Derek Mahon’s Affiliations with Albert Camus

Zadanie pt. „Digitalizacja i udostępnienie w Cyfrowym Repozytorium Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego kolekcji czasopism naukowych wydawanych przez Uniwersytet Łódzki” nr 885/P-DUN/2014 dofinansowane zostało ze środków MNiSW w ramach działalności upowszechniającej nauk

Moore's Paradox and Assertion

If I were to say, “Agnes does not know that it is raining, but it is,” this seems like a perfectly coherent way of describing Agnes’s epistemic position. If I were to add, “And I don’t know if it is, either,” this seems quite strange. In this chapter, we shall look at some statements that seem, in some sense, contradictory, even though it seems that these statements can express propositions that are contingently true or false. Moore thought it was paradoxical that statements that can express true propositions or contingently false propositions should nevertheless seem absurd like this. If we can account for the absurdity, we shall solve Moore’s Paradox. In this chapter, we shall look at Moore’s proposals and more recent discussions of Moorean absurd thought and speech

Dionysus Torn to Pieces: An Examination of The Sound and the Fury in Light of the Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche

Over the course of this thesis the author considers the problem of truth in life as manifested in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury by means of the Nietzschean conception of the Dionysian. The examination unfolds in a sequential analysis of the novel’s four sections, an analysis framed by Nietzsche’s four theses on “‘Reason’ in Philosophy:” the author considers the first section (Ben) symbolic of man’s subversion to what is directly before his eyes, and yet discovers in Ben’s idiocy a refutation of that same apparent reality in a presently-realized past, personified in Ben’s sister, Caddy; the bounds and liberties of perspective realized, the author considers how in the second section (Quentin) the limits and illusions of perspective defy rationality, and turn cultural truths into the heralds of their own apparent destruction yet aesthetic apotheosis; in the third section (Jason), the author discovers the hollow core of Jason’s morality, and ultimately recognizes in the final brother’s illusions and rationalities a meaningless martyrdom of a present believed by Jason to be denied him by the past; the author ultimately discovers what meaning the three brothers’ perspectives signify—namely, Pandora’s solace—in the novel’s blacks—specifically, Dilsey—before confronting the nihilistic implications of Ben’s recurring agony and bliss in the novel’s torturous final scene. The author concludes that the ultimate depravity of the novel, when considered the effect of the artist’s journey through the brothers’ purely perspectival realities, renders both truth and appearance moot in the fruitfulness, agony, and destruction of life. This allows the author not to deprive The Sound and the Fury of its depths of experience, but actually celebrate those depths as the necessary effect of life within a culture hostile to life

Spartan Daily, October 26, 2004

Volume 123, Issue 40https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/10044/thumbnail.jp

Deconstructive humour: subverting Mexican and Chicano stereotypes in ‘Un Día Sin Mexicanos’

a long time, US cinema developed unshakeable stereotypes of Mexican ‘otherness’, with characters of Mexican cultural and ethnic heritage stigmatised as criminals or as sensual objects of desire. Filmmakers in Mexico, meanwhile, treated Mexican Americans as misfits who belonged nowhere, or ignored them and their complex experience completely. The emergence of a distinct ‘Chicano cinema’ in the 1960s allowed for the development of a more powerful set of images of Mexican Americans, exploiting the very tool of communication that had been used against them, and for the circulation of a more productive and reflective dialogue around the questions of identity, agency and resistance that arise. This article focuses on the use of humour as a subversive tool to deconstruct certain myths and stereotypes of Mexican and, to a certain extent, Mexican American (or, Chicano) identity in Sergio Arau’s popular debut feature, Un Día Sin Mexicanos (2004). The “Mexicans” referred to in the film’s title and used in much of its dialogue stand metonymically for all Hispanic immigrants, whether recently arrived, or born in the US and of Hispanic descent, including Chicanos. Its narrative was inspired by the introduction of controversial anti-immigration legislation in California in 1994, and the Californian State is here made representative of anywhere in the US where there is a Mexican or Chicano population. This essay situates the film within the context of a growing Chicano population in the US and a high level of immigration from Mexico itself. It asks to what extent the feature version, which takes the form of satire, offers a critique of the Mexican immigrant experience, and of discrimination more broadly against Hispanic minorities. In so doing, it explores the ways in which the politics of resistance that are so often aligned with these experiences are inscribed in its narrative form