Imagining of Literature

I.                   Introduction Unlike Atonement , where at the very beginning the reader encounters an epigraph from Jane Austin that more or less pre-supposes intertextual clues for further reading, On Chesil Beach does not offer such accommodating leading first steps into its highly condensed narrative. Preoccupied with a single event that provides multivalent analyzing points, the dramatic intensity of the whole book is encoded in that condensed way of telling. 

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.

“Whatever is referred to, must exist.” John Searle’s Speech Acts Whenever we engage in argument of the whatness of what is postmodern, it is almost impossible to drop Jameson’s theories out of the discussion. Fredric Jameson is highly recognizable name in contemporary literary and philosophical studies. He qualified for a doctoral degree from Yale University, where he studied under Erich Auerbach. The literary and philosophical critic, whose mimetic approach towards the representation of reality in modern western literature is highly praised theoretical work, proved to be a lasting influence on Jameson’s thought. In his early works Jameson has been concerned, along with other Marxist cultural critics such as Terry Eagleton, to articulate Marxism’s relevance in respect to the current philosophical and literary trends. His book - “Marxism and form” published in 1971 turned out to be a pioneering book from which dialectical criticism emerges as a radical alternative to the kind of hu...

Some say Robert Frost is one of the most significant poets in modern American literature. Some critics push him in the margins of American literature. In a sense, Frost stands at the crossroads of nineteenth-century American poetry and modernism. He is either modernist but never innovator or his poetry is traditional but in original way. One of the most popular of his poems and usually anthologized is called “Fire and Ice”. The poem was originally published in December 1920 in Harper’s Magazine. And then added into Pulitzer prize winner poetry book New Hampshire. Simple as a theme, mirror like in verse and thought to be inspired by Dante’s Inferno, this poem may as well be read as subjective piece of art inspired by popular theory at that time that regards the end of the world. The main focus is in the emotional aspect of the poem, which makes “Fire and Ice” all time classic and highly preferable piece to read. In the very beginning of the poem a conflict is stated, a conflict ...

Ever since “Homo Ludens” we are comfortable to think humans as accustomed to playing. Playing is one of the most complicated activities. And the play is a tradition with long historical roots in shaping the mankind thinking. Nowadays we naturally link plays with theatre and the physical activity called playing with sports. The idea that there is infusion between sport and theatre or the acting/playing co-relation is not new at all and it descents directly from ancient times when amphitheatres held both plays and athletic events. One of the most influential (at least for me) and one of the most popular point of view regarding the theme is in one of Roland Barthes’ essays in Mythologies - the opening one and one of the most significance,  called “The world of wrestling”( Actually the essay first  appeared in Esprit). In a very punctuating, very exact manner the French structuralist managed to outline the similarities between acting and playing. One of the important conclusions...

Constance Mundy, Mrs. Talbot is the first women ever to be taken picture of. Amandine Aurore Dupin, Baronness Dudevant is the real name of the French writer George Sand, who had relationship with the composer Shopen. Auto da fe - the famous act of burning of literature and art pieces in translation reads: act of faith. The name of Ernest Hemingway’s novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls” is a quotation from an essay of the English poet John Donne. Robert Burns, the Bard of Scotland, was initiated into Masonic Lodge at the age of 22. Mary Wollstonecraft, radical advocate of women’s rights is the mother of Mary Shelley. The young Mary, whose mother died after her birth, learned to read from the epitaph of Wollstonecraft’s grave. It is tradition in England that the queen’s or king’s face is engraved at coins, in Scotland, however, the face on the coins belongs to Sir Walter Scott. Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, the youngest son of Charles Dickens, named after famous Victorian writ...

The next lines are so not going to be about the teenage sweethearts/ wet dreams vampires like Edward Cullen - the Heathcliff wanna be/ afraid of his shadow/ 100-year-old virgin with an extremely bad taste (accept Debussy) creation of a desperate housewife or erotically exaggerated to match the commercial taste undead like Bill Compton or Erik the Northman. I am talking about the classics of literature mythology that resurrect the initial fear of dead and unnatural, the taboo of incest and flesh-consuming allusions. Such vampires are Dracula - both the famous Stoker masterpiece and Kostova’s teasing character, the diabolically featured picture of Baron in the face of Pollidori’s lord Ruthven - “The vampyre. A tale” and the amazing Lestat  - Rice’s most naturalistic vampire. Villains don’t sleep. And the next one is too busy looking at eternity to lose time sleeping. Dracula. The name was simply able to sent chills to the early Stoker’s readers. He is ultimately bloodthirsty - he...

It won’t be me if I start this list with no female name on it. So without further ado here she is, the devil in a skirt, the most seductive and yet the most vicious god creature – Kate from “East of Eden”. Let’s put aside the infernal features Steinbeck is particularly searching. Kate is the perfect villain because she feels no remorse, no love and in a matter of fact no real hatred. She is amputated from everything that can be called human weakness – she does not feel regret does not fully realize what bonds are – blood relations or other – she knows not their real meaning, she is not even keen on her own children. But she does have an Achilles’ heel, however, and that is the fact that she is self-centered, egocentric person with maniac obsessions. It is not a surprise that one of the most popular teen books/tv series “Vampire diaries” is equipped with a similar villain Katherina – the evil Bulgarian vampire, who is in many ways literally like Steinbeck’s character. Book villain №...