Rather, I use cultural poetics and fiction as possible lenses through which a nontraditional interested reader (i.e., one not invested in the literature as authoritative) can read these texts in a way that can speak to the contemporary world in which we live and think.Ted Chiang’s novella “Story of Your Life,” an elegant experiment combining aliens, variational principles, and the linguistic relativity hypothesis, was first published in 1998, just as the western world was coming online and people were beginning to come in contact with each other in unprecedented ways. This essay does not claim that the kabbalists in question did or did not intend to write cultural poetics or fiction. In looking at Lurianic Kabbalah as fiction, I raise the issue of the "real" and the "true" as it relates to fictive narratives more generally. not only reflects a historical setting but also creates that setting, constructing reality in its own image and directing it toward its desired ends. I do not mean history in any positivistic sense but closer to Steven Greenblatt's description of new historicism as cultural poetics. In this essay, I resist those limitations and explore two other possible literary forms: history and fiction. The academic study of Kabbalah has largely been limited to myth and symbol as the two viable forms of kabbalistic discourse. Duplicity is, in turn, strictly linked to the theme of the novel: deception and self-deception. The analysis of some dual-natured animal symbols (centaur, dragon, harpy, and basilisk) and their metaphorical function within the narrative context reveal an underlying structure characterized by ambiguity and duplicity, which means both a twofold quality and double-dealing. The purpose of this essay is to refute the common notion that Galdós's Doña Perfecta is simply a "thesis novel" in favor of a broader and more complex view. La duplicidad está, a la vez, estrechamente vinculada con el tema de la novela: el engaño y el autoengaño.
en sus acepciones de calidad de doble y doblez. El análisis de unos símbolos animales de doble naturaleza (centauro, dragón, arpía y basilisco) y su función metafórica en el contexto narrativo ponen de manifiesto una estructura subyacente caracterizada por la ambigüedad y la duplicidad.
Read moreĮste ensayo se propone refutar la idea común de que Doña Perfecta de Galdós es simplemente una "novela de tesis" a favor de una visión más amplia y compleja. Through the interweaving of temporal and extra‐temporal spirals, Grace overcomes historical fixity while also sustaining the spiritual essentialism that supports Māoridom’s integrity and her vision of its feminist renewal. In specific terms, the isolation that Mata experiences ceases to be imprisoning because of the spiralling interventions of biculturalism, most potently represented through the agency of Makareta, and through the redeeming Māori maternal genealogy, most explicitly supported by Missy. woven into a cultural homecoming through symbolic reconstructions spanning historical time. The lives of the novel’s three cousins – Mata, Makareta and Missy – are made to collectively demonstrate how female disinheritance and isolation can be. This essay argues that narrative time in Patricia Grace’s third novel, Cousins, is constituted along the paths of multiple interconnecting spirals that not only interweave personal and historical time but also connect to extra‐temporal domains. Categorically speaking, this essay designates the highly interactive, embodied procedures involved in the production of subjectivity under a rubric of three: apocalypse, a solution to the non-zero-sum game and a planetary event of post-anthropocentric ramifications language, a new use of symbols in affective and transformational communicativity and temporality, a remembering of the future and a vision of self-destiny. To invoke such an experience, we draw on specific narrative elements in Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” as well as its cinematic adaptation, Arrival, to elucidate how subjectivity can become reconstructed, existentially, through language and time in very precise, yet nonlinear ways. What kind of event could destabilize, simultaneously, planetary trajectories and existential subjectivities? We argue that an encounter with an alien logic has the power to irrevocably dislodge common sense thinking from conventional spaces that have been molded into representational thought.