‘Seeing Double’: Exploring the Flâneur’s Gaze in Amit Chaudhuri’s A New World
نویسندگان
چکیده
The present paper explores the ambivalent existence of a modern urban figure, a flâneur, who is caught between the processes of grand and spectacular modernization and the gradual but uncertain withdrawal of the self from the external ‘reality’ through Amit Chaudhuri’s celebrated fiction A New World. The continuous ‘shocks of the new’ that the urban ‘advancement’ bombards upon the senses of a flâneur, develops a highly personal psychopathology in him/her. Georg Simmel calls this symptom a blasé outlook – a psychic structure characterized by sheer impersonality, which gives birth to an attitude of almost complete indifference towards the socio-political processes outside. The flâneur’s observation of a city remains always informed by a double vision – seeing yet disbelieving. Both the identity and the gaze of a flâneur keep on swinging incessantly between a modernity that creates a desire to become a developed subject and a subjectivity that is dismantled by an array of unfulfilled dreams beyond the scope of any premeditated determinism.
منابع مشابه
psychoanalytical interview of cinema's function basis on the concept of gaze in Jacques Lacan's thought
Abstract Theory of psychoanalysis after Lacan's theory grew up in different aspects of art and thought such as mirror stage, feminist ideology, the process of subject birth, etc. Theoreticians of the film after Lacan present a new understanding of cinema’s function uses from his psychoanalysis terms, for instance, mirror stage, the concept of desire...
متن کاملGaze Perception: Is Seeing Influenced by Believing?
Gaze perception has been thought to be stimulus-driven. This view is challenged by a new demonstration that a gaze direction aftereffect can be influenced by beliefs about the gazer's ability to see.
متن کاملThe Female gaze in proportion to pictorial elements in "A parrot with fruit and a portrait of a girl"
Qajar painting influenced Iran’s painting with a new kind of illustrations originating from the past traditions. Art and cultural politics of Fath Ali Shah performs an obvious role amongst the influential agents and historical events in the era of Qajar paintings for a presentation of the concepts of power in the social, political and cultural arena. Fath Ali Shah’s patronage of the art alters ...
متن کاملThe Paradox of Health Policy: Revealing the True Colours of This ‘Chameleon Concept’; Comment on “The Politics and Analytics of Health Policy”
Health policy has been termed a ‘chameleon concept’, referring to its ability to take on different forms of disciplinarity as well as different roles and functions. This paper extends Paton’s analysis by exploring the paradox of health policy as a field of academic inquiry—sitting across many of the boundaries of social science but also marginalised by them. It situates contemporary approaches ...
متن کاملCanons and Controversies: The Critical Gaze on Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction
The South Asian American diasporic writer, Jhumpa Lahiri has been widely acclaimed by the first-world intellectuals for her truthful representations of diasporic experience. In recent years, however, some scholars have drawn upon Gayatri Spivak’s notion of “Native Informant” to interrogate the controversial canonization of Lahiri in the West, and point instead to her disavowed participation in ...
متن کامل