To Freud, Slade claims, ‘A dream dramatizes an idea!’

Andrew Slade | A Beginner’s Delight to Psychoanalytic theory!

Andrew Slade’s book titled, Psychoanalytic Theory and Criticism is a delightful little primer on Psychoanalytic theory and criticism, subtitled, ‘by way of an introduction to the writings of Sigmund Freud!’

Well, Slade has tried to give a concise yet elegant account of the basic moves and premises of psychoanalytic theory and criticism as they have developed over the last one hundred years, and as they have been put to use in literary and cultural studies.

This little book of just around a hundred pages doesn’t ask for a sky-high knowledge on psychoanalytic theory! Rather it requires just a beginner’s level knowledge of Freud and Freudian theory! and on how their application can help formulate and understand as well, our own experiences in the present century, and also help us make sense of literary and cultural texts from a variety of places, periods, languages and cultures.

Slade takes us - his readers - with such suave elegance into his chapters! The very first chapter opens with a crisp introductory definition to psychoanalysis. Says Slade -

Psychoanalysis is a revolutionary theory of the mind, of feeling and of behaviour. It evolved over time in Vienna, Austria, in the late nineteenth century, through the curiosity and ambition of Sigmund Freud and his interlocutors from around the world who were drawn to his work.

Right from the concepts of ‘Hysteria and the Method of the ‘Talking Cure’, which acted as a discharge of intellectual and psychical energy, Slade has his task cut out and he does it with such elan!

Especially in his take on the Freudian dream interpretation, where Slade compares the unconscious to a wishing machine, and the unconscious as the mechanism that generates dreams, he seems to do it quite elegantly at that!

To Freud, Slade claims, ‘A dream dramatizes an idea!’ Moreover, it is ‘always a fulfillment of a wish!’

Chapter Three then takes us into the realm of ‘Psychoanalysis and Literature,’ where he does a wonderful take on the ‘repetition compulsion,’ as a recurring motif in psychoanalysis, which coincidentally begins Lacan’s theory of reading, says Slade.

The next chapter deals with ‘Psychoanalytic Criticism in Practice,’ using Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado’!

The fifth chapter is a wonderful take on ‘Psychoanalysis and Culture,’ and the concluding chapter gives ideas on what remains for the student to do!

Added, there’s also a brief glossary towards the end of the book on some psychoanalytic terms worth knowing!

In short, a small book of biggg value for those of us who would love to work on Psychoanalytic theory and criticism. 

Woolf on the Common Reader...

Virginia Woolf | On the Common Reader

There is a sentence in Dr. Johnson’s Life of Gray which might well be written up in all those rooms, too humble to be called libraries, yet full of books, where the pursuit of reading is carried on by private people.

The common reader, as Dr. Johnson implies, differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. 

He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others.

Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole — a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing.

He never ceases, as he reads, to run up some rickety and ramshackle fabric which shall give him the temporary satisfaction of looking sufficiently like the real object to allow of affection, laughter, and argument.

Hasty, inaccurate, and superficial, snatching now this poem, now that scrap of old furniture, without caring where he finds it or of what nature it may be so long as it serves his purpose and rounds his structure, his deficiencies as a critic are too obvious to be pointed out; but if he has, as Dr. Johnson maintained, some say in the final distribution of poetical honours, then, perhaps, it may be worth while to write down a few of the ideas and opinions which, insignificant in themselves, yet contribute to so mighty a result.

image: amazondotcom

'In Photography, the presence of the thing (at a certain past moment) is never metaphoric!'

James Wood | Fun Stuff 

Just this evening, I was rummaging through an entire collection of photographs of my college days, days when we had been to inter-collegiate events and won prizes by the dozens, crystallised in snapshots of various hues, letters preserved for posterity, that bear testimony to time past – letters written by near and dear, from the early 1990s on, when I was deposited in a hostel, to learn life in all its vitality, to learn for myself, firsthand, communal traits for life! 

Nay! This post ain't gonna do the leg-pulling to my heart's content on all ye dynamic day- scholars on this count though!

Still, life lived in a hostel has its share of fun and frolic!

There’s a lot you have to bear!

And a lot you’ve gotta do!

There’d be a guy who’d always pry around

To somehow

rummage through your cubicle!

That’s so ‘tidy and neat!’

A guy who waits

for the snacks to pop up

To finish them all at one go!

And then go to sleep!

There’d be another

who would quick catch a lizard

And throw it straight

into your mosquito net

When you’re busy on your dream mode!

And another imp!

who always makes it his hobby

to flick with glee - 
Your toothpaste,

Your towel and your soap even!

And make you

search and search for 'em all - 

Till you give up! 
And get late

to your first hour’s class!

And sometimes even your second!!!

Living those past days in your memory add such fun and joy to your present days in every way!

Added, looking up those memory-days on your treasured photographs, paper records, picture postcards etc., are real joys galore in double measure!

Exactly what German writer and academic W. G. Sebald has done in his swan song of a novel! His last one before he passed away, a novel that was also published in the same year when he died - in 2001!

A student of German and English literature, in Germany and in Switzerland respectively, Sebald was touted to be a forerunner for the Nobel Prize in Literature before death plucked him away at 57!

His works deal predominantly with memory and loss of memory with specific reference to the Holocaust, and also with the horrors and the trauma of the Second World War on the German people!

And his novels are witness to these reflections in abundance! In fact, his novels are made up of reflections, recollections and observations from around his European travels!

Sample the opening lines to this, his last novel Austerlitz –

Sebald speaks -

In the second half of the 1960s I traveled repeatedly from England to Belgium, partly for study purposes, partly for other reasons which were never entirely clear to me, staying sometimes for just one or two days, sometimes for several weeks. On one of these Belgian excursions which, as it seemed to me, always took me further and further abroad, I came on a glorious early summer’s day to the city of Antwerp, known to me previously only by name.  

And of the significance of Antwerp to the Holocaust is anybody’s guess!

And why pray, did I stumble upon this intriguing read? You may ask!

For a reason though!

You are Invited...

You are cordially invited to

A Special Lecture

by

Prof. Manuel Bracia

Pro-Dean International, Faculty of Arts

Humanities and Cultures, Chair of Global History

School of History, University of Leeds, UK

10.30 am, 30th September 2019

at

G33 Hall, University of Madras

She will interact with research scholars at 10.30 am

Dean Frank Finlay

Prof of German Language and Literature

University of Leeds, UK

will speak on Immigration during the Second World war.

Students, research scholars and faculty members are cordially invited!!!

PS: This lecture is in honour of the freshers at the MA English programme (Both SFS and Aided), with the University of Madras. Our students are most welcome to participate and be immensely benefited.

Seventy five 'seventeen syllable' poems by Sangamithra on love, death, and everyday life!

Hearty congratulations to Ms Sangamithra Nataraj on her delightful second collection of haiku poetry!

After the astounding success of her first volume of Haiku poetry, Sangamithra is on song, with her impactful second anthology in tow!

The capacity of three brief lines to evoke emotion or conjure up pictures in such a compact space is second to none. This is the magic of the Haiku.

We wish Sangamithra all success in all her creative endeavours.

The Wolf in the Mountains: A Collection of Haikus

is a collection of seventy five seventeen-syllable poems on love, death, and everyday life. 

Going Back Home: A Collection of Haiku Poetry

is a collection of seventy-five Haiku about Death, Loss and Grief. Alluring, heartbreaking, and gut-wrenching, they weave an enchanting vision of death, in all its multiple facets.

You may read a sample of the haikus on the link HERE.

You may also grab a copy for yourself online HERE.

Workshop on Enhancing Communicative Competence

You are Invited...

'It’s a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore.'

Feel Free | Zadie Smith on Books, Libraries and Social Networking

Call it mentor mania, or the amazing impacts of a good mentor like Dr. Jesudoss Manalan [a librarian par excellence,] on me, I’ve always made it a point, to coax my wards on paying a visit to some of the best libraries in town, whenever they find spare time on them!

Yes! no time is free time, we have just spare time on us, ain’t we! (Here, you may now want to check out for yourselves the difference between free time and spare time! Please do!)

That said, most of my wards, hence, take time off their schedules and their commitments, to go and browse for themselves, a library’s amazing stacks and holdings during their spare time, and even take snapshots of the books they read! Many make it a point to even send those snapshots to me!

I feel overjoyed when I find students relishing their spare time rejuvenating their minds, refreshing their thoughts,  in the portals of a good library! A future generation of learners is sure bound to be benefitted beyond measure, thanks to such dedicated and devoted young minds!

Added, today, at a talk in Loyola College, Chennai, I had the privilege of exhorting students to buy for themselves hard copies of books instead of downloading them on pdf all the time! Publishers and writers would soon become non-entities and fade into oblivion if this trend continues, I added. 

Per chance, there’s a Stephen Hawking or a Zadie Smith or a Malcolm Galdwell or a Ben Okri or a Derek Walcott or a Amitav Ghosh waiting to give their valuable thoughts and ideas to society! But when they find they don’t get their idea’s worth, they might as well opt out of taking the pains to tune their thoughts to paper! Hence the plea!

Two thoughts here! One on libraries, and the other on books!

On a related vein, the last time around, when I paid a visit to one of the bestest bookstores in the city, Starmark at Express Avenue, I was able to get for myself a wonderful line up of the latest arrivals! One such book I picked from off the stack was by one of my favys, Zadie Smith! 

It is titled, Feel Free!!!

Well, on an aside, Zadie Smith and Ben Okri have been two top-notch favys of mine for much of these days!

If Zadie ain’t on my reading zone, then Okri is!

Zadie’s earnest plea for the rejuvenation of a bookish culture is manifest in her wonderful take on ‘Generation Why’!!!

To be honest, some of these nostalgic essays by Zadie Smith are sure bound to bring a beaded bubble winking at the brim of our eyelids! 

Her candid takes are at once both pungent and at the same time so intriguing as well, which bespeaks to a fervent longing for the good ol’ past days when books where ‘our bread for daily use and not cake for special occasions!!!’

She quips at the beginning of this essay, “Perhaps Generation Facebook have built their virtual mansions in good faith, in order to house the People 2.0 they genuinely are, and if I feel uncomfortable within them it is because I am stuck at Person 1.0.”

Zadie adds on - 

You want to be optimistic about your own generation. You want to keep pace with them and not to fear what you don’t understand. To put it another way, if you feel discomfort at the world they’re making, you want to have a good reason for it.

Master programmer and virtual-reality pioneer Jaron Lanier (b. 1960) is not of my generation, but he knows and understands us well, and has written a short and frightening book, You Are Not a Gadget, which chimes with my own discomfort, while coming from a position of real knowledge and insight, both practical and philosophical. 

Lanier is interested in the ways in which people “reduce themselves” in order to make a computer’s description of them appear more accurate. “Information systems,” he writes, “need to have information in order to run, but information underrepresents reality” (my italics).

In Lanier’s view, there is no perfect computer analogue for what we call a “person.” In life, we all profess to know this, but when we get online it becomes easy to forget.

In Facebook, as it is with other online social networks, life is turned into a database, and this is a degradation, Lanier argues, which is based on [a] philosophical mistake . . . the belief that computers can presently represent human thought or human relationships.

These are things computers cannot currently do. We know the consequences of this instinctively; we feel them. We know that having two thousand Facebook friends is not what it looks like. We know that we are using the software to behave in a certain, superficial way toward others.

We know what we are doing “in” the software. But do we know, are we alert to, what the software is doing to us? Is it possible that what is communicated between people online “eventually becomes their truth?” What Lanier, a software expert, reveals to me, a software idiot, is what must be obvious (to software experts): software is not neutral!

When a human being becomes a set of data on a Web site like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears.

It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.

The last defense of every Facebook addict is: But it helps me keep in contact with people who are far away! Well, e-mail and Skype do that, too, and they have the added advantage of not forcing you to interface with the mind of Mark Zuckerberg—but, well, you know. We all know.

If we really wanted to write to these faraway people, or see them, we would. What we actually want to do is the bare minimum, just like any nineteen year-old college boy who’d rather be doing something else, or nothing!

In this sense, The Social Network is not a cruel portrait of any particular real-world person called “Mark Zuckerberg.” It’s a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore.!!!

In yet another essay, she has a wonderful take on libraries –

All libraries have a different character and setting. Some are primarily for children or primarily for students or the general public, primarily full of books or microfilms or digitized material or with a café in the basement or a market out front.

Libraries are not failing “because they are libraries.” Neglected libraries get neglected, and this cycle, in time, provides the excuse to close them. Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay.

It’s not just a matter of free books. A library is a different kind of social reality (of the three-dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal.

To conclude, the only other collection of essays that I’ve found so endearing to the heart, next only to Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands, is Zadie Smith’s Feel Free!

Please feel free to check this book out, at your nearest bookstore!

For once, not the pirated pdf copies please! One honest hard copy - for the heart, by the heart, from the heart!

Your reading gets nobler, that way, alleyyy? ;-)

Feel Free! :-) 

'Once upon a time there weren’t any scientists, as such, in plays or fictions, because there wasn’t any science as such!'

Bill Bryson and the Atwood Connect!

As noted critic Scupin Richard once said, ‘There are types and types of writers! Some are, by their own choice, always a step ahead, wanting us to follow them through the course of their mighty pages; some prefer to be at our back all the time, giving us leads and cues, prompts and high signs, to infer and to decipher the meaning all by ourselves down the pages; there are yet others who take pleasure in ambling up a leisurely stroll along with us, holding our hands, and guiding us through their pages in such gentle ways, with an involvement beyond measure!’

One such writer of the last order is Bill Bryson!

Indeed, just one cursory look at his range and his sweep makes you stand in awe of him!

Be it on travel writing, be it on the English language, be it on science, be it on memoirs, be it on philosophy, he’s got them all on him in abundant measure!

An engaging style is sure bound to be an endearing style wherein the writer resolves to take you on an awesomyyy ‘haiyahh’ kinda journey ;-) along with him/her, through his/her ideations, ruminations and reflections that’s been transferred with such enormous care and an abundance of love, onto reams and reams of paper white!

How could we ever thank Bill for making science accessible to us the lay in every way, through his wonderfully enticing book on science, titled, A Short History of Nearly Everything, published in 2003! One of the hot-sellers even today, this book takes credit for being one among the ‘mainline few’ that have made science sound so simple and so cool for all and sundry!

However the signpost thread for this post hinges on Bill’s commemorative volume to the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society of Science, titled, Seeing Further, a book which has quite unfortunately, not seen quite those stunning, raving reviews as have his other titles!

The Guardian and The Telegraph in especial, have been so bold and brazen in their bashing! ;-( Well, they’ve just unabashedly ripped apart the book as a huge ‘disappointment’, and a ‘missed opportunity’!

Ladies and gentlemen, they may be right! At the same time they may be equally wrong too!

Cos!

Bryson ain’t the reason! Nayyy!

Rather, the liaison is!

Of course, liaisoning with an astounding array of scholars drawn from different disciplines - to each their quiddities and their quirks – is, should I say, a sheer labour of love in the interests of science, ‘so to say’! (‘so to say’ is Bill’s favourite refrain, again, by the way!)

One cannot but quite appreciate the eclectic range of the contributors to this commemorative number – from Margaret Atwood to Maggie Gee on the literary arena, to Holmes and Gleick on the historians’ realm, to Dawkins and Jones on the scientific sphere, yes! you’ve got them all here by the number!

One particular essay on this commemorative volume so endeared itself to me!

And nooo! Not because Atwood happens to be one of my die-hard favourites, but because Atwood is here in a dynamic, new avatar, exploring the claims behind the ‘mad scientist’ archetype!

Or should I personally quip, on an aside, Atwood here is, on a light-lighter-lightest vein, making (or poking) fun of this sinister archetype! ‘Figures of fun’ as she calls ‘em!!!

Moreover, the beauty of this feature lies in its appeal to all and sundry across times and climes!

A lively, engaging feel there is, to this narrative!

How beautifully she engaged us all right from the opening line, ‘In the late 1950s, when I was a university student!’ And yes, from thence on, chances are, you won’t bat an eyelid even as the pages flap and flutter all by themselves, and even as you are winged and hooked to a different environ altogether, and even as you are completely unperturbed by the wing’d chariot gently flitting you by and by!!!

Oh so! Let’s thank Bill yet again, for giving us all such an engaging essay from such an endearing writer of our times! So to say! ;-)

Is Philosophy Really Dead? - Hawking Tells Us So!

The Grand Design | Stephen Hawking

When we think about the universe, the galaxies, the stars, the planets, the solar system, the asteroids, the comets et al, we always subscribe to the myriad stories and theories galore that baffle and boggle our minds on these innumerable scientific discoveries, revolutions, and inventions that are part of a particular social milieu! Ain't we? ‘Paradigm shifts’ as Thomas Kuhn would call it!

One such book of our times that analyses and examines these paradigm shifts in the history of scientific revolutions down the ages right from the times of the Ionian Greeks, is the wonderful 2010 book titled, The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking!

If to Nietzsche the philosopher, God is dead, to Stephen Hawking the physicist, philosophy itself is dead! ;-)

In the very first chapter titled, ‘The Mystery of Being’, he vouches hard to this viewpoint when he says,

We each exist for but a short time, and in that time explore but a small part of the whole universe. But humans are a curious species. We wonder, we seek answers. Living in this vast world that is by turns kind and cruel, and gazing at the immense heavens above, people have always asked a multitude of questions: How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves? How does the universe behave? What is the nature of reality?

Where did all this come from? Did the universe need a creator? Most of us do not spend most of our time worrying about these questions, but almost all of us worry about them some of the time.

Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.

Moreover, to Stephen Hawking, it was not god who created man, but man, who created god! And as James Frazer traces this evolution of humankind from 'the black thread of magic to the red thread of religion to the white thread of science', so does Stephen Dedalus! oops Stephen Hawking!!!

Says Stephen –

Ignorance of nature’s ways led people in ancient times to invent gods to lord it over every aspect of human life. There were gods of love and war; of the sun, earth, and sky; of the oceans and rivers; of rain and thunderstorms; even of earthquakes and volcanoes. When the gods were pleased, mankind was treated to good weather, peace, and freedom from natural disaster and disease. When they were displeased, there came drought, war, pestilence, and epidemics. Since the connection of cause and effect in nature was invisible to their eyes, these gods appeared inscrutable, and people at their mercy.

'Shakespeare and theory do not belong to different times and lands; they are instead kissing cousins, speaking a shared tongue.'

Shakespeare & Literary Theory | Jo Gil Harris

Terence Hawkes is real super-amazing in his wonderful book on Structuralism titled, Structuralism and Semiotics! It’s been a primer of sorts for quite many years in a row, for any beginner who’d like to foray into theory proper! Added, some of his key definitions that he’s given us all in this book are awesomeyyy to the highest order! You may wish to read some of these snippets from Terence on our previous blogpost HERE!

But the same gusto and vibrancy seems to be lacking in Terence’s Alternative Shakespeares 2!

Well, the ‘Alternative Shakespeares’ Series has been such a phenomenal contribution to the ‘phenomenon called Shakespeare’, from various theoretical postulates! Housing a host of scholarly treatises from the ‘best in town’ as regards theory, the series has been a rave and a rage for scholars of all hues, bent on politicizing oops theorizing the bard through an unending plethora of –isms to suit their own vested hypos and typos!!! Also, Terence has given an Introduction that seems to have been done more in haste and hence lacking in taste! ;-(

In addition, the treatises contained therein are so scholarly that one needs to approach them more with admiration than with love! [A rehash of Dr. Johnson’s famous line, ‘I admire Jonson, but I love Shakespeare’!]

This little lacuna in Shakespearean criticism from a theoretical framework, has been so beautifully addressed nay remedied by Jonathan Gil Harris in his book titled, Shakespeare and Literary Theory!

If per chance you’ve had the privilege of reading through his The First Firangis or even his Masala Shakespeare, chances are that, you’ve real gotten for yourself a wonderfully refreshing frame of mind to approach this theoretical text too!

Jo has you in splits on almost every other page, although the humour is not quite overt all over! But not quite like how the humour pops up every now and then in his The First Firangis, though! There’s always an impish streak to his characterizations, descriptions and portrayals, which could be rightly said to be his forte, his charm and his hallmark!

Sample this from the Introduction!

Jonathan Gil Harris speaks –

Shakespearian theory is not just about Shakespeare, but also derives its energy from Shakespeare. By reading what theorists have to say about and in concert with Shakespeare, we can begin to get a sense of how much the DNA of contemporary literary theory contains a startling abundance of chromosomes—concepts, preoccupations, ways of using language—that are of Shakespearian provenance.

Some of these chromosomes may be immediately familiar to us from Shakespeare’s writing; some have mutated almost beyond recognition. But they are omnipresent in literary theory’s genome. 

And if ‘Shakespearian theory’ suggests how theory has always been Shakespearian, it can equally help us realize that Shakespeare’s writing has itself always been theoretical. That is why the British literary theorist Terry Eagleton can say that ‘it is difficult to read Shakespeare without feeling that he was almost certainly familiar with the writings of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein and Derrida’.

Such pronouncements may be deliberately and provocatively anachronistic. But they also recognize how the relation between Shakespeare and theory is not one of prior host and belated foreign body. Rather, the relation is familial, grounded in resemblance. Shakespeare and theory do not belong to different times and lands; they are instead kissing cousins, speaking a shared tongue.

Moreover, the fact that Jo is a ‘one-man-army’ as the sole author of the book, also helps!

While it looks like, Terence seems to have had teething problems up his sleeve collating ‘myriad-minded’ Shakespearian critics and critiques under one huge umbrella, Jo has had the blessedness of skillfully skipping over this problem; and hence the man is on a jamboree of sorts right from the word ‘go!’

He has structured his book in an easy-to-read elegant way based on the three powerful currents that have swayed and still continue to sway ‘theory’ for years without measure!

The first part deals with ‘Language and Structure’, and the second part is on ‘Desire and Identity’, whereas the third and final part deals with Culture and Society!’

Taking a leaf from out of his own discourses on Shakespeare, it could be said that, this book on Shakespeare and Literary Theory is ‘honeyed and sweet’ and would sure continue to stimulate, and reward, contemplation!

Happy reading folks!!!