The Seven Veils of Salomé: Wilde’s Play in Portuguese Translation
The Translator Vol.9 Nº.1, Manchester, 2003. 1-38
Although marginalized by the English literary community until very recently, Oscar Wilde's play Salomé enjoyed an... more Although marginalized by the English literary community until very recently, Oscar Wilde's play Salomé enjoyed an immense popularity in continental Europe, including Portugal where it has been translated seven times since 1909. How can we explain this discrepancy? Could it be that the darker aspects of the play that so scandalized the British have somehow been softened in translation? This article examines the various Portuguese translations in order to establish the extent to which the translation served as a 'veil' to hide disturbing realities, with particular attention given to forms of interpersonal address and uses of modalization, employed so subversively by Wilde.
“Devices of Estrangement in Stoppard’s Travesties"
Published in "The Grove" 15 (2008): 111-23.
This paper proposes an analysis of Tom Stoppard’s play "Travesties" in light of the concept of estrangement,... more
This paper proposes an analysis of Tom Stoppard’s play "Travesties" in light of the concept of estrangement, developed by the Russian literary scholar Viktor Shklovsky. The first section of the essay will describe the three dominant elements in Travesties: foreign/estranged language, intertextuality, and theatricality. The second section will consider the juxtaposition of historical and fictional events as a key factor for estrangement, and it will also examine the presence of a character-narrator on stage, and the relation this characters bears to the estranging factors already mentioned.
Key words: Tom Stoppard; Travesties; Viktor Shklovsky; James Joyce; Oscar Wilde; estrangement; intertextuality; theatricality.
En este ensayo se propone un análisis de la obra "Travesties", de Tom Stoppard, a partir del concepto de defamiliarización según fue desarrollado por el crítico literario ruso Viktor Sklovski. La primera sección del ensayo describe los tres elementos dominantes en Travesties: lenguaje foráneo/desautomatizado, intertextualidad y teatralidad. En la segunda sección se analiza la yuxtaposición de hechos históricos y ficticios como factor clave para la desautomatización, junto con la presencia del personaje-narrador en escena, y la relación que este personaje mantiene con los factores desautomatizadores ya mencionados.
Palabras clave: Tom Stoppard; Travesties; Viktor Sklovski; James Joyce; Oscar Wilde; desautomatización; intertextualidad; teatralidad.
Download (.pdf) Fallen Nature and Infinite Desire: A Study of Love, Artifice, and Transcendence in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray
This paper has been sent to Logos Journal for consideration. I originally uploaded the first few pages but decided to take them down, since the paper was getting more attention that I expected. Feel free to contact me for more information!
The influence of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours upon Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray has been generally... more The influence of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours upon Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray has been generally acknowledged. Only a few studies have focused on this influence at any length however, and none has done so with an eye toward religion. This essay argues, in particular, that À rebours provided Wilde with a plot-driving aesthetic that was ethical and theological in character. This aesthetic coordinates the moral dimension of beauty in Wilde’s work, and illuminates how beauty impresses itself upon observers, carrying the individual to a crisis of ethical decision. In both works, this has to do with surface and depth: in À rebours and The Picture of Dorian Gray, beauty presents itself as ideation and graspable form, yet gestures past itself to a transcendent beyond of personal and divine presence. It is the dilemma of whether to cling to the form of beauty, or allow beauty to authoritatively speak the transcendent, this study contends, which drives the narratives of both works.
Benefit of Hindsight: Polibio, Vico, Wilde y el emergentismo crítico
Benefit of Hindsight: Polybius, Vico, Wilde, and Critical Emergentism
This paper is a reading of Oscar... more
Benefit of Hindsight: Polybius, Vico, Wilde, and Critical Emergentism
This paper is a reading of Oscar Wilde's essay The Rise of Historical Criticism, analyzing Oscar Wilde's conception of critical historiography, with a particular focus on the issues of hindsight bias, on the hermeneutics of retrospection and on Wilde's position within the tradition of emergentist theory and cultural evolutionism.
Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.
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“Suffer the Little Children: Irish Revivalism in the Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde.”
In a forthcoming collection from U of Notre Dame P.
Crítica acrítica, crítica crítica
Acritical Criticism, Critical Criticism
This paper theorizes critical readings from an... more
Acritical Criticism, Critical Criticism
This paper theorizes critical readings from an interactional / argumentative point of view, situating them on a scale going from consonant, "friendly" criticism, to dissonant, confrontational or "unfriendly" criticism. Some key critical notions (by Oscar Wilde, Stanley Fish, Paul Ricoeur, Judith Fetterley and H. Porter Abbott) are examined in the light of this conception of criticism, and situated within the framework of interactional pragmatics.
Keywords: Criticism, Pragmatics, Dialogism, Wilde, Fish, Ricoeur, Interaction, Emergence, Ideology
The paper is in Spanish.
Wilde y el enigma de la Esfinge
Wilde and the Riddle of the Sphinx
Oscar Wilde's essay "The Critic as Artist" is... more
Wilde and the Riddle of the Sphinx
Oscar Wilde's essay "The Critic as Artist" is shown to foreshadow some key concepts of poststructuralist interpretive theory - such as the necessary interplay of blindness and insight in criticism (Lacan, Paul de Man), or the retroactive effect of interpretation in the construction of the work. More specifically, Wilde's reading of the riddle of the Sphinx in a passage of this work both theorizes and dramatizes the paradoxical relationship between blindness and insight, in the shape of an ironic prophecy which can be read as Wilde's announcement of his own tragic downfall - in which there is an element of compulsive acting out that has been noted by a number of previous critics. That is, Wilde's Sphinx is used as the vehicle of a riddle about Wilde himself, and is an emblem of his own ambivalent attitude toward the public revelation of his homosexuality.
Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.
Keywords: Wilde, Sphinx, Hermeneutics, Interpretation, Lacan, Criticism
Mona Lisa's Satanic Smile: Occulture, Esoterization and Anti-Madonnas
by Per Faxneld
Paper presented at Evil, Women and the Feminine, 3rd Global Conference, Warsaw, Poland (May 13th – May 15th, 2011).
As has been thoroughly studied by among others Bram Dijkstra, there existed a pervasive discourse during the 19th... more
As has been thoroughly studied by among others Bram Dijkstra, there existed a pervasive discourse during the 19th century in which women were portrayed as demonic and dangerous. In this context, older cultural artifacts where re-interpreted as expressions of these ideas, one interesting example being Leonardo da Vinci’s La Gioconda (Mona Lisa). The tradition of ascribing satanic traits to it was more or less initiated by French Romantic Théophile Gautier, and then taken up by writers like Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Algernon Swinburne and Georg Heym. The paper discusses the manner in which these authors – Symbolists, Decadents and early Expressionists – wrote about the painting as an icon of eternal feminine evil. More specifically, the emphasis on La Gioconda as literally an icon, a sort of altarpiece of wickedness, is explored.
Such a religiously influenced interpretation of an originally completely secular portrait is, the paper seeks to demonstrate, related to a contemporary tendency in pictorial art to blasphemously sacralize sin. Instances of this include the so-called altar to Sin in German Symbolist Franz von Stuck’s grand villa, as well as works by among others Edvard Munch. Further, the darkly numinous aura many felt La Gioconda exuded needs to be understood in a framework of 19th century "occulture" (a term developed – in a scholarly context – by Christopher Partridge, who however only applies it to post WWII phenomena) and romantic ideas concerning artists as seers, mystics and even magicians in a more literal sense.
