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This essay begins by examining the rhetorical significance of the guillotine, an important symbol during the Romantic Period. Lacefield argues that the guillotine symbolized a range of modern ontological juxtapositions and antinomies during the period. Moreover, she argues that the guillotine influenced Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein through Giovanni Aldini, a scientist who experimented on guillotined corpses during the French Revolution and inspired Shelley's characterization of Victor Frankenstein. Given the importance of the guillotine as a powerful metaphor for anxieties emergent during this period, Lacefield employs it as a clue signaling a labyrinth of modern meanings embedded in Shelley's novel, as well as the films they anticipated. In particular, Lacefield analyzes the significance of the guillotine slice itself-the uneasy, indeterminate line that simultaneously separates and joins categories such as life/death, mind/body, spirit/matter, and nature/technology. Lacefield's interdisciplinary analysis analyzes motifs of decapitation/ dismemberment in Frankenstein and then moves into a discussion of the novel's exploration of the ontological categories specified above. For example, Frankenstein's Creature, as a kind of cyborg, exists on the contested theoretical "slice" within a number of antinomies: nature/tech, human/ inhuman (alive/dead), matter/spirit, etc. These are interesting juxtapositions that point to tensions within each set of categories, and Lacefield discusses the relevance of such dichotomies for questions of modernity posed by materialist theory and technological innovation. Additionally, she incorporates a discussion of films that fuse Shelley's themes with appeals to twentieth-century and post-millennium audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The word and the magic of its meaning have constantly obsessed the writer of the twentieth century. For George Orwell, the use of language represented almost "a moral disease" and his strongest conviction was that "without morality language could not function properly." "1984" may be considered an accumulation of all those aspects of life that Orwell felt most desperately about. One of these aspects is the legitimacy or non-legitimacy of the totalitarian society. This study intends to approach the Orwellian totalitarian world by analyzing 'the magic of words 'that make up this anti-utopic universe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's insights on the relativist presentation of Russian poet Alexander Pushkin in the book "Walks With Pushkin," by Andrey Sinyavsky. The author says that Sinyavsky was accused by the book's critics with Russophobia as he portrayed Pushkin as a relativist poet of nonsense and a vampire, who poaches on others' view. He says that his depiction of Pushkin only shows his antinomic poles, but not his total disagreement with relativism. He says that the book shows Pushkin as a post-modernist poet, who defies ideals of good, evil, and morality to be subjective. Moreover, he adds that such depiction of Pushkin shows his freedom, which turns the book usefulness as a postmodernist manifesto.

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This essay focuses on fault lines and contradictions in author Theodor W. Adorno's theory and practice of immanent critique. Immanent criticism pursues the logic of its aporias, the insolubility of the task itself. In such antinomies criticism perceives those of society. A successful work, according to immanent criticism, is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions. Confronted with this kind of work, the verdict mere ideology loses its meaning.

Discusses the works of the 20th-century writer Erich Auerbach. Absence of footnotes in "Mimesis"; Engagement with certain antinomies; Formal opposition of high to low style; Gradual shedding of a transcendentalist ontology, as realism comes of age.

The article presents information on the antinomies of the book "Nineteen Eighty-Four." On the one hand, there is the loose-jointed, empiricist, Wellsian naturalism. This is the aspect of "Nineteen Eighty-Four" that deals in great particularity of detail with objects and relations of the "real" world and that recalls the author of "A Clergyman's Daughter" and the early work generally. On the other hand, there is the totally controlled, programmatic, Swiftian satire, where complete coherence is achieved through an intricate and thoroughly fantastic two-dimensionality. It is the dialectic of genres that determines the book's overall quality. "Nineteen Eighty-Four" partakes of both the empiricist solidity of "A Clergyman's Daughter" and the total coherence and significance of "Animal Farm" by a constant and, as it were, illicit traffic between naturalism and satire.