Papers by Ferma Lekesizalin
Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 2020
This paper looks at the perverted forms of appropriating, possessing, and hoarding foregrounded i... more This paper looks at the perverted forms of appropriating, possessing, and hoarding foregrounded in Child of God and argues that McCarthy's work raises questions about the modern bourgeois constructions of the subject founded upon property. Focusing on the relationship between the emergence of Lester Ballard's necrophilia and the forfeiture of his property, I claim that McCarthy's portrayal of deviancy challenges the subject's absolute right to possess epitomized in Hegelian philosophy. "The I is at home in the World, when it knows it, and still more when it has conceived it." G.W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right The literary imagination has always been curious about transgression and deviancy and, among contemporary novelists, Cormac McCarthy's works are distinguished by their compelling portrayals of such deviant and transgressive actions. Although limited in scope in comparison with McCarthy's most acclaimed novels such as Suttree (1979) and Blood Meridian (1985), Child of God (1973) shares similar thematic preoccupations in terms of the boundaries of subjectivity, transgression, and deviancy. Centering on a necrophiliac protagonist, Lester Ballard, who prowls on the margins of society and preys on the novel's victims, Child of God, it can be argued, creates an even darker and gloomier universe than those of Blood Meridian and Suttree. While Lester is not as charismatic as Judge Holden of Blood Meridian nor has the sexual appeal of Cornelius Suttree, he is a captivating character whose apalling murders are blood curdling. Yet a careful consideration of his deviancy reveals that he is in fact a cipher for the novel's complex philosophical explorations of private property. In particular, by foregrounding violent forms of appropriating, possessing, keeping, and hoarding, Child of God raises questions about the traditional bourgeois constructions of private property as an underlying aspect of subjectivity. Lester is not only a murderer and a necrophiliac, but also a collector of dead bodies, and his perversions not only manifest themselves in the molesting of corpses, but also in appropriating and hoarding them. Moreover, from the outset of the novel, a clear connection is made between the emergence of Lester's necrophilia and an initial loss, or forfeiture, of personal property, which can be earmarked as the starting point for the character's spiraling into destitution and desolation. A cursory reading may emphasize the inevitability of a dispossessed and destitute Lester's spiraling into hostility, violence, and deviancy. A deeper probing, however, reveals that Lester's deviancy problematizes the modern bourgeois capitalist construction of the subject who has the absolute right of property. The following analysis of Lester's abject and deviant behavior, therefore, looks at the novel's engagement with the question of private property and subjectivity, specifically from a Hegelian perspective. Focusing on McCarthy's representations of the trauma of forfeiture, destitution, violence, savagery, and necrophilia, I argue that Child of God presents a sustained dispute against the central tenets of the ideological construction of private property, epitomized by Hegel's philosophy on the subject.
English Studies in Africa, 2009
Orhan Pamuk's 1998 novel, My Name is Red, features the field of art as torn with the ambigui... more Orhan Pamuk's 1998 novel, My Name is Red, features the field of art as torn with the ambiguities and the paradoxes of desire and the Ottoman miniaturist as torn with the dilemmas of East/West, reality/representation, tradition/innovation, and pleasure/pain. Except for the evident preoccupation with the differences of aesthetic concepts between the East and the West, My Name is Red further penetrates into the nature of representation and reality and explores the desire for perfection in art. Connected with the desire for immortality, the desire for perfection is projected onto the Western Other by the Ottoman artist and emerges as the unattainable object as well as the main drive for artistic creativity in the novel. In Pamuk's novel, art can be a pleasurable experience so far as it supports the fantasies of completeness and perfection and so far as it forecloses the realization of perfection which does not necessarily bring full satisfaction. The mysterious allure of art is rather consisted in its reproduction of desire as such.
Algerian novelist, translator and filmmaker Assia Djebar (1936-2015) reconstructs Algerian histor... more Algerian novelist, translator and filmmaker Assia Djebar (1936-2015) reconstructs Algerian history in Fantasia and engages with traumas of being a colonial subject who is dispossessed of land, culture, and past. The critics, who have placed Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade within the traditions of postcolonial autobiography and feminine writing, have usually ignored the novel’s anticolonial engagement with history and its construction of female agency as an aspect of the historical opposition between the oppressor and the oppressed. In my paper, I argue that Djebar’s confrontation with colonialism takes place on the historical ground and projects the struggle of a people that rise against oppression.
International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature
In this paper, I argue that Joseph Conrad portrays the imperialist ideology as fundamentally flaw... more In this paper, I argue that Joseph Conrad portrays the imperialist ideology as fundamentally flawed in “Heart of Darkness". The inconsistency of imperialism is blatantly evident in the contradiction between the perceptions of Kurtz as “an emissary of pity” (59) and his call for genocide, which he put as a postscript in his report to the Society for the Suppression of the Savage Customs. I thus claim that “Heart of Darkness” constructs the colonizer as a flawed subject who suffers from the same contradictions with the imperialist system as its product. I will use the Lacanian theory of the symbolic order and refer to Slavoj Žižek’s re-formulations of it in order to substantiate and clarify my points.
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Papers by Ferma Lekesizalin