Bahare Aarabi; Negar Sharif
Abstract
Introduction: The industrial development and rapid economic growth of the United States in the mid-twentieth century pushed the concept of nature to the margins. It is presumed that the literary pieces made during this period ignored nature to the advantage of the multilateral development of the country. ...
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Introduction: The industrial development and rapid economic growth of the United States in the mid-twentieth century pushed the concept of nature to the margins. It is presumed that the literary pieces made during this period ignored nature to the advantage of the multilateral development of the country. However, some writers consciously or unconsciously opposed this mainstream and encouraged ecological awareness. This paper seeks to study Denise Levertov’s “A Tree Telling of Orpheus”—published in 1968—in the light of eco-phenomenology to disclose Levertov’s eco-consciousness embedded in her holistic and non-hierarchical attitude toward life, against her days' backdrop of the separation paradigm. Levertov’s early works mainly celebrate nature, but her later works are primarily distinguished as social and political. This research focuses on Merleau-Ponty’s concept of ‘chiasm’ to reveal the reciprocally embodied participation between Orpheus and his natural surroundings, hidden in a shadow cast by political and spiritual analyses of this text.Background of Study: Levertov’s poetry has been studied within the framework of various literary theories, mainly Marxism and feminism. The present study gains significance as it brings the interdisciplinary approach of eco-phenomenology to practical analysis of the human-nature relationship in “A Tree Telling of Orpheus.” In the late 1960s, the Vietnam War became the US government's top priority; most literary figures of this era addressed this issue in their works. Moreover, most of the critical studies have also focused on the political aspects of these pieces, ignoring their other elements. This poem, written in 1968—while the Vietnam War was still raging—has been no exception. In her paper “A Poetic Re-Telling of the Orphic Myth: A Political Study of Denise Levertov’s ‘A Tree Telling of Orpheus’,” Rana Jabir Obed holds that like Orphic music, the Vietnam War brought “appreciation and political awareness” to the youth (Obed 4). Other aspects of this work have also been noticed by critics. In “The Hasidic Context of Nature and Music in Denise Levertov’s Relearning the Alphabet,” Estra Gancarz-Jurek stated that Levertov’s concerns for the environment and music were derived from her Hasidic religion. What the present research intends to add to the existing corpus is to study the ecological aspect of this poetry from a different angle, ‘eco-phenomenology’, to disclose an awareness of a broader phenomenological world. Methodology: The present research, as a qualitative and a descriptive one, embarks on library work and context analysis. The Main theoretical premise of this study is the eco-phenomenological concept of ‘chiasm’ put forth by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961). 'Eco-phenomenology,' as the point where philosophy and ecology meet, deals with environmental issues from a phenomenological viewpoint. Chiasm, “the reciprocal participation—between one’s own flesh and the encompassing flesh of the world” (Abram 81), dismantles the Cartesian mind/body dualism and its subsequent nature/culture distinction to open the body to the world. Emphasizing the notion of ‘embodiment,’ this study discloses the chiasmatic moments when nature and culture are intertwined. Here, the emphasis is placed on the music’s role in creating these holistic experiences.Conclusion: This research rejected the transcendental subject in favor of the ‘body-subject’ by emphasizing the superiority of the body in the process of perception to reveal the mutually embodied participation between Orpheus and nature. Using literary devices like ‘anthropomorphism,’ ‘chremamorphism,’ ‘synesthesia,’ and ‘onomatopoeia,’ the boundary between humans and nature was blurred. Thus, a Cartesian, culture-nature outlook faded into a holistic one, and a corporeally blurred amalgam of Orpheus and the surrounding nature rose to the surface. Here, the emphasis was placed on music’s role in bringing these holistic experiences. It should be mentioned that the eco-phenomenological study of literary works can encourage a holistic attitude, preventing the destruction of the environment.
Saeid Behnoud; Negar Sharif; Zahra Bordbari
Abstract
Introduction: As the investigation of the Wessex’s paratextual material reveals, Hardy’s insightful conviction on the primacy of emotional reasoning over logical cognition in the mind’s nexus informs his predetermined intentionality in assigning the impressionistic elicitation of affective ...
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Introduction: As the investigation of the Wessex’s paratextual material reveals, Hardy’s insightful conviction on the primacy of emotional reasoning over logical cognition in the mind’s nexus informs his predetermined intentionality in assigning the impressionistic elicitation of affective responsiveness as the ultimate mission of his literary compositions. Accordingly, the Wessex novelist develops a sophisticated fabric of interconnected narrative strategies to effectively evoke and enlist the subject readers’ empathetic identification with the desolately suffering protagonists. Since humankind is condemned to the inflictions of a sinisterly indifferent universe in Hardy’s fixated philosophy, the affective investments of his impressionistic narratives purportedly aim at the altruistic propagation of empathetic compassion to rectify moral degeneration. However, it is critical to reconsider the functional basis of the Wessex’s methodical dominion on emotional susceptibilities in the scope of contemporary research in affective narratology since the instrumental capitalization on affective realism harbors grave capacity for engraving the intended versions of perceived reality. Background of the Study: The recent investigations carried out in the multidisciplinary scope of neuroscience attest to the pre-eminence of emotional susceptibilities over reasoning faculty in the mind network revolutionizing the conventional theories on the cognitive function in the reality perception process. The revitalized focus on the overarching emotional orientation of the mind’s cognitive performance extends to literature in the sub-domain of affective narratology and informs the analytical research on its function and impact in narratives by such renowned scholars as Suzanna Keen. In Empathy and the Novel, Keen discusses the stylistic features and strategic techniques that elicit empathetic responsiveness in the narrative discourses leading to the subject readers’ affective identification with the represented fictional characters or situations. “Narrative Empathy Theory” and “Introduction: Narratives and Emotions” incorporate Keen’s evaluation of the role of discursive elements such as characterization style and narrator’s function in the empathetic enlistment process and provide innovative concepts in the categorization of the various strategies of empathetic evocation in the narrative discourses that perform as “ideoartistic battlefields”.Methodology: The theoretical framework and the discourse analysis procedures in affective narratology are informed by the current research in the interconnected branches of knowledge. The remarkable investigations of such prominent scholars as Suzanna Keen in affective narratology challenge the long-established emotion-reason binary by emphasizing the determining primacy of emotional susceptibility in the reciprocal interaction of the mind nexus’s cognitive and affective faculties in forming the interpretation gestalts of literary narrative discourses. Investigating the process of the Wessex’s affective impressionism through the analytical discursive reassessments in light of the latest neuro-scientific theories is crucial in uncovering the functional bases of Hardy’s methodical efficiency in the strategic capitalization on the audience’s empathetic identification.Conclusion: The saturated impressionism of the Wessex narratives is significantly enforced by the remarkable correspondence of the interconnected discursive strategies with the latest findings on the primary role of the mind’s affective faculty in shaping perceptions of reality. The stylistic assessment of Hardy’s narrative techniques to capitalize on empathetic identification indicates the substantial correspondence of his realistic representations with the principles of affective realism in present-day theories. The compelling urge on the subject readers’ affective susceptibilities is emphatically enforced through the discursive applications of the parallelism between the mind’s inner emotional valences with the projections of the outer world, their reciprocal interdependency in the forming the gestalt of a perceived cognitive reality and the consequent conception of the intentionality of an outer sentiency. However, the Wessex’s overwhelming investment in affective impressionism alarmingly facilitates the channeling of the dark ideological propositions of a sinister philosophy through the self-prophesizing transfigurations of reality that can act as deterministic forces in fashioning the individuals’ reciprocal interactions with the socio-cultural context.
Lida Matin Parsa
Abstract
A psycho-cultural study of 9/11 attack and its pertinent trauma, reflected in Don Dellilo’s Falling Man illuminates the manipulated structures of cognition and cultural identity and the way the unreliable narrators in this narrative are causing cognitive dissonance through their socio-culturally-made ...
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A psycho-cultural study of 9/11 attack and its pertinent trauma, reflected in Don Dellilo’s Falling Man illuminates the manipulated structures of cognition and cultural identity and the way the unreliable narrators in this narrative are causing cognitive dissonance through their socio-culturally-made trauma resulted by the cognitive manipulation of the 9/11 event. The way the narrator and characters in the selected novel cope with the 9/11 attack displays the cleft Festinger refers to as the cognitive dissonance as a distasteful condition led by the awareness of inconsistencies between beliefs, attitudes, or actions. However, People inherently aspire to the consistency, so they are impelled to reduce the dissonance between what actually occurred and what has been manipulated. While through the narrations, the narrators symbolically act as history-tellers reflecting the 9/11 era, the reliability or unreliability of what they narrate should be socio-culturally investigated. Based on Festinger’s theory of ‘cognitive dissonance’ and Elaine Auyoung’s idea on ‘huge cognitive leaps’, the cognition of a person changes and adapts itself to sociocultural settings and events. So any narration is prone to subjectivity and subsequently not necessarily reliable. Consequently what happens through the cognitive manipulation is meaning construction that makes narrations of cultural traumas unreliable. Thus, DeLillo’s aesthetic representation of the 9/11 trauma makes the reader encounter an unreliable version of a cultural trauma, connoting the fact that the borderline between fact and traumatic fabrications is hard to distinguish due to cognitive manipulations. Into the bargain, Delillo’s narrative scrutinizes the prospects of reoriginating individual identity and cognitive perception along with the propensity of individuals to create their identities through a group mentality or mediator groups as agents or carrier groups which are literary called unreliable narrators serve as compelling constituents in the trauma creation process since “cultural traumas are for most part historically made, not born” (Smelser “Psychological” 37). September 11, 2001 left America with a national trauma and poignant images for several upcoming years. Actually the terrorist attacks quivered the very established foundation of America. “Good weather [was] no longer synonymous with peace” (Beigbeder 198) and as a result it is just through 102 minutes that the symbol of progress distorted.
Ali Ahmadi; Azita Aryan; Negar Sharif
Abstract
IntroductionAlthusser's superiority in twentieth-century philosophy is due to his refined definition of ideology. He provides another foundation for Marxist philosophy and he considers it as a science leading to historical materialism; thus, Althusser's definition of ideology leads to the argument ...
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IntroductionAlthusser's superiority in twentieth-century philosophy is due to his refined definition of ideology. He provides another foundation for Marxist philosophy and he considers it as a science leading to historical materialism; thus, Althusser's definition of ideology leads to the argument that capitalist societies of discourse have two distinct forms of discourse.Background StudiesPost-colonial literature in general is one of the most prominent theoretical topics and approaches in literary research within the country. However, Ishmael Reed is a lesser-known figure than his global fortune. The only article to read one of Reed's works is "Identity Transmigration Through History: The Post-Structuralist Reading of Mambo Jumbo's Novel by Ishmael Reed" by Bakhtiar Sajjadi and Somayeh Ghorbani, published in the Journal of Foreign Language and Literature Criticism. Mambo reads Jumbo according to Hayden White's views and his post-structuralist definition of history. Argument and MethodReckless Eyeballing (2000) was published fourteen years after Mambo's Jumbo novel. Both novels are mainly about exposing the hidden layers of American society's ideology. Reed was heavily criticized for criticizing feminism in major parts of the work, calling it anti-feminist. Reed says of the multilayers of these texts: "[Feminists] complain about Thermnischa Smartes for why he leaves New York for California in the final part of the story to become a kid and write, write and write." Of course, this is not in line with the goals of the new generation of feminists because they believe that they can own everything, including family and work. ” When Reed lets the term "radical have everything" as a radical feminist, he actually acquits himself on charges of being anti-feminist. This acquittal, while at the same time a clear attempt to criticize feminism, is a clear indication that a single interpretation of the novel is impossible. ConclusionReed reacts frankly to the dominant discourse of his time. In Reckless Eyeballing novel, he aims the cultral ideology to show how literature has become a tool for the ruling class instead of expressing aesthetic values. Reed mentions the names of writers such as Eugene O'Neill, Ralph Eliessen, and Zora Neil Hurston, in order to express the intentions of using allegorical or metaphorical tools, therefore it becomes the undisputed spokesman for the American cultural community. He clearly informs the reader that the author must adapt to the ruling class and the Jews in order to gain a place in American literary society. Throughout the story we see that among black men only Schubert who submits to Jewish supporters can succeed in his career. Meanwhile, Smartes has allied himself with another powerful supporter, white feminism. Reed, in fact, clearly believes that literary success is the result of timely satisfaction with political and social circles. This is also the case with Ian Ball, whose incessant search for a female supporter actually reflects his quest for fame and success. The candid and honest exposition of the ideological mechanism of culture, referring to the real and real people of its time, makes the eye more of an "exemplary literature" than a "cultural ideological mechanism". The novel becomes a tool for change because of the revelation of the ideological discourse of its time, and it distances itself from becoming a tool for promoting the values of the ruling class.