John Gregg

Bio: John Gregg is an academic researcher. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 7 citations.

Blanchot's Suicidal Artist: Writing and the (Im)Possibility of Death

Abstract: What is true death? And someone will say that the ever courageous gift, presence of mind, belongs to the one who, without being overcome by the spell of death, is capable, even while gazing straight at it, to name it, to "understand" it and, in this knowledge, to pronouce the Lazare veniforas through which death will become a principle, the dreadful power in which the life that carries it must maintain itself in order to master it and to find therein the accomplishment of its mastery (EI 49-50).

Suicide Century: Literature and Suicide from James Joyce to David Foster Wallace

Abstract: Suicide Century investigates suicide as a prominent theme in twentieth-century and contemporary literature. Andrew Bennett argues that with the waning of religious and legal prohibitions on suicide in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the increasing influence of medical and sociological accounts of its causes and significance in the twentieth century, literature responds to the act and idea as an increasingly normalised but incessantly baffling phenomenon. Discussing works by a number of major authors from the long twentieth century, the book explores the way that suicide makes and unmakes subjects, assumes and disrupts meaning, induces and resists empathy, and insists on and makes inconceivable our understanding of ourselves and of others.

Seduction and Death in Muriel Spark's Fiction

Abstract: Muriel Spark's works often consider the seductive and destructive power of social structures, such as religion and education. These structures lure Spark's characters with their promise of power. But after entering the structure's domain to exploit the mastery it offers, the characters are imprisoned by rules and codes. Through a postmodern reading of Spark's works, such as The Comforters (1957), ^The Public Image (1968), The Driver's Seat (1970), Reality and Dreams (1996), and Aiding and Abetting (2000), this book analyzes the role of certain social structures in her fiction. The volume argues that these attractions and destructions are very much like postmodern critical games with structures that are open to any experimentation, but at the same time seem fixed and unchanging. Within this postmodern context, one is free to play games with signs and systems of rules. Spark's characters enter these games in a playful mood and test their limits. The texts, images, and spectacles haunt their victims, who are unable to escape the process of attraction and destruction. The characters are eventually led to their death-literal or metaphoric-which will inevitably introduce them to a new beginning.

On Psychiatry and its Disavowal of Mind: Legal and Cultural Implications:

Abstract: Biology is increasingly replacing psychology as the frame of reference for understanding human behavior. Where previously the schizophrenias and affective disorders attracted and vindicated biological explanation, now even psychodynamic explanations of the so-called neuroses are being replaced by biological understanding. This essay considers the potential loss entailed by perhaps premature biological reductionism. Anxiety has been a critical concept for psychological explanations of behavior. The move to biology resolves the mystery of anxiety by biochemically removing it. We trace what meaning anxiety had for three critical thinkers who used the term: Kierkegaard, Freud and Sartre. We argue that the loss of anxiety is a symptom of the loss of psychology and abdication on the part of psychiatry in contributing to the representation of human subjectivity for culture and law.

Death and Heterotopias: Representations of Modernity in Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Abstract: Este ensayo explora la tematizacion de la muerte y la modernidad en Los Cuadernos Malte Laurids Brigge, de Rilke, a traves de un marco del concepto de heterotopia de Michel Foucault. Descritos como espacios que son a la vez miticos y reales, las heterotopias son espacios especiales integrados con mas de una capa aparente de significado. Las cualidades especiales de las heterotopias abren un espacio que no esta sujeto a las leyes normales de la geometria y en su lugar se convierte en una interseccion o punto de vista entre lo mitico y lo real. El enfoque principal de este ensayo es un examen integrador de escenas de Los Cuadernos de Malte Laurids Brigge y del concepto de heterotopia de Foucault. Despues de delinear la superposicion entre el predominio de imagenes de la muerte esparcidas a lo largo de la novela y la presion cultural ejercida por la modernidad sobre la metropoli, sugiero que es posible comprender la busqueda del protagonista por la autorrealizacion examinando sus encuentros con diversos espacios heterotopicos.