VOLUME 1(4) • 2013
Being—in—the—World
ABSTRACT. The two main sections of this journal issue, Being-towards-death and Being-with-others, are hopefully meant to give a graphical idea of Heidegger’s Dasein (or, more precisly, Sein-zum-Tode and Mitsein) philosophy. pp. 5–8 {downloads}{slider Author's contact} Ioana Cosmanioanaco@hotmail.c..
Creativity and bipolar disorder
ABSTRACT. The genius and madness “debate” on the one hand, or the creativity and depressive illness “controversy” on the other hand actually promote one and the same idea, viz. the two notions overlap, not exactly like the two sides of the same coin but like two notions whose orbits may just interse..
The Poet’s family
ABSTRACT. Two myths, at least, come our way when we contemplate the poet’s heredity and childhood: whether we have a family history of “tainted blood” and, on the other hand, whether the poet’s childhood is unhappy in principle. With examples extracted from Eminescu’s biography, we will give a major..
The independence paradox in creative expression
ABSTRACT. The following article explores the dynamics of individualism and collectivism and creative expression. Between- and within-cultures differences regarding creative performance of individuals and groups are discussed, with evidence from experimental and nation-scale studies. Special emphasis..
All is Life—Life—Life within Life
ABSTRACT. Poe seems to have punished himself in real life by means of drug and alcohol abuse and episodic paranoia, delusion and confusion were allegedly frequent in his existence. Similarly to their creator, his narrators and characters reflect the torments from Poe’s personal life but, this time, ..
From loners through horrors to psychopaths
ABSTRACT. Influenced, at the beginning of his literary career, by the outside supernatural horrors created by Howard P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch changed his interest to the inner horrors often found in the minds of psychopaths or serial killers, but seldom evident in normal people. The modern embodim..
Madness in great ones must not unwatch’d go
ABSTRACT. Considered to be one of the less important characters of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ophelia is actually a complex young woman who points to both the status of women during the Elizabethan time, and to the type of development that helps us contemplate the roots of madness. Starting as a naïve yo..
One life, one writing…
ABSTRACT. In this study, we focus mainly on what might be called Lowell’s “technologies of the self,” with reference, though not exclusively, to his Life Studies (1959). Connected aspects, such as the use of memory, the treatment of time, relations with the Other, are also dealt with here. We read L..
Romanticism in its protean cradle
ABSTRACT. From its cradle, the romantic revolution unfolded in directions as many as the number of its initial rebellious and whimsical, but brilliant and exuberant, fathers, bearing the marks of their numerous idiosyncrasies. This state of affairs led to the notion that literary history contains as..
The loved one is always the Other
ABSTRACT. “We are our own foreigners, we are divided,” says Julia Kristeva in Strangers to Ourselves. Awareness of a certain estrangement (othering) from the dominant culture is repeatedly present in the articulation of Japanese American and Japanese Canadian subjectivity. This sense of otherness ma..
Healing identity through art
ABSTRACT. This essay starts from Jacques Lacan’s theory that claims that all humans perceive themselves as fundamentally lacking, and try to reach wholeness throughout their life, though this imaginary wholeness cannot be achieved. I claim that our perception of ourselves as flawed and with the pote..
Portraying emotion: an actor’s dilemma
ABSTRACT. A great many debates on the paradoxical relation between the real emotions of the actors and the emotions the character is supposed to express have graced the day. Diderot’s paradox was the starting point of a dispute between scholars and actors; writers and theoreticians have been discuss..