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41. Janus Head: Volume > 12 > Issue: 1
Gregory Phipps Matisse of Montreal
42. Janus Head: Volume > 12 > Issue: 1
John Pauley Faulkner’s Tragic Fiction and the Impossibility of Theodicy
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The details of evil will sink any attempt at theodicy. But details of evil are usually- or even necessarily- lost in the abstract discussions of evil in philosophical texts. Hence this essay looks at the details of tragic fiction, specifically in some stories by Faulkner. The initial analysis endeavors to show that fiction gets us closer to the reality of agency than philosophy and so it then gets us closer to the reality of the evils that haunt both individuals and cultures (the two cannot be adequately separated). Finally, the details of the evil analyzed reveal that human beings are actually capable of a self-destruction that annihilates the very grounds of human agency and identity: Faulkner’s tragic fiction reveals that self-destruction is written into the necessary components of agency and identity.
43. Janus Head: Volume > 12 > Issue: 1
Robert Garfield McInerney A Transcontinental Journey Brings Transcendental Understanding: A Review of Existential Psychology East-West
44. Janus Head: Volume > 12 > Issue: 1
Contributors
45. Janus Head: Volume > 14 > Issue: 2
Stuart Joy The Look on Their Faces: Transcending Lack on Christopher Nolan The Prestige
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This essay offers a psychoanalytical reading of Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige (2006) by principally focusing on the discourse of lack. I argue that the visual, structural and thematic composition of the film provides a means to confront the fundamental sense of lack – a central tenant of Lacanian psychoanalysis – at the heart of being. In particular, I contend that Nolan foregrounds lack by using reflexive techniques that call attention to the film’s production processes which in turn, highlight the spectator’s desire for a sense of (unattainable) unity.
46. Janus Head: Volume > 14 > Issue: 2
Nisha Gupta The Cinematic Chiasm: Evoking Societal Empathy through the Phenomenological Language of Film
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This paper is a recommendation for phenomenologists to use film as a perceptually-faithful language with which to disseminate research and in­sights about lived experience. I use Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy to illus­trate how film can evoke a state of profound, embodied empathy between self-and-other, which I refer to as “the cinematic chiasm”. I incorporate a case study of my experience as audience member becoming intertwined with the flesh of the film “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.” I discuss four aesthetic techniques of this film through which I became enveloped in a state of visceral empathy towards the “other” on-screen. The cin­ematic chiasm offers exciting, creative possibilities for phenomenologists, particularly those who are interested in evoking widespread empathy for social justice purposes.
47. Janus Head: Volume > 14 > Issue: 2
Kevin Love Différance and Paranoia
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This exploratory essay aims to open différance to a form of enquiry it has not seen coming. A consideration of the complex temporality that attends its historical emergence leads to a specifically différantial articulation of spatio-temporality. A residual element of spacing before/behind spati­otemporality provokes further consideration. The notion of verbality is introduced to provide analytical purchase. Analysis identifies a fundamen­tal mannerism in différance; a participative and orchestrative spacance. Dif­férance participates too determinately in this spacing, as this spacing. The paper thus urges différance to rewrite this element quasimetaphorically. In the ensuing drama, différance can rewrite the metaphor of spacing only by relying again on the spacing of metaphor. Unable to rewrite itself quickly enough, nonetheless compelled, an unexpected dimension opens.
48. Janus Head: Volume > 14 > Issue: 2
Christine Daigle, Louise Renée Performing Philosophy: Beauvoir’s Methodology and its Ethical and Political Implications
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Simone de Beauvoir’s contribution to ethics and politics is articulated through a methodology that successfully renders philosophy as literary and literature as philosophical. Her existential-phenomenological stance permeates her corpus and dictates a philosophical approach that avoids theoretical treatises in favour of philosophy as a way of life which is com­municated in a variety of modes of expression. The Ethics of Ambiguity furnishes us with an example of said philosophy insofar as it performs the philosophy it offers and thereby appeals to the reader to engage in ethical and political action in her own life.
49. Janus Head: Volume > 14 > Issue: 2
Saulius Geniusas The Spectacles of Pain and Their Contemporary Forms of Representation
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This essay offers a phenomenological interpretation of symbolic violence. According to my thesis, the craving for violent imagery derives from the audience’s unconscious desire to liberate itself from pain’s destructive effects. I argue that this unrealizable project of liberation can take three forms: it can aim to express the inexpressible, escape the inescapable, or transfer the non-transferrable. I further contend that the audience’s approach to contemporary representations of violence is paradoxical: its irresistible craving for pain’s virtual manifestations is no greater than its incapacity to tolerate pain’s actual manifestations. After addressing some objections that my interpretation is bound to provoke, I conclude with some reflections regarding the possibility of an ethical engagement in symbolic violence.
50. Janus Head: Volume > 14 > Issue: 2
Rachel Starr “Oh, a friend!” Psychotherapy and the Other in the Light of Montaigne’s Essays
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The irrepressible 16th century humanist and essayist, Michel de Montaigne, wrote a self-portrait with such unprecedented candour and conversational flair, that he all but jumps from the page and shakes your hand. At Mon­taigne’s invitation, I bring together psychotherapists and the Essays in a conversation that revives the notion of friendship, and evokes the pleasure of mutual revelation in the search for understanding. In the light of the Essays’ “gay and sociable wisdom”, I see essaying and therapy as discrete yet closely intertwined cultural tasks. Each is an openhearted work of being together, of making room for alterity rather than conquering it with theory. Only in a world made coherent through the practices of friendship and hospitality can we come to cultivate the otherness of painful separations, tolerate the strangeness of our ordinary foibles, and draw closer to life.
51. Janus Head: Volume > 14 > Issue: 2
Anthony Splendora Dead Tilt: Playing for Keeps at “The Blue Hotel,” the Prize and the Price
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Stephen Crane had not advanced beyond his teenage years before twelve of the sixteen original members of his immediate family had died, and by his early twenties he was becoming symptomatic with the tuberculosis that would kill him at twenty eight. Death, ever present, overshadowed his life and like a threatening eclipse looms, markedly, in his best work. “The Blue Hotel,” a crowning realization of the short story form, is a site for the expurgation of that relentless spectre, its alienated and adversarial Swede a personification of Crane’s own dissolution, forthwith to be ritualistically purged. Such sacrifice is shown to be psychosocially well founded, historical in long practice and supported by current theory as a means of restoring order to exigent chaos; here Crane in 1898, nearing his unruly end, implemented sacrificial victimization allegorically, with cardplaying rather than the casting of lots his aleatory selector, for the most vital personal reason.
52. Janus Head: Volume > 14 > Issue: 2
Robert Scott Stewart, Michael Manson “Misplaced Men: Aging and Change in Coetzee’s Disgrace and McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men”
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“That is no country for old men” is the famous first line of Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” which reflects upon aging, art, and immortality. Yeats sug­gests in his poem that the aged ought to move from the sensual, physical world of their youth to a world of intellect and timeless beauty. We em­ploy this poem and that line to explore the aging male protagonists in two recent novels: Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men, and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. We suggest that though both of the novel’s pro­tagonists have aspirations to ’sail to Byzantium’, various factors ranging from their characters to the problematic realities of contemporary south­west America and South Africa make such a wholesale, successful journey impossible even though some progress is made.
53. Janus Head: Volume > 14 > Issue: 2
Arthur A. Brown The Primordial Affirmations of Literature: Merleau-Ponty and Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat”
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Stephen Crane’s short story “The Open Boat”—a tale “intended to be after the fact”—affirms Merleau-Ponty’s conclusion that “The perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence.” The story dramatizes and reflects on the men’s situation in the world, their inter-subjective experience against the background of non-human nature. In facing the imminent possibility of their own deaths as, for each of them, “the final phenomenon of nature,” the men become “interpreters” of what is primary in the human condition. The line between the world of the reader and the world of the story, like the line between consciousness and being, is less a line than a horizon.
54. Janus Head: Volume > 14 > Issue: 2
Heather Fox Representations of Truth: The Significance of Order in Katherine Anne Porter’s The Old Order Stories
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Katherine Anne Porter submitted a group of stories called “Legend and Memory” to The Atlantic Monthly in 1934, but instead of the reception she hoped for, The Atlantic Monthly responded with a request for significant revisions. These recommendations, as Porter adamantly explained, would change the collective meaning of the stories. And yet, Porter ultimately chose to concede, publishing the stories separately in other magazines before finally collecting them together again in The Leaning Tower and Other Stories (1944). Over the next twenty years, Porter would publish the stories (later called The Old Order stories) in two more collections— The Leaning Tower and Other Stories, The Old Order: Stories of the South from The Leaning Tower, Pale Horse, Pale Rider, and Flowering Judas and The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter. Each time she chose not to edit individual stories but rearranged the order of the stories. Individually, each story is like a sketch, or one component of the protagonist Miranda’s construct of identity from the perspective of an adult looking backward and remembering as a child. And yet collectively, these stories reveal memory’s process of reconstruction and how the perspective of time transforms event through addition, elimination, and arrangement. Using text, correspondence, manuscripts, and cognitive research to examine the progression of Porter’s work on The Old Order stories in three collections over more than thirty years, “Representations of Truth: The Significance of Order in Katherine Anne Porter’s The Old Order Stories” traces the progressive ordering of these stories from their original submission to their final collection in The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (1965). This essay argues that Porter’s rearrangements reflect a reconstructive process of memory. Over time, the reorganization of The Old Order stories demonstrate a shift in Miranda’s memories from a chronological positioning to a representational ordering, allowing Miranda to reexamine her perspective on past experiences.
55. Janus Head: Volume > 14 > Issue: 2
Michael Bradburn-Ruster The Triumph of Kafka
56. Janus Head: Volume > 14 > Issue: 2
Emilie Mathis The Still Life
57. Janus Head: Volume > 14 > Issue: 2
Liz Glodek On Your Old Age
58. Janus Head: Volume > 14 > Issue: 2
Notes on Contributors
59. Janus Head: Volume > 14 > Issue: 2
Liz Glodek Hayden Planetarium
60. Janus Head: Volume > 15 > Issue: 1
Katherine Ziff TWO: The Middle Passage