Queen Elizabeth’s reign of the latter half of the sixteenth century saw a literary culture that was to be characterized largely by its conventionality. It is unsurprising then that Sir Philip Sidney’s 108 sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella is often interpreted as a tale of love and desire, as the speaker articulates the torments and… Read More Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella – love, religion and politics
In her 1949 essay ‘The Second Sex’, French feminist and existentialist Simone De Beauvoir brings to light in her section on ‘Myth and Reality’ the Myth of Woman; a myth she refers to as ‘static’, bearing its role in the birth of an immutable concept of women as Object – inferior to the male Subject.… Read More Simone De Beauvoir’s ‘Myth of Women’ and Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
‘analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it’ Laura Mulvey in her essay on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema brings to light the idea that ‘analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it’ (Mulvey, 2086). It is true that what may appear initially pleasing to the eye can be corrupted upon further inspection, by attempting to psychoanalyse the reasoning… Read More Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’
In his fiction Through The Looking Glass (TLG), Lewis Carroll depicts our young protagonist Alice as a character that fully encompasses the blurred boundaries of childhood and maturity. Carroll draws much on reality to shape his narrative, as the internal journey of fictional Alice is very similar to that of the original Alice Liddell’s. This… Read More Alice Through the Looking Glass – The Charles Dodgson in Lewis Carroll
Before one can establish the extent to which context is important when interpreting texts, we must first address the idea that literary texts can be considered from the perspective of the performative. An idea elaborating on J.L. Austin’s theory of ‘performative utterances’ (1962) that focuses primarily on verbal communication, in that language itself performs. Jacques… Read More J. L. Austin’s theory of Performative Utterances and Jacques Derrida’s ‘Signature Event Context’
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