Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop tells the story of the claustrophobic lives of six characters who find themselves stuck in the house of Uncle Philip, who demands absolute submission from them and who isolates them from the wider world. Uncle Philip acts like the Freudian Primordial Father who feels free to act in any way he likes disregarding any restrictions. By forcing the household members to work in his toyshop all day, he creates a solipsistic universe, which is cut off from the network of the symbolic in Lacanian terms. In this world, their living practice deviates from the norms of traditional discourse as there is incest between the siblings, or as they heavily engage in pre-or extra-linguistic representation of reality such as drawing, dancing, making music and toys. Aunt Margaret becomes dumb on her wedding night, or Uncle Philip does not send the siblings to school, which, in Lacanian terms, is a codifying space of the Law. For these reasons, Uncle Philip’s house embodies the heterogeneity of the imaginary residues rather than submission to the organising principles of the symbolic. Theirs becomes an alternative site of being to the one outside. This essay aims to explore the psychodynamics of the characters’ relations to one another, the unconventional intrasubjectivity created between them in this unconventional space and the implications of imaginary residues in their living practice using Lacanian ideas as my conceptual backcloth.
Lacan wrote and generated ideas at the intersection of structuralism and poststructuralism, and the question of where he stands in this intersection is crucial to understand his conception of the subject. This essay takes the multiplicity of views on Lacan as a structuralist and a poststructuralist as its starting point and aims to weigh these labels against the background of his specific theories and views. We suggest that in his early phase when he was categorised as a structuralist, he had the seeds of his later poststructuralist phase, and when he was generating his poststructuralist ideas, he was building them on his structuralist legacy. This evolution is similar to that of Roland Barthes in that he establishes an ongoing dialog between structuralism and poststructuralism: he is both a threshold figure suggesting an amalgam of these movements, but he is also a dividing figure as his evolution points at the unbridgeable rupture between structuralism and poststructuralism.
In Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Cask of Amontillado, Fortunato's captivity by Montresor in the middle of a carnival with no explanation amazes readers and leaves many unanswered questions in readers' minds, thereby leading to reductionist interpretations of the story. Each of these readings leaves some elements in the story in ambiguity, failing to integrate them into a totalizing interpretation of the story. The reading of the story in relation to the Freudian concept of the uncanny, however, helps us to understand the motive behind the murder, by revealing the unconscious mechanisms at work. In light of this, this study argues that as a murder story involving the cruel death of a helpless victim on the surface level, The Cask of Amontillado is based on what is left unsaid in the narrative. It arouses the sense of the uncanny, as what Montresor says on the conscious level in the guise of the heimlich turns out to be, on the unconscious level, actually a phantasy of acting out the repressed wishes that he had pushed back to the darkest recesses of his psyche because of their disturbing threat to his egotistical unity.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.