Intertextuality and Parody in Iris Murdoch's The Unicorn (original) (raw)
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Gender Subversion in Iris Murdoch’s The Unicorn
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2021
This study examines the various representations of female identity in Murdoch's The Unicorn. The analysis of the novel revolves around the character of Hannah who is the center of everyone's obsessive gaze. She is described both as an angel and a monster, a victim and a victimizer. Her victimization is aggravated by her passive submission to the will of her victimizers. This simultaneous presence of contradictory features in one character problematizes the notion of perceiving female identity in terms of binaries. As a typical Gothic heroine, Hannah is trapped within cultural assumptions about women. She passively and yet subversively plays the roles projected on her by the contradictory desires of other characters. It will be argued that the obsessive pursuit of perfection in a female figure as well as the disruption of the boundaries of victim and victimizer in this novel serve to problematize the cultural tendency to understand individuals in terms of stereotypes. Therefo...
Iris Murdoch's The Unicorn (1963): Gothicizing Morality
Gaudium Sciendi nº 6 (June 2014): 229-247. ISSN 2182-7605., 2014
In a post-war panorama of secular humanism, morality has taken on new contours that allow Goodness to be achieved via the forgoing of the Self. This seems to be the lesson of the late Iris Murdoch, who dedicated her life to the study of philosophy in an attempt to create a unified moral code to offer guidance to (wo)mankind. Increasingly worried by the ethical road society was travelling down in the twentieth century, its lack of religious direction and consequent spiritual void, the novelist creates a moral philosophy based on the precept that one must reject one’s natural predisposition for egotism - a form of Evil. The soul must enter a path of knowledge that will allow man to see Reality and Truth. The secular redemption of the soul can only be achieved through a life dedicated to art and looking beyond oneself. Female Gothic, a tangential strain that developed out of the eighteenth century Gothic, has been used to express social anxieties concerning such issues as identity, sexuality, the fragmentation of the self and the redemption or damnation of the soul. This article explores how Iris Murdoch appropriates Female Gothic in order to explore these anxieties, as well as to propagate her own moral philosophy in an attempt to reform our spiritual world through a suggested model of Goodness.
The Fairy-Tale Vanguard: Literary Self-Consciousness in a Marvelous Genre
2019
Ever since its early modern inception as a literary genre unto its own, the fairy tale has frequently provided authors with a textual space in which to reflect on the nature, status and function of their own writing and that of literature in general. At the same time, it has served as an ideal laboratory for exploring and experimenting with the boundaries of literary convention and propriety. While scholarship pertaining to these phenomena has focused primarily on the fairy-tale adaptations and deconstructions of postmodern(ist) writers, this essay collection adopts a more diachronic approach. It offers fairy-tale scholars and students a series of theoretical and literary-historical expositions, as well as case studies on English, French, German, Swedish, Danish, and Romanian texts from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, by authors as diverse as Marie-Catherine dAulnoy, Rikki Ducornet, Hans Christian Andersen and Robert Coover.
Studia Litterarum
In the modern English-language literary space the genre of short prose, based on the plots of classical fairy tales and addressed primarily to an adult audience, is extremely popular. Over half a century already, this genre has emerged as a separate discourse (in this article, the authors call it a “Reimagined Fairy Tale,” considering the memory of the genre). Such modificated fairy tale is simultaniously the result of the postmodern world perception (intertextuality, playfulness, gamification, multilevel text, irony, etc.) and a critical thought (deconstruction, denial of logocentrism), and represents an extensive material for research both from the point of view of literary criticism and from interdisciplinary positions. Using the example of the modern literary tale by R. Shirman “Hunger,” which is based on the folk story about Hansel and Gretel, the authors attempt to trace how the multilevel coding of the text takes place using the transformation of Jungian archetypes and decons...
Translation of the 6th chapter of my comprehensive study on The Last Unicorn, published in 2009, in Japan. This chapter discussed the numinous aspect of The Last Unicorn by applying various notions gained from the cosmological construction of Post Quantum Mechanics, the system structure of which is supposed to be able to irradiate the implication of traditional notions such as imagination, inspiration and synchronicity. Especially in The Last Unicorn those ideas are integrated in its speculative design through the word “magic,” which seems to affect everything as a signal extending to both material and immaterial, conscious being and non-conscious matters, like pilot wave generating resonance in everything. Perhaps, without the reinforcements of these key notions, I’m afraid, Peter S. Beagle’s masterpiece will be unnoticed without gaining due comprehension by those who are truly capable of grasping its virtue. I hope many scholars will take note of this masterpiece and give support to my poor attainment in my research of high aspiration.
The Fairy Tale as an Intertextual Narrative
The present paper attempts to investigate the intersemiotic interpretations of classic fairy tales. With the growing popularity of classic fairy tales, their intersemiotic interpretations have become ubiquitous in a number of fields, such as cinema, animations, illustrations, to name a few. The paper aims at identifying the changes the motifs of the fairy tale texts undergo in the process of intersemiotic interpretations. In order to achieve this aim, we have deployed descriptive and comparative methods of analysis. Having conducted the research we present the following findings: a) regardless of the medium into which fairy tales are transformed, motifs of the fairy tale are subjected to omissions, additions, explicitations, and condensations during the intersemiotic interpretation; b) the culture, into which the fairy tale text is transformed, and the target audience of the product are major factors underlying the changes of fairy tale motifs during the intersemiotic interpretation. In intersemotic translation as in any kind of translation, there is hardly, if ever, a perfect equivalence of signs, especially when the text translated into a different medium is as complex as classic fairy tales which represent universal values and illustrate universal truths.