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In the series Twin Peaks, Mark Frost, David Lynch and others create a mythological framework structured by and filtered through Shakespeare in a postsecular exploration of the posthuman. Twin Peaks exemplifies a cultural postsecular turn in its treatment of the posthuman, taking the religious and spiritual perspectives to new —and often extreme—heights in its use of Kabbalah and other traditions. Twin Peaks involves spiritual dimensions that tap into other planes of existence in which struggles between benign and destructive entities or forces, multiple universes, and extradimensional, nonhuman spirits question the centrality of the human and radically challenge traditional Western notions of being. Twin Peaks draws from Shakespeare’s expansive imagination to explore these dimensions of reality that include nonhuman entities—demons, angels, and other spirits—existing beyond and outside of fabricated, human-centered worlds, with the dybbuk functioning as the embodiment of the postsecular religious posthuman.
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The convergence of textuality and multimedia in the twenty-first century signals a profound shift in early modern scholarship as Shakespeare’s text is no longer separable from the diffuse presence of Shakespeare on film. Such transformative abstractions of Shakespearean linearity materialize throughout the perpetual remediations of Shakespeare on screen, and the theoretical frameworks of posthumanism, I argue, afford us the lens necessary to examine the interplay between film and text. Elaborating on André Bazin’s germinal essay “The Myth of Total Cinema,” which asserts that the original goal of film was to create “a total and complete representation of reality,” this article substantiates the posthuman potentiality of film to affect both humanity and textuality, and the tangible effects of such an encompassing cinema evince themselves across a myriad of Shakespearean appropriations in the twenty-first century (20). I propose that the textual discourses surrounding Shakespeare’s life and works are reconstructed through posthuman interventions in the cinematic representation of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Couched in both film theory and cybernetics, the surfacing of posthuman interventions in Shakespearean appropriation urges the reconsideration of what it means to engage with Shakespeare on film and television. Challenging the notion of a static, new historicist reading of Shakespeare on screen, the introduction of posthumanist theory forces us to recognize the alternative ontologies shaping Shakespearean appropriation. Thus, the filmic representation of Shakespeare, in its mimetic and portentous embodiment, emerges as a tertiary actant alongside humanity and textuality as a form of posthuman collaboration.
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Throughout Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary, a keyword for the combination of philosophical, aesthetic and modern qualities in Shakespearean drama is “grotesque.” This term is also relevant to other influential studies of early-modern drama, notably Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque, as well as Wolfgang Kayser’s psychoanalytic criticism. Yet if this tradition of the Shakespearean grotesque has problematized an idea of the human and of humanist values in literature, can this also be understood in posthuman terms? This paper proposes a reading of Kott’s criticism of the grotesque to suggest where it indicates a potential interrogation of the human and posthuman in Shakespeare, especially at points where the ideas of the grotesque or absurdity indicate other ideas of causation, agency or affect, such as the “grand mechanism” It will then argue for the continuing relevance of Kott’s work by examining a recent work of Shakespearean adaptation as appropriation, the 2016 novel Macbeth, Macbeth by Ewan Fernie and Simon Palfrey which attempts a provocative and transgressive retelling of Macbeth that imagines a ‘sequel’ to the play that emphasises ideas of violence and ethics. The paper argues that this creative intervention should be best understood as a continuation of Kott’s idea of the grotesque in Shakespeare, but from the vantage point of the twenty-first century in which the grotesque can be understood as the modification or even disappearance of the human. Overall, it is intended to show how the reconsideration of the grotesque may elaborate questions of being and subjectivity in our contemporary moment just as Kott’s study reflected his position in the Cold War.
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The article pays tribute to Professor I.Galea, multi-faceted personality, philologist, researcher, essayist, translator and lexicographer. The themes of interest she approached, the courage of dual interpretation, the dynamic model of interpretation, the recycling of tradition through new theories and interpretations and the dismantling of the immutable character of the text ranks her among the undisputed literati of communism, a woman of open horizons with an essential contribution to the development of Romanian anglistics.
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The present paper continues our analysis of the self as built in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, an analysis rooted in the relation between the four temperaments and the four primal elements (Fand, 1999). The ‘facet’ of the diamondlike self we concentrate on is Jinny – the element of fire, a carpe diem character who defines herself by means of a language of seduction, of the impact of a displayed eroticism on the audience of men fueling her passion for life.
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Tess Durbeyfield is the heroine of the novel. According to the concept of Greek Tragedy a hero or a heroine should be great figure by birth or achievement. But Hardy created his heroes and heroines from ordinary Wessex men and women. In tragic grandeur and sublimity she stands in front rank. The simplicity of her nature, the nobility of her soul, the capacity to suffer, the spirit of effacement, and her purity all make her one of the sublimest heroines of English Literature. Tess is the simple sincere and passionately faithful and as different as possible from those fickle and elusive young women was display, in some of his other tales affections as veering as weather-cocks. Her stoicism and her devotion to her husband win the admiration and sympathy of many generations of readers. She has dominated the novel not by the aggressiveness of her character but by her sweet and tender humility. The present paper is an attempt to explore the different shades of Tess’ vivacious character.
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Imagination and concepts pertaining to it are at the core of Conrad’s fiction and theories. Conrad, in A Personal Record, asserts that the imaginative should grasp what is “all human” and based on “experience”. Nevertheless, he introduces various kinds of imaginations to his readers when it comes to fiction. For instance in Nostromo and Victory he respectively explains moral imagination and criminal imagination. The most outstanding point is that Conrad considers a very thin line between the “imaginative” and the “real”. In fact, he represents imagination as a faculty that helps people to predict future and stay alert. Typhoon, The Secret Agent, and Amy Foster best exemplify this idea. However, Conrad, as in Lord Jim, suggests that over-reliance on imagination might be dangerous. Moreover, he sometimes interweaves an aura of mystery around imagination, a view clearly noticeable in The Nigger of Narcissus. Conrad presumably is more outspoken about imagination and its nature in Youth. Therein, Conrad provides connections between imagination, youth, and sea. For him, while imagination impregnates the vigour of youth, it also embodies its ignorance and inexperience. Yet, it is impossible to draw a clear and constant picture of what Joseph Conrad meant by imagination.
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When Lady Anne accuses Richard of cruelty in the wooing scene of act one in Richard III, she claims that even the fiercest beast will demonstrate some degree of pity. Her attempt to categorize Richard as somehow both less than human and less than a beast, however, leaves her vulnerable to Richard’s pithy retort that he knows no pity “and therefore [is] no beast” (1:2:71-2). The dialogue swiftly moves on, but the relation between the emotional phenomenon known as pity or compassion and the nonhuman, briefly raised in these two lines, remains unresolved. Recent scholarship at the intersection of early modern studies, historical animal studies and posthumanism has demonstrated ways in which the human-animal binary is often less than clearly articulated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Building on such work, and adding perspectives from the history of the emotions, I look closely at the exchange between Anne and Richard as characteristic of pre-Cartesian confusion about the emotional disposition—in particular compassion—of animals. I argue that such confusion can in fact be traced throughout Richard III and elsewhere in the Shakespeare canon and that paying attention to it unsettles the more familiar notion of compassion as a human species distinction and offers a new way to read the early modern nonhuman.
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The human face, real and imagined, has long figured into various forms of cultural and personal recognition—to include citizenship, in both the modern and the ancient world. But beyond affiliations related to borders and government, the human face has also figured prominently into biometrics that feed posthuman questions and anxieties. For while one requirement of biometrics is concerned with “unicity,” or that which identifies an individual as unique, another requirement is that it identify “universality,” confirming an individual’s membership in the species. Shakespeare’s sonnets grapple with the crisis of encountering a universal beauty in a unique specimen to which Time and Nature nonetheless afford no special privilege. Between fair and dark lies a posthuman lament over the injustice of natural law and the social valorizations arbitrarily marshaled to defend it.
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In this article the authors examine one of the major philosophical problem – the problem of the transcendental love ability which can overcome time and space. Novel intertextuality, classical and non-classical understanding and manifestation of the transcendent are analyzed. On the basis of a detailed examination of these notions the authors make conclude that the transcendent lost its ontological and substantial features after the passage from classical to non-classical philosophy. Now the transcendent manifests itself as an important element of consciousness, because without it we can’t deal with actuality that consists of both local and global perspectives, searching for global community which reflects the eternal human necessity of belonging.
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The nineteenth century was an age of reason and industrialization. Magic and mythical creatures ceased to exist for the rational minds of the time. Yet, despite the intellectual hostility to magic and mysticism, their sway over popular culture and the literary world remained undisturbed. Magic even found other ways to return. One of these is stage magic. In the 1840s, the stage magician John Henry Anderson dazzled the audiences in London with his performances so much so that Sir Walter Scott called him the Great Wizard of the North (referring to his Scottish origins). In A Christmas Carol, Dickens adds vivacity to his narrative through the use of narrative theatrics that can be described as pertaining to stage magic. In the novella, a ludicrous form of white magic transforms the main character. The other characters are baffled by the inexplicable change in his behaviors. The transformation seems magical even to them. While hidden from their eyes, Scrooge receives four strange night visitors who reform him through a series of visions. When he finally returns to the “real” world, Scrooge is a different person. What takes place in the novella can in many respects be compared to the tricks used in stage magic (where an item is hidden from the sight of the spectators only to reappear in a different form). The use of magic in the novella, therefore, goes beyond the story. Indeed, a “magical” sleight of mind structures the very narrative of A Christmas Carol. This paper seeks to trace the influence of the idea of magic on the narrative structure and techniques of Dickens’ novella. It argues that, in many respects, the narrator can be described as a magician performing tricks on characters and readers alike.
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George Orwell’s works bear a political tone. Burmese Days is not only a narrative of Burma’s historical past, but a sociological document in which the cultural and social specificities of the country feature prominently. His realism is undoubtful (“I write because there is some lie I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention”, he would confess in Killing an Elephant) and telling the truth about his contemporary world was only the first stage before reaching the absolute visionary prowess of 1984 – a novel whose dystopian character has already been surpassed by reality. Besides learning from his criticism of imperialist politics, we argue that the lesson he gives in Burmese Days – about human relations and the horrible way in which corruption affects them is worthwhile learning.
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