This paper facilitates a conversation between a classical Chinese Zen Buddhist story and contemporary French feminist theory. Hélène Cixous' work is used as a mirror to explore the significance of...Show moreThis paper facilitates a conversation between a classical Chinese Zen Buddhist story and contemporary French feminist theory. Hélène Cixous' work is used as a mirror to explore the significance of the exceptional appearance of a nude female body and a celebrated vagina in this Zen text.Show less
The aim of this study is to analyse recent changes in masculinity and the relationship between masculinity and literature. Two novels of British 'ladlit' author Nick Hornby are discussed. In the...Show moreThe aim of this study is to analyse recent changes in masculinity and the relationship between masculinity and literature. Two novels of British 'ladlit' author Nick Hornby are discussed. In the first part of the thesis, the differences between traditional and modern masculinity are explained. In the second part, a comparison is made between the differing views on masculinity of Hornby's male and female protagonists. It is shown that while the male protagonists move from a traditional outlook on masculinity to a more modern one, the female protagonists go back to the traditional view. The study shows that Hornby's novels both strongly support a return to traditional gender roles and the old standards of masculinity.Show less
The first chapter, entitled “The Narrative”, will provide a short critique to the conventional relationship between word, fact and experience: here will firstly emerge the basilar dualistic frame...Show moreThe first chapter, entitled “The Narrative”, will provide a short critique to the conventional relationship between word, fact and experience: here will firstly emerge the basilar dualistic frame that governed the problem of narrative by separating the official, general, scientific claim of historiography from the personal, variable and subjective narrative of the individual. This reflection will depart from accounting a double crisis of narrative: the one of experience, which forbids any personal narration to become paradigmatic for other individuals, and the one of scientific discourses, differently carried out by several postmodernist thinkers, that argues the inherently interpretative and therefore subjective status of sciences (among which historiography), which prevents them to reach the claim for universality they pursuit. By trying to find a new configuration that would integrate and to rehabilitate these two narratives, our argument will approach the foucaultian idea of an “history of the present”, the only model that would simultaneously unify the formalization of the past with the constant interpretation promoted by the individuals in the present. The second chapter, named “The Voice”, will examine all the possible reasons according to which the materiality of voice would embody the best tool to carry on the claim for an history of the present: we should say that whereas the first chapter engages the problem of the message, the second discusses the problem of the medium. Accordingly, we will attempt to disentangle the human voice from Derrida’s popular critique of logocentrism, by comparing it with several different models that picture the voice as a collective connecter as well as the only medium capable to give the full dimensions of the human: his feelings, his imaginary, his activity into the real world. The last chapter, which takes the name of “The Community”, departs from the possibility for an heterogeneous group of ‘vocalized individuals’ to constitute a community, namely a group definable according to common parameters. For the voice turns out to be the element which transcends all the particular claims for identity, the essential experience of language will become the fundamental experience of a globalized word. What we will be stressing is that, in this plateau, the language is no longer separable from action: by being configured as an action-in-progress, the respective community cannot be completely defined once for allShow less
