Hansel Raphael

According to Nils Clausson, the “two most favored candidates for the Dorian Gray’s controlling genre have remained fable and parable” – modes whose moral lesson would have been self-evident (341). While this paper does not claim to have found the true genre of Dorian Gray, it proposes to read the text in conjunction with Wilde’s philosophy of art, i.e. his New Hellenism. This aesthetic philosophy expressed in his critical writing will serve, as it were, as the foundations of yet another genre – one that may provisionally be termed a Hellenic Bildungsroman. As the term Bildungsroman implies, the theme of self-creation is the focus of this genre. Such readings of Dorian Gray are not new; Clausson relates the story “to the novel of self-development” (343), while Murray describes Dorian’s life as “the growth, education and development of an exceptional youth, who through personalities, a book, a picture, is moulded or moulds himself, discovering himself what he believes in” (viii). This paper builds on these established perspectives, but reframes and evaluates Dorian’s growth through a genre that expresses Wilde’s New Hellenism. In so doing, it argues for revised interpretations of the novel’s ‘moral,’ and of an ending so often understood as his retributive punishment for sinning. The argument also attempts to make sense of its mixed critical reception by proceeding from the premise that the text may be read disjunctively, between the opposing literary and cultural discourses introduced by Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy (1869), viz. Hebraism and Hellenism. It contends that the common ‘moral’ reading of Dorian Gray as a generic parabolic text is affliated to the Hebraic sentiments that dominated the Victorian period, while suggesting that to understand Wilde’s ‘aesthetic’ meaning, the antithetical Hellenic perspective is required.

B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two (1948) and Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) (and the “American Declaration of Independence” (1776) he drafted) present visions of utopia, albeit two very different ones in terms of the way each imagines its construction. Since utopia is a “no-place,” it will not come into being organically i.e. it necessarily involves political imagination and intervention to contrive it to its other meaning of “good place.” Utopian thought is therefore intrinsically connected to the politics and governance of such a society. The Jeffersonian values expressed in Notes and the Declaration conceive of Virginia (or America) as a land of promise delivered and sustained via civic republicanism. In contrast, Walden Two creates happiness – almost literally – through cultural engineering, and might pejoratively be described as a benevolent despotism. These are very different political means of achieving utopia, and the fundamental understanding of man’s nature and political will by both writers arguably accounts for this variance.

Modernism, as its name might suggest, was a new beginning that marked a rupture with the past. By radically rejecting established traditions, Modernists instigated a cultural, social and aesthetic revolution that undermined and eroded the firm conviction held by the Western consciousness, in the order and stability hitherto affirmed and guaranteed by religious faith. This was an iconoclasm that inadvertently brought about a ‘crisis of faith’, which was characterised by the loss of meaning and identity, and a deep scepticism towards the moral truths dictated by religion, particularly that of Christianity. The chaotic instability and nihilistic alienation of the Modernist period thus confirms Friedrich Nietzsche’s proclamation in The Gay Science that “God is dead” (125). Taking Nietzsche’s statement to be reflective of the cultural context, this essay will discuss the Modernist ‘crisis of faith’ and the formation of new values negotiated in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man towards its possible resolution.

In “The Intentionality of Love”, Jean-Luc Marion asserts that “[l]ove appears as the optical illusion of [one’s] consciousness, which experiences only itself alone” (Prolegomena to Charity 75). Identifying it as a phenomenological problem, he argues that “[l]oving … amounts to representing (oneself)” (71). This seems incongruent with how we usually understand love as selfless and giving. After all, love is the universal principle that validates our relationships with others and gives it meaning. Such contradictions inherent in love have unsurprisingly become the perennial preoccupation of lovers, who seek to define its nature through philosophical discourse and poetic expression. By explicating the narcissistic aporia of love that Marion identifies through its application to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and positing it against Luce Irigaray’s philosophy of love in I Love To You: Sketch for a Felicity Within History, one may better understand love’s ineffable nature and find a path to love that transcends its phenomenological quandary.

Given that Marcel Duchamp’s readymades mock and repudiate artistic conventions, the claim to aesthetic merit for such works seems contradictory. Yet their conception is today generally considered one of the most influential ideas of Modern Art. Qualifying readymades as art seems paradoxical: is an artwork not supposed to be a beautiful object created by the hands of an artist? The fact that they are mass-manufactured objects that anyone could purchase further insults aesthetic sensibilities.
Such questions and contradictions about what ‘Art’ is or should be form the basis of this essay, which seeks to clarify its constructs. As ambiguous artworks, Duchamp’s readymades serve as the ideal focal point to interrogate the definitions of art and to problematise its discourse. This discussion will firstly, introduce and contextualise Duchamp’s Fountain (1917); secondly, question conventional definitions and assumptions of art by exploring how Fountain ruptures these criteria; and lastly, reconsider if Fountain is art and the implications of Duchamp’s gesture.

The 19th century was a time of great upheaval for the traditions of the Chinese and Japanese civilisations, for it brought the threat of Western imperialism to East Asia and impelled its traditions to come face to face with the question of becoming modern. Ambivalent attitudes towards this transition address its tensions and ambiguities: these will be discussed by comparing “Diary of a Madman” and “The Real Story of Ah-Q” by Lu Xun, who was convinced that China was weakened by tradition and had to transit into modernity for it to resist imperialism; against Kokoro by Natsume Sōseki, for whom the erosion of fundamental social traditions by the modern condition presented contradictions faced by a Japanese identity lost in the transitional “spirit of the Meiji era” (Kokoro 232).

Adapted from C. Y. Lee’s novel, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song is a film musical that may be read as a site of contested narratives. On the one hand, its laudable casting of Asian Americans seemingly indicates a greater self-representation for a minority ethnicity to express its own cultural narrative. Being a Rodgers and Hammerstein production necessarily confers cultural capital on its representations of Asian Americans, effectively Americanising the otherwise alien narrative and granting it agency and legitimacy within the mainstream. Yet it is precisely in the Americanising of preexisting Asian stereotypes that the film is guilty of what Edward Said defines as Orientalism; the film is ultimately a reductive interpretation of Asian culture as perceived and mediated through American popular culture, thereby serving as a product of cultural imperialism.

In “The Ontology of the Photographic Image”, André Bazin identifies the psychological impetus of the plastic arts as being rooted fundamentally in an existential and psychological desire to preserve life and transcend its mortal finitude by creating representations. This primitive appetite for illusion is essentially a desire that seeks fulfilment by striving towards a mimetic or realist telos in the plastic arts, one which is also formulated by Bazin in “The Myth of Total Cinema”. The ontology of the photographic image, by virtue of being mechanical, thus presents man with the “furthermost evolution to date of plastic realism” (“Ontology” 10) to satisfy this desire. However, if the raison d’être of cinema is merely to satisfy a psychological need for realism – in the sense of it being “the duplication of the world outside” (“O” 11) – then Bazin’s ontological thesis would seem to jeopardise its aesthetic merit. By considering Bazin’s ontological argument for cinema, one may assess how its status as art is at odds with the realism of its ontology.