Principle of Convergence and the Theme of Disempowerment Essay

The Principle of Convergence and the Theme of Disempowerment In this paper, I propose to present interpretations of six works by French artists, three painters (Watteau, Delacroix, and Manet) and three novelists (Zola, Proust, and Camus), and to report on the unexpected discovery (if it deserves to be called such) that these disparate works have certain principles of structuring in common. Let us eliminate from the outset a possible source of distraction : these studies are interdisciplinary in character, but that seems to have nothing to do with the discoveries made. One way to throw light on the meaning of a novel or a painting is to view it in the light of a concept drawn from another discipline. Thus the various modes of structuralism borrowed from structural linguistics, either directly (e.g. via certain seminal works of Roman Jakobson, such as his famous essay on metaphor and metonymy) or indirectly (e.g. as mediated by the structural anthropology of Claude LÃ ©vi-Strauss). Such is the nature of interdisciplinary research. It is especially appropriate and valuable when a key element or a central aspect of a text has manifestly not given up its secrets to any of the traditional or conventional modes of analysis. In analyzing these works, I have had recourse to psychology, psychoanalysis, transactional analysis, group behaviour theory, feminism and control theory. However, the discovery I am presenting does not appear to depend in any way on the interdisciplinary character of the perspectives used. Rather, it depends on the plausibility of the interpretation and the central character of the aspects of the work being interpreted. Complexity in L’Embarquement pour Cythere. — The rococo is generally though... ...often without any obvious link between these two features having been noticed previously, is unexpected, both for the art critic and the literary critic. Equally intriguing is the discovery that each of the works we have examined here leads the viewer/reader through a two-part drama of disempowerment and re-empowerment that takes very different forms but in its essence recurs over and over again. As far as I know, this has never even been suspected by any critic or historian. It would be very interesting to know just how many great works of art and literature can be better understood in the light of such concepts or clusters of concepts as those used here. When we have noted that all these works appear to represent variations on one and the same drama, we are left with an intriguing question that remains to be answered : do they all have the same function?