This article interrogates the poethical turn in the work of the later Levinas. In the first instance, this reading brings to the fore the extent to which Levinas’ early ethical position paradoxically repeats formerly deni­grated aspects of Heidegger’s philosophy. Secondly, through the aperture of Celan’s poetry, Levinas’ later ethical reformulation is examined. This article demonstrates that it is through a heightened attention to language that Levinas attempts to counter the tacit duplication of Heideggerian ideals. Crucially, this article seeks to establish that it is only when Levinas fully embraces the ‘poetry of language’ that the residual Heideggerian re-inscription is finally redressed; this process of redress being mediated via what Celan refers to as ‘the not-to-be-deciphered’ free-floating poetic word.

It is undeniable that aspects of postmodernist thought are also useful to the feminist goal of unseating the hegemonic dominance of traditional male authority. The threat of moral relativism hangs over the Postmodernist head, and this stance is strongly criticized within feminist circles: As Carol Gilligan has said,” Life can’t just be continually reconstructed; ...There is a complex reality, yes, but there is something called reality, and there is something called a you.” A postmodern feminism can cope with the collapsed notions of foundationalist premises, such as that of the stable and unified self-concept. This article makes an attempt at re-visiting feminist critic of science in light of phenomenological and hermeneutical attempts at bridging the gap between science and life either in the Husserlian project of restoring the structures of the Life World, or in the Heideggerian quest for liberating the ‘Being’ from the prison house of language. Do they share similar concerns for overcoming the limitations of binary structures of understanding? The article makes an attempt at understanding the one from the perspective of the other and vice versa.

In this paper I argue that the Heidegger of Being and Time is a dialogist, and ought to be situated in the tradition of other twentieth-century dialogists like Bakhtin and Gadamer. Specifically, I claim that Heidegger’s conceptions of the “Being-with,” “discourse,” and “solicitude” of Dasein in BT illustrate his endorsement of a conception of dialogicality. There are three advantages to proposing that Heidegger is a dialogist in BT. First, this paradigm offers a more perspicuous vocabulary for describing the discursive nature of Dasein’s Being-in-the-world as a Being-with others. Second, it provides a better way of understanding the normative dimensions of “solicitude.” Lastly, it helps to underscore how Dasein’s identity remains social even in the seemingly individualizing moment of becoming authentic.

The aim of this article is to examine the ways Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness dramatizes an existential crisis that is psychologically as well as politically underpinned. It explores how the novel is reflective of the ideological complexities of its day while also corresponding to current ideas in cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind which examine the entanglements of embodied feelings, subjective sentience and the ability to narrativize experientiality in shared language. In investigating how the crisis of narration in Heart of Darkness is reflective of the psychological and existential alienation experienced by the protagonist in the novel, the article draws on debates on the role of the literary narrative as a vehicle to communicate the phenomenal quality of consciousness.

For over a century, critics have typically approached Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw from the perspective of its young governess, whose obsession with her charges and the spectral figures that allegedly haunt them ultimately leads to disaster, the death of Miles. This article, however, offers a reading atypical of those previously accomplished. Analyzing the novella from a psychoanalytic and narratological perspective, it argues for a shift in point of view, contending that the locus of the novel, the manuscript ostensibly documenting the harrowing experiences of the young governess, is not penned by a woman but rather by a man, the principle reader of the thing itself, Douglas. Given the shift in point of view, it becomes wholly evident that it is Douglas’s wildly erotic fantasy that becomes the substance of the manuscript, one culminating not in the death of a child but, rather, in the petite mort or the “little death” of sexual orgasm, the equivalent of a masturbatory episode on the child’s part while in the passionate embrace of his governess. Read in this manner, the narrative coheres as a young man’s romantic retrospective of desire, obsession and sexual initiation.

This essay offers a Schutzian reading of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, arguing that the so-called critical ambivalence in Chinua Achebe’s hermeneutic of the colonial experience makes sense if situated within his lived experiences in colonial Nigeria. Grounding its interpretation of Achebe’s meaning-making of the colonial experience in Schutz’s phenomenology, the essay begins with a close reading of the novel itself, highlighting significant areas of ambivalence. Next, it explicates Schutz’s (1967) constructs of intersubjectivity and phenomenology of literature. In the next section in which Achebe’s biography is examined, an attempt is made to show how a Schutzian reading of Achebe’s social relationships can help us understand his account of the colonial experience as represented in his first novel. Ultimately, the paper concludes by noting that the ambivalence that charactterizes Things Fall Apart reflects the author’s realism and investment in both the African and European cultures he sought to critique.

Laughter takes a great many forms in the novel of manners, signifying different things at different times for different characters in different situations. Linguistics, philosophy, rhetoric, psychoanalysis, poetry, art, and film have all attempted to tackle the subject of laughter, yet in relation to manners, and the novel of manners, the matter remains fraught and underexplored. By examining laughter in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country (1913), this paper attempts to show how laughter on a micro level mirrors the simulacra and simulations that comprise manners, characters, and even the progression of the novel on a macro level. What the study of laughter in The Custom of the Country reveals about knowledge, sign systems, and commodity and exchange, could nuance the way in which we read laughter in the novel of manners, a type literature built upon knowing and understanding the conditions of the personal and social simultaneously.

William Thomas Beckford’s Vathek chronicles the eponymous Caliph’s struggle and ultimate fall into hell as a divine punishment for his unre­strained desire for knowledge. Around the time Beckford wrote Vathek, Immanuel Kant released the Critique of Pure Reason, whose central implication is that human knowledge is restricted to appearances. Drawing on textual evidence from Vathek’s first three editions and from Kant’s Critique, I explore ways in which knowledge is negotiated and mediated by the limits of human intellect and sensory perception as they intersect with the protean boundary between reality and appearance, and suggest that Beckford’s Vathek may be viewed as a literary instantiation of Kant’s transcendental idealism, as they both - albeit in different ways - impose severe limits on man’s epistemic ability.

Contemporary democratic theory, in its focus on the distinction between a private and a public sphere, tends to exclude emotions from political life. Arendt, Habermas, and Angus present critical theories of politi­cal action and deliberation that demand that emotions be left behind in favour of a narrower rationality. On the basis of a first step toward incorporating emotions into political life as accomplished by Martha Nussbaum – despite its limitations – and of a second step taken by Sara Ahmed, an outline of a theory of emotions becomes possible, and brings into question the distinction between private and public life. Emotions act as motivations that accompany every instance of participation or for non-participation, be it because of apathy or of disengagement.

This essay argues that the critically neglected work of the American mid-twentieth-century writer Jane Bowles is a rare attempt at realism in modern fiction that takes as its metaphysical premise the reality referred to in Spinoza’s pronouncement, “By reality and perfection I understand the same.” Bowles’ innately allegorical fiction is an effort to reveal the perfect reality of the world by prophetically creating the future rather than mimetically preserving the present and recovering the past, expressing a world that is existentially founded rather than representationally endured. The realism of perfection her prophetic creations strive to apprehend serves as a necessary reproof of the all too actual world reflected in merely mimetic fiction.

In Reasons and Persons (1984), the greatest contribution to utilitarian philosophy since Henry Sidgwick’s The Methods of Ethics (1874), Derek Parfit supports his Reductionist contention “that personal identity is not what matters” by turning to the neurosurgical findings of Roger Wolcott Sperry. Parfit’s scientifically informed argument has important implications for W. E. B. Du Bois’s contentious hypothesis of African-American “double-consciousness,” which he initially advanced in “Strivings of the Negro People” (1897), before amending for inclusion in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). An analysis of “Of the Coming of John,” chapter 13 in The Souls of Black Folk, helps to trace these ramifications, resituating Du Bois’s notion from the pragmatist to the utilitarian tradition, and revealing how his concept effectively prefigured Parfit’s scientifically informed Reductionism.

For the most part, interpreters of Martin Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art” have neglected his appropriation of C. F. Meyer’s “The Roman Fountain,” yet the poem deserves attention because its final description of water as it “streams and rests” provides a motif which Heidegger uses to work out his understanding of the relationship between “world” and “earth.” Richard Wilbur uses similar language to make a similar point in his own poem about Roman fountains, “A Baroque Wall- Fountain at the Villa Sciarra.” Juxtaposing Wilbur’s depictions of moving and resting water with Heidegger’s brings out a latent implication in Heidegger’s use of the imagery, the possibility that the moving and resting interplay will result in enhanced understanding.

The academic world, at least in the West, has traditionally always been suspicious when it comes to introducing in its quest for knowledge notions of materiality, touch, texture, or “haptics” – in other words what is generally associated with sensory-experience. In the human sciences and the artistic fields the practice of research has always privileged “textual reason” over “sensory texture,” the textual over the textural. Only in the recent past have so-called postmodern theories of all kinds attempted to overcome the hierarchical dichotomy between discursive reason and embodied thought. Unfortunately, this has very often created an unprecedented ragbag of epistemological confusions and identity crises. This essay shall attempt to explain and clarify the epistemological nature of materiality, touch, texture, or “haptics,” and the role it can play in academic research in the artistic fields with particular reference to ideas developed by French philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas.

In this article, I begin with Kant’s notion of a “categorical imperative” as a framework from which to discuss the ontology of Franz Kafka’s writing. Since Kant’s moral law is a device for reflecting on our responses to challenging circumstances rather than one that tells us what we should always do in every situation, I draw inferences concerning Kafka’s own descriptions of his sense of being a writer in opposing phenomenal and spiritual worlds. Since Kafka cannot be understood exclusively from a Kantian perspective of autonomous will, I discuss Kafka’s experiencing in terms of the reciprocal interplay of being and non-being, and his awareness of finitude and the possibility of transcendence. I argue for a humanistic-existential vision of the reading of a literary text as an encounter that responds to the alterity of the Other and which, consistent with Kafka’s oeuvre, privileges being faithful to one’s own experiencing.

This article provides a Lacanian reading of one of the short stories of Zhang Ailing, a Chinese writer. It is intended to explore the possibility of employing Lacan’s theory of the symbolic order to the interpretation of a Chinese text, as well as to broaden our understanding of Zhang’s work and to unlock the potential of the applicability of Lacan’s ideas. The final part of the article will draw on Žižek’s interpretation of Lacan to illustrate how Zhang, unlike most of her contemporaries, is exempted from the obsession with China and how this obsession can lead us to the conclusion that whatever we chase obsessively in life is nothing but nothingness.

Biological, social, and technical causes of the splendor and decline of classical music are examined and found insufficient. Evidence shows that music involves unconscious motivation. The classical summit predominantly included part of the German Awakening, showing that this motivation was, at least in part, collective. The German Awakening was a phase of the Western turn from religion to a world view centered on conscious human experience and power. The decline of classical music parallels developments in literature, science, and history as this world view approaches a stage of exhaustion.

This paper proposes that the Gilgamesh epic is constructed as an encoded expression of the wish of the people where it arose to have a more responsible king. The decoding builds to a deeply encoded structure, emerging as a precursor from which all other encodings are derived. Enkidu, Utnapishtim, and the episode of a spiny bush in the Great Deep decode as three assaults on the king’s grandiose self-seeking, a character trait that supports his abuse and tyranny over Uruk’s people. Shamhat, the priestess of Ishtar, decodes as the king’s instrument with which to bring Enkidu under his own influence and to thwart Anu’s reason for creating him—to balance the king. Ishtar decodes as one who creates indebtedness from the king to her in order to later express how the king defaults on his responsibilities. The subtlety of the encoding structure reflects the depth of anxiety in the people of the epic’s time about their king sensing their anger, as well as the length of time over which the epic was elaborated.

The interface between literature and medicine has long been an area of interest for researchers. It is difficult to conceptualize any singular methodological approach for such an interdisciplinary field. However, the theoretical developments in Bioethics are promising. Besides, literary texts representing medical themes and characters have created a cultural discourse of Bioethical problems in the modern world. Borrowing its title from Shaw’s famous medical satire, The Doctor’s Dilemma, the present paper aims at exploring how far a bioethical approach—with special reference to the doctor-figures represented in some twentieth century literary works—can be helpful in delineating the complexities involved in issues like the doctor-patient relationship, medical ethics and the rapidly growing technological orientations in the modern world.