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What Is Philosophical Suicide?

January 26, 2020

absurd, ignorance, philosophy, religion, society, suicide, thought

As a notion, suicide is riddled with ideological baggage. Forbidden by most religions and snubbed by societal norms, the concept of self-annihilation often stirs emotions. On a more subtle level, this ought to be the case for philosophical suicide.

Alas, it isn’t. Ironically enough, as we’ll see, the reasons are related (at least indirectly) to the very dogmatism informing physical suicide.

But what is philosophical suicide?

Very briefly, philosophical suicide is an essentially ad-hoc attempt to explain away the inconsistency between the human desire for existential purpose and the apparent lack of such a purpose.

The term is heavily related to the concept of the absurd as described by Albert Camus. Therefore, in order to define philosophical suicide (also described by Camus), we must first take a quick look at the absurd.

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Religion in Frankenstein: Dialectics of Authority

August 30, 2019

Criticism

academia, criticism, frankenstein, Gothic, religion

Note: the following article on religion in Frankenstein is a modified excerpt (pp. 110-111) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which is available for free from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, presentations, etc. feel free to visit the relevant page on the main Home for Fiction website.

You can also find an article about religion in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and another about religion on Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Religion in Frankenstein: A Secular or Religious World?

In the context of Frankenstein, a story replete with moral dilemmas and dichotomies based on otherness, it is perhaps not surprising to discover a multitude of religiously charged temporal dichotomies.

Punter and Byron argue that Victor, although a modern Prometheus (as the subtitle of the novel underlines), lives in “a notably secular world with no gods against whom to rebel, and … his search is conceived of in scientific terms” (2004, 199).

religion in Frankenstein — Religion in *Frankenstein* is a matter of understanding the dialectics of authority involved in the story

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Religion in Dracula: Christian, Pagan, and Jewish Narratives

September 19, 2018

Criticism

academia, criticism, Dracula, Gothic, literature, religion

Note: the following article on religion in Dracula is a modified excerpt (pp. 115-117) 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 the relevant page on the main site.

You can also find an article about religion in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Religion in Dracula is a matter of oppositions. Bram Stoker’s Dracula presents the narrative as a whole and the Count in particular as an opposition to Christianity. Jacques Coulardeau argues that “Dracula [is] the heir of an older tradition than Christianity, that is to say paganism … Older religions are centered on a cult to nature: the night and the day, as well as the earth, the sun, and the moon” (2007, 130).

At the same time, Norma Rowen adds that the inverted Christian imagery in Dracula essentially renders the Count an antichrist, with Renfield’s phrase “the blood is the life” a parody of the Eucharist (1997, 241).

Furthermore, by calling Mina his “bountiful wine-press” (D 306), Dracula introduces a metaphor often argued to carry religious connotations. The reason is due to the fact that wine is part of the Eucharist (Kreitzer 1999, 125), but also because of the allusion to Genesis, with Mina’s vampiric baptism becoming a parody of the creation of Eve (Loughlin 2004, 204).

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