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Review of The Bell Jar

June 6, 2018

Bell Jar, book, criticism, depression, review, Sylvia Plath

I have a confession to make: I never liked Sylvia Plath’s poetry. Call me old-fashioned, but I have a real problem with modern poetry, and Sylvia Plath is no exception. Now comes another confession: I shamefully admit (the shame is double since I have a PhD in English literature) that I didn’t know that Sylvia Plath had written a novel. The Bell Jar is her only novel. Furthermore, it’s a semi-autobiographical* work.

*I don’t get the term “semi-autobiographical”. Deep down, all works are autobiographical, because they are based on the author’s subjective experience of the world. But if we want to make a separation between fictional autobiography and non-fictional autobiography, The Bell Jar is definitely a sample of the former category.

Review of The Bell Jar — Depression might appear peculiar from the outside – and that’s how The Bell Jar occasionally does, too

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Children in Gothic Fiction: Dialectics of In-betweenness

June 1, 2018

Criticism

academia, ambiguity, children, criticism, Gothic, time

Note: the following article on children in Gothic fiction s a modified excerpt (pp. 96-97) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, see here.

Children in Gothic fiction possess extraordinary allusive power. The reason is that they personify in graspable terms the ambiguous area between past and future. Children in Gothic texts become a link that both separates and connects the old and the new.

Essentially, the Gothic child becomes a metaphor for the eternal present. It carries the past within – both literally, as the continuation of the parents’ genetic code, as well as metaphorically, as the continuation of a cultural, social, or simply family tradition – yet it is also the future. More important, still, it is a potential future, that is, it is neither determined nor materialized.

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The Nature of Stress Is Temporal

May 28, 2018

Experiencing

experience, fear, feelings, stress, time

OK, imagine you’re walking along a peaceful sidewalk. It’s a lovely afternoon, the sun caresses your face. You feel the scent of geraniums floating in the air. Then all of a sudden, you hear a snapping sound coming from above. You look up and you see a large piano falling toward you. You step aside at the last moment before it kills you. And you’ve just gotten a bag full of interesting stuff: trauma, fear, and stress. They’re not identical, but they have something in common: time. Let’s talk about the nature of stress.

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