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Nolan brings a fairly recognizable style to all his movies, often described as "dark" or "gritty." The tone is relentlessly serious, and the narratives are infused with the ambiguity and pessimism of film noir. His protagonists are, without exception, tortured, obsessed men, struggling with the loss of loved ones or past mistakes. Not only do these men face an uncaring world with murky morality, their sense of self is also unstable. To go along with the faulty memories and self-deceptions of his characters, Nolan also has a knack for misleading his audience with convoluted narratives. As Fisher puts it, he specializes in puzzles that can't be solved. 'Inception', to my mind, makes an excellent showcase for all these themes. Therefore, through an examination of its use of space and architecture as metaphors for the mind, I aim to determine the concept of the malleable self that underlies all of Nolan's movies.
What is an exilic law? The Talmud was itself located 'in exile' without ever being considered 'exilic': the self-representation of the Talmud is consistent with the idea that Jewish law might be redacted in diaspora but is still centred on the Temple of Jerusalem. Yet the Zohar offers a unique representation of Jewish law as a central legal product and a metaphysically exiled reality. Hence, Jewish law has not only been born 'in exile' but also has an 'exilic' nature. An exilic law, then, is a tenebrous 'path' that inverts the 'moral ways' of Jewish law, as it departs from the 'exilic centre' of Babylon and installs a 'non-exilic centre' on Mount Moria, where Isaac was almost sacrificed and the Temple of Jerusalem was erected. When Scripture is brought out in an 'exodus', it departs from the solid terrain of an 'exilic law' and radicalizes the event of Abraham's being called to sacrifice his own son by producing a notable inversion of the notion of 'literal sense'. And yet this 'literal sense' that has always been there had almost been neglected, just like a 'purloined letter' - in every sense of the expression.
This article shows that 'tension' cannot be conceived as a specific object of an analysis for which one could determine a precise field of enquiry. Instead, it establishes tension as a specific mode or angle of approach with which any given contingent object or set of objects can be explored. The wideness of its applicability and the specificity of its angle suggest that research on tension can help to unfold a better understanding of a classical ontological question concerning the essential value of actions and relations in the definition of what a thing is. The text follows this line of argumentation by pairing contemporary philosophical sources and specific aesthetic and political examples. Suggesting the possibility of an open classification of different modes of tension, it clarifies the extent to which the essential definition of a thing is bound to the contingent analysis of its transformations.
The aim of this introductory article [to the volume of the same title], firstly, is to recapitulate the basic principles of Bakhtin’s initial theory as formulated in “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics” (henceforth FTC) and “The Bildungsroman and its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historic Typology of the Novel)” (henceforth BSHR). Subsequently, we present some relevant elaborations of Bakhtin’s initial concept and a number of applications of chronotopic analysis, closing our state of the art by outlining two perspectives for further investigation. Some of the issues which we touch upon receive more detailed treatment in other contributions to this volume. Others may offer perspectives for future Bakhtin scholarship.
This edited volume is the first scholarly tome exclusively dedicated to Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the literary chronotope. This concept, initially developed in the 1930s and used as a frame of reference throughout Bakhtin’s own writings, has been highly influential in literary studies. After an extensive introduction that serves as a ‘state of the art’, the volume is divided into four main parts: Philosophical Reflections, Relevance of the Chronotope for Literary History, Chronotopical Readings and Some Perspectives for Literary Theory. These thematic categories contain contributions by well-established Bakhtin specialists such as Gary Saul Morson and Michael Holquist, as well as a number of essays by scholars who have published on this subject before. Together the papers in this volume explore the implications of Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope for a variety of theoretical topics such as literary imagination, polysystem theory and literary adaptation; for modern views on literary history ranging from the hellenistic romance to nineteenth-century realism; and for analyses of well-known novelists and poets as diverse as Milton, Fielding, Dickinson, Dostoevsky, Papadiamandis and DeLillo