Suchergebnisse

This article investigates the nature of the difference between the conscious acts of a rational subject and the enigmatic worlds of dream. In particular I am concerned with situations where the dream world is represented as effectively contaminating, surprising or, in more or less severe ways, influencing the world of consciously intended objects. Beginning with Wilfred Bion's explanation of how psychotic patients project parts of their ruined emotional life into their environment through the media of sense and sensation, the article aims to raise a question about these media and their connection to dream art.

This article characterizes diaspora writing as a kind of dream writing, through the reading of two autobiographical works by Mary Antin (1881—1949), a Russian-Jewish immigrant to America. It dreams of the possibility of a `dream shibboleth', a password through which to bypass the law of the tribal shibboleths which condemn migrants to the border and the never-ending process of self-translation. It is the immigrants' wish to survive and make a home wherever they happen to land that makes their nightly adventure a scene of dream writing, in which the scars of border-crossing magically turn themselves into rich and nutritious seeds which aid their journey.

This paper will suggest that du Chaillu's Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa can be read as a book which presents to the reader a series of dream scenes that centre on the figures of gorillas, cannibals and negroes. I will argue that, by thus positioning himself as a subject who experiences West Africa as if it were a dream, du Chaillu brings back from his interior explorations not only scientific knowledge, but also dream knowledge, and that these two ways of knowing Africa are inseparably interwoven.

I draw on Derrida's limitless extension of the concept of writing to read Freud on dreams, and to explore relations between words, phenomenal or sensory experience, and life itself. I agree with Wordsworth, Freud, Derrida and Cixous that words are also things and argue that what linguistics recognizes as the sign can be marked, as a sculpted piece of stone might be, by the shaping violence of a force other than language. That opening remains traceable in the text. Dream writing names a lived experience of force: magical in its power, unlocatable in psychic terms, moving between languages, dependent on belief.

The recently published Journal de l'Occupation (1995), written by Jean Giono from September 1943 to September 1944, allows a privileged view of the French author who was subsequently blacklisted for collaboration. Contemporary critics generally consider Giono guilty of literary collaboration. In this article, I inquire into the legitimacy of these claims through a close reading of his occupation diary and other publications of the occupation period. In the end, I reject this commonly held notion in favour of the portrait that the diary provides: that of a disillusioned French author and French citizen, who is unwilling to take sides in the civil conflict beyond his local allegiances, and thus refuses to submit his vision to an overarching political project. Moreover, his total belief in an individual's freedom of conscience makes him subversive in his refusal to submit to one doctrine or another.