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These are a collection of essays which are philosophical, literary, psychoanalytical and they also include new idioms for the English Language. Postmodermism, culture, art, literature all have been given the reign of the pen through renewed interpretation. The idioms that I have created are political, literary and cultural.
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Chamber of Sacrilege
To my Father Late Professor V A Mathen Bose BookRix GmbH & Co. KG80331 MunichImageience
Imageience is a a neologism for a culture that has become so dependent on images. Whether be it for entertainment or for networking we are becoming addcited to the proliferation of images. We have to be prompted to be asking the question, are we loosing our individuality and creative thinking by adhering to the influx of images masquerading our lives. Children are the worst hit by this cataclysm. Now a days children don't even have time to play. By the time the school bell rings, they rush home and are quickly on to their laptops and tablets addicted to games. Their very identities are consctructed by virtual role playing models. For example I have been able to witness my niece open her tablet and go to a boutique house. She spends hours decorating the Barbie doll with headgear, clothes and shoes. It's shocking that the media is constructing her feminity. Though she is an artist, she spends very little time on her hobby. Boys on the other hand are deeply engaged in masculine games. There are games which openly use violence and murder. Are theses virtually constructed models of the feminine and the masculine ideal for democracies? Again role playing is strictly based on cut-out gender. Is it helpful for growing minds and ages? Children need to develop their individuality creatively and intellectually. The space given to them for understanding aesthetic and cultural artifacts is minimal. It's is sad to say that we are producing a media-fed youth who are virtizens (Virutal citizens) who become dull stereotypes of a society that has grwon culturally flaccid. Through the proliferating images ejeculaetd by the media, do we have a chance to exercise independence of opinion? We fail to think that the media is news producing factory. Let's take the case of financial turmoil in Greece. All of the media were glaring about the problems in Greece and to a full extent supporting the harsh measures on Greece dictated by the dominant powers of the European Union like Germany. Nobody lend a sympathetic arm to Greece. We all know from Keynes that an economy facing recession can be resuscitated by injectin of money. It's questionable whether economic subjugation of a financially beleagured country like Greece by the European powers that are dominant stands in good health for a union that wants to unify Europe culturally and politically.Again going on into social networking it's a worse panaroma that wnats to enslave us. We are becoming thoughtless addcited slaves of a burgeonining nexus of simulation. Most of the people that I have as friends on Facebook remain to this day as virtual strangers. I have not been able to develop a single meaningful qualitative reiationship. There seconds, minutes, hours and days that ardently reading the profiles of strangers and writing endless comments. The social networking media is wasting my time, a time that I could have spent meaningfully like taking a walk, gardening or talking to with real colleagues.
Philosophical Perspectives on Literature
Literature with the start of the 1970's undewent a sea of change. Literature started to be influenced with the strands of Philosophcal thought. Here I would like to Philosophize literature from the various readings I have collected. The various Philosophical trends in literature are New Criticism, Psychoanalysis, Existentialism, Structuralism, Post-structuralsim, Marxism, Feminism and post-colonial literature. I would like to examine each of these philosophical perspectives and their impact on literature by a critical reading of literary works that I have perused.
Now what exactly is New Criticism? New Criticism is a school of philosophical thought that emphasizes that literary artifacts should be read for aesthetic merit. Thus New Criticism adresses the figurative concerns of language. Tropes are language sculptures which are the result of the afflatus of the pen. For example, if I say that my body is a diaspora of a Palestinina desert-------at a figurative level, the meaning would render into an aesthetic, that is a metaphor which describes the scattering of the body, the libidinal urges into a homeland, a territory which is barren as a desert. This would be the aesthetic effect of reading the metaphor. But reading the metaphor with reference to figurative meanings alone creates alos problems of interpretation in singularity. The same metaphor can be read politcally and psychonalytically. The same metaphor juxtaposes the political and psychoanalytical consciousness an weaves them seamlessly into a an enlightened aesthetic experience. For a political reading of the metaphor we would have to plunge into the history of Palestine which is the voice of the repressed in a struggling political territory which aspires to be a homeland. Reading the metaphor through a psychoanalytic lense, we can refer to theories of Freud and Lacan and rerouting there would make us search the vestiges of the unconscious of the author which is caught in the prison of sublimating the baser needs of the libidinal ID to a literature of creative expression. Therefore New Criticism cripples readings of interpretative discourse in other fields.
Psychoanalysis is caught up in a monsoon of differing showers of intensity. There are two schools of thought, one the Jungian one and the other the Freudian one and also a one which involves the rereading of the theories of Freud by the French Psychoanaytic thinker Jacques Lacan. Now let me first explicate Jungian psychoanalysis and its workings in literature. Jungian psychoanalysis delves into what is famously known as as archetypes Archetypes are models , patterns or traces and according to Jung they are are embedded in the collective unconscious of the mind and are are universally recurring motifs in the culture of consciousness. Some common examples of archetypes that are most commnly found in fairy tales are the witch, wizard, fairy, fairy godmother, troll, mermaid, devil and so forth. Tp prove the existence of the collective unconscious would be too impossible a task. Hoever in an analytic mode these archetypes exhibit certain personality traits. For example let's take the case of the witch. A witch has been classified as diabolic, treachrous, ugly, covetous and greedy. It's very interesting to note that Wizards on the other hand have been elevated on the binary chain to an exalted status. It's disheartening to note that during the inquisition witches have been hunted, tortured and executed. What happens here is, the psychoanalytic mode of the witch becomes a paradigm of creating the other who is misunderstood and becomes the other as being culturally oppressed. It needs a postmodern philosophy of deconstruction to understand that thew Witch archetype is a personality type that has been culturally victimized. This victimization would have its unhloy roots in fairy tales which have marginalized witches as the wicked other. The archetypal model of the witch would be a misnomer for radically oriented feminists who would label the attributes of witches as misunderstood products of masculine imagination.
The next school of psychoanalytic thought is the Freudian one and to a later trend, one being the revision of Freudian theories by the French psychoanalist Jacques Lacan. Freudian theories of thw libidio are taken as interpretative constructs for the reading of literature. I happned to be teaching the students the famous play of George Bernard Shaw: The Arms and the Man. I have particularly surprised by his construct of male characters who are obessessed with Oedipal fantasies which they invest on their feminine amours. The lovers especially the femaies, are role played upon with dialogues that portray them as doting nurses and mothers. What is amazing here is that these fantasies are not made by Shaw with conscious intent but are manifestations from his own unconscious. This raises the question for feminists----Was Shaw Oedipally fixated?
