Author Archives
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The Conspiracy Theory of Artificial History as a Political Tool in Authoritarian Regimes: The Manipulation of Social Orders in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities
Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972), as its title suggests, implies the power of human imagination through an imaginary universe consisted of numerous surrealist representations of imaginative cities. Inspired by Marco Polo’s pilgrimages, the novel appears to be a product of… Read More ›
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What to Read and Watch This Week: Nature and Arts
Henry David Thoreau stated in Walden (1854) that he had gone to the woods because he had wished to “live deliberately and to front the essential facts of life” to reject socially constructed universal truths. Nature is one of the… Read More ›
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Expressionist Aesthetics in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie: A Fictional Recreation of Paris out of the Pastiche and the Cinéma du look
Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s French romantic comedy film Amélie (2001) is a lighthearted fiesta of daily pleasures. It narrates the life of a waitress, Amélie Poulain, who spent her childhood isolated from the outer world, and her journey to bring her little… Read More ›
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The Abyss of Semiosis in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose: The Mise en abyme of Signs
Like many of Umberto Eco’s works, The Name of the Rose (1980) is another postmodern novel that deals with the deceiving nature of language. However, although Eco once again makes use of the technique of intertextuality to mock the search… Read More ›
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What to Read and Watch This Week: Aesthetics of Dreams
Fiction itself is an imaginative dimension outside the realm of reality. When authors write about dreams, they remove the ‘ontological distance’ (a term coined by David Mitchell). Because dreams are personal experiences, they often appear in modernist literature to emphasise… Read More ›
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The Surrealist Representation of Everyday Life: The Philosophy of Existentialism in David Lynch’s Rabbits
Famous for his great success with Mulholland Drive (2001), David Lynch has been an icon of surrealist aesthetics in the cinematic world. Popularising surrealist cinematography to the mainstream audience, Lynch projects new interpretations of reality onto the big screen through… Read More ›
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The Cinematography of Chaos: Literature Reinvented by the Reader in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy
The literary movement, the Nouveau Roman, emerged in the 1950s in France. The New Novelists reject the traditional author-oriented sensorial syncretism. Being one of the most influential pioneers in the movement, Alain Robbe-Grillet, as both an author and filmmaker, writes… Read More ›
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What to Read and Watch This Week: The Enigma of Human History
As many postmodern writers like Umberto Eco claim, the history familiar to us is merely an artificial construction and thus a ‘reality’ made out of falsehoods is crafted. The postmodern notion of history as an accumulated product of multiple falsehoods… Read More ›
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The Speculatus of Self: The Author and His Literary Persona in Paul Auster’s Ghosts
Following the publication of City of Glass in 1985, Ghosts was published in the following years, which is the second novel of Auster’s bestselling collection The New York Trilogy (1987). City of Glass emphasises on the theme of the crisis… Read More ›
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What to Read and Watch This Week: The Lost Generation
Yesterday marked the 105th Anniversary of World War I, one of the most massive watersheds of geopolitical history in the 20th century. The Great War led to the downfall of the Central Powers and four great imperial dynasties. It resulted… Read More ›
