by James McAdams, Lehigh University

In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce portrays Stephen Dedalus as an ambitious, rebellious, and cultural critic hostile to his native Ireland’s naïve convictions in religion, language and family.  In these ways, Stephen, at least superficially, endorses and aims to follow Nietzsche’s model of der Ubermensch, or philosopher of the future, who will escape nihilism by creating his own identity and his own meaning through art.  During the time Portrait was composed, Nietzsche was incredibly popular among the youthful artists of Dublin, and Joyce, as has been demonstrated in many passages in The Dubliners, was foremost among them in his admiration of Nietzsche.  Continue reading The Failed Revolts of Stephen Dedalus: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Nietzschean Self-Overcoming →

by Sam Wiseman, University of Potsdam

In the fiction of M.R. James, landscape functions as a device to represent and explore the world of the imagination. This is particularly true of his most famous story, “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”, in which the setting—a stretch of East Anglian shingle beach, caught between land and sea—functions as a liminal realm, which does not belong fully to one world or another. The region’s elemental instability allows James to emphasize the inadvertent exploration of other thresholds by his protagonist, Parkins: between fiction/imagination and “reality”, the sublime and the comprehensible, the oceanic and the cultural, and the animistic and scientific. In the story’s most uncanny and frightening scene, Parkins finds himself trapped in a liminal psychological state—neither dreaming nor waking—in which the region’s landscape and weather both play a key metaphorical and atmospheric role in establishing a feeling of destabilization. It is this sense of suspension between realms, I argue, that creates the story’s distinctive power: it is typically Jamesian in its ultimate cautionary moral, one which warns of the dangers of investigating/eroding boundaries between categories, and which uses its haunting coastal landscape as a corresponding image to this message.

Download Sam Wiseman’s article “Murmuring Seas, Broken Ground: the Liminal Landscape of M.R. James’ ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad'” as a PDF file (830 KB)

Continue reading Murmuring Seas, Broken Ground: the Liminal Landscape of M.R. James’ “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” →