Narrative of Obsession: Manipulated Identities, Labyrinthine Emotions in Iris Murdoch’s A Word Child

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 PhD Candidate, Department of English, Tabriz Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tabriz, Iran

2 Assistant Professor, Department of English, Tabriz Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tabriz, Iran

3 Associate Professor, Department of English, Tabriz Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tabriz, Iran

Abstract

The theoretical discussion of the present paper is particularly based on the insights of Giorgio Agamben contextualized in Iris Murdoch’s novel, A Word Child (1975), written in the transitional period of the seventies England. It will inspect Agamben’s biopolitical insights to examine how they may contribute to understanding of the dark side of sovereignty considering the figure of a banished individual. Taking the precariousness of the emotional, political and ontological faculties of ‘love’, ‘homo sacer’ and ‘bare life’ allocated to the human being in Murdoch’s novel, A Word Child, this paper offers a different view of Murdoch’s inspirational emphatic love, socio-political abstruse problems in her novel arguing that Agamben’s account of these issues supplies an underlying structure of the form-of-life. It resounds through Agamben’s view as a never-ending struggle of human beings to underpin the messiness and cruelty of life in which characters are emotionally engaged and entrapped in order to examine some potentialities as the escape routes from the prevailing deadlocks of the era and eventually to trace, according to Agamben, a form-of-life that is called a happy life.

Keywords

References

Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Trans. Michael Haedt. Vol. 1. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990.
---. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life.  California: Stanford University Press, 1998.
---. Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience. Trans. Liz Heron, London: Verso, 1993.
---. Language and Death: The Place of Negativity. Trans. Karen E. Pinkus, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
---. Means without End: Notes on Politics. vol. 20. Trans. Vicenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 
---. Profanations. Trans. Jeff Fort, New York: Zone book, 2007.
---. The Use of Bodies: Homosacer. IV, 2, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016.
Antonaccio, Maria. A Philosophy to Live by: Engaging Iris Murdoch. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Black, Jeremy. Britain since the Seventies: Politics and Society in the Consumer Age. London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2004.
Bove, Cheryl K. Understanding Iris Murdoch. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993.
Bradford, Richard. The Novel Now: Contemporary British Fiction. Malden: Blackwell, 2007.
De Boever, Arne. Plastic Sovereignties: Agamben and the Politics of Aesthetics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016.
De la Durantaye, Leland. Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009.
Gordon, David J. Iris Murdoch’s Fables of Unselfing. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995.
Hopwood, Mark. “‘The Extremely Difficult Realization That Something Other Than Oneself Is Real’: Iris Murdoch on Love and Moral Agency”. European Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 26, No. 1, 2018, pp. 477-501.
Hunter, Ian. “Giorgio Agamben’s Form of Life.” Politics, Religion and Ideology, Vol.18, No. 2, 2017, pp. 135-156.
Joyce, Peter. The Politics of Protest: Extra-Parliamentary Politics in Britain since 1970. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
Martin, Paricilla and Anne Rowe. Iris Murdoch: A Literary Life. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Mills, Catherine. The Philosophy of Agamben. Acumen, 2008.
Murdoch, Iris. A Word Child. London: Vintage, 1975.
Parsley, Connal. “A Particular Fetishism: Love, Law and the Image in Agamben.” Giorgio Agamben: Legal, Political and Philosophical Potentialities, edited by Frost, Tom, Routledge, 2013, pp. 31-53.
Wolfreys, Julian. “Face to Face with Agamben; or, the Other in Love.” Work of Giorgio Agamben: Law, Literature, Life, edited by Clemens Justin, et al., Edinburgh University Press, 2008, pp. 149-163.
---. “Love and the Other: The Example of Giorgio Agamben.” Introducing Criticism in the 21st Century, edited by Julian Wolfreys, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015, pp. 47-59.

Files

History

  • Receive Date: 01 September 2022
  • Revise Date: 26 March 2023
  • Accept Date: 30 April 2023

Share

How to cite

Statistics