naser motallebzadeh

The theoretical discussion of the present paper is particularly based on the insights of Giorgio Agamben contextualized in Iris Murdoch’s novel, A Word Child (1975), written in the transitional period of the seventies England. It will inspect Agamben’s biopolitical insights to examine how they may contribute to understanding of the dark side of sovereignty considering the figure of a banished individual. Taking the precariousness of the emotional, political and ontological faculties of ‘love’, ‘homo sacer’ and ‘bare life’ allocated to the human being in Murdoch’s novel, A Word Child, this paper offers a different view of Murdoch’s inspirational emphatic love, socio-political abstruse problems in her novel arguing that Agamben’s account of these issues supplies an underlying structure of the form-of-life. It resounds through Agamben’s view as a never-ending struggle of human beings to underpin the messiness and cruelty of life in which characters are emotionally engaged and entrapped in order to examine some potentialities as the escape routes from the prevailing deadlocks of the era and eventually to trace, according to Agamben, a form-of-life that is called a happy life.

The transitional period of the 1970s Britain being fictionalized in Margaret Drabble’s novel, The Ice Age (1977), provides the ground for theoretical discussion of the present paper that is based on the insights of Giorgio Agamben. It will inspect the way Drabble interprets socio-political issues dominant in the 1970s and the way these issues affect her outlook. In this paper, considering the figure of an excluded existence in The Ice Age, Agamben’s biopolitical insights are examined to see how they may contribute to understanding of the dark side of sovereignty and the potentiality to transform democracies into totalitarian states. Taking the precariousness of the emotional, political and, ontological faculties of “love”, “homo sacer”, and “bare life” allocated to human being by sovereignty, it offers a different view of Drabble’s subjects on love and socio-political problems, maintaining that Agamben’s account of these issues supplies an underlying structure of the form-of-life. The paper also, through the striking features of Agamben’s discourse, approaches the concept of bare life and knits it to the concepts of instrumentalism, labor, slavery, and life, and fundamentally presents the awareness of self in political view. The characters examine some potentialities that may help them to break away from the prevailing deadlocks of the era. It is eventually shown that these practices, which according to Agamben may lead to a form-of-life that is called a happy life, conclude in the exclusion and spiritual void of the individuals.

In An Artist of the Floating World, Kazuo Ishiguro gives an account of Masuji Ono, an ageing painter who reviews his life and profession in the post-World War II Japan. Though the novel has huge potentials for psychosocial development of characterization, few studies have paid attention to this potentiality. This study is going to investigate the characterization of the protagonist in terms of the midlife crisis with which he is involved. Considering the fact that Masuji’s review is characterized by the obsession with family and profession with an attempt to decide whether he achieved “generativity” or “stagnation,” his account can be discussed in terms of Erik Erikson’s psychosocial development. Focusing on the seventh stage of Erikson’s theory which is primarily characterized by deciding over the binary “generativity versus stagnation” and the individual’s struggle to decide on the meaning of life, the present research explores Masuji’s attempts at creating a positive image of his past and also his tendency to compensate his shortcomings in familial issues in order to finally feel “generative” in his midlife years. Ultimately, this research comes to the conclusion that Masuji is able to overcome the psychological tribulations of the stage by developing the virtue of “care.”

The aim of this paper is to investigate the ideas of aestheticism in relation to power relations in a Foucauldian reading of "The Birthday Party, The Room and The Dumb Waiter". Taking the abovementioned plays of Harold Pinter as only an aesthetical masterpiece -which he also claims in his plays- is like putting it in a dead-end of thought. Likewise all the other critical reading of his works, this study reasserts its significance in this aspect but also aims to explore the boundaries of critical practices in an inevitable way of thought disentangled by Foucault. Theories of power relations which Foucault has claimed are consistent with the way pinteresque characters of Harold Pinter's plays are connected with each other.

Foucault’s resistance to universal ethics is well known. He believes ‘The search for a form of morality acceptable to everybody in the sense that everyone should submit to it strikes me as catastrophic’ (Foucault 254). He distinguishes morality from ethics. Foucault’s ethics are about how a human being turns him-or herself into a subject. Unlike traditional ethics which are about obligation to others Foucauldian ethics are about the self’s relationship to itself. Oscar wild too challenges not just the Victorian values but also universal ethics such as truth or honesty. He deviates Victorian moral codes by using satire, pun or other linguistic devices to contemn Victorian moral codes; in the other words he creates a new set of ethics. This paper aims to find a relationship between Foucault’s approach to ethics and the kind of morality Oscar wild introduced in “The Importance of Being Earnest”, “A Woman of No Importance” and “Salomé”. Elaborating the Victorian social context paves the way to distinguish the differences between the conventional values of the era with the one in these plays and makes a distinction between the two leads to the individual morality which might be compatible with Foucauldian ethics.

Late nineteenth-century’s society was an anxious one feared more and more the threat of degeneration. The idea of degeneration brought together a cluster of ideas about moral corruption, racial impurity, lack of sanitation among the working classes, and, most controversially of all, homosexuality. All sorts of books pertaining to degeneration were published from the 1880s onwards. The Wilde trials took place in a climate when nearly every periodical carried an article on Nordau’s opinions, discussing how degeneration could be found in many novels of the day. What finally landed Wilde in trouble was his style, where each axiomatic phrase inverts the original wise saying upon which it is based. Such sayings were cited as evidence against him in court, and so, in a sense, they were partly responsible for sending him to jail. The way articles could put novelists and intellectuals so briskly defenseless indicates just how tense feelings had grown between an upstanding Victorian morality and a more modern permissiveness. This paper aims to find the anti-Victorian voice in his works, a voice not intended to popularize immorality through his works; although they were perceived as if they were. By standing against the accepted norms of his society he questions the normality and acceptability of the society’s rules. He doesn’t accept the prohibitions of the unwritten rules, even it could be argued that he was accepting the moralities but with different set of rules or in other words ethics.