Document Details
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Document Type |
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Thesis |
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Document Title |
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Otherness Contested: A Lacanian Reading of Herman Melville’s Clarel الجدل حول الأخر: قراءة لقصيدة "كلاريل" لهيرمن ملفيل من خلال نظريات جاك لاكان |
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Subject |
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College of Education Humanities |
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Document Language |
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Arabic |
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Abstract |
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The present study focuses on Herman Melville’s (1819-1891) Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876), as a representative American literary work of the nineteenth century, which anticipates much of the complex psychological insights of the legendary French psychologist Jacques Lacan (1901-1981); especially his highly controversial formulations on otherness. The aim of this dissertation is not to recall a marginalized human other to the position of a recently deconstructed logocentric perspective of subjectivity; i.e. it is not a postcolonial study of the way ethnic others are portrayed in Clarel. Most importantly, it rejects the possibility of ever being able to extract a homogeneous vision of others as represented in Clarel. This outright rejection stems from the fact that the poem is merely a playground for the numerous signifiers of difference, which interact with each other, but remain in a state of constant mutation so that it becomes impossible for the reader to obtain a solidified meaning out of the various encounters with the symptoms of this difference in the poem. In line with Lacan’s teachings concerning the de-centered statues of the Subject and the consequent de-centering of otherness, which he highlights, the researcher aims at contesting the many images of otherness in Clarel, not to demonstrate, for instance, their opposition, but to stress the failure of their ever representing the Real. The first chapter: “Seductive Mirage: The Other as a Gigantic Optical Image” deals with how Clarel is preoccupied with Imaginary otherness, which relies heavily on visual and virtual representations. The poem is apparently encouraging a holistic perspective of Self and other, for the sake of acquiring a lost jouissance. A closer reading, however, proves otherwise; the poem introduces the possibility of becoming one with others, just to surprise one with how easily such a vision can be deconstructed. The second chapter: “When I Speak, the Other Speaks: Clarel as Counter-discourse” is an alternative reading of otherness in Clarel, which takes as its point of departure Lacan’s concept of the Big Other, and, which culminates in demonstrating the de-centered status of such Big Others in the poem. It postulates that the characters’ discourse on race, religious faith, time, and death seem to echo the cultural ideologies of the time, but it carries other destabilizing signifiers, which introduce counter meanings--or their willingness to be open to more than one meaning. The third chapter: “The “Desert of the Real” in Clarel” discusses how it is impossible to attain and re-experience the Real, for its otherness is doomed to remain unrealized and un-communicated. |
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Supervisor |
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prof .hoda ayad |
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Thesis Type |
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Doctorate Thesis |
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Publishing Year |
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1431 AH
2010 AD |
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Added Date |
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Saturday, June 26, 2010 |
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Researchers
| نورة أحمد المالكي | AL-Malki, Noora Ahmed | Researcher | Doctorate | |
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