Self (Philosophy) in literature

Wallace Stevens's poems alluding to hands yield one of his most profound topics of interest: reality (the external, natural world) versus the imagination (the internal mind). The human hand offers a unique perspective of the complex, often problematic worlds in which the artist exists. In terms of the external world, the hands are the most common means of sense experience. For many artists, the hands act as a medium through which expression of art is delivered. During inspiration, an artist therefore takes an experience of the world, filters it through the imagination, and then creates art by combining mind and sense experience. It is the complications involved in this process of creation that the forthcoming analysis explores. The philosophical insight of Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Husserl, and William James offers ways of interpreting the intricate creative process apparent in Stevens's poems. By visualizing the necessary altered state of perception through Stevens's language, one can then better understand the acquisition of the ideal state, or "phenomenal body."

Daniel Defoe's seminal novel Robinson Crusoe reflects major philosophical currents of the Enlightenment and brings them to bear on diverse issues: scientific advances, new economic models, British colonialization, the relation of the Other to the self. But if Robinson Crusoe presents Friday as Other who fulfills a crucial role by helping Robinson as narrating subject successfully complete the journey of self-knowledge, Michel Tournier's postmodern revision, Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique , has a quite different teleological aim. Through constantly shifting narrative and theoretical perspectives Vendredi undertakes a forceful critique of key aspects of the Western tradition which Robinson Crusoe confidently hailed: Lockean and Cartesian reasoning, traditional framing dichotomies central to the Western tradition (Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel), modern conceptions of the thinking subject. Vendredi ultimately suggests the inability of the postmodern subject to know itself while simultaneously critiquing those Western traditions whose perspectives are founded on hegemonic globalization.