Fictocritical Empathy and the Work of Mourning

What is at stake in this fictocritical aesthetic remediation? What existing practices would it re-function, supplement or supersede? Is mourning adequate to the task of cross-cultural reconciliation? How might fictocritical effects be animated in the service of this aim? In the process of exploring these questions I will suggest that the methodology of mourning is an allegorical vehicle for cross-cultural writing. Employed to remediate the colonial inheritance, it nonetheless requires acts of empathy according to models of the imagination that are part and parcel of that inheritance

At Sea

At Sea is a short film about two people who think they\u27re the same person. Crafting a dramatic narrative through a series of vignettes between two people, my film explores the tension of not knowing whether someone in one’s life is coming or going. Nora lets Lily stay in her apartment, and cares for her deeply, but doesn’t know if she’ll leave. I apply the three problematizations I analyze below—of the shot-reverse-shot, objects, and absent space—to convey this tension. Thomas Elsaesser argues inherent to the classic Hollywood melodramas of the 1940s and 50s is a certain “myth-making function, insofar as their significance lies in the structure and articulation of the action, not in any psychologically motivated correspondence with individualized experience.” The melodrama film\u27s form dictates its emotion, not the plot. This visual and sonic formalism can be understood as a filmic grammar. Wong Kar-wai\u27s filmography realizes its own language through re-realizing the convention of the shot-revers-shot, display of objects, and space itself. These films avoid the excessive signification of original melodrama, reaching a more consistent grammar. This consistency allows Wong to experiment with these problematizations, re-imagining the feminine subject. Through equalizing signification of objects within a film\u27s mise en scène, editing conventions, and portrayal of filmic space, Wong allows his actors to be bored. This radicalizes the language of traditional Hollywood films through re-realizing a style of physiological movement of actors deemed necessary. I apply these aesthetic considerations to my own film, using psychoanalysis and considerations of how language divides the body part-by-part

Flannery O' Connors's "Demonds" : intentionality and literary meaning in "The Articial Nigger"

El presente trabajo busca demostrar cómo la presencia de tres "demonios" a los que se enfrenta la autora funcionan para ampliar la significación literaria en el cuento "The Artificial Nigger" de Flannery O'Connor. El primer "demonio" que se comenta es el de su público literario, los intelectuales liberales del norte de los Estados Unidos. El público se convierte en "demonio" literario por su incomprensión y/o hostilidad hacia la visión teológica autora. El segundo "demonio" se puede ver en el lado demoníaco de la naturaleza humana, en el cual se percibe la presencia de Satanás. El tercer "demonio" al cual se enfrenta la autora es el del significado literario per se. La ficción utiliza para la representación convenciones discursivas, convenciones que, oblicuamente, comentan la naturaleza de la propia representación. O'Connor, consciente de la compleja relación entre lector, autor y narrador, se da cuenta que no es práctico ni deseable quitarle la ambigüedad al discurso, con el resultado que este último "demonio" se quedara libre en "The Artifical Nigger.

Flannery O' Connors's "Demonds" : intentionality and literary meaning in "The Articial Nigger"

El presente trabajo busca demostrar cómo la presencia de tres "demonios" a los que se enfrenta la autora funcionan para ampliar la significación literaria en el cuento "The Artificial Nigger" de Flannery O'Connor. El primer "demonio" que se comenta es el de su público literario, los intelectuales liberales del norte de los Estados Unidos. El público se convierte en "demonio" literario por su incomprensión y/o hostilidad hacia la visión teológica autora. El segundo "demonio" se puede ver en el lado demoníaco de la naturaleza humana, en el cual se percibe la presencia de Satanás. El tercer "demonio" al cual se enfrenta la autora es el del significado literario per se. La ficción utiliza para la representación convenciones discursivas, convenciones que, oblicuamente, comentan la naturaleza de la propia representación. O'Connor, consciente de la compleja relación entre lector, autor y narrador, se da cuenta que no es práctico ni deseable quitarle la ambigüedad al discurso, con el resultado que este último "demonio" se quedara libre en "The Artifical Nigger.

A Comparison of the Dramatic Technique of Antony and Cleopatra with that of MacBeth, Hamlet, and King Lear.

It is the purpose of this paper to discover the formula for a typical Shakespearean tragedy by an analysis of four of the later tragedies, Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra. Knowing that Shakespeare employed various dramatic devices to secure his effects, I propose to find out in what way his dramatic technique in the play Antony and Cleopatra differs from that of the three preceding plays. By examining the technical divisions of each Shakespearean tragedy and the use of the various dramatic elements which Shakespeare employed, I believe the outstanding differences in the dramatic technique will be made apparent. The discussion of the four plays and the comparison of their dramatic techniques has been taken largely from the .plays themselves, but I have also received much valuable information from various books of criticism, particularly from Bradley\u27s Shakespeare Studies. I hope that by employing this method in attacking the problem that both my reader and I will profit, inasmuch as a more thorough understanding of the plays, a keener appreciation of Shakespeare as a dramatic artist, and an increased knowledge of drama and dramatic technique should follow this study

(The) achievement of personality through idealization and a social mysticism; a psychological approach ..

Typewritten sheets in cover. Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University This item was digitized by the Internet Archive. Bibliography: 3 p. at end

Becoming Nothing, Becoming Everything: Quantum Posthumanism and the Writing of J.M. Coetzee

Drawing on both posthumanism and quantum theory, this thesis introduces what I am calling a framework of quantum posthumanism. Based on the epistemic and ontic aspects of entanglement, nonseparability, and becoming, and a reworking of ideas of agency and objectivity, the thesis embarks on an interdisciplinary (entangled) reading of J. M. Coetzee’s texts that seeks to move beyond the current historicist framing of his work. Utilising some of the key concepts and laws from various quantum interpretations, it seeks to show how such concepts effectively deconstruct boundaries between self/other, human/animal, animate/inanimate, body/environment and therefore, by extension to the literary, between fact/fiction, story/history, external/internal, and ultimately author/character/reader/text. The thesis approaches Coetzee’s writing by focussing on the centrality in his fiction of becoming, not only on the level of characters, but also in terms of the agencies of meaning within the literary event (the transactions amongst reader, author, and text). Quantum posthumanism deconstructs the fixed role and positionality of the external observer/Cartesian subject, represented as the reader/author outside the literary event. It proposes the term phenomenon of meaning to address the entanglement of reader/text/author that become part of the meaning they claim to own. The thesis also challenges traditional uses of concepts such as time, linearity, and origin with quantum posthumanist ideas such as multiplicity, emergence, contingency, and parallelism. Finally, through the framework of quantum posthumanism, the thesis hopes to support the argument for the entanglement of human knowledge and the detrimental illusion of the divide between the humanities and the sciences by demonstrating and exemplifying how inevitably entangled human knowledge is

What is a Literary Intellectual? Creative Writing and the New Humanities

I would like to discuss how the emergent area of Creative Writing in Australian universities might be situated in relation to what have become known as the New Humanities. The first question to ask is what are the New Humanities? The term was first used by Ian Donaldson at a symposium for the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1989. Donaldson pointed out that in the previous few decades new modes of theoretical and methodological inquiry had contributed to a breakdown of the traditional divide between the humanities and the social sciences, between a refined liberal humanist world of the arts and a more rigorous analysis of society. The New Humanities, as he describes the work of research centres in America, are concerned with ‘reconfiguring knowledge ... bringing together new combinations of scholarly and theoretical enquiry’ and ‘redrawing old taxonomies within the academy’