cries out that she is willing to crush her own child in order to gain the crown:

I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me;
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums

And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this. (1.5, 24)

Besides, she knows about her husband‘s weakness. So, first of all she encourages him by picturing the deed as heroic, recalling the murder as “this night’s great business” or
“our great quell”, while she disregards its cruelty and falseness. Then she questions Macbeth’s masculinity and manliness to convince him to murder Duncan. Bradley maintains that she destroys his weak resistance by showing him a prepared plan which may remove from him the terror and danger of consideration. She excites him with the word “coward” which no man and at least of all a soldier can bear. Lady Macbeth touches directly upon these issues in her attack on Macbeth’s manhood when he hesitates to kill Duncan.

After all, the entire play offers a formidable feminine foundation that finely sketches different feminine patterns in the play, including the echoic language, the personified Fortune, and finally the feminine temptation.

Sources:

Berry, Philippa. Shakespeare’s Feminine Endings. London: Routledge, 1999.
Bradley, A. C. Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear Macbeth. New York: Macmillan, 1905.
Brooks, Cleanth. "The Naked Babe and the Cloak of Manliness." In The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947.
Moore, R. "Macbeth: Introduction." eNotes: Macbeth. Ed. Penny Satoris. Seattle: Enotes.com LLC, October 2002. 29 May 2007.

2007-06-23T08:33:00.000-07:00

A Marxist Reading of James Joyce's Clay and Gordimer's Charmed Lives

By: M. S. Zarei

Political Reading: Marxist Criticism

Marxist literary theory emerged firstly in the writings of the German critic and philosopher Karl Heinrich Marx (1818–1883). Marx grounded his theoretical assumptions on the notion of ‘determinants’ that has a fundamental role in any Marxist type of interpretation (Bressler 192). Marx tried to articulate a version of reality that could be defined and understood. In this respect, he believed that “social and economic realities were the ultimate determinants of culture and human consciousness.” Marx simply opposed the Hegelian theory of history which argued that ‘consciousness determines life’ and maintained instead that ‘life (social existence) determines consciousness.’ This, in part, entails that our social circumstances determine our lives. Likewise, Traditional Marxism claims that thought is also subservient to the material conditions under which it develops. (82) The clash between the capitalism and the labourers in society, according to Marxism, inevitably, brings about alienation on the part of the labourers. They become alienated from themselves; being constantly seen as production units, as objects rather than human beings. In fact, capitalism reifies them while they remain blind to their own condition because of the effect of what Marxism calls ideology. (Bertens 84)

Definition of Ideology

Ideology, in Marxist view, is what makes us misrepresent the world to ourselves. According to Marxists, “ideology is not so much a set of beliefs or assumptions that we are aware of, but it is that which makes us experience our life in a certain way and makes us believe that the way of seeing ourselves and the world is natural” (Bertens 84). In so doing, the reality one takes for granted is in fact distorted and thus falsely represented as natural. To succumb to ideology, therefore, means to live in an illusory world. The French Marxist Louise Althusser also defines ideology as “the imaginary ways in which people represent to themselves their real relationship to the world” (qtd. in Selden 153). Althusser believes that “Ideology is like the air we breathe and is the seemingly natural discourse which makes possible our sense of existence as human subjects” (Selden 153). Althusser’s views appear different from earlier Marxists who simply took ideology for a kind of ‘false consciousness’ produced by capitalism. Rather, to give a more accurate reason for the existence of ideology, Althusser shares the ideas held by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan who believes that due to the processes we go through while growing up, we are left incomplete. Therefore, having been aware of ‘that deep lack’, that makes us yearn for completion, we inevitably turn to ideology to fill up the lack (Bertens 86). We constantly delude ourselves as ideology–to which we have already consigned our free will– addresses us as ‘complete subjects.’

Ideological State Apparatuses and Interpellation

The driving forces behind ideology are the so-called State Apparatuses (religious, cultural, educational, judicial, etc.) that help sustain the dominant ideology at work. All subjects are greeted by the discourse of a particular State Apparatuses. In the same respect, Althusser defines a process called ‘interpellation’ (hailing) whereby ideology works through interpellating (addressing) us in different social roles (subject positions) that we play or occupy, so that we falsely appear to ourselves as complete subjects (Bertens 87). In fact, ideology tries to convince us that we are whole and real, filling up the crack we have all inherited in our fragmented identities.

The Blindfolded Narrative in James Joyce’s Clay

Pierre Macherey in his A Theory of Literary Production (1966) introduces an idea that literary form is capable of transforming ideology into fiction and thereby of showing us its internal incoherences and contradictions. In fact, the writer [here James Joyce], by producing an ideology in the form of a fiction, makes us feel the gaps, silences and absences which in their purely ideological form are less apparent (Selden 155).

Likewise, Clay describes a deceptively simple story whose narrative self-deception attempts, and fails, to mislead the reader. The blind protagonist Maria simply fails to blind even the less attentive reader of the blind spots in her story. Having been portrayed as a product of the Irish Ideology, the “old maid” Maria appears as a figure who “seems to lack everything and therefore embodies total desire, a desire for the recognition and prestige that would let a poor old woman without family, wealth, or social standing maintain her human status in paralytic Dublin…” (Norris 206). It seems that Maria, endowed with an ideological awareness, unconsciously tries to fulfill a Lacanian lack–if not the social and personal shortcomings– of her own life. The story seemingly unfolds by means of the contrasts between the narrator's view of Maria and her own emotionally limited self-awareness.

Maria’s job in the kitchen of a laundry established for the reform of prostitutes obviously does not secure her a proper social standing, yet her self-esteem as an important figure seems to stem from an ideological consciousness that has obscured her vision of reality. Maria has been “hailed” (interpellated) in the place of an important person in the society while in reality she is nothing more than a common dishwasher.

In fact, it is Maria’s social standing, affected largely by the Ideological State Apparatuses (attending the ritual ceremony, for example), that determines her consciousness. Her isolated consciousness thus feeds upon the ideological self-awareness she has been entrapped in.

Halloween

Halloween (October 31) is “the Celtic New Year's Eve and Feast of the Dead, Christianized as the Feasts of the Blessed Virgin and All Saints (November 1) and All Souls (November 2). In Irish folk custom, it is a night of remembrance of dead ancestors and anticipation of the future through various fortune-telling games.” Halloween as a ritual ceremony serves two important purposes in the story. Firstly, it is one of those Ideological State Apparatuses that almost controls Maria’s life. Secondly, it emphasizes the notion of past and ancient values that are embodied in Joyce’s stories. In fact, Maria as an allegorical representation of Mother Ireland is paralyzed by circumstances beyond her control or awareness. She can be taken as a version of the ancient symbolic representation of Mother Ireland dominated by imperial England.

The Charmed Lives of the Other(s)

Gordimer’s Charmed Lives seemingly probes the static and equally pathetic condition of “two harmless and handicapped people” whose mechanical and unchanging lives in the story mirror the very dull lives of the native habitants of the South Africa. These two harmless people were brought out to the country, as two imported ideological models, before Kate Shand was born. The little Kate grows up as her mother subconsciously injects a potion of a false ideology into Kate’s fragmented character, so that the watchmaker’s and the doctor’s faces become “bracketed for ever” in Kate’s own face. The watchmaker Simon Datnow, as introduced earlier in the story, becomes an Other into which Kate looks up and builds her identity. In this respect, the glass cage, where the watchmaker works seemingly for no end, may also embody the Mirror Stage (also called looking-glass stage) where Kate’s own image mirrored as a whole and complete being (as that of the Watchmaker) is but an ideal. The little Kate used to “stand for a long time with her face close to the glass cage [of the watchmaker]” who has been constructed as an ideal by Mrs. Shand. Upon trying “to get her husband to stand up to her” in vain, Mrs. Shand continuously champions the watchmaker against his timid husband’s will to seemingly fulfill her marital lack: “Datnow, she gave her children to understand, was a natural gentleman, a kind of freak incidence among the immigrant relations.” She subconsciously deludes her children to turn to the idealized watchmaker who is now and then symbolized almost as a Father figure for Kate.

The narrative structure, again like that of Clay, develops by the means of contrasts between what the mother (Mrs. Shand) strongly idealizes for Kate and what she herself comes to experience in the characters of the watchmaker and the doctor. This almost brings about a kind of disillusionment on the part of Kate who finally leaves the town where she finds the mechanical, charmed lives of the other(s) hardly accommodating of her expectation. The grown-up Kate finds no glamour in the empty lives of the watchmaker and the doctor, whom her mother still regards with high respect. Likewise, Kate becomes disgusted with the way the two men live; they are blind to their own state of affairs abused by an unknown power. The notion of survival is thus drawn as its most pitiful sense in the story. The watchmaker and the doctor both simply want to survive, regardless of what is happening around them. The whole story seems to be an allegory of an ideologically plagued town whose members including both the native Africans and the immigrants are paralyzed with an unknown power. They are constantly hailed in the roles they play blindly. Yet Kate never tells the reason for her leaving the town, the reason that “had taken shape for her, slowly, out of all her childhood, in the persons of those two men whom she had known…”

Works Cited

Bertens, Hans. Literary Theory: The Basics. London: Routledge, 2001.

Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice. 4th ed. New Jersey: Pearson, 2007.

Norris, Margot. Narration under a Blindfold: Reading Joyce's "Clay”
PMLA, Vol. 102, No. 2 (Mar., 1987), pp. 206-215

Selden, Raman. Peter Widdowson. A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literature Theory. Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993.

2007-06-23T08:32:00.000-07:00

Krapp’s last Tape by Samuel Beckett

By: M. S. Zarei

Krapp’s Last Tape stages in part the incessant plays of human foibles and regret. Upon sketching an intimate portrait of the individual alone, Beckett seems to offer a worldview of an empty, cyclic nature of human life overshadowed by almost infinite regressions into a painful past. The 69-year old Krapp is almost at a trial to assess his younger self (the 39-year old Krapp) through his taped memories on the “awful occasion” of his birthday, yet he realizes that how strange his former self appears to battle with his current self, hence “brief laugh in which Krapp joins” that emerges as a result of a realization of his own futile and ambitious desires in his younger self.

The blankness of Krapp’s cyclic life, as representative of human life in general, is marked by his empty and futile documented past whose paling fire is still burning deep down inside him, yet inadequate to prod him yearning back for them.
'Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back.'– Krapp's Last Tape
Krapp’s reflection on his past self, fraught with his double sense of mockery and regret, appears to draw on significance as merely “separating [of] the grain from the husk.” The aging Krapp is assessing his accomplishment, if any, as any human being might do in that very age, however it seems to be to no avail for Beckett’s worldview affirms the undeniable futility of human life.
The techniques and methods Beckett uses to achieve and create this worldview are notable. The language of the play with its precise functionality hardly seems to convey any meaning. Thus the plot seemingly emerges as being devoid of meaning and meaning if there is such a thing may reside in stage directions. Moreover, the brevity of Beckett language is aptly highlighted here which in large scale marks the division of the whole play into a one-act play as to stage the shortness and emptiness of Krapp’s life whose pathetic ending is paralleled with recoding his last tape. Repetition also plays an important role as another method to achieve that worldview. Krapp’s life is plagued with jaded repetition as is the dead language of the play in its limited functionality. After all, Beckett seems to aim at representing Krapp’s blank life as a support for his absurd view about human life in general, and in so doing he uses different techniques and method to achieve that goal.

Back Again!

2007-06-23T08:27:00.000-07:00

Long time’s passed after publishing my last post in this, and there was time I reveled in googling my blog in net, thrilling all the day long reading my rhythmical pieces out aloud. And now all are passed in a very brutal sweep of time. I am not going to lament the old days, nor am I attending the blank future, just here I am again, blogging.

Decided to change the nature of posts from now on, sending a few term-papers along with some reaction-papers that are mostly dedicated to English Literature. The nickname, however, is still the same Alex as I found it needless to adopt a new one. A reminder of bygones!

Let's Go Then, You and I!

2006-04-17T14:29:00.000-07:00

My heart aches, no wine to drink, no nightingale to sing a song, and no hope to live a life; just being drowned in despair. There, out of light, the darkling leaves of night dwell upon my eyes and I determined to leave! The new year is ravaging the torn pages of my calendar, yet the ugly spring brings no blossom to crying leaves of whiteness. Life is mostly spent with e-motion, chatting and sharing e-feelings, e-looks, and e-tears! Long time’s passed ever since I was dreaming about the rosy days of my life, but now there is nothing to come to that uneasy mind. I am going to graduate on BA; leaving collage for good and burying down all the memories I had treasured once and for all. The tone of day is thus lamenting the very melody of my life. The winter's been approaching in the guise of spring, dressing my days and nights in a murky blue. Had I ceased the winged chariot turning on, I would have had much to please. I am going to miss the empurpled hours passing by; yet wishing to stop it. Alas, we are to leave, not the poor collage with its nasty staffs, but friends and teachers who have been the major casts of my life. Oh, let's go then you and I!

2006-03-12T06:31:00.000-08:00

O Tears, the companion of endless night,
That murky shadow burnt with a might,
Thou stain my waning words with despair
Yet behold in eyes an image to share
What more thou want of me?
Had I cradled thee not with barrier
Thou wouldst sweep down with full career
Off my burning cheeks; my fainting face

O the falling sun, thou give her to me again
From the yonder blue above the men
Ah, alas, out of love I dwell in her heart
Been expelled from the throne of part
My words doth yet lament in woe
Enchant my verse to sing a so:

"Love is a mundane grace, a shadowy pace
Love is a falling night, a perishing sight"

By: M. S. Zarei

2006-03-12T06:25:00.000-08:00

Nostalgia

Calm and mysterious the waves were weaving wonder upon my gloomy eyes, so silent as though the drunken sea-birds had already stopped loving them. Off there in the middle, the wind was trying to lift the white tops on the waves as the yachts were tacking across the bay heaving like determined horses in soft sand. Along with the mournful tone of the day, a yacht was singing her own requiem to me, seemingly warning me of her pending departure. I just cast off my eyes far in her wooden face to hardly recall a childish dream of embarking. A sense of melancholy came to darken my heart while I was witnessing some black rings of smoke twisting up in the air as like to an arrogant lady's showing off her lock of hair to a lover. The patches of clouds in sky mirrored a semi-dark visage of the silent sea while a dense fog was slyly creeping down to blind the only lantern, erected up there in the wrinkled face of harbor for the last fifty years. I sat down in despair, sharing my tears with the lashing splash of waves, and kept looking on the yacht as she was moving away in the marine world. She finally faded away and left me alone in the harbor that was now well-painted in the colorful beams of morning sun. However, determined to leave, I forsook the harbor for a later encounter, as it was now stinking the very smell of loneliness I have been stained with.

By: M. S. Zarei

2005-10-06T23:14:00.000-07:00

Cageling Love

By: M. S. Zarei

I am caged up here in love
what is told to make me move
out of despair and dark night
and towards the very blue light

I need thy winged words
of life, thy heroic swords
to fight against the hunted soul
and to soar up to the very goal

My boat of hope is wrecked down
and I stink the corruptions of town
No one would pay me a murky look
not thy faded smile would ever hook

I would die in thy charming cage
down thy ended love and the last page
buried deep in ashes of time
and never remembered in thy prime

Tomorrow Speech of A Lovelorn

2005-03-02T07:38:00.000-08:00

Out, out brief passion
Love but a falling step, a sore stab
That crashes and smashes his subject upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is fate
Given to an idiot full of err and theory
Signifying nothing!

A Receip for Tear

2005-02-25T07:44:00.000-08:00

A Recipe for Tears

Dark and dreary, came the strange feeling of within. My heart, determined to step out of the chest, was knocking impatiently and my legs were about to tremble in response. In the fog of memories, I reviewed the marching problems I had faced. Gradually, I came to believe that a growing anarchy was being inhabited within my soul while my mind, hunted by a charming passion, failed to get its bearing. There were almost dark and silence ruling in the poor surrounding. The footstep of heart, however, was trying to surpass the howling wind convincing the trees to cry their last leaves into the nearby pond. I sat down in doubt. The claws of fear were then gripped to my clammy hands, and they came to boast through my sobs! Having dealt with such a situation, I first resisted leaving any trace of tears on the puzzled eyelash. It may crash my personality as an egg!
I was big enough not to slender, but the impact held me so tightly that my bones were to crack. So I took a refugee by the crying tree as the first tear fell in shame. It freed me of the unknown fear though I felt to be a child rather than a man. Ignoring the differences, I did cry until my eyes afford!

An Onymous