Industrialization and lack of true feelings lead not only to destructive relationships but also to destructive, as opposed to natural, violence, for example in the mechanized warfare of the First World War. This unnatural violence is related to that of the super-ego, which, according to Freud, tries to impose the rules of society upon the ego through the natural violence of conscience, thus stifling Eros and the death drive. While the plot of Lady Chatterley’s Lover criticizes this civilized and mechanized violence of the super-ego, it also uses it in the form of satire to formulate this very critique, which contributes to the ambivalence in the novel’s relationship with society. Likewise, because the novel uses words to try to describe experience, …show more content…
For Girard, abhorrence and worship would be the two successive stages of mimetic contagion, when the act of the extirpation of the scapegoat from the community’s midst flips into its opposite, a belated recognition of its divine nature. But more fundamentally, this ambivalence towards the sacred captures the underlying ambivalence towards the moment of the origin of language, which establishes peace by instituting the ethics of reciprocity while at the same time giving rise to the existential human condition of an unsatisfiable desire. This underlying ambivalence prompts us to return to the question of whether it would have been better to not have invented language at all. Would we have been better off? While many critics of civilization differ in their diagnosis of when things went wrong–with the onset of Secular Humanism, Enlightenment, or Marxism–radical primitivist philosophers of the John Zerzan type (which could be seen as modern heirs to vitalism) point their finger to the very moment of the origin of language. The originary interdiction of the sign is the source of the masochist’s self-recognition and self-disavowal. The author’s investing Clifford with abject qualities and placing him in subjection to Connie (and, by extension, to Mellors) aims at the symbolic destruction of a literary Clifford within himself as a way of resolving the dilemma of writing a book about non-writing. Perhaps the act of writing a novel about a character who chooses to efface himself into oblivion is itself a circuitous act of masochistic victory through
...ow this transformation extends further over time, from the quiet town of Amiens to the liberty of 1970s London. Their resistance to the horrors of the War, to patriarchal systems and to social formalities led to significant turning points in the novel, giving us the sense of a theme of revolution on a personal and social level throughout making it the core element of the novel. The differences between the pre-war and post-war period are contrasted episodically by Faulks, and via the female protagonists, he is able to represent very openly how society has transformed. Faulks is able to very cleverly wrong foot the modern reader with the initial realist portrayal of a oppressive husband, illicit relationships and the gore of war. However, it serves only to provide him a platform from where he can present a more buoyant picture of societal and personal transformation.
Author: Walter Benn Michaels is the chair of the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago teaching literary theory, and American literature. Michaels has also has multiple essays and books published such as Against Theory, The shape of the Signifier, and Diversity's False Solace
1970, pp. 7-8. Rpt. In The Chelsea House Library of Literary Criticism. New York.:Chelsea House Publishers, 1988.
Murphy, B. & Shirley J. The Literary Encyclopedia. [nl], August 31, 2004. Available at: http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2326. Access on: 22 Aug 2010.
Deep-seated in these practices is added universal investigative and enquiring of acquainted conflicts between philosophy and the art of speaking and/or effective writing. Most often we see the figurative and rhetorical elements of a text as purely complementary and marginal to the basic reasoning of its debate, closer exploration often exposes that metaphor and rhetoric play an important role in the readers understanding of a piece of literary art. Usually the figural and metaphorical foundations strongly back or it can destabilize the reasoning of the texts. Deconstruction however does not indicate that all works are meaningless, but rather that they are spilling over with numerous and sometimes contradictory meanings. Derrida, having his roots in philosophy brings up the question, “what is the meaning of the meaning?”
In “The Great God Pan” (1894) Machen uses ancient Greek god Pan to serve as a symbol of spiritual reality that lies beyond human perception and knowledge. Machen’s use of this divine entity and his success in rediscovering a minor figure of the classical pantheon, yet “mostly neglected by earlier authors of English literature” (Pasi 69), provide what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari argue to be the significant value of a minor author, “…by using a number of minority elements, by connecting, conjugating them, one invents a specific, unforeseen, autonomous becoming” (106). “The Great God Pan” uses a detective plot and English upper class male characters’ search for an elusive figure, Helen Vaughan, who travels by assuming various identities. Helen, through her changeability of her identity destabilises the humanistic notion of identity as a stable phenomenon, and enters into the domain of becoming Pan. This fluidity and indeterminacy of Helen’s character is Machen’s attempt to undo the established notion of canonical subjectivity, and propose an alternative possibility of becoming. Helen’s insistence on entering into the zone of inhuman – god Pan- involves a position of alliance with the elements of her desire, which are beyond human accessibility and control. Helen, with this alliance with the god Pan, which has multiple forms and identities, enters into the flux of becoming Pan.
This Study aims to bring forward the Puritanical aspects in the great novel of Hawthorne “The Scarlet Letter”. The study is an attempt to highlight the basic ideology of Nathaniel Hawthorne on Puritan codes and conduct. In the effort of establishing my viewpoints on Puritanism, I have been basically guided by Hawthorne’s rejection of Puritanism as being particularly biased and discriminative. Other indications include Hawthorne’s deep Knowledge of his Puritan ancestors, which have provided the strong basic points in the study. The study makes it clear that Hawthorne describes him as having ‘all the Puritanical traits, both good and evil’, because the author uses the word ‘evil’ to describe them, every reader automatically think of them as bad guys in the story; although since he does say they have ‘good’ traits as well readers don’t go as far as despising them. Hawthorne also describes his ancestors as ‘a bitter persecutor’ that is remembered by the Quakers as having ‘hard severity towards a women of their sect which will last longer, it is to be feared, than any record of his better deeds, although these were many’. Clearly Hawthorne wanted to stress that the Puritans were not altogether evil; however they were certainly last people with whom anyone would want to hang around. The Puritanical environment in the novel also helps me in forming my argument. Therefore I have used the traditional approach to investigate Hawthorne’s experience with Puritanism by analyzing the religious conflicts and finally his unyielding stand on Puritanism. The study reveals that Hawthorne repeats again and again throughout the novel the cruelty, ...
Bloomfield, Morton W. New Literary History. Winter ed. N.p.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972. Print. Vol. 2 of Allegory as Interpretation. 3 vols. First.
Guerin, Wilfred L., Earle Labor, Lee Morgan, Jeanne C. Reesman, and John R. Willingham. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 125-156.
Ki, Magdalen Wing-chi. "Ego-Evil and 'The Tell-Tale Heart '." Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature 61.1 (2008): 25+. Academic OneFile. Web. 24 Sept.
When this story is viewed through Sigmund Freud’s “psychoanalytic lens” the novel reveals itself as much more than just another gory war novel. According to Sigmund Freud psychology there are three parts of the mind that control a person’s actions which are the id, ego, and superego. Psychoanalysis states that there are three parts of the human mind, both conscious and subconscious, that control a person’s actions. The Id, ego, and
When viewing the atrocities of today's world on television, the starving children, the wars, the injustices, one cannot help but think that evil is rampant in this day and age. However, people in society must be aware that evil is not an external force embodied in a society but resides within each person. Man has both good qualities and faults. He must come to control these faults in order to be a good person. In the novel Lord of the Flies, William Golding deals with this same evil which exists in all of his characters. With his mastery of such literary tools as structure, syntax, diction and imagery, The author creates a cheerless, sardonic tone to convey his own views of the nature of man and man’s role within society.
The notion of the author has often been disputed when it comes to critical literary studies. The argument centers around one basic question: Should the author be considered when looking at a text? There are numerous reasons given as to why the author is important or why the ...
Nathanial Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter had many reoccurring, powerful themes, however, the most predominant was how far the ripples of a person’s actions reach; Hawthorne shows this by illustrating how people in a society viewed others’ actions, how individuals viewed their own actions, and how the actions had a physical effect on the body.
The Web. The Web. 9 Dec. 2010. http://go.galegroup.com/ps/aboutEbook.do?pubDate=119880000&actionString=DO_DISPLAY_ABOUT_PAGE&inPS=true&prodId=LitRG&userGroupName=west89013tgps&searchType=AdvancedSearchForm&docId=GALE%7C0KTB>. - - -. “Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800.”