Imagining of Literature

We talk about literature and its essence, trying to capture the inner secret of its Beauty and Truth. Here is a vain attempt to bridge interpretation and creativity.  Villanelle for two Somewhere in Drumcondra two are holding hands Dancing in the orange light of silent streets Nothing of themselves they do demand. Only the sense of midnight pleasure to command To roam the roads and their signs to read Somewhere in Drumcondra two are holding hands. Should they take a left or a right again? It matters least, for of choice they felt all freed. Nothing of themselves they do demand. Rows of moonstruck houses their wary eyes do scan 'To be lost with you' is the essence of the creed. Somewhere in Drumcondra two are holding hands. It is what they do, it is what they can To get entranced in a moment that should fleet. Nothing of themselves they do demand. To walk the streets and the hearts to mend In night's secrecy they sometimes m...

                        The Politics of Vision and Love in Midsummer Night’s dream In an essay on Shakespeare Frank Kermode acknowledges that “the [Shakespeare] conversation must go on somehow, for when there is nothing more to say about the book the book dies, and the parasitical criticism dies with it”. It is this somewhat artificially sustained academic conversation about an author who has been so deeply and intensely studied that breeds into one a slight fit of doubt whether anything new and exciting could be added to the vast volume of Shakespeare criticism. Bearing it in mind, I have decided to let my own close-reading suggest the textual problems that would require interpretation in an attempt to stray away from simply echoing other people’s work. Love is a centralling force in Midsummer Night’s Dream - being the power that is requisite for unity...

For centuries human beings try to answer difficult questions related to their origin and their purpose. Myth, later literature and arts are used to explore the topic and to enlighten or add to the matter extra doubt. Led by their insatiable desire to reveal, discover, invent people fulfill the mythopoetic role given to them in the Bible - God-like creatures destined to long for the lost divinity and trying to become demiurges.

Summer time! What better way to celebrate the summer than reading? To do it on the beach, of course! A list of fine summer readings that I strongly recommend: 1.“Passion” by Jeannette Winterson This book discusses universal questions concerning the meaning of life and love. It focuses on the lukewarm people and their search of a particular passion that will lit their existence. The quest of finding the answers is held at the maze-like Venice with its secrets and powerful enigma. You will meet such interesting characters - Villanelle that has webbed feet and whose heart beats separately from her body or Henry - the sane madmen, that you will be enchanted and puzzled and eventually made to think and re-think.

Angela Carter – Heroes and Villains “If the Barbarians are destroyed, who will we then be able to blame for the bad things?”  Angela Carter was born in 1940 and she joked with her mother who insisted that she had learnt for her pregnancy in the very day The Second World War was declared. Angela Carter won several literary awards, The Somerset Maugham Award being one of them. She is often described as a neo-Gothic author and a feminist. Before her death caused by cancer, Carter was working on a sequel of “Jane Eyre”, which draws an interesting literary kinship between her and Jean Rhys, alongside the one with Charlotte Bronte. The 20th century British writer can be described by the help of many adjectives, but despite the number they still will not be enough. Not only is she a prolific writer but also a journalist, author of several screenplays (some – adaptations of her short stories to the big screen). She studied English literature at University of Bristol. Her fluency ...

The beauty of literature is its capacity to entreat various, often contradictory readings the multiplicity of which seemingly betray that "standard" meaning. If literature grants the possibility of its own multi-understanding, how are we, as readers, to guide ourselves through its maze of words, avoid the dead ends and eventually reach the exit? There is no plan for this maze, no preconceived idea. To enter it with an array of prejudices is an instance of a lack of tact. Illuminating as most of the critical approaches have been, most of them suffer from the same impediment of being highly deterministic. Psychoanalytics,the blackmailers as Sartre dubbed them, see Oedipal complex in every story that has a man involved in it and Marxists tend to be oversensitive to the market economy and capitalism. They seek for predetermined answers rather than let literature guide their findings. Literature breeds its own conventions and to impose a ready-made interpretative model is, to say...

The following was written for a university assignment, hence its short volume and loose formality despite which I think of it as a decent and modest contribution to the blog. I believe a student should entertain a slight suspicion so as not to have his thoughts lured by the exuberant display of seemingly acute arguments which, try as they might to conceal it, serve to assert the marketing of a “right” way to read. It has been widely assumed that through his visionary poems Blake establishes a kind of social system of beliefs, a collective mode for experiencing the world through which the individual embraces his past and makes sense of his present; that he establishes a mythology. But what impresses me, and consequently intrigues me, is the role Blake as an author holds within his visionary work. It is a somewhat unsettling business to point to something which is obvious: what we have in Blake is no more than mythopoeia – “the conscious creation of a myth. The appr...

My first impression of one of the most praised Ian McEwan’s books - “Atonement”- was not very positive. But as time passed and I thought a little more of the story and the idea I came to the conclusion that after all the book is not that cliché. What I found intriguing was the idea of the authorship seen through the states of maturing. What I mean is that the process of writing is linked with the process of growing. In other words, the unstable carried away lost in fantasies young Briony and her fairy-tale-like writing concerned with twisting and reinventing the reality changes through the years in a sensitive, profound, searching answers and atonement writing.

Whether it is an orangutan that moved the hands of the clock of evolution becoming human being or it refers to the not human mechanical interior of mind, Burgess’s book described the young generation of Britain in the “permissive” 60s exploring the themes of free will (“without free will the man is a clockwork orange”), good and evil, generation gap, sin. The book parodies totalitarian governments and using parody and black humor shows the dystopian society of the youth culture. The author shows the total alienation of Alex and his fellows, the representatives of the youth, by “nadstad” – the Russian based slang. In Alex’s speech often occur Russian words – viddy (to see), devochka (a girl), mesto (place) and so on, which make the book very difficult to read by English speakers. Total defamiliarization (the term Russian formalists invented for the theory). How did Stanley Kubrick transfer the book for the big screen? Brilliantly is the laconic answer. Although Burges expressed h...

In the age of rapid technological revolution basic and ordinary terms like “free speech” meet the challenging role of new contexts, requiring new definitions to replace the outdated ones. The Internet era advances with accelerating speed changing our notion almost daily, reshaping our understanding of communication, media, information and even of our own role in society. Social networks like Twitter, Facebook and why not YouTube, allow users from all over the world to form cores of communicative societies gathered together by similar interests and positions. Limitless information is spread all over the virtual space allowing unstopping interaction between users, enabling people to freely share content. Thus, the Internet plays huge role in satisfying the eternal human longing of free speech. Even more significant is that the Internet appears similar to the original Greek term of Democracy according to which every citizen of the polis could give their voice in the agora.

Homo Significans (Fr.) - human, creator of signs. Sounding almost like an ancient formula, the phrase coined by Barthes to describe the ultimate subject of his scientific interest could easily be recognized as an archetype of the imperfect human being trying to achieve the creative power of God. This impulse first of all to name, to produce meanings, then to craft, to make has always been one’s prerogative from time immemorial. In this sense we can synthesize that the human’s creative impulse is strong and has ever been connected to art. And art, argues Bourdieu, is an autonomous product (or at least modern art). It refers to itself, without pointing at its referent. Or in other words - it reaches “the level of the meaning of what is signified”(Panofsky 28). Benjamin turns his sight to the origins of art comparing the original cult practices and the exhibition value and derives the social functions of art as a base of another practice - politics.