Shaping Idealisms consists of eleven articles published earlier and three unpublished articles, a general introduction and a conclusion. The articles are mostly about Middle English romances and... Show moreShaping Idealisms consists of eleven articles published earlier and three unpublished articles, a general introduction and a conclusion. The articles are mostly about Middle English romances and nineteenth- and twentieth-century romance-related texts. The general theme is the tension between conventional hegemonic idealism and embedded criticism of that. The approach is an application of modern critical theories to medieval texts and modern related texts in order to analyse their subtextual premisses preliminary to other types of analysis. The texts have been treated as autonomous for the occasion. The main themes are: the difference between romance and allegory (symbolism); __dialogic texts__ and the agendas of clerkly and minstrel authors (formalism); linear, cyclic and concentric narrative structures (structuralism); characters as __actants__, and the symbolism of settings (narratology); and __diff_rance__, and 'the other' as antitype (poststructuralism). For the nineteenth-century texts the emphasis lies on medieval stories in new cultural contexts and on the perspective of hindsight (Tennyson, William Morris); for the twentieth-century texts on fantasy and the development of romance in modern times (Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Lodge). Show less
Taking its cue from Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance, Machinic Deconstruction: Literature / Politics / Technics addresses the question whether it is possible to conceive of a work of... Show moreTaking its cue from Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance, Machinic Deconstruction: Literature / Politics / Technics addresses the question whether it is possible to conceive of a work of technics that is operative at the same quasi-ontological level as différance itself. To do so, this study develops a concept of technics that is inscribed with multiplicity and heterogeneity from the very outset, while at the same time defying rigid order and origin. This leads to a deconstruction of the difference between natural and technical, and to a new conceptualization of the machine. In the wake of technics, machines emerge in an attempt to impose order, calculation and origin. The author distinguishes between three different machines: a literary machine, a metaphysical machine, and a political machine. These three machines constantly interrelate, but while the metaphysical machine plays a decisive role in structuring the interrelation between these three machines, the literary machine plays a decisive role in deconstructing the interrelations. Show less
