To believe in fairies is not to believe in rare Lepidoptera or the like, within a basically materialistic context. It is to take folk?stories seriously as accounts of the ?dreamworld?, the realm of conscious experience of which our ?waking world? is only a province, to acknowledge and make real to ourselves the presence of spirits that enter our consciousness as moods of love or alienation, wild joy or anger. In W. B. Yeats's philosophy fairies are the moods and characters of (...) human life, conceived not as alterations in a material being, but as the spiritual rulers of an idealistically conceived world. Yeats follows folklore in making them ambivalent: either the sweet undying voices of nature or the disillusioned destroyers of humane life. His prophecies of a New Age were of a world ruled unknowingly by fairies, spirits invoked by music, poetry, and love, that do not necessarily take much care of ordinary human life. The ?Fairy Faith? described by Yeats and Evans?Wentz is a variety of idealism, and by no means absurd. (shrink)

The blossoming literature on genealogy in recent years has come as somewhat of a pleasant surprise to the historically inclined among us. It has not, however, come without its difficulties. As I see it, the literature on genealogy is guilty of two conflations, what I call the “debunking/problematizing conflation” and the “problematizing/rationalizing conflation.” Both are the result of the inadequate typological maps currently used to organize the literature. As a result, what makes many genealogies philosophically interesting often remains obscure. In (...) response, I propose a new two-dimensional typology that avoids these conflations and outfits us with a richer conceptual vocabulary with which to understand and organize the genealogies which populate the literature. By identifying a second dimension of analysis which has thus far gone untheorized, my typology enables us to elucidate the various normative objectives and objects of investigation structuring a literature which is more diverse than previously acknowledged. We can thus get a clearer understanding of the problems those genealogies face, of their critical potential, and of their implications for our conception of critique. (shrink)

W.B. Yeats's search of wisdom through self-knowledge is reflected in his philosophical and poetical works. I explore the relevant relation between his philosophical beliefs, exposed in A Vision, and his later poetry. I defend that W.B. Yeats's search of wisdom was centred in matters of the Self displaying different Greek philosophic concepts such as the partition of the human soul, the antinomies of the Self, death, reincarnation and fate. Lastly, to proof my thesis, my study inspects 'Ego Dominus Tuus', 'A (...) Dialogue of Self and Soul' and 'The Man and the Echo'. (shrink)

This study explores a unique poetic narrative from two perspectives: a sociolinguistic point of view within the framework of functional discourse analysis and a literary critique through the prism of Indian philosophic ideas in the text. The research method is based on juxtaposing a social-semiotic interpretation and a literary commentary. Firstly, the article applies the Hallidayan model of the dimensions of discourse – field, tenor and mode – to an excerpt from Yeats's poetic drama, as the context of situation. Secondly, (...) the article identifies specific Indian philosophic concepts in the text and establishes how they influence the structure of dramatic verse and the characterization of protagonists. The discussion reveals the extent of complementarity and tension between the two approaches and how they change the reading of the text when open to disparate disciplinary perspectives. Final results signify the potential and applicability of the analytical categories to research across diverse discourses. (shrink)

The article offers a new approach for the exploration of media and television studies by extracting the television-philosophy implicit in Samuel Beckett’s television play … but the clouds …. The reading focuses on the immanent logic of the play seen as a televisual and an intermedial whole, instead of constructing it as an intertextual tapestry of references. The article argues against a popular interpretation of Beckett as the artist of failure. The reading of …but the clouds… as illustrating the failure (...) of memory and as a comment on the televisual loss of pro-filmic referentiality is subsequently also contested. On the contrary, it is argued that the play in a self-reflexive positive gesture explores both the ontology of the television-image and the ontology of memory as a process of conjuration by presenting a successful emergence of the televisual Image-in-itself. (shrink)

This is the study of the creative potential of mediumship. It emphasizes a neglected and under-conceptualized form of creativity in the realm of personality development. Examples include the cases of mediums Pearl Curran, Hélѐne Smith, and Matthew Manning. Artists with mediumistic propensities are stressed, such as Keats, Rimbaud, Blake, Yeats, and James Merrill. There is discussion of Myers' theory of genius and how this bears on the concept of personal transformation. Myers' theory is used to shed light on Surrealism, outsider (...) art, and the lives of Socrates and Joan of Arc. All this is comprehended under the Keatsian rubric of "soulmaking." Keywords: mediumship--creativity--multiplicity. (shrink)

The attempts to interpret Russian and Southeast European history in light of a Byzantine background tend to focus on traditions of political culture, and to claim that patterns characteristic of the late Roman Empire have had a formative impact on later developments. But the effects attributed to political culture presuppose a civilizational framework, and arguments on that level must come to grips with evidence of historical discontinuity, during the Byzantine millennium as well as in later centuries and on the periphery (...) of the Byzantium cultural world. The path to a historically grounded civilizational analysis is, however, obstructed by persisting images of Byzantium as a stagnant culture, immobilized by a complete fusion of secular and sacred authority. The article discusses and criticizes some of the most influential versions of this view. (shrink)