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Volume 6 Number 3 March 2020

Responsibility and Thought in William Blake’s “The Fly”


Authors: Sun Shuting
Pages: 32-36
DOI: doi.org/10.32861/ellr.63.32.36
Abstract
This article is an analysis of William Blake’s poem “The Fly” from the angles of Responsibility and Thought. The article agrees with much of the secondary literature that “The Fly” introduces an attempted identification between an inattentive philosophizing narrator and fly in the first three stanzas and then challenges it in the final two. However, the article makes the novel case that the narrator’s initial attempt at contemplative union with the fly is not completely rebuffed by the quizzical non sequitur contained in the final two stanzas. Blake’s oblique allusion to God is connected to the narrator’s recognition that he and the fly share a real and significant union, even if the two parties interpolate each other in completely alien forms.

Deprived of Free Will: Antihumanism in Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party


Authors: Mohsen Ravanpak ; Fatemeh Pourjafari
Pages: 24-31
DOI: doi.org/10.32861/ellr.63.24.31
Abstract
The present paper discusses one of Pinter’s plays, The Birthday Party, in the light of the notion of antihumanism as proposed by Foucault, Althusser, and Freud. Arguing that an important aspect of Harold Pinter’s plays is the description of how people are forced into an antihuman state in which they have no opportunity to show and practice their individuality and free will, the present research applies Foucault to see how antihumanism is created through politics, applies Althusser to see it coming through ideology, and applies Freud to find how it comes through psychological mechanisms. Thus, all through the research, Foucault’s notions of disindividualization and institutionalization, Althusser’s notions of Repressive State Apparatus and Ideological State Apparatuses, and Freud’s notions of id-ego-superego and defense mechanism act as the theoretical framework to discuss how antihumanism is created in the course of the play.