Volume 7 (2015): Edizione 1 (June 2015)

Bearing witness to the colonial and anti-feminist atmosphere of 19th-century America, Kate Chopin created her works against a background of all kinds of repression reigning over social life. Likewise, Désirée’s Baby focuses mainly on a young woman’s marital life and the social/familial problems she confronts because of her personal background and imperial and gender-based oppression surrounding her life. Through a new historicist reading, the story has several humane elements to be taken into account. Reflecting the periphery and the repressed, Désirée’s Baby is a significant anticanonical writing with an inspiring human touch and a historically excluded work which depicts the dramatic existential problems of the time

Ian McEwan has indulged in macabre plots whose points of interest reside in the power of the imaginary over allegedly rational reality. In novels like Atonement, Enduring Love, On Chesil Beach and Amsterdam he points out how approaching the world scientifically can be as misleading as doing it in religious or literary ways. The target of my paper is to spot those common loci of fanaticism and narrowed perspectives which have constituted the origin of many tragedies. Such a conjured tragedy may be identified with a sluice facilitating the passage from postmodernism to post-postmodernism

The term sacred can define itself by the influence it has. It can also be quantified simply by reporting it to other realities such as the profane, the mysterious, the absolute, the infinite and even the possible. From this analogy, the most successful, most imposing collocation is the one made from the sacred and the profane. The opposition between the two underlines two realities, giving the former a rightful and expected brilliance, and the latter the well-defined role it has taken upon itself

The aim of this paper is to describe the fictionalisation of psychoanalysis in the literary therapy genre written by psychotherapists. Being a psychotherapist, Irvin Yalom has written and published several literary therapy novels. The Schopenhauer Cure (2006) presents a psychoanalytic encounter with focus on the patient’s interpersonal issues in a group therapy session and draws a parallel line between fictional patients and the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. The fictionalisation of patients’ psychological symptoms and the way therapists examine themselves in the therapeutic milieu in The Schopenhauer Cure correspond to the fundamental concerns of isolation, meaninglessness, death and freedom in existential psychotherapy. I explore the literary representation of the psychotherapist and therapist-patient relationship and the therapeutic encounter in The Schopenhauer Cure in the context of how fictional narratives can be read as a form of highlighting the psychoanalytic encounter

It seems that the very important role of literature is its transcendental appeal. Literature knows no boundary and it ties whole nations even if they are politically segregated. The present paper tries to trace some of the salient features of humanism and Sufism, such as Absolute Unity, simplicity, selfknowing, purity, solitude, loving one another and some others in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. This American writer, as an ardent follower of the Transcendental Club in America and the holy scriptures of the East, was known as the hero of simplicity in the U.S.A. Being a protester against government and society, he dwelled for more than two years alone in Walden Pond to see the mysteries of life and to find Reality and the Almighty. He believed Nature to be the best teacher and opined that every parcel of nature is a sign of God. He came to know about the holy scriptures of the East, especially those of the Indians and strongly used them in his writings, especially in Walden and the Week. Therefore such a person who seeks God, indeed, can be familiar with elements of humanism and Sufism, and one can find such elements in Walden by pondering its text

The study focuses on the short prose text Imagination Dead Imagine (1965) by the Irish writer Samuel Beckett (1906-1989). It argues that while at first sight Beckett’s text appears to be a chaotic verbal blend with no coherence, a close reading discloses an actual underlying pattern (mandala) which gives the text a structure and enables the reader to “understand” it. The authors of the paper claim that mandala, as the structural pattern of the text, represents an attempt to find a resolution of the existential and universal conflict within man. On one hand, there is spiritual alienation (exemplified here by the dissolution of the language) and, on the other hand, one’s desire to be integrated with unity and return to the centre