Yael Levin

Bio: Yael Levin is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Disability studies & Intertextuality. The author has an hindex of 3, co-authored 13 publications receiving 42 citations.

Conrad, Freud, and Derrida on Pompeii: A Paradigm of Disappearance

Abstract: In the year 79 CE., a fierce eruption of Mount Vesuvius resulted in the complete burial of one of the most opulent cultural centers of the Roman Empire. Effaced by mounds of ash and lava, Pompeii was transformed into a symbol of severance and destruction a significance that it has retained in collective thought to this day. At present, the excavated city stands as a historical and cultural monument to a temporal arrest that occurred almost three thousand years ago. Prey to a chronological anomaly, Pompeii constitutes a paradoxical fusion: it is a virtual actuality, a present-day past. Encapsulating the incommensurate forces of disappearance and recovery, the geographical space of Pompeii doubles as a psychological, philosophical, and literary locale, a metaphor that inspires and informs the works of several great Western writers. In this paper, I will trace the manner in which this interdisciplinary juncture hosts a meeting between Joseph Conrad, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Derrida. Despite the disparity of their interpretative frameworks the three writers identify in the Pompeiian image a locus of desire that is engendered by the tantalizing absence of that which was buried or lost. By testing the writers' various approaches to this apparent lack approaches that encompass the fluctuating temporalities of absence and presence, loss and recuperation, closure and deferral this paper examines not only the motif of Pompeii but also the principles that underlie the works of those who interpret it. The texts studied here, namely, Conrad's The Arrow of Gold, Freud's \"Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva,\" and Derrida's Archive Fever, differ in their treatment of the Pompeiian motif. Freud uses the motif in a strictly interpretative manner, commenting on its significance within a fourth text, Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva: A Pompeiian Phantasy

Univocity, Exhaustion and Failing Better: Reading Beckett with Disability Studies

Abstract: The emergence of theories of disability in the last decades has rendered figurative interpretation suspect; neglect of literal and material truths has been hailed unethical, the exercising of an ab...

The Interruption of Writing in Molloy: Sunday Visits from Porlock

Abstract: Samuel Beckett´s poetics offers a paradoxical fusion of the compulsion to write and an inability to do so. Such a slippage from inspiration to expiration is in many ways definitive of twentieth-century thought on writing and subjectivity. Fraught with an obsessive preoccupation with the obligation to write, Molloy houses a crew of agents whose sole purpose is to impress this obligation upon two rather unwilling protagonists. This paper argues that the novel’s self-reflexive preoccupation with writing is symptomatic of a late modernist suspicion of discrete and independent authorship. In an attempt to tease out the fluid conceptualizations of writing and subjectivity as they emerge in the text, these figures of imposition are read alongside Coleridge’s preface to “Kubla Khan,” a literary antecedent that haunts the novel. The paper suggests that the evolution from a Romantic to a Modernist conceptualization of inspiration hinges on the figure of interruption. If the anxiety that riddles Coleridge´s preface is brought on by the inevitable cessation of writing as epitomized in the “person from Porlock,” Molloy demonstrates that writing is interruption; it is a doing and undoing of the subject within the endlessly circulating language of a poststructuralist intertext. Beckett´s reworking of Coleridge´s anecdote unfolds as a transgressive and generative exploration of subjectivity that is inseparable from the novel´s thematization of writing: the subject is both agent and receptacle of the writing that generates him. Turning to the work of Maurice Blanchot and Gilles Deleuze, the paper concludes by considering a writing that exceeds subjectivity and leads beyond dialectics, beyond ontology.

A Haunting Heroine: The Dictates of an "Irrealizable Desire" in The Arrow of Gold

Abstract: IMMOBILE AND SHADOWY, statuesque and elusive - Conrad's leading heroine in The Arrow of Gold is a conflation of contradictions. This paper attempts to shed new light on Conrad's turn to the enigmatic in his por trayal of Rita, a turn that has often been deemed an artistic failure - yet another of Conrad's failed attempts to grapple with the pitfalls of a female subject. Indeed, Conrad's treatment of his heroine does poor justice to her sex. Objectified, appropriated and stifled by the male company in which she is immersed, Rita's voice is lost and her person ality distorted. As if to exacerbate this injustice, Conrad repeatedly alludes to his heroine as mist, shadow, phantom and apparition, further imparting the impression that she is nothing but the projection of a male fantasy.1 The enigmatic, the feminine and the failure of characterization cannot but be conjoined in the critic's mind. There is a sense, however, that such a triad is all too conveniendy arranged for a feminist interpre tation of the novel. As other Conrad novels show, the turn to the enigmatic is by no means exhausted in Conrad's attempted represen tations of the female subject. We meet the enigma ? the elusive, the misty and the incomprehensible ? throughout the Conrad canon, regard less of the gender of the subject under scrutiny. Conrad's turn to the enigma in The Arrow of Gold is therefore not only another awkward undertaking of the representation of a female subject, but, more impor tandy, a return to a literary aesthetic that is rehearsed in all his major works. Whether man, woman or illusion, the Conradian object of desire is never fully "there." In hope of correcting the critical leap to judgement that equates the elusive with the feminine, this paper wishes to readdress

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Abstract: In the context of scholarly re-evaluations of James Joyce’s relation to the literary revival in Ireland at the start of the twentieth century, this essay examines the significance of W.B. Yeats to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It traces some of the debates around Celtic and Irish identity within the literary revival as a context for understanding the pre-occupations evident in Joyce’s novel, noting the significance of Yeats’s mysticism to the protagonist of Stephen Hero, and its persistence in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man later. The essay considers the theme of flight in relation to the poetry volume that is addressed directly in the novel, Yeats’s 1899 collection, The Wind Among the Reeds. In the process, the influence of Yeats’s thought and style is observed both in Stephen Dedalus’s forms of expression and in the means through which Joyce conveys them. Particular attention is drawn to the notion of enchantment in the novel, and its relation to the literature of the Irish Revival. The later part of the essay turns to the 1899 performance of Yeats’s play, The Countess Cathleen, at the Antient Concert Rooms in Dublin, and Joyce’s memory of the performance as represented through Stephen towards the end of the novel. Here, attention is given to the mystical and esoteric aspects of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, aspects that the novel shares with the poetry and drama of Yeats.