Uludağ University Social Science Institute Journal, 2020
This paper descriptively examines two Turkish translations-one published before Sherlock Holmes w... more This paper descriptively examines two Turkish translations-one published before Sherlock Holmes was popularized in visual media in the 2000s and one thereafter-of a Sherlock Holmes story entitled "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" by Arthur Conan Doyle to establish how the two translators handled certain aspects of the story deemed important for a literary interpretation. In determining these important aspects, it develops and uses an "interpretive scheme" inspired by Damrosch's (2003) ruminations on "world literature." The interpretive scheme contains three aspectual categories, i.e., "referential," "genre-related" and "stylistic" aspects. The aim of this examination is twofold: first, it seeks to find out whether there are differences between the interpretations of these important aspects in the two translations and if so, whether these differences may be a result of the popularization of Sherlock Holmes. Second, it aims to explore the educational implications of translators' choices in translating the aforementioned aspects, discussing how the use of an interpretive scheme in the analysis of translations may be helpful in choosing texts for the teaching of English literature to a Turkish-speaking audience.
This paper looks at the thematic and rhetorical variations of a fundamental fear that frequently ... more This paper looks at the thematic and rhetorical variations of a fundamental fear that frequently surfaces in Shakespeare’s The Tempest: the fear of illegitimate birth, which may also be understood as the fear of non-contractual sexuality. Sycorax is the prominent supernatural figure that the play deploys to depict unpredictable, indeterminate and horrible acts of creation unsanctioned by society. The paper shows how the fear of illegitimate birth not only shapes entire characters such as Sycorax and Caliban, but also infiltrates the language and figures that prevail in Prospero’s orchestrations of the marriage plot, his betrothal masque and his deployment of Greco-Roman mythologies (Hymen, Venus and Cupid). This fear is also connected with the play’s other fears and desires evoked in Gonzalo’s anarchist utopia and in the play’s preoccupations with the issue of legitimate government. The focus on the fear of illegitimate birth and non-contractual sexuality connects the different plot elements and rhetorical devices used in the play in a novel way, providing a plausible explanation for Prospero’s burst at Caliban in the masque scene and foregrounding (and hence doing justice to) the long-neglected figure of Sycorax.
The most interesting example of all the physical images that Sartre examines in L’Imaginaire conc... more The most interesting example of all the physical images that Sartre examines in L’Imaginaire concerns a female performer’s (Franconay’s) imitation of a male performer (Chevalier). The example is a unique instance in which Sartre deals explicitly with the possibility of ambiguity and hybridity in consciousness. Sartre’s introduction of the sign into the consciousness of imitation ties the perception of Franconay with the imaged Chevalier, but it also leads to the dissemination of the sign across the entire consciousness, a consequence that runs against Sartre’s analytic tendencies. I argue that, despite Sartre’s endeavor to keep the sign separate from perception and the image, the sign is a diffuse property of the entire consciousness of imitation, penetrating and contaminating its every instant. Sartre’s account of Franconay’s imitation contains the germs of the destruction of his clear-cut analytic distinctions, revealing the irreducible hybridity of the sign with both perception and the image.
An ingenious blend of fear and irony, realism and fantasy, Pushkin's Gothic novella, The Queen of... more An ingenious blend of fear and irony, realism and fantasy, Pushkin's Gothic novella, The Queen of Spades, is a moral tale in which its protagonist-villain, Germann, is punished for violating the norms of the moral universe peculiar to the story. To understand this universe, it is necessary to take into account the intricate ways in which the story thematizes and represents two particular issues: class difference and privacy. Indeed, the story may be read as a commentary on the horrors of attempting to dispense with a class difference by way of violating private life. This article explores the ambiguous ways in which the story reveals the private life of its characters, focu-sing particularly on Tomsky's curious anecdote and Lizaveta's revelation of the secrets of the house. It also shows that Lizaveta is invested in a different kind of bet than that of Germann, which turns her into a veritable heroine and an existential gambler despite the pathetic description that Pushkin otherwise gives of her.
Dokuz Eylül Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Dergisi , 2019
This article focuses on the topos "house" which acts as a metaphor for "being" in Kafka's short s... more This article focuses on the topos "house" which acts as a metaphor for "being" in Kafka's short story "A Country Doctor." We handle the notion of the house both literally (spatially) and metaphorically (as one's being), demonstrating the ways in which the story constructs the house on the contentious relationship between individual privacy and public revelation. While the patient's house is a playground for societal pressures that demand public exposure, the doctor's house is controlled by sexual forces that demand secrecy, preventing him from taking full ownership of the house or his own being. Both houses are representations of the doctor's homelessness. There is indeed no house in Kafka's claustrophobic literary world where one can fully feel at home, i.e. in peace with his own private being and in comfort with others.
Abstract: This essay analyzes key aspects of Heidegger’s critique of the picture (Bild) based on ... more Abstract: This essay analyzes key aspects of Heidegger’s critique of the picture (Bild) based on an objection to world-pictures as well as a negative understanding of two other related concepts: Gestell and Vorstellen (representation). The restrictive frames of world-pictures, Heidegger claims, must be opposed by instances of thinking and language use associated with poiesis. For him, the revelation of the world in poiesis results in a subject-less experience of things and words, akin to the experience of art and literature, and presumably outside the representational hold of pictures. I argue against Heidegger’s repudiation of the picture by underscoring the inescapability of Vorstellen. Heidegger’s world may be seen as a world-picture as well as a particular system of representation that we associate with affective uses of language, i.e., a literary system similar to the one discussed by Wolgang Iser.
This article critiques the way Freud associates the uncanny with the idea of repression. The rhet... more This article critiques the way Freud associates the uncanny with the idea of repression. The rhetoric he uses in the essay destabilizes his effort to place it in the depths of the psyche especially as he examines dictionary definitions, interprets the doublings in Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’, formulates an anthropological argument based on unsurmounted belief and reveals his stance on religion. Moving beyond repression, the article underscores the aspect of secrecy in the constitution of the ‘unheimlich’ and proposes a contextual return to the conflicts between secrecy and openness, between keeping private and making public that primarily play out on the surfaces of the psyche rather than in its repressed depths. It concludes with a return to the dictionary entries that fascinated Freud in order to cull more insights into the uncanny.
Seemingly a minor part of L’Imaginaire, Sartre’s literary examples therein are of great significa... more Seemingly a minor part of L’Imaginaire, Sartre’s literary examples therein are of great significance especially in the way they highlight the implicit yet crucial role of linguistic signs and words in his psychology of the image. While commenting on the act of reading a novel, he views literary words practically as images, endowing them with both an affective and representative status and illustrating the word-image through the figure of a drawing or dessin. The novel’s word-images or dessins solve an important problem in his phenomenology: in order to represent, they do not need an original perception as other, more typical images do. While the dessin suggests the opportune possibility of representation without presentation, it also introduces ambiguity in meaning, running counter to Sartre’s demand that linguistic signification be clear and transparent. Sartre attempts to contain such ambiguity by ascribing the image-like, representative use of words to poetry in What’s Literature? but I argue that the dessin indeed allows for a more comprehensive understanding of the linguistic sign and representation that covers both poetry and prose.
This article attempts to reinstate the inherent rigor of “image” as a literary
term by addressing... more This article attempts to reinstate the inherent rigor of “image” as a literary term by addressing the theoretical issues related to the image that W. J. T. Mitchell discusses in his encyclopedia entry and his articles on the concept. The image is usually considered an overly psychological concept that lacks the rigor of rhetorical devices such as metaphor. This article clarifies the relationship between the image and metaphor by arguing that, while an image may not be immediately considered a metaphor, a metaphor may be thought of as a composite and relational proposition-image. It underscores the futility of insisting on the concrete sensual (or visual) aspect of the image, arguing that, before any sensual attribution, the image must primarily be thought of as a reference or picture, which may at times be obscure, indefinite, or even empty. It also raises some objections to the conceptualization of the mental picture as private by arguing that the word on which the mental image is based cannot be less private or “mental.” Keywords: image, W. J. T. Mitchell, metaphor, figure, rhetoric, privacy, sensuality
[Full text in Link https://rdcu.be/brKbD or Ask for A Copy] This article examines the representat... more [Full text in Link https://rdcu.be/brKbD or Ask for A Copy] This article examines the representations of the supernatural in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which served as a significant source for later horror literature. It shows that the play’s rhetoric of horror and of the supernatural depends on its shifting discourse of nature. Nature in Macbeth refers to an external, nonhuman nature of cosmic events and elemental figures (air, bubble and fire) as well as to an internal, human nature of “horrid” images and surmises. Supernatural elements derive from the ontological instability in both external and internal nature, and relate particularly to those actions or events, through which nature becomes disturbed and duplicated. As the imaginary dagger scene indicates, the most terrifying source of the supernatural in the play is the human-made image that duplicates nature internally.
(Ask for a Copy) The essay attempts an understanding of the rhetorical economy in Stevenson’s Str... more (Ask for a Copy) The essay attempts an understanding of the rhetorical economy in Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It shows how the countenance or the face represents value, mediating between the actual and symbolic economies of late Victorian England. In Stevenson’s narrative, the countenance functions as a symbolic currency that speaks for the probity of private lives increasingly hidden from immediate public scrutiny. The two countenances studied in detail are that of Utterson, who ideally portrays the economy of common sense, and that of Mr. Hyde, who disturbs such an economy by introducing uncontainable excess. Indeed, Mr. Hyde’s countenance is a figure of transgression and inflation, which cannot be handled economically and which raises anxieties about the principles that define the economy of regular phenomenological experiences, such as accountability, ownership, credibility and containment.
This study of Polidori's story, The Vampyre, written at the beginning of the 19 th century aims a... more This study of Polidori's story, The Vampyre, written at the beginning of the 19 th century aims at relocating the social relevance of both the story and Gothic literature in the contentious zone between the private and public sphere. The story vacillates between private and public realms, drawing its vampiric theme from such vacillations. It expresses the horrors of vampiric intimacy inherent in private life, which opposes the moral character of the public realm. The most dangerous sites of private life are represented as the realm of the imagination and that of intersubjective intimacy. The story also contains several prominent Romantic tropes, including nature and orientalism, all pointing to the intimate dangers of the private realm. Lord Ruthven, Polidori's " vampire " is an explosive figure at the fraught intersection between a private life that demands secrecy for its private pleasures, and a public realm that demands exposure to regulate and control.
FULL TEXT IN LINK (up to 50 downloads allowed): The essay deals with the bifurcated representatio... more FULL TEXT IN LINK (up to 50 downloads allowed): The essay deals with the bifurcated representation of time in Dracula that is split into a modern and pre-modern time. In Stoker’s novel, the time of Western modernity and the modern nation depends on the repression of the past and of the past-becoming of the present. While modern technologies purportedly create an imaginary sense of control over the wayward mythologies of the past, supplementing and stabilizing the modern present, they cannot fully obstruct the haunting of the prehistory of modernity represented by the vampire and Transylvania. The predominant fears of the novel derive from the powerful eruption of this prehistory in the form of a Gothic romance that spawns unspeakable sexual perversions, adulterating both the modern time and the Victorian body. This essay performs a close reading of the passages primarily belonging to the first part of the novel that depict the perils and pleasures of being haunted by the distant past and shows how the oft-sexualized eruption of the past in the novel forces modernity to regress to the romance genre.
(FULL TEXT IN LINK---Read only) While John Tenniel’s illustrations to Lewis Carroll’s Alice books... more (FULL TEXT IN LINK---Read only) While John Tenniel’s illustrations to Lewis Carroll’s Alice books are nearly as famous as the books themselves, the question of whether these illustrations contribute to or compromise the effects produced by the written text has rarely been explored. In this paper, it is argued that the status of the illustrations is problematic unless the actual process of reading is taken into account. However humorous,strange or witty they may appear on paper, Carroll’s words ultimately depend on the reader’s interest to achieve their desired effects fully. Words alone may prove to be insufficient to achieve the sense of nonsense within the vicissitudes of a temporal reading. Focusing on several of John Tenniel’s illustrations, which attempt to draw out the impossible references and the strangely humanized animals of Carroll’s text,this article shows that Tenniel’s illustrations often reinforce the effect of nonsense that might remain buried in a perfunctory reading or, without them, might not be generated at all.
(ASK FOR A COPY) The narrative complexities of Villette derive from the positing of Lucy as a gho... more (ASK FOR A COPY) The narrative complexities of Villette derive from the positing of Lucy as a ghost that hovers between absence and presence, interiority and exteriority, private and public. The claim that Lucy is a ghost projects a somewhat different light on the novel which may then be viewed as the spectral narration of a spectral quest for a spectral identity, and this insistent aspect of spectrality, which is frequently encountered in the novel's resourceful use of gothic elements, must be thought to problematize any notion of narration, quest, or identity that grounds itself on presence. Being uprooted from her native environment, in which she seems hardly ever to have taken root, Lucy often seems to stick vehemently to her Protestantism, defending it against the incursions of the Catholic environment in which she lives and works. But this is ultimately a surface opposition which has more to do with the public performance of identity and which is largely at odds with the much more fluid field of identity determined by processes of varying and unstable identifications and speculations, in which Lucy enters as a speculating and spying ghost. What underlies the surface opposition between Catholicism and Protestantism are the various desires and fears that Lucy experiences in the project of finding a home for her own ghostly self. Therefore, the question of Lucy's national or religious identity in Villette must be understood as her ghostly quest to find an adequate home or haunt.
(Post-print allowed by the publisher included OR ask for a copy) This paper examines and critique... more (Post-print allowed by the publisher included OR ask for a copy) This paper examines and critiques Heidegger’s repudiation of aesthetics in his essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ and claims that his alternative approach to artworks in the essay must be understood as a theory of aesthetics and, more particularly, of aesthetic use, which delineates the inseparability of senses and sensations. The paper analyses Heidegger’s explicit remarks on aesthetics in the epilogue, discusses his criticism of the aesthetic thing-interpretation at the beginning of the essay and concludes with some critical observations on Heidegger’s own aesthetics. While critical of Heidegger’s separation of the equipment from the artwork, the paper claims that Heidegger’s significant contribution to the field of aesthetics must be sought in his focus on the attenuation of the subjective element in aesthetic experience.
Atlantis: Journal of the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies , 2016
This paper attempts to analyze the curious effects of the comic scenes in The Castle of Otranto (... more This paper attempts to analyze the curious effects of the comic scenes in The Castle of Otranto (1764) through a close reading of Walpole's famous prefaces to the novel. The comic scenes evoke an incongruous dramatic response and contradict the claims made in the prefaces, according to which comic elements highlight dramatic ones. While being often thought of as indicative of a general aesthetic failure, the comic elements in this foundational text of the Gothic are indeed subtle, complex and artful. More precisely, Walpole's curious use of laughter makes a complex appeal to an extra-dramatic level which undercuts the reader's identification with the dramatic situations represented in the novel.
(Full text in link--Read only) The world of Carroll’s Wonderland narratives, in which language te... more (Full text in link--Read only) The world of Carroll’s Wonderland narratives, in which language tests its own limits, overlaps with Wittgenstein’s world of counterexample, and such convergence becomes most overt in Wittgenstein’s example of a nonsensical scale in his Philosophical Investigations (§142). Wittgenstein does not find much use for such a scale, but in this paper it is claimed that Alice’s (mis)adventures with nonsensical language in Wonderland both problematize and provide fresh insights into the use of language in our actual world. Several passages in the Alice books are analysed in order to show how the curious uses of nonsensical language function to negate any theory of the ordinary use of language that is based on the assumption that there is an exact correspondence between words and meanings. This article represents an effort to understand the ways in which nonsensical narratives can throw light on the way we use language in the world. The extraordinary uses of language in narratives like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland provide a challenge to those theories of language that do not sufficiently take into account the ambiguous and imprecise nature of our ordinary use of language.
This paper explores the ambiguities in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that result ... more This paper explores the ambiguities in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that result from the conceptualization of the picture as a middle term in between the translations between language and the world. The picture is an odd inclusion that cannot help suggesting the work of the cognitive mind, odd because the analytic tendency in the Tractatus is to foreground the logical structure of the correspondences between language and the world that should not necessitate the mediation of the picturing mind. In my close reading of the statements in the Tractatus that refer to the picture, I show how ‘the picture theory of language’ cannot produce a plausible account of the truth or reality mainly because the concept of the picture in the Tractatus is not developed adequately and therefore cannot explain how linguistic propositions can ever correspond to any reality. In following Wittgenstein’s thinking on the Tractatus picture, I show that this inability results from the theory itself since it does not allow the picture and hence the picturing mind to deal with any sense of ambiguity and to exist in a sufficiently independent way from the facts of language and the world.
(Post_print allowed by Publisher uploaded OR ask for a copy) In his ‘Way to Language’ essay, as w... more (Post_print allowed by Publisher uploaded OR ask for a copy) In his ‘Way to Language’ essay, as well as in his other later work, Heidegger argues for a self-referential and non-subjective understanding of language. I argue that Heidegger sketches a different way to understanding language in one of his earlier works, which is his ‘Work of Art’ essay. In a reversal of sorts, I argue that language, and not the work of art, constitutes the underlying subject matter throughout the essay, and from its very beginning. The essay may be construed as the exposition of a theory of language, in which Heidegger employs various interpretations of works of art as analogies that exemplify his thoughts on language. In my rhetorical analysis of Heidegger’s references to the Van Gogh ‘shoes’ painting, I show that Heidegger is engaging with literature and a literary kind of writing, which have a direct bearing on his understanding of both language and the philosophical truth. Heidegger’s writing on the truth may then be thought to reflect an intricate interplay between literature, the philosophy of language and the interpretation of visual artworks.
Uludağ University Social Science Institute Journal, 2020
This paper descriptively examines two Turkish translations-one published before Sherlock Holmes w... more This paper descriptively examines two Turkish translations-one published before Sherlock Holmes was popularized in visual media in the 2000s and one thereafter-of a Sherlock Holmes story entitled "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" by Arthur Conan Doyle to establish how the two translators handled certain aspects of the story deemed important for a literary interpretation. In determining these important aspects, it develops and uses an "interpretive scheme" inspired by Damrosch's (2003) ruminations on "world literature." The interpretive scheme contains three aspectual categories, i.e., "referential," "genre-related" and "stylistic" aspects. The aim of this examination is twofold: first, it seeks to find out whether there are differences between the interpretations of these important aspects in the two translations and if so, whether these differences may be a result of the popularization of Sherlock Holmes. Second, it aims to explore the educational implications of translators' choices in translating the aforementioned aspects, discussing how the use of an interpretive scheme in the analysis of translations may be helpful in choosing texts for the teaching of English literature to a Turkish-speaking audience.
This paper looks at the thematic and rhetorical variations of a fundamental fear that frequently ... more This paper looks at the thematic and rhetorical variations of a fundamental fear that frequently surfaces in Shakespeare’s The Tempest: the fear of illegitimate birth, which may also be understood as the fear of non-contractual sexuality. Sycorax is the prominent supernatural figure that the play deploys to depict unpredictable, indeterminate and horrible acts of creation unsanctioned by society. The paper shows how the fear of illegitimate birth not only shapes entire characters such as Sycorax and Caliban, but also infiltrates the language and figures that prevail in Prospero’s orchestrations of the marriage plot, his betrothal masque and his deployment of Greco-Roman mythologies (Hymen, Venus and Cupid). This fear is also connected with the play’s other fears and desires evoked in Gonzalo’s anarchist utopia and in the play’s preoccupations with the issue of legitimate government. The focus on the fear of illegitimate birth and non-contractual sexuality connects the different plot elements and rhetorical devices used in the play in a novel way, providing a plausible explanation for Prospero’s burst at Caliban in the masque scene and foregrounding (and hence doing justice to) the long-neglected figure of Sycorax.
The most interesting example of all the physical images that Sartre examines in L’Imaginaire conc... more The most interesting example of all the physical images that Sartre examines in L’Imaginaire concerns a female performer’s (Franconay’s) imitation of a male performer (Chevalier). The example is a unique instance in which Sartre deals explicitly with the possibility of ambiguity and hybridity in consciousness. Sartre’s introduction of the sign into the consciousness of imitation ties the perception of Franconay with the imaged Chevalier, but it also leads to the dissemination of the sign across the entire consciousness, a consequence that runs against Sartre’s analytic tendencies. I argue that, despite Sartre’s endeavor to keep the sign separate from perception and the image, the sign is a diffuse property of the entire consciousness of imitation, penetrating and contaminating its every instant. Sartre’s account of Franconay’s imitation contains the germs of the destruction of his clear-cut analytic distinctions, revealing the irreducible hybridity of the sign with both perception and the image.
An ingenious blend of fear and irony, realism and fantasy, Pushkin's Gothic novella, The Queen of... more An ingenious blend of fear and irony, realism and fantasy, Pushkin's Gothic novella, The Queen of Spades, is a moral tale in which its protagonist-villain, Germann, is punished for violating the norms of the moral universe peculiar to the story. To understand this universe, it is necessary to take into account the intricate ways in which the story thematizes and represents two particular issues: class difference and privacy. Indeed, the story may be read as a commentary on the horrors of attempting to dispense with a class difference by way of violating private life. This article explores the ambiguous ways in which the story reveals the private life of its characters, focu-sing particularly on Tomsky's curious anecdote and Lizaveta's revelation of the secrets of the house. It also shows that Lizaveta is invested in a different kind of bet than that of Germann, which turns her into a veritable heroine and an existential gambler despite the pathetic description that Pushkin otherwise gives of her.
Dokuz Eylül Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Dergisi , 2019
This article focuses on the topos "house" which acts as a metaphor for "being" in Kafka's short s... more This article focuses on the topos "house" which acts as a metaphor for "being" in Kafka's short story "A Country Doctor." We handle the notion of the house both literally (spatially) and metaphorically (as one's being), demonstrating the ways in which the story constructs the house on the contentious relationship between individual privacy and public revelation. While the patient's house is a playground for societal pressures that demand public exposure, the doctor's house is controlled by sexual forces that demand secrecy, preventing him from taking full ownership of the house or his own being. Both houses are representations of the doctor's homelessness. There is indeed no house in Kafka's claustrophobic literary world where one can fully feel at home, i.e. in peace with his own private being and in comfort with others.
Abstract: This essay analyzes key aspects of Heidegger’s critique of the picture (Bild) based on ... more Abstract: This essay analyzes key aspects of Heidegger’s critique of the picture (Bild) based on an objection to world-pictures as well as a negative understanding of two other related concepts: Gestell and Vorstellen (representation). The restrictive frames of world-pictures, Heidegger claims, must be opposed by instances of thinking and language use associated with poiesis. For him, the revelation of the world in poiesis results in a subject-less experience of things and words, akin to the experience of art and literature, and presumably outside the representational hold of pictures. I argue against Heidegger’s repudiation of the picture by underscoring the inescapability of Vorstellen. Heidegger’s world may be seen as a world-picture as well as a particular system of representation that we associate with affective uses of language, i.e., a literary system similar to the one discussed by Wolgang Iser.
This article critiques the way Freud associates the uncanny with the idea of repression. The rhet... more This article critiques the way Freud associates the uncanny with the idea of repression. The rhetoric he uses in the essay destabilizes his effort to place it in the depths of the psyche especially as he examines dictionary definitions, interprets the doublings in Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’, formulates an anthropological argument based on unsurmounted belief and reveals his stance on religion. Moving beyond repression, the article underscores the aspect of secrecy in the constitution of the ‘unheimlich’ and proposes a contextual return to the conflicts between secrecy and openness, between keeping private and making public that primarily play out on the surfaces of the psyche rather than in its repressed depths. It concludes with a return to the dictionary entries that fascinated Freud in order to cull more insights into the uncanny.
Seemingly a minor part of L’Imaginaire, Sartre’s literary examples therein are of great significa... more Seemingly a minor part of L’Imaginaire, Sartre’s literary examples therein are of great significance especially in the way they highlight the implicit yet crucial role of linguistic signs and words in his psychology of the image. While commenting on the act of reading a novel, he views literary words practically as images, endowing them with both an affective and representative status and illustrating the word-image through the figure of a drawing or dessin. The novel’s word-images or dessins solve an important problem in his phenomenology: in order to represent, they do not need an original perception as other, more typical images do. While the dessin suggests the opportune possibility of representation without presentation, it also introduces ambiguity in meaning, running counter to Sartre’s demand that linguistic signification be clear and transparent. Sartre attempts to contain such ambiguity by ascribing the image-like, representative use of words to poetry in What’s Literature? but I argue that the dessin indeed allows for a more comprehensive understanding of the linguistic sign and representation that covers both poetry and prose.
This article attempts to reinstate the inherent rigor of “image” as a literary
term by addressing... more This article attempts to reinstate the inherent rigor of “image” as a literary term by addressing the theoretical issues related to the image that W. J. T. Mitchell discusses in his encyclopedia entry and his articles on the concept. The image is usually considered an overly psychological concept that lacks the rigor of rhetorical devices such as metaphor. This article clarifies the relationship between the image and metaphor by arguing that, while an image may not be immediately considered a metaphor, a metaphor may be thought of as a composite and relational proposition-image. It underscores the futility of insisting on the concrete sensual (or visual) aspect of the image, arguing that, before any sensual attribution, the image must primarily be thought of as a reference or picture, which may at times be obscure, indefinite, or even empty. It also raises some objections to the conceptualization of the mental picture as private by arguing that the word on which the mental image is based cannot be less private or “mental.” Keywords: image, W. J. T. Mitchell, metaphor, figure, rhetoric, privacy, sensuality
[Full text in Link https://rdcu.be/brKbD or Ask for A Copy] This article examines the representat... more [Full text in Link https://rdcu.be/brKbD or Ask for A Copy] This article examines the representations of the supernatural in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which served as a significant source for later horror literature. It shows that the play’s rhetoric of horror and of the supernatural depends on its shifting discourse of nature. Nature in Macbeth refers to an external, nonhuman nature of cosmic events and elemental figures (air, bubble and fire) as well as to an internal, human nature of “horrid” images and surmises. Supernatural elements derive from the ontological instability in both external and internal nature, and relate particularly to those actions or events, through which nature becomes disturbed and duplicated. As the imaginary dagger scene indicates, the most terrifying source of the supernatural in the play is the human-made image that duplicates nature internally.
(Ask for a Copy) The essay attempts an understanding of the rhetorical economy in Stevenson’s Str... more (Ask for a Copy) The essay attempts an understanding of the rhetorical economy in Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It shows how the countenance or the face represents value, mediating between the actual and symbolic economies of late Victorian England. In Stevenson’s narrative, the countenance functions as a symbolic currency that speaks for the probity of private lives increasingly hidden from immediate public scrutiny. The two countenances studied in detail are that of Utterson, who ideally portrays the economy of common sense, and that of Mr. Hyde, who disturbs such an economy by introducing uncontainable excess. Indeed, Mr. Hyde’s countenance is a figure of transgression and inflation, which cannot be handled economically and which raises anxieties about the principles that define the economy of regular phenomenological experiences, such as accountability, ownership, credibility and containment.
This study of Polidori's story, The Vampyre, written at the beginning of the 19 th century aims a... more This study of Polidori's story, The Vampyre, written at the beginning of the 19 th century aims at relocating the social relevance of both the story and Gothic literature in the contentious zone between the private and public sphere. The story vacillates between private and public realms, drawing its vampiric theme from such vacillations. It expresses the horrors of vampiric intimacy inherent in private life, which opposes the moral character of the public realm. The most dangerous sites of private life are represented as the realm of the imagination and that of intersubjective intimacy. The story also contains several prominent Romantic tropes, including nature and orientalism, all pointing to the intimate dangers of the private realm. Lord Ruthven, Polidori's " vampire " is an explosive figure at the fraught intersection between a private life that demands secrecy for its private pleasures, and a public realm that demands exposure to regulate and control.
FULL TEXT IN LINK (up to 50 downloads allowed): The essay deals with the bifurcated representatio... more FULL TEXT IN LINK (up to 50 downloads allowed): The essay deals with the bifurcated representation of time in Dracula that is split into a modern and pre-modern time. In Stoker’s novel, the time of Western modernity and the modern nation depends on the repression of the past and of the past-becoming of the present. While modern technologies purportedly create an imaginary sense of control over the wayward mythologies of the past, supplementing and stabilizing the modern present, they cannot fully obstruct the haunting of the prehistory of modernity represented by the vampire and Transylvania. The predominant fears of the novel derive from the powerful eruption of this prehistory in the form of a Gothic romance that spawns unspeakable sexual perversions, adulterating both the modern time and the Victorian body. This essay performs a close reading of the passages primarily belonging to the first part of the novel that depict the perils and pleasures of being haunted by the distant past and shows how the oft-sexualized eruption of the past in the novel forces modernity to regress to the romance genre.
(FULL TEXT IN LINK---Read only) While John Tenniel’s illustrations to Lewis Carroll’s Alice books... more (FULL TEXT IN LINK---Read only) While John Tenniel’s illustrations to Lewis Carroll’s Alice books are nearly as famous as the books themselves, the question of whether these illustrations contribute to or compromise the effects produced by the written text has rarely been explored. In this paper, it is argued that the status of the illustrations is problematic unless the actual process of reading is taken into account. However humorous,strange or witty they may appear on paper, Carroll’s words ultimately depend on the reader’s interest to achieve their desired effects fully. Words alone may prove to be insufficient to achieve the sense of nonsense within the vicissitudes of a temporal reading. Focusing on several of John Tenniel’s illustrations, which attempt to draw out the impossible references and the strangely humanized animals of Carroll’s text,this article shows that Tenniel’s illustrations often reinforce the effect of nonsense that might remain buried in a perfunctory reading or, without them, might not be generated at all.
(ASK FOR A COPY) The narrative complexities of Villette derive from the positing of Lucy as a gho... more (ASK FOR A COPY) The narrative complexities of Villette derive from the positing of Lucy as a ghost that hovers between absence and presence, interiority and exteriority, private and public. The claim that Lucy is a ghost projects a somewhat different light on the novel which may then be viewed as the spectral narration of a spectral quest for a spectral identity, and this insistent aspect of spectrality, which is frequently encountered in the novel's resourceful use of gothic elements, must be thought to problematize any notion of narration, quest, or identity that grounds itself on presence. Being uprooted from her native environment, in which she seems hardly ever to have taken root, Lucy often seems to stick vehemently to her Protestantism, defending it against the incursions of the Catholic environment in which she lives and works. But this is ultimately a surface opposition which has more to do with the public performance of identity and which is largely at odds with the much more fluid field of identity determined by processes of varying and unstable identifications and speculations, in which Lucy enters as a speculating and spying ghost. What underlies the surface opposition between Catholicism and Protestantism are the various desires and fears that Lucy experiences in the project of finding a home for her own ghostly self. Therefore, the question of Lucy's national or religious identity in Villette must be understood as her ghostly quest to find an adequate home or haunt.
(Post-print allowed by the publisher included OR ask for a copy) This paper examines and critique... more (Post-print allowed by the publisher included OR ask for a copy) This paper examines and critiques Heidegger’s repudiation of aesthetics in his essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ and claims that his alternative approach to artworks in the essay must be understood as a theory of aesthetics and, more particularly, of aesthetic use, which delineates the inseparability of senses and sensations. The paper analyses Heidegger’s explicit remarks on aesthetics in the epilogue, discusses his criticism of the aesthetic thing-interpretation at the beginning of the essay and concludes with some critical observations on Heidegger’s own aesthetics. While critical of Heidegger’s separation of the equipment from the artwork, the paper claims that Heidegger’s significant contribution to the field of aesthetics must be sought in his focus on the attenuation of the subjective element in aesthetic experience.
Atlantis: Journal of the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies , 2016
This paper attempts to analyze the curious effects of the comic scenes in The Castle of Otranto (... more This paper attempts to analyze the curious effects of the comic scenes in The Castle of Otranto (1764) through a close reading of Walpole's famous prefaces to the novel. The comic scenes evoke an incongruous dramatic response and contradict the claims made in the prefaces, according to which comic elements highlight dramatic ones. While being often thought of as indicative of a general aesthetic failure, the comic elements in this foundational text of the Gothic are indeed subtle, complex and artful. More precisely, Walpole's curious use of laughter makes a complex appeal to an extra-dramatic level which undercuts the reader's identification with the dramatic situations represented in the novel.
(Full text in link--Read only) The world of Carroll’s Wonderland narratives, in which language te... more (Full text in link--Read only) The world of Carroll’s Wonderland narratives, in which language tests its own limits, overlaps with Wittgenstein’s world of counterexample, and such convergence becomes most overt in Wittgenstein’s example of a nonsensical scale in his Philosophical Investigations (§142). Wittgenstein does not find much use for such a scale, but in this paper it is claimed that Alice’s (mis)adventures with nonsensical language in Wonderland both problematize and provide fresh insights into the use of language in our actual world. Several passages in the Alice books are analysed in order to show how the curious uses of nonsensical language function to negate any theory of the ordinary use of language that is based on the assumption that there is an exact correspondence between words and meanings. This article represents an effort to understand the ways in which nonsensical narratives can throw light on the way we use language in the world. The extraordinary uses of language in narratives like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland provide a challenge to those theories of language that do not sufficiently take into account the ambiguous and imprecise nature of our ordinary use of language.
This paper explores the ambiguities in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that result ... more This paper explores the ambiguities in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that result from the conceptualization of the picture as a middle term in between the translations between language and the world. The picture is an odd inclusion that cannot help suggesting the work of the cognitive mind, odd because the analytic tendency in the Tractatus is to foreground the logical structure of the correspondences between language and the world that should not necessitate the mediation of the picturing mind. In my close reading of the statements in the Tractatus that refer to the picture, I show how ‘the picture theory of language’ cannot produce a plausible account of the truth or reality mainly because the concept of the picture in the Tractatus is not developed adequately and therefore cannot explain how linguistic propositions can ever correspond to any reality. In following Wittgenstein’s thinking on the Tractatus picture, I show that this inability results from the theory itself since it does not allow the picture and hence the picturing mind to deal with any sense of ambiguity and to exist in a sufficiently independent way from the facts of language and the world.
(Post_print allowed by Publisher uploaded OR ask for a copy) In his ‘Way to Language’ essay, as w... more (Post_print allowed by Publisher uploaded OR ask for a copy) In his ‘Way to Language’ essay, as well as in his other later work, Heidegger argues for a self-referential and non-subjective understanding of language. I argue that Heidegger sketches a different way to understanding language in one of his earlier works, which is his ‘Work of Art’ essay. In a reversal of sorts, I argue that language, and not the work of art, constitutes the underlying subject matter throughout the essay, and from its very beginning. The essay may be construed as the exposition of a theory of language, in which Heidegger employs various interpretations of works of art as analogies that exemplify his thoughts on language. In my rhetorical analysis of Heidegger’s references to the Van Gogh ‘shoes’ painting, I show that Heidegger is engaging with literature and a literary kind of writing, which have a direct bearing on his understanding of both language and the philosophical truth. Heidegger’s writing on the truth may then be thought to reflect an intricate interplay between literature, the philosophy of language and the interpretation of visual artworks.
Uploads
Papers by Ahmet Süner
term by addressing the theoretical issues related to the image that W. J. T. Mitchell discusses
in his encyclopedia entry and his articles on the concept. The image is usually
considered an overly psychological concept that lacks the rigor of rhetorical devices such
as metaphor. This article clarifies the relationship between the image and metaphor by
arguing that, while an image may not be immediately considered a metaphor, a metaphor
may be thought of as a composite and relational proposition-image. It underscores
the futility of insisting on the concrete sensual (or visual) aspect of the image, arguing
that, before any sensual attribution, the image must primarily be thought of as a reference
or picture, which may at times be obscure, indefinite, or even empty. It also raises
some objections to the conceptualization of the mental picture as private by arguing that
the word on which the mental image is based cannot be less private or “mental.”
Keywords: image, W. J. T. Mitchell, metaphor, figure, rhetoric, privacy, sensuality
term by addressing the theoretical issues related to the image that W. J. T. Mitchell discusses
in his encyclopedia entry and his articles on the concept. The image is usually
considered an overly psychological concept that lacks the rigor of rhetorical devices such
as metaphor. This article clarifies the relationship between the image and metaphor by
arguing that, while an image may not be immediately considered a metaphor, a metaphor
may be thought of as a composite and relational proposition-image. It underscores
the futility of insisting on the concrete sensual (or visual) aspect of the image, arguing
that, before any sensual attribution, the image must primarily be thought of as a reference
or picture, which may at times be obscure, indefinite, or even empty. It also raises
some objections to the conceptualization of the mental picture as private by arguing that
the word on which the mental image is based cannot be less private or “mental.”
Keywords: image, W. J. T. Mitchell, metaphor, figure, rhetoric, privacy, sensuality