The play of codes and systems in pygmalion: Bernard Shaw and Roland Barthes

In Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw deals with the social function of language (linguistic competence) as one of the markers of social status and as a source of social power. Pygmalion’s plot revolves around the linguistic idea of the critical period hypothesis. The linguist in the play bets that the phonetician cannot change the flower girl into a lady by teaching her a genteel language. The phonetician intends to flaunt his power and skill in fashioning a new ‘self’ for the florist girl through linguistic retraining, even though her ’critical period’ is over. Though this acculturation leads to a crisis of personality for the girl, Shaw’s play goes against the hypothesis of ‘critical period’ by showing the possibility of the language retraining of a grown-up girl. Drawing on the theories of Roland Barthes, this article examines the relation between education and the issues of social mobility and cultural codes in the class-conscious society of Pygmalion. Pygmalion could be read as indicating that culture does not come by nature and it is made of codes, which can be taught and learned. Shaw suggests that it is possible to educate lower class people in upper class cultural codes. Moreover, he demonstrates that culture is time-bound and the boundaries between lower and upper class cultural codes were fading at the time so that it was difficult to distinguish a real upper class agent from a fake one

Fiction absolute and ethics: Tom Wolfe‘s back to blood

Tom Wolf once more in his last novel Back to Blood (2012) has taken the issue of race and ethnic tensions as one of its primary themes and this time he has chosen the city of Miami, home to the highest proportion of foreign-born residents of any US major metropolitan area. This novel looks into the interethnic relationships among the Cuban immigrants, Haitians, and American whites and blacks. Applying Emmanuel Levinas’s theory of alterity and ethics of sensibility to Back to Blood could be rewarding since it sheds light on the interethnic tensions present among different groups of people whose only concern is their own ‘blood’ and their own race. We argue that Wolfe’s novel, read in terms of ethics of sensibility, with its emphasis on the responsibility of one for the naked, universal Other, reveals how altericide and indifference towards the plight of the Other lie at the heart of most interethnic tensions and conflicts

John Donne's metaphors of self and empire: a cognitive analysis

Donne's strategies to win the authority of the 'domain' of love in his poetry are attempts to claim a personal domain for himself. This essay focuses on this personal domain in order to analyse the concept of self in Donne's poetry. Lakoff and Johnson's discussion about the basic metaphors embedded in our childhood by which we conceptualise the notion of self presents the cognitive bases of Donne's different metaphors of self. Significantly, as a poet of late Renaissance, Donne's metaphors have close association with imperial and colonial patterns. Combining insights from cognitive poetics and Edward Said's views about culture and imperialism, the writers try to look into the way the poet uses these metaphors to fashion a sense of communal/national identity. The essay will further focus on the multiple representations of self in Donne's poetry and the paradoxical signification of his identity

Self-fashioning in Pope's epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot: a Bourdieusian reading

The aim of the present article is to investigate Alexander Pope's self-fashioning in the light of Pierre Bourdieu's socio-cultural notion of capitals, specifically the symbolic form. Pope endeavors a lot to gain such a prominent status as the most representative poet of his age. He garners all his artistry, eloquence, savoir-faire, family and social milieu to move towards the center of the canon throughout his life. This upward movement comprises a self-fashioning by Pope which sometimes is the means to facilitate his canonization and sometimes it turns into a goal and an end in itself for him. As the highly acclaimed French philosopher, Pierre Bourdieu highlights the importance of symbolic capital in an individual‘s social status. Therefore this paper aims at shedding light on Pope's sophisticated act of self-fashioning and its relevance to Pierre Bourdieu's symbolic capital. For this reason, this article discusses Pope's Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, an exemplar of his self-fashioning and accumulation of symbolic capital

The sublime in Don DeLillo's Mao II

The world that DeLillo's characters live in is often portrayed with an inherent complexity beyond our comprehension, which ultimately leads to a quality of woe and wonder which is characteristic of the concept of the sublime. The inexpressibility of the events that emerge in DeLillo’s fiction has reintroduced into it what Lyotard calls "the unpresentable in presentation itself" (PC 81), or to put it in Jameson’s words, the "postmodern sublime" (38). The sublime, however, appears in DeLillo's fiction in several forms and it is the aim of this study to examine these various forms of sublimity. It is attempted to read DeLillo's Mao II in the light of theories of the sublime, drawing on figures like Burke, Kant, Lyotard, Jameson and Zizek. In DeLillo's novel, it is no longer the divine and magnificent in nature that leads to a simultaneous fear and fascination in the viewers, but the power of technology and sublime violence among other things. The sublime in DeLillo takes many different names, ranging from the technological and violent to the hollow and nostalgic, but that does not undermine its essential effect of wonder; it just means that the sublime, like any other phenomenon, has adapted itself to the new conditions of representation. By drawing on the above mentioned theorists, therefore, the present paper attempts to trace the notion of sublimity in DeLillo's Mao II, to explore the transformation of the concept of the sublime under the current conditions of postmodernity as depicted in DeLillo’s fiction

LIFE IS A PLAY: reading David Mamet's sexual perversity in Chicago and Glengarry Glen Ross through Cognitive Poetics

One of the concerns of Cognitive Poetic critics has been with the issue of how literary authors make meaning by means of metaphor. Building on the Cognitive Linguistic theories of metaphor, the field of Cognitive Poetics has been concerned, among its many diverse areas, with the studying of metaphor in literary texts. Proposing the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argued in Metaphors We Live By that our conceptual system is metaphorically shaped. In addition, they claimed that the metaphoric linguistic expressions are the manifestation of the fundamental conceptual metaphors forming individuals' cognitions. Conceptual metaphors were defined as the underlying structures of these expressions by means of which people comprehend intangible concepts through more tangible ones. Using the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), the present essay explores the conceptual metaphor of LIFE IS A PLAY in David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago and Glengarry Glen Ross. In these plays, Mamet depicts a world in which performance, in its theatrical sense, becomes the characters' survival strategy and a manner of living. As one of the most influential playwrights of his time, Mamet has always been concerned with the issues which most afflict America. He finds the ills of his society manifested in the relation among people. An attempt is made to explain the ways in which life-as-play finds expression both linguistically and thematically in the different contexts of these works

The ridiculous sublime in Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Cosmopolis

The sublime figures significantly in Don DeLillo’s novels. Transformed into what has been termed postmodern sublime - disposing of transcendence in favor of immanence - it is considered to be more of a hollow, confusing and overwhelming phenomenon rather than an elevating and empowering one. Moreover, the multiplicity of prior representations and the exhaustion of the possible have undermined the authenticity and power of the sublime, turning it into pseudo-sublime and mock-sublime. As such, it has moved ever closer to the realm of the ridiculous to the point where it is rather a question of co-existence and coimplication between them rather than an opposition. This can be phrased the ridiculous sublime. This paper focuses on DeLillo’s White Noise (1984) and Cosmopolis (2003) by drawing on major theorists of the sublime like Kant, Jameson, Zizek and, most notably, Lyotard, in an attempt to shed light on the modality of the merging of the sublime and the ridiculous. Our analysis shows that in DeLillo’s fiction, White Noise and Cosmopolis, the events and phenomena that transpire to convey a sense of sublimity are almost always interrupted and tarnished by an implication of the grotesque and the ridiculous. This transformation of the concept of the sublime reflects the decline of metanarratives and the exhaustion of possible experiences as the hallmarks of the postmodern era

Historiography in "Beginnings: Malcolm" by Amiri Baraka

This article discusses Aimiri Baraka‘s concern with the history of black people in his poem "Beginnings: Malcolm". The writers try to shed some light on the way Baraka's historiography challenges the white supremecist discourses through a rewriting of the African American past that blurs the boundaries of myth and history, fact and fiction, in a postmodern manner. It is argued that through the use of the central African myth of Esu/Elegba and drawing on traditions of Christianity and Western literature/culture, Baraka‘s poem offers an uncanny insight into the past

Politics and the Humanistic Pose: David Hare's 'Wall'

David Hare has tried his hand at 'writing history' for the East in a number of plays. In Wall he is keen on conferring an aura of historicity on his personal account, one thinly masked by the manipulation of documentary drama or verbatim theater as theatrical medium. Having promised to deliver an objective, impartial, and 'liberal' study of the Middle East, and aware of the accusations his 'First World' position before the Eastern subject (object) may bring against him, Hare arduously strives to avoid hackneyed representations of the unprivileged. Yet, he turns out to have fallen prey to that same old trap of polarizing and stereotyping. However, this 'historigraphic metadrama' is often treated as having 'authenticity.' Hence, the writers in this paper aim at exploring the Western unilateral fixations of the East behind the façade of humanistic treatment in the playwright's historiographic approach

"Minding" the style: reading Conrad through cognitive poetics

Cognitive Poetics works on the triangle of author-text-reader. A main focus is the reader of literature, as a co-producer of the text alongside the author, in an attempt to explain how his/her knowledge and experiences are applied in reaching an understanding of a particular text in a particular context. In this paper several examples of how contextual frames can operate in a narrative are discussed in three works of short fiction by Joseph Conrad. Analyzed in the particular context of Conradian narrative and prose style are such points as: how the readers begin a story, how they enter into the interior levels of it in order to feel and touch the events in the way its characters do, how they follow every episode of it and, in other words, how the readers "comprehend" the narrative. It is argued that the application of insights from cognitive poetics to Conrad’s fiction is of particular relevance as Conrad is a writer who embodies and foregrounds this very act and process of "comprehending" in his fiction