Faith and reason in the mad subjectivity: Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic narrative The Road

Identified as the core of human subjectivity, madness and the shattered self are among the issues which Cormac McCarthy represents in his brilliant though terrifying narrative The Road. This study attempts to address the representation of subjectivity’s faith and reason in the face of physical and mental struggles in his novel. Moreover, the relation that subjectivity has to the Big Other will be analyzed under Žižekian paradigms. In the pre-Kantian era, the human subject was to struggle against an extremity of madness so as to redeem itself a state of reason. But since Kant proposed that the core of subject/ivity can be madness itself, the struggles represented in McCarthy’s novel have been examined as significant events that show this core of inconsistency and madness. To do so, the present study analyzes his text to show the inconsistency of the subject/ivity of his characters along with the role of reason/madness and their relations to faith in the narrative. Particularly, it would be fruitful to focus on the contribution of what Žižek calls the “Light of Reason” and its fluctuations/fragmentations. The point opposite to this Light would be the Dark of the world, a dire night in which that mad center of human subjectivity could emerge into the novel’s events. For this purpose, the paper will elaborate more thoroughly on Derrida’s and Žižek’s viewpoints regarding Enlightenment and subjectivity. Of the main consideration in McCarthy’s text is deciding about life and death and about the force that compels his protagonists to keep fighting for their survival

Revisionism for Modernizing Experience in The Golden Bowl: A New-historical Perspective

The present article intends to show how the bi-partite structure of Henry James’s The Golden Bowl makes it possible for the author to recycle its discourse through a strategy of revisionism. With the emergence of new theories and critical perspectives in the humanities of the 1970s and after, it seems that this strategy of creative writing has been considerably theorized also. A hypothesis behind the insertion of theory and practice here is that revising the previous literatures has come to be strategic for modernizing experience and creating new knowledge. For example, mainly based on Foucault’s contributions to literature, new historicism takes history and literature as interconnected, while it takes their interconnection as implying that the revisionism of the bygone periods’ literatures is a way for revivifying the historical situations of their production. In a literary work, the author-text-reader connections on one side, and the relation between power and literature on other side are features on which a new historicist focuses for historicizing the work. The present study also attempts to provide James’s reader with some theories and examples of revisionism in his novel for restructuring its discourse and making it applicable to the present time conditions

Hardware Impairments Aware Transceiver Design for Full-Duplex Amplify-and-Forward MIMO Relaying

In this work we study the behavior of a full-duplex (FD) and amplify-and-forward (AF) relay with multiple antennas, where hardware impairments of the FD relay transceiver is taken into account. Due to the inter-dependency of the transmit relay power on each antenna and the residual self-interference in an FD-AF relay, we observe a distortion loop that degrades the system performance when the relay dynamic range is not high. In this regard, we analyze the relay function in presence of the hardware inaccuracies and an optimization problem is formulated to maximize the signal to distortion-plus-noise ratio (SDNR), under relay and source transmit power constraints. Due to the problem complexity, we propose a gradient-projection-based (GP) algorithm to obtain an optimal solution. Moreover, a nonalternating sub-optimal solution is proposed by assuming a rank-1 relay amplification matrix, and separating the design of the relay process into multiple stages (MuStR1). The proposed MuStR1 method is then enhanced by introducing an alternating update over the optimization variables, denoted as AltMuStR1 algorithm. It is observed that compared to GP, (Alt)MuStR1 algorithms significantly reduce the required computational complexity at the expense of a slight performance degradation. Finally, the proposed methods are evaluated under various system conditions, and compared with the methods available in the current literature. In particular, it is observed that as the hardware impairments increase, or for a system with a high transmit power, the impact of applying a distortion-aware design is significant.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication

Psychoanalytic perspective of trauma in John Barth’s The Development: nine stories

This study aims to investigate John Barth’s The Development in the light of trauma theory. Traumatic events were firstly discussed in Freud’s Studies in Hysteria, and then were revisited in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. They can have happened in the past life of a subject, can be unacceptable to their consciousness, and yet they can return in the form of compulsive and repetitive behaviors. Possible symptoms may be more the result of the subject’s repressed desires than traumatic events. Moreover, traumas are not only the result of the subject’s personal experience but the ramifications of the historical context and past environment to which the subject is bound. In Barth’s The Development: Nine Stories the tales are narrated by aging people who struggle with forces around them which affect their lives. These forces compel a couple to a pact of spontaneous suicide. Loss, family, and social dysfunction are among the other outcomes of trauma which are satirised in a conspiratorial tone. Symbolised in Heron Bay Estates, the American society is depicted as a gated community that must come to terms with the illusions of safety and conspiracy, for they are not walled off traumas that lurk in their most private moments. Barth demonstrates that a gated community can never protect its members from possible traumas. An analysis of traumatic experiences should be considered along with the linguistic and nonlinguistic means of representation through which an event is recollected because the event is reconstructed to reach equilibrium to comprehend the occurrence of the trauma. In the stories of The Development such verbal representations of temporality are enslaved to traumatic events. And this will explore how the narrative of a past history and temporality through traumatised subjects enable the representation of the hidden aspects both of history and the subconscious

The Experience of (Cultural) Reality in Henry James’s The Ambassadors

The later Henry James’s fiction is a productive field of cultural experience. The present paper takes to analyze the creation of symbolic cultural realities in The Ambassadors through the exposition of James’s main character to the manifestations of Parisian life. To achieve this purpose, it is argued that his character searches for the salvation of his consciousness mainly in language. But in search still of more new experiences, his consciousness often gets extended even beyond language. Cultural reflection in narrative language, negotiation with the other for interpretive analysis, experience as discursive, meaning as culturally represented in narrative, the quest to the beyond of language in search of experience, and cultural reflection for “civilized behavior” are among the issues which the present paper will analyze for the elaboration of its subject. The application of these techniques in James’s novel enables his character to infiltrate history through his consciousness for standing in direction connection with the nature of things

Paul Auster’s The Locked Room as a critique of the hyperreal

Auster’s The Locked Room (1986) presents a protagonist in a desperate quest for a lost character whose absence functions as the only significant storyline to which the narrative unfolds. Although, stylistically, the entire plot revolves around the disappeared Fanshawe, nowhere in the narrative can the reader identify with certainty any traces of his actual existence. Fanshawe never appears in the story, but all the characters and their lives centre firmly upon him, thereby creating the illusion that without his appearance their lives can never be fully restored nor can they make any real sense. Taking into account Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality, this research tries to demonstrate that what Auster’s characters go through is living obsessively with a nonpresent inaccessible Fanshawe whose abrupt disappearance leaves no clue of his existence, but just a lost memory which haunts the characters’ deepest senses of reality. This claim especially strengthens itself in the end, when the reader finds out that it all has been Fanshawe’s plot to keep his family and friend in dark in order to completely vanish from the realm of the real

An Analysis of ‘Closure’ and ‘Equilibrium’ in Mathew Quick’s The Silver Linings Playbook in the Light of Gestalt Psychology

The present paper moves in the line of cognitive literary studies. Its project is to interpret Mathew Quick’s The Silver Linings Playbook in the light of the theories of Gestalt psychology. Quick portrays a pair of mentally unbalanced protagonists suffering from the loss of their partners. Analyzing the psychological aftermaths which befall these figures afterwards, this paper attempts to highlight some facts through Gestalt therapy. As such, this paper tries to show the role of ‘Closure’ in the psychological imbalance of Quick’s characters, arguing that in their search for ‘Equilibrium’ they pass through a phase of neurotic problems. Deciphering part of the novel’s message as such, this paper elaborates upon the life of some mentally damaged guys who come to help each other in order to pass normal and healthy lives

On the Panoptical Eye of Self-Caring in Nabokov’s The Eye: A Foucauldian Analysis

Nabokov’s protagonist’s sufferings, suicide, and final happiness in The Eye (1930) can be analyzed through Foucault’s policy of the “care of the self” based on which an individual acts in a parrhesiastic relationship with himself to panoptically watch and discover himself. Smurov’s first-person I/eye sacrifices his former self to be reborn from the surveying eyes of his separated self. This Panopticon metaphor is bifurcated into the monopticon and the synopticon, the former letting Smurov externally watch over himself and the latter reflecting back to him others’ views of him. Thus, Smurov recognizes the true nature of his identity to be the sum of his concept of himself and his reflections in others’ minds. He recognizes that he is always being panoptically watched and created. His final happiness, therefore, emphasizes that identity stands in a symbiotic relationship with the surveillance of the self, without which the individual stays in darkness

Hardware Impairments Aware Transceiver Design for Bidirectional Full-Duplex MIMO OFDM Systems

In this paper we address the linear precoding and decoding design problem for a bidirectional orthogonal frequencydivision multiplexing (OFDM) communication system, between two multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) full-duplex (FD) nodes. The effects of hardware distortion as well as the channel state information error are taken into account. In the first step, we transform the available time-domain characterization of the hardware distortions for FD MIMO transceivers to the frequency domain, via a linear Fourier transformation. As a result, the explicit impact of hardware inaccuracies on the residual selfinterference (RSI) and inter-carrier leakage (ICL) is formulated in relation to the intended transmit/received signals. Afterwards, linear precoding and decoding designs are proposed to enhance the system performance following the minimum-mean-squarederror (MMSE) and sum rate maximization strategies, assuming the availability of perfect or erroneous CSI. The proposed designs are based on the application of alternating optimization over the system parameters, leading to a necessary convergence. Numerical results indicate that the application of a distortionaware design is essential for a system with a high hardware distortion, or for a system with a low thermal noise variance.Comment: Submitted to IEEE for publicatio

A Theory of Realistic Representation in Henry James

A dimension of the later style of the fiction of Henry James is its deep concern not with selves and identities but with images and appearances. These works typically picture the character in in-between situations where he is recognized not as he really is but as he shows himself, as he appears in projected situations. However, another aspect of James’s later style is the magnificence of the appearance, because appearance is the outcome of reciprocal spaces which in turn signify vivified and productive relations among the agents of the narrative. These facades of James’s later style render it a space for a new mode of realistic representation which depends on a new kind of verisimilitude, the story in the service of language, and consciousness dramatization. And the watershed of the Jamesian verisimilitude is the work of successive centers of consciousness from where the tale is narrated. In addition, to show the deepest layers of the human soul, Jamess narrator can occasionally go beyond the frontiers of language and take use of the non-verbal structures of culture also. This mode of fiction mainly wants to exhibit the consciousness in the process of evolution. And it shows “the real” not as what has so far been considered as real, but as what emerges in this modern analytical consciousness.Key words: James; Fiction; The real; Appearance; Representation; Consciousness; Verisimilitud