摘要(英) |
Abstract
This thesis will focus on the problem of the fantasy of self-mastery by comparing Poe’s “William Wilson” with The Horned Man, a recent novel written by James Lasdun in 2002. In studying the fantasy of self-mastery in these two texts, I intend to hold a reconsideration of the Enlightenment concept of the individual. By Lacanian reading of the Double motif in “William Wilson”, I locate the fantasy of self-mastery in the pursuit of self-unity. In Lacanian terms, self-unity comes from the subject’s identification with mirror reflection that creates the sense of mastery. However, by inducing the subject’s identification, the obsession with the unified self will also send the subject to a fantasy of self-mastery. As the tale presents the obsession with a unified self as suicidal in the end, I thus consider the tale as forming a critique to the making of the individual regulated by the Enlightenment concept. I also read an anticipation of the involuntary condition of post-modern subject in the tale. Studying the same employment of the Double motif in the novel, I find its unique accentuation of the rationalist style can be able to push further the critique formed in Poe’s tale. I see the rationalist attitude as where the fantasy of self-mastery expresses itself. From the novel’s detective narrative, I discover that under the rationalist surface lies actually a denial of the irrational self. By employing Terry Castle’s critique of the Enlightenment rationalism to read such self-denial, a process of alienation within the subject can be represented. In The end, I argue that through such self-alienation, the power of self-regulation can be internalized within the subject, who is in turn subjugated by social institutions and ideology.
|
參考文獻 |
Works Cited
Castle, Terry. “Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie.” Critical Inquiry Vol. 15, No. 1 (Autumn, 1988): 26-61.JSTOR.Web. 1 Feb. 2009.
Fisher, Benjamin Franklin. "Poe and the Gothic Tradition." The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Hayes, Kevin J. Cambridge ; New York Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Foucault, Michel. “The Subject and Power”. Critical Inquiry. Vol. 8, No. 4 (Summer, 1982): 777-795. JSTOR. Web. 9 March 2009.
Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Massachusetts US: Blackwell Publishers Inc, 2000.
Ed. Hall, Stuart. David Held, Don Hubert, and Kenneth Thompson. Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995.
Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. London New York: Routledge, 1981.
---. "Narcissism and Beyond: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Frankenstein and Fantasies of the Double." Aspects of Fantasy: Selected Essays from the Second International Conference on the Fantastic in Literature and Film. (1986): 43-53. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 9 March 2009.
Jung, Yonjae. “The Imaginary Double in Poe’’s ’’William Wilson’’”. Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory (LIT) 2001 Feb; 11 (4): 385-402.MLA International Bibliography. Web. 8 Dec. 2009.
Ed. Kennedy, J. Gerald. A Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001..
Lasdun, James. The Horned Man. New York: W.W. Norton, 2002.
Horsley, Lee. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction. Oxford University Press, 2005.
Mooney, Stephen L. "Poe’’s Gothic Waste Land." Ed. Graham Clarke. Vol. III. Edgar Allan Poe: Critical Assessment. Mountfield, East Sussex: Helm Information, 1991.
Outram, Dorinda. The Enlightenment. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1955.
Poe, Edgar Allan. “William Wilson”. Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Edward H. Davidson. USA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1956.
Rank, Otto. Beyond Psychology. N.Y.: Dover Publications, Inc., 1958.
Rosenfield, Claire. "The Shadow Within: The Conscious and Unconscious Use of the Double." Daedalus , Vol. 92.No. 2. Perspectives on the Novel (Spring, 1963): pp. 326-344.JSTOR.Web. 8 Dec. 2009.
Todorov, Tzvetan.The Poetics Of Prose. Trans. Richard Howard.Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 1977.
Thoms, Peter. Detective and Its Design: Narrative & Power in 19th-Century Detective Fiction. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1998.
Williams,J.S. Michael. A World of Words:Language and Displacement in the Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1988.
Zivkovic, Milica. “The Double as The ‘Unseen’ of Culture: Toward a Definition of Doppleganger”. Linguistics and Literature. Vol. 2, No 7 (2000):121-128.
|