Flannery Considers Her Vocation.doc

Encountering the Animal: Explorations in American Literature, 2015

In 'Murray Bail's "Eucalyptus" and the Logic of Domination' Amanda Kane Rooks examines how Bail's narrative brings to light the gendered nature of various hierarchical dualisms within the Western tradition. Rooks argues that Bail's employment of dualistic ideology in his novel serves to provide a critique of the misogyny underpinning the Australian national ethos.

International Journal of Žižek Studies, 2016

By the mid-twentieth century, Roman Catholicism was experiencing the revolutionary reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Dogmatic Law at this time gave way to a renewed emphasis on the community of love associated in early Christianity with the Holy Spirit. According to Slavoj Žižek this God of the Real is inherently Trinitarian: God-Father-Thing, Spirit as community of believers, and Christ as the imaginary Real gap between them. The American gothic writer Flannery O’Connor in her short story “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” provides a meditation on this Real Trinity. In O’Connor’s story a hermaphroditic circus freak becomes an emblem of the deadlock of sexual difference and a monstrous Christ-figure in the Žižekian sense. Its place is theologically incoherent and represents an emergent passion for the Real in modern Catholicism.

JCLA Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, 2017

European literature of the late twentieth century usually appears as belonging to an atheistic, agnostic, materialistic worldview. In post-World War II France, major literary trends created new ways of thinking and writing that seemingly precluded all metaphysical concerns. The present study focuses on a particular French literary movement called Le Nouveau Roman (The New Novel). A posteriori critical approach nevertheless shows that novels generated by these authors remain deeply rooted in mythology, particularly in mythological ways of thinking. Directly or indirectly, they reactivate the Orphic myth, and more particularly Orphism as a literary tradition in which language becomes the ultimate, the absolute. With other writers from Le Nouveau Roman, Claude Simon (1913-2005), the 1985 Nobel Prize winner, is a typical example of this type of writing and of the aesthetic evolution of a novelist. Simon’s fiction had an enormous impact on contemporary intelligentsia, although it is still considered to be rather hermetic, quite extreme in its deconstruction of the traditional novel. Such a reading of mythical dimensions in Le Nouveau Roman is indebted to Mircea Eliade and Gilbert Durand’s studies of myths and the “imaginary,” as well as the analysis of the Orphic myth by Elizabeth Sewell.

is a philosopher, writer and tutor with a first degree in the field of the Social Sciences (History, Economics, Politics and Sociology) and a PhD in the field of Philosophy, Ethics and Politics. Peter works in the tradition of Rational Freedom, a tradition which sees freedom as a common endeavour in which the freedom of each individual is conceived to be co-existent with the freedom of all. In elaborating this concept, Peter has written extensively on a number of the key thinkers in this 'rational' tradition (Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Dante, Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Habermas). Peter is currently engaged in an ambitious interdisciplinary research project entitled Being and Place. The central theme of this research concerns the connection of place and identity through the creation of forms of life which enable human and planetary flourishing in unison. Peter tutors across the humanities and social sciences, from A level to postgraduate research. Peter particularly welcomes interest from those not engaged in formal education, but who wish to pursue a course of studies out of intellectual curiosity. Peter is committed to bringing philosophy back to its Socratic roots in ethos, in the way of life of people. In this conception, philosophy as self-knowledge is something that human beings do as a condition of living the examined life. As we think, so shall we live. Living up to this philosophical commitment, Peter offers tutoring services both to those in and out of formal education.

What this article explores is how themyth of Cythera is developed and returns in French literature, and to what effect, through texts selected over several centuries until today. The literary myth of Cythera illustrates the notion of eternal return through its adherence to the ancient myth of Aphrodite, but it also subverts it in a way that pessimistically defies all possibility of cyclical recurrences of sacred times and heroic deeds.

Ra Material: Law of One, 1981

Is our universe intelligently designed? What are the possibilities of healing, transformation, and service? What is the Law of One? After 19 years of research into the channeling phenomenon that involved communications with members of the Confederation of Planets in the Service of the One Infinite Creator, a group consciousness called Ra, who had evolved on the planet Venus, established contact with three dedicated seekers of truth to explore these and other questions. Ra said that all people and all of creation are One Being: the One Infinite Creator. They suggested that the process of learning to love (awakening to the "Original Thought") is studied via humanity's movement through all of time. The Ra Material sessions conducted by these three individuals examine the meaning of our cosmic existence and contain 106 transcripts of every conversation, including events leading up to first contact, and, in Book V, commentary about the contact. This 40th-anniversary boxed set includes all five books in hard cover.