In her work “Notes from the Orifice: Language and the Body in William Burroughs”, Robin Lydenberg suggests that Naked Lunch is a “history of voice and body, of language and materiality” (56). Lydenberg discusses the use of language in which she looks closer at binaries, metonymy, and metaphors. The focus on her paper lies in relationships between the literary devices and binary oppositions. In which she reveals concepts of dehumanization and dismemberment.
While Foucault addresses the relationship between power and its subjects, Lydenberg suggests that Burroughs illustrates the “dual structure of human life” (59). Foucault’s revealing of the invisible power mechanisms and how they function, and Lydenberg’s argument of the dual structure of human life connects the two due to the impact these relations and structures have on people’s
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lives. Foucault implies that power seeks to improve the body and demonstrates this by utilizing soldiers as his example (136).
Lydenberg argues that in Naked Lunch there is “a basic contempt for human life always initiates the impulse to improve on nature, on the body” (61). One can see that both of the theories refer to improvement of the body. Instead of illustrating the point of body improvement by addressing the surgical aspects of Naked Lunch as Lydenberg does (61), this paper rather explores the theory in connection to simians. The Simopath disorder that Burroughs describes is a condition that is peculiar to the army (23). A person suffering from Simopath disorder is convinced he is an ape or other simian and discharge cures it (23). In this instance both the theories of Foucault and Lydenberg intersect. While Foucault reveals the structure of a system, Lydenberg addresses the life that is affected by it. Lydenberg states that the “truncated creatures who grope blindly around Naked Lunch are dismembered remnants of human life” (61) and that they have been “[d]ehumanized into insects, automatons, or body parts, they have been cut off from human evolution, from the”‘independent spon-taneous action' " (NL,
p. 134) of individual will” (61). In the army, the creation of the docile body is highly prominent. There are rules, hierarchy and other structures that keep the soldiers in place and make them operate in a certain manner. The army is a place where independency and human will is removed in order to create docility. According to the arguments of Lydenberg, what is left after nature and the body has been improved is a dehumanized automaton that has no free will. In regards to this papers view of the simian’s metaphorical role as revealing the different levels and negative effects of the normalization process, and that they function as positive reaction against the power the simopath disorder conjoins these aspects with the help of Lydenberg and Foucault. A human that comes to the army will lose his independency and own will so that he becomes docile (Foucault 139), and the human will in a way become a dehumanized automaton (Lydenberg 61) that develops the simopath disorder which turns him into what he believes is an ape or other simian.
Though most of the experiences and actions revealed in William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch directly contradict philosophies believed by the Jewish faith, there is a definite connection between My Name is Asher Lev and Naked Lunch. This connection lies is the narrators' artistic roles in society. Both Lev and Burroughs stray from the surrealistic aspect of their mediums: art and writing, respectively, and portray life as they see that it really is. There is no embellishing on either of their parts nor is there any glorification to the events happening around them.
“Naked Lunch” is a play written by Michael Hollinger in 2003. This play is one of the groups of written sixteen plays by several playwrights for Trepidation Nation: A Phobic Anthology, that was produced at the Humana Festival by the Actor Theatre of Louisville in 2002 to 2003. This is a one-act play that is around ten-minute long. It consists of only two actors: one man and one woman with a setting on a small dining area.
Power, the perception of superiority over another human, is the source of many conflicts between people. Feeling inferior causes people to act beyond their normal personality. John Knowles strongly demonstrates this point in his work, A Separate Peace. In the relationship between Finny and Gene, Gene sets himself up to be inferior in the balance of power which motivates him to act irrationally to take power back from Finny.
Power is an extremely dominant element that illustrates authority and control between the two young men Finny and Gene. Throughout society, “the social power, i.e., the multiplied productive force, which arises through the co-operation of different individuals, since their co-operation is not voluntary but has come about naturally, not as their own united power.”(Tucker, pg.161) Finny conducts himself as an authority figure, and an individualist with distinct and domineering characteristics. He emphasizes his power as a perfect individual that is not concerned what other people conceive of ...
Vogel’s writing exudes symbolism from the first word of the script to the last – from the rise of the curtain to its close. The glimpses into Li’l Bit’s past are sometimes explicitly and literally described, but Vogel also often uses extended metaphors to act as a detailed commentary on the action. Why, however, did the playwright choose symbolism to convey the effects of sexual abuse – as heavy as its subject matter may be – during the late twentieth century when seemingly nothing is censored in America? In order to answer this and better understand the way in which Vogel uses symbolism –in the smaller elements of the play and extended metaphors – the terms must first be defined.
...one existing trapped within the view of hegemonic society; angry, but powerless so long as he remains in this state. Yet Sanchez provides a succinct plan for Black Americans in their quest to ascend the Veil: to exist as both African and American while feeding white America a pacifying view of a half truth-destruction fueled by deadly ignorance. The speakers of the poems are merely victims of the same system, seeking the same freedom. While the works of these authors differ greatly, one characteristic is common in both works: The desire for power to ascend the Veil that hangs heavily upon them like a cloak that prevents their ascension. The desire to live beyond the Veil.
In Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, one of Ellison’s greatest assets is his ability to bestow profound significance upon inanimate objects. During the narrator’s journey from the bar to the hole, he acquires a series of objects that signify both the manifestations of a racist society, as well as the clues he employs to deconstruct his indoctrinated identity. The narrator’s briefcase thereby becomes a figurative safe in his mind that can only be unlocked by understanding the true nature of the objects that lie within. Thus, in order to realize who he is, the narrator must first realize who he is not: that unreal man whose name is written in Jack’s pen, or the forcibly grinning visage of Mary’s bank.
Baruch Spinoza once said “Experience teaches us no less clearly than reason, that men believe themselves free, simply because they are conscious of their actions and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.” He compared free-will with destiny and ended up that what we live and what we think are all results of our destiny; and the concept of the free-will as humanity know is just the awareness of the situation. Similarly, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five explores this struggle between free-will and destiny, and illustrates the idea of time in order to demonstrate that there is no free-will in war; it is just destiny. Vonnegut conveys this through irony, symbolism and satire.
From the displays of power that have been shown through out this essay, we see that this story is a story about power. Power is the story is primarily about peoples need for some small amount of power to survive in life and to feel that hey have a purpose within their society which every society it may be whether its is Gilead or Nazi Germany or modern day Britain.
Typical Western thought directs people to examine the practices of cannibalism as savage and primitive. More often than not, this type of association exists because the people viewing the action are frightened and confused by that which they do not understand. In fact, some would even claim that, “cannibalism is merely a product of European imagination” (Barker, 2), thereby completely denying its existence. The belief that cannibalism goes against “human instinct”, as seen in many literary works including Tarzan, reduces those who practice it to being inhuman. (Barker, 1) However, scientific findings demonstrate that those who practice cannibalism are still human despite their difference in beliefs; therefore, not only can rationalization be extrapolated from those who practice the act of cannibalism, but also denying the fact of the participant’s very humanity has been undermined through scientific findings.
For our last assignment in English 253, the major essay, we were assigned to analyze some of the concepts and concerns involved in a novel from the past semester. Our task at hand was to select from a topic and develop a more in-depth understanding of the chosen novel, and exactly how the literature involved in the novel is significant. I decided to choose the first option available in order to complete this essay. Since we’re supposed to investigate the accuracy of the represented ways in the chosen novel, I decided to write about the novel Invisible Man. I chose the novel Invisible Man because it is literally perfect for this assignment. I am fully appreciative of the fact that it is extremely hard for any author to publish a novel that does not sway from the “real” history being referenced. Also, I do not believe that Ellison necessarily wrote this novel with intentions to include exact characteristics of the past, or in an ahistorical way. However, throughout the text of the novel Invisible Man, there are several examples, references, and symbols that Ralph Ellison respectively included on purpose. In this essay, my investigation will prove why or why not the real-life social and political ideology involved in the literature of Invisible Man, is accurately or inaccurately depicted.
In Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, he provides the reader with a fictional account of the Bhopal Disaster through the eyes of a deformed teenager in a fictional town named Khaufpor. This teenager calls himself ‘Animal’ because his deformity bent his spine to the point where he must walk on all fours, making him feel inhuman. With his mother and father dead, he accepts the name as his own and denies his own humanity. Although Animal tries to separate himself from his humanity because of the pain it causes him, he is forced to accept his humanity through his friends’ guidance and the inner and external conflicts that he faces meaning that humanity is unavoidable.
The primal instinct inherent in man has been demonstrated historically as well as in written works of literature. These documented accounts and fictional writings shed light on a dark, intrinsic element to man’s consciousness. In the literary works Lord of the Flies and Night, the characters are exposed to adverse conditions that overrule rationality and evoke their inherent desire for survival by recourse of savagery and violence.
Third, institutions consist of a new type of power, so that all individual relations constitute a power relationship. (Foucault, “Truth and Juridical Forms” 82-83) A relationship of power may be described as a mode of action that acts upon an individual’s actions through which the behavior of an active subject is able to inscribe itself. (Foucault, “The Subject and Power” 342) Institutions work through an authority network of individuals, and power is employed and exercised by individuals through a netlike organization. “Not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power.
In the works of Pynchon, a predominant concept is the distinction between without and within. Werther[2] implies that we have to choose between postpatriarchialist deconstruction and cultural rationalism. However, a number of sublimations concerning subcapitalist textual theory exist.