A Man

1994

The Meaning of Being a Man, 2020

This is an excerpt of my 2020 book: The Meaning of Being a Man. See more: www.themeaningofbeingaman.com

A brief about grammaticalization of a Noun.

TWELVE LECTURES ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE SCIENTIFIC, ARTISTIC AND RELIGIOUS APPROACHES TO THE NATURE OF MAN

and sharing with colleagues.

1988

Sigmund Freud in his New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis quotes ‘when you meet a human being, the first distinction you make is ‘male or female?’’ Therefore, is it possible to make a binary distinction with ‘unhesitating uncertainty’ or do the gender and sexual identity have a deeper meaning and less visible characteristics? This essay seeks to analyse how gender identity is represented in two different novels, published in two different periods by two different authors.

Vir melancholicus/Femina tristis: Towards a poetics of Women’s Loss The notion of melancholia as a gendered affliction began with Aristotle, who in his Problems affirmed that it was a malady that afflicted “all great men.” Women, being essentially cold and moist, according to the theory of the humors, were unable, like the warmer and drier men, to become atrabilic; that is, men were able to produce “black bile,” the agent of melancholia, whereas women were incapable of producing it. Melancholia came to be perceived as a kind of wisdom and a privileged subjectivity of the lettered, a “blessed gloom,” that enabled great men—or men became great because of it—to become moral spokesmen for their community, to express loss and truth in terms of transcendent statements, and to “become exemplary of the human condition.” This gendered concept of melancholia was a “cultural myth” that privileged the loss and lack of men over that of women, men’s loss was more significant than women’s loss, so that said notion of melancholia resutled in a discursive practice that excluded women. In the love lyric, for example, melancholia as a discursive practice allowed men to use women as metaphors for loss, at the same time that it devalued and divested women of their own subjectivities. Women, as biologically and culturally defined, could not be melancholic but mournful.

Theory and Practice in Language Studies

Literature of diaspora has lately been widely acknowledged since the disporic generation embraces Homi Baba's belief that "nations are narrations". For them, displacement combines the notions of de- and re-inhabitation that are often regarded as related yet distinguishable processes of memory and identity formation. Not surprisingly, the displacement experience has given rise to their consciousness of the importance of constructing a counter-narrative. Most of the displaced resort to writing about their experience of migration or about the hardships they face in their new destination, especially in challenging the stereotypical image that has been "consciously" formed in the West. Arab- American diasporic women, in particular, have given rise to their voices in an attempt to overdue the injustice caused by the Western gaze to their cases. Literature has been their arena to call for presenting themselves and their own narratives to overdue the injustice caused...

The Ballad of the Girly Man" is the last poem in Girly Man, Charles Bernstein's 30th collection of poetry, which is considered as Bernstein's least elusive and least individual book. This poem has successfully conveyed Bernstein's political consciousness about the hypocritical American democracy. By combining mainstream American poetic strategies like psycho-political muse, quotation, homophonic words, juxtaposition, etc., with Jewish ways of interpretation/commentary, the philosophy of I-Thou relationship, Bernstein shows his artifice of radical poetics by challenging traditional concept of masculinity and making every possible endeavor in framing his concept of nostos for everyone which is associated with due responsibility together with justified citizenship.