Editorial [PDF]
Aaron Aquilina: Lancaster University
The time of criticalthinkings [PDF]
Ivan Callus: University of Malta
An island: there, in smaller times in a timeless sea. Stung by recent events, its people achieve consensus on the need for critical thinking. Improbable. But impossible things had happened, even there. They surprise themselves, but something had to be done. ‘As a nation, we must think more, and we must think more deeply,’ they declare through those who think up this kind of thing. ‘Our thinking must not only go deeper, it has to develop the capacity for critique,’ the people sort of learn to say. Or, as the intoning tells them, you, we, might not survive ourselves. Having got this far, they turn their half a million backs on the political groupings that had previously dulled that capacity with the rewards of loyalty, as well as on the religions that had schooled them in the rewards of faith. They are thrilled by this double emancipation. Some time is needed before the thrill can be worked off. Pragmatism, the greatest of survivors, then asserts itself. So not unreasonably they ask, ‘But who will teach us critical thinking?’
‘Post-Los Angeles’: The Conceptual City in Steve Erickson’s Amnesiascope [PDF]
Liam Randles: University of Liverpool
Within Steve Erickson’s texts, we often find setting functioning as a conceptual vehicle, the result of which is the creation of works identifiable by a number of disorienting and tangential qualities. Emanating from such employment is the presence of a symbiotic relationship existent between protagonists and their environment. Not only does this manifest in terms of interpersonal relationships, with topography fluctuating in accordance with the state of these, but we also find it apparent internally, often reflective of individual character. It is worth considering, however, the various elements and influences that inform Erickson’s conceptual settings. The writer’s fifth novel, Amnesiascope (1996), arguably depicts the most arresting of these conceptual settings. Featuring an author surrogate as the text’s central character, we find notable associations with his home city that create a ‘post-Los Angeles’. My essay aims to explore the extent to which Erickson’s own biographic details and personal interests shape this particular setting, detailing its place in the wider context of his work, whilst also analysing how a range of themes manifest within the confines of such a carefully crafted milieu.
Absurd Perseverance in Carson McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter [PDF]
Angus Young: University of Leeds
This essay argues that Carson McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) renders suicide as an ineffective response to an unassailable condition of alienation. In so doing, the text celebrates the perseverance of characters who continue living while dismissing the possibility of disrupting such a state of being through a self-orchestrated death. This extolling of survival and concurrent securing of a social order of alienation, I suggest, realises and problematises the logic of Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus. Camus argues that revolting against an insurmountable problem of being unable to define a meaning to life is itself a reason to continue living. However, such a construction presupposes the ineffectual nature of self-killing and renders living as a perpetual struggle against a fixed state of being. I suggest that McCullers develops a similar Sisyphean structure in her novel. The unassailable challenge in McCullers’ text is one of inevitable alienation working against a desire for a shared collective understanding. John Singer’s suicide troubles this construction as it reaffirms a separation between people while simultaneously ending an individual’s struggle against such isolation. An unsettled tension is then raised between the choices of a futile life or a futile death.
Symbolic Survival: Beyond the Destruction of Language in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea and Patrick Süskind’s Perfume [PDF]
Declan Lloyd: Lancaster University
In his theory of psychoanalysis Jacques Lacan puts forward his famous conceptualisation of the three primary orders—the imaginary, the symbolic and the real—which are the pillars in the constitution of the subject. Lacan’s dual theorisation of death skirts that of biological, physical death, and instead centres around the symbolic death: that is, as Jin Sook Kim neatly summarises, ‘the radical annihilation of the symbolic order through which reality is constituted […] this death implies the obliteration of the signifying network itself’. How then, could such a symbolic death be expressed through the linguistic confines of literary fiction? In some cases, this breakdown is presented not just through the more overt disintegration of language, but through images and other metatextual visual dimensions. In others, the survival beyond the symbolic death allows for transcendence into a psychical state beyond the stable, rational mind which is so cordoned and confined within the symbolic order, and beyond the malignant clutches of what Slavoj Žižek designates as the presiding ‘Big Other’. In this article, I shall analyse a number of key texts by late modernist authors who navigate this point at which the symbolic order breaks down and the structures of language fail, paving the way for the ensuing ‘real’.
Survival beyond Life and Death: The Buddhist Transcendence of Dichotomy in The Waste Land [PDF]
Chutian Xiao: Durham University
It can be argued that at the heart of The Waste Land is the supreme spiritual moment in the hyacinth garden when the speaker experiences a peculiar mode of existence in which he is neither living nor dead. The rest of the poem, to some extent, can be regarded as the interpretation of and the response to such a glimpse of survival, witness to the unification of sensibility which reconciles subjective intuition with reality. The experience is similar to Buddhist nirvana, which indicates the arrival at the other shore where the true self survives the ego and attains eternity. This essay argues that such a manner of survival is primarily Buddhist. Besides Eliot’s serious study of Buddhism at Harvard, the persistent scepticism against salvation from suffering also makes the poem more congenial to Buddhism. In the first section of the poem, the burial of the dead only leads to another circle of being and death, and renewal does not eliminate suffering. Similarly, in ‘A Game of Chess’ and ‘The Fire Sermon’ the subjective struggle to escape from various facets of life’s suffering is of no avail. The correct direction towards spiritual survival in the waste land is to let go of subjective endeavour as is explicated in the last two sections.
