Browsing by Author "Suner, Ahmet"

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AN INTERPRETATION OF SARTRE'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE IMAGE AS A PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE SIGN
(PHILOSOPHY DOCUMENTATION CENTER, 2020) Ahmet Suner; Suner, Ahmet
Sartre's phenomenology of the image in L'Imaginaire includes analytical distinctions between the mind's comportments towards perceptual objects images and signs which he refers to as different forms of consciousness. Sartre denies any possible convergence between imaging and sign consciousness arguing that there are essential differences in the way they relate to the notions of resemblance positionality and affect. This essay argues against his phenomenological distinctions by stressing the continuity of imaging with sign consciousness: between images and words. In particular it argues that his understanding of the sign as affectless is questionable and that there is no reason to believe that images and signs cannot elicit similar affects or perform the same functions. Consequently it is possible to interpret Sartre's physical images or analoga as pictorial signs: his phenomenological descriptions of physical images may indeed be recast in the language of the sign and reformulated as acts of consciousness that involve pictorial signs.
Citation - WoS: 1
Citation - Scopus: 1
Beyond Repression and Back to the Secrets of the Familiar: A Critical Look at Freud's Essay on the Uncanny
(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2019) Ahmet Suner; Suner, Ahmet
This article critiques the way Freud associates the uncanny with the idea of repression. The rhetoric he uses in the essay destabilizes his effort to place it in the depths of the psyche especially as he examines dictionary definitions interprets the doublings in Hoffmann's 'The Sandman' formulates an anthropological argument based on unsurmounted belief and reveals his stance on religion. Moving beyond repression the article underscores the aspect of secrecy in the constitution of the 'unheimlich' and proposes a contextual return to the conflicts between secrecy and openness between keeping private and making public that primarily play out on the surfaces of the psyche rather than in its repressed depths. It concludes with a return to the dictionary entries that fascinated Freud in order to cull more insights into the uncanny.
Colonial "Idea" and "Work": The evil in Marlow's Heart of Darkness
(Springer, 2021) Ahmet Süner; Suner, Ahmet
This chapter focuses on the representations of evil in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and argues that despite appearances colonial evil is not extrinsic to Marlow's voice and that it inheres in his very worldview. It draws out the implicit evil in Marlow's colonialism by close attention to the muted concepts and vague ideas in his intimate inner voice. Marlow's affective but uncritical formulations of "idea" and "work" reflect colonial ideology in unsettling ways secretly allowing for the justification of criminal evil forms of colonial practice. © 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Citation - Scopus: 1
FRAMES WORLD-PICTURES AND REPRESENTATIONS: HEIDEGGER'S CRITIQUE OF THE PICTURE
(PHILOSOPHY DOCUMENTATION CENTER, 2019) Ahmet Suner; Suner, Ahmet
This essay analyzes key aspects of Heidegger's critique of the picture (Bild) based on an objection to world-pictures as well as a negative understanding of two other related concepts: Gestell and Vorstellen (representation). The restrictive frames of world-pictures Heidegger claims must be opposed by instances of thinking and language use associated with poiesis. For him the revelation of the world in poiesis results in a subject-less experience of things and words akin to the experience of art and literature and presumably outside the representational hold of pictures. I argue against Heidegger's repudiation of the picture by underscoring the inescapability of Vorstellen. Heidegger's world may be seen as a world-picture as well as a particular system of representation that we associate with affective uses of language i.e. a literary system similar to the one discussed by Wolgang Iser.
Citation - WoS: 3
SPECTRAL NARRATION AND THE HOUSES OF DESIRE IN CHARLOTTE BRONTE'S VILLETTE
(WEST CHESTER UNIV, 2017) Ahmet Suner; Suner, Ahmet
The narrative complexities of Villette derive from the positing of Lucy as a ghost that hovers between absence and presence interiority and exteriority private and public. The claim that Lucy is a ghost projects a somewhat different light on the novel which may then be viewed as the spectral narration of a spectral quest for a spectral identity and this insistent aspect of spectrality which is frequently encountered in the novel's resourceful use of gothic elements must be thought to problematize any notion of narration quest or identity that grounds itself on presence. Being uprooted from her native environment in which she seems hardly ever to have taken root Lucy often seems to stick vehemently to her Protestantism defending it against the incursions of the Catholic environment in which she lives and works. But this is ultimately a surface opposition which has more to do with the public performance of identity and which is largely at odds with the much more fluid field of identity determined by processes of varying and unstable identifications and speculations in which Lucy enters as a speculating and spying ghost. What underlies the surface opposition between Catholicism and Protestantism are the various desires and fears that Lucy experiences in the project of finding a home for her own ghostly self. Therefore the question of Lucy's national or religious identity in Villette must be understood as her ghostly quest to find an adequate home or haunt.
Citation - WoS: 3
Citation - Scopus: 2
The ambiguous picturesin the theory of languagein wittgenstein's tractatus
(Fabrizio Serra Editore luci.corsi@libraweb.net, 2016) Ahmet Süner; Söner, Ahmet; Suner, Ahmet
This paper explores the ambiguities in Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that result from the conceptualization of the picture as a middle term in between the translations between language and the world. The picture is an odd inclusion that can not help suggesting the work of the cognitive mind odd because the analytic tendency in the Tractatus is to foreground the logical structure of the correspondences between language and the world that should not necessitate the mediation of the picturing mind. In my close reading of the statements in the Tractatus that refer to the picture I show how 'the picture theory of language' cannot produce a plausible account of the truth or reality mainly because the concept of the picture in the Tractatus is not developed adequately and therefore cannot explain how linguistic propositions can ever correspond to any reality. In following Wittgenstein's thinking on the Tractatus picture I show that this inability results from the theory itself since it does not allow the picture and hence the picturing mind to deal with any sense of ambiguity and to exist in a sufficiently independent way from the facts of language and the world. © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
The comic tragedy of mere men and women: The ambiguously distracting use of laughter in The Castle Of Otranto and its prefaces
(Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies, 2016) Ahmet Süner; Suner, Ahmet
This paper attempts to analyze the curious effects of the comic scenes in The Castle of Otranto (1764) through a close reading of Walpole's famous prefaces to the novel. The comic scenes evoke an incongruous dramatic response and contradict the claims made in the prefaces according to which comic elements highlight dramatic ones. While being often thought of as indicative of a general aesthetic failure the comic elements in this foundational text of the Gothic are indeed subtle complex and artful. More precisely Walpole's curious use of laughter makes a complex appeal to an extra-dramatic level which undercuts the reader's identification with the dramatic situations represented in the novel. © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Citation - WoS: 1
Citation - Scopus: 1
The Elucidatory Uses of Wittgenstein’s Scale of Nonsense in Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland Narratives
(Springer Netherlands rbk@louisiana.edu, 2019) Ahmet Süner; Suner, Ahmet
The world of Carroll’s Wonderland narratives in which language tests its own limits overlaps with Wittgenstein’s world of counterexample and such convergence becomes most overt in Wittgenstein’s example of a nonsensical scale in his Philosophical Investigations (§142). Wittgenstein does not find much use for such a scale but in this paper it is claimed that Alice’s (mis)adventures with nonsensical language in Wonderland both problematize and provide fresh insights into the use of language in our actual world. Several passages in the Alice books are analysed in order to show how the curious uses of nonsensical language function to negate any theory of the ordinary use of language that is based on the assumption that there is an exact correspondence between words and meanings. This article represents an effort to understand the ways in which nonsensical narratives can throw light on the way we use language in the world. The extraordinary uses of language in narratives like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland provide a challenge to those theories of language that do not sufficiently take into account the ambiguous and imprecise nature of our ordinary use of language. © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Citation - WoS: 1
Citation - Scopus: 1
The Gothic Horrors of the Private Realm and the Return to the Public in John Polidori's The Vampyre
(LMS-MODERN LANG TEACHERS ASSOC, 2018) Ahmet Suner; Suner, Ahmet
This study of Polidori's story The Vampyre written at the beginning of the 19th century aims at relocating the social relevance of both the story and Gothic literature in the contentious zone between the private and public sphere. The story vacillates between private and public realms drawing its vampiric theme from such vacillations. It expresses the horrors of vampiric intimacy inherent in private life which opposes the moral character of the public realm. The most dangerous sites of private life are represented as the realm of the imagination and that of intersubjective intimacy. The story also contains several prominent Romantic tropes including nature and orientalism all pointing to the intimate dangers of the private realm. Lord Ruthven Polidori's vampire is an explosive figure at the fraught intersection between a private life that demands secrecy for its private pleasures and a public realm that demands exposure to regulate and control.
Citation - WoS: 1
The Ineluctable Sign in Sartre's Account of Franconay's Imitation
(ROMANIAN SOC PHENOMENOLOGY, 2019) Ahmet Suner; Suner, Ahmet
The most interesting example of all the physical images that Sartre examines in L'Imaginaire concerns a female performers (Franconay's) imitation of a male performer (Chevalier). The example is a unique instance in which Sartre deals explicitly with the possibility of ambiguity and hyhridity in consciousness. Sartre's introduction of the sign into the consciousness of imitation ties the perception of Franconay with the imaged Chevalier but it also leads to the dissemination of the sign across the entire consciousness a consequence that runs against Sartre's analytic tendencies. 1 argue that despite Sartre's endeavor to keep the sign separate from perception and the image the sign is a diffuse property of the entire consciousness of imitation penetrating and contaminating its every instant. Sartre's account of Franconay's imitation contains the germs of the destruction of his clear-cut analytic distinctions revealing the irreducible hyhridity of the sign with both perception and the image.
Citation - WoS: 2
Citation - Scopus: 2
The Representation of Time Modernity and Its Prehistory in Dracula
(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2018) Ahmet Suner; Suner, Ahmet
The essay deals with the bifurcated representation of time in Dracula that is split into a modern and pre-modern time. In Stoker's novel the time of Western modernity and the modern nation depends on the repression of the past and of the past-becoming of the present. While modern technologies purportedly create an imaginary sense of control over the wayward mythologies of the past supplementing and stabilizing the modern present they cannot fully obstruct the haunting of the prehistory of modernity represented by the vampire and Transylvania. The predominant fears of the novel derive from the powerful eruption of this prehistory in the form of a Gothic romance that spawns unspeakable sexual perversions adulterating both the modern time and the Victorian body. This essay performs a close reading of the passages primarily belonging to the first part of the novel that depict the perils and pleasures of being haunted by the distant past and shows how the oft-sexualized eruption of the past in the novel forces modernity to regress to the romance genre.
The truth in Almodovar's melodramatic moment: the curious interplay between melodrama and reality in High Heels
(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2016) Ahmet Suner; Suner, Ahmet
This article attempts to show how Almodavar's melodrama treats both reality and melodrama as if they belonged to the same ontology and destroys the boundaries between them. The essay is an effort to locate both the emotionality and the irony of Almodavar's melodrama and particularly of his High Heels in the intricate relationship between the notion of reality and the genre of melodrama and to demonstrate how the ironic and the melodramatic modes supplement and reinforce each other despite their apparent opposition. It uses Peter Brooks' and Henry James' observations on nineteenth-century melodrama as a launching pad for a discussion of the ways in which Almodavar revises the genre of melodrama at the junction between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The second half of the essay is dedicated to an analysis of High Heels which illustrates the ambivalent relationships between reality and performance and between ironic and melodramatic spectatorship.
Citation - WoS: 2
Citation - Scopus: 4
The visual way to language and literature in Heidegger's 'Work of Art' essay
(Maney Publishing, 2014) Ahmet Süner; Suner, Ahmet
In his 'Way to Language' essay as well as in his other later work Heidegger argues for a self-referential and non-subjective understanding of language. I argue that Heidegger sketches a different way to understanding language in one of his earlier works which is his 'Work of Art' essay. In a reversal of sorts I argue that language and not the work of art constitutes the underlying subject matter throughout the essay and from its very beginning. The essay may be construed as the exposition of a theory of language in which Heidegger employs various interpretations of works of art as analogies that exemplify his thoughts on language. In my rhetorical analysis of Heidegger's references to the Van Gogh 'shoes' painting I show that Heidegger is engaging with literature and a literary kind of writing which have a direct bearing on his understanding of both language and the philosophical truth. Heidegger's writing on the truth may then be thought to reflect an intricate interplay between literature the philosophy of language and the interpretation of visual artworks. © 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
What Is the Literary Image in 2019? A Reevaluation of Mitchell's Encyclopedia Entry
(PENN STATE UNIV PRESS, 2019) Ahmet Suner; Suner, Ahmet
This article attempts to reinstate the inherent rigor of image as a literary term by addressing the theoretical issues related to the image that W. J. T. Mitchell discusses in his encyclopedia entry and his articles on the concept. The image is usually considered an overly psychological concept that lacks the rigor of rhetorical devices such as metaphor. This article clarifies the relationship between the image and metaphor by arguing that while an image may not be immediately considered a metaphor a metaphor may be thought of as a composite and relational proposition-image. It underscores the futility of insisting on the concrete sensual (or visual) aspect of the image arguing that before any sensual attribution the image must primarily be thought of as a reference or picture which may at times be obscure indefinite or even empty. It also raises some objections to the conceptualization of the mental picture as private by arguing that the word on which the mental image is based cannot be less private or mental.